Graham (Craig) Townsend was born in Toronto, his father, Fred (1900-1981) was Don Messer's square dance caller for many years. Visually impaired from childhood, Graham Townsend was raised in the Ottawa Valley community of Buckingham, Quebec, where he began to play violin as a child and absorbed the Irish, French and Scottish fiddle music of the Ottawa Valley that would later mould him into a prolific composer of over 400 tunes and a musician with a repertoire of nearly 4,000 fiddle tunes. Returning to Toronto, he won a CNE '30 and under' fiddling competition at the age of nine and subsequently learned repertoire and technique there from the Irish fiddlers Tom McQuestion and Billy Crawford.
In his teens Townsend began to perform on tour and on CBC TV with Don Messer and made his first records for Rodeo. Having placed third in the open class of the Canadian Open Old Time Fiddlers Contest at the age of 11, he won the event in 1963 and annually 1968-70 before retiring from competition. He later appeared on many occasions as a guest artist on CBC broadcasts of the contest. In 1963 he made the first of many tours sponsored by the CBC in conjunction with the federal departments of Defence or External Affairs.
He performed in Germany, France, and Italy (1963, 1964), Cyprus (1967), England and Jersey (1981), Australia (1982, in a command performance for Elizabeth II at the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane; 1983; and for Expo 88), and East Germany (1984). He also travelled frequently to the Canadian north under the network's auspices. He toured in 1984 in Scotland, and appeared four times 1985-91 at the Shetland [Islands] Folk Festival. Several tours were with his second wife, Eleanor, whom he married in 1973.
He played in the California and Toronto-produced 1964 show Star Route, which ran for 36 weeks. Townsend lived 1964-7 in Ottawa where he succeeded Ward Allen in the Happy Wanderers on CFRA radio and CJOH-TV. Based again in Toronto until 1991, and thereafter in Barrie, Ont, he continued to appear on TV with Messer, and as a frequent guest on the Family Brown, Tommy Hunter, and Ronnie Prophet shows and on CBC Halifax TV's 'Up Home Tonight'. In 1991 he became a regular on MC [Mid-Canada] TV's 'That Country Feeling,' produced in Sudbury, Ont.
Townsend performed at Canadian and US fairs and fiddling events, toured in 1984 in Scotland, and appeared four times 1985-91 at the Shetland [Islands] Folk Festival. He also appeared with Wilf Carter on several Canadian tours, including the singer's last in 1991. Townsend performed with a Don Messer Tribute show (1997-8), and at various festivals until shortly before his death.
Townsend studied Canada's fiddling traditions closely and can be heard playing in a variety of regional and ethnic styles on Classics of Irish, Scottish, and French Canadian Fiddling (1976, Rounder 7007) and The Great Canadian Fiddle (1977, Springwater S-6). He made some 40 albums by 1991 for Banff (eg, I Like Don Messer, SBS-5306, among nine others), Point (including Old Time Fiddle Favourites of Ward Allen, PS-328, and Harvest Home, PS-357, the latter with members of Messers' Islanders), Caprice, Marathon, Rounder, Audat, Condor, and Goodtime. In 1990 Silver Eagle issued Townsend's first CD, 100 Fiddle Hits - 35th Anniversary Album (SED-10962). Graham Townsend - Still Going Strong (Holborne/Rodeo 8044) followed in 1997, and Country Licks and All that Jazz in 1997 (Margaree Sound 6397201, recorded in 1982).
Townsend recorded some 200 of his 400 fiddle tunes. His best-known pieces include Royal Princess Two Step, Rocking Chair Jake, Debbie's Waltz, Maytime Swing, Black Jack Whiskey, My Dungannon Sweetheart, Swinging in the 80s, and Ice on the Road. His compositions have been recorded by Natalie MacMaster and April Verch. Townsend also recorded as a mandolinist (Mandolin Favorites, Cheyenne 89003) and as a pianist (accompanying the fiddler Joe Loutchan of Whitehorse on Fiddler on the Loose, a CBC Northern Services broadcast LP). He appeared as fiddler on recordings by Carroll Baker, Stompin' Tom Conners, Dolly Parton, Fred Penner, Raffi, Sharon, Lois & Bram, Sneezy Waters, and others.
