Frank Beacham's Journal

Mick Jagger is 78 years old today

Photo by Simone Joyner

Mick Jagger is 78 years old today.

Jagger is the lead vocalist and a founding member of The Rolling Stones. His career has spanned more than 50 years and he is one of the most popular and influential frontmen in the history of rock & roll.

His distinctive voice and performance, along with Keith Richards' guitar style, have been the trademark of The Rolling Stones throughout the career of the band. Jagger gained much press notoriety for admitted drug use and romantic involvements, and was often portrayed as a countercultural figure.

In the late 1960s, Jagger began acting in films (starting with Performance and Ned Kelly), to mixed reception. In 1985, he released his first solo album, She's the Boss. He was knighted in 2003.

Born into a middle-class family in Dartford, Kent, England, Jagger’s father and grandfather were both teachers. His mother was a hairdresser and an active member of the Conservative Party. From September, 1950, Keith Richards and Jagger were classmates at Wentworth Primary School in Dartford, Kent.

In 1954, Jagger passed the eleven-plus, and went to Dartford Grammar School, where there is now the Mick Jagger Centre, as part of the school.

Having lost contact with each other when they went to different schools, Richards and Jagger resumed their friendship in July, 1960 after a chance encounter and discovered that they had both developed a love for rhythm and blues music, which began for Jagger with Little Richard.

Jagger left school in 1961. He and Richards moved into a flat in Edith Grove in Chelsea with a guitarist they had encountered named Brian Jones. While Richards and Jones were making plans to start their own rhythm and blues group, Jagger continued his business courses at the London School of Economics. He had seriously considered becoming either a journalist or a politician.

In their earliest days, the group played for no money and had very little equipment and needed to borrow gear to play. This was before Andrew Loog Oldham became their manager.

Their first appearance under the name the Rollin' Stones (after one of their favorite Muddy Waters tunes) was at the Marquee Club, a jazz club, on July 12, 1962. They would later change their name to the Rolling Stones, as it seemed more formal.

Here, Jagger performs “Miss You”

The Rolling Stones, New York, 1964

Stanley Kubrick was born 93 years ago today

Stanley Kubrick behind the camera on The Shining, 1980

Stanley Kubrick was born 93 years ago today.

A film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, editor and still photographer, Kubrick is regarded as one of America's greatest filmmakers. His films, typically adaptations of novels or short stories, were noted for their "dazzling" and unique cinematography, attention to details to achieve realism and an inspired use of music scores.

Kubrick's films covered a variety of genres, including war, black comedy, horror and science fiction. He was a perfectionist in his work — using painstaking care with scene staging and working closely with his actors.

Starting out as a photographer in New York City, he taught himself all aspects of film production and directing after graduating from high school. His earliest films were made on a shoestring budget, followed by one Hollywood blockbuster, Spartacus, after which he spent most of the rest of his career living and filming in the United Kingdom.

His home became his workplace where he did his writing, research, editing and management of production details. This allowed him to have almost complete artistic control, but with the rare advantage of having financial support from major Hollywood studios.

Several of his films broke new cinematic ground. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was a science-fiction film noted for innovative visual effects and scientific realism. In Barry Lyndon (1975), Kubrick used specially-designed lenses to film scenes lit by natural candlelight. Kubrick's The Shining (1980) was among the first feature films to make use of a Steadicam to allow stabilized and fluid tracking shots.

As with his earlier shorts, Kubrick was the cinematographer and editor on the first two of his thirteen feature films. He directed, produced and wrote all or part of the screenplays for nearly all his films.

Some of his films were controversial, including A Clockwork Orange (1971), Lolita (1962) and Paths of Glory (1957).

Many of Kubrick's films were met with initial mixed reviews, although they were acclaimed years later as masterpieces. There was an old saying that a Kubrick film took at least five years to be appreciated.

Kubrick was widely admired by other prominent filmmakers, including Orson Welles, who considered him a "giant" and a "great director.” From the mid-1950s onward, all of Kubrick's films except The Shining were nominated for Oscars, Golden Globes or BAFTAs. His one personal win was for the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Film critic and historian Michel Ciment considers his films to be "among the most important contributions to world cinema in the twentieth century.”

Kubrick suffered a heart attack and died on March 7, 1999 at age 70.

Stanley Kubrick photographs the showgirl, Rosemary Williams, applying lipstick, 1949

Woman Reading, 1946

Photo by Stanley Kubrick, then 17 years old

Gracie Allen, comedienne who became internationally known as the zany partner and comic foil of husband, George Burns, was born 126 years ago today

George Burns and Gracie Allen with Ronnie and Sandy in 1952

Photo by John Springer

Gracie Allen, comedienne who became internationally known as the zany partner and comic foil of husband, George Burns, was born 126 years ago today.

Allen was born in San Francisco, making her first appearance with Eddie Cantor at age three. She was educated at the Star of the Sea Convent School and during that time became a talented dancer.

She soon began performing Irish folk dances with her three sisters, who were billed as "The Four Colleens." Allen joined her sister, Bessie, in 1909 as a vaudeville performer. At a performance in 1922, Allen met George Burns and the two formed a comedy act. The two were married on January 7, 1926, in Cleveland.

Allen was born with heterochromia, giving her two different color eyes; one blue and one green. The Burns and Allen act began with Allen as the straight man, setting up Burns to deliver the punchlines — and get the laughs.

In his book, Gracie: A Love Story, Burns later explained that he noticed Allen's straight lines were getting more laughs than his punchlines, so he flipped the act over, making himself the straight man and letting her get the laughs.

Audiences immediately fell in love with Allen's character, who combined the traits of stupidity, zaniness and total innocence. As is often the case with performers who play dumb, Gracie was, in reality, highly intelligent. The reformulated team, focusing on Allen, toured the country, eventually headlining in major vaudeville houses.

Many of their famous routines were preserved in one- and two-reeler short films, including "Lambchops" (1929), which were made while the couple was still performing on the stage. The couple performed on NBC radio. Around 1948, Burns and Allen became part of the CBS talent raid.

Their good friend and frequent guest star, Jack Benny, had decided to jump from NBC over to CBS. William S. Paley, the mastermind of CBS, had recently made it openly clear that he believed talent and not the network made the difference, which was not the case at NBC.

Benny convinced Burns and Allen (among others) to join him in the move to CBS. The Burns and Allen radio show became part of the CBS lineup and a year later they also brought their show to television. They continued to use the formula which had kept them longtime radio stars, playing themselves only now as television stars, still living next door to Harry and Blanche Morton.

They concluded each show with a brief dialogue performance in the style of their classic vaudeville and earlier radio routines.

In the 1930s, Burns and Allen adopted two children, Sandra Jean and Ronald Jon, after discovering they could not conceive on their own. They agreed to raise the children, Ronnie and Sandy, as Catholics and then let them make their own religious choice as adults.

Ronnie eventually joined the cast of his parents' television show playing George and Gracie's son, a serious drama student who disdained comedy. Sandy, by contrast, made only occasional appearances on the show (usually as a telephone operator, waitress, secretary or clerk). She left show business to become a teacher.

Gracie Allen fought a long battle with heart disease, ultimately dying of a heart attack in Hollywood in 1964. Burns' remains were interred at her side when he died at the age of 100 in 1996, 32 years later; "Gracie Allen and George Burns — Together Again," reads the engraving on the marker.

Within the entertainment industry itself, George Burns' love for Gracie was legend. After her passing, Burns made arrangements for flowers to be brought to her grave site daily, and made weekly visits in person, without fail, for the rest of his life.

Darlene Love is 80 years old today

Darleen Love and Phil Spector

Photo by Ray Avery

Darlene Love is 80 years old today.

Love, a singer and actress, gained prominence in the 1960s for the song "He's a Rebel," a #1 American single in 1962. She was one of the Phil Spector artists who produced a celebrated Christmas album in 1963.

Love appears in the documentary film, Twenty Feet From Stardom (2013), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

Born as Darlene Wright, she began singing with her local church choir in Hawthorne, California. While still in high school (1959), she was invited to join a little-known girl group called The Blossoms, who in 1962 began working with producer Phil Spector.

With her powerful voice, she was soon a highly sought-after vocalist and worked with many of the legends of 1950s and 1960s rock and soul, including Sam Cooke, Dionne Warwick, The Beach Boys, Elvis Presley, Tom Jones and Sonny and Cher.

Darlene and the Blossoms sang back-up vocals on the Shelley Fabares hit, "Johnny Angel," Sharon Marie (Esparza) (a Brian Wilson act), as well as John Phillips' solo album John, Wolfking of L.A., recorded in 1969. They also appeared on Johnny Rivers' hits, including "Poor Side of Town" and Motown covers, "Baby I Need Your Loving" and "The Tracks of My Tears."

With The Blossoms, Love also sang backing vocals on many of the biggest hits of the 1960s, including Spector's own "Da Doo Ron Ron" (allegedly recorded with her lead, which was later erased by Spector and re-recorded using Crystals' lead, Dolores "LaLa" Brooks).

Though credited by Spector as singles recorded by The Crystals, "He's A Rebel" and "He's Sure The Boy I Love," actually featured Love singing lead, backed by The Blossoms.

"Today I Met The Boy I'm Gonna Marry" was released as a single by Spector, and featured Love's name as the artist. She said that Spector offered $3,000 for her rights to the song. And though he said it was going to be a hit, she took the money.

The Blossoms landed a weekly part on Shindig!, one of the top music shows of the era. They were part of the highly acclaimed Elvis Presley's '68 Comeback Special, which aired on NBC.

"Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" is a song by Darlene Love from the 1963 holiday compilation album, A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector. The song was written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, along with Phil Spector, with the intention of being sung by Ronnie Spector of The Ronettes.

According to Love, Ronnie Spector was not able to put as much emotion into the song as needed. Instead, Love was brought into the studio to record the song, which became a big success over time and one of Love's signature tunes.

Into the 1970s, Love continued to work as a back-up singer, before taking a break in order to raise a family. She returned to music in the early 1980s and to an appreciative audience she thought might have long since forgotten her.

She had been performing at venues like the Roxy in L.A., and it was a conversation with Steven Van Zandt that greased the wheels for her to come to New York and begin performing there in 1982 at places like The Bottom Line.

Love performed the song "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" every year from 1986 to the end on the last episode before Christmas of Late Night with David Letterman (NBC 1986 - 1992) and the Late Show with David Letterman (CBS 1993 to 2015).

The song was always performed with Paul Shaffer and the show's house band, with the band being augmented over the years by additional strings and other instruments, as well as a choir. Letterman always said Love’s annual performance was his favorite part of Christmas.

Here, Love performs “He’s a Rebel”

George Bernard Shaw was born 165 years ago today

George Bernard Shaw was born 165 years ago today.

An Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics, Shaw wrote more than 60 plays. Nearly all his writings address prevailing social problems, but have a vein of comedy which makes their stark themes more palatable.

Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care and class privilege in his work. He was most angered by what he perceived as the exploitation of the working class. An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society.

He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land and promoting healthy lifestyles. For a short time, he was active in local politics, serving on the London County Council.

In 1898, Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a fellow Fabian, whom he survived. They settled in Ayot St Lawrence in a house now called Shaw's Corner. Shaw died there, aged 94, from chronic problems exacerbated by injuries he incurred by falling from a ladder.

Outside of Bob Dylan, Shaw is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize in Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938), for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion (adaptation of his play of the same name), respectively.

Shaw wanted to refuse his Nobel Prize outright because he had no desire for public honors, but accepted it at his wife's behest. She considered it a tribute to Ireland. He did reject the monetary award, requesting it be used to finance translation of Swedish books into English.

In the above photo, Shaw on a visit in Los Angeles answering questions from journalists around him.

Photo from Keystone-France

Aldous Huxley was born 127 years ago

Aldous Huxley was born 127 years ago.

An English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family, Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays. He also edited the magazine, Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel writing, film stories and scripts. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death.

