| Name | Carly Simon |
|---|---|
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | Carly Elisabeth Simon |
| Born | June 25, 1945New York City, New York, United States |
| Origin | Riverdale, Bronx, New York, United States |
| Instrument | Vocals, guitar, piano |
| Genre | Pop, rock, adult contemporary, pop standards |
| Occupation | Singer-songwriter, musician, actress, writer |
| Years active | 1964–present |
| Label | Elektra (1971–1979)Warner Bros. (1980–1984)Epic (1985–1986)Arista (1987–2001)Rhino (2002–2004)Columbia (2005–2007)Hear Music (2008)Iris (2009–present) |
| Associated acts | James Taylor, Elephant's Memory |
| Url | carlysimon.com |
Carly Elisabeth Simon (born June 25, 1945) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and children's author. She rose to fame in the 1970s with a string of hit records, and has since been the recipient of two Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, and a Golden Globe Award for her work. Simon has a contralto vocal range.
She is the former wife of another notable singer-songwriter, James Taylor, with whom she has two children: Sarah "Sally" Maria Taylor and Ben Taylor, who are also musicians.
A long-respected and acclaimed artist, Simon was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994.
Carly Simon was raised in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, New York City and has two older sisters, Joanna (b. 1940) and Lucy (b. 1943), and a younger brother, Peter (b. 1947). Simon, her sisters and brother Peter, were raised nominal Catholics, according to a book of photography Peter published in the late 1990s. She attended Riverdale Country School. She also briefly attended Sarah Lawrence College and joined Alpha Gamma Delta, before dropping out to pursue music.
Her solo music career began in 1971, with the self-titled Carly Simon on Elektra Records. The album contained her breakthrough top-ten hit "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be". It was followed quickly by a second album, Anticipation. The title song from that album, written about a romance between Simon and Cat Stevens, was a significant hit, reaching #3 at Easy Listening radio and #13 on Billboard's Hot 100. The next single release - also reportedly written about Stevens - was "Legend In Your Own Time" which failed to make much of an impact on the charts. After their brief liaison during 1970–1971 ended amicably, Stevens wrote his song "Sweet Scarlet" about Simon, who also had highly publicized relationships with Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger, Kris Kristofferson, and James Taylor during this period.
In 1973 Simon scored the biggest success of her career with the classic global smash "You're So Vain". It hit #1 on the U.S. Pop and Adult Contemporary charts and sold over a million copies in the United States alone. It was one of the decade's biggest hits and propelled Simon's breakthrough album No Secrets to #1 on the U.S. album charts, where it stayed for six consecutive weeks. The album achieved Gold status that year, but by the album's 25th anniversary in 1997, the album had been certified Platinum. "You're So Vain" received Grammy Award nominations for Record Of The Year, Song Of The Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female. Additionally, as of 2008, it is listed at #72 on the Billboard Hot 100's definitive list of the Hot 100's top 100 songs from the chart's first 50 years, August 1958 through July 2008.
The subject of the song itself has become one of the biggest enigmas in popular music, as this track also carries one of the most famous lyrics: "You're so vain/I bet you think this song is about you." Simon has never publicly admitted who the song is about. She hinted that it could be a composite of several people, and for many people the most likely "suspects" have always been Beatty or Jagger, who sings backup vocals on this recording. Simon has given vague hints over the decades to a variety of talk shows and publications, saying that riddles wouldn't be interesting if everyone knew the answers to them. On August 5, 2003, she did finally auction off the information to the winner of a charity function for a grand total of US$50,000, with the condition that the winner (a television executive, Dick Ebersol on NBC's Today Show) not reveal who it is.
Later in 1973, the follow-up single, "The Right Thing To Do", was another sizable hit, reaching #4 Adult Contemporary and #17 Pop. That same year Simon performed on Lee Clayton's album Lee Clayton and co-sang on the song "New York Suite 409" and on Livingston Taylor's album Over the Rainbow and sang with both Livingston and his famous brother, James Taylor (who was, by then, her husband) on the songs "Loving Be My New Horizon" and "Pretty Woman".
In 1974, Simon followed the smash No Secrets album with Hotcakes, which reached #3 on Billboard's Album Chart and was certified Gold, though it did not match the sales of No Secrets. Hotcakes included two top ten singles, "Mockingbird," a duet with James Taylor that peaked at #5 on Billboard's Pop Singles chart, and "Haven't Got Time For the Pain," which hit #2 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart. The same year, Simon provided vocals on Tom Rush's album Ladies Love Outlaws and co-sang with Rush on "No Regrets" and as backup on "Claim On Me". In 1975, Elektra released her first greatest-hits album, The Best of Carly Simon, which became Simon's all time best selling disc and eventually reached Triple-Platinum status in the United States.
Simon's record sales declined considerably with 1975's Playing Possum and 1976's Another Passenger. Playing Possum was a Top Ten album, with a Top 40 single "Attitude Dancing" and two other charting singles, but Another Passenger produced only one single, "It Keeps You Running," which barely scraped into the top 50. 1976 also saw Simon contributing backup vocals on the song "Peter" on Peter Ivers's album Peter Ivers. She also made her only appearance on Saturday Night Live. It was a pre-taped performance—a rare occurrence on that show—because Simon suffered terrible bouts of stage fright. In the appearance, she sang two songs: "Half A Chance" and her signature song, "You're So Vain".
In 1977, Simon had a surprise international hit with "Nobody Does It Better", the theme to the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. The million-selling Gold single held at #2 for several weeks, behind Debby Boone's mega-hit "You Light Up My Life" (which became the biggest hit of the entire decade). "Nobody Does It Better" remains Simon's second-biggest U.S. hit, after "You're So Vain". It was 1977's biggest Adult Contemporary hit, where it held at #1 for seven straight weeks. It also received Grammy nominations for Song Of The Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance Female.
