FROM THE VAULTS

Due to defunct 3^rd party add-ons I could not access my blog without being re-directed; so whilst waiting for Blogger help I created another blog

So for today’s birthday go here:

https://bobsvaults.blogspot.com/2018/08/vic-dana-born-26-august-1942.html

Should be back as normal tomorrow.

Juliette Augustina Cavazzi, CM (née Sysak; 27 August 1926 – 26 October 2017), ,was a Canadian singer and television host.

With her folksy pop style and easy rapport with an audience, big band and country singer Juliette made her CBC Saturday night music variety program Juliette (1956–66) one of Canada’s most popular television shows. Known as “our pet Juliette,” she was the country's most successful television entertainer for more than a decade. She was a Member of the Order of Canada, the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame and Canada’s Walk of Fame. Her sister Suzanne, also known only by her first name as a vocalist, is also a member of the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame.

Juliette Sysak was born in suburban Winnipeg to Polish-Ukrainian
parents. She sang at the local Ukrainian hall and won a number of amateur singing contests before her family moved to Vancouver when she was 10. After singing at the Kitsilano Showboat, she began performing with Dal Richards's orchestra at the Hotel Vancouver at age 13, under the stage name Juliette. At 15, she made her CBC network debut on George Calangis's radio program Sophisticated Strings.

After spending 1943–44 in Toronto, where she appeared on Alan Young's CBC Radio show and with Lucio Agostini's orchestra, she returned to Vancouver and sang on many other CBC Radio programs, including Burns Chuckwagon (a country music show with the Rhythm Pals), and Here's Juliette. She also appeared at Theatre Under the Stars.]

She married musician Tony Cavazzi, who became her manager, and in 1954 the two moved to Toronto, where she co-starred with Gino Silvi on CBC Radio's Gino and Juliette. She was also a featured guest on CBC TV’s Holiday Ranch and a regular performer — introduced as “our pet Juliette” — on Billy O'Connor's The Late Show (1954–56). In 1954 she was approached by American big-band leader Harry James to be his singer for a gig at the Hollywood Palladium. James was a star — Frank Sinatra was one of his old singers. But she turned him down.

In 1956, Juliette became host of the long-running Saturday night music variety program, Juliette (1956–66), succeeding O’Connor’s Late Show on CBC TV. It was one of the broadcaster’s most popular shows of the day, regularly ranking behind only Hockey Night in Canada and the national news in viewership. As the program followed Hockey Night in Canada, it was often shortened or extended depending on when the hockey game ended, adding an extra layer of spontaneity to the live show. The wholesome, conservative program took place on a living room set and featured Juliette beginning each episode with “Hi there, everybody” and ending it with “Goodnight, Mom.”

Here's "Matchmaker" from her 1968 album "Juliette"

Despite her popularity with the public, Juliette generally received little love from critics, who typically dismissed her as bland. The Globe and Mail’s television critic, Dennis Braithwaite, wrote in 1965 that her show exhibited “an unexciting format, uninspired production, bad writing, unglamorous costuming and a drab image of wholesomeness.” Her show was still ranked in the Top 10 when it fell prey to a new CBC ratings system and was cancelled in 1966.

After appearing in a number of TV and radio specials, Juliette hosted the CBC TV talk shows After Noon (1969–71) and Juliette and Friends (1973–75). She also sang the anthem at the very first home game for the Vancouver Canucks in 1970.

She began winding down her career in the 1980s, retiring to Vancouver and performing at occasional benefits and nostalgia shows. Her husband died in 1988 of Alzheimer's. She later enjoyed a romance with Raymond Smith, a widower and retired president of forestry giant MacMillan Bloedel, who had once been a member of Mr. Richards's orchestra. She rarely performed after the 1990s but during 2004 she made a special appearance at an event marking the 85th birthday of

bandleader Dal Richards with whom she sang regularly up to her retirement.

Juliette recorded two 78s for RCA's “X” label and one with the Rhythm Pals for Aragon in the early 1950s. She later made three LPs for RCA Camden: Juliette (1968), Juliette’s Christmas World (1968) and Juliette’s Country World (1969).She also recorded many transcription discs of the Juliette show. She appeared on a recording of Dolores Claman's musical comedy Timber! (1954) and the compilation album The Saga of Canadian Country and Folk Music (1972).

Juliette died on Oct. 26, 2017 at a Vancouver rehabilitation centre, where she was staying after suffering injuries from a fall. She was 91.

(Compiled and edited from various sources mainly the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada)

Here’s Juliette & Frank Ifield dueting with “Don’t Blame Me” in this CBC "Show of the Week" from 1968.

Anne Margot Lantree (born 28 August 1943, Hayes, Middlesex, England) was a drummer and singer with The Honeycombs. She was one of the only female drummers to come out of the British invasion of the early 1960s.

Anne Margot Lantree, better known as Honey Lantree, was notable as one of the few female drummers to come out of the British Invasion. Additionally, as a member -- and eventually the featured member -- of the Honeycombs, she was probably the best known woman drummer in rock & roll of the 1960s, at least in England. Lantree was not just a visual novelty; she actually could play well, and wasn't a bad singer when called upon in that capacity. The fact that she looked great also helped the band's fortunes immeasurably, and her visual attributes were no accident, either.

She was working in a London hair salon managed by Martin Murray when the latter decided in 1963 to form a rock & roll group. She had played the drums and took to that spot in the band naturally, and her presence gave them a visual edge over almost all of the competition -- with her then-fashionable beehive hairdo, she was an asset to any photo of the band and looked great behind the kit, and the fact that she could play completed the picture. The Honeycombs, as they were later christened -- which only further enhanced the attention paid to Lantree -- were signed up professionally coming out of the three-night-a-week gig at an East End pub, by songwriter/managers Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, and they hit the number one spot in early 1964 with "Have I the Right," produced by the renowned Joe Meek.

With an international hit to their credit, Lantree became the most well-known female drummer in the world from the tours, and the film and television appearances that followed.

She also proved her worth as a singer by sharing the lead vocal spot on one of their follow-up hits, "That's the Way"; their second album, All Systems Go, offered her singing a soulful pop ballad, "Something I Got to Tell You," that only confirmed her talents in this area.

No document of their live sound has emerged, but to have been heard amid the inevitable waves of screams that teenagers generated at concerts in those days, Lantree's playing must have been immensely powerful. A little later in the group's history, their managers decided to move Lantree into centre stage, with Pretty Things alumnus Viv Prince taking over the drumming on tour. Her fortunes declined with those of the group, which lost most of its audience after 1965 as music moved on and popular styles changed, and ended up playing in cabaret during their final phase.

Honey Lantree and the Honeycombs seemed quaintly archaic by 1967, when they split up following Meek's suicide early that year.

Lantree was, by some accounts, one of the inspirations for a young Karen Carpenter to take up the drums, but that was as far as her influence seemingly went. The only other female drummer that anyone remembers from this period, Maureen Tucker of the Velvet Underground, was far better known in underground circles during the late '60s and 1970s, and Lantree wasn't much more than a footnote in what music histories there were. But a revival of interest in the British Invasion in the early '80s led to a rediscovery of the Honeycombs' music and to her discovery by a new generation of young listeners.

Women drummers in all-female bands, such as the Runaways, are a separate matter, but at least one mixed-gender New York band of the early '80s, the Tryfles, seemed to have been inspired by Lantree in their configuration. Their drummer was Ellen O'Neil, whose traditional good looks (balanced by the more stylized appeal of the one other female member of the quartet, guitarist Lesya Karpilov) helped dress up the visual presence of a band that was, by equal parts, otherwise inspired by the Byrds and the Shadows of Knight.

In the 1990s founding member Martin Murray toured the cabaret circuit with a group called 'Martin Murray's Honeycombs' Another line-up including Honey Lantree, Peter Pye and Denis D'Ell also successfully toured from 1991 onwards. John Lantree later rejoined this line-up. In 1999 record producer Russell C. Brennan asked D'Ell, Honey and John Lantree and Pye to record "Live and Let Die", on the Future Legend Records compilation, Cult Themes from the '70s Vol. 2.

Since then, and with the help of various CD reissues of the Honeycombs' work, Lantree has finally gotten her due as a trailblazer in music. She has not participated in work by the revived versions of the Honeycombs.

Honey has been involved with the Joe Meek Appreciation Society and did an interview in 2008 for the film made about Meek.

(Info mainly from All Music)

Charles Parker Jr. (August 29, 1920 – March 12, 1955), also known as Yardbird and Bird, was an American jazz saxophonist and composer.

At age eleven, he had just begun to play the saxophone. At age twenty he was leading a revolution in modern jazz music. At thirty-four, he was dead from years of drug and alcohol use. Today, Charlie "Yardbird" Parker is considered one of the great musical innovators of the 20th century.

A father of bebop, he influenced generations of musicians, and sparked the fire of one of the most important and successful American artistic movements.

Born in 1920 in Kansas City, Kansas, Charlie Parker grew up just across the river in Kansas City, Missouri. By age twelve he was playing in the high school marching band and in local dance hall combos. It was then that he first heard the new sounds of jazz. Hanging around the Kansas City clubs, the young Parker went to hear every new musician to pass through. Some of his earliest idols were Jimmy Dorsey, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster, and Louis Armstrong.

