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October 23, 2021
Dwight Yoakam is 65 years old today
Dwight Yoakam is 65 years old today.
A singer-songwriter, actor and film director, Yoakam is best known for his work in country music.
Popular since the early 1980s, he has recorded more than 21 albums and compilations, charted more than 30 singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts and sold more than 25 million records.
Yoakam was born in Pikeville, Kentucky, the son of Ruth Ann, a key-punch operator, and David Yoakam, a gas-station owner. He was raised in Columbus, Ohio and graduated from Columbus's Northland High School in 1974.
During his high school years, he excelled in both music and drama, regularly securing the lead role in school plays, such as "Charlie" in a stage version of Flowers for Algernon. He honed his skills under the guidance of teacher-mentors Jerry McAfee (music) and Charles Lewis (drama).
Outside of school, Yoakam sang and played guitar with local garage bands, and entertained his friends and classmates with his impersonations, such as Richard Nixon, who, at the time, was heavily embroiled in the Watergate controversy.
Yoakam briefly attended Ohio State University, but dropped out and moved to Nashville in 1977 with the intent of becoming a recording artist. When he began his career, Nashville was oriented toward pop "Urban Cowboy" music, and Yoakam's brand of hip Honky Tonk music was not considered marketable.
Not making much headway in Nashville, Yoakam moved to Los Angeles and worked towards bringing his particular brand of new Honky Tonk or "Hillbilly" music (as he called it) forward into the 1980s.
Writing all his own songs, and continuing to perform mostly outside traditional country music channels, Yoakam did many shows in rock and punk rock clubs around Los Angeles, playing with roots rock or punk rock acts like The Blasters.
Yoakam's recording debut was the self-financed, Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., on Oak Records produced by lead-guitarist, Pete Anderson. The recording was later re-released in 1986 by Reprise records, with several additional tracks.
It became Yoakam’s major-label debut LP — Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. The album launched his career. "Honky Tonk Man,” a remake of the Johnny Horton song, and "Guitars, Cadillacs" were hit singles. His stylish video, "Honky Tonk Man," was the first country music video ever played on MTV.
The follow-up album, Hillbilly Deluxe, was just as successful. His third album, Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room, included his first #1, a duet with his musical idol, Buck Owens, on "Streets of Bakersfield.”
Johnny Cash once cited Yoakam as his favorite country singer. Chris Isaak called him as good a songwriter that ever put a pen to paper. Time Magazine dubbed Yoakam "A Renaissance Man" and Vanity Fair declared that "Yoakam strides the divide between rock's lust and country's lament."
Along with his bluegrass and honky-tonk roots, Yoakam has written or covered many Elvis Presley-style rockabilly songs, including his covers of Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" in 1999 and Presley's "Suspicious Minds" in 1992.
Yoakam has also starred in many films, most notably in critically acclaimed performances as an ill-tempered, abusive, live-in boyfriend in Sling Blade (1996), as a psychopathic killer in Panic Room (2002), as a police detective in Hollywood Homicide (2003) and as the sheriff in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005).
Here, Yoakam performs a medley of his hits at the Grand Ole Opry
Johnny Carson was born 96 years ago today
On this day in 1925 — 96 years ago — Johnny Carson, who became known to most of America as the longtime host of the popular late-night TV program, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, was born in Corning, Iowa.
As host of NBC’s Tonight Show from 1962 to 1992, Carson became a bona fide American institution and entertainment icon.
He grew up in Norfolk, Nebraska, served in the U.S. Navy and attended the University of Nebraska. By the early 1950s, Carson was living in California and working in radio and the then-new medium of television. He later moved to New York City, and in 1957 became host of the popular game show, Who Do You Trust?
In 1958, Carson appeared on The Tonight Show as a substitute for the host, Jack Paar. The Tonight Show had originated in 1951 in Los Angeles as a radio program hosted by Steve Allen. In 1954, the program moved to TV and in 1956, Jack Parr replaced Allen as the host.
Carson took over permanent hosting duties from Parr on October 1, 1962. He hosted the show from New York City until 1972, when it relocated to Burbank. Each edition of The Tonight Show began with Carson’s sidekick Ed McMahon announcing, “Heeere’s Johnny!”
Carson, who became known for his relaxed, affable stage presence and dapper appearance, performed an opening monologue of jokes, punctuated by his trademark golf swing. Following the monologue, he would banter with McMahon and the show’s bandleader, Doc Severinsen, and would sometimes perform skits and play characters such as Carnac the Magnificent, an “all-knowing seer,” and the gossipy, Aunt Blabby.
Carson then conducted celebrity interviews. The Tonight Show featured the day’s biggest movie and TV stars, as well as athletes, politicians, singers, comedians and animal acts.
According to his New York Times obituary: “During his reign, Mr. Carson was the most powerful single performer on television. He discovered or promoted new talent like Barbra Streisand and David Letterman; provided a consistent spotlight for show business warhorses like Don Rickles and Buddy Hackett; advanced the careers of emerging stars like Woody Allen, Steve Martin and, his successor, Jay Leno. He helped keep older performers like Jimmy Stewart and William Demarest in the public eye.”
In addition to hosting the Tonight Show, Carson served as master of ceremonies for the Academy Awards five times during the late 1970s and 1980s.
After deciding to retire from The Tonight Show, he hosted his final program on May 22, 1992. The comedian Jay Leno took over hosting duties the following day.
After retiring, Carson, who was married four times, stayed out of the public spotlight.
He died of complications from emphysema on January 23, 2005, at the age of 79.
Thanks History.com
Michael Crichton was born 79 years ago today
Michael Crichton was born 79 years ago today.
Crichton, the son of the executive editor of Advertising Age, was raised in Roslyn, Long Island. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, then taught anthropology at Cambridge in England. He returned to Harvard for medical school but wrote potboilers while working on his degree.
By the time he graduated, he had published five novels under the name John Lange, and another under the name, Jeffrey Hudson. Later, he collaborated on novels with his brother, Douglas, under the nom de plume, Michael Douglas.
During his final year of medical school, the 6’9″ Crichton published The Andromeda Strain (1969) and decided to write full time instead of practicing medicine.
Many of his bestselling novels, including The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man, Congo and The Great Train Robbery, became films. He directed the film version of his novels Binary (1972) and Westworld (1973).
By 1993, he had four books on the bestseller list and two blockbuster films in the theater (Jurassic Park and Rising Sun). Crichton won the Edgar Award, the mystery writers’ “Oscar,” in 1968 and 1980.
Crichton was diagnosed with lymphoma in early 2008. He was undergoing chemotherapy treatment at the time of his death. Crichton's physicians and relatives had been expecting him to recover.
He died at age 66 on November 4, 2008, the date of the 2008 presidential election.
Mike Porco, original owner and operator of Gerde’s Folk City, was born 107 years ago today
Mike Porco, holding bottle, with drinkers at Gerdes Folk City
Mike Porco, original owner and operator of Gerde’s Folk City, was born 107 years ago today.
Porco owned Gerde’s from the time it first opened in January, 1960 until he sold it in 1980. During that time, folk, blues and roots music had a resurgence into American pop culture and later became known as the Folk Revival of the 1960s.
A constellation of recording artists were hired by Porco to play Gerde's Folk City. The most notable was Bob Dylan who in 1961 asked Porco to act as his legal guardian as he signed his very first cabaret card.
In his 2004 autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan referred to Porco as "the Sicilian father that I never had."
In 1961 alone, Porco booked The Weavers, Victoria Spivey, Dave Van Ronk, Odetta, Judy Collins, John Lee Hooker, Peter Yarrow, Danny Kalb, Josh White Jr, Lonnie Johnson, Tom Paxton, Joan Baez, Peter Stampfel, Gil Turner, Jean Redpath, Len Chandler and Jean Ritchie.
Gerdes Folk City became one of the most influential American music clubs, before finally losing its lease in 1987.
"Rolling Stone Book of Lists" called Folk City one of the three top music venues in the world, along with The Cavern and CBGBs.
Porco died on March 11, 1992.
Mike Porco and Bob Dylan
Rob Stoner, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Eric Andersen on stage at Gerde's Folk City, 130 West 3rd Street, October 23, 1975
Weird Al Yankovic is 62 years old today
Image by Michael Blackwell
Weird Al Yankovic is 62 years old today.
A singer-songwriter, musician, parodist, record producer, satirist, music video director, film producer, actor and author, Yankovic is known for his humorous songs that make light of popular culture and often parody specific songs by contemporary musical acts.
Since his first-aired comedy song in 1976, he has sold more than 12 million albums (as of 2007), recorded more than 150 parody and original songs and has performed more than 1,000 live shows.
Yankovic's first Top 10 Billboard album (Straight Outta Lynwood) and single ("White & Nerdy") were both released in 2006, nearly three decades into his career.
Yankovic's success comes in part from his effective use of music video to further parody popular culture, the song's original artist, and the original music videos themselves, scene-for-scene in some cases. He directed later videos himself and went on to direct for other artists including Ben Folds, Hanson, The Black Crowes, and The Presidents of the United States of America.
In addition to recording his albums, Yankovic wrote and starred in the films, UHF (1989) and The Weird Al Show (1997). He has also made guest appearances on many television shows, in addition to starring in Al TV specials on MTV.
Here, Yankovic performs “Bad Hombres, Nasty Women” a parody on one of the Clinton-Trump debates
Ned Rorem, composer and diarist, is 98 years old today
Ned Rorem, composer and diarist, is 98 years old today.
Best known and most praised for his song settings, Rorem won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976.
Born in Richmond, Indiana, Rorem received his early education in Chicago at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, the American Conservatory of Music and then Northwestern University. Later, he moved on to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and finally the Juilliard School in New York City.
In 1966, he published The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem, which, with his later diaries, has brought him some notoriety, as he is honest about his and others' sexuality, describing his relationships with Leonard Bernstein, Noël Coward, Samuel Barber, and Virgil Thomson.