Also in 1977, Simon co-produced Libby Titus's album Libby Titus and sang backup on two songs: "Can This Be Our Love Affair?" and "Darkness 'Til Dawn".
Simon's career took another upward swing in 1978 with the hit album Boys In The Trees. The album produced another Top 10 Pop and Adult Contemporary hit with the jazzy and sensual "You Belong To Me". Boys In The Trees was a major success, and returned Simon to Platinum album status in the U.S. It later earned Simon yet another Grammy nomination. She was featured on the front covers of People and Rolling Stone magazines that spring. Also in 1978, Simon and James Taylor sang backing vocals on two songs for Taylor's sister Kate's album Kate Taylor: "Happy Birthday Sweet Darling" and "Jason & Ida". Simon and Taylor also sang backup on three songs on John Hall's debut solo album John Hall, "The Fault", "Good Enough" and "Voyagers". Simon and Taylor would also sing backup on one song, "Power", from Hall's next album, which is also titled Power (1979).
On November 2, 1978, Simon guested on the song "I Live In The Woods" at a live, four-hour concert by Burt Bacharach and the Houston Symphony Orchestra at Jones Hall in Houston, Texas. All the songs at that concert became Bacharach's album Woman, which was released in 1979. That year, shortly after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, from September 19 to September 22, a series of concerts were held at New York City's Madison Square Garden and sponsored by Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE), a group of musicians against nuclear power, co-founded by John Hall. Always politically active, Simon and James Taylor were part of the concerts which later became a documentary and concert film, No Nukes (1980) as well as a live album of the same name (1979).
Simon released her last album for Elektra, Spy, in 1979. It sold poorly, although a harder-edged single from the album, "Vengeance", was a modest hit and received airplay on U.S. album rock stations. "Vengeance" earned Simon a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Vocal Performance Female in early 1980 - the first year to feature the new category.From 1972 to 1979, Simon sang backup vocals on the following James Taylor songs and albums (not counting compilations): "One Man Parade" from 1972's One Man Dog, "Rock 'n' Roll Is Music Now", "Let It All Fall Down", "Me And My Guitar", "Daddy's Baby" and "Ain't No Song" from 1974's Walking Man, "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)" from 1975's Gorilla, "Shower the People", "A Junkie's Lament", "Slow Burning Love" and "Family Man" from 1976's In the Pocket, and "B.S.U.R." from 1979's Flag. She also co-wrote with Taylor the song "Terra Nova" on his 1977 album JT. At the end of the song, Simon sang what has come to be known as "Lambert's Cove".
Torch (1981) was an album of melancholy jazz standards, but suffered from disappointing sales. The Nile Rodgers & Bernard Edwards produced single "Why", from the soundtrack to the 1982 film Soup For One, was a top-ten hit single in the U.K. but stalled at #74 in the U.S. She had another minor U.K. success with the single "Kissing With Confidence", a song off the 1983 album Dancing For Mental Health by Will Powers (a pseudonym for photographer Lynn Goldsmith). Simon was the uncredited singer of the song co-written and mixed by Todd Rundgren. Simon's singles were generally less successful in the 1980s, although most of them did quite well on Adult Contemporary radio formats. In 1983, she made her last album for Warner, Hello Big Man, but this also suffered from disappointing sales. That same year, Simon performed on two albums, The Perfect Stranger by Jesse Colin Young (singing on the track "Fight For It" with Young) and Wonderland by Nils Lofgren (singing on the track "Lonesome Ranger" with Lofgren). By this time, her contract with Warner Bros ended. In 1985, she signed with Epic Records and made one album for them, Spoiled Girl. This too was commercially unsuccessful and her contract with Epic was cancelled.
In 1986, Simon signed with Arista Records and soon rebounded from her career slump. Her first album for Arista, Coming Around Again (1987), gave Simon another international hit with the title track (which was featured in the film Heartburn), returning her to the Billboard Pop Top 20 and the U.K. Top 10 (It also garnered her a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance). The album also featured the Top 10 Adult Contemporary hits "Give Me All Night", "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of", "All I Want Is You" and a cover of "As Time Goes By" (featuring Stevie Wonder on harmonica). The album itself was her first Gold release in nine years, and went Platinum in 1988. These and older songs were featured in a picturesque HBO concert special which was filmed at Martha's Vineyard, where Simon and her band performed live on a pier. Most of these songs were compiled for her 1988 album, Greatest Hits Live. The album continued her mounting comeback, quickly going Gold, and was later certified Platinum by the RIAA in 1996. From "Live" a recording of Simon's evergreen "You're So Vain" was released as a single in the U.K.
She is the first artist to win all three awards (Oscar, Golden Globe and Grammy) for a song that is composed and written, as well as performed, entirely by a single artist (the only other such artist being Bruce Springsteen for his "Streets of Philadelphia" 1993: Oscar, 1994: Golden Globe & two Grammys).
The Working Girl soundtrack album came out in early 1989, and featured more music from Simon, and as a tribute to Christa McAuliffe, who was slated to be the first teacher in space and who died in the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster for whom Simon also wrote a song "You're Where I Go". McAuliffe was a Simon fan and had taken a cassette of her music on board the shuttle.
In 1987, Simon also sang the theme for the 1988 Democratic National Convention, "The Turn of The Tide", for a Marlo Thomas television special Free to Be...A Family. The song was later included on the 1988 soundtrack album of the same name on A&M; Records.
1993 saw Simon recording a contemporary opera called (having been commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera Association and the Kennedy Center) and published of her fourth children's book, The Nighttime Chauffeur. She also contributed to Andreas Vollenweider's album Eolian Minstrel. Simon co-wrote the song "Private Fires" with Vollenweider and was featured vocalist on the song.
