Podcast appearances and mentions of jackson five

American pop music family group

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Best podcasts about jackson five

Latest podcast episodes about jackson five

Tipp FM Radio
Ar An Lá Seo 13-5-25

Tipp FM Radio

Play Episode Listen Later May 16, 2025 2:26


Fáilte ar ais chuig eagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo ar an 13ú lá de mí Bealtaine, liomsa Lauren Ní Loingsigh. I 1972 gabhadh garda nach raibh ar dualgas ó Bhaile Átha Cliath agus seisear fear eile chuig Bridewell tar éis a rinne bleachtaire ruathar. I 1983 tháinig an nuacht amach go mbeadh pionós ann cosúil le tréimhse phríosúnachta do dhaoine ag tiomáint agus iad ar a ghuthán. I 2002 tháinig sé amach I nDurlas cén tsráid a mbeadh táille páirceála. Bhí sé 20p gach uair le diosca páirceála agus 10 punt gach bliain do na daoine a raibh ina chónaí ann. I 2005 tháinig an Mhéara den Aonach Urmhumhan Séamus Morris amach ag iarradh níos mó Ghardaí I Castle Field. Bhí eagla ar daoine dul isteach ann I rith an lae agus san oíche de bharr go raibh a lán déagóirí ann ag déanamh damáiste. Sin Gwen Stefani le Hollaback Girl – an t-amhrán is mó ar an lá seo I 2005. Ag lean ar aghaidh le nuacht cheoil ar an lá seo I 1989 chuaigh Kylie Minogue chuig uimhir a haon sa Bhreatain don dara huair leis an amhrán Hand On Your Heart. Bhí sé scríofa ó Stock, Aitken & Waterman. I 2003 bhí cás cúirte ag Michael Jackson mar bhí sé chun an dlí a chur ar Motown Records. Thóg sé cás dlí in LA agus dúirt sé nach bhfuair sé aon airgead don amhrán a rinne sé leis The Jackson Five sna 60dí agus 70dí. Tháinig Michael Jackson amach agus dúirt sé gur úsáid siad a amhráin ar an teilifís gan cead. Agus ar deireadh breithlá daoine cáiliúla ar an lá seo rugadh amhránaí Morgan Wallen I Meiriceá I 1993 agus rugadh aisteoir Robert Pattinson sa Bhreatain ar an lá seo I 1986 agus seo chuid de na rudaí a rinne sé. Beidh mé ar ais libh amárach le heagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo. Welcome back to another edition of Ar An Lá Seo on the 13th of May, with me Lauren Ní Loingsigh 1972: an offduty garda who was stationed in dublin and 6 other men were taken to the Bridewell after a swoop by special branch detectives yesterday 1983: Stiff penalties including jail sentences were on the way for telephone tapping. 2002 - THURLES Urban District Council has named the streets on which it proposed to implement parking charges. The by-laws allow for a 20p per hour disk parking charge and a £10 per annum parking charge for residents in the areas.  2005 - Mayor of Nenagh Séaums Morris joined several of Nenagh town councillors in calling for extra Garda vigilance in the town's Castle Field. People were afraid to enter the castle grounds at any time of the day or night for fear of being accosted by teenagers loitering in the area.  That was Gwen Stefani with Hollaback Girl – the biggest song on this day in 2005 Onto music news on this day In 1989 Kylie Minogue was at No.1 on the UK singles chart with her second solo No.1 'Hand On Your Heart.' The song was written and produced by Stock, Aitken & Waterman. 2003 Michael Jackson launched a court case suing Motown Records. Jacko filed the lawsuit in LA, saying he hadn't been paid royalties due for the music he did with the Jackson Five in the 60s and 70s. The singer also claimed his music has been used in TV ads without his permission. And finally celebrity birthdays on this day – singer Morgan Wallen was born in America in 1993 and actor Robert Pattinson was born in the UK on this day in 1986 and this is some of the stuff he has done. I'll be back with you tomorrow with another edition of Ar An Lá Seo.

Audio Branding
The Sound of Being Authentic: A Conversation with John Duffin - Part 1

Audio Branding

Play Episode Listen Later May 14, 2025 34:58


This week's guest is the creator and host of the Your Message Received podcast, a groundbreaking platform with more than 125 episodes where he empowers executives, businesses, and individuals through impactful storytelling and strategic communication training. With over twenty-five years of experience in media, spanning broadcast, radio, digital, and streaming, his career has been driven by a passion for culture, content, and inclusion. As a live event announcer, marathoner, and dedicated Philadelphia sports fan, he infuses energy into every endeavor. Family is central to his life, inspired by his 95-year-old mother who began acting at age 74. At DuffinMedia, he champions authenticity, helping clients unlock their communication potential for life-changing results.His name is John Duffin, and our conversation about having a good conversation turned out to be an essential education. Effective communication is so important, especially these days, so listen in for some tips and ideas to help you communicate more effectively in your own life. As always, if you have questions for my guest, you're welcome to reach out through the links in the show notes. If you have questions for me, visit audiobrandingpodcast.com where you'll find a lot of ways to get in touch. Plus, subscribing to the newsletter will let you know when the new podcasts are available and what the newest audio chats will be about. If you're getting some value from listening, the best ways to show your support are to share this podcast with a friend and leave an honest review. Both those things really help – and I'd love to feature your review on future podcasts. (0:00:01) - Early Sound Memory and Communication JourneyAs our discussion starts, John shares his early memories of how sound moved him, from Jackson Five records to his mother singing while she did housework. “I can just remember the happiness in regards to the way that she sang,” he tells us. “So, yeah, absolutely, and that was, like I said, the first that I can easily recall it made me happy.” He tells us about his sales career in radio, and how questions about his role lead him into voiceover. “'You have a really good voice, are you on the radio?'” he recalls his clients asking. “I would brush that off, for I don't know decades, just no, no, I'm in sales…. I remember thinking, well, if they were right and if I don't find out, well then I'll live to regret that.”(0:15:00) - The Authentic Art of CommunicationJohn tells us more about his career shift into voiceover and public speaking, and how, at first, he tried to keep his experience in sales separate. “I would only speak about voiceover and voice narration and all that sort of thing,” he says. “And a few years after that I came to the realization, one, that's dumb. Your history is really important.” We discuss the importance of authenticity and a genuine connection, and how much easier communication is when it's backed up by both experience and honest interest in your client. “All the training and overthinking and technical expertise,” he adds, “all that stuff, and that's why I don't dismiss it. It's very meaningful. The training enables you to think less.” Episode SummaryJohn's memories of his musical family, and how they led to his first career in radio.The key to connecting with clients and taking a genuine interest in their needs and goals.Tune in for next week's episode as John offers his advice for sharing bad news in a professional way, his AI tool recommendations, and tips on overcoming our tendency to assume the worst.Connect with the Audio Branding

Clare FM - Podcasts
Ar An Lá Seo - 13-05-2025

Clare FM - Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later May 13, 2025 2:24


Fáilte ar ais chuig eagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo ar an 13ú lá de mí Bealtaine, liomsa Lauren Ní Loingsigh. I 1972 gabhadh garda nach raibh ar dualgas ó Bhaile Átha Cliath agus seisear fear eile chuig Bridewell tar éis a rinne bleachtaire ruathar. I 1983 tháinig an nuacht amach go mbeadh pionós ann cosúil le tréimhse phríosúnachta do dhaoine ag tiomáint agus iad ar a ghuthán. I 1972 thosaigh siad ag seiceáil na bosca ballóide ag an reifreann agus thosaigh sé ag 9 ar maidin ag an scoil in Inis. Bhí sé soiléir gur rinne an chontae vótáil ar son an EEC. I 1983 rinne comhairle contae an Chláir níos mó iarracht ina bhfeachtas chun níos mó aird a tharraing ar an droch-chor den PAYE/PRSI nuair a bhí agóid ar siúil. Sin Gwen Stefani le Hollaback Girl – an t-amhrán is mó ar an lá seo I 2005. Ag lean ar aghaidh le nuacht cheoil ar an lá seo I 1989 chuaigh Kylie Minogue chuig uimhir a haon sa Bhreatain don dara huair leis an amhrán Hand On Your Heart. Bhí sé scríofa ó Stock, Aitken & Waterman. I 2003 bhí cás cúirte ag Michael Jackson mar bhí sé chun an dlí a chur ar Motown Records. Thóg sé cás dlí in LA agus dúirt sé nach bhfuair sé aon airgead don amhrán a rinne sé leis The Jackson Five sna 60dí agus 70dí. Tháinig Michael Jackson amach agus dúirt sé gur úsáid siad a amhráin ar an teilifís gan cead. Agus ar deireadh breithlá daoine cáiliúla ar an lá seo rugadh amhránaí Morgan Wallen I Meiriceá I 1993 agus rugadh aisteoir Robert Pattinson sa Bhreatain ar an lá seo I 1986 agus seo chuid de na rudaí a rinne sé. Beidh mé ar ais libh amárach le heagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo. Welcome back to another edition of Ar An Lá Seo on the 13th of May, with me Lauren Ní Loingsigh 1972: an offduty garda who was stationed in dublin and 6 other men were taken to the Bridewell after a swoop by special branch detectives yesterday 1983: Stiff penalties including jail sentences were on the way for telephone tapping. 1972: There was a checking of ballot boxes in the referendum which started at 9am in the technical school, Ennis on thursday. It was clear that clare people had voted overwhemingly in favour of EEC entry. 1983: Clare council of trade unions this week stepped up their campaign to highlight the plight of the PAYE/PRSI sector when they staged a protest in the Co.Council chamber on Monday evening. That was Gwen Stefani with Hollaback Girl – the biggest song on this day in 2005 Onto music news on this day In 1989 Kylie Minogue was at No.1 on the UK singles chart with her second solo No.1 'Hand On Your Heart.' The song was written and produced by Stock, Aitken & Waterman. 2003 Michael Jackson launched a court case suing Motown Records. Jacko filed the lawsuit in LA, saying he hadn't been paid royalties due for the music he did with the Jackson Five in the 60s and 70s. The singer also claimed his music has been used in TV ads without his permission. And finally celebrity birthdays on this day – singer Morgan Wallen was born in America in 1993 and actor Robert Pattinson was born in the UK on this day in 1986 and this is some of the stuff he has done. I'll be back with you tomorrow with another edition of Ar An Lá Seo.

Music Story
Music Story - The Jackson Five "ABC"

Music Story

Play Episode Listen Later May 13, 2025 4:49


Rejoignez-nous pour découvrir les coulisses fascinantes de l'un des plus grands tubes de l'histoire de la musique pop : ABC des Jackson 5. Cette chanson emblématique, sortie en 1970, a marqué à jamais l'histoire de la musique. Derrière ce succès planétaire se cache une histoire riche en rebondissements, que nous vous invitons à explorer.Vous allez plonger dans les débuts de la carrière des frères Jackson, alors que le jeune Michael n'avait que 11 ans à l'époque de l'enregistrement. Vous découvrirez comment la Motown, la célèbre maison de disques, a repéré ce groupe de prodiges venus de l'Indiana et les a propulsés sur le devant de la scène mondiale.Vous serez captivés par les détails de la conception d'ABC, cette chanson légère et entraînante qui a su conquérir les cœurs du public. Vous comprendrez comment les frères Jackson, malgré leur jeune âge, ont su imprimer leur signature vocale unique, faite de petites onomatopées devenues la marque de fabrique de Michael Jackson.Vous serez étonnés d'apprendre que si Michael est la voix principale, son frère Germaine a également participé au chant sur ce titre. C'est toute la dynamique du groupe qui se révèle à travers cette anecdote passionnante.Alors n'hésitez pas, rejoignez-nous pour vivre l'incroyable aventure des Jackson 5 et découvrir les secrets de l'un des plus grands tubes de tous les temps !

La Story Nostalgie
La Story Lionel Richie (Episode 5)

La Story Nostalgie

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 11, 2025 3:27


Il était une fois la Motown, probablement la plus belle légende à raconter pour une firme de disques, familiale, avec un patriarche au milieu, démarrant dans une ville improbable, Détroit, la cité de l'automobile. Succès gigantesque dès le début des années 60, on ne compte plus les noms des stars qui en sortent : Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, les Temptations, Four Tops, Supremes, Diana Ross, les Jackson Five, les Commodores. Mais voilà, au début des années 80, la musique noire explose sur la scène mondiale avec la fin du disco. Le monde s'est mis à danser et la Motown, portée par le retour inespéré de Diana Ross et de Stevie Wonder qui avaient été en retrait durant la mode disco, ne voit pas venir l'essoufflement de ses troupes. C'est vrai qu'ils sont tous là depuis les sixties. C'est aussi le cas pour les Commodores, alors Berry leur conseille de prendre une année sabbatique. Ca ne pouvait pas mieux tomber pour Lionel qui multiplie alors les collaborations et bascule du côté blanc du métier. En 1982 son premier album solo qui ne doit n'être qu'une parenthèse, sort chez A&M, une firme de Los Angeles, celle qui édite, entre autres, The Police, LE groupe du moment. Lionel ne reviendra pas dans le giron des Commodores et de la Motown, ils vont devoir continuer sans lui.Oui, le métier du disque a changé. Terminée la toute puissance des firmes du nord-est New York, Chicago, Detroit, tout se joue désormais à Los Angeles. Et c'est là que se trouve Lionel, avec son ami Michael Jackson. On comprend qu'il ait été vite question quand il a été demandé au duo de copains Lionel Richie et Kenny Rogers de faire une chanson pour l'Ethiopie en 1985, d'aller chercher Michael et Quincy Jones. Et quarante ans après, on a du mal à imaginer combien Lionel Richie, associé à Michael Jackson et Kenny Rogers, pesait lourd sur le marché mondial du disque. Ils cumulent à eux trois 800 millions de disques vendus. Aux JO de Los Angeles, qui invite les athlètes et le monde entier à faire la fête toute la nuit, c'est Lionel, qui aura récolté 15 hits mondiaux en solo sans compter les collaborations ni le fameux We are the world.C'est là qu'on va comprendre pourquoi Lionel Richie reste un des artistes phare des années 80, il marque une pause pour profiter de la vie et aussi pour d'autres raisons matrimoniales. Mais comme souvent, s'arrêter, c'est laisser le monde changer sans vous et donc, vous oublier. C'est ce qui est arrivé. Revenu en 1996, Lionel Richie ne retrouvera pas le chemin des sommets, ni avec cet album, ni avec les suivants. N'empêche l'histoire est belle, elle a été longue, et aujourd'hui, Lionel Richie fait à nouveau recette avec un public qui prend en compte la carrière d'un artiste plus que le succès du moment, conscient de la futilité d'un tube qui bien souvent, est sans lendemain.