Rorem has written extensively about music as well. These essays are collected in anthologies such as Setting the Tone, Music From the Inside Out and Music and People. His prose is much admired, not least for its barbed observations about such prominent musicians as Pierre Boulez.
Rorem has composed in a chromatic tonal idiom throughout his career, and he is not hesitant to attack the orthodoxies of the avant-garde.
His notable students include Daron Hagen.
October 22, 2021
Timothy Leary was born 101 years ago today
Timothy Leary was born 101 years ago today.
Leary was a psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs.
During a time when drugs such as LSD and psilocybin were legal, Leary conducted experiments at Harvard University under the Harvard Psilocybin Project, resulting in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment.
Both studies produced useful data, but Leary and his associate, Richard Alpert, later to become Ram Dass, were fired from the university.
Leary believed LSD showed therapeutic potential for use in psychiatry. He popularized catchphrases that promoted his philosophy, such as "turn on, tune in, drop out,” "set and setting” and "think for yourself and question authority.”
Leary wrote and spoke frequently about transhumanist concepts involving space migration, intelligence increase and life extension (SMI²LE). He also developed the eight-circuit model of consciousness in his book, Exo-Psychology (1977).
During the 1960s and 1970s, Leary was arrested regularly and was held captive in 29 different prisons throughout the world. President Richard Nixon once described Leary as "the most dangerous man in America.”
Leary died of inoperable prostate cancer in 1996 at age 75.
Leary is often considered one of the most prominent figures during the counterculture of the 1960s, and since those times has remained influential on pop culture, literature, television, film — and especially, music.
Robert Capa, photographer, was born 108 years ago today
Robert Capa, photographer, was born 108 years ago today.
Capa was a Hungarian war photographer, photo journalist and the companion and professional partner of photographer, Gerda Taró.
He covered five wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and the First Indochina War. He documented the course of World War II in London, North Africa, Italy, the Battle of Normandy on Omaha Beach and the liberation of Paris.
In 1947, Capa co-founded Magnum Photos in Paris with David "Chim" Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and William Vandivert. The organization was the first cooperative agency for worldwide freelance photographers.
He died at ago 40 in 1954 after stepping on a landmine in the First Indochina War.
Here, Capa on assignment in Spain using a Bell and Howell 16mm film camera.
Above photo by Gerda Taró
Graham Nash has been a photographer longer than a musician
Graham Nash, New York City, Oct. 20, 2016
Photo by Frank Beacham
Graham Nash has been a photographer longer than a musician.
Born in Blackpool, Lancashire, England in 1942, Nash grew up in a poor family in Salford. At the time, most of the employment in his town was either in mines or textile mills, but his parents encouraged him to ignore tradition and follow his heart when it came to his future.
When Nash was 10 years old, his father took him to a nearby zoo to demonstrate photography. After taking a picture and going home, Nash’s father covered a window with a blanket, put a blank sheet of paper into a colorless liquid and then held up the paper for his son to watch.
“He said, ‘wait, wait, wait’ as I stared at the blank paper,” Nash recalled. “Then, all of a sudden, the image my father had taken at the zoo appeared on the paper. It was magic! My life changed dramatically that day. It was then I began taking photographs.”
In the time just after World War II, Nash said most young men in his hometown followed in their fathers’ footsteps and worked for a lifetime for a local company. “But my parents never let me fall for that,” he said. “They recognized my creative passions in music and photography and encouraged me to pursue them rather than saying things like ‘get a real job’ or ‘this is not going to last.’”
In the early 1960s, Nash co-founded The Hollies, one of the UK's most successful pop groups, with a school friend, Allan Clarke. From there, he became a professional musician, while continuing to take photographs along the way.
“I’m driven to create,” Nash said. “My girlfriend and I create every day. I'm waiting for Elvis to come back and I'll be waiting with my camera at my side.”
Because he works as a musician and performs in front of thousands of fans, Nash is no stranger to having his image taken by others. But it’s not his personal approach to the medium of photography.
“I’ve had millions of photographs taken of me,” he said. “But every time I sense a camera is on me, I try to act like James Dean or Elvis. I try to put my best side forward, whatever the fuck that is. I don't like those moments. They are totally fake to me. I like to be invisible. I like to take photos of people who have no idea I'm there.”
Those stealthy photos are what drives Nash’s best photographic work. “I'm into surreal moments that happen in life. You have to be bold enough to have your camera and bold enough to press the trigger when the moment happens.”
One example is a 1969 candid shot of Joni Mitchell, then Nash’s live-in girlfriend in Laurel Canyon, while listening her new album, Clouds, which she had just finished recording. Mitchell was concentrating on the recording, while Nash sneaked the image through the back of a hole in a kitchen chair. He took a single shot that helped define Mitchell as an artist.
Another image, made in 1988, was taken at Neil Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch in Redwood City, California. Young is driving his Jensen sports car on a lonely road toward his house on the ranch grounds. Behind the car is a limousine carrying David Crosby, Steven Stills and Nash, who is standing and shooting from the roof of the limo. It is a solitary image that defined Young’s life at the time.
Though Nash uses his camera to catch life’s unposed moments, he is adamant in his disdain for selfies. “I hate selfies and all this selfie shit that's going on,” Nash said. “It drives me crazy. I don't use my camera as my memory.”
Nash collected more than 2,000 prints and they toured the world in museums for years as the Graham Nash Collection. He sold them in a Sotheby’s auction in 1990, setting an auction record at the time for the highest grossing sale of a single private collection of photography. He also was an early pioneer experimenting with digital images and inkjet printing.
Currently, Nash continues to experiment with a range of creative projects in additional to his musical activity performing and writing with Crosby, Stills and Nash.
“I have to get this stuff out of myself so it doesn't drive me crazy,” Nash said. “I’m so pleased to live in a country where I can express myself without fear of retribution. You can't do that in some other countries. Nobody has to listen to you, but at least you can speak your mind.”
Joni Mitchell, Laurel Canyon, 1969
Taken while she listened to her new album, Clouds, through a kitchen chair
Photo by Graham Nash
Jackson Browne cruising the street, 1972
Photo by Graham Nash
Neil Young driving on a road at his Broken Arrow Ranch in Redwood City, CA, 1988
Photo by Graham Nash
On this day in 1964 — 57 years ago — Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature...he declined the award
On this day in 1964 — 57 years ago — Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He declined the award.
He said he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution.”
In his novels, essays and plays, Sartre advanced the philosophy of existentialism, arguing that each individual must create meaning for his or her own life, because life itself had no innate meaning.
Sartre studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure between 1924 and 1929. He met Simone de Beauvoir, who became his lifelong companion, during this time. The pair spent countless hours in cafés, talking, writing and drinking coffee.
Sartre became a philosophy professor and taught in Le Havre, Laon and Paris.
In 1938, his first novel, Nausea, was published. The narrative took the form of a diary of a cafe-haunting intellectual. In 1939, he was drafted into World War II and taken prisoner and held for about a year. He later fought with the French Resistance.
In 1943, he published one of his key works — Being and Nothingness — where he argued that man is condemned to freedom and has a social responsibility.
Sartre and Beauvoir engaged in social movements, supporting communism and the radical student uprisings in Paris in 1968. Also in 1943, he wrote one of his best-known plays, The Flies, followed by Huis Clos (No Exit) in 1945.
In 1945, he began a four-volume novel called The Roads to Freedom, but gave up the novel form after finishing the third volume in 1949. In 1946, he continued to develop his philosophy in Existentialism and Humanism.
In the 1950s and 60s, he devoted himself to studies of literary figures like Baudelaire, Jean Genet and Flaubert. The Family Idiot, his work on Flaubert, was massive, but only three of four volumes were published.
Sartre's health and vision declined in his later years and he died at age 74 in 1980.
The “Chitlin’ Circuit” was the collective name given to a series of performance venues for black artists throughout the eastern United States during the “Jim Crow” era of segregation
Leon “Rubber Legs” Williams, a Charlie’s Place regular, in a dance contest to win rent money in the 1940s
The “Chitlin’ Circuit” was the collective name given to a series of performance venues for black artists throughout the eastern United States during the “Jim Crow” era of segregation.
The circuit was the launching pad for many of America’s greatest black entertainers, including Ray Charles, Billie Holiday, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Little Richard and many others.
It included a diverse lineup of clubs, ranging from the smallest Southern juke joints — like Charlie’s Place in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina — to the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem.
The term “chitlin” is from chitterlings, a soul food staple made from boiled or stewed pig intestines. Once popular in the rural South, the food dates back to colonial times when hogs were slaughtered and their body parts fed to slaves.
One of the many dark sides of the Chitlin’ Circuit era was that black artists were usually not allowed to eat or rent rooms in the all-white establishments at which they performed. Many top entertainers, like Count Basie and Duke Ellington, were forced to stay at the homes of friends when performing on the road.
In order to ensure that black artists performing at his club had suitable overnight lodging, Charlie Fitzgerald, the owner of Charlie’s Place in Myrtle Beach, built a small multi-unit motel on the property directly behind the main building.
That tiny motel, listed in the Green Book for black travelers, remains standing to this day. It is the only remnant of the old nightclub and has been bought by the City of Myrtle Beach for preservation.
Though music and dance were the most visible activities at the club, Charlie Fitzgerald provided his paying customers with just about any activity they desired. That included one of his own favorite pastimes — gambling. Inside a private room curtained off from the main club area was a card table. It was home to Fitzgerald’s game of choice, “Georgia Skin.”
Immortalized in song by performers including Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Poole and Jerry Garcia, Georgia Skin was, according to Zora Neal Hurston in a 1939 spoken word recording, “the most favorite gambling game among the workers of the South.” The easily manipulated game usually resulted in players being swindled of their last dime.
Lyrics from “Georgia Skin” by Memphis Minnie summed it up well:
“When you lose your money, please don’t lose your mind
Because each and every gambler gets in hard luck sometime.”