As a teenager he married his childhood sweetheart, Rebecca Parker Davis. Living in Kansas City, they had a child, but as Kansas City declined as a center for jazz, Parker longed to leave his hometown for New York. So, just around age twenty, Parker sold his horn, left his family, and hopped on a train to New York, where he was destined to change the face of American music forever.

In New York, Parker had difficulty finding work at first, but playing with Jay McShann’s band he began to develop his fiercely original solo style. Within a short while he was the talk of the town and Dizzy Gillespie and other members of the Earl Hines band convinced Hines to hire him. Gillespie and Parker became close friends and collaborators. Of the time Gillespie recalled, "New York is the place, and both of us blossomed." Leaving Hines, the two moved on to Billy Eckstine’s band, where they were able to expand their range of experimentation.

The seeds of modern jazz, or "bebop," as the new style came to be called, were also being sown by now legendary pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, drummers Kenny Clark and Max Roach, and trumpeter Miles Davis. All were frequent Parker collaborators on recordings and in the lively 52nd Street clubs that were the jazz center of the mid-1940s. Beyond his amazing technical capacity, Parker was able to invent a more complex and individual music by disregarding the four- and eight-bar standards of jazz and creating solos that were both fluid and harsh.

Though the experiments of jazz were being heard worldwide, in the United States much of the popular media ignored the music and concentrated on the culture -- the berets, horn-rimmed glasses, goatees, and language that characterized the bebop style. Jazz critic

Leonard Feather noted, "There was no serious attention paid to Charlie Parker as a great creative musician ... in any of the media. It was just horrifying how really miserably he was treated. And this goes for the way Dizzy Gillespie was treated -- and everybody." Due in part to dissatisfaction with the amount of critical attention he was receiving and in part to his years of on and off drug use, Parker slipped into serious addiction. On a two-year tour of California, his drinking and drug addiction worsened, and for six months he was in a Los Angeles rehabilitation center.

It was not until his tour of Europe that Parker began to receive the attention he deserved. Visiting Paris in 1949, Parker was greeted with an almost cult status. His European trips also encouraged him to expand his musical arrangements, including backing strings for both touring and recording.

However, as continuing personal and creative pressures mounted, he went into a tailspin: drinking, behaving erratically, and even being banned from "Birdland," the legendary 52nd Street club named in his honor. Throughout this time, however, one thing remained intact -- Parker’s playing continued to exhibit the same technical genius and emotional investment that had made him great.

In 1954, while working again in California, Parker learned of the death of his two-year-old daughter, and went into further decline. He separated from his then common-law wife, Chan Parker, and was reduced to playing in dives. The cheap red wine he had become addicted to was exacerbating his stomach ulcers, and he even once attempted suicide.

On March 9, 1955, while visiting his friend, the "jazz baroness" Nica de Koenigswarter, Charlie Parker died. The coroner cited pneumonia as the cause, and estimated Parker’s age at fifty-five or sixty. He was only thirty-four. Though Parker was a titan among jazz musicians of the time, it would take the country at large years to learn that for a short while in the 1940s and 1950s one of the most profoundly original American musicians had walked among them virtually unrecognized. (edited from pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters)

Here's Charlie Parker alto sax and Coleman Hawkins tenor sax (date 1950) with: Hank Jones - Piano, Ray Brown - Double bass, Buddy Rich - Drums with an improvisation of "Ballade.".

Ellen Muriel Deason (August 30, 1919 – July 16, 2012), known professionally as Kitty Wells, was an American pioneering female country music singer. One of the few country stars born in Nashville, Kitty Wells had a string of hits from the '50s to the early '70s that earned her the title Queen of Country Music.

There had been female singers in country music before – the indefatigably yodelling Patsy Montana; Molly O'Day, all gingham and tears; the regal Sara Carter – but they always required the presence of male protectors: singing husbands or an all-male backing band. In the 1940s and 50s, with the rise of such charismatic performers as Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, country music came to seem more and more like men's business. Wells changed all that with a single song, It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels (1952).

The road to that hit had been a long one. Born Ellen Muriel Deason in Nashville, Tennessee, she left school in her teens, in the Depression-hit early 30s, and took a job ironing shirts. She came from a musical family, had learned to sing and play guitar, and got some experience of performing on radio in a family quartet. In

1937 she married Johnnie Wright and sang with him and his sister. A couple of years later, Wright and Jack Anglin formed a duet act, Johnnie & Jack, and she toured with them in the then conventional role of the "girl singer". Up to that point she had been using her birth name, but Wright conferred on her the more resonant Kitty Wells, a name drawn from an old song.

After the Second World War, Johnnie, Jack and Kitty secured a place in the cast of the Louisiana Hayride, which at that time was second only to the Grand Ole Opry as a shop window of country music talent. In 1952, after Johnnie & Jack's hit recording Poison Love, the Opry stage was theirs too.

The Louisiana Hayride helped Johnnie & Jack land a record contract with RCA Records in 1949. That same year, Wells recorded some gospel tracks -- featuring Johnnie & Jack as instrumental support -- for RCA, but they were unsuccessful. Following those recordings, Wells was more or less retired for the next few years.

In 1952, Paul Cohen, an executive at Decca Records, approached Wells to record "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels." Wells recorded the song and it became a smash hit, reaching number one in the summer and staying in that position for six weeks. It was set to the melody of both a tender old country song of
separated lovers, I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes, and –

even more incongruously – Roy Acuff's scriptural hit of the 30s, The Great Speckled Bird. Later in 1952, she joined the Grand Ole Opry.

Wells issued another communiqué from the dark side of town, Paying for That Back Street Affair; sang duets with Red Foley such as One By One and As Long As I Live; and had further hits with Making Believe, I Can't Stop Loving You, Mommy for a Day and Heartbreak USA – songs that skilfully evoked both the lure of sin and the comfort of repentance. "On Wells's records," wrote the country-music historian Mary Bufwack, "sorrowful men and women acted out their emotional dramas through her plaintive vocals accompanied by a crying steel guitar."

By the end of the 50s, Wells had had more than 30 top 10 records in the Billboard country charts, and was billed as the "Queen of Country Music". Decca so valued her that they signed her to a lifetime contract, though after Will Your Lawyer Talk to God (1962) she was less of a presence in the country charts. But this mattered little to the female fans that she had gathered over the past decade: they turned up at her engagements, watched her syndicated TV programme and bought her book of favourite songs and recipes. Unlike some women in country music – and indeed unlike the heroines of many of her songs – she dressed conservatively and had a sober and scandal-

free life.

In 1976, Wells was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and with good reason. Kitty Wells broke down the doors for female country singers, paving the way for artists like Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette, and Loretta Lynn. During the '80s, her activity slowed -- in addition to running a museum outside of Nashville, she toured with her husband, Johnnie, and frequently appeared on the Grand Ole Opry. In 1991, she was given a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammys. In July 2012 she died at home in Madison, Tennessee, from complications of a stroke; Kitty Wells was 92 years old.

(Compiled and edited from All Music & The Guardian)

Eva Nadauld (September 1, 1923 – November 3, 2010), known professionally as Eve Young early in her career, and later as Karen Chandler, was an American singer of popular music during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, best known for her 1952 hit, "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me".

Born September 1, 1923, in Rexburg, Idaho, she began her singing career under the name Eve Young while still a student at Brigham Young University. It is possible that the university's name influenced her choice of stage name. However, Young was her mother's maiden name; the Young family was well known for their musical talents and were called the "Singin' Swingin' Youngs".

She made her national debut on Benny Goodman's NBC radio showcase on July 8, 1946, singing "I Don't Know Why", and became the Goodman Orchestra's featured vocalist for the
remainder of that year, enjoying success as his vocalist on "A Gal in Calico". By early 1947, she joined the cast of the television showcase Musical Merry-Go-Round and was subsequently signed to RCA Victor as a solo artist.

She made her chart debut a year later with "Cuanto la Gusta" before recording
"My Darling, My Darling" as a duet with the Drugstore Cowboys vocalist Jack Lathrop. Although both of these records were hits, her subsequent releases, such as "Laughing Boy" and "It's Me" achieved less success, and in 1950 RCA terminated her contract. In the UK, however, she had her biggest successes in that year, with "(If I Knew You Were Comin') I'd've Baked A Cake" and "Silver Dollar (Roll, Roll, Roll)", in both cases credited to Eve Young & The Homesteaders, each reaching the top of the UK sheet music charts in 1950. (Charts based on record sales did not start in Britain until 1952.)

After signing a new contract with Coral Records, she emerged again in late 1952 under the name Karen Chandler. Her debut for Coral was the song "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me," and it became an enormous hit. Selling over a million copies, it peaked at No. 7

on the Billboard chart. It was followed by a second single, "The Old Sewing Machine" b/w "I Hear the Music Now," which did not enjoy the same success. Her third release, "Goodbye Charlie, Goodbye" in the spring of 1953, fared better, reaching the Top 40, but two follow-ups, "Rosebud" and "Transfer", failed to make an impact. Chandler's final solo hit, "Why?" reached the charts in 1954.