Graham & Elanor Townsend
Townsend helped establish the Ontario Old Time Fiddlers Association. He was inducted into the US Fiddlers Hall of Fame at Oceola, NY, in 1982, the Ottawa Valley Country Music Hall of Fame in 1990, and the Canadian National Fiddling Hall of Fame in 1998. He was nominated for a Juno award for instrumental artist of the year in 1991, received a 1993 Porcupine Award (jointly with Eleanor), and a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Canadian Grandmasters Fiddling Championships in 1998, but by the end of that year he had died from cancer on December 3, 1998, in Barrie, Ontario, Canada. Only weeks later, on December 31, 1998, his wife Eleanor Townsend lost her life following a house fire at their home.
(Edited from the Canadian Encyclopedia, Wikipedia & CMA Ontario)
Rhetta Hughes (June 15, 1939 – June 3, 2019) was an American soul singer and musical theatre actress.
Hughes was born in Dallas, Texas. Although she sang from a young age into adulthood in the choir of a Baptist church in her hometown, she had no aspirations to be a professional singer and had been employed for five years as a nurse at Parkland Memorial Hospital in 1963 when an impromptu vocal performance at the local club where her close friend Tennyson Stephens played piano caused the club's managers to hire her. Established as a top local lounge act, Hughes and Stephens were eventually spotted in a Dallas club by Al Williams - leader of the Four Step Brothers dance troupe - who signed as the duo's manager successfully transferring them to the Chicago nightclub circuit.
In 1965 Hughes made her recording debut with an album focused on standards - which billed Hughes as Rheta Hughes and featured Tennyson Stephens - entitled Introducing An Electrifying New Star recorded with producer Ralph Bass for Columbia Records, who would release three singles by Hughes in 1967-68 all produced by Howard Roberts (Hughes' Columbia recording sessions all took place in New York City). Continuing to play nightclubs, Hughes was discovered by Bill Cosby who caught her act at the Redd Foxx Club in Los Angeles, with Hughes resultantly being signed to Tetragrammaton Records, the label Cosby had recently co-founded. After her label debut: "You're Doing It With Her - When It Should Be Me", almost reached the R&B Top 40 in the autumn of 1968. Hughes scored her career record with a mid-tempo R&B rendition of the Doors hit "Light My Fire" which reached #36 on the Billboard R&B chart in February 1969 with the track just falling short of the Billboard Hot 100 peaking at #102 on the "Bubbling Under..." chart (Record World, whose R&B chart afforded Hughes' "Light My Fire" a #26 peak, ranked the track in its 100 Top Pops singles chart with a peak of #78). Hughes' two Tetragammraton singles were included on a 1969 album release entitled Re-Light My Fire from which two further singles were released without charting.
Hughes had no further releases on Tetragammraton before the label folded in 1971 but was featured on the track "Mother's Prayer" on the 1971 album As Serious as a Heart-Attack by Melvin Van Peebles, with Hughes also accruing an impressive résumé as a session singer with her vocalizing on the 1974 #1 Roberta Flack hit "Feel Like Makin' Love" earning Hughes a gold record.
Hughes session work résumé also includes the Van Dyke Parks album Discover America (1972), the Buffy Sainte-Marie album Moonshot (1972), the 1973 self-titled album by Brenda Patterson, the Bette Midler album Songs for the New Depression (1976), the 1976 self-titled album by Essra Mohawk and the Bobby Rydell album Born With a Smile (1976): a chorale member on the 1976 album Speak No Evil by Buddy Rich & the Big Band Machine, Hughes also vocalized on the track "The Circle" on the 1977 album Loading Zone (it) by guitarist Roy Buchanan. In the early 1970s Hughes branched out into acting, her first evident credit being the 1971 blaxploitation film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song which was created by Melvin Van Peebles.
Van Peebles next cast her as Earnestine in his 1972 musical Don't Play Us Cheap; a production which marked Hughes debut on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. The musical was subsequently adapted into a 1973 film with Rhetta reprising her role from the stage musical. Hughes had her second Broadway tenure in the musical Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope in which she impressed audience-member Harry Belafonte: subsequent to performing in Paul Sills' stage adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses at the 1973 Festival dei Due Mondi in Umbria Hughes was recruited by Belafonte to serve as second vocalist on his six-month North American tour in 1974, and then again on his eight-month global tour in 1976.
