Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949) played a leading role in American music and culture in the twentieth century. Celebrated for his arrangements of spirituals, Burleigh was also the first African American composer to create a significant body of art song. An international roster of opera and recital singers performed his works and praised them as among ......
The New Yorker recently referred to Pat Metheny as 'possibly the most influential jazz guitarist of the past five decades.' A native of Lee's Summit, Missouri, just southeast of Kansas City, Metheny started playing in pizza parlors at age fourteen. By the time he graduated from high school he was the first-call guitarist for Kansas City jazz ......
From tent revivals to radio and records with a gospel music innovator Homer Rodeheaver merged evangelical hymns and African American spirituals with popular music to create a potent gospel style. Kevin Mungons and Douglas Yeo examine his enormous influence on gospel music against the backdrop of Christian music history and Rodeheaver's impact as ......
John French's memory is extraordinary. Add to this, interviews with ex-Magic Band members and associates, and you have a treasure trove for fans of Beefheart. It cuts through the layers of myth that have attached themselves to the Beefheart legend and tells the REAL insider's story.
From tent revivals to radio and records with a gospel music innovator Homer Rodeheaver merged evangelical hymns and African American spirituals with popular music to create a potent gospel style. Kevin Mungons and Douglas Yeo examine his enormous influence on gospel music against the backdrop of Christian music history and Rodeheaver's impact as ......
Set in the months that preceded the murder of megastar Marilyn Monroe. this investigative report challenges the myths and assumptions that have, for decades, been repeated repetitively and inconclusively within the canon of half-truths widely circulated about her career and death. In it, celebrity biographer Darwin Porter has compiled, with ......
Hungarian Prodigy to American Musician, Feminist, and Activist
Written shortly after the close of World War II, Escaping Extermination tells the poignant story of war, survival, and rebirth for a young, already acclaimed, Jewish Hungarian concert pianist, Agi Jambor. From the hell that was the siege of Budapest to a fresh start in America. Agi Jambor describes how she and her husband escaped the extermination ......
A self-defined "seductress of beautiful women" and the by-product of an immense fortune, lesbian activist Mercedes de Acosta (born in 1892) was descended from Spain's Dukes of Alba and a beneficiary of the best education and best social skills that her parents' Gilded Age fortune could buy. From her perch within the aristocracy of the Belle ......
MacDonald 'Max' Gill (1884-1947) was an architect, letterer, mural painter and graphic artist of the first half of the twentieth century, best known for his pioneering pictorial poster maps including the whimsical Wonderground Map of London Town. His beautiful painted panel maps decorate the Palace of Westminster and Lindisfarne Castle and the ......