Two subsequent recordings, "Positively No Dancing" and "Why Didn't You Tell Me?" were also unsuccessful, and in 1956 she changed genres, teaming up with country singer Jimmy Wakely for the duet "Tonight You Belong to Me". This was followed at the end of 1956 by another duet, "As Far as I'm Concerned," which this time paired Chandler with Eddie Reardon.

In 1957, she released two singles under the Decca label, "Love Is the $64,000 Question" (with her husband's Jack Pleis and His Orchestra) and "Free Little Bird", but with the rise in popularity of rock and roll, these largely went unnoticed.

In the 1960s she made a small impression with "Lost And Found" (Tivoli, 1965, peaked at #141 in Record World), and then Karen Chandler had a minor comeback in 1967-68 with a revival of Hoagy Carmichael's "I Get Along Without You Very Well" on Dot. It reached No. 19 on Billboard's easy listening chart. She did not chart in the US again. After which her trail goes cold. I can only assume she retired from the music business.

She was married to arranger Jack Pleis. They lived in New York City. She died November 3, 2010.

(Edited from Wikipedia)

Laurindo Almeida (September 2, 1917 – July 26, 1995) was a Brazilian virtuoso guitarist and composer who made many recordings of enduring impact in classical, jazz and Latin genres. He is widely credited, with fellow artist Bud Shank, for creating the fusion of Latin and jazz which came to be known as the bossa nova. Almeida was the first artist to receive Grammy Awards for both classical and jazz performances. His discography encompasses more than a hundred recordings over five decades.

Laurindo Jose de Araujo Almeida Nobrega Neto was born in the village of Prainha, Brazil near Santos in the state of São Paulo. Born into a musical family, Almeida was a self-taught guitarist. During his teenage years, Almeida moved to São Paulo, where he worked as a radio artist, staff arranger and nightclub performer. At the age of 19, he worked his way to Europe playing guitar in a cruise ship orchestra. In Paris, he attended a performance at the Hot Club by Stephane Grappelli and famed guitarist Django Reinhardt, who became a lifelong artistic inspiration.

Returning to Brazil, Almeida continued composing and performing. He became known for playing both classical Spanish and popular guitar. He moved to the United States in 1947; a trip financed when one of his compositions, a song known as "Johnny Peddler" became a hit recorded by the Andrews Sisters. In Los Angeles, Almeida immediately went to work in film studio orchestras.

Almeida was first introduced to the jazz public as a featured guitarist with the Stan Kenton band in the late 1940s during the height of its success. Famed Kenton arranger Pete Rugolo

composed "Lament" specifically for Almeida's cool, quiet sound, and Almeida's own composition "Amazonia" was also featured by the Kenton orchestra. Almeida stayed with Kenton until 1952.

Almeida's recording career enjoyed auspicious early success with the 1953 recordings now called Brazilliance No. 1 and No. 2 with fellow Kenton alumnus Bud Shank, bassist Harry Babasin, and drummer Roy Harte. Widely regarded as "landmark" recordings, Almeida and Shank's combination of Brazilian and jazz rhythms presaged the fusion of Latin and jazz, which is quite different in bossa nova, although jazz critic Leonard Feather credited Almeida and Shank as the creators of bossa nova sound.

Almeida's classical solo recording career on Capitol Records began in 1954 with The Guitar Music of Spain. Almeida made a series of highly successful classical recordings produced by Robert E. Myers.Among Almeida's notable classical recordings is an album widely considered to be the first classical crossover album, the

1958 Grammy winner Duets with Spanish Guitar with mezzo soprano Salli Terri and flutist Martin Ruderman. The recording was nominated for two Grammy Awards and won for Best Classical Engineering for Sherwood Hall III at the first Grammy Awards ceremony.

Of Almeida's five career Grammys, four were awarded in classical categories. His classical recording discography also includes the debut recordings of two major guitar works, Heitor Villa-Lobos' Guitar Concerto and Radamés Gnattali's Concerto de Copacabana.

In 1964, Almeida again expanded his recording repertoire by joining forces with the Modern Jazz Quartet on Collaboration (Atlantic Records), which combined classical with jazz, called "chamber jazz." Almeida also toured with the MJQ, both in the 1960s and again in the 1990s.

In addition to his recording achievements, Almeida continued his work with the film studios throughout his career, playing guitar, lute, mandolin and other instruments for more than 800 motion picture and television soundtracks. He composed the complete film scores for ten motion pictures and portions for hundreds of others, including Charles and Ray Eames's 1957 film Day of the Dead. His final film work was in "The Cat in the Hat" (2003) in which his whistling cover of "The Girl From Ipanema" is briefly heard.

In the 1970s, Almeida reunited with Bud Shank, forming The L.A. Four with Ray Brown and Chuck Flores. From 1974 to 1982, the L.A. Four toured internationally and recorded a series of albums for Concord Jazz. In 1980, Almeida joined forces with Charlie Byrd on a series of highly regarded recordings, including Latin Odyssey, Brazilian Soul and Tango. He also recorded with Baden Powell, Stan Getz and Herbie Mann, among others. His guitar trio, Guitarjam, with Larry Coryell and Sharon Isbin played Carnegie Hall in 1988. In the 1990s, Almeida toured again with the Modern Jazz Quartet.

From 1992, Almeida was teaching, recording and performing until the week before his death of leukemia on July 26, 1995, at age 77 in Los Angeles, California.

(Edited from Wikipedia)

Memphis Slim (September 3, 1915 – February 24, 1988) was an American blues pianist, singer, and composer. He led a series of bands that, reflecting the popular appeal of jump blues, included saxophones, bass, drums, and piano. A song he first cut in 1947, "Every Day I Have the Blues", has become a blues standard, recorded by many other artists. He made over 500 recordings.

An amazingly prolific artist who brought a brisk air of urban sophistication to his frequently stunning presentation, John "Peter" Chatman -- better known as Memphis Slim -- assuredly ranks with the greatest blues pianists of all time. He was smart enough to take Big Bill Broonzy's early advice about developing a style to call his own to heart, instead of imitating that of his idol, Roosevelt Sykes. Soon enough, other 88s pounders were copying Slim rather than the other way around; his thundering ivories attack set him apart from most of his contemporaries, while his deeply burnished voice possessed a commanding authority.

As befits his stage name, John "Peter" Chatman was born and raised in Memphis; a great place to commit to a career as a bluesman. Sometime in the late '30s, he resettled in Chicago and began recording as a leader in 1939 for OKeh, then switched over to Bluebird the next year. Around the same time, Slim joined forces with Broonzy, then the dominant force on the local blues scene. After serving as Broonzy's invaluable accompanist for a few years, Slim emerged as his own man in 1944.

After the close of World War II, Slim joined Hy-Tone Records, cutting eight tracks that were later picked up by King. Lee Egalnick's Miracle label reeled in the pianist in 1947; backed by his jumping band, the House Rockers (its members usually included saxists Alex Atkins and Ernest Cotton), Slim recorded his classic "Lend Me Your Love" and "Rockin' the House." The next year brought the landmark "Nobody Loves Me" (better known via subsequent covers by Lowell Fulson, Joe Williams, and B.B. King as "Everyday I Have the Blues") and the heartbroken "Messin' Around (With the Blues)."

The pianist kept on label-hopping, moving from Miracle to Peacock to Premium (where he waxed the first version of his uncommonly wise down-tempo blues "Mother Earth") to Chess to Mercury before staying put at Chicago's United Records from 1952 to 1954. This was a particularly fertile period for the pianist; he

recruited his first permanent guitarist, the estimable Matt Murphy, who added some serious fret fire to "The Comeback,""Sassy Mae," and "Memphis Slim U.S.A."

Before the decade was through, the pianist landed at Vee-Jay Records, where he cut definitive versions of his best-known songs with Murphy and a stellar combo in gorgeously sympathetic support (Murphy was nothing short of spectacular throughout).

Slim exhibited his perpetually independent mindset by leaving the country for good in 1962. A tour of Europe in partnership with bassist Willie Dixon a couple of years earlier had so intrigued the pianist that he permanently moved to Paris, where recording and touring possibilities seemed limitless and the veteran pianist was treated with the respect too often denied even African-American blues stars at home back then.

He appeared on television in numerous European countries, acted in several French films and wrote the score for À nous deux France (1970), and performed regularly in Paris, throughout Europe, and on return visits to the United States. In the last years of his life, he teamed up with the respected jazz drummer George Collier. The two toured Europe together and became friends.
After Collier died in August 1987, Slim rarely appeared in public,

although he reunited with Matt "Guitar" Murphy for a gig at Antone's in Austin in 1987.

Two years before his death, Slim was named a Commander in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of France. In addition, the U.S. Senate honoured Slim with the title of Ambassador-at-Large of Good Will.

Memphis Slim died on February 24, 1988, of renal failure in Paris, France, at the age of 72. He is buried at Galilee Memorial Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee. (Compiled and edited from All Music & Wikipedia)

Jan Savitt (born Jacob Savetnick; September 4, 1913– October 4, 1948), was an American bandleader, musical arranger, and violinist. (He was also known as "The Stokowski of Swing", from having played violin in Stokowski's orchestra.), There has been uncertainty with the date of Savitt's birth, typically given as 1913 or 1914.

