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Joan Anita Barbara Armatrading, MBE (/ˈɑːrməˌtreɪdɪŋ/, born 9 December 1950) is a British singer-songwriter and guitarist. A three-time Grammy Award nominee, Armatrading has also been nominated twice for BRIT Awards as Best Female Artist. She received an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contemporary Song Collection in 1996.

In a recording career spanning 46 years, Armatrading has released 19 studio albums, as well as several live albums and compilations.

Joan Armatrading, the third of six children, was born in 1950 in the town of Basseterre on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts. Her father was a carpenter and her mother a housewife. When she was three years old, her parents moved with their two eldest boys to Birmingham in England, sending Joan to live with her grandmother on the Caribbean island of Antigua.

In 1975, Armatrading was free to sign with A&M Records, and issued the album Back to the Night, which was promoted on tour with six-piece English jazz-pop group The Movies. Armatrading credited English singer Elkie Brooks on the sleeve notes as she had cooked for Armatrading and the band in the studio while they had been making the album, which was produced by Brooks’ then husband Pete Gage. A major publicity relaunch in 1976 and the involvement of producer Glyn Johns propelled her next album, Joan Armatrading, into the Top 20 and spawned the Top 10 hit single “Love and Affection“. The album mixed acoustic work with jazz-influenced material, and this style was retained for the 1977 follow-up Show Some Emotion, also produced by Glyn Johns, as was 1978’s To the Limit. These albums included songs which continue to be staples of Armatrading’s live shows, including “Willow”, “Down to Zero“, “Tall in the Saddle”, and “Kissin’ and a Huggin'”. Also at this time, Armatrading wrote and performed “The Flight of the Wild Geese”, which was used during the opening and end titles for the 1978 war film The Wild Geese. The song was included on the soundtrack album for the film, originally released by A&M Records, later released under licence as a Cinephile DVD. A live album entitled Steppin’ Out was released in 1979.

Daniel Ivan Hicks (December 9, 1941 – February 6, 2016) was an American singer-songwriter known for an idiosyncratic style that combined elements of cowboy folk, jazz, country, swing, bluegrass, pop, and gypsy music. He led Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. He is perhaps best known for the songs “I Scare Myself” and “Canned Music.” His songs are frequently infused with humor, as evidenced by the title of his tune, “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?” His album, Live at Davies (2013), capped over forty years of music.

Writing about Hicks for Oxford American in 2007, critic David Smay said, “[T]here was a time from the ’20s through the ’40s when swing—’hot rhythm’—rippled through every form of popular music. That’s the music Dan Hicks plays, and there’s no single word for it because it wasn’t limited to any one genre. Django Reinhardt and the Mills Brothers and Spade Cooley and Hank Garland and the Boswell Sisters and Stuff Smith and Bing Crosby all swing. You can make yourself nutty trying to define what Dan Hicks is. Then again, you could just say: Dan Hicks swings.” Hicks was born in Little Rock, Arkansas on December 9, 1941. His father, Ivan L. Hicks (married to the former Evelyn Kehl), was a career United States Air Force non-commissioned officer. At age five, an only child, Hicks moved with his family to California. Following brief stints in Lomita, Cambria, and Vallejo, the family settled in Santa Rosa, the largest city in the North Bay subregion of the San Francisco Bay Area, where he was a drummer in grade school and played the snare drum in his school marching band.

Junior Wells (born Amos Wells Blakemore Jr., December 9, 1934 – January 15, 1998) was an American Chicago blues vocalist, harmonica player, and recording artist. He was one of the pioneers of the amplified blues harp-style associated with Chicago. Wells is best known for his signature song “Messin’ with the Kid” and his 1965 album Hoodoo Man Blues, described by the critic Bill Dahl as “one of the truly classic blues albums of the 1960s”.

Wells performed and recorded with Various notable blues musicians, including Muddy Waters, Earl Hooker, and Buddy Guy. He remained a fixture on the blues scene throughout his career and also crossed over to rock audiences while touring with the Rolling Stones. Not long before Wells died, the blues historian Gerard Herzhaft called him “one of the rare active survivors of the ‘golden age of the blues'”.

Wells may have been born in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised in West Memphis, Arkansas (some sources report that he was born in West Memphis). Initially taught by his cousin Junior Parker and by Sonny Boy Williamson II, Wells learned to play the harmonica skillfully by the age of seven.

