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Article

Abraham, Afewerki  

Mussie Tesfagiorgis

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Eritrean Tigrinya singer and performer, songwriter, instrument player, and music composer, was born in the city of Asmara. During the Eritrean war of liberation (1961–1991), Abraham Afewerki and his family, like hundreds of thousands of other Eritreans, sought refuge in Sudan.

Abraham Afewerki became attracted by music and musical instruments at an early age. As a young child, he started playing famfam harmonica and singing at school events As a young boy with great artistic potential he joined the Qeyyahti Embaba Red Flowers of the Eritrean People s Liberation Front EPLF at the age of twelve The Red Flowers was a cultural troupe composed of young artists who performed cultural and revolutionary music and theater within Eritrea in areas controlled by the EPLF and Sudan A branch of the troupe of which Abraham Afewerki was a member was active in Khartoum By writing and composing his own ...

Article

Ace, Johnny  

James M. Salem

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

musician, songwriter, and rhythm and blues star, was born John Marshall Alexander Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of John Marshall Alexander and Leslie Newsome. His father earned his living in Memphis as a packer, but his lifework was as a commuting minister to two rural Baptist churches in eastern Arkansas. At LaRose Grammar School in South Memphis, John Jr. as his family called him displayed both musical and artistic talent He mastered the piano at home but was allowed to play only religious music Along with his mother and siblings he sang in the choir at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church Becoming restless at Booker T Washington High School John Jr dropped out in the eleventh grade to join the navy and see the world His sisters recalled military police coming to the house in search of their brother and thought of his brief period ...

Article

Aitken, Lorenzo “Laurel”  

David Simonelli

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born Oliver Anthony Stephens on 22 April 1927 in Santiago, Cuba, to a Jamaican father and a Cuban mother. One of six brothers, he spent his early childhood in Cuba, speaking Spanish; over the years, he learned Italian and French as well, and his multilingual singing abilities would contribute to his international marketability as a pop singer. His father moved the family back to Kingston, Jamaica, in 1938, where Stephens absorbed many different styles of music over the radio and in the streets—American rhythm and blues heard over New Orleans radio stations broadcast across the Caribbean, the hits of jazz crooners from the United States and Britain, and mento, the local guitar and horn version of calypso in Jamaica. In 1942, at age 15, he sang in a major local talent show Vere John’s Opportunity Hour, winning and collecting 2 pounds; he entered Opportunity Hour ...

Article

Aldridge, Amanda Ira  

Philip Herbert

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Composer, contralto, successful vocal coach, accompanist, and teacher. She was the youngest daughter of the famous African‐American actor Ira Aldridge, and born in Upper Norwood, London. Early on she was educated at a convent school in Belgium. At the age of 17 she was awarded a scholarship to study singing at the Royal College of Music. Her teachers included Jenny Lind and George Henschel for singing, along with Frederick Bridge and Frances Edward Gladstone for harmony and counterpoint.

Aldridge's career was successful and varied, as a contralto until an attack of laryngitis damaged her voice, an accompanist, vocal coach, and later a composer. She accompanied her brother Ira Frederick Aldridge on musical tours until his death in 1886. She also accompanied her sister Luranah in concerts at many well‐known London venues at the turn of the 20th century.

Aldridge also played a seminal ...

Article

Alexander, Arthur  

Nathaniel Friedman

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

soul and rhythm and blues singer and songwriter, was born Arthur Alexander Jr. in Florence, Alabama, to Arthur Alexander, a laborer and musician, and Fannie Scott Spencer. He was exposed to music at an early age by his mother and older sister, who sang in church, and by his father, who played weekend gigs as a bottleneck blues guitarist. After high school Alexander was working as a bellhop at the Sheffield Hotel when he met Tom Stafford, a white R&B enthusiast who introduced him to what would become the nucleus of the Muscle Shoals–area studio scene: Dan Penn, Rick Hall, Spooner Oldham, and Billy Sherrill. The men, all then working for Rick Hall's Fame Music Stafford, found Alexander's songwriting abilities every bit as intriguing as his singing, and soon made sure that Alexander became part of Fame's writing operation. In 1958Alexander and Henry Lee Bennett coauthored ...

