We have a problem Houston!!!!!
It seems I cannot post comments at the moment. Not sure if I can receive them either. Have sent a message to customer care which may take 24 hours to respond. Antway where theres a will there's a way , so a big thank you goes to Denis for suggesting today's birthday song writer and for the loan of The Jerry Ragovoy Story (Time Is On My Side 1953-2003) https://pixeldrain.com/u/DN9mfYwG
Jerry Ragovoy (September 4, 1930 – July 13, 2011) was an American songwriter and record producer who specialised in creating three-minute songs of intense emotion, enhanced by complex orchestral arrangements and was one of several white American songwriters and producers who, in the 1960s, helped mould the new African-American sound of soul music.
Jordan "Jerry" Ragovoy was born in Philadelphia, the son of a Hungarian-born Jewish optometrist. As a child he learned the piano and absorbed European classical music. He wrote his first song at eight, describing it later as "a direct steal from the Nutcracker Suite". Ragovoy's interest in African-American music was sharpened after leaving high school, when he worked in an electrical appliance store that also sold 78rpm records. He supplemented his income by giving piano lessons.
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| The Castelles |
One day in 1952, a group of black teenagers, who had been singing at high school dances as the Castelles, came in with a demo recording to play to the shop's owner, Herb Slotkin. Impressed, Slotkin and Ragovoy set up Grand Records to release tracks by the group. Success was immediate when My Girl Awaits Me was a national R&B hit, with Ragovoy the pianist and producer. The next record, This Silver Ring, was the first of dozens of Ragovoy songs to be recorded over the next two decades. Grand Records never replicated the success of that first release and soon Ragovoy was working with Philly's premier pop label, Chancellor Records, home to Frankie Avalon and Fabian. There he wrote A Wonderful Dream for the Majors, a top 30 hit in 1962, a novelty number for which Ragovoy persuaded the group's male lead singer to sing falsetto.
Unhappy with the commercialism of Chancellor, Ragovoy moved to New York City. The first person he contacted was the songwriter and producer Bert Berns, whom Ragovoy had met when Berns was a music publisher's rep pitching songs to record companies. Berns needed a song for a new black vocal group, Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters. "He'd been working on this song called Cry Baby for six months," Ragovoy told the journalist Tony Cummings. "He was disgusted: he couldn't complete the song no-how. But one day, over at Berns' house, we got the thing finished." Cry Baby (one of a number of songs for which Ragovoy used the pseudonym Norman Meade) was a million-seller in 1963. Its mixture of pop, gospel, R&B and Ragovoy's lush string-laden orchestration has earned it the reputation of a pioneering soul recording. Among its backing singers was Dionne Warwick. Cry Baby also launched the most successful period of Ragovoy's career.
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| Jerry with Garnet Mimms & The Enchanters |
Working mainly with Berns until the latter's premature death in 1967, he crafted a series of soul records that combined high sales with artistic excellence. Among these were Time Is On My Side by Irma Thomas (1964), Erma Franklin's Piece of My Heart (1967), Howard Tate's Ain't Nobody Home (1966) and Lorraine Ellison's sublime Stay With Me (co-written by George David Weiss), a slice of grand emotion to rival almost any operatic aria (Ragovoy once said of this song "that's my Puccini influence"). Ellison's 1966 performance was recorded with the help of a full orchestra assembled in the studio to accompany Frank Sinatra, after Sinatra had cancelled.
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Several of these songs were to become big hits for white artists. Time Is On My Side was a global hit for the Rolling Stones and the Walker Brothers recorded Stay With Me, while Piece of My Heart became the Janis Joplin hit. Joplin also recorded versions of Cry Baby, and another song Ragovoy wrote for Ellison, Try (Just a Little Bit Harder). Their composer was less impressed by some of these efforts, once complaining that "lots of singers, male and female, felt they were obliged to scream until the veins popped out of their necks", than by the royalty cheques they brought him. As late as 1999, it was rumoured that the producers of a proposed film about Joplin had paid more than $1m to use Piece of My Heart.