Huxley was a humanist, pacifist and satirist. He later became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism — in particular Vivekanda's Neo-Vedanta and Universalism. He is also well known for his use of psychedelic drugs. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time.

Born in Godalming, Surrey, England, he was the third son of the writer and schoolmaster, Leonard Huxley, and his first wife, Julia Arnold, who founded Prior's Field School. His mother, Julia, was the niece of poet and critic, Matthew Arnold, and the sister of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic and controversialist ("Darwin's Bulldog").

Huxley began his education in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, then continued in a school named Hillside. His teacher was his mother, who supervised him for several years until she became terminally ill. After Hillside, he was educated at Eton College. Huxley's mother died in 1908 when he was 14.

Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of 17 and began writing seriously in his early 20s. His first published novels were social satires, beginning with Crome Yellow (1921).

During the First World War, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, working as a farm laborer. There he met several Bloomsbury figures, including Bertrand Russell and Clive Bell. Later, in Crome Yellow (1921), he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle.

In 1919, he married Maria Nys, a Belgian woman he met at Garsington. They had one son. The family lived in Italy part of the time in the 1920s, where Huxley would visit his friend, D. H. Lawrence. Following Lawrence's death in 1930, Huxley edited Lawrence's letters (1933).

Works of this period included important novels on the dehumanizing aspects of scientific progress, most famously Brave New World, and on pacifist themes (for example, Eyeless in Gaza).

In Brave New World, Huxley portrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning. Huxley was strongly influenced by F. Matthias Alexander and included him as a character in Eyeless in Gaza.

Starting from this period, Huxley began to write and edit non-fiction works on pacifist issues, including Ends and Means, An Encyclopedia of Pacifism and Pacifism and Philosophy. He was an active member of the Peace Pledge Union.

In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood, with his wife, Maria, son Matthew and friend, Gerald Heard. He lived in the U.S. until his death. Mainly he resided in California, but he also lived for a while in Taos, New Mexico, where he wrote Ends and Means, which was published in 1937.

In this work, he examined the fact that although most people in modern civilization agree that they want a world of "liberty, peace, justice and brotherly love," they have not been able to agree on how to achieve it.

Gerald Heard introduced Huxley to Vedanta (Upanishad-centered philosophy), meditation and vegetarianism through the principle of ahimsa.

In 1938, Huxley befriended, J. Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. He also became a Vedantist in the circle of Hindu Swami Prabhavananda, and introduced Christopher Isherwood to this circle. Not long after, Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas, The Perennial Philosophy, which discussed the teachings of renowned mystics of the world.

His experience in Hollywood was not a success. When he wrote a synopsis of Alice in Wonderland, Walt Disney rejected it on the grounds that "he could only understand every third word.” Huxley's leisurely development of ideas, it seemed, was not suitable for the movie moguls, who demanded fast, dynamic dialogue above all else.

Huxley had deeply felt apprehensions about the future the developed world might make for itself. From these apprehensions, he made warnings in his writings and talks.

In a 1958 televised interview conducted by journalist Mike Wallace, Huxley outlined several major concerns: the difficulties and dangers of world overpopulation; the tendency toward distinctly hierarchical social organization and the crucial importance of evaluating the use of technology in mass societies susceptible to wily persuasion. He lamented the tendency to promote modern politicians to a naive public as well-marketed commodities.

In October, 1930, the English occultist Aleister Crowley dined with Huxley in Berlin, and to this day rumors persist that Crowley introduced Huxley to peyote on that occasion. He was introduced to mescaline (the key active ingredient of peyote) by the psychiatrist, Humphry Osmond, on May 5, 1953.

Through Dr. Osmond, Huxley met millionaire, Alfred Matthew Hubbard, who would deal with LSD on a wholesale basis. On December 24, 1955, Huxley took his first dose of LSD. Indeed, Huxley was a pioneer of self-directed psychedelic drug use "in a search for enlightenment," famously taking 100 micrograms of LSD as he lay dying.

His psychedelic drug experiences are described in the essays, The Doors of Perception. The title comes from some lines in the book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by William Blake.

In 1944, Huxley wrote the introduction to the "Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God," translated by Swami Prabhavanada and Christopher Isherwood, which was published by The Vedanta Society of Southern California.

In 1960, Huxley was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer, and in the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the Utopian novel, Island, and gave lectures on "Human Potentialities" at the Esalen Institute, which were fundamental to the forming of the Human Potential Movement.

On his deathbed, unable to speak, Huxley made a written request to his wife, Laura, for "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular." According to her account of his death in This Timeless Moment, she obliged with an injection at 11:45 a.m. and a second one a few hours later.

Huxley died aged 69, at 5:20 p.m. on November 22, 1963. Media coverage of Huxley's passing was overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on the same day, as was the death of the British author, C. S. Lewis, who also died on November 22.

This coincidence was the inspiration for Peter Kreeft's book, Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley.

Here is a clip on Aldous Huxley’s use of mescaline on “Doors of Perception”

Candy Cigarette, 1969

Photo by Sally Mann

Steve Goodman was born 73 years ago today

Steve Goodman and John Prine at The Earl of Old Town, Chicago

Steve Goodman was born 73 years ago today.

A folk music singer-songwriter from Chicago, Goodman wrote "City of New Orleans," made popular by Arlo Guthrie and Willie Nelson.

Born on Chicago's North Side to a middle-class Jewish family, Goodman began writing and performing songs as a teenager, after his family had moved to the near north suburbs. He graduated from Maine East High School in Park Ridge, Illinois in 1965, where he was a classmate of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In the fall of 1965, he entered the University of Illinois and pledged Sigma Alpha Mu (Sammies) fraternity where he, Ron Banyon and Steve Hartmann formed a popular rock cover band, "The Juicy Fruits." He left college after one year to pursue his musical career.

In the early spring of 1967, Goodman went to New York, staying for a month in a Greenwich Village brownstone across the street from the Cafe Wha?, where he performed regularly during his brief stay.

Returning to Chicago, he intended to restart his education but he dropped out again to pursue his musical dream full-time after discovering the cause of his continuous fatigue was actually leukemia, the disease that would be present during the entirety of his recording career, until his death in 1984.

In 1968, Goodman began performing at the Earl of Old Town in Chicago and attracted a following. Within a year, Goodman was a regular performer in Chicago, while attending Lake Forest College. During this time Goodman supported himself by singing advertising jingles.

In September, 1969, he met Nancy Pruter (sister of R&B writer, Robert Pruter), who was attending college while supporting herself as a waitress. They were married in February, 1970.

Though he experienced periods of remission, Goodman never felt that he was living on anything other than borrowed time, and some critics, listeners and friends have said that his music reflects this sentiment.

His wife, Nancy, writing in the liner notes to the posthumous collection, No Big Surprise, characterized him this way:

“Basically, Steve was exactly who he appeared to be: an ambitious, well-adjusted man from a loving, middle-class Jewish home in the Chicago suburbs, whose life and talent were directed by the physical pain and time constraints of a fatal disease which he kept at bay, at times, seemingly by willpower alone . . . Steve wanted to live as normal a life as possible, only he had to live it as fast as he could . . . He extracted meaning from the mundane.”

Goodman's songs first appeared on Gathering at The Earl of Old Town, an album produced by Chicago record company, Dunwich, in 1971. As a close friend of Earl Pionke, the owner of the folk music bar, Goodman performed at The Earl dozens of times, including customary New Year's Eve concerts. He also remained closely involved with Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music, where he had met and mentored his good friend, John Prine.

Later in 1971, Goodman was playing at a Chicago bar called the Quiet Knight as the opening act for Kris Kristofferson. Impressed with Goodman, Kristofferson introduced him to Paul Anka, who brought Goodman to New York to record some demos. These resulted in Goodman signing a contract with Buddah Records.

All this time, Goodman had been busy writing many of his most enduring songs, and this avid songwriting would lead to an important break for him. While at the Quiet Knight, Goodman saw Arlo Guthrie and asked to be allowed to play a song for him.

Guthrie grudgingly agreed, on the condition that Goodman buy him a beer first. Guthrie said he would listen to Goodman for as long as it took him to drink the beer.

Goodman played "City of New Orleans," which Guthrie liked enough that he asked to record it. Guthrie's version of Goodman's song became a Top 20 hit in 1972, and provided Goodman with enough financial and artistic success to make his music a full-time career. The song, about the Illinois Central's City of New Orleans train, would become an American standard, covered by such musicians as Johnny Cash, Judy Collins, Chet Atkins and Willie Nelson.

In 1974, singer David Allan Coe achieved considerable success on the country charts with Goodman's and John Prine's "You Never Even Call Me By My Name," a song which good-naturedly spoofed stereotypical country music lyrics. Prine refused to take a songwriter's credit of the song, although Goodman bought Prine a jukebox as a gift from his publishing royalties.

Goodman's success as a recording artist was more limited. Although he was known in folk circles as an excellent and influential songwriter, his albums received more critical than commercial success.

One of Goodman's biggest hits was a song he didn't write – "The Dutchman," written by Michael Peter Smith. During the mid- and late-seventies, Goodman became a regular guest on Easter Day on Vin Scelsa’s radio show in New York City. Scelsa’s personal recordings of these sessions eventually led to an album of selections from these appearances, The Easter Tapes.

In 1977, Goodman performed on the Tom Paxton live album, New Songs From the Briarpatch (Vanguard Records), which contained some of Paxton's topical songs of the 1970s, including "Talking Watergate" and "White Bones of Allende," as well as a song dedicated to Mississippi John Hurt entitled "Did You Hear John Hurt?"

On September 20, 1984, Goodman died of leukemia at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle. He had anointed himself with the tongue-in-cheek nickname “Cool Hand Leuk” (other nicknames included “Chicago Shorty” and “The Little Prince”) during his illness. He was 36 years old.

Here, Goodman performs “City of New Orleans”

Steve Goodman in concert at Capitol Theatre, 1976

Walter Brennan, one of three actors to win three Academy Awards, was born 127 years ago

Walter Brennan, one of three actors to win three Academy Awards, was born 127 years ago.

Brennan joined Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day-Lewis in having won three Oscars. A character actor, Brennan won as Best Supporting Actor in 1936, 1938 and 1940.

Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, Brennan became interested in acting while in school and began to perform in vaudeville at the age of 15. While working as a bank clerk, he enlisted in the Army and served as a private with the 101st Field Artillery Regiment in France during World War I.

Following the war, he moved to Guatemala and raised pineapples before settling in Los Angeles. During the 1920s, he made a fortune in the real estate market, but he lost most of his money during the Great Depression.

Finding himself broke, Brennan began taking extra parts in 1925 and then bit parts in as many films as he could, including Texas Cyclone and Two Fisted Law with another newcomer to Hollywood, John Wayne. He also had bit parts in The Invisible Man (1933), the Three Stooges short Woman Haters (1934) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), in which he enjoyed a brief speaking part, and also worked as a stunt man.

In the 1930s, Brennan began appearing in higher-quality films and received more substantial roles as his talent was recognized. This culminated with his receiving the first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Swan Bostrom in the period film, Come and Get It (1936).

Two years later, he portrayed town drunk and accused murderer Muff Potter in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Throughout his career, Brennan was frequently called upon to play characters considerably older than he was in real life. The loss of many teeth in a 1932 accident, rapidly thinning hair, thin build and unusual vocal intonations all made him seem older than he really was.

He used these features to great effect. In many of his film roles, Brennan wore dentures. In Northwest Passage – a film set in the late-18th century – he wore a special dental prosthesis which made him appear to have rotting and broken teeth.

For director Jean Renoir's first American film, Brennan played the top-billed lead in Swamp Water (1941), a drama also featuring Walter Huston and starring Dana Andrews. In Sergeant York (also 1941), he played a sympathetic preacher and dry-goods store owner who advised the title character, played by Gary Cooper. Brennan and Cooper appeared in six films together.

