Woody Guthrie born 14 July 1912

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie ( July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) was an American singer, songwriter, and composer widely considered to be one of the most significant figures in American folk music. His work focused on themes of American socialism and anti-fascism and has inspired many generations both politically and musically with songs such as "This Land Is Your Land" and "Tear the Fascists Down". 

Guthrie, the third of five children, was the son of a onetime cowboy, land speculator, and local Democratic politician who named him after Pres. Woodrow Wilson. His mother, who introduced her children to a wide variety of music, was thought to be mentally ill and was institutionalized when Guthrie was a teenager. Her erratic behavior was actually caused by Huntington disease, a hereditary neurological disorder about which little was known at the time and which would later afflict Guthrie too. The family lived near the relocated Creek nation in Okemah, Oklahoma, a small agricultural and railroad town that boomed in the 1920s when oil was discovered in the area. The effect on the town and its people of the decline that followed the boom sensitized the young Guthrie to others’ suffering, which he had also experienced firsthand through the calamities that befell his splintering family. 

Soon after his mother’s institutionalization, Guthrie began “rambling” for the first time, coming to love life on the road. Though he often left Okemah to travel during his teens, he always returned to continue his high school education. At age 19 he relocated to Pampa, Texas, where he married Mary Jennings, with whom he had three children. When the Great Depression deepened and drought turned a large section of the Great Plains into the Dust Bowl, making it impossible for Guthrie to support his family, he again took to the road. 

Like so many other displaced people from the region (collectively called “Okies” regardless of whether they were Oklahomans), he headed for California, playing his guitar and harmonica and singing in taverns, taking odd jobs, and visiting hobo camps as he traveled by freight train, hitchhiked, or simply walked westward. In Los Angeles in 1937, he landed a spot performing on the radio, first with his cousin, Jack Guthrie, then with Maxine Crissman, who called herself Lefty Lou. At that time Guthrie began songwriting in earnest, giving voice to the struggles of the dispossessed and downtrodden while celebrating their indomitable spirit in songs such as “Do Re Mi,” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” and“Dust Bowl Refugee.”

                                    

Guthrie’s politics became increasingly leftist, and by the time he moved to New York City in 1940 he had become an important musical spokesman for labor and populist sentiments, embraced by left-leaning intellectuals and courted by communists. In New York, to which he had brought his family, Guthrie became one of the principal songwriters for the Almanac Singers, a group of activist performers—including Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Cisco Houston—who used their music to attack fascism and support humanitarian and leftist causes. 

Woody & Marjorie

In 1941 Guthrie made his first recordings, with folklorist Alan Lomax, and traveled to the Pacific Northwest, where a commission to write songs in support of federal dam building and electrification projects produced such well-known compositions as “Grand Coulee Dam” and “Roll On Columbia.” Back in New York after serving as a merchant marine during World War II, his first marriage having ended in divorce, Guthrie married Marjorie (Greenblatt) Mazia, a Martha Graham Dance Company dancer with whom he would have four children (including son Arlo, who would become an important singer-songwriter in his own right in the 1960s). 

As the political tide in the United States turned conservative and then reactionary during the 1950s, Guthrie and his folksinger friends in New York kept alive the flame of activist music making. He continued writing and performing politically charged songs that inspired the American folk revival of the 1960s, at the head of which were performers such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Phil Ochs, who came to pay homage to Guthrie in his hospital room in New Jersey, to which he was confined beginning in 1954, after his increasingly erratic actions were finally and correctly diagnosed as the result of Huntington disease. 

Increasingly unable to control his muscles, Guthrie was hospitalized at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris County, New Jersey, from 1956 to 1961; at Brooklyn State Hospital (now Kingsboro Psychiatric Center) in East Flatbush until 1966. By now he was unable to speak, often moving his arms or rolling his eyes to communicate. He was finally moved to Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens Village, New York, until his death on October 3, 1967. 

