Coordinates	29°57′53″N90°4′14″N
Name	Our Town
Caption	1938 first edition cover from the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division
Writer	Thornton Wilder
Characters	Stage ManagerMrs. Myrtle WebbMr. Charles WebbGeorge GibbsEmily WebbMrs. Julia GibbsDr. Frank F. GibbsSimon Stimson Mrs. Soames Joe Crowell, Jr.Howie NewsomeRebecca GibbsWally WebbProfessor WillardWoman in the BalconyMan in the AuditoriumLady in the BoxMrs. Louella SoamesConstable WarrenSi CrowellThree Baseball PlayersSam CraigJoe Stoddard
Setting	1901 to 1913. Grover's Corners, New Hampshire near Massachusetts.
Premiere	4 February 1938
Place	Henry Miller's TheatreNew York City, New York
Orig lang
Subject	Change comes slowly to a small New Hampshire town in the early 20th century.
Genre	Drama
Ibdb id	6845

Our Town is a three-act play by American playwright Thornton Wilder. It is a character story about an average town's citizens in the early twentieth century as depicted through their everyday lives (particularly George Gibbs, a doctor's son, and Emily Webb, the daughter of the town's newspaper editor and George's future wife). Using metatheatrical devices, Wilder sets the play in a 1930s theater. He uses the actions of the Stage Manager to create the town of Grover's Corners for the audience. Scenes from its history between the years of 1901 and 1913 play out.

Wilder wrote the play while in his 30s. In June 1937, he lived in the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, one of the many locations where he worked on the play. During a visit to Zurich in September 1937, he drafted the entire third act in one day after a long evening walk in the rain with a friend, author Samuel Morris Steward.

Our Town was first performed at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey on 22 January 1938. It next opened at the Wilbur Theater in Boston, Massachusetts on 25 January 1938. Its New York City debut was on 4 February 1938 at Henry Miller's Theatre, and later moved to the Morosco Theatre. The play was produced and directed by Jed Harris. Wilder received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1938 for the work. In 1946, the Soviet Union prevented a production of Our Town in the Russian sector of occupied Berlin "on the grounds that the drama is too depressing and could inspire a German suicide wave."

Background

The play is set in the fictional community of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, modeled upon several towns in the Mount Monadnock region: Jaffrey, Peterborough, Dublin, and others. The narrator gives the coordinates of Grover's Corners as 42°40′ north latitude and 70°37′ west longitude, which is in Massachusetts, about a thousand feet off the coast of Rockport.

Our Town's narrator, the Stage Manager, is completely aware of his relationship with the audience, leaving him free to break the fourth wall and address them directly. According to the script, the play is to be performed with little scenery, no set and minimal props. Wilder was dissatisfied with the theatre of his time: "I felt that something had gone wrong....I began to feel that the theatre was not only inadequate, it was evasive." His answer was to have the characters mime the objects with which they interact. Their surroundings are created only with chairs, tables, and ladders. (e.g., The scene in which Emily helps George with his evening homework, conversing through upstairs windows, is performed with the two actors standing atop separate ladders to represent their neighboring houses.) Says Wilder, "Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind – not in things, not in 'scenery.'"

Beginning with daily life's routines and necessities, the play reveals an American family's intimate and habitual personal lives. The last two acts gradually represent life's deeper aspects, mostly through George Gibbs and Emily Webb. Act 2 celebrates George and Emily's wedding. The characters analyze the need for human companionship while questioning the institution of marriage. The last-minute apprehension that both Emily and George experience about being married represents a universal theme of young people wanting to grow up quickly while still craving childhood's relative certainty and security.

In the final act, Emily travels back to the time of her 12th birthday after dying in childbirth. Through this, Wilder contemplates life's fundamental meaning and significance, dwelling upon daily life and routine. Also, the author's concept of pursuing life rather than just living it is shown by Mrs. Gibbs's desire to visit France. Later, she obtains the money needed to go, but she chooses to leave it to George and Emily; this implies either that she, like Emily, failed to appreciate life to its fullest, or that she instead came to enjoy its simple pleasures enough that she no longer needed to go to France.

Our Town attempts to express the New England town of the early twentieth century and how change is beginning to affect it. Ongoing industrialization and immigration are alluded to with mentions of "Polish Town." The Stage Manager stresses the famous line, "This is the way we were." Indeed, when Our Town was staged in the late 1930s and '40s, many recognized from personal experience the life and times it depicted. Today's audiences are more likely to interpret the play as a story of times gone by, although the daily routines, habits, and rituals in it still exist and help bind our society through a mutual commonality that affect us personally.

Characters

;Main characters:

Stage Manager

Mrs. Myrtle Webb

Mr. Charles Webb

Emily Webb

George Gibbs

Mrs. Julia Gibbs

Dr. Frank F. Gibbs

Secondary characters

Simon Stimson

Joe Crowell

Howie Newsome

Rebecca Gibbs

Wally Webb

Professor Willard

Woman in Auditorium

Man in Auditorium

Another Woman in Auditorium

Si Crowell

Mrs. Soames

Constable Warren

Three Baseball Players

Joe Stoddard

Sam Craig

Dead Man

Dead Woman

Mr. Carter

Farmer McCarthy

Plot

The Stage Manager guides the play, taking questions from the audience, describing the locations (as scenery is sparse) and making key observations about the world the play creates.