After some time away from performing tending her ailing mother in Dallas, Hughes led the national touring company of Bubbling Brown Sugar from July 1977 to May 1978. Also in 1978 an uncredited Hughes was featured in the chorale for the 1978 film musical The Wiz. In March 1979 Hughes was cast as second lead in an upcoming Broadway show Got Tu Go Disco - highly touted as "the first disco musical" - with Hughes casting resulting in her being signed as a recording artist by disco-oriented Aria Productions whose leader Kenny Lehman was Got Tu...'s musical director/supervisor. Although Got Tu... would not noticeably last beyond its June 1979 opening Lehman would in fact produce Hughes' third album: Starpiece, released in 1980, which year also saw Hughes co-starring in the original off-Broadway musical Paris Lights as Josephine Baker.
Throughout the 80's Hughes featured in on and off Broadway musicals including Black Nativity and Raisin (1981), Dreamgirls, Amen Corner (1983). Also in 1983 Hughes recorded two dance tracks for Kenny Lehman's Aria Productions: "Angel Man (G.A.)" and "Crisis", which ranked on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart with respective peaks of #1 and #20, with "Angel Man" becoming a minor R&B chart hit (#88).And Hughes would reprise her Black Nativity role when that musical was presented before Pope John Paul II in a December 23, 1983 performance in Vatican City. In May 1988 Hughes appeared in the Fox Theatre (Atlanta) premiere production Moms. Hughes continued to accrue occasional screen credits with a co-starring role in the 1985 exploitation film Tenement and a supporting role in the mainstream 1986 movie A Killing Affair, and also guest roles on the TV series Knightwatch and Law & Order in respectively 1988 and 1991.
In the summer of 1991 Hughes accepted an offer to co-star as Josephine Baker's mother in a new Dutch stage musical whose director: Billy Wilson, had worked (as choreographer) with Hughes in the 1977-78 national tour of Bubbling Brown Sugar: Josephine: the Musical began its premiere run at the Luxor Theatre, Rotterdam on September 19, 1991 with subsequent engagements in other European venues. Hughes remained in the Netherlands for several years residing in Amsterdam and appearing in local musical stage productions including Bubbling Brown Sugar (1993) and the gospel music revue The Glory of Gospel (1996), being featured on the cast albums for the latter two productions as she had been with Josephine. In 2008 Hughes returned to session singing for the album Subway Silence by Dutch vocalist Giovanca.
In later years Hughes returned to Dallas, where she was a full time carer of her mother. She died there on June 3, 2019, at the age of 79.
Garland Green (born Garfield Green Jr.; June 14, 1942 – February 2026) was an American soul singer and pianist.
Born in Dunleith, Mississippi, United States on June 14, 1942, Green was the tenth child of eleven in his family. He lived in Mississippi until 1958 when he moved to Chicago. While working and attending Englewood High, he sang on weekends, and one day while singing in a pool room, he was overheard by Argia B. Collins, a local owner of a barbeque chain. Collins agreed to bankroll Green's attendance at the Chicago Conservatory of Music, where Green studied voice and piano, and played in local bars and clubs. Green and Joshie Jo Armstead, a composer and lyricist from Yazoo County, Mississippi were married in Chicago in 1965 but it was short lived as they divorced two years later. She was a member of the Ikettes of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue.
In 1967, Green won a local talent show at a club called the Trocadero. His prize was a concert opening for Lou Rawls and Earl Hines at the Sutherland Lounge. In the audience was Mel Collins, and his wife Joshie Jo Armstead, who was a songwriter who had written tunes with Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson prior to the couple joining Motown. The couple arranged for Green to do a recording session in Detroit and released the result as a single on their label, Gamma Records, a song called "Girl I Love You", written by Shelley Fisher. It sold well locally and was picked up by MCA subsidiary, Revue Records for national distribution. Revue released three further singles from Green who then moved to MCA's main label, Uni Records.
In 1969, "Jealous Kind of Fella" became a major national success, reaching No. 5 in the Billboard R&B chart, No. 2 in the Cashbox soul chart, and No. 24 in Canada. Written by Green, R. Browner, M. Dollinson and Jo Armstead, the record was released in the US in August 1969. It sold a million copies by March 1971. Uni released an album from Green, but the follow-up single did not sell well and Green eventually left MCA, also parting company with Armstead. He then signed with Atlantic Records subsidiary, Cotillion Records, which released five singles from Garland, but only one proved a real success, "Plain and Simple Girl". Produced and arranged by Donny Hathaway, this reached the R&B Top 20.