Jacob Sarvetnick was a child prodigy on the violin, destined to become Jan Savitt, leader of a popular swing band. Of Russian-Jewish ancestry, his father had variously worked as a motor mechanic and as a drummer in Tsar Nicholas II's Imperial Regimental Orchestra. In the U.S. from the age of fifteen, Jan became the youngest musician to play in the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, and, from there, he advanced to concert master for the great Leopold Stokowski. In the wake of multiple scholarships and being recipient of the Philharmonic Society's Gold Medal Award, he was soon leading his own string quartet.

n 1935, after graduating from the Curtis Institute of Music with a B.A., Jan suddenly decided to forsake classical for popular music and organise a dance band. He was eventually engaged by Philadelphia radio station KYW as musical director. The resulting national broadcasts proved popular with audiences and 'Jan Savitt & His Top Hatters' (so named, because their ensemble uniform consisted of white tie, tails and top hat) soon became one of the most highly rated big bands in America, playing the swank hotels, theatres and ballrooms. The band featured a unique beat called 'shuffle rhythm' (which may, or may not, have been originated by another bandleader, Henry Busse).

Bon Bon & Jan Savitt

The 'Top Hatters' comprised between fifteen and eighteen musicians, plus vocalists. Famous sidemen included trombonist and future television composer Earle Hagen, drummer Nick Fatool and trombonist Urbie Green. Other musicians who played with the Top Hatters were: Tommy Dorsey, Al Leopold, Charles Jensen, Cutty Cutshall, Ed Clausen, Frank Langone, Gabe Galinas, George White, Harold Kearns, Harry Roberts, Howard Cook, Irv Leshner, Jack Hansen, Jack Pleis, James Schultz, Johnny Austin, Johnny Warrington, Maurice Evans, Morris Rayman, Sam Sachelle.

Among the vocalists were Carlotta Dale, future movie actress Gloria DeHaven and Bon Bon (aka George Tunnell), the first black musician to work long-term in a white orchestra.

His band names include Jan Savitt & His Top Hatters, the Jan Savitt String Orchestra and Jan Savitt & His Orchestra. His groups were throughly practiced and disciplined, with an ensemble sound considered among the finest of the era.

Jan's theme song was "Quaker City Jazz". Other unique compositions for the band included the swinging "720 In the Books" (by arranger Johnny Watson), "Meadowbrook Shuffle", "It's a Wonderful World" and "Now and Forever". Jan also had noteworthy hits with his interpretation of "Tuxedo Junction" and "Make Believe Island".

Jan & his wife Barbara 1940

In 1938, Jan Savitt & His Top Hatters broadcast from 5–5:30 pm every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday as the KYW staff orchestra at KYW/NBC in Philadelphia. Saturday's weekly broadcast was one hour, coast-to-coast. The group also played at the Earl Theatre and performed with The Andrews Sisters and The Three Stooges. By the early 1940's, he added swing versions of classical compositions (mostly arranged by Jack Pleis), such as "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", "Prelude to Carmen" and Claude Debussy's "Afternoon of a Faun" to his repertoire. The band was featured in several B-movies, released by Warner Brothers and

Columbia.

After World War II, Jan was forced to reduce the size of his band (now based on the West Coast) to eight musicians, due to tax debts. Shortly before arriving in Sacramento, California, with his orchestra on Saturday, October 2, 1948, for a concert scheduled for that evening at Memorial Auditorium, Savitt was stricken with a cerebral haemorrhage and taken to Sacramento County Hospital. His orchestra played the concert without him, and, two days later, he died on October 4, at the age of just thirty-six., with

his wife at his bedside. Frank Sinatra served as one of the pallbearers at his funeral.

Savitt was married to model Barbara Ann Stillwell from 1940 until his death in 1948, and had one daughter with her, Jo Ann, in 1943. Jo Ann was married to Joel Douglas, son of Kirk, from 2004 until her death in 2013.

(Compiled and edited mainly from IMDb, Wikipedia & All Music)

Albert Luandrew (September 5, 1906* – March 17, 1995), known as Sunnyland Slim, was an American blues pianist who was born in the Mississippi Delta and moved to Chicago, helping to make that city a center of postwar blues. The Chicago broadcaster and writer Studs Terkel said Sunnyland Slim was "a living piece of our folk history, gallantly and eloquently carrying on in the old tradition.

Exhibiting truly amazing longevity that was commensurate with his powerful, imposing physical build, Sunnyland Slim's status as a beloved Chicago piano patriarch endured long after most of his peers had perished. For more than 50 years, the towering Slim had rumbled the ivories around the Windy City, playing with virtually every local luminary imaginable and backing the great majority in the studio at one time or another. His piano style is characterised by heavy basses or vamping chords with the left hand and tremolos with the right. His voice was loud, and he sang in a declamatory style.

He was born Albert Luandrew in Mississippi and received his early training on a pump organ. After entertaining at juke joints and movie houses in the Delta, Luandrew made Memphis his home base during 1927, playing along Beale Street and hanging out with

the likes of Little Brother Montgomery and Ma Rainey. He adopted his colourful stage name from the title of one of his best-known songs, the mournful "Sunnyland Train." (The downbeat piece immortalized the speed and deadly power of a St. Louis-to-Memphis locomotive that mowed down numerous people unfortunate enough to cross its tracks at the wrong instant.)

Slim moved to Chicago in 1939 and set up shop as an in-demand piano man, playing for a spell with John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson before waxing eight sides for RCA Victor in 1947 under the somewhat misleading handle of "Doctor Clayton's Buddy." If it hadn't been for the helpful Slim, Muddy Waters may
not have found his way onto Chess; it was at the pianist's 1947

session for Aristocrat that the Chess brothers made Waters' acquaintance. Slim's Shout Aristocrat (which issued his harrowing "Johnson Machine Gun") was but one of a myriad of labels that Slim recorded for between 1948 and 1956: Hytone, Opera, Chance, Tempo-Tone, Mercury, Apollo, JOB, Regal, Vee-Jay (unissued), Blue Lake, Club 51, and Cobra all cut dates on Slim, whose vocals thundered with the same resonant authority as his 88s. In addition, his distinctive playing enlivened hundreds of sessions by other artists during the same time frame.

In 1960, Slim travelled to Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, to cut his debut LP for Prestige's Bluesville subsidiary with King Curtis supplying diamond-hard tenor sax breaks on many cuts. The album, Slim's Shout, ranks as one of his finest, with definitive renditions of the pianist's "The Devil Is a Busy Man,""Shake It,""Brownskin Woman," and "It's You Baby."

In the late 1960s, Slim became friends with members of the band Canned Heat and played piano on the track "Turpentine Moan" on their album Boogie with Canned Heat. In turn, members of the band—lead guitarist Henry Vestine, slide guitarist Alan Wilson and bassist Larry Taylor—contributed to Sunnyland Slim's Liberty Records album Slim's Got His Thing Goin' On (1968), which also featured Mick Taylor.

Chicago Jump Like a deep-rooted tree, Sunnyland Slim persevered despite the passing decades. For a time, he helmed his own label, Airway Records. As late as 1985, he made a fine set for the Red Beans logo, Chicago Jump, backed by the same crack combo that

shared the stage with him every Sunday evening at a popular North side club called B.L.U.E.S. for some 12 years.

There were times when the pianist fell seriously ill, but he always defied the odds and returned to action, warbling his trademark Woody Woodpecker chortle and kicking off one more exultant slow blues as he had done for the previous half century. He was a recipient of a 1988 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honour in the folk and traditional arts.

Finally, after a calamitous fall on the ice coming home from a gig led to numerous complications, Sunnyland Slim died of kidney failure in March 1995. He's sorely missed.

(Edited from Wikipedia & All Music) (* other sources give 1905 & 1907 as birth year)

Here’s a clip from 1969.: Sunnyland Slim - piano; Willie Dixon - bass; Johnny Shines - gtr; Clifton James - drums

Jimmie Rodgers (September 8, 1897 -– May 26, 1933) known as The Singing Brakeman and America's Blue Yodeler was the first country music superstar, resulting in another commonly used nickname: The Father of Country Music.

Singer, guitarist and Father of Country Music Jimmie Rodgers was born James Charles Rodgers on September 8, 1897, in Meridian, Mississippi. He was the youngest of three children born to Eliza and Aaron Rodgers. By the time Jimmie Rodgers was born, his mother was already suffering from a serious case of tuberculosis, and she passed away when he was only a child.

Rodgers' father worked as a maintenance foreman on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad; due to the constant travel required by his work, he was in no position to raise three young children on his own. So Jimmie Rodgers spent his formative years shuffling amongst various relatives' homes in south-eastern Mississippi and south-western Alabama. Although he was never quite the "poor orphan child" he later depicted in his songs, Rodgers' did endure an unprivileged and itinerant

childhood, something that would shape his consciousness and his music for the rest of his life.

A born entertainer, Rodgers taught himself to play the guitar and—like so many great Southern singers of his and subsequent generations—learned to sing in church. After winning an amateur talent show at the age of 13, Rodgers ran away from home to try his hand at making a living with a travelling road show, using sheets he had snatched off his sister-in-law's bed as a makeshift tent. Although his father quickly tracked him down and dragged him back home, Rodgers made enough money from his shows to buy his sister-in-law a new pair of sheets.

