Marion Worth born July 4, 1930

Marion Worth (July 4, 1930* - December 19, 1999) was an American country music singer professionally known as "Lady" Marion Worth, for her dignified manner and soft, melodic voice. She was a popular performer on the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee during the 1960's and early 1970s.

Born Mary Ann Ward, she was the daughter of a railroad worker who taught her to play piano. She won a local talent contest for five weeks straight as a 10-year-old, but did not then plan on pursuing a career in music. Instead she prepared for a nursing career at the Paul Hayne School. While there she continued to perform in talent contests, sometimes joined by her sister. A local record company hired her as a bookkeeper and she began to set her sights on singing professionally.

Ward made her radio debut on Dallas, Texas' KLIF-AM. She then returned to Birmingham and worked at WVOK-AM and WAPI-AM. She also appeared on WAPI-TV (Channel 13). During that time she met Happy Wilson, leader of the Golden River Boys. He became quite impressed with her singing and brought her with him to Huntsville to perform on WBHP-AM. He and Slim Lay brought her into the recording studio and scored a hit with her first single.

                                 

"Are You Willing, Willie?" was Worth's own composition. It was released as the flip side of a cover of Wilson's "This Heart of Mine" on Huntsville's Cherokee Records in 1959. The track was picked up on radio and peaked at #12 on the country music charts. Her 1960 follow-up on Guyden Records, "That's My Kind of Love" reached #5 and brought her to the attention of Nashville's Jack Stapp, who signed her on to appear on WSM-AM's "Friday Night Frollic" as well as to Columbia Records. She was named one of the Top Ten Most Promising Female Vocalists of 1960 by Cashbox magazine. 

Her first Columbia single, "I Think I Know", produced by Don Law and Frank Jones, peaked at #7 in 1961. It was followed by "There'll Always Be Sadness", which peaked at #21. She married Happy Wilson who by that time ran his own music company out of Nashville until Capitol Records hired him to manage their operations there. Worth's popularity waned for nearly two years until the song "Shake Me I Rattle (Squeeze Me I Cry)" brought her back to the Top 15 on the country charts and also crossed over into Top 50 pop music sales, earning radio play as an easy listening and Christmas tune due to its theme of toys and giving. Her cover of Ray Price's "Crazy Arms" also reached the Top 20 in 1963 and she joined the regular cast of the Grand Ole Opry before the year was out.

Three of Worth's 1964 releases broke the Top 40, "You Took Him Off My Hands (Now Please Take Him Off My Mind)" reached #33 and was followed by "Slipping Around" (a duet with George Morgan, #23), and "The French Song" (#25). She ended her Columbia years with the 1966 single "I Will Blow Out The Light" which peaked at #32. In 1967 Worth signed with Decca Records and provided them with two Top 100 singles, "A Woman Needs Love" (#64, 1967) and "Mama Sez" (#45, 1968). Worth's success on the country music charts waned after 1968. 

Her hobby was to study the history of the world, which she focused a lot of time on after her chart success faded away. However, Worth didn't stop performing. Her ability to change from sultry ballads to lively barn dance-type numbers made her a popular performer on the Grand Ole Opry, where she was deemed a singer’s singer, and she was one of the first country stars to play Carnegie Hall in New York. She continued to tour in the USA and Canada and, in later years, became a popular performer in various Las Vegas venues until her death. 

On Sunday, December 19, 1999, Worth died in Nashville, Tennessee at the Tennessee Christian Medical Center from complications of emphysema. She was 69 years old, and was survived by a daughter, Joyce.

(Edited from Wikipedia & Rocky52)(*Some sources give her birth year as 1935) 

Janette Carter born July 2, 1923

Janette Carter (July 2, 1923 – January 22, 2006), was the last surviving member of country's immortal Carter Family, championing the cause of traditional American roots music into the 21st century. 

