Category: Birthdays

Individuals born on this date with an emphasis on American history and culture, including pop culture.

Lennon-ade

Two Lennons have birthdays today:

Peggy Lennon is 63.

Julian Lennon is 41.

Though both are singers, they have nothing else in common.

Russell Crowe…

three time nominee and one time winner of the Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role, is 40 today. Crowe was born in New Zealand (he has a Maori ancestor) and raised in Australia. According to the IMDB, his parents were movie set caterers. His Oscar was for Gladiator.

Ravi Shankar…

is 84 today. Shankar is becoming better known now as the father of Norah Jones (she’s 25, he’s 84), but he commands respect on his own. The following is from the Ravi Shankar Foundation web site.

Ravi Shankar, the legendary sitarist and composer is India’s most esteemed musical Ambassador and a singular phenomenon in the classical music worlds of East and West. As a performer, composer, teacher and writer, he has done more for Indian music than any other musician. He is well known for his pioneering work in bringing Indian music to the West. This however, he did only after long years of dedicated study under his illustrious guru Baba Allaudin Khan and after making a name for himself in India.

Always ahead of his time, Ravi Shankar has written two concertos for sitar and orchestra, violin-sitar compositions for Yehudi Menuhin and himself, music for flute virtuoso Jean Pierre Rampal, music for Hosan Yamamoto, master of the Shakuhachi and Musumi Miyashita – Koto virtuoso, and collaborated with Phillip Glass (Passages). George Harrison produced and participated in two record albums, “Shankar Family & Friends” and “Festival of India” composed by Ravi Shankar. He has composed extensively for films and Ballets in India, Canada, Europe and the United States, including Charly, Gandhi and Apu Trilogy. Ravi Shankar is an honourary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is a member of the United Nations International Rostrum of composers. He has received many awards and honours from his own country and from all over the world, including fourteen doctorates, the Padma Vibhushan, Desikottam, the Magsaysay Award from Manila, two Grammy’s, the Fukuoka grand Prize from Japan, the Crystal award from Davos, with the title ‘Global Ambassador’ to name some. In 1986 he was nominated as a member of the Rajya Sabha, India’s upper house of Parliament. His recording “Tana Mana”, released on the private Music label in 1987, brought Mr. Shankar’s music into the “New age” with its unique method of combining traditional instruments with electronics.

In the period of the awakening of the younger generation in the mid 60’s, Ravi Shankar gave three memorable concerts – Monterey Pop Festival, Concert for Bangla Desh and The Woodstock Festival. Mr. Shankar has several disciples and many of them are now very succesful concert artists and composers.

The love and respect he commands both in India and in the West is unique in the annals of the history of music. In 1989, this remarkable musician celebrated his 50th year of concertising, and the city of Birmingham Touring Opera Company commissioned him to do a Music Theatre (Ghanashyam – a broken branch) which created history on the British arts scene.

Perhaps no greater tribute can be paid to this genius than the words of his colleagues:

“Ravi Shankar has brought me a precious gift and through him I have added a new dimension to my experience of music. To me, his genius and his humanity can only be compared to that of MOZART’S.”
– Yehudi Menuhin

“Ravi Shankar is the Godfather of World Music”
– George Harrison

John Ratzenberger…

was born on this date in 1947. Best known as Cliff Clavin the mailman on Cheers, Ratzenberger is also the voice of Hamm the Piggy Bank in the Toy Story movies and Yeti in Monsters, Inc.

Almost like it’s Oscar’s birthday

Spencer Tracy was born on this date in 1900. Tracy was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar nine times and won twice, for Captains Courageous and Boys Town.

Bette Davis was born on this date in 1908. Miss Davis was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar 11 times, winning for Dangerous and Jezebel.

Gregory Peck was born on this date in 1916. Peck was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar five times, winning for To Kill a Mockingbird. Mr. Peck also won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

Muddy Waters…

was born on this date in 1915. His real name was McKinley Morganfield.

The following is excerpted from Waters’ obituary written by Robert Palmer in The New York Times, May 1, 1983 —

Beginning in the early 1950’s, Mr. Waters made a series of hit records for Chicago’s Chess label that made him the undisputed king of Chicago blues singers. He was the first popular bandleader to assemble and lead a truly electric band, a band that used amplification to make the music more ferociously physical instead of simply making it a little louder.

In 1958, he became the first artist to play electric blues in England, and while many British folk-blues fans recoiled in horror, his visit inspired young musicians like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones, who later named their band the Rolling Stones after Mr. Waters’s early hit “Rollin’ Stone.” Bob Dylan’s mid-1960’s rock hit “Like a Rolling Stone” and the leading rock newspaper Rolling Stone were also named after Mr. Waters’s original song. …

But Muddy Waters was more than a major influence in the pop music world. He was a great singer of American vernacular music, a vocal artist of astonishing power, range, depth, and subtlety. Among musicians and singers, his remarkable sense of timing, his command of inflection and pitch shading, and his vocabulary of vocal sounds and effects, from the purest falsetto to grainy moaning rasps, were all frequent topics of conversation. And he was able to duplicate many of his singing techniques on electric guitar, using a metal slider to make the instrument “speak” in a quivering, voice-like manner.