He moved to Chicago in 1948 with his mother, after her divorce, and began sitting in with local musicians at house parties and taverns. Wild and rebellious but needing an outlet for his talents, he began performing with the Aces, consisting of the brothers Dave and Louis Myers on guitars and the drummer Fred Below, with whom he developed a modern amplified harmonica style influenced by Little Walter. In 1952, he made his first recordings when he replaced Little Walter in Muddy Waters’s band and played on one of Waters’s sessions for Chess Records in 1952. His first recordings as a bandleader were made in the following year for States Records. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he recorded singles for Chief Records and its subsidiary, Profile Records, including “Messin’ with the Kid“, “Come on in This House”, and “It Hurts Me Too“, which would remain in his repertoire throughout his career. His 1960 Profile single “Little by Little” (written by Chief owner and producer Mel London) reached number 23 on the Billboard R&B chart, the first of his two singles to enter the chart.

Jessie Hill (December 9, 1932 – September 17, 1996) was an American R&B and Louisiana blues^[2] singer and songwriter, best remembered for the classic song “Ooh Poo Pah Doo“.

Hill was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. By his teens he was playing drums in local bands, and in 1951 he formed his own group, the House Rockers. After periods performing as drummer with Professor Longhair and then Huey “Piano” Smith, Hill formed a new version of the House Rockers in 1958, which enabled him to focus on singing with the band.

The origins of “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” were apparently created from a tune played by a local pianist, who was known only as Big Four. Hill wrote the lyricsand melody, later expanding the work with an intro taken from Dave Bartholomew. It was further honed on stage, before Hill recorded a demo that he shopped to local record labels, finally recording a session at Cosimo Matassa‘s studio produced by Allen Toussaint.

Upon its early 1960 release, “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” emerged as a favorite at Mardi Gras, selling 800,000 copies and reaching the Top 5 in the USBillboard R&B chart and a Top 30 slot in the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart. There have been over 100 cover versions of “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” recorded and performed live over the years by other popular musicians.

Further recordings in New Orleans were less successful, and he moved to California to work with fellow New Orleans musicians including Harold Battiste and Mac Rebennack. In this period, he wrote songs recorded by Ike and Tina Turner, Sonny and Cher, and Willie Nelson.

A 1972 solo album was unsuccessful, and he began to suffer financial difficulties exacerbated by a drinking problem. These problems continued after his return to New Orleans in 1977, and several benefit gigs did little to revive his personal or professional fortunes.

Donaldson Toussaint L’Ouverture Byrd II (December 9, 1932 – February 4, 2013) was an American jazz and rhythm & blues trumpeter and vocalist. A sideman for many other jazz musicians of his generation, Byrd was known as one of the rare bebop jazz musicians who successfully explored funk and soul while remaining a jazz artist. As a bandleader, Byrd was an influence on the early career of Herbie Hancock.

Byrd attended Cass Technical High School. He performed with Lionel Hampton before finishing high school. After playing in a military band during a term in the United States Air Force, Byrd obtained a bachelor’s degree in music from Wayne State University and a master’s degree from Manhattan School of Music. While still at the Manhattan School, he joined Art Blakey‘s Jazz Messengers, as the successor to Clifford Brown. In 1955, he recorded with Gigi Gryce, Jackie McLean and Mal Waldron. After leaving the Jazz Messengers in 1956, he performed with many leading jazz musicians of the day, including John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, and later Herbie Hancock.

Messier 74 (also known as NGC 628 and Phantom Galaxy) is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Pisces. It is at a distance of about 32 million light-years away from Earth. The galaxy contains two clearly defined spiral arms and is therefore used as an archetypal example of a grand design spiral galaxy. The galaxy’s low surface brightness makes it the most difficult Messier object for amateur astronomers to observe. However, the relatively large angular size of the galaxy and the galaxy’s face-on orientation make it an ideal object for professional astronomers who want to study spiral arm structure and spiral density waves. It is estimated that M74 is home to about 100 billion stars.

Sinéad Marie Bernadette O’Connor (/ʃɪˈneɪd oʊˈkɒnər/ shin-AYD oh-KON-ər; born 8 December 1966) is an Irish singer-songwriter who rose to fame in the late 1980s with her debut album The Lion and the Cobra. O’Connor achieved worldwide success in 1990 with a new arrangement of Prince’s song “Nothing Compares 2 U“.

Since then, while maintaining her singing career, she has occasionally encountered controversy, partly due to her statements and gestures. These include her ordination as a priest, despite being a woman with a Roman Catholic background, and strongly expressing views on organised religion, women’s rights, war, and child abuse. In addition to her ten solo albums, her work includes many singles, songs for films, collaborations with many other artists, and appearances at charity fundraising concerts.