La Story Nostalgie
La Story Lionel Richie (Episode 1)

La Story Nostalgie

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 7, 2025 3:11


Lionel Richie est une des grandes figures de la musique populaire. Une évidence. Le crooner noir qui sait aussi bien écrire des chansons qu'il les chante, et qu'on a tous immédiatement en tête. Des chansons des années 80, une étiquette qu'il doit au succès gigantesque qu'il a remporté durant cette décennie qu'il a marquée d'or et de diamant avec Michael Jackson, Prince et Whitney Houston. Et pourtant, comme Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie est au départ un artiste des années 70. Un de ces musiciens qui a marqué la soul à une époque où le marché du disque est encore séparé, où les Afro Américains possèdent leurs propres charts, leurs propres émissions de télé et radio. Il y a certes un public blanc pour acheter leurs disques mais la grande majorité ne semble pas concernée avant l'arrivée d'un Barry White qui reste longtemps une exception dans le paysage. Oui, la soul music reste quelque part dans l'ombre des grands jazzmen comme Miles Davis qui ont réussi dans le passé à briser le mur mais à la fin des années 70, avec la folie du disco, les choses semblent changer, le mur est en train de se fissurer, chose dont le jeune Michael Jackson, vingt ans mais déjà plus de dix années de métier, compte bien profiter. Michael veut devenir N°1 en conquérant le public blanc car oui, c'est possible. Ainsi le chanteur country, Kenny Rogers, immense star américaine, ne vient-il pas en 1980 de faire un immense tube avec une chanson écrite et produite par Lionel Richie.Lionel Richie, c'est le type que personne n'a vu venir. A la fin des années 60, s'il forme un groupe avec des copains, c'est parce que ça le fait auprès des filles de jouer de la musique dans un band. Lionel n'est pas le chanteur, non, c'est Walter, la voix groove des Commodores. Car le truc de Lionel, c'est sa voix suave pour chanter les slows, le reste du temps, il souffle dans son saxophone. Et ça marche. Enfin, ça marche, … gentiment. Pas comme les Jackson Five qui sont les stars de la Motown, le label de disques soul sur lequel ils ont signé eux aussi. Les cinq premiers singles des Jackson Five sont N°1, du jamais vu depuis les Beatles, alors en concert, ce sont les Commodores qui ouvrent les spectacles avant les frères Jackson. Mais avec le temps ils deviennent un sacré groupe de scène et ô surprise, en 1974, ça y est, ils tiennent leur premier tube, dans les charts R'N'B mais quand même, c'est un sacré marché et un sacré groove ce Machine Gun. Lionel aligne alors chaque année un ou deux succès par album des Commodores dont un inévitable slow qu'on se surprend à espérer à chaque sortie comme cet extraordinaire Still, en 1977, sur ce qui est déjà leur cinquième album.

The Valley Today
Small Business Administration: Meet the Mount Jackson Five

The Valley Today

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 19, 2025 84:36


In the picturesque town of Mount Jackson, Virginia, a revolutionary initiative is buzzing with success, breathing new life into the local economy and community spirit. Under the stewardship of Town Manager Olivia Hilton and her dedicated team, the Mount Jackson Five program has turned entrepreneurial dreams into reality. On today's episode of The Valley Business Today with the SBA, host Janet Michael and cohost Carl Knoblock, the Virginia District Director for the Small Business Administration (SBA) explore the stories and the triumphs of this unique business incubation program. Olivia's passion for community and economic development shines brightly. “Quality of life, parks, and economic development are what Mount Jackson sold me on,” says Olivia. Her progressive approach and willingness to support local entrepreneurs have set the foundation for the Mount Jackson Five program. The essence of the Mount Jackson Five program lies in providing the tools and support necessary for small businesses to thrive. Through a combination of grants, mentorship, and networking, the program has fostered a diverse group of businesses poised for success. 1. Valley Trail Bike and Run: Pedaling Towards a Healthier Community Founded by Trey and Bryce Nelson, Valley Trail Bike and Run is more than just a store. It's a hub for outdoor enthusiasts, offering biking and running gear, along with a full-service maintenance shop. The store's strategic focus on community integration and quality service is poised to fill a significant gap in the region's market for outdoor activities. “Our goal is to create a business community because it really wasn't quite here in Mount Jackson,” says Olivia. 2. Jillian's Farmstead Kitchen: Homestyle Goodness Jillian's journey to opening a brick-and-mortar storefront started with a pandemic pivot from in-home childcare to meal prepping and catering. Known for her scratch-made sourdough bread and family-style meals, Jillian's Farmstead Kitchen is a culinary haven. Emphasizing community connection, the kitchen plans to offer catering, pick-up meals, and a welcoming spot for locals. “Having friends and family come to help has been amazing,” Jillian shares. 3. Wild Child Museum and Menagerie: Where Learning Meets Play Rosie Lynch's Wild Child Museum and Menagerie is set to become Shenandoah County's ideal destination for indoor play and outdoor exploration. Focused on fostering a connection to nature, the museum aims to meet families' biological, socio-emotional, and intellectual needs. Rosie's adaptability and partnership with local institutions, like CREW, are vital for the project's success. “The teamwork that the town had was helpful because we had this dream,” Rosie highlights. 4. Hero's Journey Card Shop: Building a Community One Card at a Time Anthony High's Hero's Journey Card Shop, co-owned with his future brother-in-law Ethan, is envisioned as a hub for card enthusiasts. Offering a space for trading card games like Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering, the store is designed for community engagement with events like puzzle nights and murder mystery parties. “We want to provide a place for people who need that kind of space,” Anthony explains. Starting a business is never without its hurdles. From obtaining the right permits and funding to finding the perfect location and staffing, each of these entrepreneurs has navigated significant challenges. Yet, the shared support from the town administration and the community has played an instrumental role in their progress. The excitement doesn't end here. Olivia Hilton envisions the program's continuation, bringing more entrepreneurs and innovative ideas into Mount Jackson. The town is committed to supporting these new businesses and ensuring their long-term success. In closing, the Mount Jackson Five program exemplifies the power of community support in revitalizing local economies. With a collaborative spirit and a focus on sustainable growth, Mount Jackson is paving the way for a promising future. Visit these burgeoning businesses and be a part of the town's thriving community.

La Story Nostalgie
Il y a 40 ans, We are the World par USA for Africa (Episode 2)

La Story Nostalgie

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 18, 2025 3:11


A deux jours de la Noël 1984, a lieu la conversation téléphonique qui enclenche définitivement le moment historique que s'apprête à vivre une décennie pourtant exceptionnellement créative et enthousiasmante. En effet, Lionel Richie, nouvelle star de la pop mondiale, est en discussion avec son agent Ken Kragen lui expliquant qu'en Europe, des rockers blancs sont en train de réaliser une vente de disques historique pour sauver des Africains de la famine. Et que le chanteur Harry Belafonte est venu lui dire que la communauté afro américaine ne peut pas être en reste. Alors, il a besoin de lui, et de sa notoriété. Lionel Richie va avoir besoin du plus grand des producteurs pour un challenge pareil car il s'agit non seulement de convaincre tout le pays d'acheter le disque mais aussi de tenir la comparaison avec la chanson des Britanniques. Et en 1984, le plus grand des grands se nomme Quincy Jones.Et donc, le lendemain soir, Lionel Richie vit la nuit, alors qu'ils roulent dans la limousine de Lionel, son manager propose d'utiliser son téléphone, autant vous dire que c'est une rareté à l'époque, pour appeler son ami Stevie Wonder. La raison est simple : pour écrire la chanson, Lionel Richie ne va disposer que de très peu de temps car il doit préparer la présentation des American Music Awards et surtout, sa première tournée en solo. Un enjeu considérable quand on sait le nombre de disques qu'il vend désormais. Stevie ne répond pas. Ils vont essayer de le joindre toute la nuit sans résultat mais ne s'en étonnent pas, Stevie se manage seul et met souvent des plombes avant de rappeler. McCartney l'a attendu vingt jours en studio avant d'enregistrer Ebony & Ivory. Ah ? Ça sonne. Ce doit être lui ! Mais non, c'est Quincy Jones pour annoncer qu'il voit Michael Jackson le lendemain et qu'il va lui en parler.Lionel et Michael se connaissent depuis longtemps, depuis leurs débuts. Lionel a certes presque dix ans de plus que Michael mais le succès des Jackson Five, un groupe de gamins, avait été immédiat, aussi les Commodores, le groupe dont Lionel était le saxophoniste et second soliste, avait assuré la première partie de leur tournée au début des années 70. Et c'est vrai que les années d'adolescence sont importantes, fondatrices. Si je vous dis que la première destination du jeune Michael quand il a appris à conduire, a été de se rendre chez Lionel, vous avez compris les liens entre les deux hommes, en cette fin d'année 1984. Michael est alors au sommet avec les ventes démesurées de Thriller, et en plus de son duo avec McCartney, il participe à un single qui vient d'entrer dans les charts. Nouveau succès, à nouveau un truc à frissons mais bon, il va participer au projet de Lionel et Quincy, bien sûr. Et comme Stevie Wonder n'a toujours pas rappelé malgré des messages sur son répondeur, il propose à Lionel de commencer à écrire la chanson sans lui.

Arizona's Morning News
"ABC" by the Jackson Five was released on this day

Arizona's Morning News

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 24, 2025 2:14


On this day in 1970, "ABC" by the Jackson Five was released. It would go on to replace the Beatles "Let it Be" at the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. Michael Jackson was only 11 years old at the time. The song sold 2 million copies within the first week of its release in the U.S. and more than 4 million copies worldwide. Learn more in today's KTAR timeline brought to you by Beatitudes Campus. 

Court Cousins: An Orlando Magic Podcast
Court Cousins Episode 74: Jackson Five

Court Cousins: An Orlando Magic Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 24, 2025 72:07


Join us at Court Cousins Night March 29th against the Kings: https://fevo-enterprise.com/event/Courtcousins0329 Court Cousins, two cousins sharing laughs, and talking the NBA team they love, the Orlando Magic. Topics Include: Paolo Banchero's shoe release and current play, continued tragic 3PT shooting, Markelle Fultz signing with Sacremento, and much more. Thanks for watching! www.courtcousins.com Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS24xb3LSYbzzTBtE3ASLvg/join Twitter: https://twitter.com/Court_Cousins Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/court_cousins/ 0:00 Cold Open and Intro 4:00 Are you OK-C-P Check In 8:36 What I Learned 31:30 Social Media Round Up 59:20 The Large Ending

Music History Today
Milli Vanilli Win Best New Artist Grammy, Live To Regret It: Music History Today Podcast February 21

Music History Today

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 21, 2025 8:23


On the February 21 edition of the Music History Today podcast, we have Billy Joel, the Jackson Five, & Bruce Springsteen For more music history, subscribe to my Spotify Channel or subscribe to the audio version of my music history podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts from ALL MUSIC HISTORY TODAY PODCAST NETWORK LINKS - https://allmylinks.com/musichistorytoday

Chicago History Podcast
Episode 802 - Chicago Connections: The Jackson Five

Chicago History Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 15, 2025 49:23


Send us a textWhile not from here, their connection to this city is undeniable and Chicago's influence most certainly contributed to their rise as one of the most successful musical acts of all time. Today we're talking about the Jackson Five.Show your love of this podcast for the cost of a coffee:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/chicagohistoryFurther reading (purchasing these items through these links helps support our efforts at no additional cost to you):Michael Jackson: The Magic, The Madness, The Whole Story by J. Randy Taraborrellihttps://amzn.to/4hDOfenGary, the Most American of All American Cities by S. Paul O'Harahttps://amzn.to/4hZtKbSM-D-L-T on Soul Train:https://youtu.be/tDCjHOoL1Sg?si=cCzPKcwoKkCF4YsDRenaldo Domino:https://chicagoreader.com/music/chicago-soul-dynamo-renaldo-domino-breaks-out-his-sugary-sweet-pipes-on-never-thought/https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/January-2020/You-Should-Know-Renaldo-Domino/Chicago History Podcast (chicagohistorypod AT gmail.com):Chicago History Podcast Art by John K. Schneider (angeleyesartjks AT gmail.com) Support the show

Hill-Man Morning Show Audio
Jackson tells ridiculous somehow true stories from his life

Hill-Man Morning Show Audio

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 17, 2025 9:47


Jackson tells all about his life in the Jackson Five.

Hill-Man Morning Show Audio
Looking at pro and college sports through eyes of nepotism and NIL

Hill-Man Morning Show Audio

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 17, 2025 36:26


Hour 3 - Dakota in Braintree report probably has no truth to it. Curtis predicts the NCAA Football championship. Sports nepotism discussion. It will probably always exist. The Lebron argument posed by Courtney states that people only freaked out about Bronny because there is a lot of hate for Lebron. However, some parents know their leagues very well and want what is best for their kid. NCAA nepotism. How many NCAA kids are doing commercials? The NIL is not as big as people think it is, they are getting money through the collective, not through endorsements. How does UNC compare to a school like BC? Bill Belichick saying he can get you to the NFL is priceless. Jackson tells all about his life in the Jackson Five.

80s TV Ladies
Carol Burnett, Vicki Lawrence and all about ‘The Family'

80s TV Ladies

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 8, 2025 48:20


On March 16, 1974, a sketch appeared on The Carol Burnett Show featuring Carol Burnett, Vicki Lawrence and Harvey Korman portraying a “normal” American family -- warts and all. This sketch, known as “The Family”, led by a then 25 year-old Vicki Lawrence playing a gray-haired 63 year-old ‘Mama', spawned 30 more sketches, a TV Movie (Eunice) and finally a spin-off series of its own (Mama's Family) which ran for 130 episodes over six seasons both on CBS and in syndication (1983-1990).In “The Family”, Carol Burnett played the melodramatic, ambitious, brow-beaten daughter of ‘Mama'. Mama, played by Vicki Lawrence, is an exaggeratedly mean-spirited and insult-spitting widow and mother of five children: three sons played by guest stars Roddy McDowell, Alan Alda and Tom Smothers -- and two daughters: Eunice & Ellen (played by Betty White). Eunice's husband Ed Higgins was played by Harvey Korman.How did one simple sketch take on such a huge life of its own, creating a sprawling TV empire that some are calling “The Mama-Verse”? Susan and Sharon put on their housecoats and curly gray wigs to find out!THE CONVERSATIONCarol Burnett's career started with a Broadway role starring as the lead in Once Upon a Mattress and then as a rising star on The Garry Moore Show.The Carol Burnett Show was hugely successful, running eleven seasons, garnering 70 Emmy nominations and winning 25.Carol Burnett was encouraged to “speak up for herself” by another TV comedy legend -- Lucille Ball.A fan letter from then 18 year-old Vicki Lawrence to Carol Burnett led to her actually being cast as a regular on the show!“HARVARD SCHOOL OF COMEDY”: Lawrence cites Harvey Korman and Carol Burnett as her show business mentors during the 11 years she spent on the show.ONE-HIT WONDER: Five years into her run on The Carol Burnett Show, Lawrence had a hit song, recording “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia”!In the TV movie Eunice, Mama suddenly only has three children instead of five -- what happened to the others? And why is one of them suddenly Ken Berry?Vicki Lawrence was nominated for an Emmy for her portrayal of ‘Mama' in Eunice.The TV series Mama's Family was aired first as a prime-time network comedy and later as a nationally syndicated series. It originally ran for two years on CBS, was cancelled in 1984 -- and then revived TWO YEARS LATER in 1986 by Lorimar Syndication to run for additional 100 episodes!NAME SWITCH: The character Ken Berry played started out as “Phillip” in the TV-movie but then became “Vinton” in the TV series.The TV show introduced “Fran” played by future Golden Girl, Rue McClanahan -- playing Betty White's aunt!The TV show also introduced Vinton's children Buzz and Sonya played by “80's TV Ladies” alum, Eric Brown and actress Karin Argoud.Mama's neighbor, Naomi Oates, was played by “Another World” “The Nanny” and now “80s TV Ladies” alum, Dorothy Lyman!So join Susan and Sharon as they talk Lou Grant, social justice, Julie Andrews and the first Live Televised Cinderella musical, “Raytown, Missouri”, Kamala Harris, Matlock, driving your own story -- and “Miss Fireball of Inglewood”!AUDIO-OGRAPHYWatch The Carol Burnett Show and Mama's Family across many platforms. Not all of them feature all seasons. The Carol Burnett Show can be seen for free on Pluto TV. Mama's Family can be seen for free on Pluto TV.The Carol Burnett Show “The Family” select episodes:S7, EP23 - Aired 3/16/1974 - Jackson Five and Roddy McDowall.The first of “The Family” sketches. “The Reunion  - Eunice's brother Phil (Roddy McDowall), a Nobel and Pulitzer prize winning author, returns home for a visit. On YouTube.S8, EP13 - Aired 12/21/1974 - Alan Alda“Home for the Holidays”Christmas sketch with Alan Alda on YouTube. VITAL READINGGet Handbook for A Post-Roe America by Robin Marty at Bookshop.org.Check out Men In Dark Times by Hannah Ahrendt at Bookshop.org.Read Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson at Bookshop.org.You can also follow Heather's substack.SHOPLAST WEEK FOR THE “80's TV LADIES” HOLIDAY SALE!15% off on all merch at the 8TL Shop. Make sure to use promo code “Festive80s”!CONNECTVisit 80sTVLadies.com for transcripts and more.Sign up for the 80s TV Ladies mailing list.Support us and get ad-free episodes on PATREON. In Honor of President Carter and to learn more about his presidency: Get Susan's new play about him and his Crisis of Confidence speech: Confidence (and the Speech) at Broadway Licensing.

