Gene MacLellan (February 2, 1938 – January 19, 1995) was a
Canadian singer-songwriter from Prince Edward Island. Among his compositions
were "Snowbird", made famous by Anne Murray, "Put Your Hand in
the Hand", "The Call", "Pages of Time", and
"Thorn in My Shoe". Elvis Presley, Lynn Anderson, Loretta Lynn, Joan
Baez, and Bing Crosby were among the many artists who recorded MacLellan's
songs.
Born in Val-d'Or, Quebec and raised in Toronto in a
church-going family, the shy but talented Gene MacLellan suffered polio and
other medical conditions in childhood. He began playing guitar at age 10 and
writing songs in his early teens. After joining Toronto’s nascent rock ‘n’ roll
scene, MacLellan dropped out of high school and played with local rock bands as
a guitarist and singer. In 1956, he co-founded the popular rock band The
Consuls (later known as Little Caesar and the Consuls) which opened for Ronnie
Hawkins, a powerful figure in Toronto’s early rock scene.
MacLellan’sperforming career was slowed by a 1963 car
accident that claimed the life of his father and left Gene with several
injuries, including facial scarring and an injured left eye. MacLellan left
Toronto to travel through Canada and the United States, working temporary jobs
before settling in Prince Edward Island in 1964, where he lived with his aunt
and worked as a farm labourer and a
psychiatric hospital attendant.
MacLellan continued to compose songs during this period, and
his songwriting took on a folk-country-gospel sound. He sent a demo tape to the
Charlottetown Festival and the popular CBC TV program Don Messer’s Jubilee,
which was taped in Halifax. His break came when he appeared on the show, first
as a guest and then regularly in 1966, introducing his original songs to a
national audience. It was here that MacLellan met Anne Murray, which proved to
be a turning point in both their careers. He then toured with Hal “Lone Pine”
Breau (father of noted jazz guitarist Lenny Breau), and was briefly a regular
on CBC Halifax TV’s Singalong Jubilee (ca. 1970).
Gene with Anne Murray
The success of MacLellan’s songs “Snowbird,” and “Put Your
Hand in the Hand” brought him to national attention as a songwriter. Over 100
performers, including Elvis Presley, Joan Baez, and Bing Crosby have recorded
"Put Your Hand in the Hand". In
1970, MacLellan released his own self-titled LP which was also released as
Street Corner Preacher in the United States. Recorded in Nashville, the album
produced the modest country hits “The Call” (a Top 20 hit on the RPM chart) and
“Thorn in My Shoe.” The same year, he also performed weekly with Anne Murray on
the CBC Radio show After Noon. MacLellan made concert appearances in 1971 and
1972, was a headliner at Toronto’s Riverboat club in 1972 and 1973, and gave a
concert at Massey Hall with The Bells as part of a 1972 cross-Canada tour.
Tiring of the demands of the music business and turning to
Christianity, he left music for five years. He gave away his money and possessions
and moved to Europe to perform missionary work, but by 1977 he was back in the
recording studio and released a second album, If It's Alright with You, which
included “Shilo Song,” a popular country duet with Anne Murray.
In 1979, he recorded Gene and Marty, an album of gospel
songs, with his fellow Prince Edward Islander Marty Reno. Devoted to his
Christian faith, he performed gospel and inspirational music only in small
noncommercial venues such as churches, prisons and nursing homes from 1980
until his death. He was also active in "Cons for Christ", a Christian
organization dedicated to the rehabilitation of prison inmates in Canada.
MacLellan suffered depression throughout his life and during
his later years, his condition worsened, leading to hospitalization at Prince
County Hospital in Summerside, Prince Edward Island. Shortly after his release
from the hospital, MacLellan commited suicide by hanging at his home in Summerside,
on January 19, 1995. He was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Country
Music Hall of Fame that year and in 1996 he was given the East Coast Music
Association's Dr. Helen Creighton Lifetime Achievement Award.
In 2017, MacLellan's daughter Catherine MacLellan presented
a show titled If It's Alright with You – The Life and Music of My Father, Gene
MacLellan that was described as "part theatre, part Island music history
lesson, and part mental-health awareness campaign". Her album If It's
Alright with You: The Songs of Gene MacLellan was released on June 30, 2017, by
True North Records
(Edited from The Canadian Encyclopedia, Wikipedia &
Knocking on Heavens Door)
Joseph Leslie Sample (February 1, 1939 – September 12, 2014)
was an American jazz keyboardist and composer. He was one of the founding
members of The Jazz Crusaders in 1960, whose name was shortened to "The
Crusaders" in 1971. He remained a part of the group until its final album
in 1991, and also the 2003 reunion album Rural Renewal.