In 1942, he played reporter Sam Blake, who befriended and encouraged Lou Gehrig (also played by Cooper) in Pride of the Yankees. He was particularly skilled in playing the sidekick to the protagonist or as the "grumpy old man" in films such as To Have and Have Not (1944), the Humphrey Bogart vehicle which introduced Lauren Bacall.

Though he was hardly ever cast as the villain, notable exceptions were his roles as Judge Roy Bean in The Westerner (1940) with Gary Cooper, for which he won his third best supporting actor Academy Award, 'Old Man' Clanton in My Darling Clementine (1946) opposite Henry Fonda and the murderous Colonel Jeb Hawkins in the James Stewart episode of the Cinerama production, How the West Was Won (1962).

From 1957–1963, he starred in the ABC television series The Real McCoys, a situation comedy about a poor West Virginia family that relocated to a farm in Southern California.

Film historians and critics have long regarded Brennan as one of the finest character actors in motion picture history. In all, he appeared in more than 230 film and television roles during a career that spanned nearly five decades.

Brennan died from emphysema at the age of 80 in Oxnard, California in 1974.

Benny Benjamin, drummer for Motown’s studio band, The Funk Brothers, was born 96 years ago today

Benny Benjamin, drummer for Motown’s studio band, The Funk Brothers, was born 96 years ago today.

Nicknamed Papa Zita, Benjamin was a native of Birmingham, Alabama. He originally learned to play drums in the style of the big band jazz groups.

In 1958, Benjamin became Motown's first studio drummer, where he was noted for his dynamic style. Several Motown record producers, including Berry Gordy, refused to work on any recording sessions unless Benjamin was the drummer and James Jamerson was the bassist.

The Beatles singled out Benjamin’s drumming style upon meeting him in the UK. He was influenced by the work of drummers, Buddy Rich and Tito Puente.

Among the Motown songs Benjamin performed the drum tracks for are "Money (That's What I Want)" by Barrett Strong and "Do You Love Me" by The Contours; as well as later hits such as "Get Ready" and "My Girl" by The Temptations, "Uptight (Everything's Alright)" by Stevie Wonder, "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" by Gladys Knight & the Pips and "Going To A Go-Go" by The Miracles.

By the late 1960s, Benjamin struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, and fellow Funk Brothers, Uriel Jones and Richard "Pistol" Allen, increasingly recorded more of the drum tracks for the studio's releases.

Benjamin died on April 20, 1969 of a stroke at age 43, and was inducted into the "Sidemen" category of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003.

Emmett Till was born 80 years ago today

Emmett Till was born 80 years ago today.

Till was an African-American boy who was murdered in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman.

Visiting relatives from Chicago in Money, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region, the trouble started when Till spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married proprietor of a small grocery store there.

Several nights later, Bryant's husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, arrived at Till's great-uncle's house where they took Till, transported him to a barn, beat him and gouged out one of his eyes.

Then they shot Till through the head and disposed of his body in the Tallahatchie River, weighting it with a 70-pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. Till’s body was discovered and retrieved from the river three days later.

Till was returned to Chicago and his mother, who had raised him mostly by herself, insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket to show the world the brutality of the killing.

Tens of thousands attended his funeral or viewed his casket and images of his mutilated body were published in black magazines and newspapers, rallying popular black support and white sympathy across the U.S. Intense scrutiny was brought to bear on the condition of black civil rights in Mississippi, with newspapers around the country critical of the state.

Although initially local newspapers and law enforcement officials decried the violence against Till and called for justice, they soon began responding to national criticism by defending Mississippians, which eventually transformed into support for the killers.

The trial attracted a vast amount of press attention. Bryant and Milam were acquitted of Till's kidnapping and murder, but only months later, in a magazine interview, protected against double jeopardy, they admitted to killing him.

Till's murder is noted as a pivotal event motivating the African-American Civil Rights Movement. Problems identifying Till affected the trial, partially leading to Bryant's and Milam's acquittals, and the case was officially reopened by the United States Department of Justice in 2004.

As part of the investigation, the body was exhumed and autopsied resulting in a positive identification. He was reburied in a new casket, which is the standard practice in cases of body exhumation.

His original casket was donated to the Smithsonian Institution. Events surrounding Emmett Till's life and death, according to historians, continue to resonate, and almost every story about Mississippi returns to Till, or the region in which he died, in "some spiritual, homing way."

Till continues to be the focus of literature and memorials. A statue was unveiled in Denver in 1976 (and has since been moved to Pueblo, Colorado) featuring Till with Martin Luther King, Jr. Till was included among the forty names of people who had died in the Civil Rights Movement (listed as martyrs) on the granite sculpture of the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated in 1989.

In 1991, a seven-mile stretch of 71st Street in Chicago, was renamed "Emmett Till Road." Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett’s mother, attended many of the dedications for the memorials, including a demonstration in Selma, Alabama on the 35th anniversary of the march over the Edmund Pettis Bridge.

She later wrote in her memoirs” "I realized that Emmett had achieved the significant impact in death that he had been denied in life. Even so, I had never wanted Emmett to be a martyr. I only wanted him to be a good son. Although I realized all the great things that had been accomplished largely because of the sacrifices made by so many people, I found myself wishing that somehow we could have done it another way."

Till-Mobley died in 2003, the same year her memoirs were published.

James McCosh Elementary School in Chicago, where Till had been a student, was renamed the "Emmett Louis Till Math And Science Academy" in 2005.

The "Emmett Till Memorial Highway" was dedicated between Greenwood and Tutwiler, Mississippi, the same route his body took to the train station on its way to Chicago.

In 2007, Tallahatchie County issued a formal apology to Till's family, reading "We the citizens of Tallahatchie County recognize that the Emmett Till case was a terrible miscarriage of justice. We state candidly and with deep regret the failure to effectively pursue justice. We wish to say to the family of Emmett Till that we are profoundly sorry for what was done in this community to your loved one.”

The same year, Georgia congressman John Lewis, whose skull was fractured while being beaten during the 1965 Selma march, sponsored a bill that provides a plan for investigating and prosecuting unsolved Civil Rights era murders. The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act was signed into law in 2008.

The Emmett Till murder trial, 1955

Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were tried for the murder of Till in late 1955, but acquitted by an all-white Mississippi jury.

Protected by the double jeopardy clause, Bryant and Milam admitted killing Till in a 1956 magazine interview. The widely publicized trial is considered a pivotal event in the Civil Rights Movement.

Shown in the above photo is the all-white jury

Roy Bryan, left, and J.W. Milam on trial in Sumner, Mississippi, September, 1955 for the killing of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago.

Photo by Ed Clark

Bob Dylan performs “The Death of Emmett Till”

On this day in 1965 — 56 years ago — Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival, performing a rock-and-roll set publicly for the very first time while shouts and boos came from some dismayed fans in the audience

Newport, 1965

Bob Dylan’s band included Mike Bloomfield, guitar; Jerome Arnold, bass; Al Kooper, organ, Barry Goldberg, piano and Sam Lay, drums.

Photo courtesy Newportfolk.com

Before he took the stage at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival — the annual event that had given him his first real national exposure one year earlier — Bob Dylan was introduced by Ronnie Gilbert, a member of The Weavers:

"And here he is...take him, you know him, he's yours."

In his 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan would write about how he "failed to sense the ominous forebodings in the introduction."

One year later, he would learn just how possessive the Newport audiences felt toward him.

On this day in 1965 — 56 years ago — Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival, performing a rock-and-roll set publicly for the very first time while shouts and boos came from some dismayed fans in the audience. Six weeks earlier, Bob Dylan had recorded the single that marked his move out of acoustic folk and into the idiom of electrified rock and roll.

"Like A Rolling Stone" had only been released five days before his appearance at Newport, however, so most in the audience had no idea what lay in store for them. Neither did festival organizers, who were as surprised to see Dylan's crew setting up heavy sound equipment during sound check as that evening's audience would be to hear what came out of it.

With Al Kooper and The Paul Butterfield Blues Band including Mike Bloomfield on guitar, Barry Goldberg on piano, Jerome Arnold on bass and Sam Lay on drums backing him, Dylan took to the stage with his Fender Stratocaster on the evening of July 25 and launched into an electrified version of "Maggie's Farm."

Almost immediately, the jeering and yelling came from some audience members. Some said it was due to bad sound, some said it was due to the short set, while others complained of the folk singer going electric. Dylan's vocals were unintelligible to many in the audience.

But it was clear by Dylan's next number, the now-classic "Like A Rolling Stone" — that the old folk singer was headed in a new artistic direction. Dylan's performance at Newport in 1965 stands as a pivotal moment in the history of American music.

By severing his ties to the old-guard folk establishment, Dylan sought to escape the limitations imposed by his former champions, the well-meaning purists of traditional musical expression. The rigors of their intellectual understanding of "folk music" — who should play it, how it should be made, what it should be about — were stifling to Dylan's own intellectual freedom.

He needed to purge his music of its "authenticity" and move beyond the musical category he had so willingly insinuated himself into since meeting Woody Guthrie in 1961. It was time for his music to be entirely about Bob Dylan, not about some coal mining strike in 1931.

And what did the man himself think of the unfriendly reception he received from what should have been the friendliest of audiences? Some say he was extremely shaken at the time, but with four decades of hindsight, his feelings were clear.

Reflecting on Ronnie Gilbert's "Take him, he's yours" comment, Dylan wrote, "What a crazy thing to say! Screw that. As far as I knew, I didn't belong to anybody then or now."

Thanks History.com and other sources

Here, Dylan performs “Like a Rolling Stone” at Newport, 1965

Bob Dylan, Donovan and Mary Travers of Peter Paul and Mary backstage at the Newport Folk Festival in July, 1965

Photo by David Gahr

Boy sitting on an old port street of Limassol, Cyprus, playing a wooden flute. A cat comes by to check him out.

Photo by Vladimir Zotov

On this day in 1967 — 54 years ago — The Beatles met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose lecture on Transcendental Meditation they had gone to hear at the Hilton Hotel in London

On this day in 1967 — 54 years ago — The Beatles met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose lecture on Transcendental Meditation they had gone to hear at the Hilton Hotel in London.

Transcendental Meditation involved the silent repetition of a word or sound to produce a state of mind that reduces stress, calms the mind and energizes both mind and body. Encouraged by Pattie Harrison, The Beatles and their partners — minus Ringo and Maureen Starkey, whose second child, Jason, had been born five days previously — attended the lecture.

The Harrisons had become interested in Eastern philosophy during a six-week holiday in Bombay towards the end of 1966. The following year Pattie attended a lecture on Transcendental Meditation at Caxton Hall, London, where she had been given her mantra. Inspired by her new discovery, she encouraged George to accompany her to Maharishi's lecture at the Hilton.

A press conference followed the lecture, after which a 90-minute private audience with Maharishi was held for Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and the rest of their party. The yogi's words left them keen to learn more, and they made arrangements to travel to Bangor, North Wales, the next day to attend the weekend seminar being held there.

The Maharishi invited The Beatles to travel with him to Bangor, in North Wales, to attend more lectures. They accepted his invitation.

In February 1968, the Beatles took their interest a large step forward by traveling to the Maharishi’s home base in northern India. Lennon and wife Cynthia, and Harrison and Pattie Boyd arrived first (Ringo Starr and Paul would soon join them) along with other notable friends such as Beach Boy Mike Love, Donovan and actress Mia Farrow.

During their stay, they would learn more about meditation and would also find time to write many of the songs that would ultimately end up on The Beatles (aka the White Album). “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” “Dear Prudence” (written about Farrow’s sister, also in attendance), “Mother Nature’s Son,” and “Sexy Sadie” were just a few of the songs born out of their experiences there.

“I was really impressed with the Maharishi. I was impressed because he was laughing all the time,” said Ringo. “It was another point of view. It was the first time we’re sort of getting into Eastern philosophies.” McCartney described the stay in India as “very much like a summer camp,” with Starr adding, “It was pretty far out.”

