Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant is 75 years old today
Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant is 75 years old today
Robert Plant
Photo by Ed Miles
Robert Plant is 75 years old today.
An English singer and songwriter best known as the vocalist and lyricist of Led Zeppelin, Plant has also had a successful solo career.
Born in the Black Country town of West Bromwich, Staffordshire, Plant’s father was Robert C. Plant, a qualified civil engineer who worked in the Royal Air Force during World War II, and his mother was Annie Celia Plant, a Romanichal woman.
He grew up in Kidderminster, Worcestershire and gained an interest in singing and rock and roll music at an early age. Plant left King Edward VI Grammar School for Boys in Stourbridge in his mid-teens and developed a strong passion for the blues, mainly through his admiration for Willie Dixon, Robert Johnson and early rendition of songs in this genre.
He abandoned training as a chartered accountant after only two weeks to attend college in an effort to gain more GCE passes (General Certificates of Education) and to become part of the English Midlands blues scene.
"I left home at 16," he said, "and I started my real education musically, moving from group to group, furthering my knowledge of the blues and of other music which had weight and was worth listening to."
Plant's early blues influences included Johnson, Bukka White, Skip James, Jerry Miller and Sleepy John Estes. He had various jobs while pursuing his music career, one of which was working for the major British construction company, Wimpey, in Birmingham in 1967 laying tarmac on roads.
He cut three obscure singles on CBS Records and sang with a variety of bands, including the Crawling King Snakes, which brought him into contact with the drummer, John Bonham. They both went on to play in the Band of Joy, merging blues with newer psychedelic trends.
In 1968, guitarist Jimmy Page was in search of a lead singer for his new band and met Plant after being turned down by his first choice, Terry Reid, who referred him to a show at a teacher training college in Birmingham (where Plant was singing in a band named Obs-Tweedle).
A version of "Somebody to Love" by Jefferson Airplane was sung by Plant in front of Page, leading Page to the end of his search. With a shared passion for music, Plant and Page immediately hit it off and began their writing collaboration with reworkings of earlier blues songs. Plant brought along John Bonham as drummer and they were joined by John Paul Jones, who had previously worked with Page as a studio musician.
Initially dubbed the "New Yardbirds" in 1968, the band soon became Led Zeppelin. Their debut album hit the charts in 1969 and the rest is history.
With a career spanning more than 40 years and possessing a powerful wide vocal range (particularly his trademark high-pitched screams), Plant is regarded as one of the greatest singers in the history of popular music. He has influenced contemporaries and later singers such as Freddie Mercury, Axl Rose and Chris Cornell.
In 2007, he released Raising Sand, a highly acclaimed album produced by T-Bone Burnett with American bluegrass soprano Alison Krauss.
Plant released of a new solo album, Carry Fire, in October, 2017. This year, he will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the UK Americana Honors and Awards.
Here, Plant performs “Ship of Fools” at Madison Square Garden, 1988.
Jim Reeve's last recording session, Studio B, RCA Records, 1964
Jim Reeves was born 100 years ago today.
A country and popular music singer-songwriter, Reeves had records charting from the 1950s to the 1980s. He became well known as a practitioner of the Nashville sound, a mixture of older country-style music with elements of popular music.
Known as Gentleman Jim, his songs continued to chart for years after his death from the crash of a private airplane at the age of 40. He is a member of both the Country Music and Texas Country Music Halls of Fame.
On July 31, 1964, Reeves and his business partner and manager, Dean Manuel, (also the pianist of Reeves' backing group, the Blue Boys) left Batesville, Arkansas, en route to Nashville in a single-engine Beechcraft Debonair aircraft.
Reeves was at the controls. While flying over Brentwood, Tennessee, they encountered a violent thunderstorm. A subsequent investigation showed that the small airplane had become caught in the storm and Reeves suffered spatial disorientation. According to the tower tape, Reeves ran into the heavy rain at 4:51 p.m. and crashed only a minute later, at 4:52 p.m.
On the morning of August 2, 1964, after an intense search by several parties (which included several personal friends of Reeves including Ernest Tubb and Marty Robbins), the bodies of the singer and Manuel were found in the wreckage of the aircraft. At 1:00 p.m. local time, radio stations across the United States began to announce Reeves' death.
