Intellect PlusMusicians and composers
1,494 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 20 of 25.
Why rock's hall of fame ended up beside Lake Erie in ClevelandWhen the rock hall went looking for a home, Memphis, Detroit and Philadelphia all had strong claims. Cleveland won by offering $65 million in public money and a history lesson: a …
Roger Daltrey built his first guitar and settled the Who's nameIn 1957 a London schoolboy carved himself a copy of a cherry red Stratocaster, then joined a skiffle group called the Detours. Seven years later, with another act already using th…
Rome's first written laws came from commoners demanding fair judgesEarly Roman magistrates applied unwritten custom however they liked. A plebeian tribune pushed to get the rules written down, and after eight years of struggle Rome produced the T…
Roy Orbison dyed his pale hair black long before the sunglassesThe black hair was never natural. As a shy kid in a dusty West Texas oil town, Roy Orbison was embarrassed by hair so pale it was nearly white, and he began dyeing it jet black wh…
The highest-grossing actor ever got his first big break in his thirtieth filmFilms featuring Samuel L. Jackson have taken more than 27 billion dollars worldwide, more than any other actor's. Yet he spent years as a stand-in, a night security guard and a st…
Every August, white petals fall inside a Roman basilica to recall summer snowLegend says snow fell on Rome's Esquiline Hill one August night in the fourth century, marking where the Virgin Mary wanted a church. The story surfaced only after the year 1000, …
Scarlett Johansson practised acting by staring into a mirror until she criedAs a small child in Manhattan, Scarlett Johansson rehearsed by gazing at her reflection until tears came, hoping to be Judy Garland. At seven she was crushed when an agent signed …
Paris spent a century and 1.4 billion euros making the Seine swimmable againSwimming in the Seine was banned in 1923 because the water was too dirty. By 1970 so much raw sewage poured in that only three fish species survived near Paris. Today more than 30…
Shirley MacLaine danced a whole ballet on a broken ankle before calling an ambulanceCast as the fairy godmother in Cinderella, young Shirley MacLaine snapped her ankle while warming up backstage. She laced her pointe shoes tighter, danced the entire performance, …
Shraddha Kapoor said no to Salman Khan at 16 because she wanted to be a psychologistBorn into one of Bollywood's busiest acting families, Shraddha Kapoor turned down a film offer from Salman Khan while still at school, planning to study psychology instead. She di…
Silesia holds the oldest known sentence ever written in PolishA region along the Oder River has belonged to Moravia, Bohemia, Poland, the Habsburgs, Prussia and Germany, and now lies mostly in Poland with slivers in the Czech Republic and Ge…
A music-school homework assignment launched the First Ladies of RapCheryl James and Sandra Denton met in a Sears lunchroom in Queens while training as nurses. A co-worker needed a song for his production class, so they recorded one. Radio listene…- Sam Cooke tried disguising his voice as Dale Cook and fooled nobodyGospel singers who crossed into pop risked scorn, so in 1956 Sam Cooke cut his first secular song under the fake name Dale Cook. His voice was too recognisable for the ruse to wor…
Sammy Davis Jr. began performing at two, billed as an adult to dodge the lawTo get around child labour laws, Sammy Davis Jr.'s father and godfather passed the tiny tap dancer off as a 44-year-old man of short stature. He had joined their vaudeville act at…
Before Wren's dome, Ludgate Hill carried a Gothic cathedral with a colossal spireChristopher Wren's dome, finished in 1710 and 365 feet high, stood as London's tallest building until 1963. It replaced Old St Paul's, a medieval giant whose spire reached roughly…
Stefan Zweig collected composers' manuscripts, including Mozart's handwritten catalogue of his worksIn the 1920s and 1930s few writers anywhere were translated more widely than Stefan Zweig. He was also an obsessive collector of autograph manuscripts, and the hoard his heirs gav…
Stephen Colbert picked the French-sounding pronunciation of his surname on moving to collegeStephen Colbert's family said KOHL-bert. His father preferred the French-sounding version but kept the old one out of respect and let his children choose; Stephen switched to kohl…
Aerosmith took its name from a word Joey Kramer doodled on his school notebooksWhen the young band sharing a house at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston needed a name, drummer Joey Kramer offered a word he had scrawled across his school notebooks. His bandma…
Before Simon & Garfunkel, two Queens teenagers had a minor hit as Tom & JerryAt 15, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel paid $25 to record a song called Hey, Schoolgirl in a Manhattan studio. Billed as Tom & Jerry, they sold more than 100,000 copies and played Am…
Smokey Robinson walked into Motown carrying a notebook of 100 high school songsAfter a failed audition for Brunswick Records in August 1957, a Detroit teenager showed Berry Gordy a notebook holding 100 songs he had written in high school. Gordy was impressed…