Both McCartney and Starr cut their stay short, while others hung out for close to two months. The harmonious vibes of the trip, however, would soon come to an end when allegations arose about the more earthly interests of the Maharishi in one or more of the females in attendance as well as questions surrounding the Maharishi seeking financial involvement from the Beatles.

Exactly why the Beatles left the Maharishi is up to question. All left abruptly. According to a 2006 statement by Deepak Chopra, the Beatles and their entourage "were doing drugs, taking LSD, at Maharishi's ashram, and he lost his temper with them. He asked them to leave, and they did in a huff." This was confirmed in a 2008 article in The Washington Post that reported "others said the Beatles resumed drug use at the ashram."

Others said the Beatles learned the Maharishi sought financial gain, while others said, the supposedly celibate guru made a pass at female members of the group.

Upon their return, a reporter asked Lennon if the Maharishi was “on the level.” Lennon quipped, “I don’t know what level he’s on, but we had a nice holiday in India and came back rested.”

Amelia Earhart was born 124 years ago today

Amelia Earhart was born 124 years ago today.

An aviation pioneer and author, Earhart was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She received the U.S. Distinguished Flying Cross for this record. Earhart set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots.

Earhart joined the faculty of the Purdue University aviation department in 1935 as a visiting faculty member to counsel women on careers and help inspire others with her love for aviation. She was also a member of the National Woman's Party, and an early supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment.

During an attempt to make a circumnavigational flight of the globe in 1937 in a Purdue-funded Lockheed Model 10 Electra, Earhart disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island.

There are many theories of how and why Earhart died. Though there is much evidence on various stories, so there has been no provable link to definitively settle the issue.

Fascination with Earhart’s life, career and disappearance continues.

Jon Faddis is 68 years old today

Jon Faddis is 68 years old today.

Faddis is a jazz trumpet player, conductor, composer and educator — renowned for both his playing and for his expertise in the field of music education. Upon his first appearance on the scene, he became known for his ability to closely mirror the sound of trumpet icon Dizzy Gillespie, who was his mentor, along with Stan Kenton trumpeter, Bill Catalano.

Born in Oakland, California, at 18, Faddie joined Lionel Hampton's big band before joining the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra as lead trumpet. After playing with Charles Mingus in his early twenties, Faddis became a noted studio musician in New York, appearing on many pop recordings in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In the mid-1980s, he left the studios to continue to pursue his solo career, which resulted in albums such as Legacy, Into The Faddisphere and Hornucopia. As a result of his growth as a musician and individual artist, he became the director and main trumpet soloist of the Dizzy Gillespie 70th Birthday Big Band and Dizzy's United Nation Orchestra.

From 1992 to 2002, Faddis led the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band (CHJB) at Carnegie Hall, conducting more than 40 concerts in ten years. During that time, the CHJB presented over 135 musicians, featured over 70 guest artists and premiered works by over 35 composers and arrangers at Carnegie Hall.

Faddis also led the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Stars and the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Stars Big Band from their inception through 2004, when he was appointed artistic director of the Chicago Jazz Ensemble (CJE), based at Columbia College Chicago in Illinois.

Faddis led the CJE from autumn 2004 though spring 2010, premiering significant new works, pioneering educational initiatives in Chicago public schools focusing on Louis Armstrong's music and bringing the CJE into new venues.

This included presenting the first of the "Made in Chicago" Jazz series at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park while concurrently leading the Jon Faddis Jazz Orchestra of New York, the successor to the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band.

Faddis appeared in the 1998 movie, Blues Brothers 2000. In the film, he plays trumpet with The Louisiana Gator Boys.

Faddis is a first-call lead player in New York City and has an international reputation for his playing ability in the full range, particularly the highest registers, of the trumpet. His distinctive trumpet playing can be heard on themes including "Lil' Bill," "The Wiz" and "Bird."

Here, Faddis performs “New Orleans” with the Blues Brothers and the Louisiana Gator Boys in Blues Brothers 2000.

Bob Dylan’s Masked and Anonymous debuted on this day in 2003 — 18 years ago

Bob Dylan’s Masked and Anonymous debuted on this day in 2003 — 18 years ago.

It was in March, 2006 — while taking Robert Levinson’s Bob Dylan class at the New School in New York City — that several class members met the guest speaker that night for dinner at a coffee shop before the session began.

He was Richard Thomas, director of graduate studies and professor of classics, at Harvard. Dr. Thomas is quite an expert on Dylan, having written the recent book, “Why Bob Dylan Matters” and lectured on his performance artistry and such esoteric subjects as “the Aesthetics of Pastoral Melancholy from Virgil to Dylan.”

But that night, what I mainly remember, was our discussion of Dylan’s Masked and Anonymous. On the surface, most critics said the film was about how a singer, whose career had gone on a downward spiral, was forced to make a comeback to the performance stage for a benefit concert.
 
Those critics totally missed what the film was really about. It was immediately panned as another clueless Dylan effort, which if they didn’t understand, no one else possibly could either. Thomas, of course, wasn’t one of those critics. He got the film immediately.

“In three hundred years, when people look back at the entire Sony motion picture catalog of that era, only one film will be remembered as truly important and will have stood the test of time,” Thomas told me. “That will be Masked and Anonymous.”

Over the years, I have watched Masked and Anonymous many times and each time I glean new information from what I consider a Dylan classic. This was a film that was never intended to be commercial, but a multi-layered puzzle with the viewer as one of the pieces.
 
Larry Charles, the film’s director, put it this way in an interview with Trev Gibb: Bob Dylan is “somebody who’s seen more than you have and knows more than you know and if you're wise and you listen, he will tell you everything you need to know.

“But you're gonna have to do the work of interpreting it and that’s how the movie is also, it's like Bob is telling you everything. This is Bob telling you everything about himself also, but it’s not laid out clearly. You have to do the work of putting the pieces together.”

That, in a nutshell, is why I think Masked and Anonymous is so intriguing and continues to live on in the minds of the viewers who have embraced it.

It’s important that the film was conceived outside of today’s capitalist system. “There was no commercial consideration in making this movie,” said Charles. “This was a purely instinctive process which is really an anathema to the making of movies today.”

Here's the trailer for Masked and Anonymous

Old woman and her guitar

Photo by Yaroslav Bobrichev

Alison Krauss is 50 years old today

Alison Krauss is 50 years old today.

A bluegrass-country singer-songwriter and musician, Krauss entered the music industry at an early age, winning local contests by the age of ten and recording for the first time at fourteen. She signed with Rounder Records in 1985 and released her first solo album in 1987.

Krauss was invited to join the band with which she still performs, Alison Krauss and Union Station (AKUS), and later released her first album with them as a group in 1989. In addition to more than a dozen albums, Krauss has appeared on numerous soundtracks and helped renew interest in bluegrass music in the United States.

Her soundtrack performances have led to further popularity, including the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, an album also credited with raising American interest in bluegrass, and the Cold Mountain soundtrack, which led to her performance at the 2004 Academy Awards.

Born in Decatur, Illinois, Krauss is the daughter of Fred and Louise Krauss. Her father was a German immigrant who came to the United States in 1952 and taught his native language. Her mother, of German and Italian descent, is the daughter of artists.

Krauss grew up in the college town of Champaign, home to the University of Illinois. She began studying classical violin at age five, but soon switched to bluegrass. She first became involved with music because "[my] mother tried to find interesting things for me to do" and "wanted to get me involved in music, in addition to art and sports.”

At the age of eight, she started entering local talent contests, and at ten had her own band. At 13, she won the Walnut Valley Festival Fiddle Championship, and the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass in America named her the "Most Promising Fiddler in the Midwest.”

Krauss first met Dan Tyminski around 1984 at a festival held by the Society. Every current member of her band, Union Station, first met her at these festivals.

Krauss's earliest musical experience was as an instrumentalist, though her style has grown to focus more on her vocals with a band providing most of the instrumentation. Musicians she enjoys include vocalists Lou Gramm of Foreigner and Paul Rodgers of Bad Company.

Krauss' family listened to "folk records" while she was growing up, but she had friends, who exposed her to groups such as AC/DC, Carly Simon, The Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd and ELO. She cites Dolly Parton, with whom she has since collaborated a number of times, as a major influence.

Despite being together for nearly two decades and winning numerous awards, she said the group was "just beginning right now" (in 2002) because "in spite of all the great things that have happened for the band, [she] feel[s] musically it's just really beginning."

Her work has been compared to that of The Cox Family, Bill Monroe and Del McCoury and has, in turn, been credited with influencing various "Newgrass" artists including Nickel Creek, for which she acted as record producer on two of their albums. In addition to her work with Nickel Creek, she has acted as producer to the Cox Family, Reba McEntire and Alan Jackson.

Two years ago, Krauss was placed on vocal rest following a diagnosis of a vocal condition called dysphonia. She has since resumed performing.

As of 2016, Krauss has won 27 Grammy Awards from 42 nominations, tying her with Quincy Jones as the most awarded living recipient, second only to classical conductor Georg Solti, who holds the record for most wins with 31.

She is the most awarded singer and the most awarded female artist in Grammy history. At the time of her first, the 1991 Grammy Awards, she was the second-youngest winner (currently tied as the ninth-youngest).

Krauss was married to musician Pat Bergeson from 1997 to 2001. Their son, Sam, was born in July 1999.

Here, Krauss and Union Station meet at a crossroads to perform “Goodbye Is All We Have”

Alison Krauss and Union Station in concert

Raymond Chandler, creator of detective Philip Marlowe, was born 133 years ago today

Raymond Chandler, creator of detective Philip Marlowe, was born 133 years ago today.

Born in Chicago and raised in England, Chandler went to college and worked as a freelance journalist for several newspapers. During World War I, he served in the Royal Flying Corps.

After the war, he moved to California, where he eventually became the director of several independent oil companies. He lost his job during the Depression, and he turned to writing to support himself at the age of 45.

He published his first stories in the early 1930s in the pulp magazine, Black Mask, and published his first novel, The Big Sleep, in 1939.

Chandler published only seven novels, among them Farewell My Lovely (1946) and The Long Goodbye (1953), all featuring tough, cynical Detective Philip Marlowe.

William Faulkner wrote the screen version of The Big Sleep, which starred Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe.

Chandler also wrote Hollywood screenplays in the 1940s and early 1950s, including Double Indemnity (1949) and Strangers on a Train (1951).

He died in 1959.

Ronny Cox, character actor, singer-songwriter and guitarist, is 83 years old today

Ronny Cox appears as Ozark Bule in a scene from the 1976 Woody Guthrie biopic, Bound for Glory, based on Guthrie's autobiography.

Photo from United Artists

Ronny Cox, character actor, singer-songwriter and guitarist, is 83 years old today.

Cox, the third of five children, was born in Cloudcroft, New Mexico and grew up in Portales, New Mexico. He graduated from Eastern New Mexico University in 1963 with a double major in Theater and Speech Correction.

Cox now tours regularly with a band, performing at theatres and folk music festivals.

As an actor, he made his debut in the acclaimed 1972 film, Deliverance. In a now famous scene, he played the instrumental, "Dueling Banjos," on his guitar with a banjo-playing mountain boy, played by child actor Billy Redden. Cox was hired for the role because he could play the guitar. He wrote a book which recounts his experiences making the film in 2012.

In the period 1974-1975, Cox starred in the short-lived CBS family-oriented dramatic series, Apple's Way, created by Earl Hamner, who created The Waltons. He also appeared as Mr. Webb in a television production, Our Town.

Despite having a successful acting career, Cox said that music now comes first in his life. He turns down about 90 percent of the acting jobs he is offered in order to play over 100 shows at festivals and theaters each year.

He is regularly accompanied by Radoslav Lorković (piano, accordion) and Chojo Jacques (fiddle, mandolin.) Cox also leads a musical tour to Ireland each year.

Here, Cox performs the screen version of Dueling Banjos in the 1972 film, Deliverance

The key cast members of Deliverance — Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox — get together for the 40th anniversary of the film in 2012

Though Ronny Cox is closely associated with “Dueling Banjos” in the 1972 film, Deliverance, there is far more to the story than the scene on screen.

