Intellect PlusMusicians and composers
1,494 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 23 of 25.
Bobby Darin learned at 32 that his sister was really his motherBobby Darin grew up believing his grandmother was his mother and his mother was his older sister. The truth reached him in 1968, when he was 32 and weighing a political career, an…
Bharadvaja, the Vedic sage behind a yoga pose and a cow hymnYoga students who twist into Bharadvajasana are honouring a seer from India's oldest scripture. The family of poets that carried his name composed much of the Rigveda, including t…
Bill Evans doubted his own talent before helping make Kind of BlueBill Evans first learned piano by copying what he overheard during his older brother's lessons. Years later, after Army critics shook his confidence, he spent a year alone practis…
Billy Idol took his stage name from a school report calling him idleA chemistry teacher named Bill Price once wrote that young William Broad was idle. The pupil, who admits he hated the subject, turned the insult into a stage name, swapping the sp…
Before Congress, Bernie Sanders was asked to leave a Vermont communeIn 1971 a young writer visiting a Vermont back-to-the-land commune was told to go after three days. His offence was talking politics instead of doing farm work; one resident said …
Berry Gordy turned an $800 family loan into MotownBefore he built the most famous Black-owned record company in America, Berry Gordy was a high-school dropout boxer, an Army chaplain's assistant in Korea and the owner of a failed…
Bette Midler built her following singing in a New York bathhouseBette Midler's big break came in the basement of Manhattan's Ansonia Hotel, where in 1970 she sang to the patrons of a gay bathhouse with a young pianist named Barry Manilow. The …- Betty White wanted to be a forest ranger before television existedBetty White dreamed of becoming a forest ranger, but women were not allowed the job. Instead, a month after finishing high school in 1939, she sang on an experimental broadcast wh…
Beyoncé's first job was sweeping hair in her mother's salonAs a child in Houston, Beyoncé Knowles earned her first wages sweeping up hair at her mother's salon, sometimes singing for the customers. At seven she beat teenagers twice her ag…
The Hindu epic framed as advice to a king with seven days leftThe Bhagavata Purana opens with a death sentence. King Pariksit insults a forest sage, and the sage's son curses him to die of snakebite within seven days. The king retreats to th…
Barbra Streisand only wanted to act; singing was her way inA teenager from Brooklyn who dreamed of the stage, Barbra Streisand was told she was too unattractive to be a star and advised to fix her nose. She refused, sang instead, and even…
The most common male voice was lumped in with basses for centuriesMost men who sing are baritones, sitting between the deep bass and the bright tenor. Yet for hundreds of years opera houses barely recognised the voice as its own category. It too…
How three New York punks made the first chart-topping rap albumThe Beastie Boys started as a teenage hardcore punk band playing CBGB. A prank call to an ice cream shop became their first hip-hop track, a university student named Rick Rubin be…
The father of Czech music grew up barely speaking CzechBedřich Smetana gave his first public performance at six, wrote marches for the 1848 Prague uprising, and composed the river portrait known as The Moldau. He did much of his great…
A broken record turned three Gibb brothers into singersIn Manchester in December 1957, the young Gibb brothers were rushing to a cinema to mime along to a record when the brittle shellac disc snapped. Forced to sing live, they got suc…- A music school built for jazz when everyone else taught classicalIn 1945 an MIT graduate named Lawrence Berk quit his job at Raytheon and opened a small school on Newbury Street in Boston. Nearly every music school then trained classical player…
The composer of Sabre Dance had no musical training until he was eighteenAram Khachaturian arrived in Moscow in 1921 with no formal music education and enrolled at a music institute anyway, starting on the cello. Within fifteen years his Piano Concerto…- A fifteen-minute audition turned a small-town Ontario teenager into Avril LavigneIn November 2000, the head of Arista Records heard a 16-year-old from Napanee, Ontario, sing for a quarter of an hour and signed her on the spot: $1.25 million for two albums. Her…
Ann Wilson, Heart's operatic voice, first sang because a stutter kept her quietA shy teenager with a stutter found her outlet in music. Ann Wilson went on to front Heart, one of the first hard rock bands led by women, which has sold over 35 million records a…
Charlotte Brontë blocked a reprint of her sister Anne's boldest novelAfter Anne Brontë died at 29, her sister Charlotte decided which of her books lived on. She let Agnes Grey be reissued but stopped The Tenant of Wildfell Hall from being republish…
