Over 75 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo (The Virgin) lies NGC 4981 — a spiral galaxy with a rather explosive past. NGC 4981 was discovered on 17 April 1784 by William Herschel, and subsequently documented in John Dreyer’s New General Catalogue. Over a century later, on 23 April 1968, the galaxy once again made it into the records when a Type la supernova — a stellar explosion in a binary star system — occurred within its confines: SN 1968I. SN 1968I, however, was not to be the galaxy’s only supernova. Decades later, the core collapse of a massive star led to supernova SN 2007c. This spectacular shot of NGC 4981 — not showing any of the supernovae explosions; the bright star visible in the image is a foreground star — was captured by FORS, the visible and near-UV FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph for ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). FORS is the Swiss Army knife of ESO’s instruments — it is able to study many different astronomical objects in many different ways, and is responsible for some of the most iconic photos ever captured with the VLT (see eso9948f and eso0202a). The data to create this image was selected from the ESO archive by Josh Barrington as part of the Hidden Treasures competition.

Gregory LeNoir Allman (December 8, 1947 – May 27, 2017 Nashville, TN) was an American singer-songwriter and musician. He was known for performing in the Allman Brothers Band. Allman grew up with an interest in rhythm and blues music, and the Allman Brothers Band fused it with rock music, jazz, and country at times. He wrote several of the band’s biggest songs, including “Whipping Post“, “Melissa“, and “Midnight Rider“. Allman also had a successful solo career, releasing seven studio albums. He was born and spent much of his childhood in Nashville, Tennessee, before relocating to Daytona Beach, Florida and then Richmond Hill, Georgia.

He and his brother, Duane Allman, formed the Allman Brothers Band in 1969, which reached mainstream success with their 1971 live album At Fillmore East. Shortly thereafter, Duane was killed in a motorcycle crash. The band continued, with Brothers and Sisters (1973) their most successful album. Allman began a solo career with Laid Back the same year, and was perhaps most famous for his marriage to pop star Cher for the rest of the decade. He had an unexpected late career hit with his cover of the song “I’m No Angel” in 1987, and his seventh solo album, Low Country Blues(2011), saw the highest chart positions of his career. Throughout his life, Allman struggled with alcohol and substance abuse, which formed the basis of his memoir My Cross to Bear (2012). His final album, Southern Blood, was released posthumously on September 8, 2017.

Allman performed with a Hammond organ and guitar, and was recognized for his soulful voice. For his work in music, Allman was referred to as a Southern rock pioneer and received numerous awards, including one Grammy Award; he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. His distinctive voice placed him in 70th place in the Rolling Stone list of the “100 Greatest Singers of All Time”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ9twEldw_M

James Douglas Morrison (December 8, 1943 – July 3, 1971 Melbourne, FL) was an American singer, songwriter and poet, who served as the lead vocalist of the rock band The Doors. Due to his wild personality, poetic lyrics, widely recognized voice, 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“, “Wild Child”, “The Soft Parade”, “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. Morrison was well known for improvising spoken word poetry passages while the band played live. 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, among conflicting witness and alleged witness reports. As no autopsy was performed, the cause of Morrison’s death remains disputed. 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. In 2008, he was ranked 47th in Rolling Stonemagazine’s list “The 100 Greatest Singers of All Time”.

Frederick Nathaniel “Toots” Hibbert, OJ (8 December 1942 – 11 September 2020) was a Jamaican singer and songwriter who was the lead vocalist for the reggae and ska band Toots and the Maytals. A reggae pioneer, he performed for six decades and helped establish some of the fundamentals of reggae music. Hibbert’s 1968 song “Do the Reggay” is widely credited as the genesis of the genre name reggae. His band’s album True Love won a Grammy Award in 2005.

Hibbert was born on 8 December 1942 in May Pen, Jamaica, the youngest of his siblings. Hibbert’s parents were both strict Seventh-day Adventistpreachers so he grew up singing gospel music in a church choir. Both parents died young and, by the age of 11, Hibbert was an orphan who went to live with his brother John in the Trenchtown neighborhood of Kingston. While working at a local barbershop, he met his future bandmates Raleigh Gordon and Jerry Matthias.

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.

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.

If you look closely, you may recognize the heads of four former US Presidents carved into famous Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, USA. More obvious in the featured image are the unusual mammatus clouds that passed briefly overhead. Both were captured together by a surprised tourist with a quick camera in early September. Unlike normal flat-bottomed clouds which form when moist and calm air plateaus rise and cool, bumpy mammatus clouds form as icy and turbulent air pockets sink and heat up. Such turbulent air is frequently accompanied by a thunderstorm. Each mammatus lobe spans about one kilometer. The greater mountain is known to native Lakota Sioux as Six Grandfathers, deities responsible for the directions north, south, east, west, up, and down.

Thomas Alan Waits (born December 7, 1949) is an American singer, songwriter, musician, composer, and actor. His lyrics often focus on the underbelly of society and are delivered in his trademark deep, gravelly voice. He worked primarily in jazz during the 1970s, but his music since the 1980s has reflected greater influence from blues, rock, 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. He relocated to Los Angeles in 1972, where he worked 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 film One from the Heart (1981), 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. With Brennan’s encouragement and frequent collaboration, 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, notably starring in Jim Jarmusch‘s Down by Law (1986), and also made theatrical appearances. With theatre director Robert Wilson, he produced the musicals The Black Rider and Alice, first performed in Hamburg. Having returned to California in the 1990s, his albums Bone Machine (1992), The Black Rider (1993), and Mule Variations (1999) earned him increasing critical acclaim and multiple 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).

Despite a lack of mainstream commercial success, Waits has influenced many musicians and gained an international cult following, and several biographies have been written about him. In 2015, he was ranked at No. 55 on Rolling Stone‘s “100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time“. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.

Louis Leo Prima (December 7, 1910 – August 24, 1978) was an American singer, 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 jazzband 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 and Sicilian 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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrJ7DQojzIY

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. 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.”^[1]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.