"Dueling Banjos" was an instrumental composition by Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith. It was composed in 1955 by Smith as a banjo instrumental he called "Feudin' Banjos," which contained riffs from "Yankee Doodle."

Smith recorded it playing a four-string plectrum banjo and accompanied by five-string bluegrass banjo player, Don Reno. The composition's first wide scale airing was on a 1963 television episode of The Andy Griffith Show called "Briscoe Declares for Aunt Bee," in which it is played by the visiting musical family, the Darlings, performed by The Dillards, a bluegrass group.

The song was made famous by the 1972 film, Deliverance, which also led to a successful lawsuit by the song's composer, as it was used in the film without his permission.

The film version, arranged and recorded by Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell and subsequently issued as a single, went to #2 for four weeks on the Hot 100 in 1973, all four weeks behind Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly With His Song," and topped the adult contemporary chart for two weeks the same year.

It reached #1 for one week on both the Cashbox and Record World pop charts. The song also reached #5 on the Hot Country Singles chart at the same time it was on the Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary Singles charts.

Weissberg, who was hired to record the song, had no idea it was hit until he heard it on his car radio while driving.

Above, Steve Mandel and Eric Weissberg clown around in Washington Square Park, 2009

Photo by Frank Beacham

Tony Joe White was born 78 years ago today

Tony Joe White, New York City, 2006

Photo by Frank Beacham

Tony Joe White was born 78 years ago today.

White was a songwriter and guitarist, best known for his 1969 hit "Polk Salad Annie,” recorded by Elvis Presley and Tom Jones, and "Rainy Night in Georgia," which he wrote but was first made popular by Brook Benton in 1970. White also wrote "Steamy Windows," a hit for Tina Turner in 1989.

Born one of seven children and raised on a cotton farm near the small town of Oak Grove, Louisiana, when White was 16, Charles, the oldest of the White children, brought home a Lightnin' Hopkins album and started teaching his younger brother, Tony, the blues guitar.

As a child, White listened to not only local bluesmen and country singers, but also to the distinctive cajun music of Louisiana. Cajun is a hybrid of traditional musical styles introduced by French-Canadian settlers at the turn of the 19th Century.

White began performing at school dances, and after graduating, started playing in nightclubs in Louisiana and Texas. He formed his first band, Tony White & his Combo, while still in his teens.

The three young men (White, 20, bassist Robert McGuffie, 19, and Jim Griffith, 22) played a nightclub in Kingsville, Texas for an uninterrupted engagement of eight months (six nights a week) in 1964. That band was followed by Tony Joe and the Mojos and Tony's Twilights, and for the next seven years White worked the small clubs of the South before deciding to embark on a solo career singing his own compositions.

In 1967, White signed with Monument Records, which operated from a recording studio in the Nashville suburb of Hendersonville. There, with Billy Swan, his producer, he created a variety of sounds, including rock, country and R&B.

Over the next three years, White released four singles with no commercial success stateside, although "Soul Francisco" was a hit in France.

"Polk Salad Annie" had been released for nine months and written off as a failure by his record label when it finally entered the U.S. charts in July, 1969. It climbed into the Top Ten by early August, eventually reaching #8, becoming White's biggest hit.

White's first album, 1969's Black and White, was recorded with Muscle Shoals/Nashville musicians David Briggs, Norbert Putnam and Jerry Carrigan, and featured "Willie and Laura Mae Jones" and "Polk Salad Annie," along with covers of Jimmy Webb's "Wichita Lineman."

Three more singles quickly followed, all minor hits, and White toured with Steppenwolf, Sly & the Family Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival and other major rock acts of the 1970s, playing in France, Germany, Belgium, Sweden and England.

In 1973, White appeared in the film, Catch My Soul, a rock-opera adaption of Shakespeare's Othello. It was directed by Patrick McGoohan and produced in the UK by Richard Rosenbloom and Jack Good. The cast included Richie Havens, Season Hubley, Susan Tyrrell, Bonnie Bramlett, Lance LeGault, Delaney Bramlett and Family Lotus. White played and sang four and composed seven songs for the musical.

In late September, 1973, White was recruited by record producer Huey Meaux to sit in on the legendary Memphis sessions that became a landmark album —Southern Roots — for Jerry Lee Lewis. By all accounts, these sessions were a three-day, around-the-clock party.

It reunited the original MGs (Steve Cropper, Donald "Duck" Dunn and Al Jackson, Jr. of Booker T. and the MGs fame) for the first time in three years. It also featured Carl Perkins, Mark Lindsay (of Paul Revere & the Raiders) and Wayne Jackson plus The Memphis Horns.

White died of a heart attack on October 24, 2018, at the age of 75. "He wasn't ill at all. He just had a heart attack...there was no pain or suffering,” said his son, Jody White. He died at his home in Leiper's Fork, Tennessee.

Here, White performs his song, “Rainy Night in Georgia,” in Amsterdam, 2008

Tony Joe White joins Johnny Cash to perform his song, “Polk Salad Annie”

Edward Hopper was born 139 years ago today

Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, 1942

Edward Hopper was born 139 years ago today.

A prominent American realist painter and printmaker, Hopper was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching. Both in his urban and rural scenes, his spare and finely calculated renderings reflected his personal vision of modern American life.

Born in upper Nyack, New York, a yacht-building center on the Hudson River, Hopper was one of two children of a comfortably well-off, middle-class family. His birthplace and boyhood home were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.

Today the family home is the Edward Hopper House Art Center. It serves as a non-profit community cultural center featuring exhibitions, workshops, lectures, performances and special events.

Hopper was a good student in grade school and showed talent in drawing at age five. He had a love of French and Russian culture. Hopper’s parents encouraged his art and kept him amply supplied with materials, instructional magazines and illustrated books.

By his teens, he was working in pen-and-ink, charcoal, watercolor and oil — drawing from nature as well as making political cartoons. In 1895, he created his first signed oil painting, Rowboat in Rocky Cove. It showed his early interest in nautical subjects.

In his early self-portraits, Hopper tended to represent himself as skinny, ungraceful and homely. Though a tall and quiet teenager, his prankish sense of humor found an outlet in his art, sometimes in depictions of immigrants or of women dominating men in comic situations. Later in life, he depicted mostly women as figures in his paintings.

In high school, he dreamed of being a naval architect, but after graduation he declared his intention to follow an art career. Hopper’s parents insisted that he study commercial art to have a reliable means of income.

In developing his self-image and individualistic philosophy of life, Hopper was influenced by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He later said, “I admire him greatly…I read him over and over again.”

Hopper began art studies with a correspondence course in 1899. Soon, however, he transferred to the New York Institute of Art and Design. There he studied for six years, with teachers, including William Merritt Chase, who instructed him in oil painting.

Early on, Hopper modeled his style after Chase and French masters Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas. Sketching from live models proved a challenge and a shock for the conservatively raised Hopper.

In 1913, at the famous Armory Show, Hopper sold his first painting, Sailing (1911), which he painted over an earlier self-portrait. Hopper was thirty-one, and though he hoped his first sale would lead to others in short order, his career would not catch fire for many more years to come.

Shortly after his father’s death that same year, Hopper moved to the Washington Square apartment in the Greenwich Village section of New York City, where he would live for the rest of his life.

The following year he received a commission to make some movie posters and handle publicity for a movie company. Though he did not like the illustration work, Hopper was a lifelong devotee of the cinema and the theatre, both of which became subjects for his paintings. Each form influenced his compositional methods.

At an impasse over his oil paintings, in 1915 Hopper turned to etching, producing about 70 works, many of urban scenes of both Paris and New York. He also produced some posters for the war effort, as well as continuing with occasional commercial projects. When he could, Hopper did some outdoor watercolors on visits to New England, especially at the art colonies at Ogunquit, Maine and Monhegan Island.

Hopper was very productive through the 1930s and early 1940s, producing among many important works New York Movie (1939), Girlie Show (1941), Nighthawks (1942), Hotel Lobby (1943) and Morning in a City (1944).

In the 1950s and early 1960s, he created several more major works, including First Row Orchestra (1951); Morning Sun and Hotel by a Railroad, both in 1952; and Intermission (1963).

Hopper died in his studio near Washington Square in New York City on May 15, 1967. His wife, who died 10 months later, bequeathed their joint collection of over three thousand works to the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Below, Hopper’s 1926 nude painting titled “Eleven A.M.”

New York Movie, 1939

Edward Hopper in his Greenwich Village studio, 1938

Alexander Calder, sculptor, was born 123 years ago today

Alexander Calder, sculptor, was born 123 years ago today.

Calder was the originator of the mobile — a type of kinetic sculpture the delicately balanced or suspended components of which move in response to motor power or air currents. His stationary sculptures are called stabiles. He also produced numerous wire figures, notably for a vast miniature circus.

Born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, Calder’s father, Stirling Calder, was a well-known sculptor who created many public installations, a majority of them in nearby Philadelphia. His grandfather, sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, was born in Scotland, immigrated to Philadelphia in 1868, and is best known for the colossal statue of William Penn on top of Philadelphia City Hall's tower.

Calder's mother, Nanette, was a professional portrait artist, who had studied at the Académie Julian and the Sorbonne in Paris from around 1888 until 1893. She moved to Philadelphia, where she met Stirling Calder while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. They married on February 22, 1895.

Calder’s sister, Margaret Calder Hayes, is considered instrumental in the development of the UC Berkeley Art Museum.

In 1902, Calder posed nude for his father’s sculpture, The Man Cub, which is now located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. That same year he also completed his earliest sculpture, a clay elephant.

Three years later, Stirling Calder contracted tuberculosis, and Calder's parents moved to a ranch in Oracle, Arizona, leaving the children in the care of family friends for a year. The children were reunited with their parents in late March, 1906 and stayed at the ranch in Arizona until fall of the same year.

After Arizona, the Calder family moved to Pasadena, California. The windowed cellar of the family home became Calder's first studio and he received his first set of tools. He used scraps of copper wire that he found in the streets to make jewelry and beads for his sister's dolls.

On January 1, 1907, Nanette Calder took her son to the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, where he observed a four-horse-chariot race. This style of event later became the finale of Calder's wire circus shows.

In 1909, when Calder was in the fourth grade, he sculpted a dog and a duck out of sheet brass as Christmas gifts for his parents. The sculptures were three dimensional and the duck was kinetic because it rocked when gently tapped.

In 1910, the Calder family moved back to Philadelphia, where Sandy briefly attended Germantown Academy, then moved to Croton-on-Hudson, New York. In Croton, during his early high school years, Calder was befriended by the painter, Everett Shinn, with whom he built a gravity powered system of mechanical trains.

After Croton, the Calders moved to Spuyten Duyvil to be closer to the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City, where Stirling Calder rented a studio. While living in Spuyten Duyvil, Calder attended high school in nearby Yonkers.

In 1912, Stirling Calder was appointed acting chief of the Department of Sculpture of the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. He began work on sculptures for the exposition that was held in 1915.

During Calder's high school years (1912–1915), the family moved back and forth between New York and California. In each new location, Calder's parents reserved cellar space as a studio for their son.

Toward the end of this period, Calder stayed with friends in California while his parents moved back to New York, so that he could graduate from Lowell High School in San Francisco. Calder graduated with the class of 1915.

Calder moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students' League, studying briefly with Thomas Hart Benton, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller and John Sloan.

While a student, he worked for the National Police Gazette where, in 1925, one of his assignments was sketching the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. Calder became fascinated with the circus, a theme that would reappear in his later work.

In 1926, Calder moved to Paris, visited the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and he established a studio at 22 rue Daguerre in the Montparnasse Quarter. In June, 1929, while traveling by boat from Paris to New York, Calder met his future wife, Louisa James (1905-1996), grandniece of author Henry James and philosopher William James. They married in 1931.

