ARETHA FRANKLIN, THE UNDISPUTED QUEEN OF SOUL! March 25,1942- August 16, 2018
The Queen has left us...Rest in Paradise Aretha..
I can't hear any of her songs, "Think" , "Respect", "Chain Of Fools", "Say A Little Prayer" , "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)" and not see my mother and my four aunts, ironing, shopping, putting away groceries...My mother and her sisters loved Aretha Franklin....And I did too...Seems like she was singing the soundtrack of my lifetime...
Rest Well Queen ...There will never be another quite like you!
Oh My God...we are losing some legends this year...The Great Soul Singer, Bobby Womack passed away yesterday...
Soul singer Bobby Womack has died, his record company, XL Recordings,
confirmed. The cause of death at the time I am writing this is currently unknown.
The singer's career spanned seven decades and included '80s hit "If You Think
You're Lonely Now."
Womack began his career in the early 1960s as the lead singer of his family
musical group The Valentinos. He was also Sam Cooke's backing guitarist.
In the late-60s, Womack went solo. In 1968, he signed with Minit Records and
recorded his first solo album, "Fly Me To The Moon," which included his first
major hit with a cover of The Mamas & The Papas' "California Dreamin'." He
would go on to collaborate with music notables Gábor Szabó, George Benson, Sly
and the Family Stone, Janis Joplin and Pearl.
He would later leave Minit and sign with United Artists where he released the
album, "Communication." He would earn his first Top 40 hit, "That's the Way I
Feel About Cha."
Bobby Womack's biggest commercial success would occur in the 1970s with
back-to-back successful albums.
In the 80s, Bobby Womack's career was complicated by substance abuse. He would have
kicked the problem and saw a resurgence in the 90s. During this time, he worked
with Todd Rundgren and The Roots.
In 2010, Bobby Womack collaborated on the single, "Stylo," alongside Mos Def, from
the third Gorillaz album, "Plastic Beach."
A year earlier, in 2009, Bobby Womack was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame.
Here...I leave you with one of my favorite Bobby Womack jams..."Nobody wants you, when you're down and out." So true...You were down Bobby, but never out!
Over the weekend, it was brought to my attention that a Black trailblazer has left this existence...A trailblazer that maybe few if any of you even knew about...
Dorothy Carter, a former stage actress who starred in the adaptation of the groundbreaking novel “Strange Fruit” on Broadway and later became an educator and a children’s book author, has died after battling bladder cancer. She was 94 years old. She actually died on Sept. 14 in New York City, family friend Mary Zaslofsky said Friday.
Dorothy Carter was born in 1918 in Kissimee, Fla., (A place where I also have family.)She studied drama at Spelman College and later was taught by Stella Adler in New York. She made her Broadway debut in 1945 in Lillian Smith’s adaptation of her novel “Strange Fruit,” an interracial love story.
The show, directed by Jose Ferrer and starring Jane White and Earl Jones, closed after 60 performances but got a positive write-up by then-first lady Eleanor Roosevelt in her syndicated column.
Dorothy Carter, who was black, became part of the American Negro Theater under the direction of Abe Hill and played Ruth Lawson in its 1946 Broadway production of “Walk Hard.” She also appeared in Lou Peterson’s “Take a Giant Step” in 1953.
After moving to Milwaukee, she enrolled in the Wisconsin State Teachers College and later earned her master’s degree. She taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and became the first female African-American professor at Bank Street College of Education in New York City in 1981.
In her 80s, she wrote three children’s books inspired by her childhood: “Bye, Mis’ Lela”, “Wilhe’mina Miles: After the Stork Night” and “Grandma’s General Store – the Ark.”
She is survived by her daughter, Carol Carter; a son, James Carter Jr.; and a grandson, James Yates Carter.
If you aren't from Philadelphia...This man probably means nothing to you...but if you are Black and grew up anywhere in Philadelphia, PA. from 1962 until the present and listened to a radio...Then you just had to know who Joseph "Butterball" Tamburro was....He was simply "Black radio" in Philadelphia. He passed away yesterday at the age of 70.
From the time I was about four years old and first remember hearing a radio blasting...
"Hot Butter in the City" was on the radio...I was a grown man before I discovered that he was white....Not that it mattered and it really didn't....This was the hippest , coolest man of any race that ever picked up a mike in a Philadelphia radio station...
He introduced me and all of my peers to The Motown Sound, The sound of the south, Stax/Volt Records and our own Philadelphia sound...I don't care if it was Sly and The Family Stone, The Jackson 5, Teddy Pendergrass, Rick James, Teena Marie,Lionel Richie, Patti Labelle, whoever....Butterball was usually the first to break their latest hits on his radio show.
