Tag Archives: musical celebrity

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 →

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 →

Phil Spector: A Lonely, Tortured Talent

Harvey Phillip Spector was born into a lower middle class Jewish family on December 20, 1940, in the Bronx, New York, on December 26, 1940. His parents were first cousins, a fact that he later admitted in a newspaper interview, “might have had something to do with what I am or who I became.” His father committed suicide because of family indebtedness when Phil was only nine years of age, and this profoundly affected his personality. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1953 to make a new start. As a young boy, he served as an apprentice under Jerry … Continue reading →