Janette Carter was born in Maces Springs, Virgina and was the youngest daughter of A.P. and Sara Carter Jeanette learned autoharp from her mother and at age twelve began appearing with the Family who signed with RCA Victor producer/talent scout Ralph Peer in 1927. Over the course of classics like "Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow," "Keep on the Sunny Side," and "No Depression," the Carters introduced the pure, poignant harmonies and intricate melodies that would define country & western for decades to follow, establishing the trio as the most influential group in roots music history. 

Three Carter recording sessions took place in Charlotte. The first two were arranged by RCA Victor in May of 1931; the final session was undertaken in June of 1938 for Decca Records. Twenty-nine sides were recorded in all.Despite their commercial success A.P. and Sara Carter divorced in 1932. Seven years later, Sara married A.P.'s cousin Coy Bayes and relocated to California, taking her children with her. The year 1938 proved to be especially successful for the Carters. 

They were hired by Consolidated Drug Trade Products—the Chicago-based maker of Peruna tonic, Kolorbak hair dye, and Radio Girl perfume—and sent to Texas where they broadcast daily over high-wattage border radio stations just inside Mexico. The border stations reached much of North America and introduced the Carters to hundreds of thousands of new fans. By the late 1930s Jeanette and her bother Joe were regularly adding their voices to the Carter Family broadcasts on border radio and over WBT. Along the way she helped her father gather traditional tunes from rural singers. A. P. would write down the words and Janette would commit the tunes to memory. “She was my tape recorder,” A. P. is quoted as saying proudly.

A.P. & Sara Carter with Janette and Joe

When not broadcasting on border radio, Consolidated Drug brought the Carter Family back to powerful 50,000-watt WBT in Charlotte. A Charlotte Observer radio listing for June 1939 indicates that the Carters were then broadcasting a “farm time” show with announcer Grady Cole each weekday morning, and a second half-hour program every afternoon. This schedule seems to have continued into early 1940 when the family returned to Texas for more broadcasts and transcriptions. Historians report that the family returned to Charlotte in late 1941 or early 1942 for a final six months of work for WBT. It was then that the Carter Family concluded its recording career, but in 1952 both A.P. and Sara agreed to a comeback, enlisting Janette and her brother Joe before signing to the Acme label to record some 100 songs over the next four years.  

                                  

Following her father's 1960 death, Janette, who was at the time an elementary school cook, dedicated her life to preserving their music and legacy, hosting informal music programs at A.P.'s Poor Valley, Virgina, retail store. Although she never earned the commercial or critical acclaim awarded her sister June Carter Cash, Janette also mounted a solo career, in 1972 releasing her debut LP, Storms Are on the Ocean, on the tiny Birch label. Howdayadoo followed on Traditional Records a year later. 

In 1976 she established the Hiltons, VA-based Carter Family Fold, a nonprofit amphitheater and museum site built from old railroad ties and school bus seats dedicated to the old-time music of rural Appalachia. Despite the Fold's strict adherence to traditional acoustic music, Janette eventually eased her restrictions in order to allow her brother-in-law Johnny Cash to play an electric set. 

She directed the centre and served as master of ceremonies and performer at the Saturday night shows, often accompanied by her brother Joe. She toured in the United States and abroad, appeared on radio and TV and was recognized as a living musical treasure. But by all accounts she remained an unaffected country woman who called everybody, including former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, “honey.”

Carter told a Washington Post reporter in 1989 that a visitor to the center had once asked her what she was striving for. “That’s when it hit me,” she said. “I’m not striving for anything. I’ve reached it.” Carter continued hosting weekly concerts at the Fold into her eighties, and in 2004 the Bear Family label assembled Deliverance Will Come, compiling the entirety of her slim solo output. For a long time she battled Parkinson's disease and other illnesses, then after a fall she was taken to the Holston Valley Medical Center, Kingsport, Tennessee,  where she died on January 22, 2006 at the age of 82 years.

She was 82 years old. She was buried next to her mother, Sara Carter Bayes, and her brother, Joe, at the Mount Vernon United Methodist Church Cemetery in Maces Spring.