In 2017, O’Connor changed her name to Magda Davitt. On converting to Islam in 2018, she changed it again to Shuhada’ Sadaqat. However, she continues to record and perform under her original name.

James Douglas Morrison (December 8, 1943 – July 3, 1971) was an American singer, songwriter and poet, who served as the lead vocalist of the rock band the Doors. Due to his poetic lyrics, distinctive baritone voice, wild personality, unpredictable and erratic performances, and the dramatic circumstances surrounding his life and early death, Morrison is regarded by music critics and fans as one of the most iconic and influential frontmen in rock history. Since his death, his fame has endured as one of popular culture’s most rebellious and oft-displayed icons, representing the generation gap and youth counterculture.

Together with Ray Manzarek, Morrison co-founded the Doors during the summer of 1965 in Venice, California. The band spent two years in obscurity until shooting to prominence with their number-one single in the United States, “Light My Fire,” taken from their self-titled debut album. Morrison wrote or co-wrote many of the Doors’ songs, including “Light My Fire”, “Break On Through (To the Other Side)“, “The End“, “Moonlight Drive“, “People Are Strange“, “Hello, I Love You“, “Roadhouse Blues“, “L.A. Woman“, and “Riders on the Storm“. He recorded a total of six studio albums with the Doors, all of which sold well and received critical acclaim. Though the Doors recorded two more albums after Morrison died, his death severely affected the band’s fortunes, and they split up in 1973. In 1993, Morrison was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Doors.

Morrison was also well known for improvising spoken word poetry passages while the band played live. Morrison was ranked number 47 on Rolling Stone‘s list of the “100 Greatest Singers of All Time”, and number 22 on Classic Rock magazine’s “50 Greatest Singers in Rock”. Manzarek said Morrison “embodied hippie counterculture rebellion”.

Morrison developed an alcohol dependency during the 1960s, which at times affected his performances on stage. He died unexpectedly at the age of 27 in Paris. As no autopsy was performed, the cause of Morrison’s death remains unknown.

James Douglas Morrison was born on December 8, 1943 in Melbourne, Florida, to Clara Virginia (née Clarke) and Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison, USN. His ancestors were Scottish, Irish, and English. Admiral Morrison commanded United States naval forces during the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which provided the pretext for the US involvement in the Vietnam War in 1965. Morrison had a younger sister, Anne Robin, who was born in 1947 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and a younger brother, Andrew Lee Morrison, who was born in 1948 in Los Altos, California.

In 1947, when he was four years old, Morrison allegedly witnessed a car accident in the desert, during which a truck overturned and some Native Americans were lying injured at the side of the road. He referred to this incident in the Doors’ song “Peace Frog” on their 1970 album Morrison Hotel, as well as in the spoken word performances “Dawn’s Highway” and “Ghost Song” on the posthumous 1978 album An American Prayer. Morrison believed this incident to be the most formative event of his life, and made repeated references to it in the imagery in his songs, poems, and interviews.

James Oscar Smith (December 8, 1925 or 1928 – February 8, 2005) was an American jazz musician whose albums often charted on Billboardmagazine. He helped popularize the Hammond B-3 organ, creating a link between jazz and 1960s soul music. In 2005, Smith was awarded the NEA Jazz Masters Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest honor that America bestows upon jazz musicians. There is confusion about Smith’s birth year, with various sources citing either 1925 or 1928. Born James Oscar Smith in Norristown, Pennsylvania, United States, at the age of six he joined his father doing a song-and-dance routine in clubs. He began teaching himself to play the piano. When he was nine, Smith won a Philadelphia radio talent contest as a boogie-woogie pianist. After a stint in the U.S. Navy, he began furthering his musical education in 1948, with a year at Royal Hamilton College of Music, then the Leo Ornstein School of Music in Philadelphia in 1949. He began exploring the Hammond organ in 1951. From 1951 to 1954 he played piano, then organ in Philly R&B bands like Don Gardner and the Sonotones. He switched to organ permanently in 1954 after hearing Wild Bill Davis.

He purchased his first Hammond organ, rented a warehouse to practice in and emerged after little more than a year. Upon hearing him playing in a Philadelphia club, Blue Note’s Alfred Lionimmediately signed him to the label and his second album, The Champ, quickly established Smith as a new star on the jazz scene. He was a prolific recording artist and, as a leader, dubbed The Incredible Jimmy Smith, he recorded around forty sessions for Blue Note in just eight years beginning in 1956. Albums from this period include The Sermon!, House Party, Home Cookin’, Midnight Special, Back at the Chicken Shack and Prayer Meetin’.