410 Sports Talk
We got a JACKSON FIVE in New York! | Ravens at Giants WEEK 15 Recap

410 Sports Talk

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 16, 2024 37:22


The Baltimore Ravens come back from the bye week with a dominant performance against the New York Giants. Lamar Jackson ended the day with his sixth five-touchdown game of his career. Mark Andrews now solely leads the franchise with the most total touchdowns with his score today. A healthy Ravens get a chance to showcase some depth throughout the game. #nfl #ravensflock #baltimoreravens #nfldraft #kickoff #lamarjackson #newyorkgiants Join us in YouTube Membership: https://www.youtube.com/c/410SportsTalk Follow us on social media: Instagram: @410sportstalk X (Twitter): @410_sportstalk Check out our merch: https://410-sports-talk.creator-spring.com/ BetOnline: https://www.betonline.ag/ Use promo code BLEAV for your 50% welcome bonus on your first deposit!!

IseeRobots Radio
An IseeRobots Radio Musical Christmas Experience. Tons Of Fun! Power Records!

IseeRobots Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 13, 2024 59:41


Hey guys! This week we have a very special treat. A Christmas Special. How original huh? This one is cool though. I don't know how many people out there know this but I used to totally do a different podcast way back in the day. like a few years ago. It was called creatively enough IseeRobots Radio.    It was basically a music show focused on Golden Age Hip Hop with commercials and other retro weirdness mixed in. It was cool even if nobody really listened. Once a year though I'd flip the script and throw down some Christmas Beats.    This is the second and far superior version of the IseeRobots Christmas Special, the 2013 version. It's great, really if you listen to one Christmas podcast make it this one. I think it's my finest hour. Seriously.    What it is is an hour or so of Christmas music from the likes of Buck Owens or The Jackson Five mixed with some classic Peter Pan Holiday Story records.    I guarantee that you'll like it. It's family friendly and perfect for when you guys are chilling around the house doing family stuff. Give it a shot. What do you have to lose? Nothing but a little time and you stand to gain a lot more! Merry Christmas from us here at the ISR Command Center. 

Vertigo - La 1ere
La belle histoire de Rodolphe, le Pʹtit Renne au Nez Rouge

Vertigo - La 1ere

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 12, 2024 5:42


Il y a 75 ans, Johnny Marks composait "Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer", lʹun des incontournables tubes de Noël, enregistré par Gene Autry, puis par les Jackson Five ou encore les Destinyʹs Child. Mais de quoi parle cette chanson ? A quoi ressemble-t-elle ? Et pourquoi y a-t-il tant de grelots ? Une enquête de Noël réalisée en musique par Pierre-Do Bourgknecht.

Lightnin' Licks Radio
#40 - Love at First Listen

Lightnin' Licks Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 21, 2024 115:23


Vinyl records play a significant role in Jay and Deon's lives. They're 100% obsessed with music. But how did this madness all start? Well, episode 40 of LLR examines their origin stories. Ten classic artists who helped shape the Lickers' sonic identities are discussed while another crackin' mixtape is curated, created, and (hopefully) cranked. God gave rock and roll to us, Goddamn it! Put it in your souls already. Sonic contributors to the fortieth episode of Lightnin' Licks Radio podcast include (in order of appearance): Brothers Johnson, dialogue from Peter Pan Records' "G.I. Joe: Escape From Adventure Team Headquarters" storybook, DJ Sanz, James Todd Smith, Boy Meets Girl, Berlin, Super Lover Cee & Casanova Rud, The Treacherous Three, T La Rock, Rick Rubin, Beastie Boys , NPR's A. Martinez - Kye Ryssdal - Leilah Fadel, Dolly Parton, Whitney Houston, Dr. Pascal Wallisch, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Queen, Elvis, Tommy Durden, Wings, James Horner & Will Jennings, Celine Dion, Right Said Fred, Greta Van Fleet, Dave Brubeck, Mac Demarco, Moose Charlap & Jule Styne, Jerry Goldsmith, M.M. Knapps, library “space” music and read-along storybook dialogue, Arc of All, Jim Kirk, Casey Kasem, Van Halen, Dion DiMucci, Leif Garrett, Jeff Barry & Ellie Greenwich, Shawn Cassidy, Gregg Diamond, Andrea True Connection, Sir Reginald Kenneth Dwight*, Stevie Wonder, Bernie Taupin, Norman Whitfield & Barrett Strong, The Undisputed Truth, Perry-Perkins-Johnson, Honey Cone, TV adverts from Firestone Tires and Post cereal's Pink Panther Flakes, The Jackson Five, the Motown Players & the Funk Brothers, the King of Pop*, Cameron Crowe & Nancy Wilson, Still Water, Temple of the Dog, Sweet Water, The Dust Brothers, Afrika Bambaataa, Dudley Taft (brandishing his axe and ripping a bong), Black Sabbath, Dancefloor Destruction Crew, The Wrecking Crew, The Partridge Family, Wally Gold, Idris Muhammad, Led Zeppelin, Beastie Boys (again), Alice Cooper (band), Digable Planets with Wah Wah Watson, Michael Franti and Spearhead, Jimmy Buffett, Disposable Heroes of Hypocrisy, Three Dog Night, Hoyt Axton, Randy Newman, Paul Williams, Russ Ballard, America, Rainbow, Cheap Trick, Freda, Argent, Wilson Pickett, Wu-Tang's RZA, Pinback, Three Mile Pilot, Lou Reed, Goblin Cock, Fruer, Black Sabbath (again), Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Jethro fucking Tull, the Source of Light and Power, DJT, Eric B., Soul Coughing, The Clockers. Love at First Listen mixtape [SIDE 1] (1) Sweet Water – King of '79 (2) King of Pop - GTBT* (3) Spearhead – Positive (4) The Partridge Family – Lay it on the Line (5) Pinback – Loro [SIDE 2] (1) Alice Cooper – You Drive Me Nervous (2) #6 Pop Hit W.E. 04_FEB_1984* (3) Jethro Tull – Two Fingers (4) Beastie Boys – Live at P.J.'s (5) Three Dog Night - Liar Thanks for Listening. Autumn has fallen. Do your best to not jump into a ravine. Please shop for your music locally. We suggest ⁠Electric Kitsch⁠. Drink ⁠Blue Chair Bay⁠ flavored rums. Feeling like jumping into a ravine? There's ⁠help⁠ available. *some details have been changed

Lightnin' Licks Radio
#40 - Love at First Listen

Lightnin' Licks Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 18, 2024 114:57


Clearly, vinyl records play a significant role in Jay and Deon's lives. But how did this all start? Well, episode 40 examines their origin stories. Ten classic artists who helped shape the Lickers' sonic identities are discussed and another crackin' mixtape is curated, created, and (hopefully) cranked. God gave rock and roll to us, Goddamn it. Put it in your soul already. Sonic contributors to the fortieth episode of Lightnin' Licks Radio podcast includes (in order of appearance): Brothers Johnson, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Derrick Harriott, Townes Van Zandt, James Todd Smith, Boy Meets Girl, Berlin, Super Lover Cee & Casanova Rud, The Treacherous Three, T La Rock, Rick Rubin, Beastie Boys , NPR's A. Martinez - Kye Ryssdal - Leilah Fadel, Dolly Parton, Whitney Houston, Dr. Pascal Wallisch, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Queen, Elvis, Tommy Durden, Wings, James Horner & Will Jennings, Celine Dion, Right Said Fred, Greta Van Fleet, Dave Brubeck, Mac Demarco, Moose Charlap & Jule Styne, Jerry Goldsmith, M.M. Knapps, library “space” music and read-along storybook dialogue, Arc of All, Jim Kirk, Casey Kasem, Van Halen, Dion DiMucci, Leif Garrett, Jeff Barry & Ellie Greenwich, Shawn Cassidy, Gregg Diamond, Andrea True Connection, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Bernie Taupin, Norman Whitfield & Barrett Strong, The Undisputed Truth, Perry-Perkins-Johnson, Honey Cone, TV adverts from Firestone Tires and Post cereal's Pink Panther Flakes, The Jackson Five, the Motown Players & the Funk Brothers, Michael Jackson, Cameron Crowe & Nancy Wilson, Still Water, Temple of the Dog, Sweet Water, The Dust Brothers, Afrika Bambaataa, Dudley Taft (brandishing his axe and ripping a bong), Black Sabbath, Dancefloor Destruction Crew, The Wrecking Crew, The Partridge Family, Wally Gold, Idris Muhammad, Led Zeppelin, Beastie Boys (again), Alice Cooper (band), Digable Planets with Wah Wah Watson, Michael Franti and Spearhead, Jimmy Buffett, Disposable Heroes of Hypocrisy, Three Dog Night, Hoyt Axton, Randy Newman, Paul Williams, Russ Ballard, America, Rainbow, Cheap Trick, Freda, Argent, Wilson Pickett, Wu-Tang's RZA, Pinback, Three Mile Pilot, Lou Reed, Goblin Cock, Fruer, Black Sabbath (again), Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Jethro fucking Tull, the Source of Light and Power, DJT, Eric B., Soul Coughing, The Clockers. Love at First Listen mixtape [SIDE 1] (1) Sweet Water – King of '79 (2) Michael Jackson – Got to be There (3) Spearhead – Positive (4) The Partridge Family – Lay it on the Line (5) Pinback – Loro [SIDE 2] (1) Alice Cooper – You Drive Me Nervous (2) Elton John – I Guess That's Why They Call it the Blues (3) Jethro Tull – Two Fingers (4) Beastie Boys – Live at P.J.'s (5) Three Dog Night - Liar Thanks for Listening. Autumn has fallen. Do your best to not jump into a ravine. Please shop for your music locally. We suggest Electric Kitsch. Drink Blue Chair Bay flavored rums. Feeling like jumping into a ravine? There's help available.

BarstoolDMV-Baltimore Podcast
Jumbo Set Podcast, Episode 48: A Jackson Five in Tampa

BarstoolDMV-Baltimore Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 24, 2024 73:14


Another week, another win, as the Ravens went into Tampa Bay and beat the Buccaneers 41-31. Jake and Spenny are here to look back on that game and what went so well for the offense, things that could be cleaned up on defense and special teams, and what it all says about the team as they head into what looks to be a softer portion of their schedule. The guys also look around the league a bit at what other teams are doing, discuss the trade deadline and what the Ravens could do on the market, and answer some listener questions. Thanks as always for tuning in, and we'll be back at you very soon. Hosts: Jake Louque, Spencer Schultz Producer: Jake Louque Thanks to our presenting sponsors, Jimmy's Seafood, Fed Thrill Sunglasses, Black Eyed Susan Spices, Clipper City Barber Co. Follow the show on social: Twitter: @Exit52Podcast, @JumboSetPodcast IG: exit52podcast TikTok: exit52podcast

Gig Gab - The Working Musicians' Podcast
From The Jackson Five to Shawn Cassidy: Bob LeVitus' Untold Tales of Touring Legends

Gig Gab - The Working Musicians' Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 30, 2024 49:06


Ever wondered what it's like to tour with music legends? This episode of Gig Gab takes you behind the scenes with Bob “Doctor Mac” LeVitus, a tech author and former roadie for the Jackson 5 and Shaun Cassidy. Bob LeVitus, who has authored 92 books on technology, shares his unique […] The post From The Jackson Five to Shawn Cassidy: Bob LeVitus' Untold Tales of Touring Legends — Gig Gab 449 appeared first on Gig Gab.

A Bowl of Soul A Mixed Stew of Soul Music™
A Bowl of Soul A Mixed Stew of Soul Music Broadcast - 09-20-2024 - Rest in Peace - Abdul Duke Fakir - Frankie Beverly- Sergio Mendes - Tito Jackson

A Bowl of Soul A Mixed Stew of Soul Music™

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 23, 2024 67:23


  On A Bowl of Soul, we're honoring Classic Soul and R&B. In this broadcast, we're also paying tribute to soul music artists who have passed away this summer and in September, including Duke Fakir of the Four Tops, Frankie Beverly, Sergio Mendes, and Tito Jackson, one of the founders of the Jackson Five. Additionally, we'll celebrate the artists who have performed songs written by the legendary Stevie Wonder. I hope you enjoy the show! Rest In Peace, Abdul "Duke" Fakir, Frankie Beverly, Sergio Mendes and Tito Jackson #dukefakir #frankiebeverly #sergiomendes #titojackson Get up to 2 months free podcasting service with our Libsyn code=ABOS. Sign up & bring your  podcast to life! Get on Apple & Spotify, get critical stats & all the support you need to sound your best and grow your show!! Sign up here: https://signup.libsyn.com/?promo_code=ABOS You can listen to the A Bowl of Soul Radio Network on Live365.com giving you 24/7/365 days of Soul Music. Stop on by and listen:  A Bowl of Soul Radio Network on Live365 You can support A Bowl of Soul and Buy Me A Coffee. Just click: Buy A Bowl of Soul A Cup of Coffee Purchase your A Bowl of Soul T-Shirt and other merchandise. Just click: Get Your A Bowl of Soul Merch Follow me: @abowlofsoul on Twitter                   @proftlove on Instagram                   @A Bowl of Soul A Mixed Stew of Soul Music on Facebook Promote your product or service on the podcast and the radio network. You can sponsor A Bowl of Soul by getting your product or service in front of listeners. Email us at: abowlofsoul@gmail.com  Thank you for your Support!!!