Outside the soul music genre, Ragovoy worked with such artists as the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the exiled South African singer Miriam Makeba, whose version of a traditional tune Pata Pata was a Top 20 hit in 1967. In the late 1960s, Ragovoy ploughed some of his earnings into a New York recording studio, the Hit Factory, which he was to sell in 1975. Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life was among the albums made there. Ragovoy also owned a shortlived record label, Rags. After 1970, Ragovoy was much less active in the record industry, although he won a Grammy award as producer of the cast album of the Broadway show Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope. In 1974, Ragovoy teamed up with Dionne Warwick to produce her Then Came You album, which peaked at No. 35 in the US Billboard R&B albums chaHe also produced albums by Bonnie Raitt and Milkwood.
He decided to come out of retirement in 2003 for a reunion with Howard Tate, writing the songs for an album by the veteran singer. A comprehensive collection of his best productions, The Jerry Ragovoy Story: Time Is On My Side, was issued on CD by the British company Ace Records in 2008. Prior to Joplin's death, Ragovoy wrote a song especially for her next album, titled "I'm Gonna Rock My Way to Heaven". The song was never recorded or performed until it was included in the theatrical production One Night with Janis Joplin, written and directed by Randy Johnson with arrangements and musical direction by Len Rhodes. Ragovoy was in attendance on opening night when the show premiered at Portland Center Stage on May 27, 2011.
Ragovoy was taken ill shortly after giving an interview for a documentary film about Berns. He died, due to complications from a stroke at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, New York City on July 13, 2011, at the age of 80. In 2025 Ragovoy was posthumously Inducted Into the Songwriters Hall of Fame during an intimate ceremony held in New York City.
(Edited from Dave Laing obit @ The Guardian, Wikipedia & Broadway World)
Ernie Henry (September 3, 1926 – December 29, 1957) was an American jazz alto saxophonist. Not well known, but even in his brief lifetime, he played with Monk, Mingus, and Gillespie – and he was on the verge of bridging the gap from bebop to free jazz. However, his life ended far too soon, but certainly deserves to be remembered.
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| Ernie Henry with Tadd Dameron |
Ernie Albert Henry was born and grew up in Brooklyn and learned piano at 8, violin at 10, and turned to the alto sax while in high school. He began playing in the style of Johnny Hodges, who of course was the alto man at the time. Ernie's first memory of hearing Charlie Parker dates back to 1939, when he happened to catch a radio broadcast of the Jay McShann band from the Savoy Ballroom and, he recalls, was immediately impressed.
His professional career began after his army service, when in 1947 Tadd Dameron began to show an interest in his playing and made him known to musicians who worked in the clubs on 52nd street; as a result he performed with Dameron, Fats Navarro, Charlie Ventura, Max Roach, Georgie Auld and Kenny Dorham. After working with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band (1948-49) he joined Illinois Jacquet (1950).
Here's "Gone With The Wind" from above LP
As an alto saxophonist, Ernie Henry naturally lived in the shadow of the great Charlie Parker at that time. But the youngster had a knack for giving his solos a different twist and avoiding typical Parker phrases as much as possible. In pieces like “The Chase” and “The Squirrel” (both from 1947 with Dameron/Navarro), his playing tended towards a rough cry and adventurous runs through the octaves.
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| Charlie Parker |
In the early 1950s, Ernie Henry disappeared from the scene for an extended period. It was an open secret that he was battling drug addiction. Heroin use was a sad trend among jazz musicians at the time, and many talents died young from overdoses, including Freddie Webster (1947), Sonny Berman (1947), Dick Twardzik (1955), Carl Perkins (1958), Shadow Wilson (1959), and Sonny Clark (1963). Even Charlie Parker, the leading alto saxophonist of bebop, lost his life in 1955 – heroin and alcohol played a significant role in his demise.
When Ernie Henry returned to the scene a year after Parker’s death, his style had visibly matured. He no longer compulsively avoided sounding like his great predecessor but integrated the “Parker tone” into his own phrasing. His sound was aggressive, almost tenor-like. He played virtuoso bop but led his lines across large intervals into remote territories. It’s no wonder that the later avant-gardist Eric Dolphy was a big fan of his. In 1956 he recorded with Matthew Gee and just a few days before his 30th birthday, Ernie Henry made his debut album: “Presenting Ernie Henry” (Riverside, 1956). In September 1957, Henry made more recordings as a bandleader, but they were only released after his death.