While in Paris, Calder met and became friends with a number of avant-garde artists, including Joan Miró, Jean Arp and Marcel Duchamp. Calder and Louisa returned to America in 1933 to settle in a farmhouse they purchased in Roxbury, Connecticut, where they raised a family (first daughter, Sandra born 1935, second daughter, Mary, in 1939).

In 1955, Alexander and Louisa Calder travelled around in India for three months, where Calder produced nine sculptures as well as some jewelry. In 1962, Calder settled into his new workshop, Carroi, which was of a futuristic design and overlooked the valley of the Lower Chevrière to Saché in Indre-et-Loire (France).

He did not hesitate to offer his gouaches and small mobiles to his friends in the country, he even donated to the town a stabile trônant, which since 1974 has been situated in front of the church. It is an anti-sculpture free from gravity.

Throughout his artistic career, Calder named many of his works in French, regardless of where they were destined for eventual display.

Calder died unexpectedly on November 11, 1976, shortly after opening a major retrospective show at the Whitney Museum in New York.

Above, Calder is shown in his studio, 1955

Photo by Evans Hulton

Bobby Sherman is 78 years old today

Bobby Sherman is 78 years old today.

A singer, actor and occasional songwriter, Sherman was a popular teen idol in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He graduated in 1961 from Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, California and attended Pierce College in Woodland Hills, California.

Sherman’s interest in music began at age 11, when he learned to play the trumpet. He eventually progressed to playing 16 musical instruments. At Birmingham High School, Sherman played football, joined a dance band and discovered his love for singing.

In 1962, Sal Mineo took Sherman under his wing and wrote two songs for him as well as arranging for Sherman to record the songs. Then, in 1964, when Sherman was asked by Mineo to sing with his old band at a Hollywood party (there were many actors and agents in attendance) he made such an impression at that party that he landed an agent and eventually a part on the ABC television show Shindig! as a regular cast member/house singer.

The show ran for two years — from 1964 to 1966. During that time Sherman made several records with Decca and another smaller label, and landed in all the teen magazines. However, it did not seem to catapult his career.

Sherman's luck changed drastically early in 1968 when, out of hundreds of actors, he was cast in the role as the bashful, stammering logger, Jeremy Bolt, in the television series, Here Come the Brides (1968-1970 ABC), with Bridget Hanley as his romantic interest, Candy Pruitt.

The cast included Robert Brown, David Soul and Joan Blondell. Sherman managed to become the breakout star of the show as well as a beloved Teen Idol world wide.

Sherman also appeared on an episode of The Monkees entitled "Monkees at the Movies," playing a pompous surfer/singer named Frankie Catalina in the vein of Frankie Avalon, performing the song "New Girl in School" (which was co-written by The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, Jan Berry of Jan and Dean, songwriter Roger Christian and Bob Norberg, who was a roommate of Wilson's at the time).

In Sherman's recording career, he had seven Top 40 hits. In 1969, his first gold single, "Little Woman," became popular, peaking at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (#2 in Canada) and spending nine weeks in the Top 20. It sold over a million copies.

In 1998, after a 25 year absence, eager fans flocked to see him in concert as part of "The Teen Idol Tour" with Peter Noone and Davy Jones. Fellow Monkees member, Micky Dolenz replaced Davy Jones on the tour in 1999.

Sherman did his last concert as a solo performer in Lincoln, Rhode Island on August 25, 2001. He mostly retired from music for a career as a paramedic and later a police officer, though he still performs and records occasionally.

Here, Sherman performs “Julie Do You Love Me” in early 1960s

Don Henley is 74 years old today

Don Henley is 74 years old today.

Henley is a singer, songwriter and drummer, best known as a founding member of the Eagles before launching a successful solo career. He was the drummer and lead vocalist for the Eagles from 1971–1980, when the band broke up.

Henley sings lead vocals on Eagles hits such as "Witchy Woman," "Desperado," "Best of My Love," "One of These Nights," "Hotel California," "Life in the Fast Lane" and "The Long Run."

After the Eagles broke up in 1980, Henley pursued a solo career and released his debut album in 1982. He has released four studio albums, two compilation albums, and one live DVD.

His solo hits include "Dirty Laundry," "The Boys of Summer," "All She Wants to Do Is Dance," "The Heart of the Matter," "The Last Worthless Evening," "Sunset Grill," "Not Enough Love in the World," "New York Minute" and "The End of the Innocence."

The Eagles have sold over 120 million albums worldwide, had five #1 singles, 17 Top 40 singles and six #1 albums.

As a solo artist, Henley has sold over 10 million albums worldwide and had eight Top 40 singles. Combined with the Eagles and as a solo artist, Henley has released 25 Top 40 singles. He has released seven studio albums with the Eagles and four as a solo artist.

George Clinton is 80 years old today

George Clinton is 80 years old today.

A singer, songwriter, bandleader and music producer and the principal architect of P-Funk, Clinton was the mastermind of the bands, Parliament and Funkadelic, during the 1970s and early 1980s and launched a solo career in 1981. He is one of the foremost innovators of funk music, along with James Brown and Sly Stone.

Born in Kannapolis, North Carolina (allegedly in an outhouse), Clinton grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey and currently resides in Tallahassee, Florida. During his teen years, Clinton formed a doo wop group inspired by Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers called The Parliaments. His day job was straightening hair at a barber salon in Plainfield.

For a period in the 1960s, Clinton was a staff songwriter for Motown. Despite initial commercial failure (and one major hit single —"(I Wanna) Testify" in 1967), The Parliaments eventually found success under the names Parliament and Funkadelic in the 70s.

These two bands combined the elements of musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, Cream and James Brown while exploring different sounds, technology and lyricism. Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic dominated diverse music during the 1970s with over 40 R&B hit singles (including three #1s) and three platinum albums. Clinton's efforts as a solo artist began in 1982.

He is also a notable music producer working on almost all of the albums he performs on, as well as producing albums for Bootsy Collins and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Here, Clinton performs “Atomic Dog”

Rufus Wainwright is 48 years old today

Rufus Wainwright is 48 years old today.

An American-Canadian singer-songwriter and composer, Wainwright has recorded original music and numerous tracks on compilations and film soundtracks, and has written a classical opera and set Shakespeare sonnets to music for a theater piece by Robert Wilson.

Born in Rhinebeck, New York, to folk singers Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III, Wainwright’s parents divorced when he was three. He lived with his mother in Montreal for most of his youth, and has dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship.

Wainwright attended high school at the Millbrook School in New York (which would later inspire his song "Millbrook"). He began playing the piano at age six, and started touring at 13 with "The McGarrigle Sisters and Family," a folk group featuring Rufus, his sister, Martha, his mother, Kate, and aunt, Anna.

His song, "I'm a-Runnin'," which he performed in the film, Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller, at the age of 14, earned him a nomination for a 1989 Genie Award for Best Original Song.

Wainwright became interested in opera during his adolescent years, and the genre strongly influences his music. (For instance, the song "Barcelona" features lyrics from the libretto of Giuseppe Verdi's opera, Macbeth.) During this time, he became interested in Édith Piaf, Al Jolson and Judy Garland.

Through weekly shows at Cafe Sarajevo, Wainwright was on the Montreal club circuit and eventually cut a series of demo tapes produced by Pierre Marchand, who later produced Wainwright's album, Poses. The resulting tapes impressed his father, Loudon, who passed them on to his friend, Van Dyke Parks.

Parks sent the recordings to Lenny Waronker, the DreamWorks executive who eventually signed Wainwright to his label.

Waronker said the following of Wainwright: "When I was about to listen to his tape, I remember clearly I was thinking, 'Gee, if he has the mom's musicality and smarts, and the dad's smarts and voice, that'd be nice.' Then I put it on and I said, 'Oh, my God, this is stunning.'"

The singer moved to New York City in 1996, performing regularly at Club Fez. He relocated to Los Angeles that year and began work on his first studio album, Rufus Wainwright, which was released in 1998.

Waronker paired Wainwright with producer Jon Brion, and the two spent most of 1996 and 1997 making the record. Wainwright recorded 56 songs in total on 62 rolls of tape. The sessions cost $700,000.

Here, Wainwright performs Leonard Cohen’s “Halleujah”

The Last Waltz, Paris, 1949

Photo by Robert Doisneau

Greta Garbo, known for her almost unearthly beauty and intense desire for privacy, made her U.S. screen debut in The Torrent on this day in 1926 — 95 years ago today

The glamorous, husky-voiced Swedish actress Greta Garbo, known for her almost unearthly beauty and intense desire for privacy, made her U.S. screen debut in The Torrent on this day in 1926 — 95 years ago today.

Born Greta Louisa Gustaffson in 1905, Garbo grew up in a poor family in Stockholm. At age 13, she started working as a lather girl at a barbershop and later moved to a department store, where she was asked to appear in a publicity film for the store.

Later, she appeared in a publicity film for a bakery. Pleased with her success, she applied for and won a scholarship to the Royal Dramatic Theater’s acting school, where she was discovered by director, Mauritz Stiller, one of the most powerful directors in Swedish cinema.

He cast her as the Countess Elizabeth Dohna in his critically acclaimed 1924 film, The Legend of Gosta Berling, which ran some four hours. He also gave her the now-famous stage name, Garbo.

In 1924, Louis B. Mayer of Hollywood’s powerful Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio hired Stiller on contract and brought him to the United States. Stiller only accepted the job on the condition that MGM contract Garbo as well.

Mayer agreed, although he reportedly considered Garbo too full-figured to succeed as an actress in America at the time. In The Torrent, a silent film co-starring the Latin heartthrob Ricardo Cortez, Garbo played a Spanish peasant girl who becomes an opera star.

Her charisma, beauty and acting talent made an immediate impact on the filmmakers, so much so that they raised her salary even before the movie was released. When it hit theaters, Garbo was an immediate sensation.

For his part, Stiller had been prevented by Mayer from directing The Torrent, and clashed with the studio repeatedly during the filming of a follow-up picture, The Temptress.

Fired mid-production, he had an unhappy stint at Paramount before being forced to return to Sweden, where he died in 1945. The loss reportedly left Garbo devastated.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, the Swedish beauty successfully made the transition to sound after becoming a star during the silent film era. Her first talking picture was Anna Christie in 1930, which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

Romantically linked with numerous fellow celebrities, including her frequent co-star, John Gilbert, Garbo never married. Reserved and withdrawn, she recoiled from publicity, cloaking herself in dark glasses and large hats when she traveled.

“I want to be alone,” a line from her 1939 film, Grand Hotel, has often been used to sum up her aversion to fame. Garbo’s reclusiveness only heightened her mystique, however.

Although she retired from moviemaking in 1941, she was chosen by the entertainment trade newspaper Variety in 1950 as the best actress of the first half of the 20th century. She became an American citizen in 1951, and was honored with a special Academy Award for her “unforgettable” work in 1954.

Garbo died on April 15, 1990.

Don Knotts was born 97 years ago today

Don Knotts was born 97 years ago today.

A comedic actor best known for his portrayal of Barney Fife on the 1960s television sitcom, The Andy Griffith Show, Knotts also played landlord, Ralph Furley, on the 1970s and 1980s television sitcom, Three's Company.

Born in Morgantown, West Virginia, Knotts was the son of William Jesse Knotts and his wife, the former Elsie L. Moore. Knotts' father was a farmer.

Because of the burden of a fourth child (Don) being born so late (his mother was 40), William had a nervous breakdown, becoming a shell of his former self. Afflicted with both schizophrenia and alcoholism, he sometimes terrorized his young son, Don, with a knife, causing him to turn inward at an early age.

Knotts' father died of pneumonia when he was 13 years old. Knotts and his three brothers were then raised by their mother, who ran a boarding house in Morgantown. Knotts is a sixth cousin of Ron Howard, a co-star on The Andy Griffith Show. He began his career performing in many venues, including a ventriloquist act with a dummy named Danny "Hooch" Matador.

In a TV Guide interview in the 1970s, Knotts spoke about how, when he was in the Army, he was getting tired of playing straight man for a hunk of wood. According to Knotts, while on a ship in the South Pacific, he took the dummy topside and tossed him overboard. He swore he could hear the dummy calling for help as the ship sailed on, leaving him bobbing helplessly in the waves.