(Edited from Britannica & Wikipedia)

 

Don Ralke born 13 July 1920

Don Ralke (full name: Donald Edward Ralke) (July 13, 1920 – January 26, 2000) was an American music arranger, composer, and record producer, working for four decades in the Hollywood studio system in films, television, and pop recordings. Described by Gold Star Recording Studio co-owner Stan Ross as "the most well-known unknown in the business," he was a fixture of the Hollywood recording studio, overseeing a sprawling body of work extending from pop hits to golden-throat celebrity records to his own cult classic exotica LPs. 

He was born in Battle Creek, Michigan to Carl Henry Ralke and Maude Margaret Mueller. Ralke received his bachelor's and master's degrees in music from the University of Southern California, graduating with honors. He also studied with famed composer and Hollywood emigre, Arnold Schoenberg. 

Ralke spent the bulk of his early recording career as a staffer with the budget label Crown, which specialized in knock-offs of current chart trends. His contributions to the company's output are nevertheless coveted by collectors, boasting a uniform quality and oddball charm in direct opposition to Crown's signature cut-rate approach. Following the well-received Jazz Heat, recorded in collaboration with reedist Buddy Collette, Ralke issued Bongo Madness, the first in a series of percussion-themed efforts that eventually brought him to the attention of Warner Bros., which signed him for two 1960 releases: But You've Never Heard Gershwin with Bongos and the jungle exotica landmark The Savage and the Sensuous. 

                                   

On the bongos, Ralke collaborated with versatile flute and reed instrumentalist Buddy Collette on Jazz Heat, Bongo Beat. Warner Bros. hired him for Gershwin with Bongoes and The Savage and The Sensuous, which is widely regarded as one of the best jungle exotica albums of that era. During his Warner tenure, Ralke also teamed with composer Warren Barker on the jazz-inspired score for the television series 77 Sunset Strip, later the subject of a best-selling soundtrack LP, and also produced and arranged series co-star Edd "Kookie" Byrnes' novelty pop hit "Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb." 

Ralke performed similar duties for Hawaiian Eye star Connie Stevens when she recorded "Sixteen Reasons". He worked on hundreds of pop recordings and five other gold records, and formed his own production company in the late 1960s. His orchestra backed Sam Cooke on several 1959-1960 songs. Ralke also recorded two hits by Ty Wagner: "I'm a No Count" as well as "Slander". In the late 1960s, he formed his own record company. 

 Ralke is notorious for his involvement in a series of other so-called "golden throat" records performed by television and film stars seeking to cross over to pop music success; his credits include Lorne Greene's On the Ponderosa, William Shatner's camp classic The Transformed Man, and, most infamously, The Many Moods of Murry Wilson, headlined by the abusive father/manager of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. Ralke also helmed a number of pop smashes, highlighted by Jewel Akens' "The Birds and the Bees," and during the late '60s teamed with engineer Brad Miller for a series of easy listening LPs credited to the Mystic Moods Orchestra. 

In 1972, Ralke produced and orchestrated Bob and Dick Sherman's Grammy nominated musical film Snoopy Come Home. In the 1970s, he returned to television, working for producer Garry Marshall on the series Happy Days and its spin-off, Laverne and Shirley. He wrapped his Hollywood career by scoring the 1987 exploitation comedy Takin' It All Off. 

Ralke died on January 26, 2000, in Santa Rosa, California. 

(Edited from Wikipedia, All Music)

Wilko Johnson born 12 July 1947

John Andrew Wilkinson (12 July 1947 – 21 November 2022), better known by the stage name Wilko Johnson, was an English guitarist, singer, songwriter and occasional actor. He was a member of the pub rock/rhythm and blues band Dr. Feelgood in the 1970s. Johnson was known for his distinctive guitar playing style, which he achieved by not using a plectrum but playing fingerstyle. This enabled him to play rhythm guitar and riffs or solos at the same time creating a highly percussive guitar sound. 

