Category Archives: Music Calendar

April 26 in music history

20 year anniversary for Johnny Cash’s American RecordingsAmerican Recordings did something very important — it gave Cash a chance to show how much he could do with a set of great songs and no creative interference, and it afforded him the respect he’d been denied for so long, and the result is a powerful and intimate album that brought the Man in Black back to the spotlight, where he belonged.
~Mark Deming (allmusic.com)
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William “Count” Basie (August 21, 1904 – April 26, 1984)
was an American jazz pianist, organist, bandleader, and composer. Basie led his jazz orchestra almost continuously for nearly 50 years. Many notable musicians came to prominence under his direction, including tenor saxophonists Lester Young and Herschel Evans, guitarist Freddie Green, trumpeters Buck Clayton and Harry “Sweets” Edison and singers Jimmy Rushing and Joe Williams. Basie’s theme songs were “One O’Clock Jump” and “April In Paris”.
Count_Basie_in_Rhythm_and_Blues_Revue
Johnny Shines (April 26, 1915 – April 20, 1992)
was an American blues singer and guitarist. According to the music journalist Tony Russell, “Shines was that rare being, a blues artist who overcame age and rustiness to make music that stood up beside the work of his youth. When Shines came back to the blues in 1965 he was 50, yet his voice had the leonine power of a dozen years before, when he made records his reputation was based on”.
johnny shines
 Devils & Dust is the 13th studio album by American recording artist Bruce Springsteen, and his third folk album (after Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad). It was released on April 25, 2005 in Europe and on April 26 in the US. It debuted at the top of the US Billboard 200 album chart.  bruce devil and dust
Ma Rainey (April 26, 1886? – December 22, 1939)
was one of the earliest known American professional blues singers and one of the first generation of such singers to record. She was billed as The Mother of the Blues.
MaRainey
Duane Eddy (born April 26, 1938)
is a Grammy Award-winning American guitarist. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he had a string of hit records, produced by Lee Hazlewood, which were noted for their characteristically “twangy” sound, including “Rebel Rouser”, “Peter Gunn”, and “Because They’re Young”. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
 duane eddy

 

– Hallgeir

April 25 in music history

The late Albert King was born in 1923 “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.”
~”Born Under A Bad Sign”

Albert King is truly a “King of the Blues,” although he doesn’t hold that title (B.B. does). Along with B.B. and Freddie King, Albert King is one of the major influences on blues and rock guitar players. Without him, modern guitar music would not sound as it does — his style has influenced both black and white blues players from Otis Rush and Robert Cray to Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
~Stephen Thomas Erlewine (allmusic.com)
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Bruce Springsteen: Fox Theatre, Detroit, MI, USA April 25, 2005 (Videos)This is the first concert from Springsteen’s “Devils & Dust Solo Acoustic” tour. bruce springsteen 2005-04-25-2
Ella Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917 – June 15, 1996), also known as the “First Lady of Song”, “Queen of Jazz”, and “Lady Ella”, was an American jazz vocalist with a vocal range spanning three octaves (D♭3 to D♭6). She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccablediction, phrasing and intonation, and a “horn-like” improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.Fitzgerald was a notable interpreter of the Great American Songbook. Over the course of her 59-year recording career, she sold 40 million copies of her 70-plus albums, won 13 Grammy Awards and was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Ronald Reagan and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George H. W. Bush. Ella Fitzgerald Copenhagen April 1970
 Jerome “Jerry” Leiber (April 25, 1933 – August 22, 2011) and Mike Stoller (born March 13, 1933) were American songwriting and record producing partners. Stoller was the composer and Leiber the lyricist. Their most famous songs include “Hound Dog”, “Jailhouse Rock”, “Don’t”, “Kansas City”, “Stand By Me” (with Ben E. King), and “On Broadway” (with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil). Today, their songs are managed by Sony/ATV Music Publishing.  jerry leiber
 Dexter Gordon (February 27, 1923 – April 25, 1990) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist and an Academy Award-nominated actor (Round Midnight, Warner Bros, 1986). He is regarded as one of the first and most important musicians to adapt the bebop musical language of people like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell to the tenor saxophone. His studio and live performance career were both extensive and multifaceted, spanning over 50 years in recorded jazz history.  dexter gordon 1948
 Bob Dylan recorded master version of “Let Me Die In My Footsteps” @ Studio A – Columbia Recording Studios, NYC in 1962  – 51 years ago.Let Me Die in My Footsteps is a song written by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in February 1962. The song was selected for the original sequence of Dylan’s 1963 album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, but was replaced by “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”. This version was recorded at Columbia studios on April 25, 1962, during the first Freewheelin’ session, and was subsequently released in March 1991 on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991.
 Derek William Dick, better known as Fish, (born 25 April 1958, Dalkeith, Midlothian, Scotland) is a Scottish singer, lyricist and occasional actor, best known as the former lead singer of the neo-progressive rock band Marillion.  fish

 

-Egil

Marvin Gaye profile

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“If you cannot find peace within yourself, you will never find it anywhere else.”
~Marvin Gaye

I hope to refine music, study it, try to find some area that I can unlock. I don’t quite know how to explain it but it’s there. These can’t be the only notes in the world, there’s got to be other notes some place, in some dimension, between the cracks on the piano keys.
~Marvin Gaye

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Today: Elvis Presley recorded Always on my Mind in 1972 42 years ago

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Always on my Mind is seldom considered among the best of Elvis’ 70’s output, but if you ask me it’s at the top of the list. The recording sessions was great, it included Burnin Love and For the good times. I almost cry when I listen to it, it embodies everything, everything I love about Elvis, heartbreak, slow ballads, empathy and true feelings. What a voice!

Peter Guralnick writes in his book Careless Love:

The trouble was, he (Elvis) wasn’t interested in cutting a hit record. “He was trying to get something out of his system.”

On the second night Felton finally got his way, but he was under no illusion that Elvis was doing it for any other reason than to indulge his producer. With encouragement from Joe Esposito and Jerry Schilling, and with Charlie pounding away on acoustic guitar, they got a good, energetic version of “Burning love”, the song Felton had brought to the session, but it was tossed off in six quick takes, in almost throwaway style, and everyone could see that Elvis’ heart wasn’t really in it. They kept working till four in the morning but got only one more song that night and two the following night, including “Always on my mind”…

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Today: Happy 50th birthday Patterson Hood

pattersonhood American musician and singer/songwriter, plays Guitar, Banjo, Mandolin, Piano and works as producer and mixing engineer, born March 24, 1964. He is best known as leader of the Drive-By Truckers.
His father is David Hood, longtime bassist of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.

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