In 1994, she covered "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" for Ken Burns' 1994 film Baseball , as well as a recording of "I've Got a Crush On You" for Larry Adler's covers album The Glory of Gershwin. That same year, Simon recorded another album of original songs, Letters Never Sent, and contributed a Christmas song, "The Night Before Christmas", to the movie and soundtrack Mixed Nuts. In April 1995, Simon surprised thousands of commuters at New York's Grand Central Terminal with an unannounced performance which was filmed for a Lifetime Television Special. It was also released on home video in December of that year. Also in 1995, she put aside years of stage fright long enough to perform on an American concert tour in conjunction with Hall & Oates. That same year, Clouds In My Coffee, a boxed set (of highlights from her career from 1965 to 1995) was released. On August 30, 1995, Simon made a rare joint appearance with her ex-husband, James Taylor, for a concert on Martha's Vineyard. Dubbed "Livestock '95", it was a benefit for the Martha's Vineyard Agricultural Society, with over 10,000 people in attendance. She performed a duet with Mindy Jostyn on the song "Time, Be On My Side", on Jostyn's 1995 album Five Miles From Hope.
Simon wrote the theme songs to several more movies, including "Two Little Sisters" from the 1996 movie Marvin's Room and "In Two Straight Lines" from the 1998 movie Madeline. 1997 saw the release of Simon's third standards album in collaboration with Jimmy Webb, Film Noir, for which she was Grammy nominated for Best Traditional Vocal Performance, as well as her fifth children's book, "Midnight Farm". In 1998, Simon was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy and received chemotherapy. In 1999 , a U.K.-only greatest hits album, was released. That year, Simon was the featured vocalist for "Your Silver Key" on the album Cosmopoly by Andreas Vollenweider.
During the 1990s, the American press reported an incident between Simon and the Pretenders' vocalist Chrissie Hynde, at a Joni Mitchell concert at New York's Fez Club. Some reports stated that a drunk and disorderly Hynde grabbed Simon around the neck and punched her, although Simon attempted to put these rumors to rest on her official website in 2002. Numerous witnesses, however, claim that Simon was, indeed, assaulted by Hynde.
In 2002, Simon recorded a Christmas album, Christmas Is Almost Here, for Rhino Records , while she was in Los Angeles to lend support to her son Ben Taylor and his band. That same year, Simon personally chose all of the songs for a two disc anthology album, to be titled Anthology for Rhino Records. 2003 saw a re-release of her 2002 Christmas album with two extra tracks and called Christmas Is Almost Here Again on Rhino Records. The two extra tracks, "White Christmas" and "Forgive", were also released as a single. Simon also performed several concerts during the 2004 holiday season at Harlem's Apollo Theater , along with BeBe Winans, son Ben and daughter Sally, Rob Thomas, Livingston Taylor, Mindy Jostyn and Kate Taylor, along with other members of the Taylor and Simon family.
Among Simon's recent work, there were songs for the Disney Winnie the Pooh films Piglet's Big Movie in 2003 and Pooh's Heffalump Movie in 2005. Several of her songs were also featured in the 2004 movie Little Black Book that starred Brittany Murphy and Holly Hunter. Simon appears in a cameo role as herself at the end of the movie. 2004 also saw the release of her fourth greatest hits album, , which peaked at #22 on the Billboard charts that year (#25 in the U.K.). The album became Simon's first Gold-certified disc since the late 1980s.
In 2005, she released her fourth album of standards, titled Moonlight Serenade. It reached #7 on the Billboard Album charts, her highest-charting album in nearly 30 years. She was also nominated for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. To promote Moonlight Serenade, Simon performed two concerts onboard the Queen Mary 2 which were recorded and released on DVD in 2005. She also performed in a concert tour in the United States - her first tour in 10 years. Simon also sang a duet, "Angel Of The Darkest Night", with Mindy Jostyn on Jostyn's 2005 album Coming Home , which was released several months after Jostyn's death, on March 10, 2005. As one of Simon's closest friends, Jostyn was married to Jacob Brackman, Simon's long-time friend and musical collaborator. In 2005, she became involved in the legal defense of musician and family friend John Forté with his struggle against a federal incarceration.
The following year, Simon recorded yet her fifth album of covers, a collection of "soothing songs and lullabies" which was called Into White for Columbia Records. The eclectic collection featured covers of songs by Cat Stevens - the title track, Judy Garland, The Beatles and the Everly Brothers , as well as two new original songs. It also features the vocal collaborations of her children, Ben Taylor and Sally Taylor, both accomplished artists. Released in 2007, it became Billboard Magazine's "Hot Shot Debut", entering the chart at number #13.
Simon is also the featured vocalist on four songs on Andreas Vollenweider's holiday album Midnight Clear, released in 2006: "Midnight Clear", "Suspended Note", "Hymn to the Secret Heart" and "Forgive". "Forgive" is a song Simon wrote for her own holiday album on RHINO Records from 2002 (re-released in an expanded version in 2003), Christmas Is Almost Here.
In 2005, Simon paired up with Livingston Taylor on his album There You Are Again (2006), adding her vocals to his opening track "We're The Best Of Friends".
In March 2008, it was announced that Simon had signed to the Starbucks label Hear Music. She released a new album entitled This Kind of Love with them in the spring of 2008. The album is her first collection of original songs since 2000's The Bedroom Tapes. However, in October 2009, it was reported that Simon was suing Starbucks, saying they did not adequately promote her This Kind of Love album — despite that it peaked at a lofty #15 on Billboard's album chart and sold nearly 150,000 copies. (Incidentally, Simon's suit states that Starbucks publicly announced it was backing out of participation in Hear Music just days before the album debut — a decision that she claims doomed the record before it was even released.)
On June 19, 2008, Carly Simon and her son, Ben, performed "You're So Vain" together on The Howard Stern Show on Sirius Satellite radio.