Born John Wilkinson (which he inverted to come up with his stage name), Johnson grew up in the coastal Canvey Island area, and played around the local music scene during the '60s (often in jug bands). In 1965 Johnson bought his first Fender Telecaster guitar from a shop in Southend, Essex, for £90. He studied at Newcastle University beginning in 1967, but returned home during breaks to keep up his musical activities. After graduating, he travelled overland to India before returning to Essex to play with the Pigboy Charlie Band in 1971. 

Dr. Feelgood

This band evolved into Dr. Feelgood, and Johnson quickly became one of their focal points thanks to his maniacally intense stage presence. Dr. Feelgood played locally for a couple of years and made their debut in London in the summer of 1973; their distinctively scruffy image and menacing energy soon made them a hot commodity on the pub rock circuit. The band released its debut album, Down by the Jetty, in 1975; Johnson stayed for two more studio albums (Malpractice and Sneakin' Suspicion) and the chart-topping live document Stupidity, contributing a number of fine original songs. However, tensions between Johnson and the rest of the group led to his departure toward the end of 1977. 

                                   

Johnson soon formed a backing band called the Solid Senders, which featured keyboardist John Potter, bassist Steve Lewins, and drummer Alan Platt. They signed to Virgin in 1978 and released the LP Solid Senders that year. The following year, Johnson joined Ian Dury's Blockheads, where he remained until 1980; there he met bassist Norman Watt-Roy, who later became a regular collaborator. In early 1981, Johnson released his second album, Ice on the Motorway, and two years later issued the EP Bottle Up and Go! with Lew Lewis; several small-scale LPs, mostly for European labels, followed over the '80s: 1984's Pull the Cover, 1985's Watch Out!, and 1987's Call It What You Want. 

1988's Barbed Wire Blues was the first recording with his new regular group, the Wilko Johnson Band, featuring Watt-Roy and drummer Salvatore Ramundo. Ramundo was replaced in 1988 by Steve Monti (ex-Curve) for the Barbed Wire Blues tour and remained in the band -- which toured almost literally nonstop throughout Europe and Japan for the next decade -- until he tired of touring and was replaced by ex-Blockhead Dylan Howe. Johnson finally had the opportunity to release another album, Going Back Home, for Mystic. 

There was renewed interest in Johnson's career in the 21st century, due largely to director Julien Temple's Oil City Confidential, a documentary about Dr. Feelgood and Johnson. The film appeared on the festival circuit, where it drew rave reviews, as did the soundtrack. Johnson also gained fame as an actor, playing the fearsome executioner Ser Ilyn Payne on the popular fantasy drama series Game of Thrones. As a result, two volumes of The Best of Wilko Johnson were released in 2010, as well as a remastered reissue of Barbed Wire Blues. Following a 2011 tour on which he supported the Stranglers, 2012 saw Johnson publish his autobiography, Looking Back on Me. 

In early 2013, Johnson was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and announced that his televised performance on the show Madness Live: Goodbye Television Centre would be his last. However, the summer brought impromptu live appearances with Watt-Roy and Howe in Essex, and by the end of that November he had recorded an album of re-interpretations of material from his back catalog in collaboration with the Who's Roger Daltrey. Ahead of the release of Going Back Home -- not to be confused with the aforementioned Mystic album of the same title -- Johnson performed it in its entirety with Daltrey at a packed Shepherd's Bush Empire in London toward the end of February 2014. 

Later that year, after undergoing surgery that removed a tumor weighing three kilograms, Johnson revealed that he was cancer free, and returned to music, performing regularly and releasing the album Blow Your Mind in 2018. In 2016 he published the memoir Don’t You Leave Me Here. He also became the subject of a second documentary by Julien Temple, The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson. 

Wilko Johnson died at his home on November 21, 2022, only two months after his final concert appearance. He was 75 years of age. 