Act I: Daily Life

The play begins with the Stage Manager describing the town. After this come scenes in the Gibbs' and Webbs' homes, where both families prepare their children for school. The Stage Manager then guides the audience through a day in the life of the town. The local milkman, Howie Newsome, reappears during every morning scene—once each in Acts I, II, and III—highlighting the continuity of life in Grover's Corners and in the general human experience. The Stage Manager also has Professor Willard, a long-winded local historian, and Mr. Webb, editor of the Grover's Corners Sentinel, talk about the town. During this scene, Editor Webb answers some questions from actors who have been planted in the audience. After a scene within the Congregational Church at a choir practice, Mrs. Webb, Mrs. Gibbs, and Mrs. Soames discuss Simon Stimson. Stimson is the church organist with a reputation for being a drunkard. Due to his non-conforming nature, he is often the subject of the town's gossip. The act also includes a scene in which George and Emily discuss school. Also on the ladder, George's younger sister Rebecca, talks about the moon and how it might get nearer and nearer until there's a "big 'explosion", showing George's sister is a curious girl. Rebecca proceeds to tell George about a letter that a girl received from her minister in which the address on the envelope says, "Jane Crofut, the Crofut farm, Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, United States of America, continent of North America, the Western Hemisphere, the world, the solar system, the universe, the mind of God." This scene shows how all people are connected through humanity. The subject of "daily life" addressed throughout this act stereotypes the average "American family."

Act II: Love and Marriage

Three years pass and George and Emily announce their plans to wed. The day is filled with stress, topped off by George's visit to the Webb family home. There, he meets Mr. Webb, who tells George of his own father's advice to him: to treat his wife like property and never to respect her needs. Mr. Webb then says that he did the exact opposite of his father's advice and has been happy since. Mr. Webb concludes by telling George not to take advice from anyone on matters of that nature. Here, the Stage Manager interrupts the scene and takes the audience back a year, to the end of Emily and George's junior year. Over an ice cream soda, Emily confronts George about his pride, and they discuss the future and their love for each other. The wedding follows, where George, in a fit of nervousness, tells his mother that he is not ready to marry. Emily, too, tells her father of her anxiety about marriage, saying she wishes she were dead. However, they both regain their composure, and George proceeds down the aisle to be wed by the preacher (played by the Stage Manager). Mrs. Soames is very pleased with the wedding, as she purrs, "Isn't this the loveliest wedding..." The text is interrupted by the individual thoughts, a modern twist to Shakespeare's soliloquy.

Act III: Death and Eternity

The setting for Act III is a cemetery near Grover's Corners. The Stage Manager opens this act with a lengthy monologue emphasizing eternity, expressed by the survival of Emily's second child after Emily herself dies giving birth. Emily's coffin is brought to the cemetery and buried, and she emerges from the mourners as a spirit. She joins her relatives and fellow townsfolk in the graveyard, including her mother-in-law, Mrs. Gibbs, Simon Stimson, Mrs. Soames, Wally Webb and Mr. Carter. The dead tell her that they must wait and forget the life that came before, but Emily refuses. Soon Emily's ghost learns it is possible to re-live parts of her past. Despite the warnings of Simon, Mrs. Soames, and Mrs. Gibbs, Emily decides to return to Earth to re-live just one day, her 12th birthday, and realizes just how much life should be valued, "every, every minute." Poignantly, she asks the Stage Manager whether anyone realizes life while they live it, and is told, "No. The saints and poets, maybe--they do some." She then returns to her grave. The Stage Manager concludes the play with a monologue and wishes the audience a good night.

Awards and nominations

;Awards

1938 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

1989 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival

1989 Tony Award for Best Revival

Adaptations

The play has been adapted numerous times:

Our Town (1940 film), adaptation starring William Holden and Martha Scott. Many members of the original cast repeated their roles in this film, but the ending was drastically changed.

Our Town (television), a live musical 1955 TV adaptation on Producers' Showcase starring Frank Sinatra as the Stage Manager, Paul Newman as George Gibbs, and Eva Marie Saint as Emily. The first and only musical version of the play to be telecast (so far).

Our Town, a 1977 television adaptation of the play, starring Hal Holbrook as the Stage Manager, Robby Benson as George, and Glynnis O'Connor as Emily

Our Town, a 1989 telecast of a Lincoln Center stage production starring Spalding Gray, Frances Conroy, Penelope Ann Miller, and Eric Stoltz

Our Town (2003 film), a made-for-TV adaptation of a 2002 Broadway revival starring Paul Newman, this time as the Stage Manager

Our Town (opera), an operatic version of the play with music by Ned Rorem

An award-winning revival of Our Town opened at the Barrow Street Theatre on February 26, 2009. The production was directed by David Cromer, who also performed the role of Stage Manager for much of the show's run. Upon closing, the production had played four preview and 644 regular performances, making it the longest-running production of the play in its history. In addition to Cromer, other notable actors who performed in the role of Stage Manager included Helen Hunt, Michael McKean, Jason Butler Harner, Stephen Kunken and Michael Shannon.

References

Further reading

External links

Our Town 1940 film; free download at archive.org

Two authorized productions on DVD

Cummings Study Guide of "Our Town"

Category:1938 plays Category:Broadway plays Category:Drama Desk Award winning plays Category:Pulitzer Prize for Drama Category:Plays by Thornton Wilder Category:Tony Award winning plays Category:West End plays Category:New Hampshire in fiction

Coordinates	29°57′53″N90°4′14″N
Name	Iris DeMent
Background	solo_singer
Born	January 05, 1961Paragould, Arkansas,United States
Instrument	Vocals, guitar, piano
Genre	Country, folk, alternative country
Occupation	Singer-songwriter
Years active	1991–present
Label	Warner Bros., Flariella
Associated acts	Greg Brown
Url	http://www.irisdement.com/

Iris DeMent (born January 5, 1961) is an American singer and songwriter. DeMent's musical style encompasses the genres country and folk music.