Carter is a recipient of a 2005 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States' highest honour in the folk and traditional arts, in recognition for her lifelong advocacy for the performance and preservation of Appalachian music.

(Edited from AllMusic, Wikipedia, History South & Masters of Traditional Arts)

Willie Dixon born July 1, 1915

Willie Dixon (July 1, 1915 – January 29, 1992) was a well-known American blues bassist, singer, songwriter, and record producer. He wrote or co-wrote more than 500 songs.

William James Dixon was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on July 1, 1915. He was one of 14 children. His mother, Daisy, often rhymed things she said, a habit her son imitated. At the age of seven, young Dixon became an admirer of a band that featured pianist Little Brother Montgomery. He sang his first song at Springfield Baptist Church at the age of four. Dixon was introduced to blues when he served time on prison farms in Mississippi as a young teenager. Later in his teens, he learned to sing harmony from a local carpenter, Theo Phelps, who led a gospel quintet, the Union Jubilee Singers, in which Dixon sang bass; the group regularly performed on the Vicksburg radio station WQBC. He began adapting his poems into songs and even sold some to local music groups.

Dixon left Mississippi for Chicago in 1936. A man of considerable stature, standing 6 feet 6 inches tall and weighing over 250 pounds, he took up boxing, at which he was successful, winning the Illinois State Golden Gloves Heavyweight Championship (Novice Division) in 1937. Around 1939, he became a professional boxer and worked briefly as Joe Louis's sparring partner, but after four fights he left boxing in a dispute with his manager over money. Dixon met Leonard Caston at a boxing gym, where they would harmonize at times. Dixon performed in several vocal groups in Chicago, but it was Caston that persuaded him to pursue music seriously. Caston built him his first bass, made of a tin-can and one string. Dixon's experience singing bass made the instrument familiar. He also learned to play the guitar.

The Big Three Trio

In 1939, Dixon was a founding member of the Five Breezes, with Caston, Joe Bell, Gene Gilmore and Willie Hawthorne. They recorded eight numbers for the Bluebird record label. The group blended blues, jazz, and vocal harmonies, in the mode of the Ink Spots. Dixon's progress on the upright bass came to an abrupt halt with the advent of World War II, when he refused induction into military service as a conscientious objector and was imprisoned for ten months. He refused to go to war because he would not fight for a nation in which institutionalized racism and racist laws were prevalent. After the war, he formed a group named the Four Jumps of Jive. He then reunited with Caston, forming the Big Three Trio, which went on to record for Columbia Records. On the road, they are a huge success on a circuit that takes in the Mid-West and the northern states.

                                  

Dixon signed with Chess Records as a recording artist, but he began performing less, being more involved with administrative tasks for the label. By 1951, he was a full-time employee at Chess, where he acted as producer, talent scout, session musician and staff songwriter. He was also a producer for the Chess subsidiary Checker Records. His relationship with Chess was sometimes strained, but he stayed with the label from 1948 to the early 1960s. During this time Dixon's output and influence were prodigious.

From late 1956 to early 1959, he worked in a similar capacity for Cobra Records, for which he produced early singles for Otis Rush, Magic Sam, and Buddy Guy. In 1956, Dixon wrote "Fishin' in My Pond", which was recorded by Lee Jackson, and released on Cobra in February 1957. His double bass playing was of a high standard. He appears on many of Chuck Berry's early recordings, further proving his linkage between the blues and the birth of rock 'n' roll. He records his first LP in 1959, Willie's Blues, for the Bluesville Record label and in 1960 he provides Howlin' Wolf with the songs 'Wang Dang Doodle', Back Door Man', 'Spoonful' and 'The Red Rooster'. During this time his output and influence was prodigious. Indeed, he once claimed "I am the blues." This may seem a little arrogant, but there is no doubt that he was one of the major influences on the genre, through his original and varied song writing, live performances, recording, and copious production work.