During 1998, Reeves was inducted into the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame in Carthage, Texas, where the Jim Reeves Memorial is located. The inscription on the memorial reads, "If I, a lowly singer, dry one tear, or soothe one humble human heart in pain, then my homely verse to God is dear, and not one stanza has been sung in vain."
Here, Jim Reeves performs “I Love You Because” in Oslo, 1964.
Jack Teagarden, Victor Studio, New York City, 1947
Photo by William P. Gottlieb
Jack Teagarden was born 118 years ago today.
Teagarden, known as "Big T" and "The Swingin' Gate," was a jazz trombonist, bandleader, composer and vocalist. He was regarded as the "Father of the Jazz Trombone."
Born in Vernon, Texas, his brothers, Charlie and Clois ("Cub,") and his sister, Norma, also became noted professional musicians. Teagarden's father was an amateur brass band trumpeter and started young Jack on the baritone.
By age seven, he had switched to trombone. His first public performances were in movie theaters, where he accompanied his mother, a pianist.
Teagarden's trombone style was largely self-taught, and he developed many unusual alternative positions and novel special effects on the instrument. He is usually considered the most innovative jazz trombone stylist of the pre-bebop era.
Pee Wee Russell once called him "the best trombone player in the world." He did much to expand the role of the instrument beyond the old tailgate style role of the early New Orleans brass bands. Chief among his contributions to the language of jazz trombonists was his ability to interject the blues or merely a "blue feeling" into virtually any piece of music.
By 1920, Teagarden was playing professionally in San Antonio, including with the band of pianist, Peck Kelley. In the mid-1920s, he started traveling widely around the United States in a quick succession of different bands. In 1927, he went to New York City where he worked with several bands. By 1928, he played for the Ben Pollack band.
Within a year of the commencement of his recording career, Teagarden became a regular vocalist, first doing blues material ("Beale Street Blues," for example), and later doing popular songs.
He is often mentioned as one of the best jazz vocalists of the era. His singing style is quite like his trombone playing, in terms of improvisation (in the same way that Louis Armstrong sang quite like he played trumpet). His singing is best remembered for duets with Louis Armstrong and Johnny Mercer.
In the late 1920s, he recorded with such notable bandleaders and sidemen as Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Bix Beiderbecke, Red Nichols, Jimmy McPartland, Mezz Mezzrow, Glenn Miller and Eddie Condon.
Glenn Miller and Teagarden collaborated to provide lyrics and a verse to Spencer Williams', “Basin Street Blues,” which in amended form became one of the numbers that Teagarden played until the end of his days.
In 1946, Teagarden joined Louis Armstrong's All Stars. Armstrong and Teagarden's work together shows a wonderful rapport, in particular their duet on "Rockin' Chair." In late 1951, Teagarden left to again lead his own band, then co-led a band with Earl Hines, then again with a group under his own name with whom he toured Japan in 1958 and 1959.
Teagarden appeared in the movies, Birth of the Blues (1941), The Strip (1951), The Glass Wall (1953) and Jazz on a Summer's Day (1960), the latter a documentary film of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.
Teagarden died of a heart attack complicated by bronchial pneumonia in his room at the Prince Conti Hotel in the French Quarter of New Orleans on January 15, 1964. He was 58.
Here, Teagarden and his orchestra perform “Dark Eyes.”
John Hiatt is 71 years old today.
A rock guitarist, pianist, singer and songwriter, Hiatt has played a variety of musical styles on his albums, including New Wave, blues and country. He remains one of the most respected and influential American singer-songwriters.
Hiatt was working as a songwriter for Tree International, a record label in Nashville, when his song “Sure As I'm Sittin’ Here” was covered by Three Dog Night. The song became a Top 40 hit, earning Hiatt a recording contract with Epic Records.
On July 15, 2014, Hiatt released, Terms of My Surrender, his 22nd studio album. His songs have been covered by a variety of artists in multiple genres, including Bob Dylan, Willy DeVille, Ry Cooder, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Joe Bonamassa, Willie Nelson, Three Dog Night and Joan Baez.
Also, Paula Abdul, Buddy Guy, the Desert Rose Band, Jimmy Buffett, Mandy Moore, Iggy Pop, Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell, Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Rosanne Cash, Suzy Bogguss, Jewel, Aaron Neville, Jeff Healey, Keith Urban, Joe Cocker and Chaka Khan.
Here, Hiatt performs “Have a Little Faith in Me.”