Cleopatra Brown (December 8, 1907 or 1909 – April 15, 1995), known as Cleo Brown, C. Patra Brown or Cleo Patra Brown, was an American blues and jazz vocalist and pianist. She was the first woman instrumentalist to receive the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship. Brown was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and played piano in the Baptist church as a child. In 1919 her family moved to Chicago, and she began learning piano from her brother who worked with “Pine Top” Smith, playing boogie-woogie for dances. From around 1923 she worked in vaudeville, as well as taking gigs in clubs. In 1935, she replaced Fats Waller as pianist on New York radio station WABC.

From the 1930s to the 1950s she toured the United States regularly, recording for Decca Records (among other labels) along the way and recording many humorous, ironic titles such as “Breakin’ in a New Pair of Shoes”, “Mama Don’t Want No Peas and Rice and Coconut Oil“, “When Hollywood Goes Black and Tan”, and “The Stuff Is Here and It’s Mellow”. Her stride piano playing was often compared to Fats Waller, and she is credited as an influence on Dave Brubeck, who played during the intermissions of her shows, and Marian McPartland. She played regularly at clubs in Chicago, toured widely, and recorded for both Decca and Capitol Records.

Brown began to shy away from singing bawdy blues songs because of her deepening religious beliefs and, in 1953, she was baptized, retired from music, and became a nurse in 1959. Jazz biographies frequently listed her as deceased due to her absence from music. The song “Sweet Cleo Brown” was recorded by Brubeck in tribute to her.

From the mid-1970s until 1981, she performed under the name of C. Patra Brown on radio shows in Denver, Colorado. She replaced boogie-woogie music with slower, inspirational music. She returned to record again, and performed on National Public Radio. She gave birth to a son, Matthew and had four grandchildren. She died on April 15, 1995 in Denver, Colorado.

This six-panel mosaic shows the three stars in the center of the constellation Orion the Hunter. From left to right, they are Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. Alnitak and Mintaka are 1,200 light-years away while Alnilam lies some 2,000 light-years distant.

Orion’s Belt or the Belt of Orion, also known as the Three Kings or Three Sisters, is an asterism in the constellation Orion. It consists of the three bright stars Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka.

Looking for Orion’s Belt in the night sky is the easiest way to locate Orion in the sky. The stars are more or less evenly spaced in a straight line, and so can be visualized as the belt of the hunter’s clothing. They are best visible in the early night sky during the Northern Winter/Southern Summer, in particular the month of January at around 9:00 pm.

Thomas Alan Waits (born December 7, 1949) is an American singer, songwriter, musician, composer, and actor. His music is characterized by lyrics focusing on the underside of society, delivered in his distinctive deep, gravelly voice. During the 1970s, he worked primarily in jazz, but since the 1980s his music has reflected greater influence from blues, vaudeville, and experimental genres.

Waits was born and raised in a middle-class family in Pomona, California. Inspired by the work of Bob Dylan and the Beat Generation, he began singing on the San Diego folk music circuit as a teenager, relocating to Los Angeles in 1972. He worked there as a songwriter before signing a recording contract with Asylum Records. His first albums were the jazz-oriented Closing Time (1973) and The Heart of Saturday Night (1974), which reflected his lyrical interest in nightlife, poverty, and criminality. He repeatedly toured the United States, Europe, and Japan, and attracted greater critical recognition and commercial success with Small Change (1976), Blue Valentine (1978), and Heartattack and Vine (1980). He produced the soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola‘s 1981 film One from the Heart, and subsequently made cameo appearances in several Coppola films.

In 1980, Waits married Kathleen Brennan, split from his manager and record label, and moved to New York City. Under his wife’s encouragement, he pursued a more experimental and eclectic musical aesthetic influenced by the work of Harry Partch and Captain Beefheart. This was reflected in a series of albums released by Island Records, including Swordfishtrombones (1983), Rain Dogs (1985), and Franks Wild Years (1987). He continued appearing in films, taking a leading role in Jim Jarmusch‘s Down by Law (1986), and made theatrical appearances. With theatre director Robert Wilsonhe produced two musicals, The Black Rider and Alice, first performed in Hamburg. Having returned to California in the 1990s, Waits’ albums Bone Machine (1992), The Black Rider (1993), and Mule Variations (1999) earned him increasing critical acclaim and various Grammy Awards. In the late 1990s, he switched to the record label Anti-, which released Blood Money (2002), Alice (2002), Real Gone (2004), and Bad as Me (2011).