In 2009 Carly released an album of reworkings of many of her classic songs titled "Never Been Gone" on Iris Records.
On November 26, 2009, Simon appeared on the Care Bears float of the 83rd Annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, where she sang "Let The River Run".
On 2 March 2010 Venue at Studio 3 BBC Maida Vale Studios London "RADIO 2 - AN EVENING WITH CARLY SIMON " Presented by Paul Gambaccini. Carly Simon performed live for the first time in the UK to a small audience of approximately 100 people with her son Ben Taylor
Prior to her marriage to Taylor, Simon was briefly engaged to William Donaldson in the 1960s (who jilted fiancee Sarah Miles for her). Donaldson described her as "the answer to any sane man's prayers; funny, quick, erotic, extravagantly talented." She also was engaged to musician Russ Kunkel, from 1985 to 1986.
Simon married James Hart, a writer, poet, and businessman, on December 23, 1987. The couple divorced in 2007.
Simon underwent a mastectomy, chemotherapy, and reconstructive surgery for breast cancer during 1997 and 1998. There had been a lump in her breast for several years before then, but her doctors had advised her against surgery. Simon later recounted: "Then one doctor said, 'You know what, I'd rather see it in a jar than in your breast.'" She also said that she felt "a little angry with myself" over the fact that she didn't insist on taking it out sooner. Simon's surgery came at the same time as the death of her long-time friend Linda McCartney, who had also struggled with breast cancer. Simon described McCartney's death as having emotionally "crushed" her.
Simon lives on Martha's Vineyard and is associated with a store in Vineyard Haven named Midnight Farm, the title of one of her series of children's books from the late 1980s and 1990s.
In an interview published on May 1, 2008, with the Bay Area Reporter, an LGBT news service, Simon was asked about the possibility of a performance in the True Colors Tour. She responded, "The part that I could be involved in is the gay and lesbian part. The part that would be hard for me is to commit to a tour, because I'm not very comfortable [with] being onstage. But the part that would be easiest for me would be singing on behalf of all of us. I don't consider myself to be not gay... I've enlarged all of my possibilities. I have a lot of extremely personal stories to tell about that, but we won't go into that right now. Let's just say that it just depends upon who I'm with."
Simon addressed the rumors about her sexuality created by the interview on The Howard Stern Show which aired June 18, 2008. Since July 2006 she has been dating a surgeon, Richard H. Koehler, a Gulf War veteran.
Simon has been close friends with James Taylor's younger brother Livingston Taylor for over forty years. Livingston has said, "I love Carly and Carly loves me. She's a ferocious advocate and supporter of my music." They have worked as a musical duo for some songs such as "Best of Friends", released in Livingston's 2006 album There You Are Again, and others earlier in their careers.
In May 2010 Simon revealed she was one of the several celebrities who fell victim to Kenneth I. Starr, now a prison inmate, whose Ponzi scheme lured her into investing millions of dollars with him, which were lost.
{| |- |width=50%| Studio albums
Category:1945 births Category:American female guitarists Category:American female singers Category:American Jews Category:American musicians of French descent Category:American musicians of German descent Category:American people of Cuban descent Category:American people of Spanish descent Category:American pop singers Category:American singer-songwriters Category:Arista Records artists Category:Best Song Academy Award winning songwriters Category:Breast cancer survivors Category:Elektra Records artists Category:English-language singers Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Jewish composers and songwriters Category:Living people Category:Massachusetts Democrats Category:People from the Bronx Category:Riverdale, Bronx Category:Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees Category:Traditional pop music singers
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | James Taylor |
|---|---|
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | James Vernon Taylor |
| Born | March 12, 1948Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Origin | Carrboro, North Carolina |
| Instrument | VocalsGuitarHarmonica |
| Genre | Folk rockRockPopCountry |
| Occupation | Singer-songwritermusician |
| Years active | 1968–present |
| Label | Apple/Capitol/EMI RecordsWarner Bros. RecordsColumbia/SME RecordsHear Music |
| Associated acts | Carole King, Carly Simon |
| Url | JamesTaylor.com |
James Vernon Taylor (born March 12, 1948) is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in Carrboro, North Carolina. He owns a house in the Berkshire County town of Washington, Massachusetts. A five-time Grammy Award winner, Taylor was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2000.
Taylor achieved his major breakthrough in 1970 with the #3 single "Fire and Rain" and had his first #1 hit the following year with "You've Got a Friend", a recording of Carole King's classic song. His 1976 Greatest Hits album was certified Diamond and has sold 12 million US copies. Following his 1977 album, JT, he has retained a large audience over the decades. His commercial achievements declined slightly until a big resurgence during the late 1990s and 2000s, when some of his best-selling and most-awarded albums (including Hourglass, October Road and Covers) were released.
In 1951, when James was three years old, the family moved to the countryside of Carrboro, North Carolina, when Isaac took a job as Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. They built a house in the Morgan Creek area, which was sparsely populated. James attended public primary school in Chapel Hill. Isaac Taylor later rose to become Dean of the UNC School of Medicine from 1964 to 1971. The family spent summers on Martha's Vineyard beginning in 1953.
Taylor first learned to play the cello as a child in North Carolina, and switched to the guitar in 1960. His style on that instrument evolved from listening to hymns, carols, and Woody Guthrie, while his technique derived from his bass clef-oriented cello training and from experimenting on his sister Kate's keyboards: "My style was a finger-picking style that was meant to be like a piano, as if my thumb were my left hand, and my first, second, and third fingers were my right hand." He began attending Milton Academy, a prep boarding school in Massachusetts in Fall 1961; summering before then with his family on Martha's Vineyard, he met Danny Kortchmar, an aspiring teenage guitarist from Larchmont, New York. The two began listening to and playing blues and folk music together, and Kortchmar quickly realized that Taylor's singing had a "natural sense of phrasing, every syllable beautifully in time. I knew James had that thing." Taylor wrote his first song on guitar at age 14, and continued to learn the instrument effortlessly.