Failure To Stop
631. UNCUFFED: The Battle Of Celebrity Endorsements

Failure To Stop

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 17, 2024 58:46


Taylor Swift has endorsed her candidate-- but who else is next? Kamala's Jackson Five crush has passed away, as has the star of "The Sandlot," "Lion King," "Star Wars," James Earl Jones. Biden has an interesting choice of headwear, but we are all past the point of trying to figure out of he has any idea of what's going on. Kelly Osborne has come out to say the obvious, that rehab facilities pray on addicts-- billing their insurance, and then kicking them out when the money turns off. And of course, hoping they start up drugs and insurance all over again. Eric promises to review Deadpool just in time for it's release on home video, and also the new Beetlejuice movie with Michael Keaton in the starring role. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tim Conway Jr. on Demand
Hour 1 | Emmy Broadcast @ConwayShow

Tim Conway Jr. on Demand

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 17, 2024 34:51 Transcription Available


Guest: Jason Nathanson on yesterday's Emmy broadcast. / Trump's second assassination attempt update and the Emmy's avoiding any mention of the assassination attempt. The issue of Hollywood and Republicans, and the ramifications of being a Republican. / Security update at Mar-a-Lago and Biden calls for more Secret Service personnel. Also, there's a lot of silence since the assassination attempt, should more people be condemning the violence? / The passing of Tito Jackson and Conway's past with the Jackson family / history seeing The Jackson Five.  

The Record Store Day Podcast with Paul Myers

Big Star drummer and founding members Jody Stephens, R.E.M.'s Mike Mills, Wilco's Pat Sansone, and Jon Auer of The Posies join Paul for a discussion of The Big Star Quintet (a supergroup which also includes Chris Stamey of The dB's) as they keep the music of Big Star alive on the 50th Anniversary tour for Big Star's second album, Radio City (available at your local independent record store from Stax/Craft Recordings).  It's another "bucket list" interview that you'll only hear on the Record Store Day Podcast. *Special thanks to Jon Auer for making this happen. And RSD co-founder Carrie Colliton returns to talk about her busy fall concert schedule from our East Coast office in Raleigh, North Carolina. The Record Store Day Podcast is a weekly music chat show written, produced, engineered and hosted by Paul Myers, who also composed the theme music and selected interstitial music.  Executive Producers (for Record Store Day) Michael Kurtz and Carrie Colliton. For the most up-to-date news about all things RSD, visit RecordStoreDay.com)   Sponsored by Dogfish Head Craft Brewery (dogfish.com), Tito's Handmade Vodka (titosvodka.com), RSDMRKT.com, and Furnace Record Pressing, the official vinyl pressing plant of Record Store Day.   Please consider subscribing to our podcast wherever you get podcasts, and tell your friends, we're here every week and we love making new friends.   R.I.P Alex Chilton, Chris Bell, and Andy Hummel.  Late R.I.P. to Tito Jackson of the The Jackson Five.   

Daily Inspiration – The Steve Harvey Morning Show
Overcoming the Odds: UniverSoul investors and friends questioned his business plan to showcase Black talent.

Daily Inspiration – The Steve Harvey Morning Show

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 7, 2024 28:24 Transcription Available


Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Cedric Walker.  UniverSoul is a highly interactive combination of circus arts, theater, and music that spans genres including Pop, Classic R&B, Latin, Hip Hop, Jazz, and Gospel. It embraces and celebrates the unique and familiar aspects of pop culture globally by bringing them center stage with a cast of international performers. UniverSoul is rated as one of the top live family acts in America along with Cirque du Soleil. UniverSoul's fresh approach to family friendly live entertainment has garnered it a coveted spot as one of Ticketmaster's top ten most requested family events. UniverSoul was created 30 years ago as the brainchild of Atlanta concert and theater producer Cedric Walker. Cedric Walker, a native of Baltimore, Maryland, showed an entrepreneurial spirit from a young age, starting with his shoe shine business at six years old. His love for the circus grew as he and his brother would re-create the spectacles they witnessed, with Cedric even dreaming of running away with the circus to work as a maintenance man. In the 1970s, Walker's passion for entertainment led him to work with the Commodores and later become a promoter for the Jackson Five. In the 1980s, he organized the Fresh Festivals, the world's first Rap music tour in large arenas, featuring iconic rappers. By the mid-1990s, Walker and his team sought new family entertainment ideas, leading to the creation of The UniverSoul Circus in 1994, an urban family entertainment event under the big top. This groundbreaking venture showcased a variety of talents from black performers, ranging from hip-hop musicals to vaudeville acts, and animal performances, setting a new standard in live entertainment. Walker's dedication to this vision inspired performers worldwide to join the unique and successful circus venture. #AMI #BEST #STRAW #SHMSSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Steve Harvey Morning Show
Overcoming the Odds: UniverSoul investors and friends questioned his business plan to showcase Black talent.

The Steve Harvey Morning Show

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 7, 2024 28:24 Transcription Available


Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Cedric Walker.  UniverSoul is a highly interactive combination of circus arts, theater, and music that spans genres including Pop, Classic R&B, Latin, Hip Hop, Jazz, and Gospel. It embraces and celebrates the unique and familiar aspects of pop culture globally by bringing them center stage with a cast of international performers. UniverSoul is rated as one of the top live family acts in America along with Cirque du Soleil. UniverSoul's fresh approach to family friendly live entertainment has garnered it a coveted spot as one of Ticketmaster's top ten most requested family events. UniverSoul was created 30 years ago as the brainchild of Atlanta concert and theater producer Cedric Walker. Cedric Walker, a native of Baltimore, Maryland, showed an entrepreneurial spirit from a young age, starting with his shoe shine business at six years old. His love for the circus grew as he and his brother would re-create the spectacles they witnessed, with Cedric even dreaming of running away with the circus to work as a maintenance man. In the 1970s, Walker's passion for entertainment led him to work with the Commodores and later become a promoter for the Jackson Five. In the 1980s, he organized the Fresh Festivals, the world's first Rap music tour in large arenas, featuring iconic rappers. By the mid-1990s, Walker and his team sought new family entertainment ideas, leading to the creation of The UniverSoul Circus in 1994, an urban family entertainment event under the big top. This groundbreaking venture showcased a variety of talents from black performers, ranging from hip-hop musicals to vaudeville acts, and animal performances, setting a new standard in live entertainment. Walker's dedication to this vision inspired performers worldwide to join the unique and successful circus venture. #STRAW #SHMSSupport the show: https://www.steveharveyfm.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Strawberry Letter
Overcoming the Odds: UniverSoul investors and friends questioned his business plan to showcase Black talent.

Strawberry Letter

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 7, 2024 28:24 Transcription Available


Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Cedric Walker.  UniverSoul is a highly interactive combination of circus arts, theater, and music that spans genres including Pop, Classic R&B, Latin, Hip Hop, Jazz, and Gospel. It embraces and celebrates the unique and familiar aspects of pop culture globally by bringing them center stage with a cast of international performers. UniverSoul is rated as one of the top live family acts in America along with Cirque du Soleil. UniverSoul's fresh approach to family friendly live entertainment has garnered it a coveted spot as one of Ticketmaster's top ten most requested family events. UniverSoul was created 30 years ago as the brainchild of Atlanta concert and theater producer Cedric Walker. Cedric Walker, a native of Baltimore, Maryland, showed an entrepreneurial spirit from a young age, starting with his shoe shine business at six years old. His love for the circus grew as he and his brother would re-create the spectacles they witnessed, with Cedric even dreaming of running away with the circus to work as a maintenance man. In the 1970s, Walker's passion for entertainment led him to work with the Commodores and later become a promoter for the Jackson Five. In the 1980s, he organized the Fresh Festivals, the world's first Rap music tour in large arenas, featuring iconic rappers. By the mid-1990s, Walker and his team sought new family entertainment ideas, leading to the creation of The UniverSoul Circus in 1994, an urban family entertainment event under the big top. This groundbreaking venture showcased a variety of talents from black performers, ranging from hip-hop musicals to vaudeville acts, and animal performances, setting a new standard in live entertainment. Walker's dedication to this vision inspired performers worldwide to join the unique and successful circus venture. #STRAW #SHMSSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Best of The Steve Harvey Morning Show
Overcoming the Odds: UniverSoul investors and friends questioned his business plan to showcase Black talent.

Best of The Steve Harvey Morning Show

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 7, 2024 28:24 Transcription Available


Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Cedric Walker.  UniverSoul is a highly interactive combination of circus arts, theater, and music that spans genres including Pop, Classic R&B, Latin, Hip Hop, Jazz, and Gospel. It embraces and celebrates the unique and familiar aspects of pop culture globally by bringing them center stage with a cast of international performers. UniverSoul is rated as one of the top live family acts in America along with Cirque du Soleil. UniverSoul's fresh approach to family friendly live entertainment has garnered it a coveted spot as one of Ticketmaster's top ten most requested family events. UniverSoul was created 30 years ago as the brainchild of Atlanta concert and theater producer Cedric Walker. Cedric Walker, a native of Baltimore, Maryland, showed an entrepreneurial spirit from a young age, starting with his shoe shine business at six years old. His love for the circus grew as he and his brother would re-create the spectacles they witnessed, with Cedric even dreaming of running away with the circus to work as a maintenance man. In the 1970s, Walker's passion for entertainment led him to work with the Commodores and later become a promoter for the Jackson Five. In the 1980s, he organized the Fresh Festivals, the world's first Rap music tour in large arenas, featuring iconic rappers. By the mid-1990s, Walker and his team sought new family entertainment ideas, leading to the creation of The UniverSoul Circus in 1994, an urban family entertainment event under the big top. This groundbreaking venture showcased a variety of talents from black performers, ranging from hip-hop musicals to vaudeville acts, and animal performances, setting a new standard in live entertainment. Walker's dedication to this vision inspired performers worldwide to join the unique and successful circus venture. #AMI #BEST #STRAW #SHMSSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

All About M.E. PODCAST
Episode-47 Dedication to Michael Jackson

All About M.E. PODCAST

Play Episode Play 60 sec Highlight Listen Later Aug 28, 2024 59:02


We would LOVE to hear what you think. Please drop a line."Explore the life, music, and legacy of the King of Pop Michael Jackson in this captivating podcast. Delve into the unparalleled career of Michael Jackson, from his early days with the Jackson 5 to his groundbreaking solo albums. Uncover the man behind the music, his impact on pop culture, and the controversies that surrounded him. Join us for an in-depth look at the iconic artist who left an indelible mark on the world of music."Support the Show.

Ultimate Playlist
Ultimate Motown Playlist

Ultimate Playlist

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 17, 2024 89:36


Matt and Briggs create ultimate music playlists around a theme. This time we created the Ultimate Motown Playlist.    Follow us on:   Twitter: https://twitter.com/UPwithMB YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJWoLCPwdFdf9gjRQBd6Xsg   Matt's Music on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4xxrTMyeailrpFvLXiyhDs?si=3cjpYTywT9GaRyjFV57EJQ

Music History Today
Mick Jagger is Born: Music History Today Podcast July 26

Music History Today

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 26, 2024 12:09


On the July 26 edition of Music History Today podcast, the Jackson Five sign, Billy Joel performs, and Beyonce acts. Plus, happy birthday to Mick Jagger!!! For more music history, subscribe to my Spotify Channel or subscribe to the audio version of my music history podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts from ALL MUSIC HISTORY TODAY  PODCAST NETWORK LINKS - https://allmylinks.com/musichistorytoday --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/musichistorytodaypodcast/support

WDR ZeitZeichen
Michael Jackson - vor 15 Jahren stirbt der King of Pop

WDR ZeitZeichen

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 24, 2024 14:37


Als Musiker und Tänzer setzt er neue Maßstäbe, wird zum Weltstar - und zur tragischen Skandalfigur. Am 25.6.2009 stirbt Michael Jackson durch ein Narkosemittel. Von Andrea Klasen.

Black History, For Real
21 | Tend to Your Own Business | Motown Vs. Stax

Black History, For Real

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 24, 2024 41:01


Motown has finally found its groove. The Jackson Five add their bubblegum soul to the company's more traditional sound. And albums from Motown artists rocket to the top of the Billboard charts. The record label is churning out hit record after hit record. Things at Stax Records ain't too bad either. They've finally figured out how to capture some of that Motown magic, but new rules for creating music are stifling creativity. Stax musicians are pushing back. Over at Motown, songwriters clamor for more credit, creating tension between the hit writers and the check writers. The legacies of both record labels are on the line, and it's hard to know how they'll hold on. Or, if it's even possible. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Car Stuff Podcast
Chevy Equinox EV, History of American Motors, New Discontinued-Models List

Car Stuff Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 17, 2024 54:43


Jill is back in studio this week, and recounted for Tom her recent travels and product evaluations. Tom went on to share what he has learned from a series of brief conversations with Amazon delivery drivers who have spent time with the Rivian EDV electric van; the feedback is interesting. Still in the first segment, the hosts discussed Jeep's recently announced $25,000 electric vehicle. To be called Renegade, the subcompact electric crossover is due to arrive for the 2027 model year. Jill then shared her impressions of the all-new Chevrolet Equinox EV compact electric crossover. Jill's take is mostly positive, though she has serious concerns regarding connectivity. Listen in to hear Jill discuss her issues. The Equinox EV starts at less than $30,000 once the federal tax credit is applied. In the second segment Jill and Tom welcome Joe Ligo, producer of The last Independent Automaker, a documentary about carmaker American Motors. Joe walked the hosts through the formation and early days of American Motors, as well as the maker's decision to produce its lineup of Eagle AWD vehicles. Listen in for details regarding the documentary's release day. In the last segment Jill is subjected to Tom's “Under $60,000?” quiz, featuring a bonus question about the Jackson Five. The hosts then quickly shared a list of a dozen cars that will soon be discontinued. What If? So What?We discover what's possible with digital and make it real in your businessListen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

The Steve Harvey Morning Show
Universoul Circus founder Cedric Walker said people told him in 1994 a circus entertaining a Black audience would never work.

The Steve Harvey Morning Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 10, 2024 28:24 Transcription Available


Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Cedric Walker.  UniverSoul is a highly interactive combination of circus arts, theater, and music that spans genres including Pop, Classic R&B, Latin, Hip Hop, Jazz, and Gospel. It embraces and celebrates the unique and familiar aspects of pop culture globally by bringing them center stage with a cast of international performers. UniverSoul is rated as one of the top live family acts in America along with Cirque du Soleil. UniverSoul's fresh approach to family friendly live entertainment has garnered it a coveted spot as one of Ticketmaster's top ten most requested family events. UniverSoul was created 30 years ago as the brainchild of Atlanta concert and theater producer Cedric Walker. Cedric Walker, a native of Baltimore, Maryland, showed an entrepreneurial spirit from a young age, starting with his shoe shine business at six years old. His love for the circus grew as he and his brother would re-create the spectacles they witnessed, with Cedric even dreaming of running away with the circus to work as a maintenance man. In the 1970s, Walker's passion for entertainment led him to work with the Commodores and later become a promoter for the Jackson Five. In the 1980s, he organized the Fresh Festivals, the world's first Rap music tour in large arenas, featuring iconic rappers. By the mid-1990s, Walker and his team sought new family entertainment ideas, leading to the creation of The UniverSoul Circus in 1994, an urban family entertainment event under the big top. This groundbreaking venture showcased a variety of talents from black performers, ranging from hip-hop musicals to vaudeville acts, and animal performances, setting a new standard in live entertainment. Walker's dedication to this vision inspired performers worldwide to join the unique and successful circus venture.  Support the show: https://www.steveharveyfm.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Dark Mark Show
292: Happy Birthday Tommy Chong !!!

