Earl Thomas Conley born 17 October 1941

Earl Thomas Conley (October 17, 1941 – April 10, 2019) was an American country music singer-songwriter. Between 1980 and 2003, he recorded ten studio albums, including seven for RCA Records. In the 1980s and into the 1990s, Conley also charted more than 30 singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, of which 18 reached Number One. His 18 Billboard Number One country singles during the 1980s were the third most by any artist in any genre during that decade, after Alabama and Ronnie Milsap. 

Conley was born in Portsmouth, Ohio, to Glenna Ruth (née Davis; 1918–2002) and Arthur Conley (1910–1989). When he was 14, his father lost his job with the railroad, forcing the young boy to move in with his older sister in Jamestown, Ohio. He was offered a scholarship to an art school, but rejected it in favor of joining the U.S. Army. While in the Army, he became a member of a Christian-influenced trio, where his musical talent and vocal ability first became apparent. He then decided to consider performing as a serious career option. He shifted more deeply into the classic country sounds of artists such as Merle Haggard and George Jones. 

During this period he first tried his hand at songwriting. In 1968, after his honorable discharge from the Army, he began commuting from Dayton to Nashville. In 1973 while in Nashville, he met Dick Heard, who produced country music singer Mel Street. This meeting eventually led to the Conley-Heard collaboration on the song "Smokey Mountain Memories", which made the top 10 for Street. After his discharge from the military, Conley had been playing in clubs in Nashville at night, supporting himself by working blue-collar jobs during the day. 

In his early days before fame, Conley worked in a steel mill near Portsmouth, Ohio. Until one day he made the bold decision to pack up and move to Nashville. Feeling that he was not making any progress in Nashville, Conley moved to Huntsville, Alabama. There, he met record producer Nelson Larkin, who helped him sign with independent record label GRT in 1974. Conley released four singles on that label, none of which became hits. At the same time, he was selling songs that he had written to other artists, including Conway Twitty and Mel Street, who were having much success with them. 

                                   

In 1977, Conley signed with Warner Bros., and in early 1979 he had his first Top 40 hit, "Dreamin's All I Do" but none of the rest of his Warner singles became big hits, and he left the label at the end of 1979. After spending six months reassessing his career and musical direction, he signed to Sunbird Records and began working with Nelson Larkin again. Conley's first single for Sunbird, "Silent Treatment," was an immediate Top Ten hit late in 1980, and it was quickly followed by the number one "Fire and Smoke" early in 1981. Following his breakthrough success, RCA signed Conley to a long-term deal. "Tell Me Why," his first single for the label, reached number ten in late 1981, followed shortly afterward by the number 16 "After the Love Slips Away." 

In the summer of 1982, "Heavenly Bodies" kicked off a string of 21 straight Top Ten hits that ran for seven years. During that time, he had a remarkable 17 number one hits, including a record-setting four number one singles from 1984's Don't Make It Easy for Me -- it was the first time any artist in any genre had four number one hits from the same album. Though he had some financial and vocal problems during the mid-'80s, the hits never stopped coming during the entire decade. In 1983 he was nominated for multiple Grammy Awards for his song "Holding Her and Loving You". In 1986, Conley was credited with breaking down country music barriers in his duet with pop/R&B singer Anita Pointer of the Grammy-winning Pointer Sisters. Their single, "Too Many Times", the title track to his 1986 album, reached No. 2 on the Country chart. With the song, Conley also became the only country artist to appear on the syndicated music program Soul Train. 

By the end of the '80s, he had stopped working with Nelson Larkin, preferring to collaborate with Randy Scruggs, which brought his music back to his country and R&B roots. His sales took a dramatic dip during 1990 due to the rise of contemporary country, but he had two new Top Ten hits, "Shadow of a Doubt" and the Keith Whitley duet "Brotherly Love." The singles set the stage for the harder-edged country of his 1991 album, Yours Truly. Despite receiving some of the best reviews of Conley's career, the record was a commercial failure, and RCA dropped him shortly after its release. For much of the '90s, he was without a record label, yet he continued to give concerts and to tour, finally landing on Intersound for 1998's Perpetual Emotion. 