Early life

DeMent was the youngest child of Pat DeMent and his second wife, Flora Mae. As the baby of the family, she was Pat DeMent's fourteenth child, and Flora Mae's eighth. She was raised in a Pentecostal household, but now identifies as agnostic.

She was born near the town of Paragould, Arkansas but grew up in Cypress, California, where she was exposed to and influenced by country and gospel music.

Music and career

DeMent's songs are typically simple, clearly told stories about life's pains and joys.

Her first album, Infamous Angel, was released in 1992 and explored themes like religious skepticism, living in a small town, lamenting "nothing good ever lasts", and forgiving human frailty. Her song "Let the Mystery Be" from that album has been covered by a number of artists, including 10,000 Maniacs, Alice Stuart, and in the opening scenes of the movie Little Buddha (neither credited, nor on the sound-track album) and has become one of DeMent's better known compositions. In her second album, My Life, released in 1994, she continued the personal and introspective approach. My Life was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Contemporary Folk Album category. DeMent's third album, The Way I Should, was released in 1996. Featuring the protest song "Wasteland of the Free," it is DeMent's most political work, and covers topics like sexual abuse, religion, government policy, and Vietnam. After a hiatus during the late 1990s and early 2000s, she released her fourth album, Lifeline, in 2004.

She gained some notice singing the Merle Haggard song, "Big City", on Tulare Dust: Tribute to Merle Haggard, a 1994 various artists tribute album. In 1995, her song "Our Town" was played in the closing moments of the last episode for the popular CBS TV series Northern Exposure, gaining DeMent more fans. (The song has also been recorded by Kate Rusby, Jody Stecher, and Kate Brislin.)

DeMent has sung duets with John Prine (on In Spite of Ourselves), Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris and is featured on the albums of many other performers. She has made frequent appearances on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion, and appeared in the 2000 film Songcatcher, playing the character Rose Gentry and singing on the soundtrack as well. In 1994, Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs performed DeMent's song "Let the Mystery Be" with David Byrne for the show MTV Unplugged. The song was included on .

DeMent's renditon of "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" accompanies the closing credits of the Coen brothers' True Grit (2010 film).

Personal life

DeMent married Elmer McCall in 1991, but the marriage subsequently ended in divorce. She married singer-songwriter Greg Brown on November 21, 2002.

Charts

Discography

Albums

Infamous Angel (January 16, 1992)

My Life (1994)

The Way I Should (1996)

Lifeline (2004)

Other contributions

(2002) - "Our Town"

Further reading

In The Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music, Nicholas Dawidoff, Vintage Books, 1998, ISBN 0-375-70082-X

Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class, Bill C. Malone, University of Illinois Press, 2001, ISBN 0-252-02678-0

References

External links

Iris DeMent Homepage

Iris DeMent at Folklib.net

Category:1961 births Category:Living people Category:American agnostics Category:American country musicians Category:American country singers Category:American female singers Category:American folk singers Category:American folk musicians Category:People from Greene County, Arkansas Category:Musicians from Arkansas

Coordinates	29°57′53″N90°4′14″N
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.

Biography

Early years

James Taylor was born at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 12, 1948, where his father, Isaac M. Taylor, was a resident. His father was from a well-off family of Southern Jewish and Scottish ancestry. James was the second of five children, the others being Alex (born 1947), Kate (born 1949), Livingston (born 1950), and Hugh (born 1952).

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.

1966–1969: Early career

Taylor checked himself out of McLean and, at Kortchmar's urging, moved to New York City to form a band. They played songs that Taylor had written at and about McLean, such as "Knocking 'Round the Zoo", "Don't Talk Now", and "The Blues Is Just a Bad Dream".

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.

1974–1976: Career ups and downs

Taylor spent most of 1973 enjoying his new life as a married man, and he did not return to the recording studio until January 1974, when sessions for his fifth album began. Walking Man was released in June and featured appearances of Paul and Linda McCartney and guitarist David Spinozza. The album was a critical and commercial disaster, being his first album to miss the Top 5 since his contract with Warner. It received poor reviews and sold a mere 300,000 copies in the United States. The title track was a huge disappointment, and failed to even appear on the Top 100 – nevertheless, it stands today as an often reprised fan favorite in concerts.

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.

1977–1981: Move to Columbia and maintained success

In 1977 Taylor signed with Columbia Records. Between March and April, he quickly recorded his first album for the label. JT, released that June, gave Taylor his best reviews since Sweet Baby James, earning a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year in 1978. Rolling Stone was particularly favorable to the album – "JT is the least stiff and by far the most various album Taylor has done. That's not meant to criticize Taylor's earlier efforts [...]. But it's nice to hear him sounding so healthy." JT reached #4 in the Billboard charts, selling more than 3 million copies in the United States alone. The album's Triple Platinum status ties it with Sweet Baby James as Taylor's all-time biggest selling studio album. It was propelled by the highly successful cover of Jimmy Jones and Otis Blackwell's "Handy Man", which hit #1 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart and reached #4 on the Hot 100, earning Taylor another Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for his cover version. The song also topped the Canadian charts. The success of the album propelled the release of two further singles – the rocking "Your Smiling Face" (an enduring live favorite) reached the American Top 20; however, "Honey Don't Leave L.A." did not enjoy much success, barely reaching the Top 75.

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.")