Article

Almeida Bosque, Juan  

Michael J. Bustamante

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born on 27 February 1927 in Havana into a working-class family with twelve children. After completing the eighth grade and working as a bricklayer, Almeida was introduced to political activity in 1952 upon meeting Fidel Castro while employed at the beach club for students of the University of Havana. A veteran of the failed 1953 assault on Santiago de Cuba’s Moncada Barracks, and prisoner of the Fulgencio Batista government until May 1955, Almeida returned to Cuba in late November 1956 from exile in Mexico, along with other insurgents of the 26th of July Movement, aboard the yacht Granma. Together with Fidel Castro and his brother, Raúl, as well as Ché Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, Almeida was among the few rebels who survived initial clashes with Batista’s forces and arrived at the Sierra Maestra in eastern Cuba. In early 1958 he was promoted to Comandante Commander the ...

Article

Almenerio, Miguel  

Fred Rohner

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born in Callao (Peru), on 8 May 1877, the son of Ignacio Almenerio and Juana Mejia. He moved to Barrios Altos (Lima) in his youth and lived there for the rest of his life. Almenerio was a criollo musician of the early twentieth century and was renowned as a composer and performer of the mandolin and bandurria (a lute-type instrument).

While still a child, he attended a performance of the Spanish Estudiantina Figaro (a string ensemble) at La Linea café; this sparked his passion for stringed instruments. A few years later, he learned to play the bandurria under the guidance of Manuel Boza and later mastered the mandolin and guitar.

His work as a composer includes several well known waltzes Rebeca based on a stanza of a poem by Guillermo Bazo El Huracan Tempestad and La Abeja the musical arrangement of a poem by the Colombian Julio Florez ...

Article

Armstrong, Lil  

Jack Sohmer

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

jazz pianist, composer, and singer, was born Lillian Hardin in Memphis, Tennessee, the daughter of Dempsey Hardin, a strict, churchgoing woman who disapproved of blues music. Nothing is known of her father. At age six Lil began playing organ at home, and at eight she started studying piano. In 1914 she enrolled in the music school of Fisk University in Nashville, taking academic courses and studying piano and music theory. After earning her diploma, around 1917 she joined her mother in Chicago, where she found work demonstrating songs in Jones' Music Store. Prompted by her employer, in 1918 Hardin became house pianist for the clarinetist Lawrence Duhé's band at Bill Bottoms's Dreamland Ballroom, where she played with the cornetists “Sugar Johnny” Smith, Freddie Keppard, and King Oliver; the trombonist Roy Palmer; and other New Orleans musicians Because she was still a minor her mother ...

Article

Armstrong, Lil(lian) Hardin  

Lisa Clayton Robinson

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Armstrong's career as a Jazz musician began with a job in a music store in Chicago, Illinois. She met Louis Armstrong while they were both with King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band in Chicago. They married in 1924 and divorced in 1938 Armstrong worked with her husband in the ...

Article

Armstrong, Lillian “Lil” Hardin  

Hilary Mac Austin

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 May 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Lil Hardin Armstrong is one of the great treasures of American jazz. In a day when women in music were the singers, Hardin played the piano, composed, arranged, and managed—both her own career and that of her husband Louis Armstrong. Uncredited for many years, happily she has begun to gain some well-deserved attention.

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Lillian Beatrice Hardin was the daughter of Dempsey Martin and William Hardin Reports differ on whether Hardin s parents divorced or whether her father died when she was young but it is known that Hardin was raised by her mother and her maternal grandmother in a strictly religious household Hardin was attracted to music almost from birth and began playing the organ when she was very young By the time she was six her mother had arranged that she take additional piano lessons from her schoolteacher and by nine she ...