Antonio Banderas learned his first Hollywood lines phonetically, barely speaking EnglishWhen Antonio Banderas shot The Mambo Kings in 1992, he spoke so little English that he memorised his dialogue by sound. Critics praised him anyway. It was a long way from Malaga, …
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam missed becoming a fighter pilot by one placeOnly eight Indian Air Force pilot places were on offer, and the young engineer Abdul Kalam finished ninth. Missing his dream pushed him into rocketry instead. Decades later the ne…
Alex Jennings played Prince Charles, then the uncle who gave up the throneAlex Jennings is the only performer to win Olivier Awards for drama, musical and comedy. On screen he has become a specialist in royalty: Prince Charles in The Queen, the abdicate…
Alfred Molina's career began with one doomed guide and a lot of octopusesHis first time in front of a film camera lasted only minutes: a treacherous jungle guide who begs Harrison Ford to throw him the idol. Alfred Molina later called that job a gift f…
The 2001 fanfare ends a Strauss tone poem that refuses to pick a keyMost people know only its first minute, the blazing sunrise Stanley Kubrick used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Richard Strauss's 1896 tone poem runs about 33 minutes, draws on Nietzsc…
André Rieu turned the waltz into stadium entertainment, and critics still argue about itA Dutch violinist with a 1667 Stradivarius, André Rieu founded a twelve-piece waltz band in 1987 and grew it into a touring spectacle that fills stadiums. In Australia he outsold …
Angela Lansbury was cast as older villains at nineteen before becoming Jessica FletcherAt 17, Angela Lansbury was working a department store counter in Los Angeles for 28 dollars a week. Months later she had an MGM contract and an Oscar nomination. Then the studio s…- Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture officially lists a battery of cannons in its orchestraAlongside flutes, horns and violins, the score of the 1812 Overture calls for artillery. Tchaikovsky wrote it in about six weeks to mark Russia's defeat of Napoleon's invasion, an…
- Albert Bierstadt sold the American West to Europe with showman flairAlbert Bierstadt painted the Rockies and Yosemite on canvases so vast and theatrical that audiences bought tickets to see them. One sold in 1865 for $25,000, close to $400,000 in …
Scriabin wrote his first great sonata as a cry against GodTold by a doctor that his damaged right hand would never recover, the young pianist Alexander Scriabin poured his fury into a piano sonata he called a cry against God and fate. Th…
Six minutes of Like a Rolling Stone rewrote the pop singleIn 1965 Bob Dylan released a six-minute single that stretched what a hit song could be. Like a Rolling Stone sat beside albums that plugged folk into electric rock and unsettled f…- Island Records heard a rock rebel inside reggae's rhythmWhen the Wailers met Chris Blackwell in London, they meant to talk royalties. Island's Jimmy Cliff had just left, and Blackwell saw in Bob Marley the face that could carry Jamaica…
- A self-described non-musician coined ambient as ignorable musicBrian Eno wanted electronic pieces that were as ignorable as they were interesting. Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1979) named the genre and, for Pitchfork, defined its peak. The …
- Decca's misspelling permanently renamed Charles HolleyWhen Decca signed the Lubbock teenager, the contract wrote Holly instead of Holley. Charles Hardin Holley kept the typo as his stage name. Locked out of releasing the same songs u…
Azúcar became salsa's most recognizable shoutCelia Cruz sold more than thirty million records and earned the title Queen of Salsa, yet audiences still wait for one word: ¡Azúcar!—Sugar! The Cuban-born guaracha star carried A…
Eight decades at the piano, Chopin without peerArthur Rubinstein (1887–1982) played publicly for eighty years, from a child prodigy Joseph Joachim endorsed to a final Wigmore Hall bow at eighty-nine. Many held him peerless in …
A nineteen-year-old cellist seized the podium and never left itIn Rio de Janeiro in 1886, when a conductor quit hours before Aida and the crowd booed his replacement off the stage, Arturo Toscanini rose from the cello section, took the baton,…- Nadia Boulanger told him to stop hiding the tangoAstor Piazzolla almost abandoned the bandoneon for classical respectability. In Paris, Nadia Boulanger heard his earnest concert pieces, then lit up when he played the tango Triun…
Lucille was named after a fight he ran back into fire forIn Twist, Arkansas, a brawl over a woman named Lucille set a club ablaze. B. B. King escaped, then rushed back for his guitar. He named every treasured instrument Lucille afterwar…- Lester Young nicknamed her Lady Day; she called him PrezBillie Holiday sang as if she were another horn in the band—bending phrase and tempo the way improvising instrumentalists do. Tenor saxophonist Lester Young heard a shared mind on…