1981–1996: Troubled times and new beginnings

Simon announced her separation from Taylor in September 1981 – saying "Our needs are different; it seem[s] impossible to stay together" – and their divorce became final in 1983. Taylor was living on West End Avenue in Manhattan and on a methadone maintenance program. Over the course of four months starting in September 1983, spurred on in part by the deaths of his friends John Belushi and Dennis Wilson and in part by the desire to be a better father to his children, he dropped methadone and finally kicked his habit for good. He was encouraged by the nascent democracy in Brazil at the time, buoyed by the positive reception he got from the large crowd and other musicians, and musically energized by the sounds and nature of Brazilian music. "I had... sort of bottomed-out in a drug habit, my marriage with Carly had dissolved, and I had basically been depressed and lost for a while, " he recalled in 1995. "I sort of hit a low spot. I was asked to go down to Rio de Janeiro to play in this festival down there. We put the band together and went down and it was just an amazing response. I played to 300,000 people. They not only knew my music, they knew things about it and were interested in aspects of it that to that point had only interested me. To have that kind of validation right about then was really what I needed. It helped get me back on track." The song "Only a Dream in Rio" was written in tribute to that night, with lines like I was there that very day and my heart came back alive. Taylor's next albums were partially successful – in 1988, he released Never Die Young, highlighted with the charting title track, and in 1991, the platinum New Moon Shine provided Taylor some popular songs with the melancholic "Copperline" and the upbeat "(I've Got to) Stop Thinkin' About That", both hit singles in the AC radio. During the late 1980s, he began touring regularly, especially on the summer amphitheater circuit. His later concerts feature songs from throughout his career and are marked by the musicianship of his band and backup singers. The 1993 two-disc Live album captures this, with a highlight being Arnold McCuller's descants in the codas of "Shower the People" and "I Will Follow." In 1995, Taylor performed the role of the Lord in Randy Newman's Faust.

1997–2003: Successful comeback

After six years since his last studio album, Taylor released Hourglass, an introspective album that gave him the best critical reviews in almost twenty years. The album had much of its focus on Taylor's troubled past and family. "Jump Up Behind Me" paid tribute to his father's rescue of him after The Flying Machine days, and the long drive from New York City back to his home in Chapel Hill. "Enough To Be On Your Way" was inspired by the alcoholism-related death of his brother Alex earlier in the decade. The themes were also inspired by Taylor and Walker's divorce, which took place in 1996. Rolling Stone found that "one of the themes of this record is disbelief", while Taylor told the magazine that it was "spirituals for agnostics." Critics embraced the dark themes on the album, and Hourglass was a huge commercial success, reaching #9 on the Billboard 200 (Taylor's first Top 10 album in sixteen years) and also provided a big adult contemporary hit on "Little More Time With You". The album also gave Taylor his first Grammy since JT, when he was honored with Best Pop Album in 1998.

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.

Current events

Always visibly active in environmental and liberal causes, in October 2004 Taylor joined the "Vote for Change" tour playing a series of concerts in American swing states. These concerts were organized by MoveOn.org with the goal of mobilizing people to vote for John Kerry and against George W. Bush in that year's Presidential campaign. Taylor's appearances were joint performances with the Dixie Chicks.

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.

Musicians in the family

Taylor's four siblings—Alex, Livingston, Hugh, and Kate—have also been musicians with recorded albums. Livingston is still an active musician; Kate was active in the 1970s but did not record another album until 2003; Hugh operates a bed-and-breakfast with his wife, The Outermost Inn in Aquinnah on Martha's Vineyard; and Alex died in 1993. Taylor's children with Carly Simon—Ben and Sally—have also embarked on musical careers.

Awards and recognition

Grammy Awards

1971 — Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male, "You've Got a Friend"

1977 — Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male, "Handy Man"

1998 — Best Pop Album, Hourglass

2001 — Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male, "Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight"

2003 — Best Country Collaboration With Vocals, "How's the World Treating You" with Alison Krauss

2006 — Grammy Award-sponsored MusiCares Person of the Year. At a black tie ceremony held in Los Angeles, musicians from several eras paid tribute to Taylor by performing his songs, often prefacing them with remarks on his influence on their decisions to become musicians. These artists included Carole King, Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Taj Mahal, Dr. John, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, David Crosby, Sheryl Crow, India.Arie, the Dixie Chicks, Jerry Douglas, Alison Krauss, and Keith Urban. Paul Simon performed as well, although he was not included in the televised program; Taylor's brother Livingston appeared on stage as a "backup singer" for the finale, along with Taylor's twin boys, Rufus and Henry.

Other recognition

1995 — Honorary doctorate of music from the Berklee College of Music, Boston, 1995.

2000 — Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 2000.

2000 — Inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, 2000.

2003 — The Chapel Hill Museum in Chapel Hill, North Carolina opened a permanent exhibit dedicated to Taylor. At the same occasion the US-15-501 highway bridge over Morgan Creek, near the site of the Taylor family home and mentioned in Taylor's song "Copperline", was named in honor of Taylor.

2004 — George and Ira Gershwin Award for Lifetime Musical Achievement, UCLA Spring Sing. 2004 — Ranked 84th in Rolling Stone's list of "The Immortals: 100 Greatest Artists of All Time."

2009 — Honorary Doctorate of Music from Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Discography

;U.S. Billboard Top 10 Albums

1970 – Sweet Baby James (#3)

1971 – Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon (#2)

1972 – One Man Dog (#4)

1975 – Gorilla (#6)

1977 – JT (#4)

1979 – Flag (#10)

1981 – Dad Loves His Work (#10)

1997 – Hourglass (#9)

2002 – October Road (#4)

2008 – Covers (#4)

2010 – Live at the Troubadour (with Carole King) (#4)

;U.S. Billboard Top 10 'Pop' Singles

1970 – "Fire and Rain" (#3)

1971 – "You've Got a Friend" (#1)

1974 – "Mockingbird" (with Carly Simon) (#5)

1975 – "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)" (#5)

1977 – "Handy Man" (#4)

Other appearances

He provided acoustic guitar accompaniment for several tracks on Joni Mitchell's 1971 album Blue.