Article

Arroyo, Joe  

Carlos Vázquez Cruz

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born Álvaro José Arroyo González on 1 November 1955 in the coastal city of Cartagena de Indias Colombia various iconic the son of Guillermo Arroyo and Ángela González El Joe as he is also known grew up in a humble family in a marginal neighborhood of Cartagena where he started singing at the age of 8 in the school choir At the same time he accepted a proposal from the saxophonist and bandleader Michi Sarmiento to start singing with orchestras in the bars and brothels of Tesca one of Cartagena s red light districts to earn money to support his household Cartagena was an important port and the city s nightlife scene catered to lots of international visitors with live entertainment With his rare voice and musical creativity Arroyo soon found this job opening up opportunities for him to join several groups He began his professional singing career ...

Article

Attaway, William  

Christina Accomando

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 February 2001
Published online:
01 December 2006

William Attaway was born 19 November 1911, in Greenville, Mississippi, to Florence Parry Attaway, a teacher, and William Alexander Attaway, a physician and founder of the National Negro Insurance Association. When he was five, his family moved to Chicago, taking part in the Great Migration that he later chronicled as a novelist. The family moved to protect the children from the corrosive racial attitudes of the South.

Attaway's early interest in literature was sparked by Langston Hughes's poetry and by his sister who encouraged him to write for her theater groups. He attended the University of Illinois until his father's death, when Attaway left school and traveled west. He lived as a vagabond for two years, working a variety of jobs and writing. In 1933 he returned to Chicago and resumed his schooling, graduating in 1936. Attaway's play Carnival (1935 was produced at the ...

Article

Attaway, William Alexander  

George P. Weick

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

writer, was born in Greenville, Mississippi, the son of William S. Attaway, a medical doctor, and Florence Parry, a teacher. His family moved to Chicago when Attaway was six years old, following the arc of the Great Migration, that thirty‐year period beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century during which more than 2 million African Americans left the South for the burgeoning industrial centers of the North. Unlike many of these emigrants, who traded the field for the factory and the sharecropper's shack for the ghetto, the Attaways were professionals at the outset, with high ambitions for themselves and their children in their new homeland.

Attaway attended public schools in Chicago, showing no great interest in his studies until, as a high school student, he encountered the work of Langston Hughes He became from that point on a more serious student and even tried his hand ...

Article

Baca, Susana  

Elio Leturia

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born Susana Esther Baca de la Colina in Lima, Peru, on 24 May 1944. Her parents were Ernesto Baca Ramírez, a driver for the aristocratic Nicolini family, and Carmen Eugenia de la Colina Gonzáles, a cook working in the homes of wealthy families. Her childhood was spent in the coastal district of Chorrillos, south of Lima, along with Raúl Ernesto and Maruja, her older siblings. Music entered her life at an early age, as her father played the guitar and her mother was a gifted dancer. Baca attended the 444 Public School in Chorrillos, and then the Juana Alarco de Dammert Public School. Because of incidents of racial harassment, her mother moved Baca to the Divino Maestro School, where she completed high school. She later attended the National University of Education Enrique Guzmán y Valle in La Cantuta, Lima, graduating as an elementary school teacher in 1968 ...

Article

Barbosa, Domingos Caldas  

Genaro Vilanova Miranda de Oliveira

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

better known as Lereno freeborn in Brazil from a Portuguese father and an Angolan mother rose to be a celebrated eighteenth century artist of the Portuguese Empire Details about Barbosa s childhood are largely unknown He was probably born in Rio de Janeiro just after his merchant father arrived from West Central Africa Barbosa s mother initially brought as a slave by his father was manumitted after giving birth so that the mixed descent child could be raised in freedom Because of his Iberian father Barbosa was able to enroll at a Jesuit school where he received instruction in liberal arts and philosophy including rhetoric and music He eventually moved to Portugal to study law at the prestigious University of Coimbra However following the death of his father and sponsor he was forced to prematurely abandon his studies and move to Lisbon Penniless he turned to the lyrical and poetic ...