The Dark Mark Show

Play Episode Listen Later May 24, 2024 95:58


Tommy Chong is turning 86 (!) today. Mark and Nicole had the honor of speaking to the comedy legend and hero twice. Here is the first time we spoke to Tommy in 2021 Legendary comedian Tommy Chong joined Mark and Nicole for an epic supersized show. Chong talked about everything from his being a clubowner in the 60s, being on Motown Records and discovering the Jackson Five and performing with Ike and Tina Turner and Diana Ross, discovering improv comedy and meeting Cheech, how his classic "Dave" routine was actually a happy accident, Why they turned down Stripes and a Friday the 13th movie as well as a TV show which became Chico and the Man. He explains why he wasn't on Born in East LA, doesn't spoke as much weed as you think and even bonded with Nicole over their jail experiences...or as he put it a "time out". He also describes how CBD saved his life and so much more.. Get some Dark Mark Show gear Go to www.teepublic.com/user/dms1 for shirts, mugs, phone/laptop covers, masks and more! This show is sponsored by: Eddie by Giddy FDA Class II medical device built to treat erectile dysfunction and performance unpredictability. Eddie is specifically engineered to promote firmer and longer-lasting erections by working with the body's physiology. Get rock hard erections the natural way again. Using promo code DARKMARK20, you can save 20% on your Eddie purchase, and you and your partner will be chanting incantations of ecstasy together faster than you can say “REDRUM.” Go to buyeddie.com/DarkMark for 20% off your purchase using code DARKMARK20 today. Raze Energy Drinks Go to https://bit.ly/2VMoqkk and put in the coupon code DMS for 15% off the best energy drinks. Zero calories. Zero carbs. Zero crash Renagade CBD Go to renagadecbd.com for all of your CBD needs Tactical Soap Smell Great with Pheromone infused products and drive women wild with desire!

Timesuck with Dan Cummins
400 - Molly and Michael Jackson: Rolling on the King of Pop!

Timesuck with Dan Cummins

Play Episode Listen Later May 6, 2024 149:16


Michael Jackson is the most successful solo act in the history of recorded music. Only the Beatles have sold more albums. He has the top selling album of all time, Thriller. And the 5th best selling album of all time, Bad. He was arguably the most famous man in the history of the world at his career's peak. But also.... a very troubled, beyond eccentric person who was creepy with kids, at best, or... a pedophile. I try and explore his life today... while fighting against the effects of a double-dose of Molly... for Timesuck's 400th episode.  Hail Nimrod and thanks for sticking around!! Watch the Suck on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fFiBZuI1prIMerch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89vWant to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :)For all merch-related questions/problems: store@badmagicproductions.com (copy and paste)Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcastWanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast.Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. And you get the download link for my secret standup album, Feel the Heat.

Lighthouse Faith – FOX News Radio
A Mother's Love, a Son's Incredible Talent, and a Faith That Moved Mountains: Zoro!

Lighthouse Faith – FOX News Radio

Play Episode Listen Later May 5, 2024 35:01


When stars align it's hard not to see God's hand in it. For world class percussionist, Zoro, it's hard not to see his mother as the gift that kept on giving. How does a young boy of a single mother of seven children go from abject poverty to the highest ranks of musicians, performing with the likes of Lenny Kravitz,  Earth, Wind and Fire, and hob-knobbing with the Jackson Five? It's a faith that moved mountains. It was also a mother's love that believed in her children's dreams. Like the unknown author said, "Mothers hold their children's hands for a while... their hearts forever." On this episode of Lighthouse Faith podcast, Zoro talks about his rise in the music world, his faith, and his new book, "Maria's Scarf: a Memoir of a Mother's Love, a Son's Perseverance, and Dreaming Big." Christian minister, pastor, evangelist, and now author Zoro seems to have no limits to what is possible to achieve. With faith and his mother's orange scarf, Zoro lived out her prophecy of doing something fantazmical! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Live2cre8
Manny Cuevas: Fashion Designer to the Stars

Live2cre8

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 14, 2024 54:30


Step into the vibrant world of fashion as we sit down with Manny Cuevas, the formidable designer who's stitched his legacy into the very fabric of the industry. Growing up amidst the swirl of his father Manuel's tailor shop, Manny's tale is woven with the golden threads of heritage and innovation. From the eclectic celebrity clientele of his youth to the birth of his own label, Wear It Out by Manny, we explore the symphony of style and music that's danced through his career, especially the beat of change that came with his move to the heart of Nashville. We trace the footsteps of his journey as he crafts limited edition lines, fusing the exclusivity of couture with the reach of ready-to-wear. But it's not just about the glitz of the garments; Manny gets real about the hustle it takes to raise $8.9 million, storm New York Fashion Week, and the rush of seeing his designs sell like hotcakes in the aftermath. His story isn't just a lesson in style‚ it's a masterclass in turning dreams into tangible triumphs. As we wrap up, Manny's passion for design unfurls like the finest silk, revealing a philosophy that's as personal as it is professional. He imparts wisdom to budding designers, reflecting on moments that marked his career‚ like Bob Dylan's Vatican performance and the shine of a lifetime achievement award. But it's the intimate memories, the blend of art and celebrity from his father's shop, and the solid foundation of support that truly dress the soul of this episode. Join us, and let Manny Cuevas tailor an experience that will leave you inspired, informed, and immeasurably enriched by the threads that connect us all. We cover a ton of cool topics in this extended episode including: Getting started in his dad's shop at the age of 6 by digging leather scraps out of the trash and sewing them together Working with Country Music elite like Johhny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Little Jimmy Dickens, Marty Robbins, and Porter Wagoner  Being bounced on the knees of Salvador Dali as a child When major designer labels knock off your designs Being mentored by Alan Tucker, co-creator of Calvin Klein How taking big, unheard-of risks paid off in big ways headlining fashion weeks in New York and Mexico City Working in the shadow of his father, legendary fashion icon Manuel, and the challenge of making a name for himself Designing Bob Dylan's stage outfit for his concert in front of the Pope at the Vatican A run-in with Sylvester Stallone as a kid Learning lessons about how a man should talk to a woman by watching Ronald speak to Nancy Reagan...and SO much more! BIO Manny Cuevas was born into fashion design royalty. He began working with his father – the world-renown designer Manuel – at the age of 6, designing for and dressing everyone from American Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and both George Bushes – to music royalty such as Liberace, Johnny Cash, The Rat Pack Elite, John Lennon, Dolly Parton, Roy Rogers, The Grateful Dead, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, The Jackson Five, David Lee Roth, Kid Rock, Jack White, and Kenny Chesney – to Hollywood icons like Marlon Brando, John Wayne, Jack Nicholson, John Travolta, and Sylvester Stallone, to name a few. After being approached in 2006 by Alan Tucker (who helped Calvin Klein create and launch the Calvin Klein brand) about creating a ready-to-wear line, Manny has developed into a global fashion force of his own. He's headlined fashioned weeks in New York and Mexico City, and his signature clothing line, Wear it Out by Manny, can be found in stores and boutiques around the globe. And Manny himself designed the suit that Johnny Cash was laid to rest in.

Trading Places Minute
Minute 29: Thank You, You've Been Helpful

Trading Places Minute

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 4, 2024 39:19


Billy Ray Valentine, Capricorn, accepts the generous help of Mor-tay and Randy, like Randy Jackson of the Jackson Five. Patreon: www.patreon.com/ditchdiggers Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ditchdiggerslistenershole Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ditchdiggerspodcasts Find out more at http://tradingplacesminute.com

Humor en la Cadena SER
Especialistas Secundarios | Un oyente busca músicos para su banda entre los miembros de La Ventana

Humor en la Cadena SER

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 31, 2024 6:20


José Luis Panadero y sus hermanos tienen un grupo de rock, pero ninguno sabe tocar. Se le ha ocurrido reclutar a los Panadero del programa para aprovechar el apellido y montar unos Jackson Five a la española

Grizz 901 - Memphis Grizzlies Podcast
Free Basketball- NBA Etc & The Jackson Five

Grizz 901 - Memphis Grizzlies Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 18, 2024 50:42


In this episode of FB, Cody and Ryan discuss a handful of NBA topics, such as, the Siakam trade, Celtics home winning streak, and the Clippers "Wall." They end the episode talking about GG Jackson and how should the Grizzlies approach his recent on court success. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/grizz901/support

Couleurs tropicales
Couleurs Tropicales fête 2024 en musiques

Couleurs tropicales

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 1, 2024 48:30


Pour cette première émission de 2024, nous vous proposons une sélection musicale des tubes de l'année 2023, et dans la séquence gold, les chansons d'Aretha Franklin, Jackson Five, Sylvester et Beyoncé. Pour visionner les clips, cliquez sur les titres des chansons :Joeboy -Body and soulLibianca -PeopleKidi feat Tulsi Kuma - Shut upRexxie, Naira Marley & Skiibii -AbracadabraRuger - AsiwajuGDS feat Camidoh - Ghetto loveBayanni - Ta ta taSkyface SDW feat O'kenneth, Reggie, Jay Bahd, Beeztrap KOTM, Kwabu DMC - Obaa HemaaOmah Lay - SosoKizz Daniel - Rich till I dieAretha Franklin - RespectJackson Five - ABC Sylvester - You make me feel Beyoncé - Crazy in loveRetrouvez notre playlist sur Deezer. 

Minnesota Now
How two Minnesota producers helped launch Janet Jackson's career

Minnesota Now

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 21, 2023 7:12


Janet Jackson was in her late teens when she released an album that changed her career and lifted her out of the shadows of her famous brothers who made up the Jackson Five — including little brother Michael Jackson. Something you may not know is that she came to Minneapolis to make that album... and it was also a turning point for the two producers she worked with. MPR contributors Robbie Mitchem, Jamal Allen and Britt Aamodt bring us this final story in our Minnesota Now and Then series this year.

The Opperman Report
Diane Dimond Returns: Be Careful Who You Love: Inside the Michael Jackson Case

The Opperman Report

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 30, 2023 61:39


The explosive definitive account of the Michael Jackson saga, chronicling the King of Pop's battles against child molestation charges from 1993 to 2005, from award-winning journalist Diane Dimond, who broke the story first, over twelve years ago Michael Jackson has long captured the world's attention, first as the dynamic lead singer of the Jackson Five, then during his highly successful breakout solo career. But somewhere along the line Jackson transformed himself into something hardly recognizable and was investigated - not once, but twice - for crimes we could hardly imagine. Even now, after his unexpected acquittal on multiple charges of child molestation, there is a sense that the real truth behind the allegations is not known. The character of Michael Jackson - from his humble beginnings to his rich career and the birth of Neverland Ranch - is destined for great debate among fans, journalists, historians, and psychiatrists for years to come. In the meantime, there is Diane Dimond, the journalist of record on the Jackson case. In November 2003, when the Santa Barbara county sheriff's department conducted another raid on Neverland Ranch, Diane Dimond and her camera crews were the only ones there to capture the moment and report the news to the world. Now, for the first time, Dimond recounts the multifaceted details of the Jackson case, utilizing her extensive notes and sources. What she tells us is a shocking story. Be Careful Who You Love will take you behind the scenes and into the courtroom of one of the most controversial cases of the decade, while giving readers a dramatic glimpse of one reporter's vigilance and unending quest to uncover the truth.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/1198501/advertisement

The Opperman Report
My Disturbing Michael Jackson Experience - James Hudnall

The Opperman Report

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 30, 2023 64:50


I met Michael Jackson just once back in 1993. It was only months before he was first accused of sexually molesting then 13-year-old Jordy Chandler. Like a lot of people before that scandal, I was an admirer of his music. I grew up listening to the Jackson Five and later Michael Jackson's solo efforts. I wasn't a huge fan, but I bought most of his CDs.Coincidentally, I was living in Encino, California in 1993. The Jackson family lived not far from me. I would see Joe Jackson at the supermarket or Randy at the car wash. But I never expected to meet Michael. About once a week I would go over the hill to Golden Apple Comics on Melrose. It was owned by a friend, the late Bill Liebowitz, and I also had a bunch of friends who worked there. They told me Michael was a big customer. He would go there with a group of kids and buy them whatever they wanted. He would often spend thousands on those days.I asked one of my friends if Michael bought any comics for himself. He said sure. So I said what kind of books does he read? He said “Anything with kids in them.” I remember thinking: “Brrr!” at the time.Sure, that could be innocent and all, but there were all those stories even then of Michael having kids with him all the time. Which is kind of odd for a grown man, but Michael Jackson was never known for being normal.Everyone I know who knew him said he was a very nice guy, kind of quiet and he did a lot with charity. No one had a bad thing to say about him. But I did detect a certain reluctant vibe when discussing Michael with my friends at the store. They didn't say why, but they felt he was weird. And this is from people who worked at a store on Melrose in L.A.So one day I came in the store and one of my friends told me Jackson was in the store. And there he was, over by the comics rack. He had his arm around someone like he was on a date. That someone was Jordy Chandler.I walked over to the long racks and pretended not to notice them. Jackson had his people with him including his driver. That driver was later a witness against Jackson in his trial.Jackson was whispering in Jordy's ear and they were acting totally like people on a date. It was not the kind of behavior a couple of straight guys do together. Then they went back in the store in the employee area and disappeared. They were gone for a half hour. I stuck around and talked to my friends, just shooting the breeze. I assumed Jackson left by the back door to avoid people. But Bill the owner asked me if I wanted to meet Michael Jackson, and I said, sure.Jackson reappeared, and left the store. I went out there with Bill and he introduced me. Jordy had detached from Michael and went to the black SUV. I didn't shake hands with Jackson, I only got to exchange pleasantries. But I noticed something, when I tried to look him in the eyes, he had this very evasive…almost crazed look. Like someone who had just committed a crime and didn't want anyone to see them. It was weird.I've met a lot of famous celebs and have never seen them as anything other than people. People who work in the entertainment industry, which I was doing at the time myself. So I've been very laid back in these encounters. So I know it was nothing I did that made him look at me like that. I thought, “Man, is he paranoid or what? Maybe he's on something.”After they took off, I went back in the store to buy some comics and I asked one of my friends what they were doing in the back room for so long. He said Michael and Jordy were in the bathroom for a half hour.Yeah.I said, huh? He said that's not unusual for him. Now, I don't know what they did in there, but it was a small one-person bathroom. And I can only think of a couple reasons two people would go into a small bathroom together. One of the nice reasons is they were helping the other with their costumes. He wasn't wearing anything that out of the ordinary. So that leaves the other two reasons, since we can assume Jordy is potty trained at 13. Sex or drugs.When the story about the molestation broke a few months later, that pretty much made up my mind which reason it was.A lot of people say Michael Jackson did not molest kids. Maybe not. But I have a hard time believing it.Everyone I know, who worked with Michael had great things to say about him, so I suppose he wasn't a bad person. But if you have followed his story closely, he was no saint either. He actively worked to insure his brothers would never succeed. He reneged on deals constantly and didn't pay people he owed their money.There will be a lot of stories coming out about him and his defenders will work hard to try to canonize him. But the truth is a lot more complex.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/1198501/advertisement

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs
Episode 168: “I Say a Little Prayer” by Aretha Franklin