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Kenny Dorham, the trumpeter on Henry’s debut album, returned the favour at the end of 1957 by recording the album “2 Horns/2 Rhythm” (Riverside, 1957) together with the saxophonist. Once again, Henry took the opportunity to harmonically loosen his controlled, jagged style. His fantastic playing here points directly toward the freer jazz of the 1960s. These later recordings show that he was beginning to develop a strongly individual style that seemed primed to send him to future stardom. Unfortunately, four weeks after these recordings, on December 29, 1957, Ernie Henry mysteriously died in his sleep at the age of 31. A heroin overdose has been alleged, but he also suffered from very high blood pressure.
(Edited from Fidelity Magazine, New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, and Liner Notes) (NB. There are very few photos of Ernie on the web and many that say that it's him but it isn't, so beware)
Big Jeff Bess (2 September 1920 - August 23, 1998) was an American country singer, radio personality and former co-owner of Tootsie's Orchid Lounge.
Grover Franklin Bess was born near Ashland City in Cheatham County, Tennessee where his parents sharecropped a 60 acre farm. The nickname "Big Jeff" came from pronouncing his initials and his six foot frame. Jeff moved to Nashville about 1940 and by 1942 was appearing on WSIX. He also seems to have worked in tent shows. By late 1945 or early 1946, he was on WLAC with a show of his own. This station had several daytime acts with shows including Mac O'Dell, Ted & Wanda Henderson, Jack & Louise Henderson, and later Mel & Stan. But Big Jeff & His Radio Playboys seemed dominant and most long-lasting. Hattie Louise, by then known as Tootsie, married Jeff and became the Playboys' on-stage comedian and de facto manager. Big Jeff's tenure at the station lasted about sixteen years, eventually as mostly a deejay.
During this time he recorded rather sparingly on small labels. The greater number of Jeff's recordings appeared on Randy Woods' Dot label that was based in Gallatin, Tennessee before it had attained much prestige (that came from Pat Boone's rise to fame). At the time, phonograph platters were not of much consequence to one who was doing well. Big Jeff also appeared in a couple of movies, A Face in the Crowd and Wild River. In the former film, he played a husky sheriff named "Big Jeff Bess," in the latter he sang "In the Pines." In March 1960, Tootsie and Jeff took over the lease of a club, Mom's Place, on Nashville's Lower Broadway. The club name changed to Tootsie's Place, and, finally, to Tootsie's Orchid Lounge after a decorator painted the exterior a vivid purple.
He died at the age 77 in Davidson, Tennessee due to complications from diabetes.
(Edited from Hillbilly Music & The Tennessean)
Willie Ruff (September 1, 1931 – December 24, 2023) was an American jazz musician, specializing in the French horn and double bass, and a music scholar and educator, primarily as a Yale professor from 1971 to 2017.
Willie Henry Ruff Jr. was born in Sheffield, Alabama. He was one of eight children, and his father left the family before Willie was a year old. His mother died from tuberculosis when he was 13.Willie then went to live with his father and attend high school in Evansville, Indiana. In 1946, at age 14, he lied about his age, forged his father's signature, and joined the Army on the expectation of developing a career as a drummer. When the band had too many percussionists and the horns were the weakest section, Willie volunteered to learn to play the horn. He learned on his own from an Oscar Franz method book, practicing in the boiler room.
When Willie was 16 years old and playing in the band at segregated Lockbourne Air force Base near Columbus, Ohio, he started taking lessons from Abe Kniaz, first horn in the Columbus Philharmonic Orchestra. He discovered that he had been using incorrect fingerings and soon improved his technique, musical knowledge, and other knowledge under Kniaz's guidance. It was while stationed at Lockbourne that Willie met his future duo partner, Dwike Mitchell, who recruited Ruff to play bass with his unit band for an Air Force radio program. Ruff continued to study orchestral horn, and attended the Yale School of Music as an undergraduate (Bachelor of Music, 1953) and graduate student (Master of Music, 1954). He then joined Lionel Hampton's band, with which Mitchell was already playing, and the two musicians left to form a duo in 1955.