As a teenager, Bill Wingate witnessed Georgia Skin games run by Fitzgerald. “I saw people throw the deed to their house or the title to their car in the pot,” he remembered.
Yet, despite the occasional drunken visitor who crossed the line, Charlie’s Place had a reputation as one of most peaceful establishments on the beach. Perhaps a major reason for this tranquility was the general knowledge that under his stylish clothes, Fitzgerald packed weapons.
“He carried a .45 and a .38 all the time. He had holsters that ran around his shoulders,” said Leroy Brunson, a former customer. “Charlie was a man of few words. He didn’t talk much. But when he told you something, he meant what he said.”
Then Brunson paused, as if to reconsider his hardball take on Fitzgerald. “Charlie was a bluffer, though. He’d scare a lot of people by pulling a gun out and firing it into the floor or in the air. He’d do this during fights or if he wanted somebody to leave and they didn’t want to go.”
It was also well known to club goers that Charlie kept a sawed off shotgun and a wooden blackjack under the bar. “Oh yeah, he’d pop someone with the blackjack to get them out of there,” recalled Wingate. “And that shotgun, he didn’t just aim it at them, he put it in them.”
On one memorable occasion, a young Wingate said he saw Charlie evict a troublesome customer by jamming the shotgun deep into the man’s stomach. “He put it right in the guy’s gut. That ended the trouble right away.”
As a rebellious teenager, Henry Hemingway learned the hard way that Charlie was boss. “Back in those days, I loved to fight. I’d go up to Charlie’s Place at night and turn the place out…just raise hell. He’d say ‘Boy, you got to quit this! You got to quit this!’ One night I went there and stepped on a guy’s foot, and he asked ‘What did you step on my foot for?’ I hit him.”
Hemingway said he’ll never forget what happened next. “Charlie put his nickel-plated shotgun in my mouth and said, ‘Son, hell has overtook you.’ I was scared outta my mind and that was the last big fight I ever had.”
Later, when Hemingway was older and in a band, Charlie gave the young man a musical instrument. Fitzgerald was like that.
But it was never Charlie that instigated the trouble. “Charlie was cool, but there was always that little underlying air of danger about him,” said Wingate. It was “I won’t mess with you, but I’ll give you some good advice. Don’t mess with me either. I’m gonna live and let live. If you don’t, you may not live.”
The story of Charlie Fitzgerald and how the Ku Klux Klan attacked him and tried to stop the rise of black music is in the the fourth edition of the book, Whitewash: A Southern Journey Through Music, Mayhem & Murder, by Frank Beacham.
John Reed, journalist, poet and socialist activist, was born 134 years ago today
John Reed, journalist, poet and socialist activist, was born 134 years ago today.
Reed wrote a first-hand account of the Bolshevik Revolution — Ten Days that Shook the World. He was married to writer and feminist, Louise Bryant.
Reed was born on October 22, 1887, in his maternal grandmother's mansion in Portland, Oregon. In the fall of 1906, he entered Harvard College.
Tall, handsome and light-hearted, he attended (but never joined) meetings of the Socialist Club, over which his friend, Walter Lippmann, presided. Still, the club left its impact on his psyche.
The group had social legislation introduced into the state legislature, attacked the university for failing to pay its servants living wages and petitioned the administration for the establishment of a course in Socialism.
Reed was determined to become a journalist and he set out to make his mark in the big city in which that industry was based, New York. He discovered the muckraking journalist, Lincoln Steffens, who appreciated Reed's skills and intellect at an early date.
Steffens landed his young admirer an entry-level position on the American Magazine, reading manuscripts, correcting proofs and later helping with the composition. Reed made his home in Greenwich Village, a burgeoning hub of poets and artists. He came to love New York, relentlessly exploring it and writing poems about it.
His formal jobs on the magazines paid the rent, but he sought to establish himself as a freelance journalist. In 1913, he joined the staff of The Masses, edited by Max Eastman and his sister, Crystal. Reed contributed more than 50 articles, reviews and shorter pieces to this publication.
The first of Reed's many arrests came in Paterson, New Jersey in 1913, for attempting to speak on behalf of strikers in the New Jersey silk mills. The harsh treatment meted out by the authorities to the strikers and a short jail term which followed further radicalized him.
While paying a visit to his mother in Portland, Reed met and fell in love with Louise Bryant, who joined him on the East coast in January, 1916. Though happy, both had affairs with others rather freely, in accord with the bohemian sensibilities of sexual liberation in common currency in that day.
Early in 1916, Reed met Eugene O'Neill, and beginning that May the three rented a cottage in Provincetown. Not long after, Bryant and O'Neill began a romance.
Reed died in Russia in 1920 and was buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
The uses of John Reed as a symbol in popular culture have been varied. Some have dismissed him as a "romantic revolutionary" and a "playboy"— a vapid dilettante pretending to profess revolutionary sensibilities.
For the Communist movement to which he belonged, Reed became a symbol of the international nature of the Bolshevik revolution, a martyr buried at the Kremlin wall amidst solemn fanfare, his name to be uttered reverently as a member of the radical pantheon.
Reed has also been an influence upon the cinema. Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein's influential 1927 silent film, October: Ten Days That Shook the World, was based on Reed's book.
Half a century later, Warren Beatty made the 1981 film, Reds, based on the life of John Reed. Beatty starred as Reed, while Diane Keaton played the part of Louise Bryant and Jack Nicholson that of Eugene O'Neill. The movie won three Academy Awards, and was nominated for nine others.
Above, Reed and Bryant in 1916
Curly Howard, member of The Three Stooges, was born 118 years ago today
Jerome Lester "Jerry" Horwitz — better known by his stage name Curly Howard — was born 118 years ago today.
A comedian and vaudevillian actor, he was best known as the most outrageous member of the American slapstick comedy team, The Three Stooges, which also featured his older brothers, Moe Howard and Shemp Howard, plus actor, Larry Fine.
Curly was generally considered the most popular and recognizable of the Stooges. He was well known for his high-pitched voice and vocal expressions ("nyuk-nyuk-nyuk!" "woob-woob-woob!" "soitenly!" and barking like a dog) as well as his physical comedy, improvisations and athleticism.
An untrained actor, Curly borrowed (and significantly exaggerated) the "woob woob" from "nervous" and soft-spoken comedian, Hugh Herbert. Curly's unique version of "woob-woob-woob" was firmly established by the time of the Stooges' second film, Punch Drunks, in 1934.
Howard was born in the Bensonhurst section of the Brooklyn in New York City. He was the fifth of the five Horwitz brothers and of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry.
Because he was the youngest, his brothers called him "Babe" to tease him. The nickname stuck with him all his life, although when his older brother, Shemp, married Gertrude Frank, who was also nicknamed, "Babe," the brothers started calling him "Curly" to avoid confusion.
When Curly was 12, he accidentally shot himself in the left ankle while cleaning a rifle. Moe rushed him to the hospital and saved his life. The wound resulted in a noticeably thinner left leg and a slight limp. He was so frightened of surgery that he never had the limp corrected. While with the Stooges, he developed his famous exaggerated walk to mask the limp on screen.
Curly's childlike mannerisms and natural comedic charm made him a hit with audiences, particularly children. He was famous in the act for having an "indestructible" head, which always won out by breaking anything that assaulted it, including saws (resulting in his characteristic quip, "Oh, look!").
Although having no formal acting training, his comedic skills were exceptional. Many times, directors would simply let the camera roll freely and let Curly improvise.
Jules White, who directed the Stooge’s films, would leave gaps in the scripts where Curly could improvise for several minutes. "If we wrote a scene and needed a little something extra, I'd say to Curly, 'Look, we've got a gap to fill this in with a 'woob-woob' or some other bit of business.' And he never disappointed us," White said.
By the time the Stooges hit their peak in the late 1930s, their films had almost become vehicles for Curly's unbridled comic performances. Classics like A Plumbing We Will Go, We Want Our Mummy, An Ache in Every Stake and Cactus Makes Perfect display his ability to take inanimate objects (like food, tools, pipes, etc.) and turn them into ingenious comic props.
Moe later confirmed that when Curly forgot his lines, that merely allowed him to improvise on the spot so that the "take" could continue uninterrupted.
Curly's offscreen personality was the antithesis of his onscreen manic persona. An introvert, he generally kept to himself, rarely socializing with people unless he had been drinking (which he would increasingly turn to as the stresses of his career grew). In addition, he came to life when in the presence of brother, Shemp.
Curly could not be himself around brother Moe, who treated his younger brother with a fatherly wag of the finger. Never an intellect, Curly simply refrained from engaging in "crazy antics" unless he was in his element — with family, performing or intoxicated.
During filming on May 6, 1946, Curly suffered a severe stroke while sitting in director Jules White's chair, waiting to film the last scene of the day. When Curly was called by the assistant director to take the stage, he did not answer. Moe went looking for his brother and found Curly with his head dropped to his chest.
Moe later recalled that his mouth was distorted and he was unable to speak, only cry. Moe quietly alerted White to all this, leading the latter to rework the scene quickly, dividing the action between Moe and Larry. Curly was rushed to the hospital, where Moe joined him after the filming.
After his discharge, Curly went to live at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California.
In 1948, Curly suffered a second massive stroke, which left him partially paralyzed. He used a wheelchair by 1950 and was fed boiled rice and apples as part of his diet to reduce his weight [and blood pressure].
In February, 1951, he was placed in a nursing home, where he suffered another stroke a month later. In April, he went to live at the North Hollywood Hospital and Sanitarium.
In December, 1951, the North Hollywood Hospital and Sanitarium supervisor advised the Howard family that Curly was becoming a problem to the nursing staff at the facility because of his mental deterioration. They admitted they could no longer care for him and suggested he be placed in a mental hospital.
Eleven days later, on January 18, 1952, Curly died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage at 48.