He provided a guest voice to The Simpsons episode "Deep Space Homer" where he played some of his songs to Homer, Buzz Aldrin, and Race Bannon when they were in space. He also appeared later on in the series when the family put together a jigsaw puzzle. His face was the missing final piece.

Performed "Second Star to the Right" on in 1988 as one of Various Artists.

Taylor performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Game 2 of the World Series in Boston on October 25, 2007, at Game 1 of the 2008 NBA Finals in Boston on June 5, 2008, and at the NHL's Winter Classic game between the Philadelphia Flyers and Boston Bruins, the first hockey game ever held at Boston's Fenway Park.

He appeared on Sesame Street performing the song "Your Smiling Face" although the song was sung "Your Grouchy Face" as he sang it to Oscar the Grouch. He also appeared on the Sesame Street video compilation Silly Songs, and the album , performing the song "Jellyman Kelly".

Has appeared on NBC's Saturday Night Live six times as a musical guest: in 1976 performing "Shower the People," "Roadrunner" (with David Sanborn), and "Sweet Baby James" (host: Lily Tomlin); in 1979 performing "Johnnie Comes Back," "Up on the Roof," and "Millworker" (host: Michael Palin); in 1980 performing with Paul Simon "Cathy's Clown / Take Me to the Mardi Gras" (host: Paul Simon); in 1988 performing "Never Die Young," "Sweet Potato Pie," and "Lonesome Road" (host: Robin Williams); in 1991 performing "Stop Thinkin' About That," "Shed A Little Light," and "Sweet Baby James" (Host: Steve Martin); and in 1993 performing "Memphis," "Slap Leather," and "Secret of Life" (host: Rosie O'Donnell).

He provided background vocals for "Back In The High Life Again" by Steve Winwood in 1986.

He performed at a benefit concert supporting John B. Anderson's U.S. presidential campaign at Charleston, West Virginia in 1980.

He provided background vocals for "Perfect Love" by Marc Cohn.

He appeared on The West Wing where he played Sam Cooke's A Change is Gonna Come.

He appeared on the The Johnny Cash Show, singing "Sweet Baby James", "Fire and Rain", and "Country Road", on February 17, 1971.

His song "Fire and Rain" was in the movie Remember the Titans and the movie " Running on Empty" in 1988 .

He provided vocals for the song "First Me, Second Me" by the Italian band Elio e le Storie Tese

Along with Linda Ronstadt, he did backup vocals for two hit singles on Neil Young's Harvest: "Old Man" and "Heart of Gold". Twenty years later, the two would reunite with Young on his Harvest Moon album, singing backup on "From Hank to Hendrix," "War of Man," and the title track.

He made his debut for his 24th album Other Covers on The Oprah Winfrey Show on April 10, 2009.

He appeared on the final of Star Académie, the Quebec version of American Idol, on April 13, 2009.

On May 29, 2009, he made a guest appearance and sang "Sweet Baby James" on the final episode of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno before Leno was replaced by Conan O'Brien.

Taylor appeared briefly in the 2009 movie Funny People, where he played Carolina in My Mind for a MySpace corporate event as the opening act for the main character.

Bibliography

References

External links

The Official James Taylor website

The official James Taylor Facebook page

James Taylor Online

James Taylor discography

James Taylor profile, NNDB

Dedication of James Taylor Bridge

"Carolina in My Mind" — The James Taylor Story at the Chapel Hill Museum

2006 Grammy MusiCares Person of the Year

James Taylor Tabs

BBC Radio 2, "The James Taylor Story: Parts I & II, presented by Bob Harris, 13 & 20 January 2004

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

Coordinates	29°57′53″N90°4′14″N
Name	The Kings
Background	group_or_band
Origin	Vancouver, BC, Canada
Genre	Rock, pop
Years active	1977-present
Current members	David Diamond Mister Zero Peter Nunn Sonny Keyes Peter Kadar Todd Reynolds
Past members	Gary Craig Greg Chritchley Josh Broadbent Marty Cordrey Max Styles Randall Coryell Rich Roxborough Whitey Glan Atilla Turi

The Kings are a Canadian band formed in the 1970s, best known for their 1980 North American hit "This Beat Goes On/Switchin' To Glide".

}}

External links

Official website

Bullseye Records

The Kings: Anatomy of a One-Hit Wonder DVD review

Category:Canadian rock music groups Category:Musical groups from Vancouver

Coordinates	29°57′53″N90°4′14″N
Name	Randy Newman
Background	solo_singer
Birth name	Randall Stuart Newman
Born	November 28, 1943
Origin	Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Instrument	Vocals, piano
Genre	Piano rock, comedy rock
Occupation	Singer-songwriter, arranger, musician
Years active	1961–present
Label	Warner Bros. Records Walt Disney Records (Disney-Pixar films) Dreamworks Records Nonesuch Records
Url	RandyNewman.com

Randall Stuart "Randy" Newman (born November 28, 1943) is an American singer/songwriter, arranger, composer, and pianist who is notable for his (and often satirical) pop songs and for his many film scores.

Newman is noted for his practice of writing lyrics from the perspective of a character far removed from Newman's own biography. For example, the 1972 song "Sail Away" is written as a slave trader's sales pitch to attract slaves, while the narrator of "Political Science" is a U.S. nationalist who complains of worldwide ingratitude toward America and proposes a brutally ironic final solution. One of his biggest hits, "Short People" was written from the perspective of "a lunatic" who hates short people. Since the 1980s, Newman has worked mostly as a film composer. His film scores include Ragtime, Awakenings, The Natural, Leatherheads, James and the Giant Peach, Meet the Parents, Seabiscuit and The Princess and the Frog. He has scored six Disney-Pixar films: Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Cars and most recently Toy Story 3.