Together as the Mitchell-Ruff Duo, they played as "second act" to artists such as Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie. From 1955 to 2011, the duo regularly performed and lectured in the United States, Asia, Africa, and Europe. The 1959 Mitchell-Ruff Duo was the first jazz band to play in the Soviet Union. In 1966 they accompanied President Lyndon Johnson to Mexico, and the following year they made a film in Brazil which traced the African roots of Brazilian music. Ruff was chosen by John Hammond to be the bass player for the recording sessions of Songs of Leonard Cohen, an album first released in 1967. During those sessions, he and Cohen laid down the bed tracks for most of the songs on the album.
Ruff was a faculty member at the Yale School of Music from 1971 until his retirement in 2017, teaching music history, ethnomusicology, and arranging. Ruff's classes at Yale, often with partner Dwike Mitchell, were free-flowing jam sessions: roller-coaster rides through the colours of American Improvisational Music. The duo could play in the style of most notable jazz artists and related styles. They had a large repertoire. Ruff was founding Director of the Duke Ellington Fellowship Program at Yale, a community-based organization sponsoring artists mentoring and performing with Yale students and young musicians from the New Haven Public School System. The program was founded in 1972 as a "Conservatory Without Walls" to "'capture the essence and spirit' of the tradition of African-American music". By its 30th anniversary in 2002, the program had reached an estimated 180,000 students in New Haven schools.
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| The Duo in China |
From 1976 to 1977, he held a visiting appointment at Duke University, where he oversaw the jazz program and directed the Duke Jazz Ensemble. In 1979, with the scientist John Rodgers, he recorded a realization of Harmonices mundi. He was also on the faculty at UCLA and Dartmouth. The Mitchell-Ruff trio played in China in 1981. Ruff was one of the founders of the W. C. Handy Music Festival in Florence, Alabama. The first festival was first held in 1982. In 1983 Ruff recorded as an unaccompanied soloist in St. Marks basilica in Venice. He was fluent in eight languages, and his unusual talents as both a performer and a teacher have helprd to make jazz accessible to audiences throughout the world.
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| Mingus, Ellington & Ruff |
In 1992, Ruff published his memoir, titled A Call to Assembly: The Autobiography of a Musical Storyteller. The autobiography was hailed as "an unmitigated delight" and was awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. Ruff was a 1994 inductee of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame. In 2000, he received the Connecticut Governor's Arts Award for his work with the Duke Ellington Fellowship Program. In May 2013, he was awarded the Sanford Medal. The Sanford Medal is the highest honour from Yale University's School of Music.
Ruff was known for uncovering links between traditional black gospel music and unaccompanied psalm singing. Ruff's theory was that the Scottish Presbyterian practice of lining out, in which a precentor read or chanted a line of the psalm, which was then sung by the congregation, led to the call and response form of black gospel music. Ruff co-created the documentary "A Conjoining of Ancient Song", which focuses on a rapidly vanishing form of congregational singing that is shared by Scottish, African American, and Native American music. It received its world premiere screening at Yale in 2013. Ruff's work in this area was also a subject of Sterlin Harjo's 2014 documentary film, This May Be the Last Time.
Throughout his time with the duo, Dwike Mitchell maintained a residence in New York City and a parallel career teaching piano there. In 2012, after becoming ill, he returned to his native South, spending his last months in Jacksonville, Florida where he died on April 7, 2013, of pancreatic disease. Ruff retired from teaching at Yale in 2017. A year later, the university bestowed on Ruff an honorary doctorate. He died at his home in Killen, Alabama on December 24, 2023, at the age of 92.
(Edited from the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, The Horn Society & Wikipedia)
Caroline Paton (31 August 1932 -18 March 2019) was a singer of traditional and contemporary folk songs with a bright, beautiful voice; an amazing recall of lyrics; and a talent for harmony, also a co-owner of Folk-Legacy Records.
