NGC 317 is a pair of interacting galaxies, consisting of a lenticular galaxy (PGC 3442) and a spiral galaxy (PGC 3345), in the constellation Andromeda. It was discovered on October 1, 1885 by Lewis Swift.

Carly Elisabeth Simon (born June 25, 1945) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and children’s author. She first rose to fame in the 1970s with a string of hit records; her 13 Top 40 U.S. hits include “Anticipation” (No. 13), “You Belong To Me” (No. 6), “Coming Around Again” (No. 18), and her four Gold certified singles “Jesse” (No. 11), “Mockingbird” (No. 5, a duet with James Taylor), “You’re So Vain” (No. 1), and “Nobody Does It Better” (No. 2) from the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me.

After a brief stint with her sister Lucy Simon as duo group the Simon Sisters, she found great success as a solo artist with her 1971 self-titled debut album Carly Simon, which won her the Grammy Award for Best New Artist, and spawned her first Top 10 single, “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” (No. 10). Her second album, Anticipation, followed later that year and became an even greater success, earning Simon another Grammy nomination and later being certified Gold by the RIAA. She achieved international fame the following year with the release of her third album, No Secrets, which sat firmly at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for five weeks, was certified Platinum, and spawned the worldwide hit “You’re So Vain”, for which she received three Grammy nominations, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year. With her 1988 hit “Let the River Run“, from the film Working Girl, she became the first artist to win a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Golden Globe Award for a song composed and written, as well as performed, entirely by a single artist.

Over the course of her career, Simon has amassed 24 Billboard Hot 100 charting singles, 28 Billboard Adult Contemporary charting singles, and won 2 Grammy Awards, from 14 nominations. AllMusic called her “one of the quintessential singer-songwriters of the ’70s”. She has a contralto vocal range, and has cited Odetta as a significant influence. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994. In 1995 and 1998, respectively, she received the Boston Music Awards Lifetime Achievement and a Berklee College of Music Honorary Doctor of Music Degree. She was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for “You’re So Vain” in 2004 and awarded the ASCAP Founders Award in 2012.

Simon was born June 25, 1945, in the Bronx borough of New York City. Her father, Richard L. Simon, was the co-founder of Simon & Schuster and a classical pianist who often played Frédéric Chopin and Ludwig van Beethoven at home. Her mother was Andrea Heinemann Simon (née Heinemann), a civil rights activist and singer. Her father was from a German-Jewish family, while her maternal grandfather Friedrich was of German descent; her maternal grandmother, Ofelia Oliete, known as “Chibie”, was a Catholic originally from Cuba, and was of Pardo heritage, a freed-slave descendant. Ofelia was raised primarily in England by nuns until the age of sixteen. A 2017 episode of PBS show Finding Your Roots tested Simon’s DNA, which included 10% African and 2% Native American, likely via her maternal grandmother.

Joe Chambers (born June 25, 1942) in Chester, Pennsylvania is an American jazz drummer, pianist, vibraphonist and composer. He attended the Philadelphia Conservatory for one year. In the 1960s and 1970s Chambers gigged with many high-profile artists such as Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Wayne Shorter, and Chick Corea. During this period, his compositions appeared on some of the albums in which he made guest appearances, such as those with Freddie Hubbard and Bobby Hutcherson. He has released eight albums as a bandleader and been a member of several incarnations of Max Roach‘s M’Boom percussion ensemble.

He has also taught, including at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York City, where he leads the Outlaw Band. In 2008, he was hired to be the Thomas S. Kenan Distinguished Professor of Jazz in the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Clifton Chenier (June 25, 1925 – December 12, 1987), a Louisiana French-speaking native of Leonville ^[3], Louisiana, near Opelousas, was an eminent performer and recording artist of zydeco, which arose from Cajun and Creole music, with R&B, jazz, and blues influences. He played the accordion and won a Grammy Award in 1983. He was a recipient of a 1984 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. He was inducted posthumously into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1989, and the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2011. In 2014, he was a recipient of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

He was known as the King of Zydeco and also billed as the King of the South.

Chenier began his recording career in 1954, when he signed with Elko Records and released Cliston’s Blues [sic], a regional success. In 1955 he signed with Specialty Records and garnered his first national hit with his label debut “Ay-Tete Fi” (Hey, Little Girl) (a cover of Professor Longhair‘s song). The national success of the release led to numerous tours with popular rhythm and blues performers such as Ray Charles, Etta James, and Lowell Fulson. He also toured in the early days with Clarence Garlow, billed as the Two Crazy Frenchmen. Chenier was signed with Chess Records in Chicago, followed by the Arhoolie label.

Johnny Henry Smith II (June 25, 1922 – June 11, 2013) was an American cool jazz and mainstream jazz guitarist. He wrote “Walk, Don’t Run” in 1954. In 1984, Smith was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame.