Franz Liszt, composer, was born in Hungary 210 years ago today
Born on this day in 1811 in the Hapsburg Kingdom of Hungary, Franz Liszt would go on to make a name for himself not only as an important composer in the Romantic era, but also as one of the greatest pianists who ever lived.
In a career that spanned five eventful decades in classical-music history, his professional accomplishments alone would have made him a figure of historical significance. But his good looks and charisma, his effect on female audiences and his gossip-worthy romantic entanglements made him a figure somewhat larger than life.
If it weren't for the fact that rock and roll was still 140-plus years off in the future, it would be reasonable to call Liszt the biggest rock star of his era.
Born to a musician father employed in the service of a Hungarian prince, Liszt learned piano by the age of seven and was recognized shortly thereafter as a budding virtuoso.
His musical education, paid for by a group of Hungarian noblemen, took place in Vienna. It was in Paris during his teens and early 20s, however, that Liszt first gained widespread public attention as a performer.
Though his stature as a composer continued to grow throughout his long career, his reputation as a pianist both preceded and exceeded it.
Influenced most heavily not by another pianist but by the violinist Niccolò Paganini, Liszt developed a style that helped shape the future of piano technique, and he developed a following — particularly among women — that made him a massive concert draw throughout Europe at the height of his career in the 1840s and 50s.
It was no accident that director Ken Russell cast lead singer Roger Daltry of the Who in the role of Liszt in his 1975 film, Lisztomania.
Away from the piano, Liszt also conducted a number of high-profile and often controversial affairs over course of his career, beginning with a student who was also the daughter of high-ranking French government official and continuing through several famous dancers, a French countess and a Polish princess.
Widely believed to have fathered many children out of wedlock, Liszt famously denied one such paternity claim by writing, "I know his mother only by correspondence, and one cannot arrange that sort of thing by correspondence."
Franz Liszt died of pneumonia on July 31, 1886, in Bayreuth, Bavaria.
Thanks History.com
October 21, 2021
Steve Cropper is 80 years old today
Steve Cropper plays at the Stax Records tribute at Lincoln Center in New York City, August 14, 2011
Photo by Frank Beacham
Steve Cropper is 80 years old today.
Steve "The Colonel" Cropper is a guitarist, songwriter and record producer and best known as the guitarist of the Stax Records house band, Booker T. & the M.G.’s.
He has backed artists such as Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas and Johnnie Taylor, also acting as producer on many of their records. Cropper later gained fame as a member of the Blues Brothers band.
When he was nine years old, Cropper moved with his family to Memphis. At the age of ten, he strummed his brother-in-law's Gibson guitar for the first time. Cropper received his first guitar by mail order at 14 and started playing with local musicians.
His guitar heroes at the time included Lowman Pauling of the "5" Royales, as well as Chet Atkins, Chuck Berry, Tal Farlow, Jimmy Reed and the guitarist of the Bill Doggett band, Billy Butler.
Cropper and guitarist, Charlie Freeman, formed the Royal Spades, who eventually became the Mar-Keys. The name referred to the marquee outside Stax studios, known as Satellite Records at the time. Eventually the Mar-Keys began playing on sessions and had a hit single of their own with "Last Night" in 1961.
When American Records founder Chips Moman left Stax, Cropper was promoted to the company's A&R man. He became a founding member of the Stax house band, Booker T. & the M.G.'s, along with Hammond organ player Booker T. Jones, bassist Donald "Duck" Dunn and drummer Al Jackson Jr.
As a house guitarist, he played on many recordings such as "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay," co-written with and performed by Otis Redding, and Sam & Dave's "Soul Man," on which he was mentioned by name.
When Cropper played on the song's remake by the Blues Brothers, lead singer John Belushi again mentioned Cropper. At this time Cropper's fame was not limited to the United States. The Beatles favored Cropper's playing and his production on Otis Redding records.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney made tentative plans to record in Memphis, and to work with the guitarist. However Brian Epstein cancelled the sessions, citing security problems.
Regarding this period, Rob Bowman, in his book, Soulsville U.S.A.: The Story Of Stax Records, quoted Booker T. Jones as saying: “We were writing sounds too, especially Steve. He's very sound-conscious, and he gets a lot of sounds out of a Telecaster without changing any settings — just by using his fingers, his picks and his amps”
Along with influential work with Booker T & The MG's, Cropper co-wrote "Knock On Wood" with Eddie Floyd, "In the Midnight Hour" with Wilson Pickett and "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" with Otis Redding. In 1969, Cropper released his first solo album, With a Little Help From My Friends.
In 1978, Cropper and Dunn became members of Levon Helm's RCO All-Stars, and then went on to figure prominently in the Blues Brothers Band with the drummer Willie Hall. This led to two albums and two movie soundtracks.
Cropper also re-recorded "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" (1979) for Sammy Hagar. Cropper lived in Los Angeles for the next thirteen years before moving to Nashville and reuniting with the Blues Brothers Band in 1988.
In 1992, Booker T. & the M.G.'s were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Cropper appeared with a new line-up of the group for the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary concert, on October 1992 at Madison Square Garden, performing songs by and backing Dylan, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, Chrissie Hynde, Sinéad O'Connor, Stevie Wonder and Neil Young.
The concert was recorded and later released as The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration (1993).
Neil Young later recruited this line up of Booker T. and the M.G's, to tour with him and record as his studio band.
In 1996, Cropper was named "the greatest living guitar player" by Britain's Mojo magazine. When asked what he thought of Cropper, the guitarist Keith Richards said, "Perfect, man."
In February, 1998, Cropper released Play It, Steve! which included some of soul music's most enduring songs. The album title came from the "shout" of the title phrase by Moore on Sam & Dave's "Soul Man," and later by John Belushi (with the Blues Brothers).
Here’s Cropper on how Booker T. and the MGs did “Green Onions”
Booker T. & The MG's perform "Time Is Tight," 1970
Steve Cropper, April 13, 2010, P&G Bar, New York City
Photo by Frank Beacham
Dizzy Gillespie, one of the great trumpeters in jazz history, was born 103 years ago today
Photo by Raymond Clement
Dizzy Gillespie, one of the great trumpeters in jazz history, was born 103 years ago today.
An iconic figure in the history of jazz music who was instantly recognizable even to millions of non-jazz fans by his puffed-out cheeks and his trademark trumpet, with its horn bent upwards at a 45-degree angle, John Birks Gillespie — better known as "Dizzy" — was born on this day in 1917 in Cheraw, South Carolina.
The youngest of nine children in a musical family, Gillespie began playing piano at the age of four and took up the trombone and trumpet at the age of 12.
He showed enough talent on the latter instrument to earn a music scholarship to North Carolina's Laurinburg Institute at the age of 15, but even through his high school years, Gillespie was essentially self-taught.
In the late 1930s, at the height of the Swing era, Gillespie worked his way through a succession of increasingly prestigious big bands, earning a reputation as a talented performer and as a free spirit worthy of the nickname, "Dizzy."
By 1939, at the age of 22, he was playing for Cab Calloway, one of the most successful bandleaders of the time.
Dizzy would stay with Calloway's band through 1941, but more important than the recordings on which he appeared during this period were the connections he made with fellow musicians who would greatly influence the next phase of his career — musicians that included the great saxophonist, Charlie "Bird" Parker and the pianist, Thelonious Monk.
During their late-night jam sessions in the early 1940s at New York clubs like Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, Gillespie, Parker and Monk, among several others, established an entirely new sound in jazz: bebop.
Because of a recording ban instigated by union musicians during the bulk of World War II, the evolution of bebop was not documented in commercial recordings. In the postwar era, however, the revolutionary new style took the jazz world by storm and established Gillespie's international reputation.
In addition to acting as one of bebop's founding fathers, Dizzy Gillespie also pioneered the fusion of Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz music in the 1940s, helping to create another jazz genre of enormous popularity and importance.
Gillespie died of pancreatic cancer on January 6, 1993 at the age of 75.
He taught and influenced many other musicians, including trumpeters Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Arturo Sandoval, Lee Morgan, Jon Faddis and Chuck Mangione.
Thanks History.com
Manfred Mann is 81 years old today
Manfred Mann is 81 years old today.
Born Manfred Sepse Lubowitz in Johannesburg, South Africa, Mann is a keyboard player best known as a founding member and namesake of Manfred Mann and Manfred Mann's Earth Band.
Lubowitz studied music at the University of the Witwatersrand, and worked as a jazz pianist at a number of clubs in Johannesburg. Between 1959 and 1961 he and his childhood friend, Saul Ozynski, recorded two albums as the Vikings – South Africa's first rock and roll band.
Strongly opposed to the apartheid system in his native South Africa, Lubowitz moved to the United Kingdom in 1961 and began to write for "Jazz News" under the pseudonym, Manfred Manne, after jazz drummer, Shelly Manne. Soon, he dropped the final “e,” making the name, Manfred Mann.
The next year he met drummer and keyboard player, Mike Hugg, at Clacton Butlins Holiday Camp and together they formed a large blues-jazz band, the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers. This eventually evolved into a five-piece group and they signed a record deal with EMI in 1963, under the HMV label.
Their name was changed to Manfred Mann at the suggestion of the label's record producer. From 1964 to 1969, they had a succession of hit records, including "Do Wah Diddy Diddy," "Sha La La," "Pretty Flamingo" and "Mighty Quinn."
The group split in 1969, and Mann immediately formed another band with Mike Hugg. Called Manfred Mann Chapter Three, it was an experimental jazz rock band. They disbanded after two albums, but Mann formed a new group in 1971, Manfred Mann's Earth Band, which still records and performs to this day.
The Cocoanut Grove nightclub was located in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles until it was demolished in 2005
The Cocoanut Grove nightclub was located in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles until it was demolished in 2005.