(Edited from AllMusic & Wikipedia)

 

Francine Reed born 11 July 1947

Francine Reed (born July 11, 1947, in Pembroke Township, Illinois, United States) is an American blues singer, solo artist, and regular singing partner of Lyle Lovett since the 1980s and member of Lovett's Large Band. Reed has also recorded duets with Willie Nelson and Delbert McClinton and others. 

Reed’s career was cemented on the foundation of a musically rich family. Her father was a gospel singer and her sister Margo Reed became a noted jazz singer. As the youngest of six siblings, Reed began performing at the age of five as a member of the family’s gospel group. In her twenties she relocated to Phoenix, Arizona, and began singing at nightclubs alongside her sister Margo. 

While in Phoenix, Reed set the standard by which other local talent was judged. She often performed as the opening act for such headliners as Miles Davis, Etta James, Smokey Robinson, and the Crusaders. Widely known for her powerful voice and commanding stage presence, she sang an eclectic repertoire of jazz, blues, and rhythm and blues. 

Making the acquaintance of Texas musician Lyle Lovett, who was virtually unknown at the time, in a Phoenix nightspot proved beneficial for Reed. In 1985 she began touring as a background vocalist and occasional duettist for Lovett, whose records would soon receive Grammy Awards and enjoy gold and platinum sales. Reed’s tenure with Lovett included duet appearances on many television shows, including The Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Reed and Lovett performed together for forty years. 

                                    

In addition to singing with Lovett, Reed performed on Willie Nelson’s acclaimed album Milk Cow Blues (2000), lending her soulful voice to the title track as well as to the song “Funny How Time Slips Away.” She has contributed vocals to other musicians’ recordings as well, including those of Delbert McClinton and Roy Orbison. 

Reed demonstrated her musical prowess as a solo artist with several albums of her own after arriving in Atlanta. Her first solo album, I Want You to Love Me (1995), featured a duet with Lovett. The album peaked at number seven on Billboard’s blues chart and prompted the first of several W. C. Handy Award nominations for Reed. Her second album, Can’t Make It on My Own (1996), features a duet with McClinton. In 1997 Reed was inducted into the Arizona Blues Hall of Fame, and her third record, Shades of Blue (1999), met with critical acclaim. 

Reed is perhaps best known for her performances of the classic blues song "Wild Women (Don't Get the Blues)", written in 1924 by Ida Cox. A recording of this song appears on Reed's albums, I Want You to Love Me, and Blues Collection; as well as on Ichiban Records Wild Women Do Get the Blues and Lyle Lovett's Live in Texas. 

In 2001 following the demise of Ichiban Records, which left her first two records out of print and unavailable, Reed and longtime collaborator Marvin Taylor re-recorded some of her best material live in the studio and released the results as I Got a Right!...To Some of My Best. 

In 2014 she was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. In 2016 she moved back to Phoenix and prior to her “retirement from touring in 2022”, she appeared with her bands Jazz Alive and Fever at venues such as The Boojum Tree, Chuy’s and Chuy’s Next Door/The Night Club, Churchill’s Pub and Bombay Bicycle Club, plus numerous festivals and concert halls. But never fear, Francine fans, the singer is still performing when the mood — or the right offer introduces itself and can be still be found singing at the best local clubs and resorts in Phoenix. 

(Edited from New Georgia Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, Eldridge Atlanta & Joseph Berg)

 

Dave Kirby born 10 July 1938

Dave Kirby (July 10, 1938 - April 17, 2004) was an American BMI award winning singer/songwriter and session guitarist. Married to singer Leona Williams, he will be best remembered for writing one of the most popular songs in country-music history, "Is Anybody Goin' to San Antone?" 