He has been awarded an Academy Award, three Emmys, four Grammy Awards, and the Governor's Award from the Recording Academy. Newman was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2002. In 2007, Newman was inducted as a Disney Legend.

Early life

Newman was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of Adele (née Fox), a secretary, and Irving George Newman, an internist. He lived in New Orleans as a small child and spent summers there until he was 11 years old, his family having by then returned to Los Angeles. The paternal side of his family includes three uncles who were noted Hollywood film-score composers: Alfred Newman, Lionel Newman and Emil Newman. Newman's cousins Thomas and David, and nephew Joey are also composers for motion pictures. He graduated from University High School in Los Angeles. Newman attended the University of California, Los Angeles.

Songwriter

Newman has been a professional songwriter since he was seventeen. He cites Ray Charles as his greatest influence growing up, stating, "I loved Charles' music to excess." His first single as a performer was 1961's "Golden Gridiron Boy", released when he was eighteen. However, the single flopped and Newman chose to concentrate on songwriting and arranging for the next several years. His early songs were recorded by Gene Pitney, Jerry Butler, Jackie DeShannon, The O'Jays and Irma Thomas, among others. His work as a songwriter met with particular success in the UK: top 40 UK hits written by Newman included Cilla Black's "I've Been Wrong Before" (#17, 1965), Gene Pitney's "Nobody Needs Your Love" (#2, 1966) and "Just One Smile" (#8, 1966); and The Alan Price Set's "Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear" (#4, 1967). Besides "Simon Smith", Price featured seven Randy Newman songs on his 1967 A Price On His Head album.

In the mid-1960s, Newman was briefly a member of the band The Tikis, who later became Harpers Bizarre, best known for their 1967 hit version of the Paul Simon composition "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)". Newman kept a close musical relationship with Harpers Bizarre, offering them some of his own compositions, including "Simon Smith" and "Happyland". The band recorded six Newman compositions during their short initial career (1967–1969).

In this period, Newman began a long professional association with childhood friend Lenny Waronker. Waronker had been hired to produce The Tikis, the Beau Brummels, and The Mojo Men, who were all contracted to the Los Angeles independent label Autumn Records, and he in turn brought in Newman, Leon Russell and another friend, pianist/arranger Van Dyke Parks, to play on recording sessions. Later in 1966 Waronker was hired as an A&R; manager by Warner Bros. Records and his friendship with Newman, Russell, and Parks began a creative circle around Waronker at Warner Bros that became one of the keys to Warner Bros' subsequent success as a rock music label.

Recording artist

His 1968 debut album, Randy Newman, was a critical success but never dented the Billboard Top 200. Many artists, including Alan Price, Dave Van Ronk, Judy Collins, the Everly Brothers, Claudine Longet, Dusty Springfield, Nina Simone, Pat Boone and Peggy Lee, covered his songs and "I Think It's Going To Rain Today" became an early standard.

In 1969, he did the orchestral arrangements for Peggy Lee's single Is That All There Is?, as well as her album with the same title (which also contained her cover versions of two of his songs: "Love Story" and "Linda").

In 1970, Harry Nilsson recorded an entire album of Newman compositions called Nilsson Sings Newman. That album was a success, and it paved the way for Newman's 1970 release, 12 Songs, a more stripped-down sound that showcased Newman's piano. Ry Cooder's slide guitar and contributions from Byrds members Gene Parsons and Clarence White helped to give the album a much rootsier feel. 12 Songs was also critically acclaimed (6th best album of the seventies according to Rolling Stone critic Robert Christgau), but again found little commercial success, though Three Dog Night made a huge hit of his "Mama Told Me Not to Come". The following year, Randy Newman Live cemented his cult following and became his first LP to appear in the Billboard charts, at #191. Newman also made his first foray into music for films at this time, writing and performing the theme song "He Gives Us All His Love" for Norman Lear's 1971 film Cold Turkey.

1972's Sail Away reached #163 on Billboard, with the title track making its way into the repertoire of Ray Charles and Linda Ronstadt. "You Can Leave Your Hat On" enigmatically touches on what it is men find important in relationships, and was covered by Three Dog Night, then Joe Cocker, and later by Keb Mo, Etta James, Tom Jones (whose version was later used for the final striptease to the 1997 film The Full Monty), and the Québécois singer Garou. The album also featured "Burn On", an ode to an infamous incident in which the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River literally caught fire. In 1989, "Burn On" was used as the opening theme to the film Major League, whose focus was the hapless Cleveland Indians.

His 1974 release Good Old Boys was a set of songs about the American South. "Rednecks" began with a description of segregationist Lester Maddox pitted against a "smart-ass New York Jew" on a TV show, in a song that seems to criticize both southern racism and the complacent bigotry of American north-easterners who stereotype all southerners as racist yet ignore racism in northern states. This ambiguity was also apparent on "Kingfish" and "Every Man a King", the former a paean to Huey Long (the assassinated former Governor and United States Senator from Louisiana), the other a campaign song written by Long himself. An album that received lavish critical praise, Good Old Boys also became a commercial breakthrough for Newman, peaking at #36 on Billboard and spending 21 weeks in the Top 200.

Little Criminals (1977) contained the surprise hit "Short People," which also became a subject of controversy. In September 1977, the British music magazine, NME reported the following interview with Newman talking about his then new release. "There's one song about a child murderer," Newman deadpans. "That's fairly optimistic. Maybe. There's one called 'Jolly Coppers on Parade' which isn't an absolutely anti-police song. Maybe it's even a fascist song. I didn't notice at the time. There's also one about me as a cowboy called 'Rider in the Rain.' I think it's ridiculous. The Eagles are on there. That's what's good about it. There's also this song 'Short People.' It's purely a joke. I like other ones on the album better but the audiences go for that one."