Article

Bartholomew, Dave  

Zachary J. Lechner

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

bandleader, songwriter, producer, and arranger, was born Dave Louis Bartholomew in Edgard, Louisiana, to Louis Bartholomew, a musician, and Marie Rousell, a housekeeper. Louis played Dixieland tuba in Kid Harrison's and Willie Humphrey's jazz bands. He moved the family to New Orleans while Dave was in high school. Young Dave became interested in performing music after watching his father play. He first took up the tuba but switched to the trumpet because it would allow him a place in the popular marching bands of New Orleans. As a high school student he enjoyed the tutelage of Peter Davis, Louis Armstrong's teacher. Bartholomew honed his skills on the New Orleans scene in the late 1930s. He moved in and out of various jazz and brass bands in Louisiana, including Marshall Lawrence's Brass Band, Toots Johnson's Band, and Claiborne Williams's Band. The pianist Fats Pinchon ...

Article

Beaubrun, Mimerose “Manzè”  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

and founding member of the mizik rasin (roots music) group Boukman Eksperyans (née Mimerose Pierre) was born on 13 November 1956 in Ouanaminthe, Nord-est, Haiti, near the border with the Dominican Republic. Her parents, Emelie Pierre (née Charles-Pierre) and Ovide Pierre, a justice of the peace, encouraged her schooling, but during vacations from school, she learned guitar from her brother and began to sing, with special emphasis on the songs in Spanish that were common in the border region. Although her parents were devout Catholics, Manzè discovered that her grandmother had been a manbo (female Vodou priest).

Manzè is best known for fronting Boukman Eksperyans with her husband Theodore Lòlò Beabrun Jr cowriting and coproducing several of the group s albums Her creative output as a performer and writer reveals the influences of Vodou theology her studies in cultural anthropology and her embrace of social activism all of which resonated ...

Article

Beaubrun, Theodore, Jr. “Lolo”  

Gage Averill and Kevin F. Mason

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

and founding member of the Haitian mizik rasin (roots music) band Boukman Eksperyans, was born on 20 September 1956 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in the neighborhood of Bas-Peu-de-Choses. Lòlò Beaubrun was the son of a popular comedic actor in Haiti, Theodore Beaubrun Sr., and Luce Americe Beaubrun, a folk dancer and actress, formerly with La Troupe Folklorique Nationale d’Haïti. Lòlò acted in the cast of his father’s television program Aventures de Languichatte, in which his father played the madcap character Languichatte Débordus.

Lòlò Beaubrun went to Petit Séminaire Collège Saint Martial for his primary schooling, later attending high school first at the Collège Canado-Haïtien and then at the Union School, an American school in Haiti, graduating in June 1975. In September 1975 he traveled to New York to join his mother, who had relocated to the United States in 1970 In New York City Lòlò took classes in ...

Article

Ben Jor, Jorge  

Tshombe L. Miles

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born Jorge Duilio Lima Menezes in Rio de Janeiro, on 22 March 1942. Ben Jor is of mixed African and European heritage, including a grandfather on his mother’s side who came to Brazil from Ethiopia. In November 2009, in an interview for Trip magazine, he described his youth as a time when all of his basic needs were met. He received a good education, at Colégio Diocesano São José in Rio de Janeiro, and even studied at a seminary, also in Rio de Janeiro, where he had the opportunity to read philosophy. This would have a profound effect on his development. As a youth he also proved to be a talented soccer player, and he has devoted many songs to the sport.

Ben Jor is a self taught guitarist singer and songwriter Over the course of his musical career he has experimented with a variety of musical ...

Article

Benjamin, Bennie  

Gelien Matthews

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born Claude A. Benjamin on 4 November 1907 in Christiansted, St. Croix, United States, Virgin Islands. Very little is known about his parents except that as a young man growing up in Christiansted, while they supported his calling to religious ministerial service, they were unable to finance his training. At the age of 20, he migrated to the United States, hoping to make his fortune in New York. From the outset, he embarked on a musical path from which he never deviated.

Benjamin s first formal training as a student of music in New York was in playing the banjo and guitar at Hy Smith s School of Music Not long after he enrolled in the prestigious Juilliard School of Music In the late 1920s and 1930s he secured employment as an instrumentalist with lower level orchestras and vaudeville groups His first major music based job was as a ...