Big Bill Lister with young Dave

David Carroll Kirby was born in Brady, Texas. He was a natural musician and took up the guitar while still a young boy,  encouraged by his uncle, legendary Hank Williams’s front man Big Bill Lister. Lister took Dave under his wing and first introduced him to songwriting and guitar playing at the age of eight. Dave moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1955. He landed a job at a local radio station playing country music. He was influenced by the music of Carl Smith, Mac Wiseman, Ernest Tubb and the guitar playing of Merle Travis. 

In time, he began composing his own songs with Buck Owens recording Dave’s first song “Down By the River”. Rose Maddox the cut the same song and shortly after Owens and Maddox recorded it as a duet. Johnny and Jonie Mosby and Porter Wagoner also added their vocals to Dave's compositions while he was living in New Mexico.“During the 1960’s, Willie Nelson used to come out to Albuquerque and he got me to go and play in the band,” Dave recalled in a 2000 interview. “Willie got to liking my songs, and I don’t remember how, but Hank Cochran got to liking them too. They both wrote me saying ‘Come to Nashville’ so in 1967, I made the big move.” 

Dave signed a writing contract with Pamper Music, which was owned in part by Ray Price. Other writers for Pamper at this time included Roger Miller, Harlan Howard, Nelson and Cochran. “I got a few things cut and then I wrote “Is Anybody Going To San Antone?” Dave said. “It has become my biggest hit, but it just lay there at the Pamper shelf for three years before it ever got cut.” Charley Pride heard the song in 1970 and it became a multi million selling single. 

                                   

In all Dave wrote in excess of 300 songs, many became hits for a host of entertainers including “Wish I Didn’t Have To Miss You” by Jack Greene and Jeannie Seely, “April’s Fool” and “You Wouldn’t Know Love” by Ray Price, “What Have You Got Planned Tonight Diana?” and “Sidewalks of Chicago” for Merle Haggard, “There Ain’t No Good Chain Gang” for Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, “Memories To Burn” for Gene Watson, “Where Are You Going Billy Boy?” for Bill Anderson and Mary Lou Turner, “Leavin’s Been Coming For A Long Long Time” for George Strait and “I’ll Go To A Stranger” for Johnny Bush.

Ray Charles, Moe Bandy, Norma Jean, Porter Wagoner, Johnny Russell, Texas Tornadoes, George Jones, Faron Young, Charley Walker, Johnny Rodriguez, Cal Smith, John Anderson, Kitty Wells, Razzy Bailey, Jo-El Sonnier, Curtis Potter, Hank Thompson and dozens more have recorded Dave's compositions. Dave began session work in Nashville during the early 1970’s. His first session was with Country Music Hall of Famer Granpa Jones. “Granpa walked in the studio and looked at me,” Dave recalled. “I had kind of long hair and the first thing he said was ‘Son, don’t play any of those hippie licks on my record’.” 

Dave & Leona Williams

Dave went on to have a very successful session career playing lead guitar for Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Janie Fricke, Ringo Star, Emmylou Harris, Don Williams, Kenny Rogers, Willie Nelson, Crystal Gayle, Wynn Stewart, Ray Price, Moe Bandy, Ronnie Milsap, Connie Smith and Kenny Price. Not only a successful writer and session player, Dave also contributed many vocal recordings of his own including “North Alabama” “Cantaloupe Jones” “The Rumor” “Cowboy Connection” and “Better Off When I Was Hungry.” Dave recorded for Boone, Capitol, Dimension and Monument Records.Dot Records released his album “Writer, Singer, Picker” in 1973. 

Dave married country music entertainer Leona Williams in 1985. The two entertained together throughout the country while still maintaining a heavy writing schedule and session work. “Dave Kirby never realized his importance in the country music community,” Brady, Texas, disc jockey Tracy Pitcox said. “Dave played on virtually all of the sessions leaving Nashville throughout the 1970’s and into the 1980’s. His songwriting is legendary. We were very honored to recognize Dave in his hometown for the last eight years during our ‘Dave Kirby Celebration’.” 