Conley, one of the most successful country singers of the 1980s, passed away in Nashville on April 10, 2019, following a battle with a condition similar to dementia. He was 77.

(Edited from Wikipedia & AllMusic)

 

Bobby Milano born 16 October 1936

Bobby Milano (October 16, 1936 - January 17, 2006) was an American Rock’n’Roll and nightclub singer with reported ties to the underworld. 

Cologero 'Charles' Caci was born on  October 16, 1936 in Buffalo, New York to Alfonzo and Josephine Dina. Father from Porto Empedocle comune of Agrigento, Sicily. Mother from Palermo. The Caci family resided at 82 10th St in Buffalo's West Village district. Alfonzo worked at the Curtiss-Wright plant located in the adjacent town of Kenmore. 

By the age of 12 he was the winner of the 'Ted Mack Amateur Hour' and by the age of 16, he recorded his first record and in 1955 he moved to Los Angeles. It was during this time that Charles, using the name Bobby Milano, began what would be a lifelong involvement of two paths. One was with with the entertainment industry and the other along with several Caci brothers would be in association with Buffalo's Magaddino Family. Eldest brother Onofrio aka 'Al' was a made member of the Family. Vincent aka 'Jimmy' and Salvatore aka 'Sam' were Associates. 

                                    

In June 1967 Charles and others were indicted for Hobbs Act conspiracy concerning a planned robbery in Los Angeles. Co-defendants included Magaddino Underboss Frederico Randaccio, Capodecina Pasquale Natarelli and Associate Stephen Cino. The group was convicted at trial later that year and Caci received a ten year sentence. When his music career ended, he became known in the underworld there as 'The Crooning Cry Baby' 

Bobby Milano by the 1980s, was used an enforcer in the Caci crew, while still performing at various establishments in the Los Angeles and Palm Springs areas. He had married singer Keely Smith at Palm Springs in 1975 and the pair were known to perform together as a nightclub act at times. Frank Sinatra, who was close with Smith, reputedly gave the bride away at the couple’s wedding ceremony. Bobby took care of Keely’s career and even produced an album fror her in 1985, but that didn't stop him from joining the mafia community after moving to Palm Springs to join his brother Peter Milano (Jimmy Caci). Meanwhile in 1981 Bobby appeared in the film “The Million Dollar Face.”  

In mid-June 1985 the FBI included Charles Caci in a list of newly identified members of the Los Angeles Family. Also included was his brother Jimmy, a Capodecina who joined the Family a couple of years prior. In May 1987 the brothers were indicted by USAO Los Angeles on Federal racketeering charges. Among the thirteen co-defendants were Family Boss Peter Milano, Underboss Carmen Milano, Capodecina Luigi Gelfuso Jr. and three other Family members, including fellow Buffalo transplant Stephen Cino. Also indicted was Bonanno Soldier Arthur 'Artie' Franconeri from Bayonne, New Jersey. 

An article in The Desert Sun noted: "Charles Caci and others allegedly obtained property from two gamblers by extortion and from a Palm Springs bookmaker." The article described a March 1985 meeting between Charles and the unnamed bookmaker:  The victim was ordered to give a portion of his gambling business to Caci or his business would be closed." The Caci brothers and five others reached a global plea agreement in late March 1988. On May 16, 1988 Charles and Jimmy were each given prison terms of one year and one day. 

Nearly ten years later the brothers were named in another Federal racketeering case, this one out of Las Vegas.On February 3, 1998 sixteen were indicted on various counts that included extortion, money laundering, fraud and murder conspiracy. Returning co-defendants included Family Underboss Carmen Milano and Soldiers Stephen Cino and Rocco Zangari. Capodecina Louis Caruso and Magaddino Member Robert Panaro were also charged. 

On January 8, 2001 Charles pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy, admitting his role in a plot to sell fraudulent traveler's checks, and was sentenced to four months confinement at his residence in Palm Springs. In law enforcement circles, Weigel says, "Bobby was thought of as an enforcer and petty criminal." But his friend, restaurant owner Tony Prenesti, says Milano wasn't much of a mobster. 