1979's Born Again featured a song satirically mythologizing the Electric Light Orchestra (and their arranging style) entitled "The Story of a Rock and Roll Band".

His 1983 album Trouble in Paradise included the hit single "I Love L.A.", a song that has been interpreted as both praising and criticizing the city of Los Angeles. This ambivalence is borne out by Newman's own comments on the song. As he explained in a 2001 interview, "There's some kind of ignorance L.A. has that I'm proud of. The open car and the redhead, the Beach Boys...that sounds 'really' good to me." The ABC network and Frank Gari Productions transformed "I Love L.A." into a popular 1980s TV promotional campaign, retooling the lyrics and title to "You'll Love It! (on ABC)". This song became popular at games won by the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium.

In the years following Trouble in Paradise, Newman focused more on film work, but his personal life entered a difficult period. He separated from his wife of nearly 20 years, Roswitha, and was diagnosed with Epstein-Barr virus. He has released three albums of new material as a singer-songwriter since that time: Land of Dreams (1988), Bad Love (1999), and Harps and Angels, which was released on August 5, 2008. Land of Dreams included one of his most well-known songs, "It's Money That Matters", and featured Newman's first stab at autobiography with "Dixie Flyer" and "Four Eyes", while Bad Love included "I Miss You", a moving tribute to his ex-wife. He has also re-recorded a number of his earlier songs, accompanying himself on piano, as The Randy Newman Songbook Vol. 1 (2003), and continues to perform his songs before live audiences as a touring concert artist.

In the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe of 2005, Newman's "Louisiana 1927" became an anthem and was played heavily on a wide range of American radio and television stations, in both Newman's 1974 original and Aaron Neville's cover version of the song. The song addresses the deceitful manner in which New Orleans's municipal government managed a flood in 1927, during which, as Newman asserts, "The guys who ran the Mardi Gras, the bosses in New Orleans decided the course of that flood. You know, they cut a hole in the levee and it flooded the cotton fields." In a related performance, Newman contributed to the 2007 release of (Vanguard), contributing his version of Domino's "Blue Monday". Domino had been rescued from his New Orleans home after Hurricane Katrina, initially having been feared dead.

During a European tour in the summer of 2006, Newman premiered three new songs: "Potholes in Memory Lane", "Losing You", and "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country" (all three songs were later recorded for his 2008 album, Harps and Angels). The latter was released as an MP3 single in February 2007. It compared the United States to previous empires, criticized the War on Terror and the Supreme Court, and suggested that "this empire is ending like all the rest." The song is available through his website.

Film composer

Newman's work as a film composer began in 1971, with his work on the Norman Lear satire Cold Turkey. He returned to film work with 1981's Ragtime, for which he was nominated for two Academy Awards. Newman co-wrote the 1986 film ¡Three Amigos! with Steve Martin and Lorne Michaels, wrote three songs for the film, and provided the voice for the singing bush. His orchestral film scores resembles the work of Elmer Bernstein (with whom he had worked on ¡Three Amigos!) and Maurice Jarre.

Newman scored the first four Disney/Pixar feature films; Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, and Monsters, Inc. He also scored the 1996 film James and the Giant Peach and the 2006 Disney/Pixar film Cars. He returned to Disney/Pixar to score the 2010 film Toy Story 3. Additional scores by Newman include Avalon, Parenthood, Seabiscuit, Awakenings, The Paper, Overboard, Meet the Parents, and its sequel, Meet the Fockers. His score for Pleasantville was an Academy Award nominee. He also wrote the songs for Turner's Cats Don't Dance.

One of Newman's most iconic and recognizable works is the central theme to The Natural, a dramatic and Oscar-nominated score, which was described by at least one complimentary critic as "Coplandesque".

Newman had the dubious distinction of receiving the most Oscar nominations (fifteen) without a single win. His losing streak was broken when he received the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2001, for the Monsters, Inc. song "If I Didn't Have You", beating Sting, Enya and Paul McCartney. After receiving a standing ovation, a bemused but emotional Newman began his acceptance speech with "I don't want your pity!"

Besides writing songs for films, he also writes songs for television series such as the Emmy-Award winning current theme song of Monk, "It's a Jungle out There". Newman also composed the Emmy-Award winning song "When I'm Gone" for the final episode.

In October 2006, it was revealed that Newman would write the music for the Walt Disney movie The Princess and the Frog, which was released in December 2009. During the Walt Disney Company's annual shareholder meeting in March 2007, Newman performed a new song written for the movie. He was accompanied by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. The New Orleans setting of the film played to Newman's musical strengths, and his songs contained elements of Cajun music, zydeco, blues and Dixieland jazz. Two of the songs, "Almost There" and "Down in New Orleans," were nominated for Oscars.

Filmography

¡Three Amigos! (1986) -The Singing Bush , Also Writer

Musical theatre

A revue of Newman's songs, titled Maybe I'm Doing It Wrong, was performed at the Astor Place Theater in New York City in 1982, and later at other theaters around the country. The New York cast featured Mark Linn-Baker and Deborah Rush, and at one point included Treat Williams.

In the 1990s, Newman adapted Goethe's Faust into a concept album and musical, Randy Newman's Faust. After a 1995 staging at the La Jolla Playhouse, he retained David Mamet to help rework the book before its relaunch on the Chicago Goodman Theatre mainstage in 1996. Newman's Faust project had been many years in the making, and it suffered for it; a central joke was Newman's depiction of Faust as a shallow heavy metal music fan in thrall to Satan, and this had to be modified to accommodate the less-than-devil obsessed age of grunge rock that was in fashion by 1995.