Dave just completed work on his first solo album in twenty years shortly before his death. “Is Anybody Going To San Antone?” contains ten of Kirby’s biggest writing successes and was released on Heart of Texas Records on May 15, 2004. Dave Kirby passed away at his Branson, Missouri, residence on Saturday, April 17, 2004, after a short illness. Kirby was diagnosed with multimyloma cancer in March of 2004.  (Edited from Hillbilly Hits)

Leonard Pennario born 9 July 1924

Leonard Pennario (July 9, 1924 – June 27, 2008) was an American classical pianist and composer. 

He was born in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in Los Angeles, attending Los Angeles High School. He remained in Los Angeles his entire career. He can hardly have known when, aged seven, he was taken to hear Rachmaninov in concert that he would be the first pianist after the composer himself to record all four Rachmaninov concertos and the Paganini Variations. He was seven, too, when he gave his first public performance in a Buffalo department store. 

He first came to notice when he performed Edvard Grieg's Piano Concerto at age 12, with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. The scheduled performer had fallen ill, and Pennario's piano playing had come to the attention of the conductor Eugene Goossens, who recommended him as the soloist after being assured by Pennario that he knew the work. In fact, he had never seen the music or even heard it, but he learned it in a week. The 2,000 strong audience at the Texas Exposition witnessed the beginning of an extraordinary career. He was  particularly proud that he hadn't had to miss school in the process. 

He studied with Guy Maier, Olga Steeb, and Isabelle Vengerova and attended the University of Southern California, where he studied composition with Ernst Toch. World War II interrupted his career, and he served in the U.S. Army Air Forces in the China Burma India Theater, where his piano skills were soon realized and served well entertaining troops of the Air Transport Command operation known as "The Hump". He occasionally had to play around keys missing from the keyboards of the pianos at a couple of the more remote bases. He was discharged in 1946 as a staff sergeant and was awarded three Battle Stars. He had, however, made his debut, in uniform, with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall on November 17, 1943, with Artur Rodziński, playing Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1. 

                                    

Shortly after Sergei Rachmaninoff's death, the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos invited Leonard Pennario to be the soloist at a memorial concert, playing the Second Piano Concerto with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. Pennario became the first pianist after the composer himself to record all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. His recording of the Rachmaninoff 2nd Concerto was used for the film September Affair (1950), in which Joan Fontaine plays a concert pianist preparing to play the concerto. 

Pennario recorded over 60 LPs, most of them of composers dating from Chopin and later. He is perhaps best known for championing certain modern composers such as George Gershwin, Rachmaninoff, Rózsa, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and Sergei Prokofiev. In 1958, he was tied with Walter Gieseking in terms of best-selling classical records involving the piano. In 1961 the violinist Jascha Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky invited Pennario to replace Arthur  Rubinstein in a series of concerts in New York and on the West Coast and for the next three years,  Pennario recalled, "Recording with them, getting ready with them, was the biggest thrill of my life."  They won a Grammy in 1963. 

When the classical division of Capitol went belly up in the early 1980s, it derailed Pennario's recording career, but it did not affect his standing in the concert world. In 1987 Pennario played a concert at Lincoln Center that was broadcast over PBS in observance of the 50th anniversary of Gershwin's death. Although Pennario's career was focused principally on the United States (he was the first pianist to  perform in all 50), where he appeared with every orchestra and conductor of note, he was also  heard widely abroad. In 1989 he was one of the first American pianists to play in Communist China,  and he returned two years later to play not the piano but bridge, winning an "Open Pairs" event in  Beijingin 1991. 

Bridge had been Pennario's main hobby since 1965, and he became a Life Master in 1980. When in  the late 1990s the onset of Parkinson's disease forced him to give up the piano, it became the  solace of his old age. His mentor had been Alfred Sheinwold, America's leading bridge columnist.  On Sheinwold's death in 1997, Pennario remembered his friend in a letter to the bridge press: "He had a fine tenor voice, and at our get-togethers he often sang lieder by Schubert and Brahms. I would accompany him and he in turn would partner me in tournaments. Each of us felt he had the better deal!" 