The hotel was the site of six Academy Awards ceremonies between 1930 and 1943, and the June, 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
The Ambassador Hotel began operation formally on January 1, 1921, and was located at 3400 Wilshire Boulevard, between Catalina Street and Mariposa Avenue, in the center of the Los Angeles Mid-Wilshire district.
Seven U.S. Presidents stayed at The Ambassador Hotel, from Hoover to Nixon, along with chiefs of state from around the world.
For decades, the hotel's famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub hosted well-known entertainers, such as Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland, Lena Horne, Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Liza Minnelli, Martin and Lewis, The Supremes, Merv Griffin, Dorothy Dandridge, Vikki Carr, Evelyn Knight, Vivian Vance, Dick Haymes, Sergio Franchi, Perry Como, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Sammy Davis Jr., Little Richard, Liberace, Natalie Cole and Richard Pryor.
During the 1920s, the Cocoanut Grove was frequented Louis B. Mayer, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, Howard Hughes, Clara Bow, Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Anna May Wong and Norma Talmadge.
Joan Crawford went go there once a week to dance the Charleston, where she won more than 100 dance contests.
During the 1930s, the club was frequented by celebrities of cinema such as Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg, Errol Flynn, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Marlene Dietrich, Lana Turner, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Lucille Ball, Ginger Rogers, Gary Cooper and Loretta Young.
In the pantry area of the hotel's main kitchen, soon after midnight on June 5, 1968, and after a brief victory speech in the Embassy Room ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel, the winner of the California Democratic presidential primary election, Senator Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), was shot along with five other people.
Palestinian immigrant, Sirhan Sirhan, was arrested at the scene and later convicted of the murder. Kennedy died one day later from his injuries, while the other victims survived their wounds. The death of Robert F. Kennedy coincided with the beginning of the hotel's demise, hastened by the decline of the surrounding neighborhood.
Despite a renovation of the Cocoanut Grove in the mid-1970s, with the creative control of Sammy Davis, Jr., the hotel was closed in 1989 to guests, but remained open for filming and private events. A liquidation sale of the hotel's contents was conducted in 1991 by National Content Liquidators Inc. based in Ohio.
Emilio Estevez's movie, Bobby, was filmed there during late 2005, even as the adjoining wing was being demolished.
Owen Bradley, Nashville record producer, was born 106 years ago today
Owen Bradley in his studio in the early 1970s with Loretta Lynn
Owen Bradley, Nashville record producer, was born 106 years ago today.
Along with Chet Atkins and Bob Ferguson, Bradley was one of the chief architects of the 1950s and 1960s Nashville sound in country music and rockabilly.
A native of Westmoreland, Tennessee, Bradley learned piano at an early age, and began playing in local nightclubs and roadhouses when he was a teenager. At 20, he got a job at WSM-AM radio, where he worked as an arranger and musician.
In 1942, he became the station's musical director, and was also the leader of a sought-after dance band, joined later by vocalists, Bob Johnstone and Dottie Dillard, that played at well-heeled society parties all over the city.
That same year, Bradley co-wrote Roy Acuff’s hit, “Night Train to Memphis." He kept the band up until 1964, although in the intervening decades, his work as a producer would far overshadow his own performing career.
In 1947, Bradley took a position as a music arranger and songwriter at Decca Records. He worked for Paul Cohen on recordings by some of the biggest talents of the day, including Ernest Tubb, Burl Ives, Red Foley and Kitty Wells. Learning from Cohen, he eventually began to produce records on his own.
When his mentor left the label in 1958, Bradley became vice president of Decca's Nashville division, and began pioneering what would become the "Nashville sound." Country music had long been looked on as unsophisticated and folksy, and was largely confined to listeners in the less affluent small towns of the American South and Appalachia.
In the late 1950s, Bradley's home base of Nashville was positioning itself to be a center of the recording industry, and not just the traditional home of the Grand Ole Opry.
In fact, the Nashville sound began in a Quonset hut attached to a house Bradley owned with his brother, Harold, at 804 16th Avenue South in Nashville. The Quonset Hut is commonly recognized as the birthplace of a more commercial country music that often crossed over into pop.
This distinct genre of American music was developed primarily by Owen Bradley's crew of hand picked musicians, Grady Martin, Bob Moore, Hank Garland and Buddy Harman — Nashville's "A-Team."
The success of Bradley's Quonset Hut studio spurred RCA Victor to build its famous RCA Studio B. A handful of other labels soon followed setting up shop on what would eventually become known as Music Row.
Bradley and his contemporaries infused hokey melodies with more refined lyrics and blended them with a refined pop music sensibility to create the Nashville sound, known later as Countrypolitan. Light, easy listening piano (as popularized by Floyd Cramer) replaced the clinky honky-tonk piano.
Ironically, one of the artists Bradley would record in the 1950s was honky tonk blues singer pianist, Moon Mullican. The Mullican sessions produced by Bradley were experimental in that they merged Moon's original blues style with the emerging Nashville sound stylings.
The singers Bradley produced made unprecedented headway into radio, and artists such as Patsy Cline, Brenda Lee, Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty became household names nationwide. Pop singers like Buddy Holly and Gene Vincent also recorded with Bradley in his Nashville studio.
Also, he produced Bill Monroe in both bluegrass and decidedly non-bluegrass settings (Monroe's covers of Jimmie Rodgers' "Caroline sunshine girl" and Moon Mullican's "Mighty pretty waltz," for example, feature a standard country band rather than bluegrass.
Bradley sold The Quonset Hut to Columbia (which today is a division of Sony Music Entertainment) and bought a farm outside of Nashville in 1961, converting a barn into a demo studio.
Within a few years, the new "Bradley's Barn" became a legendary recording venue in country music circles. It burned to the ground in 1980, but Bradley rebuilt it within a few years in the same location.
He retired from production in the early 1980s, but continued to work on selected projects. Canadian artist k.d. lang chose Bradley to produce her acclaimed 1988 album, Shadowland.
His production of Cline's legendary hits like "Crazy," "I Fall to Pieces" and "Walkin' After Midnight" remain, more than fifty years later, the standard against which great female country records are measured today.
It is his work with Cline and Loretta Lynn for which he is best known, and when the biopics Coal Miner's Daughter and Sweet Dreams were filmed, he was chosen to direct their soundtracks.
Bradley died on Jan. 7, 1998 at age 82.
On this day in 1959 — 62 years ago today — on New York City's Fifth Avenue, thousands of people lined up outside the newly opened Guggenheim Museum
On this day in 1959 — 62 years ago today — on New York City's Fifth Avenue, thousands of people lined up outside a bizarrely shaped white concrete building that resembled a giant upside-down cupcake.
It was opening day at the new Guggenheim Museum, home to one of the world's top collections of contemporary art.
Mining tycoon Solomon R. Guggenheim began collecting art seriously when he retired in the 1930s. With the help of Hilla Rebay, a German baroness and artist, Guggenheim displayed his purchases for the first time in 1939 in a former car showroom in New York.
Within a few years, the collection — including works by Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Marc Chagall — had outgrown the small space.
In 1943, Rebay contacted the architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and asked him to take on the work of designing not just a museum, but a "temple of spirit," where people would learn to see art in a new way.
Over the next 16 years, until his death six months before the museum opened, Wright worked to bring his unique vision to life. To Wright's fans, the museum that opened on October 21, 1959, was a work of art in itself.
Inside, a long ramp spiraled upwards for a total of a quarter-mile around a large central rotunda, topped by a domed glass ceiling. Reflecting Wright's love of nature, the 50,000-meter space resembled a giant seashell, with each room opening fluidly into the next.
Wright's groundbreaking design drew criticism as well as admiration. Some felt the oddly-shaped building didn't complement the artwork. They complained the museum was less about art and more about Frank Lloyd Wright.
On the flip side, many others thought the architect had achieved his goal — a museum where building and art work together to create "an uninterrupted, beautiful symphony."
Located on New York's impressive Museum Mile, at the edge of Central Park, the Guggenheim has become one of the city's most popular attractions. In 1993, the original building was renovated and expanded to create even more exhibition space.
Today, Wright's creation continues to inspire awe, as well as odd comparisons — a Jello mold! a washing machine! a pile of twisted ribbon! — for many of the 900,000-plus visitors who visit the Guggenheim each year.
Above, The Guggenheim, October, 1959
Photo by Robert Mates
Elvin Bishop is 79 years old today
Elvin Bishop, Boston’s On the Beach, July 3, 2010
Photo by Carl Lender
Elvin Bishop is 79 years old today.
A blues and rock and roll musician and guitarist, Bishop was born in Glendale, California, and grew up on a farm near Elliott, Iowa.
His family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, when he was ten years old. There he attended Will Rogers High School, winning a full scholarship to the University of Chicago as a National Merit Scholar finalist. Upon graduation, he moved to Chicago in 1960 to attend school, where he majored in physics.
In 1963, he met harmonica player, Paul Butterfield, in the neighborhood of Hyde Park and joined Butterfield's blues band, with whom he remained for five years. Their third album, The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw, takes its name from Bishop's nickname.
In 1968, he went solo and formed the Elvin Bishop Group. He also performed on the album, The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. The group signed with Fillmore Records, which was owned by Bill Graham, who also owned the music venues of the same name.
In March, 1971, The Elvin Bishop Group and The Allman Brothers Band co-billed a series of concerts at the Fillmore East. Bishop joined The Allman Brothers Band onstage for a rendition of his own song, "Drunken Hearted Boy.”
Over the years, Bishop has recorded with many other blues artists including Clifton Chenier and John Lee Hooker. In late 1975, he played guitar for a couple of tracks on Bo Diddley's The 20th Anniversary of Rock 'n' Roll album, and in 1995, he toured with B.B. King.
October 20, 2021
New Morning, Bob Dylan’s 11th studio album, was released on this day in 1970 — 51 years ago today
New Morning, Bob Dylan’s 11th studio album, was released on this day in 1970 — 51 years ago today.
