keeping the music of the past ALIVE!...from the Golden Eras of the 1920's, 1930's, 1940's, 1950's and 1960's including Big Band, Dance Orchestras, Swing, Crooners, Nostalgic, Popular Artists and Harmony Groups plus Contemporary, Retro and Revival artists
The legendary jazz/blues vocalist Billie Holiday certainly needs no introduction here. Anyone interested in classic and vintage jazz and blues will know her music and inimitable style of singing. No music collection is complete with out at least one Billie Holiday album. There has also been much written about Billie, some true, some not, some good, some not so good, but one story I recently came across was how she got the name "Lady Day". This is an excerpt from the book "Wishing On the Moon (The Life and Times of Billie Holiday)" written by Donald Clarke and published by Penguin Books, 1994. "....she had occasionally been called Lady since the early days in Harlem clubs, when she was reluctant to take the tips off the table...Lester (Young) had nicknames for everybody: he called (Count) Basie "Holy"; he called his younger brother, drummer Lee Young, "Little Pea". It was Lester who called trumpeter Harry Edison "Sweets". Will Friedwald says that he dubbed Ella Fitzgerald "Lady Time". Jazz already had an Earl, a Duke and a so-called "King of Swing"....Anyway, this was America, and Franklin D.Roosevelt was the biggest man around, and as Lester was the President of the saxophone, Billie called him "Prez" for short. He though that she must be the First Lady, named her "Lady Day", and reasoned that Sadie (Billie's mother), must be called "Duchess". All the names stuck for the rest of their lives..." So while you ponder and digest that, here are a couple of Billie Holiday releases that cover a good cross section of her musical output.
Scott Joplin (1868-1917) was an African-American composer and pianist. Joplin achieved fame for his ragtime compositions and was dubbed the King of Ragtime. During his brief career, he wrote 44 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of his first and most popular pieces, the "Maple Leaf Rag", became ragtime's first and most influential hit, and has been recognized as the archetypal rag. Joplin was born into a musical family of railway laborers in Texarkana, Arkansas, and developed his musical knowledge with the help of local teachers. He grew up in Texarkana, Texas, where he formed a vocal quartet and taught mandolin and guitar. During the late 1880's he left his job as a railroad laborer and travelled the American South as an itinerant musician. He went to Chicago for the World's Fair of 1893, which played a major part in making ragtime a national craze by 1897. Joplin moved to Sedalia, Missouri, in 1894 and earned a living as a piano teacher. There he taught future ragtime composers Arthur Marshall, Scott Hayden and Brun Campbell. He began publishing music in 1895, and publication of his "Maple Leaf Rag" in 1899 brought him fame. This piece had a profound influence on writers of ragtime. It also brought Joplin a steady income for life, though he did not reach this level of success again and frequently had financial problems. In 1901 Joplin moved to St. Louis, where he continued to compose and publish, and regularly performed in the community.
In 1907, Joplin moved to New York City to find a producer for a new opera. He attempted to go beyond the limitations of the musical form that made him famous, but without much monetary success. In 1916, Joplin descended into dementia as a result of syphilis. He was admitted to a mental institution in January 1917, and died there three months later at the age of 48. Joplin's death is widely considered to mark the end of ragtime as a mainstream music format; over the next several years, it evolved with other styles into stride, jazz, and eventually big band swing. Joplin's music was rediscovered and returned to popularity in the early 1970's with the release of a million-selling album recorded by Joshua Rifkin. This was followed by the Academy Award-winning 1973 film The Sting that featured several of Joplin's compositions, most notably "The Entertainer", whose performance by pianist Marvin Hamlisch received wide airplay. In 1976, Joplin was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