Caroline Ann Swenson was born with a sight-impairment. She grew up in Whiting, Indiana, near Chicago and first became intrigued by folk music at summer camps where she was a counsellor. By the time she started college, her interest in folk music was well-established. Caroline studied for two years at Oberlin College before transferring to the University of Chicago, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology. Wanting to experience the western United States, Caroline took a job at the University of California library in Berkeley, California, at the same time exploring ways to pursue her interests in literature, music and anthropology.
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She met her husband Sandy Paton, at a concert in 1957 after she asked him for lyrics to the song he had performed that night. Sandy had already noticed her in the front row as she was harmonizing with his singing. They connected immediately over their love of folk music, and sang that song together for many years. Later, they travelled in England performing in London clubs, studying British folk music, and listening to recordings at Cecil Sharp House. They took a trip to Scotland with their 9-month-old son David to spend time with Jeannie Robertson, a renowned ballad singer from Aberdeen, Scotland, and Hamish Henderson of the School of Scottish Studies.
After returning to the States, they established the label Folk-Legacy in 1961 with a friend Lee B. Haggerty. It was an independent record company which introduced many voices of the East Coast folk revival, such as Gordon Bok or Rosalie Sorrels, as well as artists of the older generation, including the Kentucky singer Sarah Ogan Gunning and the North Carolina banjo player and singer Frank Proffitt.
Over the next 50 years, Caroline and Sandy brought music and joy to thousands through performances, special gatherings, and sales of the traditional and contemporary folk recordings they produced. As performing artists and in keeping with the folk tradition, the Patons encouraged the audience at their own concerts to sing along on choruses and be active participants in the folk music experience. She and her husband sang together for many years before being joined by their musical sons and singing grandchildren. Folk-Legacy’s home-based operation and music was featured in the New York Times in 1981.
Caroline and Sandy’s Folk-Legacy sales booth was a steadfast presence at the Old Songs Folk Festival, the New England Folk Festival, and historically at the Champlain Valley Folk Festival. The Patons were given the honorary designation of Connecticut State Troubadours in 1993. Caroline and Sandy also received awards and accolades from the California Traditional Music Society, the Memphis Dulcimer Festival in Tennessee, the Folk Alliance, and the Eisteddfod Festival of Traditional Arts in Massachusetts.
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Sandy Paton who was born in Florida, USA on 22 January 1929, later suffered from emphysema which required that he was constantly connected to oxygen. He died in Sharon, Connecticut USA on 26 July 2009. In November 2018, Caroline sold Folk-Legacy to the Smithsonian Institution. After living in a Connecticut nursing home for a year she died on 18 March 2019 at the age of 86.
(Edited from The Berkshire Edge & Discogs)
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Chuck Miller (30 August 1924 – 15 January 2000) was an American singer and pianist who had a US top ten hit in 1955 with his version of "The House of Blue Lights".
Charles Nelson Miller was born in Wellington, Kansas, United States, and little is known of his early life. One of four children, he learned to play piano as a child and by the mid 1940s had become a professional musician in the Los Angeles area, alongside other singer/pianists such as Nat Cole and Charles Brown. He became friendly with saxophonist Big Dave Cavanaugh and formed a bond with Cavanaugh's bass-player, Robert Douglass, who would become instrumental in helping Miller form his own trio for personal appearances and became the group's chief arranger as well as playing the bass. They began touring as the Chuck Miller Trio in the late 1940s, but California was awash with similar groups and record deals were hard to come by.
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| Dave Cavanaugh |
Chuck Miller began recording for Capitol with Cavanaugh's band and the first singles, released in 1953-54, were firmly in the MOR pop and novelty moulds, heavily inspired by Miller's twin influences of Bing Crosby and Dean Martin. Chuck's third release however was a cover of Wade Ray's "Idaho Red" - a hillbilly truck-driving song written by a real truck driver, Frank Kauzlaric. Wade Ray's original recording had been in the western swing style, but Miller's more urbane arrangement sold well too and caused Capitol to swiftly scour their stockpile of unissued tracks for a lively follow-up. Chuck's self-penned "Hopahula Boogie" had been cut by the trio in a break from the usual orchestral fare and, although it wasn't a big seller, it set the style for much of what Miller would produce in the next few years.