He bankrolled tape so radio could be edited like filmAfter seeing a German reel-to-reel recorder that John T. Mullin brought to America, Bing Crosby put fifty thousand dollars into Ampex to build copies. He then convinced ABC to let…
A horror film across the street renamed a blues band foreverIn Birmingham, a cinema opposite the rehearsal room was packing lines for Mario Bava's Black Sabbath. Bassist Geezer Butler wondered why people paid to be scared—then he and Ozzy …
ABBA’s divorce years rewrote their brightest popFour Stockholm musicians—Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, Anni-Frid Lyngstad—formed ABBA in 1972 and became one of history’s bestselling acts. At their peak they …- Eighteen-hour days forged a sarod master for the WestAli Akbar Khan’s father, Allauddin Khan, began lessons before dawn and could stretch them to eighteen hours. That Maihar discipline produced a sarod virtuoso who, invited to Ameri…
A school choir request launched a Broadway empireAndrew Lloyd Webber was seventeen when Tim Rice, twenty, became his lyricist. Their biblical pop cantata for a London school choir—paid a hundred-guinea Novello advance—grew into …
One Ipanema song helped a jazz album sweep GrammysAntônio Carlos “Tom” Jobim fused samba with cool jazz and helped invent bossa nova. His “Garota de Ipanema” has been recorded more than 240 times. When it anchored Getz/Gilberto i…- Atlantic, not Columbia, unlocked the Queen of SoulAretha Franklin left Columbia owing the label money when her contract expired in November 1966. Producer Jerry Wexler brought her to Atlantic and leaned into the gospel fire her f…
- Brewster-Douglass teens became Motown’s premier girl groupThe Supremes began in Detroit in 1959 as the Primettes—Florence Ballard, Mary Wilson, Diana Ross, and Betty McGlown from the Brewster-Douglass projects. They became Motown’s most …
Afeni named Tupac for global revolutionaries, not a block aloneTupac Shakur (1971–1996), also 2Pac and Makaveli, was born in East Harlem to Black Panther parents and raised by mother Afeni, who wanted a name tied to indigenous revolutionaries…
Tyagaraja composed Carnatic devotion across four Maratha reignsSaint-composer Tyagaraja (1767–1847), born Kakarla Tyagabrahmam in Thiruvarur, wrote the Carnatic repertoire still central to South Indian classical performance. He lived through …- Horowitz left Soviet Russia with dollars sewn into shoesVladimir Horowitz (1903–1989), Kiev-born pianist often ranked among history’s greatest, fled via Germany in December 1925—ostensibly to study with Schnabel, secretly packing curre…
Vysotsky’s gravel songs became the USSR’s unofficial diaryVladimir Vysotsky (1938–1980), Moscow-born singer-songwriter, poet, and actor, stamped Soviet culture with hoarse ballads of war, prisons, and everyday nerve. A wartime childhood,…- Okemah’s Dust Bowl bard wrote hundreds of people’s songsWoody Guthrie (1912–1967), named for Woodrow Wilson in Okemah, Oklahoma, became American folk’s touchstone. Dust Bowl Ballads fixed migrant hardship in song; Huntington’s disease,…
- Teresa Teng recorded seventeen hundred songs across eight tonguesTaiwanese singer Teresa Teng (1953–1995) dominated East and Southeast Asian pop for nearly thirty years. She cut more than 1,700 songs in Mandarin plus Hokkien, Cantonese, Shangha…
- Hawthorne’s Wilson brothers sold over a hundred million recordsThe Beach Boys formed in Hawthorne, California, in 1961 around brothers Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson, cousin Mike Love, and friend Al Jardine. Brian’s writing and studio craft d…
Four Liverpool players became history’s top-selling actThe Beatles—Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Starr—formed in Liverpool in 1960 and are widely called the most influential rock band ever. Estimated sales exceed 600 million units, unm…- Blues-obsessed Dartford teens outlasted six decades of rockThe Rolling Stones formed in 1962 and remain among rock’s longest-running giants, with more than 250 million albums sold and a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame berth. Jagger and Richard…
- A Barranquilla poet became Latin pop’s global crossoverBorn 2 February 1977 on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll signed with Sony’s Colombian arm at fourteen. Her first English album in 2001 moved more than thi…
Blind from infancy, Wonder signed to Motown at elevenBorn Stevland Hardaway Judkins in Saginaw on 13 May 1950, he lost sight to retinopathy of prematurity after arriving six weeks early. Motown’s Tamla roster billed him Little Stevi…
A mostly self-taught Odessa pianist stunned the centuryBorn in Zhytomyr in 1915, Sviatoslav Richter is routinely ranked among the twentieth century’s greatest pianists for depth, technique, and repertoire. His first public program—all…