Garland with Marvin Gaye
Moving on to Spring Records in 1973, Green recorded five more singles, some of which charted modestly, notably "Let the Good Times Roll" (not the Shirley and Lee song) and "Bumpin' and Stompin'." His recording for the label, "Just What The Doctor Ordered", remained unissued until 1990, when it was included on a compilation album of his Spring singles on the UK label, Ace/Kent. A move then to RCA Records resulted in three singles and an album, produced by the Los Angeles, California producer/singer Leon Haywood.Sadly, RCA didn't promote the album well and nothing significant resulted from the association. After this he didn't record again for nearly seven years.
In 1979, Green moved to California, and eventually signed with a small independent label, Ocean-Front Records for an album produced by Lamont Dozier and Arleen Schesel, the latter of whom Green later married. The album featured a re-worked version of a major hit for Dozier 10 years earlier, "Trying to Hold on to My Woman". When the label closed, Green continued to record and self-release. In 2011, Green signed a deal for a brand new album with Special Soul Music, a new division of the label CDS Records. The album, entitled I Should've Been The One, was released February 2012. It was his first album of new material in 29 years. In 2013 he received the Denise La Salle Recording For Excellence Award at the the Jus Blues Foundation Awards in Memphis, Tennessee.
Despite his million selling “Jealous Kind of Fellow” Garland Green never achieved great success in the music business. For reasons that are not entirely clear, much of his work was censored by some top musical professionals at the time including the composer team Nicholas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, and Donnie Hathaway with whom he worked in the 1970s.
Green's death at the age of 83 was announced on February 9, 2026.
Frank R. Strozier Jr. (born June 13, 1937) is a jazz alto saxophonist, flutist, pianist and composer whose contributions remain insufficiently known and appreciated by the wider jazz community.
Strozier was born in Memphis, Tennessee, where he learned to play piano. In 1954, after high school, he moved to Chicago, where he studied clarinet at the Chicago Conservatory of Music and performed with other Memphis musicians such as Harold Mabern, George Coleman, and Booker Little, and also played with Walter Perkins group MJT+3 (recording in 1959-60) and led sessions for Vee-Jay Records during that period.
In 1959 he moved to New York, where he appeared with Miles Davis for a brief period n 1963 (alongside Hank Mobley and George Coleman) and with Roy Haynes's quartet. After six years in Los Angeles, during which he performed with Chet Baker (recording in 1965) and groups led by Shelly Manne (1965-c1967) and Don Ellis (1968), he returned to New York in 1971.
He joined the Jazz Contemporaries, led by drummer Keno Duke (recording in 1974), and the New York Jazz Repertory Company. He recorded as a leader for Trident (1972) and Steeple Chase (1976-1977) and also played with Horace Parlan (1977). Strozier was a dynamic and committed performer with a blues-based style that enlivened any context in which he appeared. His tone and phrasing had a biting edge reminiscent of Jackie McLean's playing.
He played and recorded with Woody Shaw in 1978, and with Louis Hayes and Stafford James in 1979. Frustrated with his lack of work, Strozier dropped out of the music scene by the mid-1980s. On March 31, 1990, he made his piano debut in a trio setting at Weill Recital Hall in New York which was favourably reviewed by a critic in Cadence Magazine. But since then, little has been heard of Strozier who left music to become a teacher of math and/or science in schools in Westchester County, New York.
(Limited information edited from New Grove Dictionary of Music, Wikipedia & AllMusic)
Della Griffin (born June 12, 1922 – died August 9, 2022) was an amazing American jazz singer and drummer. She was also known as Della Simpson. Della was part of two of the very first all-girl R&B music groups in the 1950s: The Enchanters and The Dell-Tones.
Della Griffin was born in Newberry, South Carolina, on June 12, 1922. She was the nineteenth of twenty children! Later, she moved to New York City and grew up there. Della loved music from a young age. She really looked up to famous musicians like Count Basie, Charlie Barnet, and especially Billie Holiday. Della started singing when she was just 12 years old. Singing was her biggest passion, but she was also great at playing the drums, alto saxophone, and piano. After finishing Jamaica High School in Queens, New York, in 1943, Della began singing professionally.