Coming only four months after the controversial Self Portrait, New Morning won a much warmer reception from fans and critics. It reached #7 in the U.S., quickly going gold.
Harvey Brooks played bass during the final sessions for New Morning, after having performed on Dylan’s Highway 61 album a few years earlier.
Here is Harvey’s account of how he became involved on the session.
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On the recording of Bob Dylan’s New Morning
By Harvey Brooks
One sunny afternoon in the Fall of 1970, I was upstairs working in my Woodstock house on a painting. It was inspired by some dying flies falling off the large picture window directly in front of me onto my already abstract canvas.
The phone rang. It was Levon Helm calling to tell me he had given Bob (Dylan) my new phone number. Was it all right? About an hour later, Dylan called. He said if I wasn’t doing anything he would stop by — if I was alone. I was and he did.
We sat in my living room and started talking about what was going on in Woodstock. I made some coffee and as we talked, Dylan’s eyes seemed to be capturing a picture of the room that stopped at the chessboard. I asked, do you play? His answer came in his move to the table where my chessboard sat.
I’ll give you Queen odds in the first game, he said. If you win, we’ll make it rook odds. We both laughed, lit up a joint and Bob made the first move across the board, with our back and forth repartee about our former manager, Albert Grossman.
Bob’s stories about Albert and their falling out centered on management fees and publishing. I left working for Albert because we did not have a signed contract and he never wanted to pay me what I thought I was worth. Albert was an arrogant and assertive guy. He, as I have written earlier in the book, managed Peter, Paul and Mary, Janis Joplin, Richie Havens and Todd Rundgren. Most of his relationships ended bitterly.
Oddly, Albert is still a good part of what Woodstock is today. He created the artist colony that is still a haven to many musicians and his Bearsville Theater complex continues to prosper.
As we continued across the chess board, Bob suggested that I read the book, The Death Ship. It is a novel by the pseudomonas author known as B. Traven. The setting, as Bob shared it, was the predicament of a merchant seaman who had lost his passport/citizenship papers and cannot find any legal residence or employment in any nation.
The character in the book is repeatedly arrested and deported from one country to the next by government officials who do not want to be bothered with helping or jailing him. Bob embellished the story of the ship by saying that the workers from around the world were treated as expendable slaves. B. Traven also wrote The Treasure of The Sierra Madre. I do not remember if Bob or I took the game!
A few weeks later, I got a call from Al Kooper booking me on a series of sessions for Bob’s New Morning album, being recorded at Columbia Studio E. Prior to my being called for the session, Bob had gone through many players. They’d done a lot of recording in Nashville and New York, but still hadn’t gotten the tunes the way Bob wanted them.
Al knew that we were all comfortable together, and hoped that the sessions would go smoothly. There was a lot of burnt out emotion in the studio when I got there, and I couldn’t miss the frustration that Bob and Al were going through. The room was like sitting in a pressure cooker that was ready to blow! It took awhile for everyone to settle into a groove.
I played on If Not for You, Day of the Locusts, One More Weekend, Father of Night and The Man In Me. My performance is pretty much about the feel of the song.
What I do is listen to a combination of the rhythm and chords and find a basic part that fits. Then I evolve the part as the song comes together. It’s just moving and bridging sections so that the tunes becomes comfortable.
That’s what I did on New Morning and it worked.
Wanda Jackson is 84 years old today
Wanda Jackson is 84 years old today.
A singer, songwriter, pianist and guitarist who had success in the mid-1950s and 1960s as one of the first popular female rockabilly singers and a pioneering rock and roll artist, Jackson is known to many as the Queen (or First Lady) of Rockabilly.
Jackson mixed country music with fast-moving rockabilly, often recording them on opposite sides of a record.
As rockabilly declined in popularity in the mid-1960s, she moved to a successful career in mainstream country music with a string of hits between 1966 and 1973, including "Tears Will Be the Chaser for Your Wine,” "A Woman Lives for Love" and "Fancy Satin Pillows.”
After graduating from high school, Jackson began to tour with her father as manager and chaperon. She often shared the bill with Elvis Presley, who encouraged Jackson to sing rockabilly. Jackson briefly dated Elvis, during which time Elvis sometimes would coach Jackson how to play rock 'n' roll.
During the 1950s, Jackson's stage outfits were often designed by her mother. Unlike traditional clothing worn by female country music singers of the time, she wore fringe dresses, high heels and long earrings. She has claimed she was the first female to put "glamor into country music."
She continued to record more rockabilly singles through the decade with producer Ken Nelson. Jackson insisted that Nelson make her records sound like those of label mates, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps.
Nelson brought in many experienced and popular session players, including rock and roll pianist, Merill Moore, and the then unknown, Buck Owens. With a unique vocal style and upbeat material, Jackson created some of the most influential rock and roll music of the time.
Jackson has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity among rockabilly revivalists in Europe and younger Americana fans, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an Early Influence in 2009.
On March 27, 2019, Jackson announced her official retirement from performing.
Here Jackson performs “Hard Headed Woman” in 1958
Wanda Jackson performs “Funnel Of Love,” 2012
On this day in 1977 — 44 years ago — three members of Lynyrd Skynyrd died in a plane crash
On this day in 1977 — 44 years ago — three members of Lynyrd Skynyrd died in a plane crash.
In the summer of 1977, members of the rock band, Aerosmith, inspected an airplane they were considering chartering for their upcoming tour — a Convair CV-240 operated out of Addison, Texas.
Concerns over the flight crew led Aerosmith to look elsewhere — a decision that saved one band but doomed another. The aircraft in question was instead chartered by the band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, who were just setting out that autumn on a national tour that promised to be their biggest to date.
During a flight from Greenville, South Carolina to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Lynyrd Skynyrd's tour plane crashed in a heavily wooded area of southeastern Mississippi during a failed emergency landing attempt.
The crash killed band-members Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines and Cassie Gaines, as well as the band's assistant road manager and the plane's pilot and co-pilot. Twenty others survived the crash.
The original core of Lynyrd Skynyrd — Ronnie Van Zant, Bob Burns, Gary Rossington, Allen Collins and Larry Junstrom — first came together as Jacksonville, Florida teenagers under the name "My Backyard" in 1964.
Under that name and several others, the group developed its chops playing local and regional gigs throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, then finally broke out nationally in 1973 following the adoption of the name "Lynyrd Skynyrd" in honor of a high school gym teacher/nemesis, Leonard Skinner.
The newly renamed band scored a major hit with their hard-driving debut album (pronounced 'lĕh-'nérd 'skin-'nérd) (1973), which featured one of the most familiar and joked-about rock anthems of all time, "Free Bird."
Their follow-up album, Second Helping (1974), included the even bigger hit "Sweet Home Alabama," and it secured the band's status as giants of the southern rock subgenre.
On October 17, 1977, Lynyrd Skynyrd — now in a lineup that included backup singer Cassie Gaines and her guitarist brother, Steve — released their fifth studio album, Street Survivors, which would eventually be certified double-platinum.
Three days later, however, tragedy struck the group when their chartered plane began to run out of fuel at 6,000 feet en route to Baton Rouge. The plane's crew, whom the National Transportation Safety Board would hold responsible for the mishap in the accident report issued eight months later, radioed Houston air-traffic control as the plane lost altitude, asking for directions to the nearest airfield.
"We're low on fuel and we're just about out of it," the pilot told Houston Center at approximately 6:42 pm. "We want vectors to McComb [airfield] poste-haste please, sir."
Approximately 13 minutes later, however, the plane crashed just outside of Gillsburg, Mississippi.
Thanks History.com
Jelly Roll Morton was born 131 years ago today
Jelly Roll Morton with two visitors at RCA’s Studio #3, New York City, 1939, during his second Bluebird recording session
Photo courtesy Ate van Delden Collection
Jelly Roll Morton was born 131 years ago today.
Morton was a ragtime and early jazz pianist, bandleader and composer. He was widely recognized as a pivotal figure in early jazz.
Morton is perhaps most notable as jazz's first arranger, proving that a genre rooted in improvisation could retain its essential spirit and characteristics when notated. His 1915 composition, "Jelly Roll Blues," was the first published jazz composition.
Morton is also notable for naming and popularizing the "Spanish tinge" (habanera rhythm and tresillo), and for penning such standards as "Wolverine Blues,” "Black Bottom Stomp" and "I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say,” the latter a tribute to New Orleans personalities from the turn of the 19th to 20th century.
Reputed for his arrogance and self-promotion as often as recognized in his day for his musical talents, Morton claimed to have invented jazz outright in 1902 — much to the derision of later musicians and critics.
However, jazz historian, musician and composer Gunther Schuller writes about Morton's "hyperbolic assertions" that there is "no proof to the contrary" and that Morton's "considerable accomplishments in themselves provide reasonable substantiation.”
Michael McClure, beat poet, was born 89 years ago today
Michael McClure, 1975
Photo by Frank Beacham
Michael McClure, beat poet, was born 89 years ago today.
A poet, playwright, songwriter and novelist, McClure found fame as one of the five poets (including Allen Ginsberg and Philip Whalen) who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955.
The reading is described in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums. He soon became a key member of the Beat Generation and is immortalized as "Pat McLear" in Kerouac's, Big Sur.
McClure's first book of poetry, Passage, was published in 1956 by small press publisher, Jonathan Williams. His poetry is heavily infused with an awareness of nature, especially in the animal consciousness that often lies dormant in mankind.
Not only an awareness of nature, but the poems are organized in an organic fashion, continuing with his appreciation of nature's purity.
Stan Brakhage, friend of McClure, stated in Chicago Review that: "McClure always, and more and more as he grows older, gives his reader access to the verbal impulses of his whole body's thought (as distinct from simply and only brain-think, as it is with most who write). He invents a form for the cellular messages of his, a form which will feel as if it were organic on the page; and he sticks with it across his life..."