On this day in 1911 — 112 years ago — a dispatcher in the New York Times office sent the first telegram around the world via commercial service.
Exactly 66 years later, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sent a different kind of message — a phonograph record containing information about Earth for extraterrestrial beings — shooting into space aboard the unmanned spacecraft Voyager II.
The Times decided to send its 1911 telegram in order to determine how fast a commercial message could be sent around the world by telegraph cable. The message, reading simply “This message sent around the world,” left the dispatch room on the 17th floor of the Times building in New York at 7 p.m. on August 20.
After it traveled more than 28,000 miles, being relayed by 16 different operators, through San Francisco, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, Bombay, Malta, Lisbon and the Azores — among other locations — the reply was received by the same operator 16.5 minutes later.
It was the fastest time achieved by a commercial cablegram since the opening of the Pacific cable in 1900 by the Commercial Cable Company.
On August 20, 1977, a NASA rocket launched Voyager II, an unmanned 1,820-pound spacecraft, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It was the first of two such crafts to be launched that year on a “Grand Tour” of the outer planets, organized to coincide with a rare alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Aboard Voyager II was a 12-inch copper phonograph record called “Sounds of Earth.” Intended as a kind of introductory time capsule, the record included greetings in 60 languages and scientific information about Earth and the human race, along with classical, jazz and rock ‘n’ roll music, nature sounds like thunder and surf, and recorded messages from President Jimmy Carter and other world leaders.
The brainchild of astronomer Carl Sagan, the record was sent with Voyager II and its twin craft, Voyager I — launched just two weeks later — in the faint hope that it might one day be discovered by extraterrestrial creatures. The record was sealed in an aluminum jacket that would keep it intact for one billion years, along with instructions on how to play the record, with a cartridge and needle provided.
The two Voyager crafts were designed to explore the outer solar system and send information and photographs of the distant planets to Earth.
Over the next 12 years, the mission proved a success. After both crafts flew by Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager I went flying off towards the solar system’s edge while Voyager II visited Uranus, Neptune and finally Pluto in 1990 before sailing off to join its twin in the outer solar system.
Thanks to the Voyager program, NASA scientists gained a wealth of information about the outer planets, including close-up photographs of Saturn’s seven rings; evidence of active geysers and volcanoes exploding on some of the four planets’ 22 moons; winds of more than 1,500 mph on Neptune; and measurements of the magnetic fields on Uranus and Neptune.
The two crafts are expected to continue sending data until 2020, or until their plutonium-based power sources run out. After that, they will continue to sail on through the galaxy for millions of years to come, barring some unexpected collision.
Isaac Hayes was born 81 years ago today.
Hayes was an American songwriter, musician, singer, actor and voice actor. He was one of the creative influences behind the southern soul music label, Stax Records, where he served both as an in-house songwriter and as a record producer, teaming with his partner, David Porter, during the mid-1960s.
Hayes, Porter, Bill Withers, the Sherman Brothers, Steve Cropper and John Fogerty were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005 in recognition of writing scores of notable songs for themselves, the duo, Sam & Dave and Carla Thomas.
The hit song, "Soul Man,” written by Hayes and Porter and first performed by Sam & Dave, has been recognized as one of the most influential songs of the past 50 years.
During the late 1960s, Hayes also began recording music and he had several successful soul albums such as Hot Buttered Soul (1969) and Black Moses (1971). In addition to his work in popular music, he worked as a composer of musical scores for motion pictures.
Hayes is well known for his musical score for the film, Shaft, in 1971. For the "Theme from Shaft,” he was awarded the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1972. He became the third African-American, after Sidney Poitier and Hattie McDaniel, to win an Academy Award in any competitive field covered by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Hayes was found unresponsive in his home located just east of Memphis on August 10, 2008, ten days before his 66th birthday. The cause of death was a stroke.
Isaac Hayes live in concert at the Jazz Open Festival in Stuttgard, Germany, 1997.
In 1968 — 55 years ago today — the director of the University of Tennessee's audio lab, Dr. David M. Lipscomb, reported that a guinea pig subjected over a three month period to 88 hours of rock music recorded at a disco at 120 decibels suffered acute damage to the inner ears.
Steve Paul, the owner of a New York disco, replied "Should a major increase in guinea pig attendance occur at The Scene, we'll certainly bear their comfort in mind.
“My camera is my weapon against poverty and racism.”
— Gordon Parks
Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956
Photo by Gordon Parks