In 1950, Della and her friend Frances Kelley decided to start a singing group. They knew each other from working together in a factory. They soon added Pearl Brice, Della's childhood friend, and Rachel Gist, a singer from Harlem. Their friend Chris Townes helped them a lot. He became their teacher, helped arrange their songs, played piano, and wrote music for them. The group performed in small clubs for about a year. In 1951, Della invited Jerry Blaine, who owned Jubilee Records, to hear them. He was so impressed that he signed them the very next day! Their first songs included "Today is Your Birthday" and "How Could You Break My Heart." In January 1952, Jubilee released The Enchanters' first record. The group started touring the country and became very popular. Later that year, Rachel Gist and Pearl Brice left the group.
Della and Frances Kelley wanted to keep making music. They found two new members, Gloria Alleyne and Sherry Gary. With these new singers, the group changed its name to The Dell-Tones. They named it after Della Griffin because she was the lead singer and also the group's drummer. Della Griffin was actually the first female drummer in a well-known music group! Della's first husband, Jimmy Simpson, managed the group. He helped them get a recording deal with Coral's Brunswick company. In 1953, they recorded "Yours Alone" and "My Hearts on Fire." When these songs didn't get much attention, The Dell-Tones moved to Rainbow records. There, they recorded "I'm Not in Love With You" and "Little Short Daddy." The group then went on the "Night Train Tour" with Jimmy Forrest. After this, Frances Kelley, Gloria Alleyne, and Sherry Gary left.
New members Algie Willie, Shirley Bunnie Foy, and Renee Stewart joined. The Dell-Tones then signed with Baton records and recorded songs like "Don't Be Long" and "Baby Say You Love Me." In 1955, The Dell-Tones went on a tour of Canada. Later, Gloria Bell and Chris Townes left the group. The Dell-Tones then joined forces with Sonny Til and his group The Orioles. This new, bigger group included Della Griffin, Sonny Til, Della's second husband Paul Griffin, and many other talented musicians. They performed in clubs in New York City and recorded "Voices of Love" and "I'm so Lonely" in 1957. After this, The Dell-Tones slowly stopped performing together, and Della began her solo career.
Here's "My Melancholy Baby" from above album.
Della Griffin was married three times. Her husbands were Jimmy Simpson, Paul Griffin (a pianist), and Gene Walker (a saxophone player). Over the years, she toured and performed with many famous artists like Jimmy Forrest, Sonny Stitt, Benny Green, Illinois Jacquet, and her sister-in-law, Etta Jones. After The Dell-Tones, Della's husband at the time, Paul Griffin, encouraged her to take a break to focus on their family. After their marriage ended, Della started performing again in New York City clubs.
In 1973, Griffin opened at Harlem's Blue Book Club. It became a steady gig for 14 years, ending only when Griffin was injured in a car accident. Frequent comparisons to Billie Holiday were both a blessing and a frustration -- a frustration because she was persistently asked by audiences to sing the songs Holiday sang. Limited in her ability to consistently do her own stuff, Griffin left the business. Returning in the '80s, she worked with both Etta Jones and Irene Reid, recording with Jones.
This work led to two albums for Muse Records, I'll Get By and Travelin' Light, both produced by Houston Person. When Muse folded, Griffin followed many of that label's performers to the newly formed HighNote-Savant. Her first album for Savant, also produced by Person and which he appeared on, The Very Thought of You, came out in 1998. That same year, Griffin was invited to Finland to appear at one of that country's major jazz festivals. Griffin settled in New York and performed regularly at clubs and other jazz events.
In 2005, Della Griffin and The Enchanters performed as the main act at a show organized by the UGHA (United Group Harmony Association). The audience loved her performance. Della Griffin lived in New Rochelle, New York, where her foster children would visit her every day. She passed away in New York City on August 9, 2022, at the age of 100.
David Gardner (June 11, 1926 – September 22, 1983), known as Brother Dave Gardner, was an American comedian, professional drummer and singer. Next to Homer & Jethro, he was the most successful Southern-derived comedian. Variously described as a "Southern Lenny Bruce" or "Billy Graham with a sense of humour," Gardner's best routines still sound fresh and original today, a testament to his off-kilter genius.
