Jesse James born 3 October 1943

Jesse James (born October 3, 1943) is an American soul singer who had several minor US hits from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and has continued to record since then. 

James Herbert McClelland was born in El Dorado, Arkansas, but in one interview he gave his home state as nearby Louisiana. His singing ability was recognizable at an early age where he sang alongside his mother in church. While still a toddler, his family relocated to California. After literally singing his way through school he accepted his first professional singing engagement at The Makesmo, a popular Richmond nightclub whilst in his late teens. He was given his stage name Jesse James by a compere who struggled to announce his real name. During his early years as a singer, Jesse had a job at a local chemical factory. 

                                   

Initially credited as Jessie James, he recorded several singles in the early 1960s on the Shirley label before moving to the Hit label where some of his recordings featured guitar by Sly Stewart (later Sly Stone). His first commercial success came in 1967 when one of his recordings for Hit, "Believe in Me Baby", was reissued by 20th Century Fox Records, and reached No. 42 on the Billboard R&B chart and No. 92 on the Pop chart. The song was credited to Jesse James & the Dynamic Four, was produced by Jesse Mason Jr., and was co-written by James with Sugar Pie DeSanto, Shena Demell, and Jesse Anderson. 

Later recordings for 20th Century Fox, to which he was signed by Hosea Wilson, failed to chart, but he released a self-titled LP on the label in 1968, also produced by Mason. After one single on Uni, he set up his own label, Zea, distributed by Roulette Records. His first single for the new label, the self-penned "Don't Nobody Want to Get Married", reached No. 18 on the R&B chart in 1970, and its follow-up, "I Need You Baby", reached No. 47 R&B. After Zea's distribution deal ended, he re-launched the label as Zay, and had another R&B hit (No. 25) with his version of "At Last", arranged and produced by Willie Hoskins and previously a hit for Etta James. In 1974, he returned to the 20th Century label, and the following year had a minor R&B hit (No. 73) with "If You Want a Love Affair". 

He continued to record for various labels through the 1970s and 1980s, and his final chart success came in 1987, when "I Can Do Bad By Myself", on the TTED label, reached No. 61 on the R&B chart. He released one album on TTED, It Takes One to Know One (credited as Mr. Jessie James), followed by several on Gunsmoke, for whom he signed in 1988. His first album on Gunsmoke, I Can Do Bad by Myself (1988), included a collaboration with Harvey Scales, and was followed by Looking Back (1990). 

He has continued to release albums on Gunsmoke, including Operator Please Put Me Through (1993), It Just Don't Feel the Same (1997), Versatility (1998), It's Not So Bad After All (2006), Get in Touch with Me (2009), Do Not Disturb (2012), and I Lost My Baby on Facebook (2014). Now well into his seventh decade this most resilient and enduring performer, has never been one to let the grass grow under his feet. He still performs live shows and is actively writing, producing and recording fresh new material. 

He is sometimes confused with the Philadelphia songwriter and record producer Jesse James, who wrote "Boogaloo Down Broadway" for the Fantastic Johnny C and "The Horse" for Cliff Nobles. 

(Edited from Wikipedia, Soulwalking, Doul Junction Records Soundclick)

 

George Siravo born 2 October 1916

George Siravo (October 2, 1916 - February 28, 2000, Medford, Oregon) was an American composer, arranger, conductor, saxophonist, and clarinetist. 

Cliquot Club Eskimos

Siravo was born in Staten Island, New York and began learning the clarinet at an early age, and by the early 1930s, he had begun working professionally. Once of his earliest gigs was as a member of Harry Reser's Cliquot Club Eskimos, an ersatz Dixieland band that was one of the first groups to gain fame through radio. Percussionist Harry Breuer was another Cliquot Club alumnus. 

Glenn Miller's Band 1937 

Through the 1930s and into the early 1940s, Siravo wandered from band to band, playing with Jan Savitt, Charlie Barnet, Will Hudson, and Artie Shaw. He played in Glenn Miller's first band appearing on the 1937 recording "Community Swing" and joined Gene Krupa in 1938, when Krupa left Benny Goodman. He eventually quit the road in favor of working on the staff of the radio show, "Your Hit Parade." Siravo's first exposure to Sinatra was while the two were both working on the show, and Sinatra put him on retainer for his next radio show, "Frank Sinatra in Person." 

He joined the staff of Columbia Records in 1947, and when Sinatra and Columbia producer Mitch Miller decided to do an entire album of uptempo numbers, Siravo was their first choice. Sinatra later said of Siravo, "He's one of the untapped arrangers, I feel. He's a very fresh style guy, he's just fine." Unfortunately, both Sinatra and Miller got cold feet about a whole album of dance tunes, particularly since Sinatra's pipes were about to go due to an unrelenting schedule of radio shows, four club sets a night, and studio work, and a number of Siravo's arrangements went unrecorded. 

Siravo attributed a lot of Sinatra's technique to the lessons he learned from jazz musicians. "Frank would hang out with the real hip instrumentalists, guys that could do anything you asked them to do. That's where Frank got it, from the trombones and trumpets and clarinets and saxophones." He also appreciated Sinatra's approach to studio work: "He was so flexible... He was the guy who could walk between raindrops without getting wet." 

                                   

He did most of the arranging for Sinatra's first album after winning the Oscar for "From Here to Eternity," but Capitol Records ended up giving the credit to Nelson Riddle. For years, Siravo nursed a grudge about being cheated of the credit, but Riddle later passed on his apologies through Tony Bennett, and told Bennett that much of what he learned about writing for a singer without getting in his way he owed to Siravo. And when Riddle did the arrangements for Sinatra's tour of Australia in 1959, he brought in Siravo to handle the orchestration. Siravo tried to keep Sinatra in perspective and "never let him mold me." 