From the late 1960s until the mid-1970s, Dixon ran his own record label, Yambo Records, and two subsidiary labels, Supreme and Spoonful. He released his 1971 album, Peace?, on Yambo and also singles by McKinley Mitchell, Lucky Peterson and others. In 1977, unhappy with the small royalties paid by Chess's publishing company, Arc Music, Dixon and Muddy Waters sued Arc and later Dixon founded his own publishing company, Hoochie Coochie Music. Dixon's health increasingly deteriorated during the 1970s and the 1980s, primarily as a result of long-term diabetes. Eventually one of his legs was amputated. Dixon was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980, in the inaugural session of the Blues Foundation's ceremony. In 1982 he set up the Blues Heaven Foundation to aid young musicians. He had bypass surgery in 1987 and in 1989 he received a Grammy Award for his album Hidden Charms.

Dixon died of heart failure on January 29, 1992, in Burbank, California. His body was carried by a horse-drawn hearse through where he grew up. He was buried in Burr Oak Cemetery, in Alsip, Illinois. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 and also inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015.

(Edited from Wikipedia & Discogs) 

Ann Gilbert born June 30, 1933.

Ann Gilbert (June 30, 1933 - October 25, 2012) was an American Jazz-pop singer from the 1950s.

Born Ann Elizabeth Gilbert she began singing in church at the age of four, and by ten, she was a regular on the radio program Young America Sings. She acted and sang in summer stock musicals and seemed destined for a career in classical music when jazz beckoned. Gilbert studied classical music at Lindenwood College for Women in St. Charles, MO. 

                                 

She began improvising at the piano and preferred experimenting with music rather than the formality of classical study. Gilbert began singing in clubs, working as her own accompanist, and began building a reputation at clubs in Indianapolis and Chicago.

In 1956, she got her big chance to record when she was signed to Groove Records by a talent scout passing through Chicago. The result was her first album, The Many Moods Of Ann, on which she was accompanied by the Elliot Lawrence Orchestra. Pianist and bandleader Elliot Lawrence also did the arrangements; her accompanists included Al Cohn on tenor sax and clarinet; Hal McKusick on alto, clarinet, and flute; Sam Marowitz on alto and clarinet; and Osie Johnson on drums. She went on to do a second album, where she had much more artistic freedom, In A Swingin' Mood. 

After her marriage to producer / director Stuart Ostrow in 1957, she had her daughter, Julie Elizabeth, and retired from professional singing. She went on to adopt Katherine Ann and John Stuart. Throughout her children's childhood, she taught at every school and church that they were enrolled in. 

Ann went on to coach at The University of Houston in Texas, where many a frustrated classical singer would sneak into her studio and be schooled on the great American Songbook. She died after a heroic battle with aspiration pneumonia on October 25, 2012 (79 years of age).

(Scarce information mainly edited from Discogs) 

Leonard Lee born June 29,1935

Leonard Lee (June 29,1935 - October 23,1976) was an American R&B singer, who came to prominence as one half of 1950's duo, Shirley and Lee.

Shirley Goodman and Leonard Lee were bororn ten days apart, they met when they were children, and both of them sang in their Baptist church in New Orleans. They were discovered by studio owner Cosimo Matassa, who heard Goodman and Lee as part of the Joseph Clark High School singing group when they were thirteen years old. Matassa got Aladdin Records owner Eddie Messner interested in pairing them as a duo, and New Orleans veteran producer Dave Bartholomew produced their first recording, “I’m Gone,” in 1952, and backed the teenaged singers with many of the most skilled session musicians in New Orleans at the time, including saxophonists Alvin “Red” Tyler, Herb Hardesty and Lee Allen, bassist Frank Fields, and drummer Earl Palmer.

                                  

“I’m Gone” climbed to No. 2 on the rhythm and blues charts in 1952. The record contrasted Goodman's soprano with Leonard's baritone. This success was followed by a string of other duets, including “Shirley, Come Back to Me,” “Shirley’s Back,” and “The Proposal,” backed with “Two Happy People.” These songs gave Shirley and Lee their stage name, and each new release continued the saga of these presumed teenage sweethearts, which added to the duo’s popularity, though they were never romantically involved.