He was born in Houston, Texas, the fourth of five siblings,
including an older brother who was to play in a band led by the blues
saxophonist Earl Bostic. Joe took up the piano at the age of five, and in high
school joined a trio called the Swingsters, which included the saxophonist
Wilton Felder and was led by the drummer Nesbert "Stix" Hooper. At
Texas Southern University, Sample discovered the trombonist Wayne Henderson,
the bassist Henry Wilson and the flautist Hubert Laws, and the now six-strong
group worked modestly around Houston in the mid-50s under the name of the
Modern Jazz Sextet.
It was a move by four of the members to Los Angeles at the
end of that decade that changed their fortunes, and – now calling themselves
the Jazz Crusaders – they recorded their debut album, Freedom Sound, for the
jazz label Pacific in 1961. Mainly playing in the punchy, soul-inflected
hard-bop style popular at the time (the state-of-the-art practitioners were Art
Blakey's Jazz Messengers, who inspired their name), the group added their own
kind of blues-rooted funkiness that many fans identified as a particularly
Texan ingredient. Catchy melodies played in sax/trombone unison and a coolly
understated rhythm-section touch also became their signature qualities.
Sometimes featuring a guitarist, they performed regularly on
the west coast and released several successful albums for Pacific. But then
they reduced their live schedule and concentrated on recording from 1968, when
Sample, Hooper and Felder began developing lucrative careers as session
musicians and Henderson became a producer.
Sample's session activity in those years included work for
pop stars such as Diana Ross and the Jackson Five, and he also appeared for the
classy west coast hard-bop quintet led by the saxophonist Harold Land and the
vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson. He toured with Joni Mitchell as a member of LA
Express (1973-74) and contributed to hits by Marvin Gaye, Tina Turner, Steely
Dan and BB King.
The rise of progressive rock in the 70s severely dented the
commercial appeal of conventional acoustic jazz, but the Crusaders' already
dance-friendly sound made them better suited to the change than most of the
era's jazz artists. Some canny modifications followed, notably with the arrival
of a gifted electric guitarist, Larry Carlton, in 1970. The lineup also adapted
to include electric bass and keyboards, and with the repertoire widening to
include Beatles hits, they sharply expanded their audience, not always to the
delight of the jazz cognoscenti.
Soon they had dropped the word "jazz" from their
name, and the 1971 album Crusaders 1, with four Sample compositions on its
tracklist, was noticeable for a more explicitly hard-hitting rock approach. The
high point of this Crusaders period was the 1979 single Street Life, written by
Sample and a fellow Texan songwriter, Will Jennings, as a vocal for the singer
Randy Crawford. It was a chart hit in the US and UK and still receives
considerable radio airplay.
The Crusaders' lineup changed periodically following
Henderson's departure to pursue a career in production in 1975. Sample and
Felder remained co-leaders, as well as sustaining busy freelance lives in the
studios – with Sample developing an increasingly personal sound on electric
instruments, as he tellingly displayed on Clavinet with the soul-saxist Ronnie
Laws on the 1975 club hit Always There.
Sample and Felder disagreed artistically and wound up the
band in 1988, and Sample then concentrated on the ideas he had been nurturing
since his leadership of the 1969 Fancy Dance session, a gospelly, bop-blues
trio he set up with the bassist Red Mitchell and the drummer JC Moses. This had
led to Carmel (1979) and several strings-accompanied early 80s albums under his
name, confirming that he remained a subtle refiner of familiar musical
materials and a piano soloist of percussive punch and delicate melodic
concision.
There were occasional Crusaders reunions, and in 2004 Sample
surprised his long-time fans with another solo album, Soul Shadows, in which he
revealed just how profound his jazz sensibility remained. In 2014, Joe Sample
was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a rare form of cancer. He sought treatment at the MD Anderson Cancer
Center in Houston, Texas, where he had relocated years earlier to be closer to
his roots and family.
Throughout his career, Sample maintained privacy
regarding his health challenges, including prior heart attacks in 1994 and
2009, focusing instead on his music without public disclosure of personal
medical details. He died in Houston, Texas, on September 12, 2014 at the age of
75. At the time of his death, Sample had been working on a project,
"Quadroon," with singer-songwriter Jonatha Brooke.
(Edited from John Fordham Obit @ The Guardian &
Wikipedia)
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