David Crosby, the brash rock musician who evolved from a baby-faced harmony singer with the Byrds to a mustachioed hippie superstar and an ongoing troubadour in Crosby, Stills, Nash & (sometimes) Young, has died at 81, several media outlets reported Thursday. Continue reading BREAKING: David Crosby — And Another (Great) One Bites The Dust→
Jimmie Lee Jackson’s bullet-scarred headstone, near Marion, Alabama.
I was arrested again on February third, marching outside the Dallas County courthouse in downtown Selma. I spent the following ten days in jail. Half that time I was back in the county jail’s dayroom, where I had been crammed in with Dr. King and 200-plus other marchers on February First. on the third floor of City Hall. The second time I was in with a dozen or so teenagers, soon augmented by more voting rights marchers. Continue reading Another for Dr. King: The Night March & The Killers→
The Friends burial ground at Limerick, Ireland Meeting.
[Note: We’re obliged to start with another, “Happy Holidays, you’re fired!” report, in that industry where they are a near-daily occurrence: The Washington Post announced last week that it will kill its sixty year old Sunday magazine. Its ten staffers have their pink slips, and the final issue will hit the streets on Sunday December 25, ho ho ho.
[NOTE: i saw Gladys Knight perform with The Pips in the early ‘70s. It was in a seedy, low-light club in Boston. I wasn’t a clubber; the tickets came from a stash of freebies collected by a local music editor I wrote some reviews for. The passes were also the paper’s substitute for decent paychecks for our efforts. But I was too young to care: what was catching up on the rent compared to catching up with Gladys? (I began to figure that out later.) And they did put on a heckuva show: Gladys belted them out of the park, and the Pips were not only fine backup, they could, as Gladys explains below, dance their precisely choreographed behinds off. A fine moment in a long-lost youth, and it’s great to see she’s getting some overdue mainstream propers.]
Gladys Knight has always been ‘a singer’s singer ‘
Gladys Knight, today
It’s something that came to me that wasn’t forced,’ says the ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’ singer, who won her first vocal competition as a child
By Helena Andrews-Dyer — November 30, 2022
ASHEVILLE, N.C. – It is much too easy to take Gladys Knight for granted.
Her sound is so pure, her steps so graceful, her smile so disarming that the vocal powerhouse’s sheer presence seems at once natural and divine. Wrapped in a magenta turtleneck, she tells the handsome waiter pouring her iced tea that he “should be in the movies” before launching into a humble story about how she discovered Michael Jackson. As the Atlanta native peppers her sentences with y’all and fussin’, she makes it easy to forget that she is the prototype. Continue reading Star of the Week: Gladys Knight And her Storied Career→