In their early songs, they pretended as if they were sweethearts and were dubbed "the Sweethearts of the Blues". Still just teenagers when they found success, Goodman's grandmother chaperoned her while they toured with Big Mama Thorton as her opening act. Nightclubs often stopped serving alcohol when they performed due to their age. Although both Shirley and Lee sang, theirs was often a call-and-response style rather than a two-part harmony.

Flagging sales prompted Shirley and Lee to change their song topics, starting with “Feels So Good” in 1955. In 1957 they released their most popular song, the anthem “Let the Good Times Roll,” which sold over a million copies and was awarded a gold disc. The song was considered too suggestive by many radio stations, and they banned it from their airwaves. Although a follow-up single, "I Feel Good". also made the charts. The duo's later releases were less successful, and the pair moved to the Warwick label in 1959, followed by Imperial Records in 1962. The duo never equalled their biggest hit, and broke up in 1963.

Leonard made some subsequent solo records with little success. In the mid 1960's Goodman moved to California, where she worked as a session singer on records by Sonny & Cher, Dr. John and others, and also formed a duo for a time with Jesse Hill. She sang backing vocals on the Rolling Stones' Exile On Main Street album, but then briefly retired from the music industry.

On October 15,1971 Shirley & Lee were reunited for one show only at the Madison Square Garden in New York City. The playbill included musicians of the early rock era, including Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Bobby Rydell.

Lee eventually returned to school, earned a degree in social work, and worked for a government poverty agency as a social worker. He died of a heart attack in New Orleans on October 23,1976 aged 40, and was buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery and Mausoleum in New Orleans. In 1994, Shirley suffered a stroke and moved back to California to live with her son. She died there at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles on July 5th of this year. She was 69 years old.

(Edited from Discogs & WBSS Media)

Jimmy Mundy born June 28, 1907

James Mundy (June 28, 1907 – April 24, 1983) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist, composer and One of the finer arrangers of the swing era, Jimmy Mundy never became a big name to the general public, but musicians of the era certainly knew who he was.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Mundy began developing his arranging skills in the 1920s while playing with local bands led by Erskine Tate, Tommy Miles, and Carroll Dickerson. In 1932 he wrote and sold a few arrangements to Claude Hopkins, and at about the same time joined Earl Hines' famous "Grand Terrace" ballroom band in Chicago. Hines hired him originally as a saxophonist, for whom he worked over the course of the next four years. During this period Mundy developed a reputation as a prolific arranger in the emerging "swing" style and began writing and selling arrangements to other bandleaders in order to supplement his income.

                                  

Late in 1935, Goodman and his band worked their way east to Chicago where they began their historic six-month booking in the Joseph Urban room of the Congress Hotel. After selling one of his arrangements to Goodman, Goodman hired Mundy on a full-time basis. Until 1938, Mundy became one of Goodman's principal staff arrangers, joining Spud Murphy and Fletcher Henderson. From the moment he was hired, it was Mundy upon whom Goodman relied to create up-tempo "flag-waving" musical numbers. Mundy's list of "killer-dillers" include the 1936 (revised) version of "Bugle Call Rag", "Jam Session" (an original composition by Mundy), and the band's 1937 adaptation of "Ridin' High". Mundy was adept at arranging standard popular tunes: "You Turned The Tables On Me" (1936) and "And the Angels Sing" (1939).

Jimmy & Dorothy Mundy

When Gene Krupa left the band in 1938, Mundy left shortly after as well to write for Krupa's new outfit, although he continued to contribute scores to Goodman on a free-lance basis. He briefly led his own band in 1939. Throughout the 1940s Mundy supplied a significant number of original compositions and arrangements to Count Basie (ca. 1940 to ca. 1947), Artie Shaw (1944–45), Dizzy Gillespie (1949), Harry James, Charlie Spivak, Paul Whiteman and many others. He wrote the score to the 1955 Broadway musical The Vamp which starred Carol Channing. The 1957 musical Livin' The Life and the 2010 dance revue Come Fly Away also used some of his music. In 1959, he moved to Paris, where he was musical director for Barclay Records. He returned to the U.S. in the 1960s and continued with his active career as a writer into the 1970s.