A year later, a 14-year-old Rodgers got his first job, as a water boy for his father's railroad crew. Rodgers spent the next dozen years toiling away on the railroads, working his way up from callboy to flagman to baggage master to brakeman, all the while singing and strumming his guitar in the evenings.

In 1924, Rodgers contracted tuberculosis, the disease that had taken his mother's life, and could no longer labor long days out on the railroad. Making the best of his illness, Rodgers turned his focus to music, spending the next three years playing with amateur bar bands, earning just enough money from his music to make ends meet. In 1927, he teamed up with a string band called the Tenneva Ramblers, landing a regular but unpaid spot on a local radio station in Asheville, North Carolina. When the radio station folded, the band managed to find a new gig performing at a Blue Ridge Mountains resort.

Rodgers then got his big break when he learned that Ralph Peer, a talent scout for the Victor Talking Machine Company, was holding auditions in Bristol, Tennessee. Although their audition went over

well, the night before they were scheduled to record with Peer, Rodgers and his band got into a squabble about billing, so the next morning Rodgers went in to record alone—just his voice and his guitar. Rodgers recorded two songs for Peer that day: "Sleep, Baby, Sleep" and "The Soldier's Sweetheart." The former became a surprise hit, introducing Rodgers to national audiences for the first time.

Besides giving Rodgers' his big break, Peer's 10-day stop in Bristol (known ever after in country music lore as The Bristol Sessions) also launched the career of the legendary Carter Family; many consider it the foundational moment in the history of modern country music.

In November 1927, Rodgers recorded "Blue Yodel (T is for Texas)." Based on 12-bar blues and featuring a unique yodeling chorus, the song transformed Rodgers into a national star. Over the next five years, Rodgers recorded country music classics and forerunners of rock and roll. However, Rodgers' most popular songs were his 12 different sequels to "Blue Yodel” all of which were also based on 12-bar blues and featured Rodgers' distinctive yodeling choruses. The most famous of these sequels were "Blue Yodel No. 8 (Mule Skinner Blues)" and "Blue Yodel No. 9 (Standin' On the Corner)," both recorded in 1930 —the latter featuring the great jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong. In 1929, Rodgers also starred in a movie called The Singing Brakeman.

By 1933, Rodgers' record sales and concert attendance were flagging due to the Great Depression, and his health was failing as his tuberculosis worsened. In May 1933, he managed to travel to New York, where he was under contract to produce a dozen more records. His recordings from that session included two hits in "Mississippi Delta Blues" and "Years Ago," but the effort it took to

record these songs sapped Rodgers of what little energy he had left. Rodgers He died at the Taft Hotel in New York on May 26, 1933, the night after the session, planning to make more records. He was only 35 years old.

Jimmie Rodgers was extraordinarily popular in his short lifetime, and remains popular with generations of music fans. Numerous musicians have remade Rodgers’s songs, especially “T for Texas” and “In the Jailhouse Now,” and his influence has been wide.

He was the first performer inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1961 and in 1976, the Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Museum opened in his home town of Meridian.

(Edited mainly from biography.com)

Marion Mann (9 September 1914 - 1966) was a singer with Bob Crosby’s Orchestra and Bob Cats from 1938 – 1941.

As you well may know I usually have a comprehensive biography of my birthday celebrities but Marion Mann has been a labour of love. I have spent hours combing the web for any information and all I got is what you see below.

Marion Mann was was born Marion Bateson in Columbus, OH, United States 9 September 1914.

After graduating from a Columbus high school, Marion sang with a girl's trio on a local station. Emerson Gill hired her to sing with his orchestra during the mid 30’s and then Bob Crosby hired her away to do likewise, She was with Bob Crosby and His Orchestra and Bob Crosby's Bobcats between 1938 and 1940.

Before all these breaks, Marion had one that wasn't at all lucky. An auto accident left her with a fractured pelvis, broken collar bone, and skull puncture, nearly ending her career. But she didn't let it, and after leaving Crosby for Breakfast Club she learned to cook and tell riddles.

She was with the Breakfast Club at WMAQ for NBC from1942 to 1947. During 1945 she recorded some Musicraft sides with Jose Bethancourt and his Orchestra. And that’s about it regarding Marion Mann.

Any other information about this under-appreciated singer would be much appreciated.

Raymond Scott (born Harry Warnow, September 10, 1908 – February 8, 1994) was an American composer, band leader, pianist, recording studio maverick, and inventor of electronic instruments.

Born Harry Warnow in Brooklyn on September 10, 1908, he was a musical prodigy, playing piano by the age of two; following high school, he planned to study engineering, but his older brother Mark -- himself a successful violinist and conductor -- had other ideas,

buying his sibling a Steinway Grand and persuading him to attend the Institute of Musical Art, later rechristened the Juilliard School. After graduating in 1931, Scott -- the name supposedly picked at random out of the Manhattan phone book -- signed on as a staff pianist with the CBS radio network house band conducted by his brother. Finding the repertoire dull and uninspired, he began presenting his own compositions to his band mates, and soon bizarre Scott originals like "Confusion Among a Fleet of Taxicabs Upon Meeting with a Fare" began creeping into broadcasts.

Scott remained a member of the CBS band until 1936, at which time he convinced producer Herb Rosenthal to allow him the chance to form his own group. Assembling a line-up originally comprised of fellow network veterans, he dubbed the group the Raymond Scott Quintette, debuting on the Saturday Night Swing Session with the song "The Toy Trumpet." The Quintette was an immediate hit with listeners, and Scott was soon offered a recording contract with the Master label. Dissent quickly broke out in the group's ranks, however, as Scott's obsessive practice schedule began to wear out his band mates.

Still, for all of Scott's eccentricities, his records flew off the shelves, their Dadaist titles ("Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals,""Reckless Night on Board an Oceanliner," and "Boy Scout in Switzerland") and juxtaposed melodies, odd time signatures, and quirky arrangements somehow connected with

mainstream American audiences. Hollywood soon came calling, with the Quintette performing music for features including Nothing Sacred, Ali Baba Goes to Town, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Upon returning to New York, in 1938 Scott was tapped to become CBS' next music director; around the same time he expanded the Quintette to big-band size, and by 1940 quit his network position to lead his ensemble on tour. He returned to CBS in 1942, however, assembling the first racially mixed studio orchestra in broadcast history.

In 1941, Warner Bros.' fledgling animation department bought the rights to Scott's back catalog, with music director Carl Stalling making liberal use of the melodies in his groundbreaking cut-and-paste cartoon soundtracks. By the time Warner Bros. began using Scott's music on a regular basis in 1943, he had already moved on to new projects, including a lucrative career authoring commercial jingles.

In 1946, Scott founded Manhattan Research, the world's first electronic music studio. Housing equipment including a Martenot, an Ondioline, and a specially modified Hammond organ, it was advertised as "the world's most extensive facility for the creation of Electronic Music and Musique Concrete." Of all of Scott's accomplishments of 1949, however, none was more important than the Electronium, one of the first synthesizers ever created.

His other inventions included the "Karloff," an early sampler capable of re-creating sounds ranging from sizzling steaks to jungle drums; the Clavinox, a keyboard Theremin complete with an electronic sub-assembly designed by a then 23-year-old Robert Moog; and the Videola, which fused together a keyboard and a TV screen to aid in composing music for films and other moving images.

Raymond Scott Conducts the Rock 'n Roll Symphony In addition to hosting Your Hit Parade, Scott continued recording throughout the '50s, issuing LPs including This Time with Strings, At Home with Dorothy & Raymond, and Rock 'N' Roll Symphony. Additionally,

he cranked out advertising jingles at an astonishing rate, scored countless film and television projects, and even founded a pair of record labels, Audiovox and Master, while serving as A&R director for Everest Records.

During the mid-'50s, Scott assembled a new Quintette; the 1962 edition of the group was its last. The year following, he began work on the three-volume LP set Soothing Sounds for Baby, an "aural toy" designed to create a comforting yet stimulating environment for infants. As electronic music produced to inspire and relax, the records fit snugly into the definition of ambient suggested by Brian Eno a decade later, their minimalist dreamscapes also predating Philip Glass and Terry Riley.

The Music of Raymond Scott: Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights By the middle of the '60s, Scott began turning increasingly away from recording and performing to focus on writing and inventing.

a 1969 musical celebrating the centennial of Kentucky Bourbon was his last orchestral work, with his remaining years spent solely on electronic composition. Scott was still composing music on computer in his 70s, but a series of heart attacks and strokes in the early 90s left him unable to work, speak or communicate. He died on February 4th, 1994, at the age of 85.

(Compiled and edited mainly from All Music)

Iain David McGeachy, OBE (11 September 1948 – 29 January 2009), known professionally as John Martyn, was a British singer-songwriter and guitarist. Over a 40-year career, he released 22 studio albums, and received frequent critical acclaim. He was one of the most revered and innovative singer-songwriters of his generation; his music – a mix of blues, folk and funk – influenced artists as varied as U2, Portishead and Eric Clapton.

John Martyn was born Ian David McGeachy on September 11 1948

at New Malden, Surrey. His parents, both singers of light opera, divorced when he was five and he spent much of his childhood in Glasgow, where he lived with his grandmother and attended Shawlands Academy.