All through High school and college he and a list of super talented Black jocks brought this city the best in R&B, Funk, Disco, New jack soul and Neo soul....
By the time I was in my thirties...He was no longer on radio everyday, but you could hear him playing the oldies on Sunday Nights at different clubs in South Jersey and the Philadelphia area...He was still doing that show as late as last Sunday!
He was like part of the family. My wife and I even got a chance to meet him a few years ago at Penns Landing here in Philadelphia...She hugged him and told him that he practically raised us...He laughed....I know he'd probably heard that from so many people.... It was afterall, the truth. He was just so nice, so humble...
I had just heard him on his weekly oldies show this past Sunday.....I had no idea that that was going to be his last broadcast.....I can't imagine him not being on the radio...
I just can't.....He was such a part of my life..
Butter, you'll be missed...There will never be another quite like you!
I am still reeling from the deaths of Whitney Houston, Don Corneilius, Dick Clark, Davy Jones of the Monkees and yesterday , Go-Go Music King, Chuck Brown...and now today, Donna Summer, the queen of Disco has also passed on after a battle with cancer.
Incredible! Born LaDonna Gaines, from Boston, she went to Germany with a company of "Hair" in the early '70s, married a German actor named Sommer, and connected with a German bubblegum artist and producer named Giorgio Moroder, and his partner Pete Bellotte, around 1973. One of their first collaborations, a single called "The Hostage," was a disturbing piece of work capitalizing on the European kidnapping-as-political-statement trend that culminated in the killings at the Munich Olympics.
That record couldn't have been farther away from her U.S. debut. "Love to Love you baby" it was a demo that, according to Casablanca executive Larry Harris, was accidentally jarred while playing at a party, so that in effect it played for twice its actual length. Intrigued, Casablanca president Neil Bogart commissioned Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer to make an extended version, which Bogart further extended to 17 minutes. Little more than a long simulated orgasm over a hypnotic track, it became a club sensation, then a radio sensation, in late 1975. I don't know a 17 year old boy that didn't secretly listen to this song in his bedroom late at night after everyone was fast asleep! Really, I don't.
You could argue that this first mega-successful extended 12-inch was the ancestor of all trance music to follow, but realistically, if her career had ended then, it would have made a feeble legacy. But over the next few years, Giorgio Moroder (who originally thought he could find a stronger singer than Summer for "Love to Love You") found an ideal creative partner in Summer.
That burst of creativity first bloomed on Donna Summer's third album, 1976's "Four Seasons of Love," which was nothing less than a disco concept album, just like the heavy thematic albums that progressive rock titans were making during that decade. "Seasons" was vastly more listenable, four entrancing tracks that combined the disco pulse with genuine melody. Follow-up "I Remember Yesterday" nodded to the past (notably on "Love's Unkind," as masterful a Phil Spector/Crystals pastiche as you could hope to find) but on its key track single-handedly propelled music into the future.
Even after all this time.. "I Feel Love" still sounds like a recording beamed in from another galaxy. Moroder's army of chattering synthesizers creates a desensitized zone in which Summer is trapped, and her icy insistence that she can "feel love" establishes a deadly irony. More than any other record, this one proved you didn't need guitars and "real" instruments to create great records. The synth-pop of the '80s and '90s as well as the last quarter-century of dance music (and pop, for that matter) would be inconceivable without it.
But Summer and Moroder had even more to offer. Certainly there was schlock galore on her singles -- the everlasting prom standard and compulsory aspiring-diva karaoke cover "Last Dance," a superfluous disco-fication of "MacArthur Park" -- but 1977 double album "Once Upon a Time" (her fifth album in two years) was a dazzling disco fairy tale full of sumptuous melodies and gloriously mesmerizing arrangements. And for an encore, she helped marry disco and rock.
"Hot Stuff" wasn't the first rock-disco fusion by any means. (Check longtime French star Sheila's "You Light My Fire" for a pioneering effort.) But as the first superstar record to incorporate these seemingly incompatible elements, it sealed the deal, building a bridge between two musical factions that seemed unalterably opposed. Rock fans were publicly destroying disco records and radio stations sponsored "no-Bee Gees" weekends" in a climate of fear that disco would render rock irrelevant, and along came a record celebrating that sybaritic disco lifestyle that so alarmed upstanding Americans with good old heartland power chords. Labelmates Kiss immediately followed suit from the rock side with the disco fusion "I Was Made for Lovin' You," and while the two sides didn't exactly air-kiss and hold hands, the established musical boundaries were breached once and for all.