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2023


Episode 168 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Say a Little Prayer”, and the interaction of the sacred, political, and secular in Aretha Franklin's life and work. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "Abraham, Martin, and John" by Dion. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. Even splitting it into multiple parts would have required six or seven mixes. My main biographical source for Aretha Franklin is Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz, and this is where most of the quotes from musicians come from. Information on C.L. Franklin came from Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom is possibly less essential, but still definitely worth reading. Information about Martin Luther King came from Martin Luther King: A Religious Life by Paul Harvey. I also referred to Burt Bacharach's autobiography Anyone Who Had a Heart, Carole King's autobiography A Natural Woman, and Soul Serenade: King Curtis and his Immortal Saxophone by Timothy R. Hoover. For information about Amazing Grace I also used Aaron Cohen's 33 1/3 book on the album. The film of the concerts is also definitely worth watching. And the Aretha Now album is available in this five-album box set for a ludicrously cheap price. But it's actually worth getting this nineteen-CD set with her first sixteen Atlantic albums and a couple of bonus discs of demos and outtakes. There's barely a duff track in the whole nineteen discs. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick warning before I begin. This episode contains some moderate references to domestic abuse, death by cancer, racial violence, police violence, and political assassination. Anyone who might be upset by those subjects might want to check the transcript rather than listening to the episode. Also, as with the previous episode on Aretha Franklin, this episode presents something of a problem. Like many people in this narrative, Franklin's career was affected by personal troubles, which shaped many of her decisions. But where most of the subjects of the podcast have chosen to live their lives in public and share intimate details of every aspect of their personal lives, Franklin was an extremely private person, who chose to share only carefully sanitised versions of her life, and tried as far as possible to keep things to herself. This of course presents a dilemma for anyone who wants to tell her story -- because even though the information is out there in biographies, and even though she's dead, it's not right to disrespect someone's wish for a private life. I have therefore tried, wherever possible, to stay away from talk of her personal life except where it *absolutely* affects the work, or where other people involved have publicly shared their own stories, and even there I've tried to keep it to a minimum. This will occasionally lead to me saying less about some topics than other people might, even though the information is easily findable, because I don't think we have an absolute right to invade someone else's privacy for entertainment. When we left Aretha Franklin, she had just finally broken through into the mainstream after a decade of performing, with a version of Otis Redding's song "Respect" on which she had been backed by her sisters, Erma and Carolyn. "Respect", in Franklin's interpretation, had been turned from a rather chauvinist song about a man demanding respect from his woman into an anthem of feminism, of Black power, and of a new political awakening. For white people of a certain generation, the summer of 1967 was "the summer of love". For many Black people, it was rather different. There's a quote that goes around (I've seen it credited in reliable sources to both Ebony and Jet magazine, but not ever seen an issue cited, so I can't say for sure where it came from) saying that the summer of 67 was the summer of "'retha, Rap, and revolt", referring to the trifecta of Aretha Franklin, the Black power leader Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (who was at the time known as H. Rap Brown, a name he later disclaimed) and the rioting that broke out in several major cities, particularly in Detroit: [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "The Motor City is Burning"] The mid sixties were, in many ways, the high point not of Black rights in the US -- for the most part there has been a lot of progress in civil rights in the intervening decades, though not without inevitable setbacks and attacks from the far right, and as movements like the Black Lives Matter movement have shown there is still a long way to go -- but of *hope* for Black rights. The moral force of the arguments made by the civil rights movement were starting to cause real change to happen for Black people in the US for the first time since the Reconstruction nearly a century before. But those changes weren't happening fast enough, and as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", there was not only a growing unrest among Black people, but a recognition that it was actually possible for things to change. A combination of hope and frustration can be a powerful catalyst, and whether Franklin wanted it or not, she was at the centre of things, both because of her newfound prominence as a star with a hit single that couldn't be interpreted as anything other than a political statement and because of her intimate family connections to the struggle. Even the most racist of white people these days pays lip service to the memory of Dr Martin Luther King, and when they do they quote just a handful of sentences from one speech King made in 1963, as if that sums up the full theological and political philosophy of that most complex of men. And as we discussed the last time we looked at Aretha Franklin, King gave versions of that speech, the "I Have a Dream" speech, twice. The most famous version was at the March on Washington, but the first time was a few weeks earlier, at what was at the time the largest civil rights demonstration in American history, in Detroit. Aretha's family connection to that event is made clear by the very opening of King's speech: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Original 'I Have a Dream' Speech"] So as summer 1967 got into swing, and white rock music was going to San Francisco to wear flowers in its hair, Aretha Franklin was at the centre of a very different kind of youth revolution. Franklin's second Atlantic album, Aretha Arrives, brought in some new personnel to the team that had recorded Aretha's first album for Atlantic. Along with the core Muscle Shoals players Jimmy Johnson, Spooner Oldham, Tommy Cogbill and Roger Hawkins, and a horn section led by King Curtis, Wexler and Dowd also brought in guitarist Joe South. South was a white session player from Georgia, who had had a few minor hits himself in the fifties -- he'd got his start recording a cover version of "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor", the Big Bopper's B-side to "Chantilly Lace": [Excerpt: Joe South, "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor"] He'd also written a few songs that had been recorded by people like Gene Vincent, but he'd mostly become a session player. He'd become a favourite musician of Bob Johnston's, and so he'd played guitar on Simon and Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme albums: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "I am a Rock"] and bass on Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, with Al Kooper particularly praising his playing on "Visions of Johanna": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Visions of Johanna"] South would be the principal guitarist on this and Franklin's next album, before his own career took off in 1968 with "Games People Play": [Excerpt: Joe South, "Games People Play"] At this point, he had already written the other song he's best known for, "Hush", which later became a hit for Deep Purple: [Excerpt: Deep Purple, "Hush"] But he wasn't very well known, and was surprised to get the call for the Aretha Franklin session, especially because, as he put it "I was white and I was about to play behind the blackest genius since Ray Charles" But Jerry Wexler had told him that Franklin didn't care about the race of the musicians she played with, and South settled in as soon as Franklin smiled at him when he played a good guitar lick on her version of the blues standard "Going Down Slow": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Going Down Slow"] That was one of the few times Franklin smiled in those sessions though. Becoming an overnight success after years of trying and failing to make a name for herself had been a disorienting experience, and on top of that things weren't going well in her personal life. Her marriage to her manager Ted White was falling apart, and she was performing erratically thanks to the stress. In particular, at a gig in Georgia she had fallen off the stage and broken her arm. She soon returned to performing, but it meant she had problems with her right arm during the recording of the album, and didn't play as much piano as she would have previously -- on some of the faster songs she played only with her left hand. But the recording sessions had to go on, whether or not Aretha was physically capable of playing piano. As we discussed in the episode on Otis Redding, the owners of Atlantic Records were busily negotiating its sale to Warner Brothers in mid-1967. As Wexler said later “Everything in me said, Keep rolling, keep recording, keep the hits coming. She was red hot and I had no reason to believe that the streak wouldn't continue. I knew that it would be foolish—and even irresponsible—not to strike when the iron was hot. I also had personal motivation. A Wall Street financier had agreed to see what we could get for Atlantic Records. While Ahmet and Neshui had not agreed on a selling price, they had gone along with my plan to let the financier test our worth on the open market. I was always eager to pump out hits, but at this moment I was on overdrive. In this instance, I had a good partner in Ted White, who felt the same. He wanted as much product out there as possible." In truth, you can tell from Aretha Arrives that it's a record that was being thought of as "product" rather than one being made out of any kind of artistic impulse. It's a fine album -- in her ten-album run from I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You through Amazing Grace there's not a bad album and barely a bad track -- but there's a lack of focus. There are only two originals on the album, neither of them written by Franklin herself, and the rest is an incoherent set of songs that show the tension between Franklin and her producers at Atlantic. Several songs are the kind of standards that Franklin had recorded for her old label Columbia, things like "You Are My Sunshine", or her version of "That's Life", which had been a hit for Frank Sinatra the previous year: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "That's Life"] But mixed in with that are songs that are clearly the choice of Wexler. As we've discussed previously in episodes on Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, at this point Atlantic had the idea that it was possible for soul artists to cross over into the white market by doing cover versions of white rock hits -- and indeed they'd had some success with that tactic. So while Franklin was suggesting Sinatra covers, Atlantic's hand is visible in the choices of songs like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "96 Tears": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "96 Tears'] Of the two originals on the album, one, the hit single "Baby I Love You" was written by Ronnie Shannon, the Detroit songwriter who had previously written "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Baby I Love You"] As with the previous album, and several other songs on this one, that had backing vocals by Aretha's sisters, Erma and Carolyn. But the other original on the album, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)", didn't, even though it was written by Carolyn: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] To explain why, let's take a little detour and look at the co-writer of the song this episode is about, though we're not going to get to that for a little while yet. We've not talked much about Burt Bacharach in this series so far, but he's one of those figures who has come up a few times in the periphery and will come up again, so here is as good a time as any to discuss him, and bring everyone up to speed about his career up to 1967. Bacharach was one of the more privileged figures in the sixties pop music field. His father, Bert Bacharach (pronounced the same as his son, but spelled with an e rather than a u) had been a famous newspaper columnist, and his parents had bought him a Steinway grand piano to practice on -- they pushed him to learn the piano even though as a kid he wasn't interested in finger exercises and Debussy. What he was interested in, though, was jazz, and as a teenager he would often go into Manhattan and use a fake ID to see people like Dizzy Gillespie, who he idolised, and in his autobiography he talks rapturously of seeing Gillespie playing his bent trumpet -- he once saw Gillespie standing on a street corner with a pet monkey on his shoulder, and went home and tried to persuade his parents to buy him a monkey too. In particular, he talks about seeing the Count Basie band with Sonny Payne on drums as a teenager: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Kid From Red Bank"] He saw them at Birdland, the club owned by Morris Levy where they would regularly play, and said of the performance "they were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before. What I heard in those clubs really turned my head around— it was like a big breath of fresh air when somebody throws open a window. That was when I knew for the first time how much I loved music and wanted to be connected to it in some way." Of course, there's a rather major problem with this story, as there is so often with narratives that musicians tell about their early career. In this case, Birdland didn't open until 1949, when Bacharach was twenty-one and stationed in Germany for his military service, while Sonny Payne didn't join Basie's band until 1954, when Bacharach had been a professional musician for many years. Also Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet bell only got bent on January 6, 1953. But presumably while Bacharach was conflating several memories, he did have some experience in some New York jazz club that led him to want to become a musician. Certainly there were enough great jazz musicians playing the clubs in those days. He went to McGill University to study music for two years, then went to study with Darius Milhaud, a hugely respected modernist composer. Milhaud was also one of the most important music teachers of the time -- among others he'd taught Stockhausen and Xenakkis, and would go on to teach Philip Glass and Steve Reich. This suited Bacharach, who by this point was a big fan of Schoenberg and Webern, and was trying to write atonal, difficult music. But Milhaud had also taught Dave Brubeck, and when Bacharach rather shamefacedly presented him with a composition which had an actual tune, he told Bacharach "Never be ashamed of writing a tune you can whistle". He dropped out of university and, like most men of his generation, had to serve in the armed forces. When he got out of the army, he continued his musical studies, still trying to learn to be an avant-garde composer, this time with Bohuslav Martinů and later with Henry Cowell, the experimental composer we've heard about quite a bit in previous episodes: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] He was still listening to a lot of avant garde music, and would continue doing so throughout the fifties, going to see people like John Cage. But he spent much of that time working in music that was very different from the avant-garde. He got a job as the band leader for the crooner Vic Damone: [Excerpt: Vic Damone. "Ebb Tide"] He also played for the vocal group the Ames Brothers. He decided while he was working with the Ames Brothers that he could write better material than they were getting from their publishers, and that it would be better to have a job where he didn't have to travel, so he got himself a job as a staff songwriter in the Brill Building. He wrote a string of flops and nearly hits, starting with "Keep Me In Mind" for Patti Page: [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Keep Me In Mind"] From early in his career he worked with the lyricist Hal David, and the two of them together wrote two big hits, "Magic Moments" for Perry Como: [Excerpt: Perry Como, "Magic Moments"] and "The Story of My Life" for Marty Robbins: [Excerpt: "The Story of My Life"] But at that point Bacharach was still also writing with other writers, notably Hal David's brother Mack, with whom he wrote the theme tune to the film The Blob, as performed by The Five Blobs: [Excerpt: The Five Blobs, "The Blob"] But Bacharach's songwriting career wasn't taking off, and he got himself a job as musical director for Marlene Dietrich -- a job he kept even after it did start to take off.  Part of the problem was that he intuitively wrote music that didn't quite fit into standard structures -- there would be odd bars of unusual time signatures thrown in, unusual harmonies, and structural irregularities -- but then he'd take feedback from publishers and producers who would tell him the song could only be recorded if he straightened it out. He said later "The truth is that I ruined a lot of songs by not believing in myself enough to tell these guys they were wrong." He started writing songs for Scepter Records, usually with Hal David, but also with Bob Hilliard and Mack David, and started having R&B hits. One song he wrote with Mack David, "I'll Cherish You", had the lyrics rewritten by Luther Dixon to make them more harsh-sounding for a Shirelles single -- but the single was otherwise just Bacharach's demo with the vocals replaced, and you can even hear his voice briefly at the beginning: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Baby, It's You"] But he'd also started becoming interested in the production side of records more generally. He'd iced that some producers, when recording his songs, would change the sound for the worse -- he thought Gene McDaniels' version of "Tower of Strength", for example, was too fast. But on the other hand, other producers got a better sound than he'd heard in his head. He and Hilliard had written a song called "Please Stay", which they'd given to Leiber and Stoller to record with the Drifters, and he thought that their arrangement of the song was much better than the one he'd originally thought up: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Please Stay"] He asked Leiber and Stoller if he could attend all their New York sessions and learn about record production from them. He started doing so, and eventually they started asking him to assist them on records. He and Hilliard wrote a song called "Mexican Divorce" for the Drifters, which Leiber and Stoller were going to produce, and as he put it "they were so busy running Redbird Records that they asked me to rehearse the background singers for them in my office." [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Mexican Divorce"] The backing singers who had been brought in to augment the Drifters on that record were a group of vocalists who had started out as members of a gospel group called the Drinkard singers: [Excerpt: The Drinkard Singers, "Singing in My Soul"] The Drinkard Singers had originally been a family group, whose members included Cissy Drinkard, who joined the group aged five (and who on her marriage would become known as Cissy Houston -- her daughter Whitney would later join the family business), her aunt Lee Warrick, and Warrick's adopted daughter Judy Clay. That group were discovered by the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and spent much of the fifties performing with gospel greats including Jackson herself, Clara Ward, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But Houston was also the musical director of a group at her church, the Gospelaires, which featured Lee Warrick's two daughters Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick (for those who don't know, the Warwick sisters' birth name was Warrick, spelled with two rs. A printing error led to it being misspelled the same way as the British city on a record label, and from that point on Dionne at least pronounced the w in her misspelled name). And slowly, the Gospelaires rather than the Drinkard Singers became the focus, with a lineup of Houston, the Warwick sisters, the Warwick sisters' cousin Doris Troy, and Clay's sister Sylvia Shemwell. The real change in the group's fortunes came when, as we talked about a while back in the