McClure published eight books of plays and four collections of essays, including essays on Bob Dylan and the environment. His fourteen books of poetry include Jaguar Skies, Dark Brown, Huge Dreams, Rebel Lions, Rain Mirror and Plum Stones.
McClure famously read selections of his Ghost Tantra poetry series to the caged lions in the San Francisco Zoo. His work as a novelist includes the autobiographical The Mad Cub and The Adept.
On January 14, 1967, McClure read at the epochal Human Be-In event in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and transcended his Beat label to become an important member of the 1960s Hippie counterculture.
Barry Miles referred to McClure as "the Prince of the San Francisco Scene.”
McClure would later court controversy as a playwright with his play, The Beard. The play tells of a fictional encounter in the blue velvet of eternity between Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow and is a theatrical exploration of his "Meat Politics" theory, in which all human beings are "bags of meat."
McClure was a close friend of The Doors lead singer, Jim Morrison, and is generally acknowledged as having been responsible for promoting Morrison as a poet.
McClure performed spoken word poetry concerts with Doors keyboard player, Ray Manzarek, until Manzarek’s death in 2013.
McClure died of stroke-related complications on May 4, 2020, in Oakland, at the age of 87.
Here, McClure reads poetry to lions in San Francisco in this mini-documentary in 1966
Philip Whalen, beat generation poet, was born 98 years ago today
Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen and William F. Burroughs, Colorado, 1976
Philip Whalen, a key beat generation poet, was born 98 years ago today.
A Zen Buddhist, Whalen was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance movement. Born in Portland, Oregon, he served in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. He later attended Reed College on the GI Bill.
There, he met Gary Snyder and Lew Welch, and graduated with a BA in 1951. He read at the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955 that marked the launch of the West Coast Beats into the public eye.
He appears, in barely fictionalized form, as the character, "Warren Coughlin," in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, which includes an account of that reading.
In Kerouac’s Big Sur, he is, "Ben Fagan.” Whalen's poetry was featured in Donald Allen's anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960.
Whalen's first interest in Eastern religions centered on Vedanta. Upon release from the Army in 1946, he visited the Vedanta Society in Portland, but did not pursue this very far, because of the expense of attending their countryside ashram.
Tibetan Buddhism also attracted him, but he found it "unnecessarily complicated."
In 1952, Gary Snyder lent him books on Zen by D. T. Suzuki. Ultimately, Zen became his chosen path. Whalen spent 1966 and 1967 in Kyoto, Japan, assisted by a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a job teaching English. There, he practiced zazen daily and wrote some forty poems and a second novel.
He moved into the San Francisco Zen Center and became a student of Zentatsu Richard Baker in 1972. The following year, he became a monk. He became head monk of Dharma Sangha in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1984.
In 1987, he received transmission from Baker, and in 1991, he returned to San Francisco to lead the Hartford Street Zen Center until forced by ill health to retire.
Whalen died on June 26, 2002 at age 78.
Here, Whalen on plums, metaphysics, an investigation, a visit and a short funeral ode
Louis Marshall Jones, better known as Grandpa Jones, was born 108 years ago today
Louis Marshall Jones, better known as Grandpa Jones, was born 108 years ago today.
Jones was a banjo player and "old time" country and gospel music singer, and a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. Born in the farming community of Niagara in Henderson County, Kentucky, Jones spent his teenage years in Akron, Ohio, where he began singing country music tunes on a radio show on WJW.
In 1931, Jones joined the Pine Ridge String Band, which provided the musical accompaniment for the very popular Lum and Abner show.
By 1935, his pursuit of a musical career took him to WBZ (AM) radio in Boston where he met musician/songwriter Bradley Kincaid, who gave him the nickname "Grandpa" because of his off-stage grumpiness at early-morning radio shows.
Jones liked the name and decided to create a stage persona based around it. Later in life, he lived in Mountain View, Arkansas. Performing as Grandpa Jones, he played the guitar, yodeled and sang mostly old-time ballads.
By 1937, Jones had made his way to West Virginia, where Cousin Emmy taught Jones the art of the clawhammer style of banjo playing, which gave a rough backwoods flavor to his performances. In 1942, Jones joined WLW in Cincinnati. It was there that he met fellow Kentuckian, Merle Travis.
In 1943, the pair made their recording debuts together for Syd Nathan's upstart King Records. Jones was making records under his own name for King by 1944 and had his first hit with, "It's Raining Here This Morning.”
In March, 1946, he moved to Nashville and started performing on the Grand Ole Opry. Jones married Ramona Riggins on October 14, 1946. Ramona would not only remain his wife for the rest of his life, but, as an accomplished performer herself, would also be a part of his performances.
Jones' vaudevillian humor was a bridge to television entertainment. Some of his more famous songs include, "T For Texas,” "Are You From Dixie,” "Night Train To Memphis" and "Mountain Dew.” He also wrote the song, "Eight More Miles To Louisville."
In 1969, Jones became a charter cast member on the long-running television show Hee Haw, often responding to the show's skits with his trademark phrase "Outrageous.” He also played banjo, either by himself or with fellow banjo player, David "Stringbean" Akeman.
In January, 1998, Jones suffered a stroke after his second show performance at the Grand Ole Opry. He died on February 19, 1998 at age 84.
Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó — better known as Bela Lugosi — was born 139 years ago today
Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó — better known as Bela Lugosi — was born 139 years ago today.
Lugosi was a Hungarian actor, who is best known for playing the character "Dracula" in the 1931 film and for his roles in various other horror films.
He had been playing small parts on the stage in his native Hungary before making his first film in 1917, but had to leave the country after the failed Hungarian Revolution. He arrived in America as a seaman on a merchant ship.
In 1927, he appeared as Count Dracula in a Broadway production, which Hamilton Deane and John Balderston had dramatized from Bram Stoker's novel. He was talent-spotted as a character actor for the new Hollywood talkies, appearing in the first Dracula film with sound.
Through the 1930s, he occupied an important niche in popular horror films, with their East European setting, but his Hungarian accent limited his repertoire, and he tried unsuccessfully to avoid typecasting.
Meanwhile, he was often paired with Boris Karloff, who was able to demand solo star billing. To his frustration, he was increasingly restricted to minor parts, for the sake of his name on the posters.
Only in Son of Frankenstein (1939), did he perform a major role again.
By this time, Lugosi had been receiving regular medication for sciatic neuritis, and he had become addicted to morphine and methadone. This drug dependence was noted by producers, and the offers dwindled down to a few parts in Ed Wood's low-budget movies.
Lugosi was married five times, and had one son, Bela George Lugosi.
Lugosi die in August, 1956 at age 73.
Above, Lugosi as the title count with Helen Chandler in 1931′s ”Dracula.” (Universal Studios)
Photo by Christopher Wallenberg
Arthur Rimbaud, French poet, was born 167 years ago today
Arthur Rimbaud, French poet, was born 167 years ago today.
Born in Charleville, Ardennes, Rimbaud produced his works while still in his late teens — Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare" — and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 20.
As part of the decadent movement, Rimbaud influenced modern literature, music and arts, and prefigured surrealism. He was known to have been a libertine and a restless soul, traveling extensively on three continents before his death from cancer just after his 37th birthday.
Rimbaud's first poem to appear in print was "Les Étrennes des orphelins" ("The Orphans' New Year's Gift"), which was published in the January, 1870 issue of Revue pour tous.
Two weeks after his poem was printed, a new teacher, Georges Izambard, arrived at the Collège de Charleville. Izambard became Rimbaud's literary mentor and soon a close accord formed between professor and student and Rimbaud for a short time saw Izambard as a kind of older brother figure.
From late 1870, Rimbaud's behavior became outwardly provocative. He drank alcohol, spoke rudely, composed scatological poems, stole books from local shops and abandoned his characteristically neat appearance by allowing his hair to grow long.
Rimbaud was encouraged by friend and office employee, Charles Auguste Bretagne, to write to Paul Verlaine, an eminent Symbolist poet, after letters to other poets failed to garner replies.
Taking his advice, Rimbaud sent Verlaine two letters containing several of his poems, including the hypnotic, gradually shocking "Le Dormeur du Val" (The Sleeper in the Valley), in which certain facets of Nature are depicted and called upon to comfort an apparently sleeping soldier. Verlaine, who was intrigued by Rimbaud, sent a reply that stated, "Come, dear great soul. We await you; we desire you," along with a one-way ticket to Paris.
Rimbaud arrived in late September, 1871 at Verlaine's invitation and resided briefly in Verlaine's home.
Verlaine, who was married to the seventeen-year-old and pregnant, Mathilde Mauté, had recently left his job and taken up drinking. In later published recollections of his first sight of Rimbaud, Verlaine described him at the age of seventeen as having "the real head of a child, chubby and fresh, on a big, bony rather clumsy body of a still-growing adolescent, and whose voice, with a very strong Ardennes accent, that was almost a dialect, had highs and lows as if it were breaking."
Rimbaud and Verlaine began a short and torrid affair. Whereas Verlaine had likely engaged in prior homosexual experiences, it remains uncertain whether the relationship with Verlaine was Rimbaud's first. During their time together they led a wild, vagabond-like life spiced by absinthe and hashish.
They scandalized the Parisian literary coterie on account of the outrageous behavior of Rimbaud, the archetypical enfant terrible, who throughout this period continued to write strikingly visionary verse. The stormy relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine eventually brought them to London in September, 1872, a period about which Rimbaud would later express regret.
During this time, Verlaine abandoned his wife and infant son — both of whom he had abused in his alcoholic rages. Rimbaud and Verlaine lived in considerable poverty, in Bloomsbury and in Camden Town, scraping a living mostly from teaching, in addition to an allowance from Verlaine's mother.
In February, 1891, Rimbaud developed what he initially thought was arthritis in his right knee. It failed to respond to treatment and became agonizingly painful, and by March, the state of his health forced him to prepare to return to France for treatment.