Jimmy Mundy led relatively few sessions: a small-group date in 1937, four songs by his short-lived orchestra in 1939, a few existing broadcasts of his 1946 Los Angeles band, and he led two obscure Epic albums during 1958-1959.

Mundy died of cancer at Roosevelt Hospital, New York City at the age of 75.

(Edited from People Pill, AllMusic & Wikipedia)

Johnny "Big Moose" Walker born June 27, 1927

 Johnny "Big Moose" Walker (June 27, 1927 – November 27, 1999) was an American Chicago blues and electric blues pianist and organist. 

John Mayon Walker was born in the unincorporated community of Stoneville, Mississippi, partly of Native American ancestry. He acquired his best-known stage name in his childhood in Greenville, Mississippi, derived from his long, flowing hair. He learned to play several instruments, including the church organ, guitar, vibraphone and tuba. Although Walker was primarily a piano player, he was also proficient on the electronic organ and the bass guitar (he played the bass guitar when backing Muddy Waters). He recorded solo albums and accompanied other musicians in concert and on recordings.

He began his musical career as a pianist, in 1947, touring with various blues bands and backing such notable artists as Ike Turner, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Elmore James, Lowell Fulson and Choker Campbell. Walker served in the United States Army from 1952 to 1955, serving during the Korean War. In 1955 he recorded several more or less obscure singles for Ultra, Age and The Blues under variants of his name such as Moose John or Big Moose. "I got the name because of the length of my hair," he explained. "People said I looked like a moose." 

                                 

These recordings were unsuccessful, but Walker started working more consistently in the mid-1950s, notably backing Earl Hooker and Elmore James. Walker moved to Chicago in the late 1950s and over the next decade accompanied Sunnyland Slim, Otis Rush, Muddy Waters (for whom Walker played bass guitar), Ricky Allen, Little Johnny Jones, and Howlin' Wolf. In 1960, he accompanied Junior Wells on his best-known recording, "Messin' with the Kid". The following year Walker played on James's recordings of "Look on Yonder Wall" and "Shake Your Moneymaker". In 1962, Walker played on Waters's recording of "You Shook Me". During the 1960s, a couple of obscure Chicago-based record labels, Age and The Blues, released Walker's solo singles.

By 1969, Walker had rejoined Earl Hooker and played on the latter's album Don't Have to Worry (ABC Bluesway). After Hooker's death in 1970, Walker played backing for Jimmy Dawkins, Mighty Joe Young and Louis Myers. His debut album, Ramblin' Woman, was issued in 1970 by ABC. He provided piano accompaniment on Andrew Odom's album Farther on the Road and on If You Miss 'Im...I Got 'Im, by John Lee Hooker, featuring Earl Hooker.

In December 1979, Willie James Lyons played guitar on Walker's album, Going Home Tomorrow. Alligator Records used Walker's playing on their Living Chicago Blues series of recordings. He toured Europe in 1979 with the Chicago Blues Festival. In 1982 he made a memorable trip to New Zealand where he ended up living in a native Maori village. With his long grey hair, white beard and exuberant manner he was an arresting figure, and Maori audiences particularly took to him. He became venerated as a member of the tribe. 

His second album, Blue Love, was released in 1984. He later toured in New Zealand and Canada. He recorded with Son Seals and performed at the Burnley Blues Festival, in England, in 1991. Walker had a stroke prior to this engagement, and subsequent strokes left him unable to perform. Evidence Music reissued Blue Love in 1996, with five bonus tracks.

Walker lived in a nursing home in Chicago before his death, at the age of 72, in November 1999. The Killer Blues Project placed a headstone for Walker at the Oakridge Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois, in 2021.

(Edited from Wikipedia)