George Siravo

He claimed that attitude led to Sinatra's dumping him around 1961. Sinatra called Siravo in New York and invited him to come join a golf tournament in Las Vegas. Siravo had a heavy schedule of studio work and told Sinatra, "You gotta be kidding, I'm busy." Sinatra replied, "I'll send my jet." Siravo told him, "You're out of your mind." "That was the last time I ever talked to him," Siravo later told a reporter. Sinatra was not the only singer to credit Siravo for a hit. Songwriter Sammy Cahn said Siravo was the reason Doris Day's 1950 single, "It's Magic," became a hit, and he helped Tony Bennett with one of his most successful albums and singles, Who Can I Turn To?. He also worked with Vic Damone, Jimmy Rosselli, Connie Boswell, and Rosemary Clooney. 

Siravo recorded under his own name only intermittently. His best-known album, Swingin' in Studio A is a fine example of big band arranging and top-notch studio engineering and is the sort of thing audio engineering legend Henry Kloss probably had in mind when he said that the best demonstration of his pioneering headphones was "a great big band album written for stereo and recorded with top studio musicians and engineers." It may not be as splashy as an Esquivel album, but in its own way, it may be more representative of space age pop as a whole. He also recorded a showcase album for Time, Seductive Strings that featured Doc Severinsen on trumpet. His personal favorite may have been an obscure album of small ensemble, chamber music-influenced jazz recorded for Kapp Records, Polite Jazz. 

Siravo and his wife retired to Oregon in 1983, picking out the town of Medford from a map. "It's close to California, how different can it be?" he later explained. He died from natural causes at his home in Medford on February 28, 2000 at the age of 83 years. 

(Edited from Spaceagepop)

Richard Harris born 1 October 1930

Richard St John Francis Harris (1 October 1930 – 25 October 2002) was an Irish actor and singer. Having studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, he rose to prominence as an icon of the British New Wave. He received numerous accolades including the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor, and a Grammy Award. In 2020 he was listed at number 3 on The Irish Times's list of Ireland's greatest film actors. 

The notion of Richard Harris as a popular singer would have seemed an absurdity to anyone who knew his work in 1967, ten years into his career. In less than a year from that time, however, Harris would be the most popular actor-singer in the history of popular music, with a gold record to his credit and radio play that rivaled the Beatles. 

The son of a miller, Richard Harris was educated at the Sacred Heart Jesuit College, and later studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. His stage debut took place in 1956, and he made his first film appearance in 1958 in Alive and Kicking, a British film. He appeared in key supporting roles in big-budget movies like The Guns of Navarone and Mutiny on the Bounty (where he outshone Marlon Brando's Fletcher Christian), but it was his performance in This Sporting Life (1963) which propelled him to a major international career. 

For most of the mid-'60s, Harris was among the most visible of British (or, more properly, Irish) actors in international cinema, alongside the likes of Michael Caine and Sean Connery, although he seldom played starring roles; Cromwell (1970) was such a rarity, but it was A Man Called Horse that same year that turned him into a popular culture icon, and yielded two sequels over the next 13 years. 

It was his performance as King Arthur in Warner Bros.' 1967 screen version of Lerner & Loewe's musical Camelot that made people begin to think of Harris as a singer. 

As directed by Joshua Logan, the movie was monumentally long and sluggish, but Harris proved an electrifying presence and revealed himself as a better actor-singer than Rex Harrison, who had done the role on Broadway and on the original cast album. To a great extent, Harris talked his songs in a manner similar to Harrison, but he also put a lot of an actor's performance into the material, so that one swore it was an attractive singing voice that one was hearing. The soundtrack album on Warner Bros. remained in print for decades, and was more profitable than the movie itself. 

                                   

A year later, he was approached by his friend, songwriter Jimmy Webb, with a proposed epic-length pop project, and Harris agreed to record it. The recording was eventually placed with Lou Adler's Dunhill label, and the song "MacArthur Park," clocking in at seven-and-a-half minutes, rose to number two on the American charts and shattered AM radio's established prohibition against playing singles of greater than three-and-a-half minute-length. The accompanying album A Tramp Shining was one of the great pop LPs of the '60s, a sophisticated and extraordinarily well-produced concept album (which owed a considerable debt to Sgt. Pepper's) to rival any of Sinatra's efforts in that direction. 

Harris continued working in movies  but he also found himself in demand as a recording artist. He did a second album with Webb writing and producing, The Yard Went on Forever, which may have been an even better collection of material even though it didn't sell nearly as well or yield any hits. His subsequent records included My Boy and The Richard Harris Love Album (which pulled some of the best romantic numbers from his previous records), and well into the early '70s, three years after it had been on the charts, Harris was still prevailed upon to perform "MacArthur Park" during his talk-show appearances. 

Harris' acting career remained strong right into the end of the '70s, including very well-received performances in Juggernaut (1974), Robin and Marion (1976), and The Wild Geese (1978), although these were counterbalanced by starring roles in popular junk movies like Orca (1977), sort of the equivalent of Michael Caine's work in movies like The Island and Blame It on Rio, which made a fortune but made everybody in them look more than a little foolish at the time. 

Harris' health deteriorated during this period, a result of his well-publicized heavy drinking and other fast-lane activities. He withdrew from most public activities during the early '80s, gave up drinking, and spent years recovering his health on a strict dietary regimen -- he also rediscovered religion in the process, and pursued a writing career, publishing poetry and a novel. Harris re-emerged in movies during the early '90s as the star of an acclaimed drama entitled The Field, directed by Jim Sheridan, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. Harris was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease in 2002 and died of that ailment the same year on October 25 at University College Hospital in London. 

(Edited from AllMuisc & Wikipedia)