Waits’ albums have met with mixed commercial success in the U.S., while they have occasionally achieved gold status in other countries. He has a cult following and has influenced many singer-songwriters, despite having little mainstream radio or music video support. In 2011, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was included among the 2010 list of Rolling Stone‘s 100 Greatest Singers, as well as the 2015 Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time.

Louis Leo Prima (December 7, 1910 – August 24, 1978) was an American singer, actor, songwriter, bandleader, and trumpeter. While rooted in New Orleans jazz, swing music, and jump blues, Prima touched on various genres throughout his career: he formed a seven-piece New Orleans-style jazz band in the late 1920s, fronted a swing combo in the 1930s and a big band group in the 1940s, helped to popularize jump blues in the late 1940s and early to mid 1950s, and performed frequently as a Vegas lounge act beginning in the 1950s.

From the 1940s through the 1960s, his music further encompassed early R&B and rock’n’roll, boogie-woogie, and even Italian folk music, such as the tarantella. Prima made prominent use of Italian music and language in his songs, blending elements of his Italian identity with jazz and swing music. At a time when “ethnic” musicians were often discouraged from openly stressing their ethnicity, Prima’s conspicuous embrace of his Sicilian ethnicity opened the doors for other Italian-American and “ethnic” American musicians to display their ethnic roots.

Louis Leo Prima was from a musical Italian American family in New Orleans, Louisiana. His father, Anthony Prima, was the son of Leonardo Di Prima, a Sicilian immigrant from Salaparuta, while his mother, Angelina Caravella, had immigrated from Ustica as a baby. Prima was the second child of four; his older brother, Leon, was born in 1907, while his sisters Elizabeth and Marguerite were younger. Marguerite died when she was three years old. Leon, Louis, and Elizabeth were all baptized at St. Ann’s Parish. They lived in a house at 1812 St. Peter Street in New Orleans.

Blind John Davis (December 7, 1913 – October 12, 1985) was an American blues and boogie-woogie pianist and singer. He is best remembered for his recordings, including “A Little Every Day” and “Everybody’s Boogie”.

Davis was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and relocated with his family to Chicago at the age of two. Seven years later he had lost his sight. In his early years Davis backed Merline Johnson, and by his mid-twenties he was a well-known and reliable accompanying pianist. Between 1937 and 1942, he recorded with Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Boy Williamson I, Tampa Red, Red Nelson, Merline Johnson, and others. He also made several records of his own, singing in his lightweight voice.

Having played in various recording sessions with Lonnie Johnson, Davis teamed up with him in the 1940s. He recorded later on his own. His “No Mail Today” (1949) was a minor hit. Most of Doctor Clayton‘s later recordings featured Davis on piano.

He toured Europe with Broonzy in 1952, the first blues pianist to do so. In later years Davis toured and recorded frequently in Europe, where he enjoyed a higher profile than in the United States.

In 1955, Davis’s house in Chicago burned down. His wife died in the fire, and his collection of 1700 78-rpm records, some of them unissued, was destroyed. Davis died in Chicago in October 1985, at the age of 71.

Edmundo Ros OBE FRAM (7 December 1910 – 21 October 2011), born Edmund William Ross, was a Trinidadian-Venezuelan musician, vocalist, arranger and bandleader who made his career in Britain. He directed a highly popular Latin American orchestra, had an extensive recording career and owned one of London’s leading nightclubs. Edmund William Ross was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad. His mother Luisa Urquart was a Venezuelan teacher, thought to be descended from indigenous Caribs, and his father, William Hope-Ross, was a mulatto of Scottish descent. He was the eldest of four children, having two sisters, Ruby and Eleanor, followed by a half-brother, Hugo. His parents separated after Hugo was born, and after various false steps Edmund was enrolled in a military academy. There he became interested in music and learned to play the euphonium and percussion.^[3] When his mother became involved with a man he loathed and had a son by him, the 17-year-old left for Caracas, Venezuela, to study at the Academy of Music under Vicente Emilio Sojo.

He played drums in the city’s nightclubs and in the Martial Band of Caracas as well as was soon hired by Sojo as timpanist in the new Venezuela Symphony Orchestra. As his obituary in The Guardian noted: “His local name, ‘Edmundo Ros’, launched a lasting myth that he was Venezuelan.”Later he received a music scholarship from the Venezuelan government of Eleazar Lopez Contreras, and, from 1937 to 1942, studied harmony, composition and orchestration at the Royal Academy of Music. At the same time he was the vocalist and percussionist in Don Marino Baretto’s band at the Embassy Club, and also recorded several sides as a sideman to Fats Waller, who was visiting London in 1938.