Having twice reshaped the course of popular music (three times if you count "Love to Love You Baby"), Summer settled down to a more mundane form of stardom. She still managed to break ground: "Bad Girls" was a notable tribute to a profession as old as that of musicians, "The Wanderer" was an edgy attempt to escape the disco pigeonhole she was mired in, and her penultimate hit, and my favorite Donna Summer record of all time, 1983's "She Works Hard For The Money" has endured as a notable tribute to an even older occupation than the one saluted in "Bad Girls": underpaid women's scut work.
But the quality control, erratic in the best of times, deteriorated, and we got by-the-numbers disco-pop exercises such as "Dim All the Lights" and "On the Radio" and extravagant, soulless stunts on the order of her duet with Barbra Streisand. "Enough Is Enough," indeed. The public was only occasionally enamored by her post-Moroder records on Geffen, where she thrashed through a variety of derivative styles, and after "Hard for the Money," hardly an innovative record, there was only one more hit, 1989's "This Time I Know It's for Real," masterminded by British schlock-meister team Stock/Aitken/Waterman (of Rick Astley fame). She became more serious about her Christian faith, interspersing non musical activities with sporadic comebacks on the diva-nostalgia circuit.
And that's how she's been perceived, as the main survivor of a much-derided musical era. She deserves better. Her best records from the '70s are every bit as important, and impressive, as the rock classics from Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie and their compatriots and (listen to "I Feel Love" again) quite conceivably more influential.
Another one gone too soon, way too soon....We'll miss you Donna!
Whitney Elizabeth Houston - August 9th 1963-February 11,2012
Wow...Etta James, Don Corneilius and now Whitney!!! It pains me to have to write these things...It really does...We are just losing all of the great voices and icons of the music world. In my own selfish way...maybe yours too...I somehow counted on people like Luther Vandross, Michael Jackson, James Brown, Gerald Levert, Barry White ,Rick James, Teena Marie..et al always being around...to make great music and give my life some meaning.....But like me....They are just human and as I see...they all have an appointed time to come here and an appointed time to die.....Just as I do.
We all are guilty of laughing at a lot of Whitney's troubles during her last years.....The drug addiction, the train wreck of a marriage to singer Bobby Brown, the divorce, the reality show, et al.... But you know, beneath it all, I was rooting for Whitney....I wanted her to be great again and above the fray....I never thought that she didn't have time....
Perhaps that's the problem with all of us....We always think that we have time....We never realize how short that time may be. Look at me....Just ramblimg here.....I am still shocked and in a state of unbeleif (is that a word?) that she's gone......... I leave you here with a beautiful song she sung once...Not a hit, just an album cut...that I choose to always remember her by.
I'm writing way too many of these posts..Of all the recurring posts that I write, these obituaries are the posts I'd rather not write. They found Don Cornelius in the foyer of his home...dead from an apparent self inflicted gunshot would.
The man was the creator and the host of Soul Train....Now , he's gone!....
What would my life had been like without Soul Train? I can't imagine....It would have been somewhat less richer than it was.. Every Saturday from the time I was 13 until I went off to college and even during my first years there...Me and everybody I knew that was under 25 was glued to our television sets watching Soul Train.
You have to remember...This was way before cable and MTV and even BET.....This was in 1971 , when it was just becoming cool to be Black. Soul Train introduced America to acts it wouldn't have normally seen on Television... War, Earth Wind & Fire, Mandrill, Gladys Knight & The Pips, The Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder,Marvin Gaye, The Ojays, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes , Billy Paul.....and the list goes on and on.
Yeah, I remember...I would wash my father's car...and my brother and I would rush to somebody's room or to the big TV downstairs in the living room....The only one in the house that was in color...To see what new star or what new dance was going to be out.....Soul Train , for a time...was the epitome of hipness and cool.
Yesterday, when I heard the sad news on the Steve Harvey Morning show that Don Cornelius had died...apparently of a self inflicted gunshot wound to the head....A part of my childhood , a part of my young adulthood died with him....
Today...We have nationally syndicated disc jockeys like Tom Joyner, Steve Harvey, Ricky Smiley...et al who can break a new artist on their radio shows...We have Black Entertainment Television and Centric and TV One, where you can see Black stars around the clock.....Before Soul Train came along...you had none of that and if Soul Train hadn't of come along when it did...You might still have none of that...
I don't know all of the circumstances of Don Cornelius's life or his tragic death by apparent suicide and it's not important that I write about them...Plenty of other bloggers and magazines and newspapers will do that...All I want to do is celebrate what the man meant to me and so many others...
In celebrating him....I'll close by saying ..."Thanks DC...Thanks for everything."