In October 2007 he was inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame. He died of complications from Parkinson's disease on June 27, 2008 at the age of 83, in La Jolla, California. 

(Edited from Wikipedia, The Independent & AllMusic)

Bill Challis born 8 July 1904

Bill Challis (July 8, 1904 – October 4, 1994) was an American jazz arranger, best known for his association with the Paul Whiteman orchestra. 

William H. Challis was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He played piano and then took up saxophone and later led the student band at Bucknell University in the early-1920s. In 1926 he joined Jean Goldkette’s band as staff arranger, and began a close association with Bix Beiderbecke that continued when both men joined Paul Whiteman’s band in 1927. Challis wrote some of Whiteman’s most jazz-oriented arrangements, including Lonely Melody, Changes, and Dardanella, giving Beiderbecke ample solo space and sometimes scoring his cornet improvisations for the trumpet section.

He also wrote excellent scores for smaller groups formed for recording sessions from Whiteman’s band and led by Frankie Trumbauer. Challis’s best work of this period reveals a tasteful synthesis of jazz and dance-band elements, a sure grasp of the new jazz style, and an awareness of the strengths of Whiteman’s and Goldkette’s musicians. “He was a pioneer in the art of arranging,” said Warren Vache Sr., a band leader and for 20 years, editor of the music journal, Jersey Jazz. “At the beginning of orchestrating for a swing ensemble, Bill put much more life in” arrangements, said Vache. 

Jean Goldkette

Norman P. Gentieu, a jazz historian in Philadelphia, interviewed Challis many times over the years; “I won’t say Bill invented it, but Bill was very influential in establishing the format of what became the big bands.” Newell “Spiegle” Willcox, the trombonist and last surviving member of the Goldkette Orchestra, recalled the innovations Challis brought to the group. “Bill allowed the soloist to show off with certain background riffs,” said Wilcox. “He used built-up chords. He was far ahead of who was arranging in those days.”  

While writing arrangements for the popular Whiteman Orchestra, Challis highlighted the full, baritone voice of Bing Crosby, propelling the singer’s career. After leaving Whiteman in 1930 Challis became a freelance arranger for, among others, Trumbauer, Fletcher Henderson, the Dorsey Brothers’ Orchestra, the Casa Loma Orchestra, Lennie Hayton, Artie Shaw, and a number of radio orchestras.  He also worked for network radio shows including his own show, “Bill Challis and His Music.” 

                                   

He recorded 25 transcription tracks in 1936 for World Records, for radio broadcast only, using the best studio men, such as Artie Shaw, trumpeter Manny Klein, trombonist Jack Jenny, guitarist Dick McDonough; these were issued on two Circle LPs '83 and later nearly all on one CD as Bill Challis And His Orchestra: the sound is that of a big studio dance band with strings, without much jazz content and without the élan of the Whiteman band at its best. He carried on writing for Fletcher Henderson, Lennie Hayton, Claude Hopkins, Jerry Wald and others into the '60s turning to popular music. 

In 1974 he arranged Beiderbecke’s piano compositions for guitar quintet. In 1985, he rewrote his original Goldkette charts (which had been lost) and his protégé, Vince Giordano, led a hand-picked band on a recording that included original Goldkette trombonist Newell Spiegle Wilcox. The subsequent album was titled “Bill Challis: The Goldkette Project.” 

“We were happy to be working,” recalled Giordano, who at age 13 became Challis first student. “He was never heady about it. He never had a big ego.” Despite his achievements and his place as a seminal figure in swing jazz history, Challis was relatively unrecognized. He died in October 1994, at the age of 90, in Luzerne, Pennsylvania. 

(Edited from Wikipedia & Times Leader & New Grove Dictionary of Jazz)