In Aden, Rimbaud consulted a British doctor who mistakenly diagnosed tubercular synovitis and recommended immediate amputation. His right leg was amputated in May. The post-operative diagnosis was cancer. He died in Marseilles on November 10, 1891 at the age of 37.
Rimbaud's poetry, as well as his life, made an indelible impression on 20th century writers, musicians and artists. Pablo Picasso, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Vladimir Nabokov, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Giannina Braschi, Léo Ferré, Henry Miller, Van Morrison and Jim Morrison have been influenced by his poetry and life.
Above, Illustration of Rimbaud by Ernest Pignon-Ernest
On October 20, 1947 — 74 years ago today — the notorious Red Scare kicked into high gear in Washington, as a Congressional committee began investigating Communist influence in Hollywood
On October 20, 1947 — 74 years ago today — the notorious Red Scare kicked into high gear in Washington, as a Congressional committee began investigating Communist influence in Hollywood.
After World War II, the Cold War began to heat up between the world's two superpowers — the United States and the Soviet Union. In Washington, conservative watchdogs tried to reveal communists in government before setting their sights on alleged "Reds" in the famously liberal movie industry.
In the investigation, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) grilled a number of prominent witnesses, asking bluntly "Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?"
Whether out of patriotism or fear, some witnesses — including director Elia Kazan, actors Gary Cooper and Robert Taylor and studio heads, Walt Disney and Jack Warner — gave the committee names of colleagues they suspected of being communists.
A small group known as the "Hollywood Ten" resisted, complaining that the hearings were illegal and violated their First Amendment rights. They were all convicted of obstructing the investigation and served jail terms.
Pressured by Congress, the Hollywood establishment started a blacklist policy, banning the work of about 325 screenwriters, actors and directors who had not been cleared by the committee.
Those blacklisted included composer Aaron Copland, writers Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker, playwright Arthur Miller and actor and filmmaker, Orson Welles.
Some of the blacklisted writers used pseudonyms to continue working, while others wrote scripts that were credited to other writer friends.
Starting in the early 1960s, after the downfall of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the most public face of anti-communism, the ban began to lift slowly.
In 1997, the Writers' Guild of America unanimously voted to change the writing credits of 23 films made during the blacklist period, reversing — but not erasing — some of the damage done during the Red Scare.
In the above photo, a Hollywood Ten protest
Thanks History.com
Tom Petty was born 71 years ago today
Tom Petty, New York City, 1976
Photo by Richard E. Aaron
Tom Petty was born 71 years ago today.
A singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Petty was the frontman of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and was a founding member of the late 1980s supergroup, Traveling Wilburys, and Mudcrutch.
He also performed under the pseudonyms of Charlie T. Wilbury, Jr. and Muddy Wilbury.
Petty recorded a number of hit singles with the Heartbreakers and as a solo artist, many of which remain heavily played on adult contemporary and classic rock radio.
His music, and notably his hits, became popular among younger generations. Throughout his career, Petty and his collaborators sold more than 60 million albums.
Petty was found unconscious at his home, not breathing and in full cardiac arrest, early in the morning of October 2, 2017. He was taken to the UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, California, where he died at 8:40 p.m. that evening.
Arlene Francis, pioneer for women on television, was born 114 years ago today
Arlene Francis on NBC’s Home, 1957
Arlene Francis is remembered by most of us as a talk show host on WOR Radio and a game show panelist on CBS’s “What’s My Line.”
Yet Francis, who was born 114 years ago today, was a pioneer for women on television. She began her career as an actress. Active on Broadway, she acted in several films, debuting in the role of a prostitute in Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), which had her falling prey to mad scientist, Bela Lugosi.
In the 1960s, Arlene Francis appeared as the wife of James Cagney in the comedy, One, Two, Three (1961), directed by Billy Wilder and filmed on location in Munich.
She also made The Thrill of It All (1963) and the television version of the play, Laura (1968), which she had played on stage several times.
In her earliest days, Francis worked on stage and on radio with Orson Welles. I did an audio documentary in the late 1980s with Leonard Maltin about actors who had worked with Welles.
In February, 1988, Francis gave me an interview and I visited her New York City apartment. She was a charming and very friendly lady. We talked in her living room.
Welles “was very imaginative and his manner of forcefulness in what he had to say was powerful. I mean you just had to pay attention and I think it was one of the first times radio had heard anybody with that kind of positive, able, brilliance in his introduction to a play or into his understanding of the part that he was playing. He was always Orson, I will say that. Very few people argued with Orson about anything, I noticed,” said Francis.
“I noticed mostly because I wouldn't have dared, but I mean mostly they just took his word for it, although he was always open to suggestions and talks and so forth....and I remember one time when his first wife, Virginia, said 'I don't happen to think that's the right way to do that.' And he said, 'But I do.'
And she had an ice cream soda in her hand in a container and she just threw it at him in front of the whole company. He just mopped it up and they went on working...” (laughter)
As the infamous "War of the Worlds" aired on radio on October 30, 1938, Francis was in rehearsals for Welles' stage production of "Danton's Death." She remembers Welles arriving at the theatre after the broadcast.
“And so we used to rehearse at the theatre until midnight or later and Orson came from that broadcast and he burst into....we were all waiting for him....he burst into the auditorium and said: 'I don't know what's going to happen. The police are gonna be after me. I know all hell has broken loose now because of the fact that I had this 'War of the Worlds' done so well that they really thought it was going on.
“And he couldn't believe the reaction to it....none of us could. But we all stayed there a long time and he was talking about it."
He said "it was nothing, they made such a big thing out of nothing. How could they do that? How are people so so silly as to believe the thing like that? In the first place, they hear my voice. They don't think I'm gonna be the one to announce the war between the worlds."
The rest, they say, is history.
Francis died at age 93 on May 31, 2001 in San Francisco. Her death was attributed to Alzheimer's disease and cancer.
Arlene Francis, James Cagney and Billy Wilder on the set of of the comedy film, One, Two, Three, 1961
October 19, 2021
Jeannie C. Riley is 76 years old today
Jeannie C. Riley is 76 years old today.
Riley is best known for her 1968 country and pop hit, "Harper Valley PTA," written by Tom T. Hall, which missed (by one week) becoming the Billboard Country and Pop #1 hit at the same time.
In subsequent years, she had moderate chart success with country music, but never again duplicated the success of "Harper Valley PTA." She became a born-again Christian and began recording gospel music during the late 1970s.
Born in Stamford, Texas, as a teenager, she married Mickey Riley and gave birth to a daughter, Kim Michelle Riley on January 11, 1966. Later, they moved to Nashville after receiving a letter from Weldon Myrick, who heard a demo tape of Jeannie's and believed she could be successful.
In Nashville, Riley worked as a secretary for Passkey Music while recording demos on the side. Riley's career was stagnant until a former Mercury Records producer, Shelby Singleton, received a demo tape of Riley's voice. Singleton was starting and succeeding with his own label, Plantation Records, at the time.
Singleton worked with Riley in the recording of the Tom T. Hall demo song where he saw potential, "Harper Valley PTA." The record quickly became one of the best-known country music songs of all time.
"Harper Valley PTA" was released in 1968. The song immediately became a hit for Riley and went to #1 on both the Billboard Pop and Country charts — a feat not repeated until 1981 when Dolly Parton released "9 to 5."
The song is about a widowed woman by the name of Mrs. Johnson, who confronts a group of members of the PTA after her daughter brings home a note from school that's critical of her (Mrs. Johnson's) habits of wearing miniskirts, going out with men and other behavior of which they do not approve.
The climax of the song comes when Mrs. Johnson turns the tables on the PTA and exposes their hypocrisy, one member at a time.
Riley and the song became an overnight sensation. Globally the single sold over five and a half million copies, and the album of the same name sold over one million copies.
The song was a phenomenon which led to Riley making country music history in 1969 as the first female vocalist to have her own major network variety special, Harper Valley U.S.A. She hosted the show along with Jerry Reed and it featured performances by Mel Tillis and Harper Valley’s writer, Tom T. Hall.
The song spawned a 1978 film and a 1981-83 television series, both titled Harper Valley PTA and both starring Barbara Eden as the widow, Mrs. Johnson.
Dave Guard, founding member of the Kingston Trio, was born 87 years ago today
Dave Guard, founding member of the Kingston Trio, was born 87 years ago today.
Guard was a folk singer, songwriter, arranger and recording artist. Along with Nick Reynolds and Bob Shane, he founded The Kingston Trio.
Guard was born in San Francisco and went to Punahou School in Honolulu in what was then the pre-statehood U.S. Territory of Hawaii. Upon completion of his final year of high school in 1952 at Menlo School, a private prep school in Menlo Park, California, he attended nearby Stanford University, graduating in 1957 with a degree in economics.
While an undergraduate at Stanford, Guard started a pickup group with Reynolds and Shane. Guard called his group Dave Guard and the Calypsonians, with a Weavers-style signature sound that was principally two guitars, a banjo and rollicking vocals.
Guard kept the group together after Reynolds and Shane left, changing the name of the Calypsonians to The Kingston Quartet. Then, in 1957, when Reynolds and Shane agreed to team up with Guard again, the group changed its name to The Kingston Trio.
Under contract with Capitol Records, the Trio became a huge commercial and influential success.
On March 22, 1991, aged 56, Guard succumbed to lymphoma. In 2000, The Kingston Trio was inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame.
Charlie's Place: Photo Essay
- The true story of the Ku Klux Klan’s violent attempt in South Carolina in the post World War II years to stop dirty dancing and kill the emerging black music behind it—rhythm & blues. E-book in all platforms.
Mill Town Murder: Photo Essay
- On the morning of Sept. 6, 1934, in the tiny town of Honea Path, S.C., friends and neighbors came to blows in a labor dispute. When it was over, seven people were dead and 30 others wounded. The bloody riot at the town’s cotton mill shaped the lives of two generations to follow—not because of the shock of what was known, but by what was unknown. E-book available on all platforms.
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