Knotts got his first major break on television in the soap opera, Search for Tomorrow, where he appeared from 1953 to 1955. He came to fame in 1956 on Steve Allen's variety show, as part of Allen's repertory company, most notably in Allen's mock "Man in the Street" interviews, always as an extremely nervous man.

In 1958, Knotts appeared in the film, No Time for Sergeants, alongside Andy Griffith. In 1960, when Griffith was offered the opportunity to headline in his own sitcom, The Andy Griffith Show (1960–1968), Knotts took the role of Barney Fife, the deputy — and originally cousin — of Sheriff Andy Taylor (portrayed by Griffith).

Knotts’s portrayal of the deputy on the popular show earned him five Emmy Awards for Best Supporting Actor in a Television Comedy, one award for each of the five seasons he played the character. Self-important, romantic and nearly always wrong, Barney dreamed of the day he could use the one bullet Andy had issued to him although he did fire his gun on a few occasions.

He always fired his pistol accidentally while still in his holster or in the ceiling of the court house, at which point he would sadly hand his pistol to Andy. This is why Barney kept his one very shiny bullet in his shirt pocket.

While Barney was forever frustrated that Mayberry was too small for the delusional ideas he had of himself, viewers got the sense that he couldn't have survived anywhere else. Knotts played the comic and pathetic sides of the character with equal aplomb.

When the show first aired, Griffith was intended to be the comedic lead with Knotts as his straight man, similar to their roles in No Time for Sergeants. However, it was quickly discovered that the show was funnier with the roles reversed. As Griffith maintained in several interviews, "By the second episode, I knew that Don should be funny and I should play straight."

Believing earlier remarks made by Griffith that The Andy Griffith Show would soon be ending after five seasons, Knotts began to look for other work. He signed a five-film contract with Universal Studios and was caught off guard when Griffith announced he would be continuing with the show after all, However, Knotts’ hands were tied.

In his autobiography, Knotts admitted that he had not yet signed a contract when Griffith made his decision, but he had made up his mind believing that he would not get this chance again.

Knotts left the show in 1965. Within the series, it was announced that Deputy Fife had finally made the "big time," joining the Raleigh, North Carolina police force.

Knotts went on to star in a series of film comedies which drew on his high-strung persona from the TV series: he had a cameo appearance in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), and starred in The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964), The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966), The Reluctant Astronaut (1967), The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968), The Love God? (1969) and How to Frame a Figg (1971).

Knotts would, however, return to the role of Barney Fife several times in the 1960s. He made five more guest appearances on The Andy Griffith Show (gaining him another two Emmys), and later appeared once more on the spin-off Mayberry RFD, where he was present as best man for the marriage of Andy Taylor and his longtime love, Helen Crump.

Don Knotts died on February 24, 2006 at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles from pulmonary and respiratory complications to pneumonia related to lung cancer. He had been undergoing treatment at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in the months before his death, but had gone home after he reportedly had been feeling better.

His long-time friend, Andy Griffith, visited Knotts’s bedside just hours before his death.

Here, Knotts and Andy Griffith perform some sketches in a CBS special in 1966

The Andy Griffith, Don Knotts, Jim Nabors Special, 1966

Don Knotts on leaving The Andy Griffith Show

Yusuf Islam, also known as Cat Stevens, is 73 years old today

Yusuf Islam, also known as Cat Stevens, is 73 years old today.

A British singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, humanitarian, education philanthropist and prominent convert to Islam, as Cat Stevens, Islam’s early 1970s record albums, Tea for the Tillerman and Teaser and the Firecat, were both certified triple platinum in the United States.

His 1972 album, Catch Bull at Four, sold half a million copies in the first two weeks of release alone and was Billboard's #1 album for three consecutive weeks. He has also earned two ASCAP songwriting awards in consecutive years for "The First Cut Is the Deepest," which has been a hit single for four different artists.

Stevens converted to Islam in December, 1977 and adopted the name Yusuf Islam the following year. In 1979, he auctioned all his guitars for charity and left his music career to devote himself to educational and philanthropic causes in the Muslim community.

He has been given several awards for his work in promoting peace in the world, including the 2003 World Award, the 2004 Man for Peace Award and the 2007 Mediterranean Prize for Peace.

In 2006, he returned to pop music with his first album of new pop songs in 28 years, An Other Cup. He now goes professionally by the single name Yusuf. In 2009, he released the album Roadsinger, and in 2014, he released the album Tell 'Em I'm Gone, and began his first US tour since 1978.

He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. His second North American tour since his resurgence, featuring 12 shows in intimate venues, began in September, 2016.

Born in the Marylebone area of London, Yusuf’s family lived above the Moulin Rouge, a restaurant that his parents operated on the north end of Shaftesbury Avenue which was a short walk from Piccadilly Circus in the Soho theatre district of London.

All family members worked in the restaurant. His parents divorced when he was about eight years old, but they continued to maintain the family restaurant and live above it.

He developed an interest in piano at a fairly young age, eventually using the family baby grand piano to work out the chords, since no one else there played well enough to teach him. Inspired by the popularity of the Beatles at age 15, he extended his interest to the guitar, persuaded his father to buy his first instrument and began playing it and writing songs.

He would escape at times from his family responsibilities to the rooftop above their home, and listen to the tunes of the musicals drifting from just around the corner from Denmark Street, which was then the center of the British music industry.

Later, Yusuf has emphasized that the advent of West Side Story in particular affected him, giving him a "different view of life," he said in 2000. He wanted to establish a musical career and began to perform originally under the stage name "Steve Adams" in 1965 while at Hammersmith. At that point, his goal was to become a songwriter.

Among the musicians who influenced him were Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, blues artists Lead Belly and Muddy Waters, John Lennon, Biff Rose (who played on his first album), Leo Kottke and Paul Simon. He also wanted to emulate composers who wrote musicals, like Ira Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein.

In 1965, he signed a publishing deal with Ardmore & Beechwood and cut several demos, including "The First Cut Is the Deepest." He chose the stage name Cat Stevens, in part because a girlfriend said he had eyes like a cat."

In 1966, at age 18, he impressed manager/producer Mike Hurst, formerly of British vocal group, The Springfields, with his songs and Hurst arranged for him to record a demo and then helped him get a record deal.

The first singles were hits. "I Love My Dog" charted at #28, and "Matthew and Son," the title song from his debut album, went to #2. "I'm Gonna Get Me a Gun" reached Britain's Top 10, and the album Matthew and Son itself began charting.

The original version of the The Tremeloes cover hit, "Here Comes My Baby," was written and recorded by Stevens. Over the next two years, Stevens recorded and toured with an eclectic group of artists ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Engelbert Humperdinck. Stevens was considered a fresh-faced teen star, placing several single releases in the British pop music charts.

On March 2, 2011, Yusuf released his latest song, "My People," as a free download available through his official website, as well as numerous other online outlets. Said to have been recorded at a studio located within a hundred yards of the site of the Berlin Wall, the song is inspired by a series of popular uprisings in the Arab world called the Arab Spring.

In April, 2011, Yusuf launched his first European tour in over 36 years. The ten-date tour visited Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium and cities such as Stockholm, Hamburg, Oberhausen, Berlin, Munich, Rotterdam, Paris, Mannheim, Vienna and Brussels.

Here, as Cat Stevens, he performs “Morning Has Broken” in 1971

On this day in 1899 — 122 years ago — Ernest Hemingway, author of such novels as For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, was born in Oak Park, Illinois

On this day in 1899 — 122 years ago — Ernest Hemingway, author of such novels as For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, was born in Oak Park, Illinois.

The influential American literary icon became known for his straightforward prose and use of understatement. Hemingway, who tackled topics such as bullfighting and war in his work, also became famous for his own macho, hard-drinking persona.

As a boy, Hemingway, the second of six children of Clarence Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a musician, learned to fish and hunt. Each would remain lifelong passions.

After graduating from Oak Park and River Forest High School in 1917, he worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star in Missouri. The following year, as a volunteer ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy during World War I, he was wounded by mortar fire and spent months recuperating.

During the 1920s, Hemingway lived in Paris and was part of a group of expatriate writers and artists that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.

In 1925, Hemingway published his first collection of short stories in the U.S., which was followed by his well-received 1926 debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, about a group of American and British expatriates in the 1920s who journey from Paris to Pamplona, Spain to watch bullfighting.

In 1929, Hemingway, who by then had left Europe and moved to Key West, Florida, published A Farewell to Arms, about an American ambulance driver on the Italian front during World War I and his love for a beautiful English nurse. In 1932, his non-fiction book, Death in the Afternoon, about bullfighting in Spain, was released.

It was followed in 1935 by another non-fiction work, Green Hills of Africa, about a safari Hemingway made to East Africa in the early 1930s. During the late 1930s, Hemingway traveled to Spain to report on that country’s civil war, and also spent time living in Cuba.

In 1937, he released To Have and Have Not, a novel about a fishing boat captain forced to run contraband between Key West and Cuba. In 1940, the acclaimed For Whom the Bell Tolls, about a young American fighting with a band of guerrillas in the Spanish civil war, made its debut.

Hemingway went on to work as a war correspondent in Europe during World War II, and release the 1950 novel, Across the River and into the Trees.

Hemingway’s last significant work to be published during his lifetime was 1952’s The Old Man and the Sea, a novella about an aging Cuban fisherman that was an allegory referring to the writer's own struggles to preserve his art in the face of fame and attention.

Hemingway had become a cult figure whose four marriages and adventurous exploits in big-game hunting and fishing were widely covered in the press. But despite his fame, he had not produced a major literary work in the decade before The Old Man and the Sea debuted. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.

After surviving two plane crashes in Africa in 1953, Hemingway became increasingly anxious and depressed. On July 2, 1961, he killed himself with a shotgun at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. (His father had committed suicide in 1928.)

Three novels by Hemingway were released posthumously—Islands in the Stream (1970), The Garden of Eden (1986) and True at First Light (1999) — as was the memoir A Moveable Feast (1964), which he penned about his time in Paris in the 1920s.

Thanks History.com

Garry Trudeau is 73 years old today

Garry Trudeau is 73 years old today.

A cartoonist, best known for the Doonesbury comic strip, Trudeau was born in New York City, the son of Jean Douglas and Francis Berger Trudeau, Jr. He is the great-grandson of Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, who created Adirondack Cottage Sanitorium for the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis at Saranac Lake, New York.

Raised in Saranac Lake, Trudeau attended St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. He enrolled in Yale University in 1966 and became a member of Scroll and Key. Trudeau was confident that his major would end up being theatre, but he discovered a greater interest in art design.

A drawing by Trudeau of Yale quarterback, Brian Dowling, for the Yale Daily News led to the creation of a comic strip for the paper, Bull Tales, the progenitor of Doonesbury. As a Yale undergraduate, Trudeau was also the editor-in-chief of The Yale Record, the nation's oldest college humor magazine.

Trudeau did postgraduate work at the Yale School of Art, earning a master of fine arts degree in graphic design in 1973.

In 1970, Trudeau's creation of Doonesbury was syndicated by the newly formed Universal Press Syndicate. Today, Doonesbury is syndicated to almost 1,400 newspapers worldwide and is accessible online in association with Slate Magazine at doonesbury.com.

Trudeau is also the creator and executive producer of the Amazon Studios political comedy series, Alpha House.

In 1980, Trudeau married the journalist, Jane Pauley. They have three children, Ross, Rachel and Thomas and live in New York City.

Kay Starr was born 99 years old today

Kay Starr was born 99 years old today.

A pop and jazz singer who enjoyed considerable success in the 1940s and 1950s, Starr is best remembered for introducing two songs that became #1 hits in the 1950s — "Wheel of Fortune" and "The Rock And Roll Waltz.”

Starr was successful in every field of music she tried: jazz, pop and country. But her roots were in jazz.

