Tag Archives: composer

Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)

Everyone who was everyone in Hollywood (with the exception of David Niven) made an appearance in “Till the Clouds Roll By,” a look into the life of noted composer, Jerome Kern. Frank Sinatra, Dinah Shore, June Allyson, and Judy Garland are just a few of the names that grace this show’s playbill. Jerome Kern (Robert Walker) was a young song writer with a dream – he wanted to look out over the city, behold people he’d never met, and know that they were singing his songs. His first go-round didn’t go over so well, and he was encouraged to seek … Continue reading →

Night and Day (1946)

Cary Grant stars in this recap of the life of one of our most prolific music composers to date, Cole Porter. He wrote more standards than anyone else I can think of; if you’re singing a Golden Oldie, chances are you’re singing a Cole Porter. The movie title, “Night and Day,” is also the title of one of his hits. The movie takes us on a journey to Yale, where we see young Cole Porter as a student. His family wants him to go into law, but his heart is in his music. Going home for Christmas vacation, he tells … Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

Carole King: Talented Brooklyn Composer

Carole Klein was born on February 9, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York. Her talent and love for music revealed itself by the age of four when she began playing piano. While in high school, she formed her first band, the “Co-Sines,” and regularly attended the local rock and roll shows created by influential disc jockey and impresario, Alan Freed. She attended Queens College where she met and forged a writing partnership with budding songwriters Paul Simon, Neil Sedaka and Gerry Goffin, whom she later married. In 1961, she and Goffin scored their very first hit with the Shirelle’s chart-topping number, … 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 →