episode on "The Loco-Motion", the original lineup of the Cookies largely stopped working as session singers to become Ray Charles' Raelettes. As we discussed in that episode, a new lineup of Cookies formed in 1961, but it took a while for them to get started, and in the meantime the producers who had been relying on them for backing vocals were looking elsewhere, and they looked to the Gospelaires. "Mexican Divorce" was the first record to feature the group as backing vocalists -- though reports vary as to how many of them are on the record, with some saying it's only Troy and the Warwicks, others saying Houston was there, and yet others saying it was all five of them. Some of these discrepancies were because these singers were so good that many of them left to become solo singers in fairly short order. Troy was the first to do so, with her hit "Just One Look", on which the other Gospelaires sang backing vocals: [Excerpt: Doris Troy, "Just One Look"] But the next one to go solo was Dionne Warwick, and that was because she'd started working with Bacharach and Hal David as their principal demo singer. She started singing lead on their demos, and hoping that she'd get to release them on her own. One early one was "Make it Easy On Yourself", which was recorded by Jerry Butler, formerly of the Impressions. That record was produced by Bacharach, one of the first records he produced without outside supervision: [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, "Make it Easy On Yourself"] Warwick was very jealous that a song she'd sung the demo of had become a massive hit for someone else, and blamed Bacharach and David. The way she tells the story -- Bacharach always claimed this never happened, but as we've already seen he was himself not always the most reliable of narrators of his own life -- she got so angry she complained to them, and said "Don't make me over, man!" And so Bacharach and David wrote her this: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Don't Make Me Over"] Incidentally, in the UK, the hit version of that was a cover by the Swinging Blue Jeans: [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "Don't Make Me Over"] who also had a huge hit with "You're No Good": [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "You're No Good"] And *that* was originally recorded by *Dee Dee* Warwick: [Excerpt: Dee Dee Warwick, "You're No Good"] Dee Dee also had a successful solo career, but Dionne's was the real success, making the names of herself, and of Bacharach and David. The team had more than twenty top forty hits together, before Bacharach and David had a falling out in 1971 and stopped working together, and Warwick sued both of them for breach of contract as a result. But prior to that they had hit after hit, with classic records like "Anyone Who Had a Heart": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Anyone Who Had a Heart"] And "Walk On By": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Walk On By"] With Doris, Dionne, and Dee Dee all going solo, the group's membership was naturally in flux -- though the departed members would occasionally join their former bandmates for sessions, and the remaining members would sing backing vocals on their ex-members' records. By 1965 the group consisted of Cissy Houston, Sylvia Shemwell, the Warwick sisters' cousin Myrna Smith, and Estelle Brown. The group became *the* go-to singers for soul and R&B records made in New York. They were regularly hired by Leiber and Stoller to sing on their records, and they were also the particular favourites of Bert Berns. They sang backing vocals on almost every record he produced. It's them doing the gospel wails on "Cry Baby" by Garnet Mimms: [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms, "Cry Baby"] And they sang backing vocals on both versions of "If You Need Me" -- Wilson Pickett's original and Solomon Burke's more successful cover version, produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "If You Need Me"] They're on such Berns records as "Show Me Your Monkey", by Kenny Hamber: [Excerpt: Kenny Hamber, "Show Me Your Monkey"] And it was a Berns production that ended up getting them to be Aretha Franklin's backing group. The group were becoming such an important part of the records that Atlantic and BANG Records, in particular, were putting out, that Jerry Wexler said "it was only a matter of common decency to put them under contract as a featured group". He signed them to Atlantic and renamed them from the Gospelaires to The Sweet Inspirations.  Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham wrote a song for the group which became their only hit under their own name: [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Sweet Inspiration"] But to start with, they released a cover of Pops Staples' civil rights song "Why (Am I treated So Bad)": [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Why (Am I Treated So Bad?)"] That hadn't charted, and meanwhile, they'd all kept doing session work. Cissy had joined Erma and Carolyn Franklin on the backing vocals for Aretha's "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You"] Shortly after that, the whole group recorded backing vocals for Erma's single "Piece of My Heart", co-written and produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] That became a top ten record on the R&B charts, but that caused problems. Aretha Franklin had a few character flaws, and one of these was an extreme level of jealousy for any other female singer who had any level of success and came up in the business after her. She could be incredibly graceful towards anyone who had been successful before her -- she once gave one of her Grammies away to Esther Phillips, who had been up for the same award and had lost to her -- but she was terribly insecure, and saw any contemporary as a threat. She'd spent her time at Columbia Records fuming (with some justification) that Barbra Streisand was being given a much bigger marketing budget than her, and she saw Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, and Dionne Warwick as rivals rather than friends. And that went doubly for her sisters, who she was convinced should be supporting her because of family loyalty. She had been infuriated at John Hammond when Columbia had signed Erma, thinking he'd gone behind her back to create competition for her. And now Erma was recording with Bert Berns. Bert Berns who had for years been a colleague of Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers at Atlantic. Aretha was convinced that Wexler had put Berns up to signing Erma as some kind of power play. There was only one problem with this -- it simply wasn't true. As Wexler later explained “Bert and I had suffered a bad falling-out, even though I had enormous respect for him. After all, he was the guy who brought over guitarist Jimmy Page from England to play on our sessions. Bert, Ahmet, Nesuhi, and I had started a label together—Bang!—where Bert produced Van Morrison's first album. But Bert also had a penchant for trouble. He courted the wise guys. He wanted total control over every last aspect of our business dealings. Finally it was too much, and the Erteguns and I let him go. He sued us for breach of contract and suddenly we were enemies. I felt that he signed Erma, an excellent singer, not merely for her talent but as a way to get back at me. If I could make a hit with Aretha, he'd show me up by making an even bigger hit on Erma. Because there was always an undercurrent of rivalry between the sisters, this only added to the tension.” There were two things that resulted from this paranoia on Aretha's part. The first was that she and Wexler, who had been on first-name terms up to that point, temporarily went back to being "Mr. Wexler" and "Miss Franklin" to each other. And the second was that Aretha no longer wanted Carolyn and Erma to be her main backing vocalists, though they would continue to appear on her future records on occasion. From this point on, the Sweet Inspirations would be the main backing vocalists for Aretha in the studio throughout her golden era [xxcut line (and when the Sweet Inspirations themselves weren't on the record, often it would be former members of the group taking their place)]: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] The last day of sessions for Aretha Arrives was July the twenty-third, 1967. And as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", that was the day that the Detroit riots started. To recap briefly, that was four days of rioting started because of a history of racist policing, made worse by those same racist police overreacting to the initial protests. By the end of those four days, the National Guard, 82nd Airborne Division, and the 101st Airborne from Clarksville were all called in to deal with the violence, which left forty-three dead (of whom thirty-three were Black and only one was a police officer), 1,189 people were injured, and over 7,200 arrested, almost all of them Black. Those days in July would be a turning point for almost every musician based in Detroit. In particular, the police had murdered three members of the soul group the Dramatics, in a massacre of which the author John Hersey, who had been asked by President Johnson to be part of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders but had decided that would compromise his impartiality and did an independent journalistic investigation, said "The episode contained all the mythic themes of racial strife in the United States: the arm of the law taking the law into its own hands; interracial sex; the subtle poison of racist thinking by “decent” men who deny they are racists; the societal limbo into which, ever since slavery, so many young black men have been driven by our country; ambiguous justice in the courts; and the devastation in both black and white human lives that follows in the wake of violence as surely as ruinous and indiscriminate flood after torrents" But these were also the events that radicalised the MC5 -- the group had been playing a gig as Tim Buckley's support act when the rioting started, and guitarist Wayne Kramer decided afterwards to get stoned and watch the fires burning down the city through a telescope -- which police mistook for a rifle, leading to the National Guard knocking down Kramer's door. The MC5 would later cover "The Motor City is Burning", John Lee Hooker's song about the events: [Excerpt: The MC5, "The Motor City is Burning"] It would also be a turning point for Motown, too, in ways we'll talk about in a few future episodes.  And it was a political turning point too -- Michigan Governor George Romney, a liberal Republican (at a time when such people existed) had been the favourite for the Republican Presidential candidacy when he'd entered the race in December 1966, but as racial tensions ramped up in Detroit during the early months of 1967 he'd started trailing Richard Nixon, a man who was consciously stoking racists' fears. President Johnson, the incumbent Democrat, who was at that point still considering standing for re-election, made sure to make it clear to everyone during the riots that the decision to call in the National Guard had been made at the State level, by Romney, rather than at the Federal level.  That wasn't the only thing that removed the possibility of a Romney presidency, but it was a big part of the collapse of his campaign, and the, as it turned out, irrevocable turn towards right-authoritarianism that the party took with Nixon's Southern Strategy. Of course, Aretha Franklin had little way of knowing what was to come and how the riots would change the city and the country over the following decades. What she was primarily concerned about was the safety of her father, and to a lesser extent that of her sister-in-law Earline who was staying with him. Aretha, Carolyn, and Erma all tried to keep in constant touch with their father while they were out of town, and Aretha even talked about hiring private detectives to travel to Detroit, find her father, and get him out of the city to safety. But as her brother Cecil pointed out, he was probably the single most loved man among Black people in Detroit, and was unlikely to be harmed by the rioters, while he was too famous for the police to kill with impunity. Reverend Franklin had been having a stressful time anyway -- he had recently been fined for tax evasion, an action he was convinced the IRS had taken because of his friendship with Dr King and his role in the civil rights movement -- and according to Cecil "Aretha begged Daddy to move out of the city entirely. She wanted him to find another congregation in California, where he was especially popular—or at least move out to the suburbs. But he wouldn't budge. He said that, more than ever, he was needed to point out the root causes of the riots—the economic inequality, the pervasive racism in civic institutions, the woefully inadequate schools in inner-city Detroit, and the wholesale destruction of our neighborhoods by urban renewal. Some ministers fled the city, but not our father. The horror of what happened only recommitted him. He would not abandon his political agenda." To make things worse, Aretha was worried about her father in other ways -- as her marriage to Ted White was starting to disintegrate, she was looking to her father for guidance, and actually wanted him to take over her management. Eventually, Ruth Bowen, her booking agent, persuaded her brother Cecil that this was a job he could do, and that she would teach him everything he needed to know about the music business. She started training him up while Aretha was still married to White, in the expectation that that marriage couldn't last. Jerry Wexler, who only a few months earlier had been seeing Ted White as an ally in getting "product" from Franklin, had now changed his tune -- partly because the sale of Atlantic had gone through in the meantime. He later said “Sometimes she'd call me at night, and, in that barely audible little-girl voice of hers, she'd tell me that she wasn't sure she could go on. She always spoke in generalities. She never mentioned her husband, never gave me specifics of who was doing what to whom. And of course I knew better than to ask. She just said that she was tired of dealing with so much. My heart went out to her. She was a woman who suffered silently. She held so much in. I'd tell her to take as much time off as she needed. We had a lot of songs in the can that we could release without new material. ‘Oh, no, Jerry,' she'd say. ‘I can't stop recording. I've written some new songs, Carolyn's written some new songs. We gotta get in there and cut 'em.' ‘Are you sure?' I'd ask. ‘Positive,' she'd say. I'd set up the dates and typically she wouldn't show up for the first or second sessions. Carolyn or Erma would call me to say, ‘Ree's under the weather.' That was tough because we'd have asked people like Joe South and Bobby Womack to play on the sessions. Then I'd reschedule in the hopes she'd show." That third album she recorded in 1967, Lady Soul, was possibly her greatest achievement. The opening track, and second single, "Chain of Fools", released in November, was written by Don Covay -- or at least it's credited as having been written by Covay. There's a gospel record that came out around the same time on a very small label based in Houston -- "Pains of Life" by Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio: [Excerpt: Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio, "Pains of Life"] I've seen various claims online that that record came out shortly *before* "Chain of Fools", but I can't find any definitive evidence one way or the other -- it was on such a small label that release dates aren't available anywhere. Given that the B-side, which I haven't been able to track down online, is called "Wait Until the Midnight Hour", my guess is that rather than this being a case of Don Covay stealing the melody from an obscure gospel record he'd have had little chance to hear, it's the gospel record rewriting a then-current hit to be about religion, but I thought it worth mentioning. The song was actually written by Covay after Jerry Wexler asked him to come up with some songs for Otis Redding, but Wexler, after hearing it, decided it was better suited to Franklin, who gave an astonishing performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] Arif Mardin, the arranger of the album, said of that track “I was listed as the arranger of ‘Chain of Fools,' but I can't take credit. Aretha walked into the studio with the chart fully formed inside her head. The arrangement is based around the harmony vocals provided by Carolyn and Erma. To add heft, the Sweet Inspirations joined in. The vision of the song is entirely Aretha's.” According to Wexler, that's not *quite* true -- according to him, Joe South came up with the guitar part that makes up the intro, and he also said that when he played what he thought was the finished track to Ellie Greenwich, she came up with another vocal line for the backing vocals, which she overdubbed. But the core of the record's sound is definitely pure Aretha -- and Carolyn Franklin said that there was a reason for that. As she said later “Aretha didn't write ‘Chain,' but she might as well have. It was her story. When we were in the studio putting on the backgrounds with Ree doing lead, I knew she was singing about Ted. Listen to the lyrics talking about how for five long years she thought he was her man. Then she found out she was nothing but a link in the chain. Then she sings that her father told her to come on home. Well, he did. She sings about how her doctor said to take it easy. Well, he did too. She was drinking so much we thought she was on the verge of a breakdown. The line that slew me, though, was the one that said how one of these mornings the chain is gonna break but until then she'll take all she can take. That summed it up. Ree knew damn well that this man had been doggin' her since Jump Street. But somehow she held on and pushed it to the breaking point." [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] That made number one on the R&B charts, and number two on the hot one hundred, kept from the top by "Judy In Disguise (With Glasses)" by John Fred and his Playboy Band -- a record that very few people would say has stood the test of time as well. The other most memorable track on the album was the one chosen as the first single, released in September. As Carole King told the story, she and Gerry Goffin were feeling like their career was in a slump. While they had had a huge run of hits in the early sixties through 1965, they had only had two new hits in 1966 -- "Goin' Back" for Dusty Springfield and "Don't Bring Me Down" for the Animals, and neither of those were anything like as massive as their previous hits. And up to that point in 1967, they'd only had one -- "Pleasant Valley Sunday" for the Monkees. They had managed to place several songs on Monkees albums and the TV show as well, so they weren't going to starve, but the rise of self-contained bands that were starting to dominate the charts, and Phil Spector's temporary retirement, meant there simply wasn't the opportunity for them to place material that there had been. They were also getting sick of travelling to the West Coast all the time, because as their children were growing slightly older they didn't want to disrupt their lives in New York, and were thinking of approaching some of the New York based labels and seeing if they needed songs. They were particularly considering Atlantic, because soul was more open to outside songwriters than other genres. As it happened, though, they didn't have to approach Atlantic, because Atlantic approached them. They were walking down Broadway when a limousine pulled up, and Jerry Wexler stuck his head out of the window. He'd come up with a good title that he wanted to use for a song for Aretha, would they be interested in writing a song called "Natural Woman"? They said of course they would, and Wexler drove off. They wrote the song that night, and King recorded a demo the next morning: [Excerpt: Carole King, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (demo)"] They gave Wexler a co-writing credit because he had suggested the title.  