Having taught himself the guitar at the age of 15, he returned to London on leaving school and appeared regularly at Les Cousins, the Soho folk club which also launched Ralph McTell, Bert Jansch and Al Stewart. He became the first white act to be signed to Chris Blackwell's Island record label, and recorded his debut album, London Conversation, for £158 in 1968. He began to experiment with electronic effects, notably a tape device known as the Echoplex, which provided his signature sound, and which he introduced on his second album Stormbringer! in 1970.

Martyn sealed his reputation with his album, Solid Air, described as the "musical equivalent of a reassuring hug" by Q Magazine, which named it the 67th best British album of all time in 2000. Martyn dedicated the haunting title track to his friend Nick Drake, another singer-songwriter, who died of an overdose at the age of 26 shortly after it was finished.

At this point Martyn seemed on the brink of major international success, but he was derailed by his passion for musical exploration and by an appetite for excess that bordered on self-destruction. Solid Air included his most celebrated song, the beautiful May You Never (subsequently covered by Eric Clapton and many others), and his record company anticipated a big commercial breakthrough. Yet the follow-up LP in 1973, Inside Out, was wilfully inaccessible as his interest in experimental electronics increased, and the jazz-rock fusions gave the album only limited cult appeal.

Over the next few years Martyn slid into alcoholism, his live performances punctuated by moments of incoherent drunkenness. Drugs took a toll on his personal life, and his first marriage broke up in the late 1970s. This darkest period in his life found artistic expression in the despairing, autobiographical Grace and Danger, which was finally released in 1980 after Chris Blackwell had initially blocked it because he thought it was too upsetting and personal. Martyn himself described the record as "cathartic". Yet it yielded a restoration in his fortunes, and subsequent albums – Glorious Fool (1981), produced by Phil Collins, and Well Kept Secret (1982) – were the highest-charting records of his career.

In the late 1990s Martyn began to experiment with electronic dance sounds, and in 2001 he had a top 40 hit as a featured vocalist on Deliver Me, a dance record by Sister Bliss, keyboard player with the group Faithless.

Since losing a leg, Martyn had performed from a wheelchair but did not repine. "If I could control myself more, I think the music would be much less interesting," he told Q Magazine. "I'd probably be a great deal richer, but I'd have had far less fun and I'd be making really dull music."

His cantankerous behaviour was famous, and age did not appear to mellow him or diminish his interest in expanding the horizons of music and making musical boundaries redundant. Early on in his career he proved himself one of the most brilliant acoustic guitarists of his generation, but he was never content to rest on his laurels, taking his guitar-playing into constantly new directions, even at the cost of his commercial appeal.

Martyn hated being pigeonholed by any one musical genre and as a result remained essentially a cult hero. He never became rich, but he was hugely influential and was idolised by his peers.

He was presented with a lifetime achievement award by Phil Collins at the 2008 BBC Folk Awards, when he sang May You Never, backed by John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin. Eric Clapton sent a message saying he was "so far ahead of everything else it was inconceivable". Martyn joked: "At last I'm a celebrity."

He was appointed OBE in the 2009 New Year Honours. Martyn died on 29 January 2009, in hospital in Thomastown, County Kilkenny, Ireland, after a third bout with pneumonia.

John Martyn's marriage to the blues singer Beverley Kutner in 1969 ended in divorce after 10 years, and his second wife, Annie, predeceased him. (Edited from The Telegraph)

Tony Russell "Charles" Brown (September 13, 1922 – January 21, 1999) was an American blues singer and pianist whose soft-toned, slow-paced blues-club style influenced blues performance in the 1940s and 1950s. He had several hit recordings, including "Driftin' Blues" and "Merry Christmas Baby".

How many blues artists remained at the absolute top of
their game after more than a half-century of performing? One immediately leaps to mind: Charles Brown. His incredible piano skills and laid-back vocal delivery remained every bit as mesmerizing at the end of his life as they were way back in 1945, when his groundbreaking waxing of "Drifting Blues" with guitarist Johnny Moore's Three Blazers invented an entirely new blues genre for sophisticated post-war revellers: an ultra-mellow, jazz-inflected sound perfect for sipping a late-night libation in some hip after-hours joint. Brown's smooth trio format was tremendously influential to a host of high-profile disciples -- Ray Charles, Amos Milburn, and Floyd Dixon, for starters.

Brown was born in Texas City, Texas. As a child he loved music and received classical music training on the piano. He graduated from Central High School in Galveston, Texas, in 1939 and Prairie View A&M College in 1942 with a degree in chemistry. He then became a chemistry teacher at George Washington Carver High School in Baytown, Texas, a mustard gas worker at the Pine Bluff Arsenal at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and an apprentice electrician at a shipyard in Richmond, California, before settling in Los Angeles in 1943.

He played with the Bardu Ali band before joining Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, who modelled themselves after Nat "King" Cole's trio but retained a bluesier tone within their ballad-heavy repertoire. With Brown installed as their vocalist and pianist, the Blazers'

"Drifting Blues" for Philo Records remained on Billboard's R&B charts for 23 weeks, peaking at number two. Follow-ups for Exclusive and Modern (including "Sunny Road,""So Long,""New Orleans Blues," and their immortal 1947 Yuletide classic "Merry Christmas Baby") kept the Blazers around the top of the R&B listings from 1946 through 1948. Irked that he was not receiving the same billing or money as guitarist Moore, who neither wrote nor sang, Brown opted to go solo.

If anything, Brown was even more successful on his own. Signing with Eddie Mesner's Aladdin logo, he visited the R&B Top Ten no less than ten times from 1949 to 1952, retaining his mournful, sparsely arranged sound for the smashes "Get Yourself Another Fool," the chart-topping "Trouble Blues" and "Black Night," and "Hard Times." Brown's style dominated the influential Southern California club scene on Central Avenue, in Los Angeles, during that period. He influenced such performers as Floyd Dixon, Cecil Gant, Ivory Joe Hunter, Percy Mayfield, Johnny Ace and Ray Charles

Despite a 1956 jaunt to New Orleans to record with the Cosimo's studio band, Brown's mellow approach failed to make the transition to rock's brasher rhythms, and he soon faded from national
prominence (other than when his second holiday perennial, "Please Come Home for Christmas," hit in 1960 on the King label).

Occasionally recording without causing much of a stir during the '60s and '70s, Brown began to regroup by the mid-'80s. One More for the Road, a set cut in 1986 for the short-lived Blue Side logo, announced to anyone within earshot that Brown's talents hadn't diminished at all while he was gone (the set later re-emerged on Alligator). Bonnie Raitt took an encouraging interest in Brown's comeback bid, bringing him on tour with her as her opening act (thus introducing the blues vet to a whole new generation or two of fans). His recording career took off too, with a series of albums for Bullseye Blues (the first entry, 1990's All My Life, is especially pleasing), and more recently, a disc for Verve.

In his last years, Brown finally received at least a portion of the recognition he deserved for so long as a genuine rhythm and blues pioneer. But the suave, elegant Brown was by no means a relic, as anyone who witnessed his thundering boogie piano style will gladly attest; he returned in 1998 with So Goes Love before dying on January 21, 1999 from congestive heart failure in Oakland, California. (Compiled and edited from All Music, Wikipedia & Britannica.com)

Tom Delaney (September 14, 1889 – December 16, 1963) was an African-American blues and jazz songwriter, pianist and singer, who wrote a number of popular songs, mainly in the 1920s

Tom Delaney was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1889 and raised at the Jenkins Orphanage. Founded in 1891 by Rev. Daniel Jenkins, it became one of the most successful orphanages for black children in the South. One of the most famous features of the orphanage was the Jenkins Band, which performed military marching music on street corners and “passed-the-hat” for donations. Delaney performed with the band until 1910.

He later toured the East Coast in a song and dance duo billed as Mitchell and Delaney. He then played piano on the vaudeville circuit before finding his voice as a songwriter. At age 21 he was living in New York City, playing piano, writing songs and singing in saloons, gin joints and whorehouses in the seedy sections of Manhattan.

His first big break came when he was thirty-two years old, in 1921. Delaney’s song “Jazz Me Blues” attracted the attention of professional musicians and, more importantly, people who owned recording studios. They were always looking for songs to record,

especially now that there was money to be made with “black” songs. “ Lucille Hegamin recorded it that year and it went on to become a jazz standard.

The year before, 1920, Perry Bradford convinced a New York record company to record a “black blues” song. Mamie Smith recorded Bradford’s “Crazy Blues.” It sold more than a million copies in less than a year. Suddenly, “black blues” songs were hot. Delaney had written hundreds of blues songs by then, so he began to peddle them to record companies.

During this time he met a young singer named Ethel Waters. She performed in vaudeville shows for years as a dancer billed as “Sweet Mama Stringbean.”

Waters, however, preferred singing to dancing, and on March 21, 1921, she recorded two of Delaney’s songs for the Pace & Handy Music Company, “Down Home Blues” and “At The Jump Steady Ball.” A twenty-three year old former chemistry student named Fletcher Henderson played the piano for the session. “Down Home Blues” became a hit. Pace & Handy paired Waters and Delaney together and sent them out on tour, Waters on vocals and Delaney on piano.