His blues sounded simple, but it was so deeply rooted in the traditions of the Mississippi Delta that other singers and guitarists found it almost impossible to imitate it convincingly. “My blues looks so simple, so easy to do, but it’s not,” Mr. Waters said in a 1978 interview. “They say my blues is the hardest blues in the world to play.”

Anthony Perkins…

was born on this date in 1932. Tony Perkins is best known for his portrayal of Norman Bates in Psycho but he was nominated for the Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Friendly Persuasion.

Anthony Perkins died in 1992 as a result of pnuemonia brought on by AIDS.

Doris Day…

is 80 today. She was born in Cincinnati on this date in 1924. BBC NEWS has a profile that begins:

Doris Day was one of the most prolific actresses of the 50s and 60s, carving out a niche as the sassy but sweet all-American girl in light-hearted comedies opposite male stars like Rock Hudson.

Marlon Brando…

is 80 today. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on this date in 1924.

Brando has been nominated for the Best Actor Oscar seven times (1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1958, 1973 and 1974). He won twice, for On the Waterfront and for The Godfather. He was also nominated for the Best Actor in a Supporting Role for A Dry White Season in 1990.

Getting old

Frankie Laine is 91 today.
Warren Beatty is 67.
Astrud Gilberto (The Girl from Ipanema) is 64.
Eric Clapton is 59.

Norah Jones on the other hand is just 25 today.

Judith Guest…

was born in Detroit, Michigan, on this date in 1936. The Writer’s Almanac tells her story:

[Guest’s] written three novels, each of them about adolescent children who have to deal with a crisis in their family: Second Heaven (1982), Errands (1997) and, most famously, Ordinary People (1976).

She didn’t begin writing seriously until she was in her thirties, after all of her children had begun school. She finished the manuscript of Ordinary People in 1974 and sent it to Viking Press without the usual cover letter and plot synopsis. Viking hadn’t published an unsolicited manuscript in over twenty-five years, but an editorial assistant happened to read Ordinary People and recommended it to her publishers. It was published two years later, and it became a bestseller. In 1980, Robert Redford made it into a movie, and it won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft…

was born near Albany, New York, on this date in 1793. Schoolcraft is regarded as the foremost pioneer in American Indian studies.

Schoolcraft College (Michigan) provides this biography:

Schoolcraft maintains a prominent position among the pioneers and builders of America’s intellectual climate. His works in ethnology add an important segment to the folklore of America and filled a gap in the overall information of the aborigines of the continent. Little was known in this country, or the rest of the world, of the American Indian: his origin, customs, legends, language, manners. Schoolcraft was to clarify this. After a second trip through the midwest as geologist and mineralogist for the Department of War, he realized that someone had to study the Indian and his world before we could civilize and educate him. Schoolcraft’s plans to act were formulated after participating in a treaty council held in Chicago where he had the good fortune to see Indians of many American nations and observe their “eloquence and serenity.” Accepting a position as Indian agent in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, he commenced, assiduously, to collect and record the life of the Ojibwa Indians, the tribe inhabiting the area around the Sault. His enthusiasm led him to organize the Algic Society, for rehabilitation purposes, and to publish Algic Researches, a text perpetuating knowledge that probably would have been lost had it not been for Schoolcraft’s efforts. Like the monks of Iceland who preserved and recorded Norse mythology from oblivion, Schoolcraft preserved the “dark and dawn of North America” as he called the period of the American aborigine. …

Schoolcraft has also left his mark as an educator and a vital figure in American education. His studies on the middle west were already known to the American public for their literacy, historic and geological merit. To these were added his extensive works on the American Indian. Shortly after arriving at the Sault as Indian agent he opened schools to educate the Indians. Once this was under way he became a member of the Board of Regents of the University of Michigan. In this position he was instrumental in saving the state university from financial disaster. He is also credited with establishing and contributing to the first common school journal in the United States, The Journal of Education. Recognition must also be given him for publishing the first literary magazine in Michigan, The Souvenir of the Lakes.

Probably the most important contribution Schoolcraft made was the essential role he played in the creation of The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This poem “which has made the English critics shout for joy that at length there was an American poem” had immediate and tremendous success. From the time of publication, 1855, the poem has become a part of the cultural background of every English speaking school child and considered a world classic. Of Schoolcraft’s contribution Longfellow states: “…I have woven the curious Indian legends drawn chiefly from the various and valuable writings of Mr. Schoolcraft to whom the literary world is greatly indebted for his indefatigable zeal in rescuing from oblivion so much of the legendary lore of the Indians.”

August Anheuser Busch, Jr. …

was born in St. Louis, on this date in 1899. According to the Library of Congress:

Scion of the famous brewing family, Busch served as Chairman of the Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc. from 1946-1975. During his tenure, the company his grandfather established emerged as the largest brewery in the world.