There was much, much more to this small-statured stand-up comic than your average hillbilly ploughboy set of wheezy jokes; Gardner may just very well have been the true innovative genius of classy Southern humour. A native of Tennessee, Gardner studied drumming, beginning at age 13. After a one-semester term as a Southern Baptist ministerial student at Union University in his hometown of Jackson, Tennessee, he began a musical career as a drummer and occasional vocalist. After recording a handful of semi successful singles as a drummer/vocalist in and around his native Memphis (he had the original hit of "White Silver Sands"), Gardner found his true calling when Chet Atkins discovered him in Nashville doing comedy routines between drum solos.
His on-stage character (and by most accounts, off-stage as well) was one part hipster, one part Sunday-morning preacher, peppered with off-the-wall observations about history and life, all of it barely concealing a personality that was as convention shattering as the times would barely allow. His debut album on RCA, Rejoice, Dear Hearts!, was released at the height of the comedy-album craze in 1960, and his follow-up, Kick Thy Own Self, was even more successful. These propelled Brother Dave into the national eye, along with the first of several appearances on national television talk/variety shows such as The Tonight Show.
Gardner's act played well on national TV, so well, in fact, that a young Ray Stevens took whole Gardner routines, set them to music, and scored big with most of them well into the late '60s ("Ahab, the Arab," "Speedball," etc.). In the late '60s, a Memphis rock & roll band -- the Hombres -- took one line from a Gardner routine and fleshed it out into a hit song, "Let It All Hang Out." On-stage, Gardner was a law and entity unto himself. Although his original ascension to stardom was made, not unlike Bruce, with carefully constructed "bits," as time went on these gave way more and more to off-the-wall but trenchant observations. But unlike Bruce, Gardner never totally abandoned these staples of his nightclub act and his records. Instead, the nightly grind in clubs caused him to expand on them, and true fans of his fertile comic imagination can compare his telling of "The Motorcycle Story" (from one of his early albums) with the full-blown treatment it receives -- almost covering an entire side of an album -- on his second-to-last LP, Out Front.
Rather than sounding like a comedian giving a perfunctory reading of a well-known (and well-worn) routine, he sounds as if he just concocted it moments ago, his enthusiasm in telling the tale literally bounding off the grooves. His sense of timing was unerring, and his ability to respond to his surroundings would often send him into a free association rant that would spawn an ad-lib passage that would stretch over several minutes. One of his greatest personal quirks on-stage was that he never timed his act in the conventional sense, and although he wore an expensive watch on-stage, he never bothered to look at it. Generally credited (oddly enough) with the invention of the 100 millimetre cigarette, Gardner had them custom-made for him in quantity starting in the early '60s. Once he had pulled three of them from his similarly custom-made cigarette case, fired them up, and disposed of them in rapid, chain-smoking succession, he knew he had filled his time on-stage.
Gardner's involvement with drugs somewhat derailed his career after a bust for marijuana possession in 1962. Although he never wore it on his sleeve the way Bruce did, Gardner, by all accounts, had a voracious and most experimental appetite for them and was not above sneaking in veiled references in one of his routines. He was cleared, but the resulting publicity flap closed off the big television shows and forced him out of the big rooms up North and into the small-time Southern club circuit. After a small prison stint for tax evasion in the early '70s (his defence at his trial was to tell the judge, "I didn't know how much money I made, so I figured it was a fraud to fill out one of them things"), Gardner's career was pretty much dead in the water, having gone from RCA Victor to Capitol to their budget label, Tower, to no deal at all.
Working small clubs, his humorous and skewered outlook nonetheless stayed intact, a true rebel spirit that refused to be brought down, even though he was now under the "management" of a racist billionaire who was trying to remould him for the "good ol' boy" Hee Haw crowd. He recorded for a spate of small labels right up to the end, including one-offs for Four Star (his last, where he asks a stunned Nashville crowd, "I wonder if Johnny Cash turned Billy Graham on?") and another for the short-lived record division of the Tonka toy company. Gardner suffered a mild heart attack in January 1983, and had a pacemaker inserted while in Smyrna, Georgia. The following September, he was on a movie set near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, working on an Earl Owensby film called Chain Gang, when he had a much bigger heart attack. He had just completed filming that day, and was signing autographs and joking with people when he suddenly went into the studio and said he needed help. He died that night at about 9 p.m. in Grand Strand General Hospital, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Gardner was twice married: his first wife, Millie, preceded him in death, and he was married to his second wife, Judy, at the time of his death. He had two children from his first marriage — son Dave II (died 1999) and daughter Candace. Although he is seldom remembered today, except by old timers who smile when you mention his name, Gardner's influence on all branches of comedy continues to be writ large.