Two months later an act called Lillyn Brown and Her Jazz-Bo Syncopaters recorded “Jazz Me Blues.” That was followed quickly by an instrumental version of the song by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Both versions sold thousands of copies.

Delaney's own recorded work amounts to two singles, both recorded in New York and released by Columbia Records in 1922: "Bow Legged Mama" backed with "Parson Jones (You Ain't Livin' Right)" and "I'm Leavin' Just to Ease My Worried Mind" backed with "Georgia Stockade Blues".

"Sinful Blues", first published in 1923, was an example of one of the many Delaney titles that fell into control of producer, publisher and record company manager Joe Davis. Davis continued exploiting Delaney material throughout the decade, examples of which include Maggie Jones recording the resigned "If I Lose, Let Me Lose" for Columbia and Clara Smith coming up with an unhassled version of "Troublesome Blues".

Not every song he came up with made it all the way to a recording session or sheet music form, however. "Goopher Dust Blues", which may or may not include a spelling mistake in its title and "Grievin Mama" were Delaney titles that were never recorded for undisclosed reasons

Through the years more than 100 of Delaney’s songs were recorded by the most popular artists of the day. “Jazz Me Blues” became a standard recorded by Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke, Count Basie, Jack Teagarden and Benny Goodman

Delaney died of atherosclerosis in December 1963, at the age of 74, in Baltimore, Maryland

(Compiled and edited from Wikipedia, All Music & a Mark.R. Jones article)

Roy Claxton Acuff (September 15, 1903 – November 23, 1992) was an American country music singer, fiddler, and promoter. Known as the "King of Country Music," Acuff is often credited with moving the genre from its early string band and "hoedown" format to the singer-based format that helped make it internationally successful.

Roy Claxton Acuff was born September 15, 1903, in a three-room shack in Maynardville, Tennessee, the son of a Baptist minister. As a child he learnt jew’s harp and harmonica. Following a move to Fountain City, near Knoxville he started playing minor league baseball and was considered for the New York Yankees. However, severe sunstroke put an end to his career, confining him to bed for much of 1929 and 1930. Following his illness, he hung around the house learning fiddle and listening to old-time players. In early 1932 he joined a travelling medicine show, playing small towns in Virginia and Tennessee.

A year later he formed a group, The Tennessee Crackerjacks, in which Clell Sumney played Dobro, providing the distinctive sound that came to be associated with Roy Acuff. He soon gained a regular programme on Knoxville’s WROL. Adopting the name of The Crazy Tennesseans, they moved to the rival Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round show on KNOX. He married Mildred Douglas in 1936, the same year he made his recording debut for ARC (later to become Columbia). Among the first songs he recorded were The Great Speckled Bird and Wabash Cannonball, which would always be associated with him.

He made his first appearance on The Grand Ole Opry in 1938 and soon became a regular. He changed the name of his band to the Smoky Mountain Boys, a name that was to stick, and recruited long time band members Bashful Brother Oswald, Howdy Forrester and Jimmie Riddle. With his Smoky Mountain Boys he did not just perform hillbilly songs, they gave a complete stage show, including vaudeville/minstrel-style skits and slapstick. Over the years he refashioned the band as an old-time string band and added more traditional sounding and religious songs to their repertoire.

He started having unprecedented recording success, his biggest sellers during the early 1940s included Night Train To Memphis, Pins And Needles, Beneath That Lonely Mound of Clay, and The Precious Jewel. He also appeared in several movies including Hi Neighbour, My Darling Clementine, Cowboy Canteen and Sing

Neighbour, Sing. It was at this time that he printed and published his own songbooks.

Out on the road he soon sold several hundred thousand copies and realised that there was an untapped goldmine in music publishing. He set up Acuff-Rose with Fred Rose, a professional songwriter and pianist working in Chicago, who had enjoyed notable country success with songs like Be Honest With Me and Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain. The publishing company went on to become one of the most famous in the world, publishing songs penned by Hank Williams, Don Gibson, Roy Orbison, The Everly Brothers,

Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, John D. Loudermilk and many more Nashville-based writers.

In the early 1950s country music was beginning to undergo changes. Electric guitars, drums and smoother vocalists were creeping into the music, and the older traditional styling of Roy Acuff was not selling. Columbia requested that he change his sound. He was having none of that, and instead changed labels, recording for MGM, Decca and Capitol without any chart success. Through Acuff-Rose he set up Hickory Records and made a modest return to the charts in 1958 with Once More.

Though he continued to record prolifically, his record sales were no longer at the peak of the 1940s, though he did score low chart entries with So Many Times, Come and Knock (1959), and Freight Train Blues (1965), and his publishing empire seemed ever-expanding. However, his tremendous contribution to country music was recognised in November 1962 when he became the first living musician to be honoured as a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame.

By the beginning of the 1970s, he decided to cut back on touring,

though he did visit the UK for the Wembley Festivals. He guested on The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s triple album set, “Will the circle be unbroken” in 1972, lending credence to contemporary and country-rock music. He continued to appear on The Grand Ole Opry throughout the 1970s and 1980s, though by the early 1990s his only appearances were infrequent guest spots at Opryland. Roy Acuff died on November 23, 1992, following a short illness, and was buried just four hours later. He had requested a swift service and burial because he did not want his funeral turned into a circus.

(Compiled and edited mainly from an article by Alan Cackett)

Al (“Dr. Horse”) Pittman (17 September 1917 – 28 April 2003), an American rhythm and blues vocalist and entertainer who performed between the 1930s and 1960s.

I couldn’t find much information concerning Mr. Pittman but here’s all I could muster…also I found two uncredited photos of Al Pittman. (There is supposedly only one…but which one?)

Dr. Horse was the stage name of Alvergous "Al" Pittman Al Pittman, son of Henry and Susan A. Pittman, was born in Vinnia, Georgia. He first performed in New York City in the 1930s as a dancer and a member of Doc Sausage's musical comedy group, the Five Pork Chops.

However, he did not record until 1961, when he released "I'm Tired Of It" on the Fire label owned by Bobby Robinson. His second record, "Jack, That Cat Was Clean", is the one for which he is best known. Produced by Robinson and Marshall Sehorn, Dr. Horse delivered a jive monologue about "a tall handsome guy", Bobo, who "really knows how to dress" and had "two $50,000 rings, and he wore one on each hand... The chicks used to scream when Bobo walked in the door".

The backing musicians included Red Prysock (tenor saxophone) and Billy Butler (guitar). The track has been included on several compilation albums, including Early Rappers: Hipper Than Hop - The Ancestors of Rap. Sadly it would be his only side enumerating the acquisitions and exploits of “Bobo,” who comes across as a sort of moddish Stagger Lee figure.

Dr. Horse also recorded a straight blues album, Blues Ain't Nothin' But A Good Man Feelin' Bad, with Sammy Price and His Bluesicians, recorded in New York in 1961 and released by Kapp Records in 1962.

He died 28 April 2004 in new York City, at the age of 85.

(Info mainly Wikipedia)

Billy Ward (born September 19, 1921 - February 16, 2002) was a vocal coach, pianist, arranger, songwriter who formed The Dominoes in 1950. One of the most successful R&B groups of the early 1950s, the Dominoes helped launch the singing careers of two notable members, Clyde McPhatter and Jackie Wilson.

Billy Ward was born Robert Lloyd Williams in Savannah, Georgia. He moved to Philadelphia as a child and sang in his church choir and eventually became its organist (this isn't surprising, since his father was a preacher and his mother a choir singer). He was a

musical prodigy as a child, and, when he was 14, won an award from famed composer Walter Damrosch for a piano piece he had written, called "Dejection". In the army during World War 2 (drafted October 30, 1942), he rose to the rank of Second Lieutenant, and supposedly directed the Coast Artillery Choir at Fort Eustis, Virginia.

Upon his discharge, Williams spent some time at the Chicago Art Institute, before coming to New York to attend the Julliard School of Music. Once in New York, he became a vocal coach and arranger and also changed his name, for unknown reasons, to "Everett William Ward", then "Billy Ward". While working as a vocal coach and part-time arranger on Broadway, he met talent agent Rose Marks, who became his business and songwriting partner.

The pair set out to form a vocal group from the ranks of his students, hoping to cash in on the new trend of vocal quintets in R&B. The group was at first called the Ques, composed of Clyde McPhatter (lead tenor), whom Ward recruited after McPhatter won "Amateur Night" at the Apollo Theater, Charlie White (tenor), Joe Lamont (baritone), and Bill Brown (bass). Ward acted as their pianist and arranger. After the group made successful appearances on talent shows in the Apollo Theatre and on the Arthur Godfrey show in 1950, Rene Hall recommended them to Ralph Bass of Federal Records, a subsidiary of King, where they were signed to a recording contract and renamed themselves The Dominoes. Their first single release, "Do Something For Me", with McPhatter’s lead vocal, reached the R&B charts in early 1951, climbing to #6.

After a less successful follow-up, the group released "Sixty Minute Man", on which Brown sang lead, and boasted of being able to satisfy his girls with fifteen minutes each of "kissin'""teasin'" and "squeezin'", before "blowin'" his "top". It reached #1 on the R&B chart in May 1951 and stayed there for 14 weeks, and crossed over to the pop charts, reaching #17 and voted "Song of the Year" for

1951. It was an important record in several respects—it crossed the boundaries between gospel singing and blues, its lyrics pushed the limits of what was deemed acceptable, and it appealed to many white as well as black listeners. In later years, it became a contender for the title of "the first rock and roll record".