Busch’s grandfather Adolphus Busch came to America from Germany in 1857, settling in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1866, he founded the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Company with his father-in-law, Eberhard Anheuser. Busch discovered a way to pasteurize beer, allowing national distribution of his product. By 1901, Anheuser-Busch’s brewery was the nation’s largest. Busch also developed a beer lighter than those commonly sold at the time. This beer, named Budweiser, ultimately became the world’s best seller.

In February 1953, August Anheuser Busch, Jr. rescued a St. Louis tradition by purchasing the St. Louis Cardinals. Busch’s decision was a relief to local baseball fans threatened with the prospect of seeing their team move to Milwaukee or Houston. He became a familiar figure at Cardinal games, entering the Busch Memorial Stadium behind a team of the brewing company’s famous Clydesdale horses.

Sarah Vaughan…

was born on this date in 1924. The PBS web site for American Masters profiles Miss Vaughan:

Jazz critic Leonard Feather called her “the most important singer to emerge from the bop era.” Ella Fitzgerald called her the world’s “greatest singing talent.” During the course of a career that spanned nearly fifty years, she was the singer’s singer, influencing everyone from Mel Torme to Anita Baker. She was among the musical elite identified by their first names. She was Sarah, Sassy — the incomparable Sarah Vaughan.

The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost was born on this date in 1874.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Birthday boys and girls

Leonard Nimoy, to be known forever as Mr. Spock, is 73 today.

Alan Arkin is 70. Arkin was twice nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role — for The Russians are Coming, the Russians Are Coming and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

James Caan is 65. Caan was nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his portrayal of Sonny Corleone in The Godfather.

Diana Ross is 60. According to news reports Miss Ross celebrated early by persuading an appeals board to reduce her estimated $168,000 annual property tax bill by $30,000. According to Newsday:

Ross contested the town’s $13.4 million appraisal of her 5-acre Belle Haven estate, which includes a 12,562-square-foot mansion with 11 bedrooms, six bathrooms, five fireplaces, a hot tub, pool, tennis court and two apartments.

The person who used to look like Jennifer Grey is 44 today.

Joseph Campbell…

was born on this date in 1904. Professor Campbell is best known for his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which discusses the myth of the hero’s journey found in many cultures, and for his PBS series with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth.

Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces has been sited as a source of inspiration by many filmmakers, novelists and comic book creators, most notably Star Wars director/writer George Lucas.

Edith Wheeler…

was born in New York City on this date in 1900. On her father’s side Edith was descended from John Wheeler and Agnes Yeoman who emigrated from England in 1634 on the ship Mary & John and settled in Massachusetts. Edith’s mother’s father, Andrew Jackson Hutchinson, served with the Union Army during the War of the Rebellion.

Edith Wheeler had four children and sixteen grandchildren of whom NewMexiKen is one.

The first woman inducted into
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame…

Aretha Franklin, was born on this date in 1942. I Never Loved A Man, Respect, Baby I Love You, A Natural Woman, Chain of Fools, Think, The House That Jack Built, I Say a Little Prayer, Bridge Over Troubled Water — all great, but for NewMexiKen give me Aretha’s version of You Are My Sunshine.

The following is an excerpt from Richie Unterberger’s fine review in the All Music Guide:

When Franklin left Columbia for Atlantic, producer Jerry Wexler was determined to bring out her most soulful, fiery traits. As part of that plan, he had her record her first single, “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” at Muscle Shoals in Alabama with esteemed Southern R&B musicians. In fact, that was to be her only session actually at Muscle Shoals, but much of the remainder of her ’60s work would be recorded with the Muscle Shoals Sound Rhythm Section, although the sessions would actually take place in New York City. The combination was one of those magic instances of musical alchemy in pop: the backup musicians provided a much grittier, soulful, and R&B-based accompaniment for Aretha’s voice, which soared with a passion and intensity suggesting a spirit that had been allowed to fly loose for the first time.

In the late ’60s, Franklin became one of the biggest international recording stars in all of pop. Many also saw Franklin as a symbol of black America itself, reflecting the increased confidence and pride of African Americans in the decade of the civil rights movements and other triumphs for the black community. The chart statistics are impressive in and of themselves: ten Top Ten hits in a roughly 18-month span between early 1967 and late 1968, for instance, and a steady stream of solid mid- to large-size hits for the next five years after that. Her Atlantic albums were also huge sellers, and far more consistent artistically than those of most soul stars of the era. Franklin was able to maintain creative momentum, in part, because of her eclectic choice of material, which encompassed first-class originals and gospel, blues, pop, and rock covers, from the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel to Sam Cooke and the Drifters. She was also a fine, forceful, and somewhat underrated keyboardist.

Franklin’s commercial and artistic success was unabated in the early ’70s, during which she landed more huge hits with “Spanish Harlem,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and “Day Dreaming.” She also produced two of her most respected, and earthiest, album releases with Live at Fillmore West and Amazing Grace. The latter, a 1972 double LP, was a reinvestigation of her gospel roots, recorded with James Cleveland & the Southern California Community Choir. Remarkably, it made the Top Ten, counting as one of the greatest gospel-pop crossover smashes of all time.