Billie Holiday, considered by many the greatest jazz singer of all time, called Starr "the only white woman who could sing the blues."

Married six times, Starr was one of the first female artists to perform country western swing music. She died Nov. 3, 2016.

Here, Starr performs “Rock and Roll Waltz” in 1983

Marshall McLuhan was born 110 years ago today

Marshall McLuhan was born 110 years ago today.

A Canadian philosopher of communication theory and a public intellectual, McLuhan’s work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries.

McLuhan is known for coining the expressions “the medium is the message” and “the global village,” and for predicting the World Wide Web almost thirty years before it was invented. Although he was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, his influence began to wane in the early 1970s.

In the years after his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. With the arrival of the internet, however, interest in his work and perspective was revived.

In the early 1950s, McLuhan began the Communication and Culture seminars, funded by the Ford Foundation, at the University of Toronto. As his reputation grew, he received a growing number of offers from other universities and, to keep him, the university created the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1963. He published his first major work during this period: The Mechanical Bride (1951) was an examination of the effect of advertising on society and culture.

McLuhan also produced an important journal, Explorations, with Edmund Carpenter, throughout the 1950s. Together with Harold Innis, Eric A. Havelock and Northrop Frye, McLuhan and Carpenter have been characterized as the Toronto School of communication theory.

McLuhan remained at the University of Toronto through 1979, spending much of this time as head of his Centre for Culture and Technology. His most widely known work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), is a pioneering study in media theory.

Dismayed by the way people approached and used new media such as television, McLuhan famously argued that in the modern world "we live mythically and integrally ... but continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age."

After the publication of Understanding Media, McLuhan received an astonishing amount of publicity, making him perhaps the most publicized English teacher in the 20th century and arguably the most controversial.

This publicity had much to do with the work of two California advertising executives, Gerald Feigen and Howard Gossage, who used personal funds to fund their practice of "genius scouting."

McLuhan was credited with coining the phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out” by its popularizer, Timothy Leary, in the 1960s. In a 1988 interview with Neil Strauss, Leary stated that slogan was "given to him" by McLuhan during a lunch in New York City.

Leary said McLuhan "was very much interested in ideas and marketing, and he started singing something like, 'Psychedelics hit the spot/Five hundred micrograms, that’s a lot,' to the tune of a Pepsi commercial. Then he started going, 'Tune in, turn on, and drop out.'"

During his lifetime and afterward, McLuhan heavily influenced cultural critics, thinkers and media theorists such as Neil Postman, Jean Baudrillard, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, William Irwin Thompson, Paul Levinson, Douglas Rushkoff, Jaron Lanier, Hugh Kenner, and John David Ebert, as well as political leaders such as Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Jerry Brown.

Andy Warhol was paraphrasing McLuhan with his now famous 15 minutes of fame quote.

McCluen died in his sleep on December 31, 1980.

Above, Marshall McLuhan, 1974

Portrait by Yousuf Karsh

Sara Carter, a member of the famous Carter family, was born 124 years ago today

Maybelle, Sara and A.P. Carter appear ready for a performance in Poor Valley, Virginia, 1929

The furs and hats are typical garb for the performers of the day

Sara Carter, a member of the famous Carter family, was born 124 years ago today.

A musician, singer and songwriter, Carter is remembered for her deep, distinctive, mature singing voice. She was the lead singer on most of the recordings of the historic Carter Family act in the 1920s and 1930s. In her earliest recordings, her voice was pitched very high.

Born in Copper Creek, Virginia (Rich Valley), she was the daughter of William Sevier Dougherty and Nancy Elizabeth Kilgore. Sara married A. P. Carter on June 18, 1915, but they were later divorced in 1939. They had three children: Gladys (Millard), Janette (Jett) and Joe.

In 1927, she and A. P. began performing as the Carter Family, perhaps the first commercial rural country music group. They were joined by her cousin, Maybelle, who was married to A. P.'s brother, Ezra Carter.

Later she married Coy Bayes, A. P.'s first cousin, and moved to California in 1943, and the original group disbanded. In the late 1940s, Maybelle began performing with her daughters, Helen, June and Anita, as The Carter Sisters (the act was renamed The Carter Family during the 1960s).

On some Carter Family recordings, Sara is incorrectly credited as author of the songs "Fifty Miles of Elbow Room" and "Keep on the Firing Line." The truth is she discovered these public domain songs when they were being sung at a church she visited.

RCA gave her songwriter credit, as it did A. P. Carter on his public domain discoveries. The Carter Family recordings of these tunes did, however, bring the songs wide fame and are largely responsible for their being known today.

Sara actually did write or cowrite several other songs. Examples include My Foothills Home, The Dying Soldier, Lonesome Pine Special, Farther On and Railroading on the Great Divide.

Sara reunited with Maybelle briefly in the 1960s for two albums, and they briefly performed together during the folk music craze of the time.

The duo were also featured as guests in a late 1960s episode of The Wilburn Brothers television show, singing "Little Moses" and "As The Band Kept Playing Dixie." Following this period, Sara went back into retirement in California.

Carter died on January 8, 1979.

Here, Sara and Maybelle Carter reunite on the Johnny Cash Show in 1970

Accordion Girl, 1953

Photo by Robert Doisneau

A Robert Doisneau slide show backed with a French accordion

Fifty two ago today — at 10:56 p.m. EDT — American astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon

Fifty two ago today — at 10:56 p.m. EDT — American astronaut Neil Armstrong, 240,000 miles from Earth, spoke these words to more than a billion people listening at home:

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

Stepping off the lunar landing module Eagle, Armstrong became the first human to walk on the surface of the moon.

The American effort to send astronauts to the moon has its origins in a famous appeal President John F. Kennedy made to a special joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961: "I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth."

At the time, the United States was still trailing the Soviet Union in space developments, and Cold War-era America welcomed Kennedy's bold proposal.

In 1966, after five years of work by an international team of scientists and engineers, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) conducted the first unmanned Apollo mission, testing the structural integrity of the proposed launch vehicle and spacecraft combination.

Then, on January 27, 1967, tragedy struck at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, when a fire broke out during a manned launch-pad test of the Apollo spacecraft and Saturn rocket. Three astronauts were killed in the fire.

Despite the setback, NASA and its thousands of employees forged ahead, and in October 1968, Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission, orbited Earth and successfully tested many of the sophisticated systems needed to conduct a moon journey and landing.

In December of the same year, Apollo 8 took three astronauts to the dark side of the moon and back, and in March, 1969 Apollo 9 tested the lunar module for the first time while in Earth orbit. Then in May, the three astronauts of Apollo 10 took the first complete Apollo spacecraft around the moon in a dry run for the scheduled July landing mission.

At 9:32 a.m. on July 16, with the world watching, Apollo 11 took off from Kennedy Space Center with astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin Jr., and Michael Collins aboard.

Armstrong, a 38-year-old civilian research pilot, was the commander of the mission. After traveling 240,000 miles in 76 hours, Apollo 11 entered into a lunar orbit on July 19. The next day, at 1:46 p.m., the lunar module Eagle, manned by Armstrong and Aldrin, separated from the command module, where Collins remained.

Two hours later, the Eagle began its descent to the lunar surface, and at 4:18 p.m. the craft touched down on the southwestern edge of the Sea of Tranquility. Armstrong immediately radioed to Mission Control in Houston, Texas, a famous message: "The Eagle has landed."

At 10:39 p.m., five hours ahead of the original schedule, Armstrong opened the hatch of the lunar module.

As he made his way down the lunar module's ladder, a television camera attached to the craft recorded his progress and beamed the signal back to Earth, where hundreds of millions watched in great anticipation.

At 10:56 p.m., Armstrong spoke his famous quote, which he later contended was slightly garbled by his microphone and meant to be "that's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." He then planted his left foot on the gray, powdery surface, took a cautious step forward and the first human had walked on the moon.

Buzz Aldrin joined him on the moon's surface at 11:11 p.m., and together they took photographs of the terrain, planted a U.S. flag, ran a few simple scientific tests, and spoke with President Richard M. Nixon via Houston.

By 1:11 a.m. on July 21, both astronauts were back in the lunar module and the hatch was closed. The two men slept that night on the surface of the moon, and at 1:54 p.m. the Eagle began its ascent back to the command module.

Among the items left on the surface of the moon was a plaque that read: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on the moon — July, 1969 A.D. — We came in peace for all mankind."

At 5:35 p.m., Armstrong and Aldrin successfully docked and rejoined Collins, and at 12:56 a.m. on July 22 Apollo 11 began its journey home. It safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 12:51 p.m. on July 24.

There would be five more successful lunar landing missions, and one unplanned lunar swing-by, Apollo 13. The last men to walk on the moon, astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt of the Apollo 17 mission, left the lunar surface on December 14, 1972.

The Apollo program was a costly and labor intensive endeavor, involving an estimated 400,000 engineers, technicians and scientists. It cost $24 billion (close to $100 billion in today's dollars).

The expense was justified by Kennedy's 1961 mandate to beat the Soviets to the moon. After the feat was accomplished, ongoing missions lost their viability.

Thanks History.com

Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon

Buzz Aldren steps onto the surface of the moon

Photo by Neil Armstrong

Carlos Santana is 74 years old today

Carlos Santana, Woodstock, 1969

Carlos Santana is 74 years old today.

Santana is a Mexican and American musician who became famous in the late 1960s and early 1970s with his band, Santana, which pioneered a fusion of rock and Latin American music.

The band's sound featured his melodic, blues-based guitar lines set against Latin and African rhythms featuring percussion instruments such as timbales and congas not generally heard in rock music. Santana continued to work in these forms over the following decades.

Born at Autlán de Navarro, Jalisco, Mexico, Santana learned to play the violin at age five and the guitar at age eight. His younger brother, Jorge Santana, would also become a professional guitarist.

Young Carlos was heavily influenced by Ritchie Valens at a time when there were very few Latinos in American rock and pop music. The family moved from Autlán de Navarro to Tijuana, the city on Mexico's border with California, and then San Francisco.

Santana stayed in Tijuana, but later joined his family in San Francisco and graduated from James Lick Middle School and in 1965 from Mission High School. He was accepted at California State University, Northridge, and Humboldt State University, but turned down these offers.

Santana got the chance to see his idols (most notably B.B. King) perform live in San Francisco. He also was introduced to a variety of new musical influences, including jazz and folk music, and witnessed the growing hippie movement centered in San Francisco in the 1960s.

After several years spent working as a dishwasher in a diner and busking for spare change, Santana decided to become a full-time musician. In 1966, he gained prominence by a series of accidental events.

Santana was a frequent spectator at Bill Graham's Fillmore West. During a Sunday matinee show, Paul Butterfield was slated to perform there but was unable to do so as a result of being intoxicated. Bill Graham assembled an impromptu band of musicians he knew primarily through his connections with the Grateful Dead, Butterfield's own band and Jefferson Airplane, but he had not yet picked all of the guitarists at the time.

Santana's manager, Stan Marcum, immediately suggested to Graham that Santana join the impromptu band and Graham assented. During the jam session, Santana's guitar playing and solo gained the notice of both the audience and Graham.

During the same year, Santana formed the Santana Blues Band, with fellow street musicians, David Brown and Gregg Rolie (bassist and keyboard player, respectively).mWith their highly original blend of Latin-infused rock, jazz, blues, salsa and African rhythms, the band (which quickly adopted their frontman's name, Santana) gained an immediate following on the San Francisco club circuit.

The band's early success, capped off by a memorable performance at Woodstock in 1969, led to him signing a recording contract with Columbia Records, then run by Clive Davis.

Said Santana of the 1960’s: “The '60s were a leap in human consciousness. Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Che Guevara, Mother Teresa, they led a revolution of conscience. The Beatles, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix created revolution and evolution themes. The music was like Dalí, with many colors and revolutionary ways. The youth of today must go there to find themselves."

Here, Santana recalls his classic performance at Woodstock in 1969 and then performs “Soul Sacrifice”