Bobby Milano died from liver cancer at the hospital in Rancho Mirage, California on January 17, 2006 and was buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Cheektowaga, New York. Shortly after he was inducted into the Palm Springs Walk of Stars. At the time of his death he was with Betty Battista as the relationship with Keely Smith had ended although they were still good friends. 

(Edited from LCN Bios blogspot, Silverscreen Wiseguys & rocknroll-schallplatten-forum)

Calvin Boze born 15 October 1916

Calvin Boze (October 15, 1916 – June 18, 1970) was an American trumpeter and bandleader who was one of the many West Coast singers who took part in the development of the rhythm and blues scene in the late 1940s and early 1950s. His recordings are often reminiscent of Louis Jordan with their easy going swing and slyly witty lyrics. 

Born in Trinity County, Texas, Calvin B. Boze, Sr.,  began his musical career as a trumpet player in a high school band in his native Wheatley in the 1930s. This band also featured Illinois Jacquet along with his brother Russell Jacquet and tenor saxophonist Arnett Cobb. In college he played with the Prairie View Collegians, a group that included Charles Brown. In the early forties Boze branched out as a vocalist with the Southwestern territory band of Marvin Johnson. By the mid-1940s he was a member of the Milton Larkins Orchestra where he was reunited with Illinois Jacquet. Another member of this band was alto sax player and singer Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson. 

After wartime service, he settled in Los Angeles and, as singer and trumpet player, took part in the development of the jump blues style, heavily influenced by Louis Jordan. He was signed by Aladdin Records in 1949 and had his first recording session on August 15, 1949. All four tracks from this session were released, first on Aladdin's Score subsidiary ("Working With My Baby"/ "Satisfied") and then the parent label ("Waitin' And Drinkin'"/"If You Ever Had the Blues"). 

                                   

His second session, in January 1950, would result in his only hit, "Safronia B", which went to # 9 on Billboard's R&B charts in June 1950. "Safronia B" is a classic if unsophisticated recording which, with its refrain of "I surrender! I surrender!", epitomises the sense of fun in the West Coast music scene just before the dawn of rock and roll. It was reissued on Imperial in 1962, the year in which Imperial purchased the Aladdin catalog. The song was later recorded by The Manhattan Transfer. 

Starting in January 1950, Boze had formed his own band, the Calvin Boze Combo (soon rechristened The Calvin Boze All-Stars), which toured heavily, not only on the West Coast, but also in the North East (including an appearance at the Apollo Theatre in New York) and in the Midwest, with Dinah Washington. Several more Aladdin sessions followed, always with Maxwell Davis and his orchestra, but the sales figures of his later singles did not measure up to those of his earlier efforts. These later recordings include "Looped" (also recorded by Melvin Smith and Tommy Ridgley), "Shamrock", the instrumental "Fish Tail" and "Hey Laudie Miss Claudie" (which preceded Lloyd Price's Specialty recording of "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" by five months). 

Calvin Boze did not record after 1952, but he continued to play at jam sessions around Los Angeles, while also developing a career as a social worker and school teacher, before his early death, aged 53, after prolonged ill health.

He died in Los Angeles, California on  the 18^th June,1970. 

(Edited from Wikipedia & This Is My Story)

Joyce Bryant born 14 October 1927

Joyce Bryant (October 14, 1927 – November 20, 2022) was an American singer, dancer, and civil rights activist who achieved fame in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a theater and nightclub performer. With her signature silver hair and tight mermaid dresses, she became an early African-American sex symbol. 

Emily Ione Bryant, the third of eight children, was born in Oakland, California, and known from her early childhood as Joyce. She was raised in San Francisco. Bryant eloped at the age of 14 but the marriage ended that same evening. In 1946, while visiting cousins in Los Angeles, she agreed on a dare to participate in an impromptu singalong at a local club. "After a while," Bryant recounted in a 1955 Jet interview, "I found I was the only one singing. A few minutes later the club owner offered me $25 to go up on stage, and I took it because I needed the money to get home." 