In early 1955 Chuck Miller left Capitol for a new recording contract with Mercury Records. His debut with the label paired his own classy pop song, "Can't Help Wonderin'", with the hip revival of Freddie Slack's old swing-era classic "The House of Blue Lights" - both arranged by Robert Douglass - which would soon prove to be his most successful single. It did so well during the summer of 1955 - spending 14 weeks on the Best Seller chart, peaking at #9 - that Capitol Records rushed out a fifth single from their stockpile, but the sides remaining with his debut label were a bit corny compared to what Miller was then laying down for Mercury.
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| Chuck Miller Trio |
Having proven his success with cover versions, Mercury next had Chuck cover Bobby Lord's jaunty country rocker, "Hawk-Eye" written by Boudleaux Bryant, which they paired with another solid Miller-penned ballad "Something To Live For". The single was nowhere near as successful as the first, so for the follow-up they decided to expand the sound of the Chuck Miller Trio to include horns and the resulting single was quite spectacular, with another rocked-up swing-era classic, Gene Krupa's "Boogie Blues" coupled with an eldritch novelty full of voodoo symbolism called "Lookout Mountain". The latter was so unusual that RCA's chief A\&R executive, Steve Sholes, sent the record to the young singer he had just signed (but not yet recorded) to consider for his upcoming debut session. Sadly, as far as is known, Elvis never recorded the appealingly sinister song written by one Seymour Lazar, even though "Heartbreak Hotel" had been cast from the same mould.
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By 1956, due mainly to that boy Elvis, rock 'n' roll was running rampant and Miller was now teamed in New York City with Hugo Peretti's small studio orchestra to sample the charts and run the gamut from the out-and-out motor-head madness of "Bright Red Convertible", the Tennessee Ernie-like "Baltimore Jones", the MORish "Good Mornin' Darlin'" and the bubbly "Baby Doll", the latter composed for the controversial Elia Kazan film of the same name. Hugo Peretti also arranged Chuck's fine cover of Leroy Van Dyke's country novelty hit "The Auctioneer", which gave him his only other taste of national chart success when it peaked at #59 on the Hot Hundred in December 1956.
On another occasion in Chicago in 1956, with support provided by David Carroll's orchestra, Chuck covered Bob Temple's King rocker "Vim Vam Vamoose" (which alludes to Presley and "Heartbreak Hotel") and the minor rock 'n' roll classic "Cool It Baby!" which had been featured by The Treniers in the movie "Teenage Rebel" and would achieve celluloid rock excellence with Eddie Fontaine's version in the mighty "Girl Can't Help It" movie later in the year. During that year Mercury honoured Chuck with his first LP; an album called Songs After Hours With Chuck Miller (Mercury LP MG-20195), on which he and his trio indulged their love of swing-era music ("I Can't Give You Anything But Love", "Cow Cow Boogie", "September In The Rain", etc.) as well as cutting loose with a couple of breakneck eponymous rockin' boogies and a very nice version of "Re-Enlistment Blues", famous for the rendition by Merle Travis in the 1953 Columbia film From Here To Eternity.
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Chuck Miller's swansong for Mercury Records was another old Freddie Slack boogie woogie classic from the early 1940s. Miller's pounding version of "Down the Road A-Piece" was backed by an energetic take on "Mad About Her Blues". Inexplicably, like his previous releases, the single went nowhere and he was dropped by Mercury at the end of his contract, but was swiftly snapped up by California-based Imperial Records where he cut a variable LP called Now Hear This! Songs Of The Fighting 40s.The Imperial deal seems to have contracted for just one album and subsequently Chuck Miller faded into obscurity. He and his trio had a residency in Boise, Idaho for a while, before Miller moved to Anchorage, Alaska, did a stint playing piano in The Sage Room at Harvey's Lake Tahoe, and later to Maui where he played at The Whale's Tale for many years. He later retired to Hawaii where he lived in Lahaina, Maui. He died aged 75 in the Maui Memorial Hospital on 15th January 2000, where a very modest obituary appeared in the local Honolulu Star Bulletin newspaper, in which he was described as a “self-employed entertainer”.
(Edited from This Is MY story \& Wikipedia)