Rest In Peace Dwight Arrington Myers ,known to the world as Heavy D. "The Overweight Lover"
I'm still in shock at his untimely death two days ago...Rather than write an obituary...There will be plenty...I thought it better to spotlight what I think are three of his greatest performances.
I have just awakened to the tragic news that Boxing Great and Philadelphian, "Smokin" Joe Frazier has passed away. It was just this weekend that we learned that he was suffering from Liver Cancer and in hospice care....I was floored by that news....and now I hear that he has died.
I had the pleasure of actually meeting him about ten years ago...In a bar...He bought me and my friends drinks and laughed and talked with us...He was a real nice guy....Back in the 70's...I have to admit, I was an Ali fan during their classic three wars...but even then..I always had great respect for that man's left hook and that warrior heart of his....
He was once a heavyweight champion, and a great one at that.Muhammad Ali would say as much after Frazier knocked him down in the 15th round en route to becoming the first man to beat Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden in March 1971.
But he bore the burden of always being Ali's foil, and he paid the price. Bitter for years about the taunts his former nemesis once threw his way, Frazier only in recent times came to terms with what happened in the past and said he had forgiven Ali for everything he said.
Joe Frazier, who died Monday night after a brief battle with liver cancer at the age of 67, will forever be linked to Muhammad Ali. But no one in boxing would ever dream of anointing Ali as The Greatest unless he, too, was linked to Smokin' Joe.
''I will always remember Joe with respect and admiration,'' Ali said in a statement. ''My sympathy goes out to his family and loved ones.''
They fought three times, twice in the heart of New York City and once in the morning in a steamy arena in the Philippines. They went 41 rounds together, with neither giving an inch and both giving it their all. They nearly killed each other..but in those wars grew a grudging respect, I believe.
In their last fight in Manila in 1975, when I was 17 and still in high school they traded punches with a fervor that seemed unimaginable among heavyweights then and now. Joe Frazier gave almost as good as he got for 14 rounds, then had to be held back by trainer Eddie Futch as he tried to go out for the final round, unable to see.
''Closest thing to dying that I know of,'' Ali said afterward.
Muhammad Ali was as merciless with Frazier out of the ring as he was inside it. He called him a gorilla, and mocked him as an Uncle Tom. But he respected him as a fighter, especially after Frazier won a decision to defend his heavyweight title against the then-unbeaten Ali in a fight that was so big Frank Sinatra was shooting pictures at ringside and both fighters earned an astonishing $2.5 million. Unheard of until then for a prize fight.
The night at the Garden 40 years ago remained fresh in Joe Frazier's mind as he talked about his life, career and relationship with Ali a few months before he died.
''I can't go nowhere where it's not mentioned,'' he told The Associated Press. ''That was the greatest thing that ever happened in my life.''
Joe... We'll miss you...You were a true warrior! You can rest on your shield now~!
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
We lost a giant yesterday....Not only Steve Jobs but Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth...
The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, one of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s chief lieutenants in the 1950s and ’60s, was in his Avondale church when he learned Dr. King had been assassinated in 1968.
“My choir was in rehearsal,” he remembered years later. “I broke the news to them. I said, ‘This is the price.’ ” Cincinnati, a Northern city with a Southern exposure, had its own civil rights struggles in the early years. But the battles in Shuttlesworth’s native Birmingham were vicious. He endured more than two dozen jailings and a $10,000 bounty while leading efforts to desegregate Birmingham’s schools and public facilities.
He was beaten with chains when he tried to enroll his children in an all-white school and escaped death when a bomb destroyed the parsonage of his church in Birmingham on Christmas Day, 1956.
Dr.King feared Shuttlesworth’s in-your-face style might make him the movement’s first martyr. That never happened. Lured by better pay and improved educational opportunities for his children, Fred Shuttlesworth moved to Cincinnati in 1971, serving first as pastor of Revelation Baptist Church and later at Greater New Light Baptist Church.
Cincinnati embraced Reverend Shuttlesworth during his 47-year stay in the city. It was a polite embrace, not passionate. The civil rights icon was given his due and left in peace.
When he retired from the ministry in 2006, he reflected: “People ask me if I’m excited,” he said. “I’m never excited. I excite things. I’m in the world to excite things so things might get done.”
After a stroke, Reverend Shuttlesworth moved back to Birmingham in 2008 for health reasons, to a town that now adores him, erected a statue of him and named its airport for him.
American entrepreneur and inventor. He was the co-founder, Chairman, and Former Chief Executive Officer of Apple Inc. Who gave us the Iphone, The I pad..and an assortment of other cool things we think we can't live without....He died yesterday of Pancreatic Cancer.