During the Great Depression, Smith’s family moved from Birmingham, Alabama, United States, where Smith was born, through several cities, ending up in Portland, Maine.

Smith taught himself to play guitar in pawnshops, which let him play in exchange for keeping the guitars in tune. At thirteen years of age he was teaching others to play the guitar. One of Smith’s students bought a new guitar and gave him his old guitar, which became the first guitar Smith owned.

Smith joined Uncle Lem and the Mountain Boys, a local hillbilly band that travelled around Maine, performing at dances, fairs, and similar venues. Smith earned four dollars a night. He dropped out of high school to accommodate this enterprise.

Having become increasingly interested in the jazz bands that he heard on the radio, Smith gradually moved away from country music towards playing more jazz. He left The Mountain Boys when he was eighteen years old to join a variety trio called the Airport Boys.

June 24, 1947: They Came From … Outer Space?

1947: Pilot Kenneth Arnold sights a series of unidentified flying objects near Washington’s Mount Rainier. It’s the first widely reported UFO sighting in the United States, and, thanks to Arnold’s description of what he saw, leads the press to coin the term flying saucer.

Arnold was an experienced pilot with more than 9,000 hours of flying time. He had diverted from his flight plan – Chehalis to Yakima, Washington – to search for a Marine Corps C-46 transport plane reported down in the Cascades near the southwest slope of Mount Rainier. A sweep of the area revealed nothing, and Arnold resumed his original course.

As Arnold recalled, the afternoon was crystal clear, and he was cruising at an altitude of 9,200 feet. A minute or two after noting a DC-4 about 15 miles behind and to the left of him, he was startled by something bright reflecting off his plane. At first he thought he had nearly hit another aircraft but as he looked off in the direction the light had come from, he saw nine “peculiar-looking” aircraft flying rapidly in formation toward Mount Rainier.

As these strange, tailless craft flew between his plane and Mount Rainier and then off toward distant Mount Adams, Arnold noted their remarkable speed – he later calculated that they were moving at around 1,700 mph – and said he got a pretty good look at their black silhouettes outlined against Rainier’s snowy peak. He later described them as saucer-like disks … something the gentlemen of the press glommed on to very quickly.

Friday, May 1, 2020: A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope features the sparkling spiral galaxy NGC 4100, which is teeming with baby stars. The galaxy’s spiral arms are speckled with pockets of bright blue starlight radiating from hot newborn stars. NGC 4100 is located about 67 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major, and it belongs to a group of galaxies called the Ursa Major Cluster. It’s about three-quarters the size of the Milky Way, which is also a spiral galaxy, and it “looks almost stretched across the sky” in this new view, Hubble scientists said in a statement. The space telescope captured this image using its Advanced Camera for Surveys, and it was released today (May 1).

Derrick “Duckie” Simpson , born June 24, 1950 in Kingston , Jamaica , is a Jamaican reggae singer . He was one of the founders of the reggae band Black Uhuru , who received reggae history’s first grammy in 1985. Duckie Simpson has almost always been in some of the Black Uhurus’s different constellations over the years, but has remained in the background and been the band’s “anchor” while others have taken the places as a lead singer.

Black Uhuru was founded by vocalists Simpson, Ervin “Don Carlos” Spencer and Rudolph “Garth” Dennis in the late 1960s. Everyone was raised in the slum district of Waterhouse in Kingston’s inner city. At the end of the 1970s, Don Carlos and Garth Dennis had been replaced by the talented Michael Rose (First Vocalist), also from the Waterhouse, and the American Sandra “Puma” Jones . The drummer Sly Dunbar and the bassist Robbie Shakespeareresponded to production and new, creative grips, and the band lifted and became the world’s leading reggae band in the years 1983-85. The album Anthem was released in an original version in 1983, blended for an American and European audience in 1984, and it was this remixed version that received the Grammy Award for this year’s best reggae album.

In 1985, Michael Rose left Black Uhuru for a solo career and was replaced by Junior Reid , and Puma Jones died of breast cancer in 1989. In 1990, Simpson took in the two original members Spencer and Dennis for a new constellation.

Michael John Kells Fleetwood (born 24 June 1947) is a British musician and actor, best known as the drummer, co-founder, and de facto leader of the rock band Fleetwood Mac. Fleetwood, whose surname was merged with that of the group’s bassist John “Mac” McVie to form the name of the band, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.

Born in Redruth, Cornwall, Fleetwood lived in Egypt and Norway for much of his childhood years as his father travelled with the Royal Air Force. Choosing to follow his musical interests, Fleetwood travelled to London at the age of 15, eventually combining with Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer and Bob Brunning, at Green’s behest, to become the first incarnation of Fleetwood Mac. Fleetwood would remain the only member to stay with the band through its ever-changing line-up.