Taylor faltered during his junior year at Milton, not feeling at ease in the high-pressured college prep environment despite having good scholastic performance. He returned home to North Carolina to finish out the semester at Chapel Hill High School. There he joined a band his brother Alex had formed called The Corsayers (later The Fabulous Corsairs), playing electric guitar; in 1964 they cut a single in Raleigh that featured James's song "Cha Cha Blues" on the B-side. He would later view his nine-month stay at McLean as "a lifesaver ... like a pardon or like a reprieve," and both his brother Livingston and sister Kate would later be patients and students there as well.
Taylor associated with a motley collection of people and began using heroin, to Kortchmar's dismay, and wrote the "Paint It, Black"-influenced "Rainy Day Man" to depict his drug experience. Released on Jay Gee Records, a subsidiary of Jubilee Records, it received some radio airplay in the Northeast, Other songs had been recorded during the same session, but Jubilee declined to go forward with an album. Indeed, his drug use had developed into full-blown heroin addiction during the final Flying Machine period: "I just fell into it, since it was as easy to get high in the Village as get a drink." Finally out of money and abandoned by his manager, he made a desperate call one night to his father. Isaac Taylor flew to New York and staged a rescue, renting a car and driving all night back to North Carolina with James and his possessions.
Taylor decided to try being a solo act and a change of scenery. In late 1967, funded by a small family inheritance, he moved to London, living variously in Notting Hill, Belgravia, and Chelsea. He recorded some demos in Soho and, capitalizing on Kortchmar's connection to The King Bees (who once once opened for Peter and Gordon), brought the demos to Peter Asher, who was A&R; head for The Beatles' newly-formed label Apple Records. Asher showed the demos to Paul McCartney, who later said, "I just heard his voice and his guitar and I thought he was great ... and he came and played live, so it was just like, 'Wow, he's great." Taylor recorded the album from July to October 1968 at Trident Studios, at the same time The Beatles were recording The White Album. McCartney and an uncredited George Harrison guested on "Carolina in My Mind", whose lyric holy host of others standing around me made reference to the Beatles, while the title phrase of Taylor's "Something in the Way She Moves" provided the starting point for Harrison's classic "Something". McCartney and Asher brought in arranger Richard Hewson to add orchestrations to several of the songs and unusual "link" passages in between them; these would receive a mixed reception at best.
During the recording sessions, Taylor fell back into his drug habit, using heroin and methedrine. Meanwhile, Apple released his debut album, James Taylor, in December 1968 in the UK and February 1969 in the U.S. In early 1969, to clean up the situation, three of the Beatles brought in Allen Klein, who began purging Apple personnel. Asher did not like Klein; he resigned of his own accord and offered to manage Taylor, to which Taylor agreed. Klein wanted to hit Taylor with a $5 million lawsuit for leaving, but McCartney (a Klein antagonist) and then the other Beatles, overruled him on the grounds that artists should not be holding each other to contracts. Shortly thereafter, he broke both hands and both feet in a motorcycle accident on Martha's Vineyard and was forced to stop playing for several months. But while recovering, he continued to write songs and in October 1969, signed a new deal with Warner Bros. Records. in 2003. ("Fire and Rain" was also listed #227 on Rolling Stone's list of the Greatest Songs of All Time).
for Two-Lane Blacktop: Boswell, Oklahoma ]] During the time Sweet Baby James was released, Taylor appeared with Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys in a Monte Hellman film, Two-Lane Blacktop. In October 1970, he performed with Joni Mitchell, Phil Ochs, and the Canadian band Chilliwack at a Vancouver benefit concert that funded Greenpeace's protests of 1971 nuclear weapons tests by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission at Amchitka, Alaska. (This performance was released in 2009 on the album Amchitka, The 1970 Concert That Launched Greenpeace.) In January 1971, sessions for Taylor's next album, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, began. Released in April, the album also gained massive critical acclaim and contained Taylor's biggest Pop single in the U.S., a version of the Carole King standard "You've Got a Friend" (featuring backing vocals by Joni Mitchell), which reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in late July. The album itself reached #2 in the album charts, which would be Taylor's highest position ever on this list. In early 1972, Taylor received his first Grammy Award, for (Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male) for "You've Got a Friend" (King also won Song of the Year for the same song on that ceremony). The album went on to sell 2½ million copies in the United States alone.
November 1972 saw the release of Taylor's fourth album, One Man Dog. A concept album primarily recorded in his home recording studio, it featured cameos by Linda Ronstadt and consisted of eighteen short pieces of music put together. It was received with generally lukewarm reviews and, despite making the Top 10 of the Billboard Album Charts, overall sales were disappointing. The lead single "Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight" peaked at #18 on the Hot 100, and the follow-up, "One Man Parade", barely reached the Top 75. Almost simultaneously, Taylor married fellow singer-songwriter Carly Simon on November 3, in a small ceremony at her Murray Hill, Manhattan apartment. A post-concert party following a Taylor performance at Radio City Music Hall turned into a large-scale wedding party, and the Simon-Taylor marriage would find much public attention over the following years.
However, James Taylor's artistic fortunes spiked again in 1975 when the Gold album Gorilla reached #6 and provided one of his biggest hit singles, a cover version of Marvin Gaye's "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)", which featured wife Carly in backing vocals and reached #5 in America and #1 in Canada. On the Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart, the track also reached the top, and the follow-up single, the feel-good "Mexico" also reached the Top 5 of that list. A critically very-well received album, Gorilla showcased Taylor's electric, lighter side that was evident on Walking Man. However, it was arguably a more consistent and fresher-sounding Taylor, with classics such as "Wandering" and "Angry Blues." It also featured a song about his daughter Sally, "Sarah Maria".