The group toured widely, building up a reputation as one of the top R&B acts of the era, edging out the Five Keys and the Clovers (two of the top R&B groups of the early 1950s) and commanding an audience which crossed racial divides. However, Ward's strict disciplinarian approach, and failure to recompense the singers, caused internal problems. "Billy Ward was not an easy man to work for. He played piano and organ, could arrange, and he was a fine

director and coach. He knew what he wanted, and you had to give it to him. And he was a strict disciplinarian. You better believe it! You paid a fine if you stepped out of line," according to Jackie Wilson.

The name "The Dominoes" was owned by Ward and Marks, who had the power to hire and fire, and to pay the singers a salary. Allegedly, Ward paid his singers $100 a week, minus deductions for taxes, food and hotel bills. McPhatter often found himself billed as "Clyde Ward" to fool fans into thinking he was Billy Ward's little brother. Others assumed Ward was doing the lead singing.

White and Brown both left in 1951 to form the Checkers, and were replaced by James Van Loan (1922–1976) and David McNeil (1932–2005, previously of the Larks). In March 1952, the Dominoes were chosen to be the only vocal group at Alan Freed's "Moondog Coronation Ball". The hits continued, with "Have Mercy Baby" topping the R&B charts for 10 weeks in 1952. Later records were credited to "Billy Ward and His Dominoes".

In early 1953, McPhatter decided to leave, and soon formed his own group, the Drifters. His replacement in the Dominoes was Jackie Wilson, who had been coached by McPhatter while also singing with the group on tour. Lamont and McNeil also left and were replaced by Milton Merle and Cliff Givens (Givens had been in The Southern Sons Gospel Quartet, and joined the Ink Spots in 1944 upon the death of original bass Orville "Hoppy" Jones). With Wilson singing lead, singles

such as "You Can't Keep A Good Man Down" continued to be successful, although the Dominoes didn't enjoy quite the same success as they had with McPhatter as lead tenor.

In 1954, Ward moved the group to the Jubilee label and then to Decca, where they enjoyed a #27 pop hit with "St. Therese of the Roses", featuring Wilson on tenor, giving the Dominoes a brief moment in the spotlight again. However, the group was unable to follow that success in the charts, and there were a succession of personnel changes. They increasingly moved away from their R&B roots with appearances in Las Vegas and elsewhere

In late 1957, Wilson left for a solo career and was replaced by Gene Mumford of the Larks. Then, the group got a new contract with Liberty Records. They had a #13 pop hit with "Stardust". Stardust was one of the earliest multitrack recordings in the rock & roll era. It was to be their only million seller. This proved to be their last major success, although various line-ups of the group continued recording and performing up to the late 60’s when the Dominoes began a tour of American military bases in Japan and Vietnam. They were due to spend a couple of months in the Far East before returning for engagements in Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe, and Puerto Rico.

Billy Ward, Barry D. Williams & Inga Daniels - April 2001

Ward died 16 February 2002, in Inglewood, California. The Dominoes were inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2006.

(Edited mainly from Wikipedia, All Music & Deep Southern Soul)

Sofia Villani Scicolone (born 20 September 1934), known by her stage name Sophia Loren, Dame of the Grand Cross, O.M.R.I., is an Academy Award-winning Italian actress and singer. A striking beauty, Loren is often listed among the world's all time most attractive women. In a long career spanning six decades, the Italian actress has appeared in at least 60 movies.

Sofia Loren was born in Rome, Italy. Her father, Riccardo Scicolone spent most of his time hanging around the fringes of show business, hoping to romance young actresses. Sophia Loren's mother, Romilda Villani, was one of them. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to Greta Garbo, Villani had once been offered a trip to the United States to play Garbo's body double, but her mother refused to let her go.

After Sophia Loren's birth, her mother took her back to her hometown of Pozzuoli on the Bay of Naples, which one travel book described as "perhaps the most squalid city in Italy." Although Riccardo Scicolone fathered another child by Villani, they never married.

A quiet and reserved child, Loren grew up in extreme poverty, living with her mother and many other relatives at her grandparents' home, where she shared a bedroom with eight people. Things got worse when World War II ravaged the already struggling city of Pozzuoli. The resulting famine was so great that Loren's mother occasionally had to siphon off a cup of water from the car radiator to ration between her daughters by the spoonful. During one aerial bombardment, Loren was knocked to the ground and split open her chin, leaving a scar that has remained ever since.

Nicknamed "little stick" by her classmates for her sickly physique, at the age of 14 Loren blossomed, seemingly overnight, from a frail child into a beautiful and voluptuous woman. That same year, Loren won second place in a beauty competition, receiving as her prize a small sum of cash and free wallpaper for her grandparents' living room.

In 1950, when she was 15 years old, Loren and her mother set off for Rome to try to make their living as actresses. Loren landed her first role as an extra in the 1951 Mervyn LeRoy film Quo Vadis. She also landed work as a model for various fumetti, Italian publications that resemble comic books but with real photographs instead of illustrations.

After various bit parts and a small role in the 1952 film La Favorita, the first for which she adopted the stage name "Loren," she delivered her breakthrough performance as the title character in the 1953 film Aida. Another leading role in The Gold of Naples (1954) established Loren as one of the up-and-coming stars of Italian cinema.

In 1957, Loren starred in her first Hollywood film, The Pride and the Passion, filmed in Paris and co-starring Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra. At the same time, she became enmeshed in a love triangle when both Grant and an Italian film producer named Carlo Ponti declared their love for her. Although she had a schoolgirl's crush on Grant, Loren ultimately chose Ponti, a man the media joked was twice her age and half her height.

Even though they married in 1957, complications regarding the annulment of Ponti's first marriage prevented their union from being officially legally recognized in Italy for another decade. Loren and Ponti's marriage nevertheless remains one of the rare, heart-warming success stories among celebrity relationships. They remained happily married until Ponti's death in 2007.

Loren was not naturally a singer or musical star, but Loren followers should recall that she began, in the hungry years, with two 1952-53 films drawn from Italian opera, Favorita and Aida. She began singing custom popster material in 1954 with "Mambo bacan" in River Girl, and over this decade she commuted between Paramount, Cinecitta, Fox and Metro where important film composers and pop songwriters customized the Sophia soundtracks.

Throughout her career, Sophia Loren has recorded more than two dozen songs. A tune she made famous is Bing! Bang! Bong!, which she sang in the 1958 film “Houseboat”, co-starring Cary Grant. In the 1960 film “It Started in Naples”, she famously sings “Tu vuò fa' l’americano”, giving a hilarious performance. And who can forget the novelty songs with Peter Sellers from Millionairess such as “Goodness Gracious Me" which was a top 5 UK single in 1960

Elvis & Sophia 1959

In 1960, Sophia Loren turned in the most acclaimed performance of her career in the Italian World War II film Two Women. In a film with parallels to her own childhood, Loren played a mother desperately trying to provide for her daughter in war-ravaged Rome. The film transformed Loren into an international celebrity, winning her the 1961 Academy Award for Best Lead Actress. She was the first actress ever to win the award for a non-English-language film. Throughout the 1960s, Loren continued to star in Italian, American and French films, cementing her status as one of the great international movie stars of her generation.

Sophia Loren moved back to her native Italy during the 1970s and spent most of the decade making highly popular Italian films. She had given birth to two sons, Carlo Hubert Leone Ponti, Jr. (born December 29, 1968) and Edoardo (born January 6, 1973), and during the 1980s she backed off her intense filming schedule to spend more time raising her teenage children.

Loren also expanded into other business ventures. In 1981 she became the first female celebrity to release her own perfume, following up with a personal eyewear line shortly thereafter. Loren published a book, Women and Beauty, in 1994. She continues to act and appear frequently in public as one of the film industry's greatest living legends. Some of her more popular and acclaimed later films include Prêt-à-Porter (1994), Grumpier Old Men (1995) and Nine (2009).

Loren retains her youthful energy and age-defying hourglass physique. Although now a resident of geneva, Switzerland, she still can be seen strutting down the red carpet into award shows, looking fabulous in high heels and low-cut dresses that women several decades her junior would be happy to pull off. However, after more than 100 films and five decades in the spotlight, Loren remains true to her humble Italian roots.

(Edited mainly from Biography.com)

Vic Dana born 26 August 1942

Juliette Cavazzi born 27 August 1926

Honey Lantree born 28 August 1943

Charlie Parker born 29 August 1920

Kitty Wells born 30 August 1919

Karen Chandler born 1 September 1923

Laurindo Almeida born 2 September 1917

Memphis Slim born 3 September 1915

Jan Savitt born 4 September 1913

Sunnyland Slim born 5 September 1906

Jimmie Rodgers born 8 September 1897

Marion Mann born 9 September 1914

Raymond Scott born 10 September 1908

John Martyn born 11 September 1948

Charles Brown born 13 September 1922

Tom Delaney born 14 September 1889

Roy Acuff born 15 September 1903

Al (Doctor Horse) Pittman born 17 September 1917

Billy Ward born 19 September 1921

Sophia Loren born 20 September 1934