During the late 1940s, Bryant had slowly acquired a series of regular gigs, from a $400-per-week engagement at New York City's La Martinique nightclub to a 118-show tour of the Catskill Mountains hotel circuit. Her reputation and profile eventually grew to the level that one night, she appeared on the same bill as Josephine Baker. Not wanting to be upstaged, Bryant colored her hair silver using radiator paint, and performed wearing a tight silver dress and silver floor-length mink. Bryant recalled when she arrived onstage, "I stopped everything!" Bryant's silver hair and tight, backless, cleavage-revealing mermaid dresses became her trademark look and, combined with her four octave voice, further elevated her status into one of the major headlining stars of the early 1950s, by which time she became known by such nicknames as "The Bronze Blond Bombshell", "the black Marilyn Monroe", "The Belter", and "The Voice You'll Always Remember". 

                                    

Beginning in 1952, Bryant released a series of records for Okeh, including "A Shoulder to Weep On", "After You've Gone", and "Farewell to Love". Two of her most well-known standards, "Love for Sale" and "Drunk with Love", were banned from radio play for their provocative lyrics. Upon the release of "Runnin' Wild" two years later, Jet noted that the song was Bryant's "first to be passed by CBS and NBC radio censors, who banned three previous recordings for being too sexy." Bryant remarked in 1980, "what an irony that my biggest hit record was 'Love for Sale'. Banned in Boston it was, and later...just about everywhere else." Bryant, who often faced discrimination and was outspoken on issues of racial inequality, became in 1952 the first black entertainer to perform at a Miami Beach hotel, defying threats by the Ku Klux Klan who had burned her in effigy. 

Bryant was critical of racial billing practices at night clubs and hotels and advocated for entertainers as a group to fight Jim Crow laws. In 1954, she became one of the first black singers to perform at the Casino Royal in Washington, D.C., where she said that she had heard so much about the segregation practiced there that she was surprised to see so many African-Americans attend the downtown club. "It was a great thrill," she said, "to see them enter and be treated so courteously by the management." Bryant, along with Lena Horne, Hilda Simms, Eartha Kitt, and Dorothy Dandridge were named in an issue of Ebony as five most beautiful black women in the world. 

Bryant earned up to $3500 a performance in the early 1950s, but she had grown weary of the industry. The silver paint had damaged her hair, she did not enjoy working on the Sabbath, and she felt uneasy with her image. Further, Bryant hated the men, often gangsters, who frequented the clubs in which she worked. She was once beaten in her dressing room after rejecting a man's advances. Her disenchantment with the drug and gangster subcultures, combined with pressures from her management, led Bryant to quit performing late in 1955. 

Devoting herself to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Bryant enrolled in Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama. Traveling for years through the South, Bryant grew angry when she saw hospitals refuse care for those in critical need because they were black. As a result, she organized fundraisers for blacks to buy food, clothing, and medicine, and she continued to put on concerts (wearing her natural black hair and no makeup) to raise money for her church. 

Disillusioned, Bryant returned to entertaining in the 1960s and trained with vocal teacher Frederick Wilkerson at Howard University, which led to her winning a contract with the New York City Opera. She also toured internationally with the Italian, French, and Vienna Opera companies. She returned to performing jazz in the 1980s and began a career as a vocal instructor, with such clients as Jennifer Holliday, Phyllis Hyman, and Raquel Welch. 

In the early 1990s Ms. Bryant, who was living in New York at the time, was walking near Lincoln Center on a sidewalk that was being repaired. She took a fall and was injured, breaking a knee and chipping some teeth after which she  moved back to California and faded into relative obscurity. She died of complications from Alzheimer's disease in Los Angeles on November 20, 2022, at the age of 95. (Edited from Wikipedia & New York Times)

 

My 500th show on Angel Radio

Hello music lovers, I have been so busy today that I just haven't got time to do a birthday profile, but I have just been sent a copy of my 500th show from the manager of Angel Radio, which I would like to share. I'm in the process of highlighting the songs of Tepper & Bennett so here is my latest program in the series...

https://www.imagenetz.de/bRS7r

Please look us up here;

https://www.angelradio.co.uk/

Hidehiko "Sleepy" Matsumoto born 12 October 1926

Hidehiko "Sleepy" Matsumoto (October 12, 1926 – February 29, 2000, Tokyo) was a Japanese jazz saxophonist and bandleader. His contributions to the jazz industry of Japan were many and recognized by many awards and honors. 