Gorilla was followed in 1976 by In the Pocket, Taylor's last studio album to be released under Warner Bros. Records. The album found him with many colleagues and friends, including Art Garfunkel, David Crosby, Bonnie Raitt and Stevie Wonder (who co-wrote a song with Taylor and contributed a harmonica solo). A very melodic album, it was highlighted with the single "Shower the People", an enduring classic that hit #1 Adult Contemporary and almost hit the Top 20 of the Pop Charts. But the album was not very well-received, reaching only #16 and being highly criticized, particularly by Rolling Stone. Nevertheless 1976 was a huge boom year in the recording business — the year of inception of the "Platinum" disc — and In The Pocket was certified Gold.
With the close of Taylor's contract with Warner, in November the label released Greatest Hits, the album that comprised most of his best work between 1970 and 1976. It became with time his best-selling album, ever. It was certified eleven times Platinum in the US, earning a Diamond certification by the RIAA and eventually selling close to twenty million copies worldwide. It still stands as the best-selling folk album by any artist.
Back in the forefront of popular music, Taylor collaborated with Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel in the recording of a cover of Sam Cooke's "Wonderful World", which reached the Top 20 in the U.S. and topped the AC charts in early 1978. After briefly working on Broadway, he took a one-year break, reappearing in the summer of 1979 with the cover-studded Platinum album Flag, featuring a Top 30 version of Gerry Goffin and Carole King's "Up on the Roof". (Two selections from Flag, "Millworker" and "Brother Trucker," were featured on the PBS production of the Broadway musical based on Studs Terkel's non-fiction book , and James himself appeared in that production as a trucker; he performed "Brother Trucker" in character.) Taylor also appeared on the No Nukes concert in Madison Square Garden, where he made a memorable live performance of "Mockingbird" with his wife Carly. The concert appeared on both the No Nukes album and film.
On December 7, 1980 Taylor had an encounter with Mark David Chapman who would assassinate John Lennon. Taylor told the BBC in 2010 "The guy had sort of pinned me to the wall and was glistening with maniacal sweat and talking some freak speak about what he was going to do and his stuff with how John was interested, and he was going to get in touch with John Lennon. And it was surreal to actually have contact with the guy 24 hours before he shot John." The next night Taylor who lived in the next building from Lennon heard the assassination.
In March 1981, James Taylor released the album Dad Loves His Work, whose themes concerned his relationship with his father, the course his ancestors had taken, and the effect he and Simon had had on each other. The album was another Platinum success, reaching #10 and providing Taylor's final real hit single in a duet with J. D. Souther, "Her Town Too," which reached #5 Adult Contemporary and #11 on the Hot 100 in Billboard. The album's title was, in part, drawn from the reasons for Taylor's divorce from Carly Simon. She gave him an ultimatum: cut back on his music and touring, and spend more time with her and their children, or the marriage was through. The album's title was Taylor's answer, and Simon asked for divorce. (The emotional repercussions of the divorce likely served as at least part of the inspiration for "Her Town Too.")
On February 18, 2001 at the Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Boston, Taylor wed for the third time, marrying Caroline ("Kim") Smedvig, the director of public relations and marketing for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. They had begun dating in 1995, when they met as he appeared with John Williams and the Boston Pops Orchestra. The couple reside in the town of Washington, Massachusetts with their twin boys, Rufus and Henry, born in April 2001 to a surrogate mother via in vitro fertilization. The album appeared in two versions, a single-disc version and a "limited edition" two-disc version which contained three extra songs including a duet with Mark Knopfler, "Sailing to Philadelphia," which also appeared on Knopfler's Sailing to Philadelphia album. Also in 2002, Taylor teamed with bluegrass musician Alison Krauss in singing "The Boxer" at the Kennedy Center Honors Tribute to Paul Simon. They later recorded the Louvin Brothers duet, "How's the World Treating You?" In 2004, after he chose not to renew his record contract with Columbia/Sony, he released with distribution through Hallmark Cards.
Taylor performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Game 2 of the World Series in Boston on October 24, 2004. In December, he appeared as himself in an episode of The West Wing entitled "A Change Is Gonna Come". He sang Sam Cooke's classic "A Change Is Gonna Come" at an event honoring an artist played by Taylor's wife Caroline. Later on, he appeared on CMT's Crossroads alongside the Dixie Chicks. In early 2006, MusiCares honored Taylor with performances of his songs by an array of notable musicians. Before a performance by the Dixie Chicks, lead singer Natalie Maines acknowledged that he had always been one of their musical heroes, and had for them lived up to their once-imagined reputation of him. They performed his song, "Shower the People", with a surprise appearance by Arnold McCuller, who has sung backing vocals on Taylor's live tours for many years.
In the fall of 2006, Taylor released a repackaged and slightly different version of his Hallmark Christmas album, now entitled James Taylor at Christmas, and distributed by Columbia/Sony. In 2006, Taylor performed Randy Newman's song "Our Town" for the Disney animated film Cars. The song was nominated for the 2007 Academy Award for the best Original Song. On January 1, 2007, Taylor headlined the inaugural concert at the Times Union Center in Albany, New York, honoring newly sworn in Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer.
Taylor's next album, One Man Band was released on CD and DVD in November 2007 on Starbucks' Hear Music Label, where he joined with Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell. The introspective album grew out of a three-year tour of the United States and Europe—featuring some of Taylor's most beloved songs and anecdotes about their creative origins—accompanied solely by the "one man band" of his longtime pianist/keyboardist, Larry Goldings. The mix of One Man Band won a TEC Award for best surround sound recording in 2008.