King later wrote in her autobiography "Hearing Aretha's performance of “Natural Woman” for the first time, I experienced a rare speechless moment. To this day I can't convey how I felt in mere words. Anyone who had written a song in 1967 hoping it would be performed by a singer who could take it to the highest level of excellence, emotional connection, and public exposure would surely have wanted that singer to be Aretha Franklin." She went on to say "But a recording that moves people is never just about the artist and the songwriters. It's about people like Jerry and Ahmet, who matched the songwriters with a great title and a gifted artist; Arif Mardin, whose magnificent orchestral arrangement deserves the place it will forever occupy in popular music history; Tom Dowd, whose engineering skills captured the magic of this memorable musical moment for posterity; and the musicians in the rhythm section, the orchestral players, and the vocal contributions of the background singers—among them the unforgettable “Ah-oo!” after the first line of the verse. And the promotion and marketing people helped this song reach more people than it might have without them." And that's correct -- unlike "Chain of Fools", this time Franklin did let Arif Mardin do most of the arrangement work -- though she came up with the piano part that Spooner Oldham plays on the record. Mardin said that because of the song's hymn-like feel they wanted to go for a more traditional written arrangement. He said "She loved the song to the point where she said she wanted to concentrate on the vocal and vocal alone. I had written a string chart and horn chart to augment the chorus and hired Ralph Burns to conduct. After just a couple of takes, we had it. That's when Ralph turned to me with wonder in his eyes. Ralph was one of the most celebrated arrangers of the modern era. He had done ‘Early Autumn' for Woody Herman and Stan Getz, and ‘Georgia on My Mind' for Ray Charles. He'd worked with everyone. ‘This woman comes from another planet' was all Ralph said. ‘She's just here visiting.'” [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"] By this point there was a well-functioning team making Franklin's records -- while the production credits would vary over the years, they were all essentially co-productions by the team of Franklin, Wexler, Mardin and Dowd, all collaborating and working together with a more-or-less unified purpose, and the backing was always by the same handful of session musicians and some combination of the Sweet Inspirations and Aretha's sisters. That didn't mean that occasional guests couldn't get involved -- as we discussed in the Cream episode, Eric Clapton played guitar on "Good to Me as I am to You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Good to Me as I am to You"] Though that was one of the rare occasions on one of these records where something was overdubbed. Clapton apparently messed up the guitar part when playing behind Franklin, because he was too intimidated by playing with her, and came back the next day to redo his part without her in the studio. At this point, Aretha was at the height of her fame. Just before the final batch of album sessions began she appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, and she was making regular TV appearances, like one on the Mike Douglas Show where she duetted with Frankie Valli on "That's Life": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and Frankie Valli, "That's Life"] But also, as Wexler said “Her career was kicking into high gear. Contending and resolving both the professional and personal challenges were too much. She didn't think she could do both, and I didn't blame her. Few people could. So she let the personal slide and concentrated on the professional. " Her concert promoter Ruth Bowen said of this time "Her father and Dr. King were putting pressure on her to sing everywhere, and she felt obligated. The record company was also screaming for more product. And I had a mountain of offers on my desk that kept getting higher with every passing hour. They wanted her in Europe. They wanted her in Latin America. They wanted her in every major venue in the U.S. TV was calling. She was being asked to do guest appearances on every show from Carol Burnett to Andy Williams to the Hollywood Palace. She wanted to do them all and she wanted to do none of them. She wanted to do them all because she's an entertainer who burns with ambition. She wanted to do none of them because she was emotionally drained. She needed to go away and renew her strength. I told her that at least a dozen times. She said she would, but she didn't listen to me." The pressures from her father and Dr King are a recurring motif in interviews with people about this period. Franklin was always a very political person, and would throughout her life volunteer time and money to liberal political causes and to the Democratic Party, but this was the height of her activism -- the Civil Rights movement was trying to capitalise on the gains it had made in the previous couple of years, and celebrity fundraisers and performances at rallies were an important way to do that. And at this point there were few bigger celebrities in America than Aretha Franklin. At a concert in her home town of Detroit on February the sixteenth, 1968, the Mayor declared the day Aretha Franklin Day. At the same show, Billboard, Record World *and* Cash Box magazines all presented her with plaques for being Female Vocalist of the Year. And Dr. King travelled up to be at the show and congratulate her publicly for all her work with his organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Backstage at that show, Dr. King talked to Aretha's father, Reverend Franklin, about what he believed would be the next big battle -- a strike in Memphis: [Excerpt, Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech" -- "And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right."] The strike in question was the Memphis Sanitation Workers' strike which had started a few days before.  The struggle for Black labour rights was an integral part of the civil rights movement, and while it's not told that way in the sanitised version of the story that's made it into popular culture, the movement led by King was as much about economic justice as social justice -- King was a democratic socialist, and believed that economic oppression was both an effect of and cause of other forms of racial oppression, and that the rights of Black workers needed to be fought for. In 1967 he had set up a new organisation, the Poor People's Campaign, which was set to march on Washington to demand a program that included full employment, a guaranteed income -- King was strongly influenced in his later years by the ideas of Henry George, the proponent of a universal basic income based on land value tax -- the annual building of half a million affordable homes, and an end to the war in Vietnam. This was King's main focus in early 1968, and he saw the sanitation workers' strike as a major part of this campaign. Memphis was one of the most oppressive cities in the country, and its largely Black workforce of sanitation workers had been trying for most of the 1960s to unionise, and strike-breakers had been called in to stop them, and many of them had been fired by their white supervisors with no notice. They were working in unsafe conditions, for utterly inadequate wages, and the city government were ardent segregationists. After two workers had died on the first of February from using unsafe equipment, the union demanded changes -- safer working conditions, better wages, and recognition of the union. The city council refused, and almost all the sanitation workers stayed home and stopped work. After a few days, the council relented and agreed to their terms, but the Mayor, Henry Loeb, an ardent white supremacist who had stood on a platform of opposing desegregation, and who had previously been the Public Works Commissioner who had put these unsafe conditions in place, refused to listen. As far as he was concerned, he was the only one who could recognise the union, and he wouldn't. The workers continued their strike, marching holding signs that simply read "I am a Man": [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "Blowing in the Wind"] The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP had been involved in organising support for the strikes from an early stage, and King visited Memphis many times. Much of the time he spent visiting there was spent negotiating with a group of more militant activists, who called themselves The Invaders and weren't completely convinced by King's nonviolent approach -- they believed that violence and rioting got more attention than non-violent protests. King explained to them that while he had been persuaded by Gandhi's writings of the moral case for nonviolent protest, he was also persuaded that it was pragmatically necessary -- asking the young men "how many guns do we have and how many guns do they have?", and pointing out as he often did that when it comes to violence a minority can't win against an armed majority. Rev Franklin went down to Memphis on the twenty-eighth of March to speak at a rally Dr. King was holding, but as it turned out the rally was cancelled -- the pre-rally march had got out of hand, with some people smashing windows, and Memphis police had, like the police in Detroit the previous year, violently overreacted, clubbing and gassing protestors and shooting and killing one unarmed teenage boy, Larry Payne. The day after Payne's funeral, Dr King was back in Memphis, though this time Rev Franklin was not with him. On April the third, he gave a speech which became known as the "Mountaintop Speech", in which he talked about the threats that had been made to his life: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech": “And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."] The next day, Martin Luther King was shot dead. James Earl Ray, a white supremacist, pled guilty to the murder, and the evidence against him seems overwhelming from what I've read, but the King family have always claimed that the murder was part of a larger conspiracy and that Ray was not the gunman. Aretha was obviously distraught, and she attended the funeral, as did almost every other prominent Black public figure. James Baldwin wrote of the funeral: "In the pew directly before me sat Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt—covered in black, looking like a lost, ten-year-old girl—and Sidney Poitier, in the same pew, or nearby. Marlon saw me, and nodded. The atmosphere was black, with a tension indescribable—as though something, perhaps the heavens, perhaps the earth, might crack. Everyone sat very still. The actual service sort of washed over me, in waves. It wasn't that it seemed unreal; it was the most real church service I've ever sat through in my life, or ever hope to sit through; but I have a childhood hangover thing about not weeping in public, and I was concentrating on holding myself together. I did not want to weep for Martin, tears seemed futile. But I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep I would not be able to stop. There was more than enough to weep for, if one was to weep—so many of us, cut down, so soon. Medgar, Malcolm, Martin: and their widows, and their children. Reverend Ralph David Abernathy asked a certain sister to sing a song which Martin had loved—“Once more,” said Ralph David, “for Martin and for me,” and he sat down." Many articles and books on Aretha Franklin say that she sang at King's funeral. In fact she didn't, but there's a simple reason for the confusion. King's favourite song was the Thomas Dorsey gospel song "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", and indeed almost his last words were to ask a trumpet player, Ben Branch, if he would play the song at the rally he was going to be speaking at on the day of his death. At his request, Mahalia Jackson, his old friend, sang the song at his private funeral, which was not filmed, unlike the public part of the funeral that Baldwin described. Four months later, though, there was another public memorial for King, and Franklin did sing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" at that service, in front of King's weeping widow and children, and that performance *was* filmed, and gets conflated in people's memories with Jackson's unfilmed earlier performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord (at Martin Luther King Memorial)"] Four years later, she would sing that at Mahalia Jackson's funeral. Through all this, Franklin had been working on her next album, Aretha Now, the sessions for which started more or less as soon as the sessions for Lady Soul had finished. The album was, in fact, bookended by deaths that affected Aretha. Just as King died at the end of the sessions, the beginning came around the time of the death of Otis Redding -- the sessions were cancelled for a day while Wexler travelled to Georgia for Redding's funeral, which Franklin was too devastated to attend, and Wexler would later say that the extra emotion in her performances on the album came from her emotional pain at Redding's death. The lead single on the album, "Think", was written by Franklin and -- according to the credits anyway -- her husband Ted White, and is very much in the same style as "Respect", and became another of her most-loved hits: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Think"] But probably the song on Aretha Now that now resonates the most is one that Jerry Wexler tried to persuade her not to record, and was only released as a B-side. Indeed, "I Say a Little Prayer" was a song that had already once been a hit after being a reject.  Hal David, unlike Burt Bacharach, was a fairly political person and inspired by the protest song movement, and had been starting to incorporate his concerns about the political situation and the Vietnam War into his lyrics -- though as with many such writers, he did it in much less specific ways than a Phil Ochs or a Bob Dylan. This had started with "What the World Needs Now is Love", a song Bacharach and David had written for Jackie DeShannon in 1965: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "What the "World Needs Now is Love"] But he'd become much more overtly political for "The Windows of the World", a song they wrote for Dionne Warwick. Warwick has often said it's her favourite of her singles, but it wasn't a big hit -- Bacharach blamed himself for that, saying "Dionne recorded it as a single and I really blew it. I wrote a bad arrangement and the tempo was too fast, and I really regret making it the way I did because it's a good song." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "The Windows of the World"] For that album, Bacharach and David had written another track, "I Say a Little Prayer", which was not as explicitly political, but was intended by David to have an implicit anti-war message, much like other songs of the period like "Last Train to Clarksville". David had sons who were the right age to be drafted, and while it's never stated, "I Say a Little Prayer" was written from the perspective of a woman whose partner is away fighting in the war, but is still in her thoughts: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] The recording of Dionne Warwick's version was marked by stress. Bacharach had a particular way of writing music to tell the musicians the kind of feel he wanted for the part -- he'd write nonsense words above the stave, and tell the musicians to play the parts as if they were singing those words. The trumpet player hired for the session, Ernie Royal, got into a row with Bacharach about this unorthodox way of communicating musical feeling, and the track ended up taking ten takes (as opposed to the normal three for a Bacharach session), with Royal being replaced half-way through the session. Bacharach was never happy with the track even after all the work it had taken, and he fought to keep it from being released at all, saying the track was taken at too fast a tempo. It eventually came out as an album track nearly eighteen months after it was recorded -- an eternity in 1960s musical timescales -- and DJs started playing it almost as soon as it came out. Scepter records rushed out a single, over Bacharach's objections, but as he later said "One thing I love about the record business is how wrong I was. Disc jockeys all across the country started playing the track, and the song went to number four on the charts and then became the biggest hit Hal and I had ever written for Dionne." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Oddly, the B-side for Warwick's single, "Theme From the Valley of the Dolls" did even better, reaching number two. Almost as soon as the song was released as a single, Franklin started playing around with the song backstage, and in April 1968, right around the time of Dr. King's death, she recorded a version. Much as Burt Bacharach had been against releasing Dionne Warwick's version, Jerry Wexler was against Aretha even recording the song, saying later “I advised Aretha not to record it. I opposed it for two reasons. First, to cover a song only twelve weeks after the original reached the top of the charts was not smart business. You revisit such a hit eight months to a year later. That's standard practice. But more than that, Bacharach's melody, though lovely, was peculiarly suited to a lithe instrument like Dionne Warwick's—a light voice without the dark corners or emotional depths that define Aretha. Also, Hal David's lyric was also somewhat girlish and lacked the gravitas that Aretha required. “Aretha usually listened to me in the studio, but not this time. She had written a vocal arrangement for the Sweet Inspirations that was undoubtedly strong. Cissy Houston, Dionne's cousin, told me that Aretha was on the right track—she was seeing this song in a new way and had come up with a new groove. Cissy was on Aretha's side. Tommy Dowd and Arif were on Aretha's side. So I had no choice but to cave." It's quite possible that Wexler's objections made Franklin more, rather than less, determined to record the song. She regarded Warwick as a hated rival, as she did almost every prominent female singer of her generation and younger ones, and would undoubtedly have taken the implication that there was something that Warwick was simply better at than her to heart. [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Wexler realised as soon as he heard it in the studio that Franklin's version was great, and Bacharach agreed, telling Franklin's biographer David Ritz “As much as I like the original recording by Dionne, there's no doubt that Aretha's is a better record. She imbued the song with heavy soul and took it to a far deeper place. Hers is the definitive version.” -- which is surprising because Franklin's version simplifies some of Bacharach's more unusual chord voicings, something he often found extremely upsetting. Wexler still though thought there was no way the song would be a hit, and it's understandable that he thought that way. Not only had it only just been on the charts a few months earlier, but it was the kind of song that wouldn't normally be a hit at all, and certainly not in the kind of rhythmic soul music for which Franklin was known. Almost everything she ever recorded is in simple time signatures -- 4/4, waltz time, or 6/8 -- but this is a Bacharach song so it's staggeringly metrically irregular. Normally even with semi-complex things I'm usually good at figuring out how to break it down into bars, but here I actually had to purchase a copy of the sheet music in order to be sure I was right about what's going on. I'm going to count beats along with the record here so you can see what I mean. The verse has three bars of 4/4, one bar of 2/4, and three more bars of 4/4, all repeated: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] While the chorus has a bar of 4/4, a bar of 3/4 but with a chord change half way through so it sounds like it's in two if you're paying attention to the harmonic changes, two bars of 4/4, another waltz-time bar sounding like it's in two, two bars of four, another bar of three sounding in two, a bar of four, then three more bars of four but the first of those is *written* as four but played as if it's in six-eight time (but you can keep the four/four pulse going if you're counting): [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] I don't expect you to have necessarily followed that in great detail, but the point should be clear -- this was not some straightforward dance song. Incidentally, that bar played as if it's six/eight was something Aretha introduced to make the song even more irregular than how Bacharach wrote it. And on top of *that* of course the lyrics mixed the secular and the sacred, something that was still taboo in popular music at that time -- this is only a couple of years after Capitol records had been genuinely unsure about putting out the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows", and Franklin's gospel-inflected vocals made the religious connection even more obvious. But Franklin was insistent that the record go out as a single, and eventually it was released as the B-side to the far less impressive "The House That Jack Built". It became a double-sided hit, with the A-side making number two on the R&B chart and number seven on the Hot One Hundred, while "I Say a Little Prayer" made number three on the R&B chart and number ten overall. In the UK, "I Say a Little Prayer" made number four and became her biggest ever solo UK hit. It's now one of her most-remembered songs, while the A-side is largely forgotten: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] For much of the

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