Born in Okayama Prefecture and raised in Fuchū, Hiroshima,  Matsumoto played bebop in Japan in the late 1940s with the group CB Nine, then joined The Six Josés and The Big Four, a group which included George Kawaguchi, Hachidai Nakamura, and Mitsuru Ono. His nickname was given by an American soldier when he was playing in a US military camp after the war. 

 In 1959 he became a member of Hideo Shiraki's small ensemble, and played with Gerald Wilson at the 1963 Monterey Jazz Festival and Toshiko Akiyoshi in 1964. Starting in 1964 he led his own ensembles, which have included as sidemen Takeshi Inomata, Akira Miyazawa, George Otsuka, and Isao Suzuki. On July 22 and 24, 1966, he played with the John Coltrane quintet in Tokyo while the group was touring Japan. 

He died in Tokyo on 29^th February 2000 

(Not much information on the web about “Sleepy.”  All I could find was this very small Wikipedia entry) 

 

Harmonica Frank Floyd born 11 October 1908

Frank Floyd, known as Harmonica Frank (October 11, 1908 – August 7, 1984) was an American blues singer, guitarist and harmonicist. He was his own best caricature. A hobo and refugee from the old Southern medicine shows who sang and played like a throwback from the 1920s, he was as colorful as they come, and a case could be made that without Frank there wouldn't have been an Elvis. 

He was born to itinerant parents in Toccopola, Mississppi, and his parents promptly separated without even giving him a proper name (he decided to call himself Frank Floyd as a teen), leaving Frank to be raised by his sharecropping grandparents. He taught himself to play harmonica when he was ten, and eventually became a pretty decent guitar player as well. 

Following the death of his grandparents, and while still a teenager, Floyd began working as a clown and musician on the carnival and medicine show circuits. His circus skills are said to have included fire-eating, hypnotism and make-up artistry.  He performed as a bogus Hawaiian, and specialised in nonsense talk and farmyard noises, leading to some 30 years of hoboing that would generate his frequent boasts that he never spent two nights in the same place. 

He learned many types of folk music and became a mimic, effortlessly switching from humorous hillbilly ballads to deep country blues. With his self-taught harmonica technique, he was a one-man band, able to play the instrument without his hands or the need for a neck brace. While also playing guitar, he perfected a technique of manipulating the harmonica with his mouth while he sang out of the other side. He could also play harmonica with his nose and thus play two harmonicas at once, a skill he shared with blues harp players Walter Horton and Gus Cannon's partner Noah Lewis. 

                                    

He began working in radio in 1932, and cut a few sides for Chess Records in 1951, the most notable of which was "Swamp Root." He cut the ultra-primitive "Rockin' Chair Daddy" for Sam Phillips' Sun Records in 1954, becoming the first white musician to record at the studio. "Rockin' Chair Daddy" sounded like a song and recording straight out of the country blues era of the 1920s, but it had just a tinge of what would eventually be called rockabilly, and one can imagine Phillips wondering what would happen if he could find a young, good looking white guy who could sing this kind of stuff -- enter Elvis. 

Harmonica Frank's songs appeared on many all-black blues compilations in the 1960s and 1970s, collectors being unable to distinguish his race. In 1972 he was "rediscovered" by Stephen C. LaVere and in the following years recorded two albums for the Adelphi and Barrelhouse labels, including a compilation of the early material. Additional full albums were recorded before his death in 1984, many of which have become available on CD, though his vintage recordings (1951–59) remain mostly out of print and unavailable aside from occasional tracks on compilations. 

In his 1975 book Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music, author Greil Marcus presented a unique vision of America and music, and how they relate by using (as metaphors) six musicians, one of whom was Harmonica Frank. 

Floyd never abandoned his archaic, medicine show-derived style, and when the folk revival hit, he found himself in demand again. He continued to perform and record occasionally right up until his death in Blanchester, OhioH, on August 7, 1984 due to complications from Type II diabetes (which had previously cost him his leg) and lung cancer. 

An American original, his life linked the medicine show tradition to early rock & roll, and there are precious few who could ever make that claim. 

(Edited from Wikipedia, AllMusic & Mustrad.org)