November 28–30, 2007, Taylor, accompanied by his original band and Carole King, headlined a series of six shows at The Troubadour. The appearances marked the 50th anniversary of the venue, where Taylor, King and many others, such as Tom Waits, Neil Diamond, and Elton John, began their music careers. Proceeds from the concert went to benefit the Natural Resources Defense Council, MusiCares, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, and the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank, a member of America's Second Harvest — The Nation's Food Bank Network. Parts of the performance shown on CBS Sunday Morning in the December 23, 2007, broadcast showed Taylor alluding to his early drug problems by saying, "I played here a number of times in the 70s, allegedly..." Taylor has used versions of this joke on other occasions, and it appears as part of his One Man Band DVD and tour performances.
]] In December 2007 James Taylor at Christmas was nominated for a Grammy Award. In January 2008 Taylor recorded approximately 20 songs by others for a new album with a band including Luis Conte, Michael Landau, Lou Marini, Arnold McCuller, Jimmy Johnson, David Lasley, Walt Fowler, Andrea Zonn, Kate Markowitz, Steve Gadd and Larry Goldings. The resulting live-in-studio album, named Covers, was released in September 2008. This album forays into country and soul while being the latest proof that Taylor is a more versatile singer than his best known hits might suggest. The Covers sessions stretched to include "Oh What a Beautiful Morning," from the musical Oklahoma - a song that his grandmother had caught him singing over and over at the top of his lungs when he was seven years old. Meanwhile, in summer 2008, Taylor and this band toured 34 North American cities with a tour entitled James Taylor and His Band of Legends. A additional album, called Other Covers, came out in April 2009, containing songs that were recorded during the same sessions as the original Covers but had not been put out to the full public yet.
During October 19–21, 2008, Taylor performed a series of free concerts in five North Carolina cities in support of Barack Obama's presidential bid. On Sunday, January 18, 2009, he performed at the , singing "Shower the People" with John Legend and Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland.
Taylor performed on the final The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on May 29, 2009, distinguishing himself further as the final musician to appear in Leno's original 17-year run.
On September 8, 2009 Taylor made an appearance at the twenty-fourth season premiere block party of The Oprah Winfrey Show on Chicago's Michigan Avenue.
performing "You've Got a Friend" together during their Troubadour Reunion Tour in 2010.]] On January 1, 2010, Taylor sang the American national anthem at the NHL Winter Classic at Fenway Park, while Daniel Powter sang the Canadian national anthem.
On March 7, 2010, Taylor sang The Beatles' "In My Life" in tribute to deceased artists at the 82nd Academy Awards.
In March 2010 he commenced the Troubadour Reunion Tour with Carole King and members of his original band, including Russ Kunkel, Leland Sklar, and Danny Kortchmar. They played shows in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and North America, with the final night being at the Honda Center, in Anaheim, CA. The tour was a major commercial success, and in some locations found Taylor playing arenas instead of his usual theaters or amphitheaters. Ticket sales amounted to over 700,000 and the tour grossed over 59 million dollars. It was one of the most successful tours of the year.
;U.S. Billboard Top 10 Albums
;U.S. Billboard Top 10 'Pop' Singles
Category:1970s_singers Category:1948 births Category:Living people Category:American acoustic guitarists Category:American folk guitarists Category:American folk singers Category:American male singers Category:American pop guitarists Category:American rock guitarists Category:American rock singers Category:American singer-songwriters Category:Apple Records artists Category:American people of English descent Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Musicians from Massachusetts Category:Musicians from North Carolina Category:People from Belmont, Massachusetts Category:Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Category:People from Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts Category:American people of Scottish descent Category:Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees Category:1960s singers Category:1970s singers Category:1980s singers Category:1990s singers Category:2000s singers Category:2010s singers
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Tavis Smiley |
|---|---|
| Birthname | Tavis Smiley |
| Birth date | September 13, 1964 |
| Birth place | Gulfport, MississippiUnited States |
| Age | 46 |
| Education | Indiana University |
| Occupation | Talk show host Author Entrepreneur Advocate Philanthropist |
| Gender | Male |
| Status | Single |
| Ethnicity | African-American |
| Religion | Christian |
| Credits | Tavis Smiley host (2004–present)The Tavis Smiley Show from PRI (radio) host(2005-present)"Smiley & West" co-host (2010-present)BET Tonight with Tavis Smiley host (1996–2001) |
| Url | http://www.tavistalks.com/ |
His family soon moved to Indiana because his stepfather had been transferred to Grissom Air Force Base near Peru, Indiana. Upon arriving in Indiana, the Smiley family took up residence in a crowded mobile home in the small town of Bunker Hill, Indiana. Smiley's immediate family size was increased following the homicide of his aunt, whose death left five children with no stable home. Smiley's parents agreed to take in and raise their five orphaned nieces and nephews. Joyce and her husband also had eight children of their own over the years, resulting at one point in 13 children and Mr. and Mrs. Smiley all living in the trailer-home. Smiley's mother was a very religious person, and the family attended the local New Bethel Tabernacle Church, part of the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World. The Smiley children were forbidden from listening to secular music at home and going to the movie theater and could watch television shows that their parents felt were family-friendly. When Tavis Smiley was in seventh grade, New Bethel pastor Elder Rufus Mills accused Tavis and his siblings of "running wild, disobeying their teacher, disrespecting their teacher, disrespecting the sanctity of this building, and mocking the holy message being taught" during Sunday School. According to Smiley's account of the incident, Smiley's Sunday School teacher became more confused as she was asking questions about the Book of John, and while other students "responded by giggling and acting a little unruly," he and his sister Phyllis "remained quiet". Garnell whipped Tavis and Phyllis with an extension cord, wounding the two children. The next day at school, administrators found out about the children's injuries. The local newspaper in Kokomo reported on the beating and the legal proceedings against Garnell, and Tavis and Phyllis were sent to foster care temporarily, Garnell told his children that the judge decided that he had "overreacted" and found he and Joyce as "concerned parents who were completely involved in our children's lives and well-being".
