Tag Archives: American singer

Joni Mitchell: Canadian Songbird

Joni Mitchell: Canadian Songbird Roberta Joan Mitchell was born on November 7, 1943, in Fort MacLeod, Alberta, Canada. She studied art briefly in Calgary and moved to Toronto in 1964. The following February she gave birth to her daughter, Kelly Dale Anderson. Reluctantly, she gave the child up for adoption some six months later, a subject memorialized in her 1971 album, “Blue” in the song, “Little Green.” (She would be reunited with her thirty-two years later.) Also in 1964, she married fellow singer, Chuck Mitchell, and they performed for a while in coffee houses and folk clubs. The couple divorced … Continue reading →

Judy Collins: A Voice Still Lovely and Strong

Judith Marjorie Collins was born on May 1, 1939, in Seattle, Washington. She studied classical piano as a child with Antonio Brico, and made her public debut at the age of 13, performing Mozart’s “Concerto for Two Pianos.” Three years later, she was playing the guitar, drawn to the folk revival sounds of the early 1960s and the music particularly of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. She performed in Greenwich Village, New York, busking and playing in clubs until she landed a contract with Elektra records with whom she was associated for thirty-five years. In 1961, at the age of … Continue reading →

Brandy: Superstar Shining Bright

Brandy Rayana Norwood was born on February 11, 1979, in Macomb, Mississippi. Her father, Willie Ray Norwood, was a pastor and choir director, and by the age of two, Brandy was singing in his church. Her mother, Sonja Bates, is a cousin of blues singer, Bo Diddley, and she quit her job at H&R Block to manage her daughter’s career. As a child, Brandy revered Whitney Houston and she told her father at a very age that she wanted to sing like her when she grew up. When, Brandy was nine, her family moved to California where she began singing … Continue reading →

Bob Dylan: Epic Poet of His Age

Robert Allen Zimmerman was born on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, and was raised in Hibbing, Minnesota, northwest of Lake Superior. His grandparents hailed from Lithuania, Russia and the Ukraine and his parents, Abraham Zimmerman and Beatrice Stone Beatty, were part of the area’s small, but tightly knit Jewish community. Bobby spent much of his youth listening to the radio, mesmerized by the musical strains of country and early rock and roll. On Christmas Eve, 1956, he made his earliest known recordings with two friends in a department store booth, in which they sang the songs made popular by … Continue reading →

Billy Joel: Long Island’s Own Music Man

William Martin “Billy” Joel was born on May 9, 1949, in the South Bronx, New York. The son of a Holocaust survivor from Germany, his family moved to Long Island soon after his birth. His parents later divorced and his father, Howard Joel, moved back to Eastern Europe. He has a half brother, Alexander Joel, who is an acclaimed European classical pianist. An intense love of music appears to have run in the family, and from an early age, Billy began piano lessons, drawn especially to classical music. This was fodder for much bullying and teasing in his formative years, … Continue reading →

Joan Baez: So Much More Than A Singer

Born in 1941, on Staten Island, New York, one of three daughters of a Quaker family of Mexican, English and Scottish descent, Joan’s political activism was most probably influenced by her physicist father, Albert Baez. The co-inventor of the x-ray microscope and author of one of the most widely used physics textbooks in the United States, he declined lucrative defense industry jobs during the height of the Cold War. The family moved frequently and lived in different areas of the world before settling in Boston in the late 1950s. There he accepted a faculty position at MIT, and Joan attended … Continue reading →

Cyndi Lauper: Brooklyn Born Talent

Cynthia Ann Stephanie Lauper was born on June 22, 1953, to Italian and German parents in Brooklyn, New York. She and her two siblings (a brother and a sister) were raised in the neighboring borough of Queens, New York, in the Ozone Park section, and her Queens accent is one of her most prominent trademarks. She dropped out of high school, and began singing in a number of local cover bands. Soon she began writing and performing her own material with keyboardist, John Turi, but her vocal chords became so strained that in 1977 she almost quit singing altogether. She … Continue reading →

Patti La Belle: Inspiration Personified

Patricia Louise Holt was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on May 24, 1944, the youngest of five children. She began singing in church at the age of 14 and in 1958 with her friend, Cindy Birdsong, she formed a four member girl group called “The Ordettes.” Two of the singers were replaced in 1959, and two years later the group auditioned for Blue Note Records. The president of the record company signed the girls to the label and changed the name of the group to the Blue belles and Patsy to Patti La Belle. In 1962, they scored their first doo-wop … Continue reading →