The do-re-mi scale takes its names from the opening syllables of a medieval hymnIn eleventh-century Italy, Guido of Arezzo noticed that each line of a Latin hymn to St John the Baptist started one step higher than the last. He named six notes after those firs…
Sombr taught himself production on GarageBand before TikTok made him a star at 19Shane Boose started layering harmonies in GarageBand at the end of elementary school. In March 2025, two of his songs, Back to Friends and Undressed, took off on TikTok and climbe…
Sonata form got its name decades after Haydn and Mozart had perfected itHaydn and Mozart wrote the model examples of sonata form in the late 18th century, yet no theorist of their day used that name. The textbook template came later, built by 19th-cen…- Stevie Wonder nearly quit music for Ghana, then made Songs in the Key of LifeIn March 1975 Stevie Wonder was seriously planning to leave the music business and move to Ghana to help disabled children. Instead he signed the biggest recording contract yet, v…
- The Band's name came from what Woodstock locals called themFor years they backed someone else: rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, then Bob Dylan when he went electric. Around Woodstock everyone just called them the band, so when four Canad…
- A freezing, broken-down tour bus led Buddy Holly to charter his final flightIn the winter of 1959 Buddy Holly's package tour zigzagged across the Midwest in buses whose heaters kept failing, during the coldest winter in 30 years. His drummer ended up in h…
Beethoven's Seventh premiered as a wartime charity gig and won an instant encoreIn December 1813 Beethoven conducted his new Seventh Symphony in Vienna to raise money for soldiers wounded at Hanau. The audience loved the slow-ish second movement so much they …
Fainting at the sight of blood may be an ancient trick for playing deadRoughly 15 percent of people react to blood, needles or injury by feeling faint. One evolutionary idea holds that collapsing once helped our ancestors survive attackers and slowed…
Talking Heads took their name from a TV Guide phrase: all content, no actionThree Rhode Island art students moved into a New York loft, opened for the Ramones at CBGB in June 1975, and borrowed their band name from TV slang for a head-and-shoulders shot. …
Country queen Tammy Wynette kept renewing her beautician's licence just in caseTammy Wynette sold an estimated 30 million records and put twenty singles at the top of the US country chart. Yet every year until she died she renewed her cosmetology licence, in…
Technicolor's first colour films needed a technician babysitting every projectorThe earliest Technicolor system of 1916 split each shot into red and green frames and demanded a special projector with two lenses and a prism that kept drifting out of line. Only…- The tenor got its name from holding the tune, not from singing highTenor comes from the Latin for to hold. In early church polyphony the tenor line carried a borrowed melody in long notes while other voices were built around it, and it was usuall…
- Tex Avery bluffed his way into directing and helped invent Bugs BunnyIn 1935 Tex Avery told producer Leon Schlesinger he was an experienced director. He later admitted he was nothing of the sort and had simply talked his way in. Within a few years …
Two lead guitars, two drummers: the Allman Brothers built Southern rock around jammingDuane Allman wanted a different kind of band, with two lead guitarists and two drummers. In 1969 he gathered them in Jacksonville, Florida, pushed his brother Gregg to sing his gu…- Super Bowl LX went three quarters without a touchdown, and Seattle still won 29–13In Santa Clara on February 8, 2026, the Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots 29–13 in a game with no touchdown until the fourth quarter. Seattle's Dark Side defense did …
- Mötley Crüe's drummer was born in Athens to a Miss Greece contestantTommy Lee, the drummer famous for playing inside a spinning, airborne drum kit, began life as Thomas Lee Bass in Athens. His father was an American army sergeant, his mother had c…
- The Prodigy took their name from a synthesizer scrawled on a mixtapeA dancer at an Essex nightclub asked the DJ for a mixtape. Liam Howlett handed back a cassette with his own tracks on the flip side and one word scratched on it, the name of the M…
Before My Girl, Motown insiders called them the Hitless TemptationsFor three years after signing with Motown in 1961, the Temptations released song after song that went nowhere, earning a cruel nickname. Then Smokey Robinson wrote a tune for the …
Thomas Tallis wrote church music for four Tudor monarchs who disagreed about GodHenry VIII broke with Rome, Edward VI pushed Protestant reform, Mary I restored Catholicism and Elizabeth I reversed course again. Thomas Tallis served them all at court, reshapin…
Disney fired Tim Burton for being too dark, then Hollywood hired him for exactly thatIn 1984 Disney let go a young animator whose short film about a boy reviving his dog seemed too frightening for children. Paul Reubens watched that same short and immediately want…