Smiley became interested in politics at age 13 after attending a fundraiser for U.S. Senator Birch Bayh. Smiley was active in student council and the debate team, even though his parents were "skeptical of all non-church extracurricular activities."
Twice, Smiley considered quitting college, first during junior year, and then after finishing his internship with Mayor Bradley. Bradley successfully convinced Smiley to return to college, and Smiley did. Smiley took the LSAT twice, as he was considering attending Harvard Law School. However, in his senior year, he failed a test in a computer class after being accused of copying another student's, so he failed that class and several others and lacked nine hours of credits and thus did not graduate from IU. Following a hiring freeze by the government of Los Angeles, Smiley served as an aide to Mayor Bradley until 1990. A 1988 article in the Los Angeles Times identified Smiley as "a Bradley administrative assistant who works in South Los Angeles."
In 1996, Smiley became a frequent commentator on the Tom Joyner Morning Show, a nationally syndicated radio show broadcast on black and urban stations in the United States. He developed a friendship with host Joyner; together they began hosting annual town hall meetings beginning in 2000 called "The State of the Black Union" which were aired live on the C-SPAN cable television network. These town hall meetings each focused on a specific topic affecting the African-American community, featuring a panel of African-American leaders, educators, and professionals assembled before an audience to discuss problems related to the forum's topic, as well as potential solutions. Smiley also used his commentator status on Joyner's radio show to launch several advocacy campaigns to highlight discriminatory practices in the media and government and to rally support for causes such as the awarding of a Congressional Gold Medal to civil rights icon Rosa Parks. Smiley also began building a national reputation as a political commentator with numerous appearances on political discussion shows on MSNBC, ABC, and CNN.
Also in 1996, Smiley began hosting and executive producing BET Tonight (originally BET Talk when it first premiered), a public affairs discussion show on the Black Entertainment Television (BET) network. Smiley interviewed major political figures and celebrities and discussed topics ranging from racial profiling and police brutality to R&B; music and Hollywood gossip. Smiley hosted BET Tonight until 2001, when in a controversial move, the network announced that Smiley's contract would not be renewed. This sparked an angry response from Joyner, who sought to rally his radio audience to protest BET's decision. Robert L. Johnson, founder of BET, defended the decision, stating that Smiley had been fired because he had sold an exclusive interview to ABC News without first offering the story to BET, even though Smiley's contract with BET did not require him to do so. Smiley countered with the assertion that he had offered the story — an interview with Sara Jane Olson, an alleged former member of the Symbionese Liberation Army — to CBS, which, along with BET, was owned by Viacom. Smiley ultimately sold the interview to rival network ABC, he said, only after CBS passed on the interview, and suggested that his firing was payback for the publicity he gained as a result of providing an exclusive interview to ABC. Ultimately BET and Viacom did not reverse their decision to terminate Smiley's contract.
Smiley was then offered a chance to host a radio talk show on National Public Radio. He served as host of The Tavis Smiley Show on NPR until December 2004 when he announced that he would be leaving his NPR show, citing the network's inability to reach a more diverse audience. Smiley launched a weekly version of his radio program The Tavis Smiley Show on April 29, 2005, distributed by NPR rival Public Radio International. On October 1, 2010, Tavis Smiley turned the second hour of his PRI program into Smiley & West co-hosted by his longtime collaborator Dr. Cornel West. Smiley also hosts Tavis Smiley, a late night talk show televised on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) network and produced in association with WNET in New York.
Smiley moderated two live presidential candidate forums in 2007: a Democratic forum on June 28 at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and a Republican forum on September 27 at Morgan State University in Baltimore.
Smiley appears on the Democracy Now! show.
Described by the publisher as a national plan of action to address the primary concerns of African-Americans related to social and economic disparities but seen by others as a self-promoting rehash of old ideas, the book became the first non-fiction book by a Black-owned publisher to be listed as the number-one non-fiction paperback in America by The New York Times Best Seller list.
Smiley's advocacy efforts have earned him numerous awards and recognitions including the recipient of the Mickey Leland Humanitarian Award from the National Association of Minorities in Communications.
In 1999, he founded the Tavis Smiley Foundation, which funds programs that develop young leaders in the black community. Since its inception, more than 6,000 young people have participated in the foundation's Youth to Leaders Training workshops and conferences.
His communications company, The Smiley Group, Inc., serves as the holding company for various enterprises encompassing broadcast and print media, lecturers, symposiums, and the Internet.
In 1994, Time named him one of America's 50 Most Promising Young Leaders. Time would later honor him in 2009 as one of the "100 Most Influential People in the World." In May 2007, Smiley gave a commencement speech at his alma mater, Indiana University at Bloomington, Indiana. In May 2008, he gave the commencement address at Connecticut College, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate. In May 2009, Smiley was awarded an honorary doctorate at Langston University after giving the commencement address there.
On December 12, 2008, Smiley received the Du Bois Medal from Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.
He would also be awarded the 2009 Interdependence Day Prize from Demos in Istanbul, Turkey.
Indiana University recently honored Smiley by naming the atrium of its School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) building, The Tavis Smiley Atrium.
Smiley would be named No. 2 change agent in the field of media behind Oprah Winfrey in EBONY magazine's POWER 150 list.
In 2011, Tavis Smiley will celebrate 20 years in broadcasting.
Category:1964 births Category:Living people Category:African American radio personalities Category:American journalists Category:American memoirists Category:American Pentecostals Category:American philanthropists Category:American political writers Category:American talk radio hosts Category:American television talk show hosts Category:Indiana University alumni Category:National Public Radio personalities Category:People from Gulfport, Mississippi Category:People from Kokomo, Indiana Category:People from Los Angeles, California Category:People from Montreal Category:People from Peru, Indiana Category:Public Radio International personalities
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