Shirley Alston Reeves (born June 10, 1941), born Shirley Owens, is an American soul singer who was the main lead singer of the hit girl group the Shirelles.
Raised in Passaic, New Jersey, she formed the group in 1957 with classmates Beverly Lee, Doris Kenner Jackson (nee Coley), and Addie "Micki" Harris under the name The Poquellos for a talent show at their high school, they were signed by Florence Greenberg of Tiara Records. Their first single, "I Met Him on a Sunday", was released by Tiara and licensed by Decca Records in 1958.
After a brief and unsuccessful period with Decca, they went with Greenberg to her newly formed company, Scepter Records where as The Shirelles they achieved fame with hits like "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" (1960) which was the first number-one hit by a Black girl group on the Billboard Hot 100, and "Dedicated to the One I Love" (1961). Owens’ warm, soulful voice defined their sound, and was the lead singer, though Jackson was also featured as lead on several songs, as well. Blending pop, R&B, and doo-wop. The Shirelles released 12 studio albums, with over 20 charting singles, influencing the girl group era and artists like The Beatles.
After a successful period of collaboration with Dixon and promotion by Scepter, with seven top 20 hits, the Shirelles left Scepter in 1966. Afterwards, the Shirelles declined in popularity due in part to pressure from the British Invasion and the heavy competition from other girl groups, including the Chiffons, the Supremes, the Ronettes, Martha & the Vandellas, and the Crystals.
Clockwise from top-Addie Harris, Shirley Owens, Beverly Lee and Doris Coley
During this period, Warwick often replaced Coley on stage due to the latter's family commitments. The Shirelles were still bound to Scepter and thus unable to record for another company until the end of their contract in 1966. Their last single to chart was 1967's "Last Minute Miracle", which peaked at No. 99.
After the commercial failure of their most recent releases, Coley left the group in 1968 to focus on her family. The remaining three Shirelles recorded songs for several labels, including Bell Records, RCA Victor, and United Artists until 1971. Afterwards, they toured singing their older songs, and participated in the filming of the 1973 documentary Let the Good Times Roll, recording two songs for it. Coley returned as lead singer in 1975, replacing Owens, who left that year to pursue a solo career.
Owens then went on to release albums like With a Little Help from My Friends (1975) under the name Shirley Alston,which featured members of the Flamingos, the Drifters, Shep and the Limelites, the Five Satins, the Belmonts, Danny & the Juniors, Herman's Hermits and La La Brooks of the Crystals. Then she recorded as Lady Rose and released a self titled album in 1977. Also that year as Shirley Lady Rose Alston" she recorded Sings Shirelles Greatest Hits. Doris, Beverly and Shirley would come together once more to record on Dionne Warwick's 1983 album, "How Many Times Can We Say Goodbye", which featured a new version of "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?"
In 1994, the Shirelles were honored by the Rhythm and Blues Foundation with the Pioneer Award for their contributions to music. The award was accepted by Owens, Lee, and Kenner. As Coley was accepting her award, she said "This is dedicated to the one I love", and sang an impromptu rendition of "Soldier Boy" together with Owens and Lee. Two years later they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, together with Gladys Knight & the Pips. At the ceremony in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, the three surviving members sang a medley of songs after being presented the awards by Merry Clayton, Marianne Faithfull, and Darlene Love.
Shirley continued to perform as Shirley Alston Reeves and The Shirelles with various line-ups into the 2000s. The Shirelles were inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame. Lee and Owens accepted the award. In September, 2008, The Shirelles' hometown of Passaic, New Jersey honored the group by renaming a section of Paulison Avenue as Shirelles Boulevard. Shirley is married to Kenneth Reeves and has two children. She retired from performing in 2020 but remains a celebrated figure in R&B history, living in North Carolina.
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