Tim Robbins turned down a million dollars and won Cannes insteadAround 1991 Tim Robbins was offered a million dollars to star in a comedy called Folks! He said no and took the lead in Robert Altman's The Player, playing a scheming studio execu…
Tina Turner got her big break because the booked singer never showed upIn 1960 Ike Turner booked studio time for a singer who failed to arrive. Rather than waste the money, a teenager from Nutbush, Tennessee, offered to sing the lead on a demo meant …- Tom Petty traded a slingshot for Elvis records after watching the King filmIn the summer of 1961 a ten-year-old from Gainesville, Florida, visited a film set in nearby Ocala where his uncle was working and saw Elvis Presley in person. Elvis glowed, Tom P…
- The Doors began with a chance beach meeting and one sung lyricOne July day in 1965, two former UCLA film students ran into each other on the sand at Santa Monica. Jim Morrison admitted he had been writing songs and sang a few lines about swi…
- Gilbert and Sullivan opened Pirates in New York to beat the real piratesThe title of The Pirates of Penzance hides a jab. After roughly 150 American companies staged H.M.S. Pinafore without paying a penny, Gilbert and Sullivan premiered their next ope…
The US Navy was disbanded after independence and revived to fight piratesIn August 1785 Congress sold off Alliance, the Continental Navy's last ship, because it could not afford to keep her. For nearly a decade the United States had no navy at all, unt…
UBC students marched through Vancouver to shame the government into building their campusIn 1922 more than 1,200 University of British Columbia students were crammed into makeshift quarters at Fairview, their promised campus unbuilt. So they marched through Vancouver,…
The Victorian era was really three different eras hiding under one long reignQueen Victoria reigned for 63 years and seven months, longer than any monarch before her, and that single stretch can make the period look uniform. The writer Michael Sadleir disa…- Before directing Gigi, Vincente Minnelli dressed shop windows at Marshall Field'sThe director of An American in Paris learned his eye for colour and mood arranging antiques in a Chicago department store window. Lester Minnelli later renamed himself Vincente, a…
- Bob Hope renamed Anthony Benedetto, and Tony Bennett sang for seven more decadesAnthony Benedetto was a Queens grocer's son who sang for tips as a waiter at 13. After Bob Hope shortened his name, Tony Bennett landed a number-one hit in 1951, and seventy years…
Trinity College, Cambridge exists because a queen talked Henry VIII out of closing collegesIn 1545 Henry VIII took the power to seize any college he liked. Catherine Parr persuaded him to build one instead, and he merged two old foundations into Trinity. Its members hav…- Twin Peaks returned after 25 years, and critics called it the decade's best filmTwin Peaks premiered on ABC in April 1990 as a small-town murder mystery and quickly became something stranger: a mix of detective story, soap opera and dream logic. Cancelled in …
Udmurtia's name probably means 'meadow people', a label recorded back in 1557West of the Urals, between the Kama and Vyatka rivers, lies a Russian republic named after a Finno-Ugric people whose ancestors may never have moved. Scholars consider the Udmurts…
Uma Thurman calls turning down Éowyn one of her worst decisionsScouts spotted Uma Thurman playing Abigail in a school production of The Crucible, and she left school to act. By 24 she had an Oscar nomination for Pulp Fiction, and Quentin Tara…
Umm Kulthum began singing hymns dressed as a boy and became Egypt's Fourth PyramidIn rural Egypt a century ago, girls were not supposed to sing in public, so Fatima el-Beltagi's father dressed her in boys' clothes when she performed hymns alongside him. As Umm …- Merle Haggard watched Johnny Cash play San Quentin from the inmates' seatsIn 1960 Johnny Cash played a concert at San Quentin, and one inmate in the audience, prisoner A45200, came away knowing what he would do once he got out. His name was Merle Haggar…
- Noah Webster's great dictionary flopped, then two brothers bought itNoah Webster spent two decades on his American Dictionary, learning 26 languages to trace word origins. Published in 1828 when he was 70, it sold just 2,500 copies and left him in…
Wu-Tang's contract let Method Man go solo first, and he made it countThe Wu-Tang Clan signed an unusual deal: every member could record solo albums for any label he liked. Method Man went first. His 1994 debut Tical entered the charts at number fou…- Macklemore reached number one without a record labelIn 2012 a Seattle rapper and his producer friend put out a jokey song about bargain-hunting in secondhand shops. Thrift Shop climbed to the top of the Billboard Hot 100, the first…
- Two brothers from Arran built the house that published Alice and NatureDaniel and Alexander Macmillan grew up on the Scottish island of Arran and opened a bookselling business in 1843. Within a few decades their firm had published Alice's Adventures …