After several album releases and line-up changes, the group moved to the United States in 1974 in an attempt to boost the band’s success. Here Fleetwood invited Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to join. Buckingham and Nicks contributed to much of Fleetwood Mac’s later commercial success, including the celebrated album Rumours, while Fleetwood’s own determination to keep the band together was essential to the band’s longevity. He has also enjoyed a solo career, published written works, and flirted briefly with acting and vinification, as well as opened blues-themed restaurants in Alexandria, Virginia and Hawaii.

Geoffrey Arnold Beck (born 24 June 1944) is an English rock guitarist. He is one of the three noted guitarists to have played with the Yardbirds (the other two being Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page). Beck also formed the Jeff Beck Group and with Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice, he formed Beck, Bogert & Appice.

Much of Beck’s recorded output has been instrumental, with a focus on innovative sound, and his releases have spanned genres ranging from blues rock, hard rock, and an additional blend of guitar-rock and electronica. Although he recorded two hit albums (in 1975 and 1976) as a solo act, Beck has not established or maintained the sustained commercial success of many of his contemporaries and bandmates. Beck appears on albums by Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger, Tina Turner, Morrissey, Donovan, Diana Ross, Jon Bon Jovi, Malcolm McLaren, Kate Bush, Roger Waters, Stevie Wonder, Les Paul, Zucchero, Cyndi Lauper, Brian May, Roger Taylor, Stanley Clarke, Screaming Lord Sutch, ZZ Top, and Toots and the Maytals.

He was ranked fifth in Rolling Stone‘s list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” and the magazine, upon whose cover Beck has appeared three times, has described him as “one of the most influential lead guitarists in rock”. He is often called a “guitarist’s guitarist”.^[1] Beck has earned wide critical praise and received the Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance six times and Best Pop Instrumental Performance once. In 2014 he received the British Academy’s Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. Beck has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice: as a member of The Yardbirds (1992) and as a solo artist (2009).

Terrence Mitchell Riley (born June 24, 1935) is an American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist school of composition. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his music became notable for its innovative use of repetition, tape musictechniques, and delay systems.

Riley is best known for his 1964 composition In C and 1969 album A Rainbow in Curved Air, both considered landmarks of minimalism and important influences on experimental, rock, and electronic music. Since the 1970s, he has collaborated extensively with chamber ensemble the Kronos Quartet. Born in Colfax, California in 1935, Riley began performing as a solo pianist during the 1950s. During that decade, he studied composition at San Francisco State University, the San Francisco Conservatory, and University of California, Berkeley, studying with Seymour Shifrin and Robert Erickson. He was involved in the experimental San Francisco Tape Music Center, working with Morton Subotnick, Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros, and Ramon Sender. Throughout the 1960s he also traveled frequently in Europe, taking in musical influences and supporting himself by playing in piano bars.

His most influential teacher was Pandit Pran Nath (1918–1996), a master of Indian classical voice who also taught La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and Michael Harrison. Riley made numerous trips to India over the course of their association to study and accompany him on tabla, tambura, and voice. In 1971 he joined the Mills College faculty to teach Indian classical music. Riley also cites John Cage and “the really great chamber musicgroups of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Bill Evans, and Gil Evans” as influences on his work. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate Degree in Music at Chapman University in 2007.

Lester B. Williams (June 24, 1920 – November 13, 1990) was an American Texas blues and electric blues guitarist, singer and songwriter. He is best known for his song “Winter Time Blues” and “I Can’t Lose with the Stuff I Use”. His main influence was T-Bone Walker. Williams released several singles in the 1950s. His recording career lasted from 1949 to 1956, but he remained a stalwart of the Houston blues circuit for decades.

Williams was born in Groveton, Texas. When he was a young boy his family relocated to Houston. After serving in World War II, Williams sang at Houston’s Eldorado Ballroom, but quit and enrolled at the New England Conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts, to study piano and voice. He did not graduate, and he returned to Houston, where he taught himself to play the guitar and started to write songs. Walker’s influence inspired Williams, who said to himself, “I could learn to play guitar and pull in some of that money that T-Bone made”. Having formed his own group in 1949, he wrote “Winter Time Blues”, which came from his own experience when his wife and daughter traveled to Los Angeles for the summer, leaving him to contemplate the winter alone. The song included the lyric “Winter without your baby, you might as well be dead”.

He signed a recording contract with Macy’s Recordings, and Steve Poncio produced “Winter Time Blues” which was a regional hit. His next few releases did not fare well commercially and, by 1951, Williams had moved to Specialty Records. His first disc for them was his biggest success, “I Can’t Lose with the Stuff I Use” (1952). His notability rose to the extent that he appeared in February 1953 at Carnegie Hall, in New York, on a bill that included Dinah Washington, Billy Eckstineand Nat King Cole. The song “I Can’t Lose with the Stuff I Use” was covered a decade later by B.B. King.