In 2000, South Coast Repertory (SCR) produced The Education of Randy Newman, a musical theater piece that recreates the life of a songwriter who bears some resemblance to the actual Newman. Set in New Orleans and Los Angeles, it was modeled on the celebrated American autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. Newman, together with Jerry Patch and Michael Roth, surveyed Newman's songs to find those that, taken together, depict the life of an American artist in the last half of the 20th century. After its premiere at SCR, it was reworked with additional songs written specifically for the show by Newman and presented in Seattle by ACT.

Notable performances and appearances

In 2000, Newman hosted a PBS special on Sunset Blvd, in his native Los Angeles. Driving a convertible, he followed the road from the Amtrak train station downtown, through Silver Lake, on past his alma mater UCLA, and finished in Santa Monica.

Randy Newman appeared on The Colbert Report on October 9, 2006, performing "Political Science" after his interview. At the end of the performance Stephen Colbert said "I hope they're listening in D.C." This appearance came days after North Korea conducted an underground test of a nuclear weapon.

Newman appeared on the season two finale of the sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun, accompanying the character Harry Solomon's performance of "Life Has Been Good To Me" on piano in a dream sequence.

He appeared as a musical guest at the end of the Keynote Address at Macworld's 2008 San Francisco Macworld Expo, performing the songs "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country" and "You've Got a Friend in Me".

Newman appeared as a musical guest on the second episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live in 1975.

Pop culture references

Newman was parodied on the sketch comedy show MADtv, where he was impersonated by MADtv cast member Will Sasso.

Newman was also parodied on the television cartoon series Family Guy in the episode Da Boom, written by Neil Goldman and Garrett Donovan. The Randy Newman character (again voiced by Will Sasso) exaggerates the real Newman's style of observational singing and piano playing. Family Guy later parodied Randy Newman again in

Paul and Storm wrote 25 songs in the style of Newman for their 25 Days of Newman season.

Michael Grimm performed his song "You Can Leave Your Hat On" on the semi-Finals of America's Got Talent 2010.

In the Showtime television series Weeds, the main characters (Botwin family) are on the run and change their last name to Newman. Andy Botwin changes his first name to Randy and jokes about being named Randy Newman. This is a reference to three seasons earlier when Randy Newman performs the show's theme song for episode one of season three.

Discography

Albums

Randy Newman (1968)

12 Songs (1970)

Randy Newman Live (1971)

Sail Away (1972)

Good Old Boys (1974)

Little Criminals (1977)

Born Again (1979)

Trouble in Paradise (1983)

Land of Dreams (1988)

Randy Newman's Faust (1995)

Bad Love (1999)

Harps and Angels (2008)

Compilations

(1987)

(1998) (Box set)

The Best of Randy Newman (2001)

The Randy Newman Songbook Vol. 1 (2003) (New recordings of previously released songs)

Other Contributions

(Vanguard, 2007)

Film scores

Performance (1970) (song: Gone Dead Train)

Cold Turkey (1971)

Ragtime (1981)

The Natural (1984)

¡Three Amigos! (1986) (songs: "The Ballad of the Three Amigos," "My Little Buttercup," and "Blue Shadows")

Parenthood (1989)

Awakenings (1990)

Avalon (1990)

The Paper (1994)

Maverick (1994)

Toy Story (1995)

James and the Giant Peach (1996)

Michael (1996)

Bean (1997) (song: I love L.A.)

Cats Don't Dance (1997) (songs: "Danny's Arrival Song","Little Boat On The Sea","Animal Jam Session","Big and Loud","Tell Me Lies", and "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now")

A Bug's Life (1998)

(1998) (song: "That'll Do" by Peter Gabriel)

Pleasantville (1998)

Toy Story 2 (1999)

Meet the Parents (2000)

Monsters, Inc. (2001)

Seabiscuit (2003)

Meet the Fockers (2004)

Cars (2006)

Leatherheads (2008)

The Princess and the Frog (2009)

Toy Story 3 (2010)

Cars 2 (2011)

Awards and honors

Academy Award

*2010: Nominee - Original Song - "Almost There" and "Down in New Orleans" - The Princess and the Frog

*2007: Nominee - Original Song - "Our Town" - Cars

*2002: Winner - Original Song - "If I Didn't Have You" - Monsters, Inc.

*2002: Nominee - Original Score - Monsters, Inc.

*2001: Nominee - Original Song- "A Fool In Love" - Meet The Parents

*2000: Nominee - Original Song- "When She Loved Me" - Toy Story 2

*1999: Nominee - Original Dramatic Score - Pleasantville

*1999: Nominee - Original Musical or Comedy Score - A Bug's Life

*1999: Nominee - Original Song- "That'll Do" -

*1997: Nominee - Musical or Comedy Score - James and the Giant Peach

*1996: Nominee - Original Song- "You've Got a Friend in Me" - Toy Story

*1996: Nominee - Original Musical or Comedy Score - Toy Story

*1995: Nominee - Original Song- "Make Up Your Mind" - The Paper

*1991: Nominee - Original Score - Avalon

*1990: Nominee - Original Song - "I Love to See You Smile" - Parenthood

*1985: Nominee - Original Score - The Natural

*1982: Nominee - Original Score - Ragtime

*1982: Nominee - Original Song- "One More Hour" - Ragtime

Golden Globe

*2000: Nominee - Original Song - "When She Loved Me" - Toy Story 2

*1999: Nominee - Original Score - A Bug's Life

*1996: Nominee - Original Song - "You've Got a Friend in Me" - Toy Story

*1991: Nominee - Original Score - Avalon

*1990: Nominee - Original Song - "I Love to See You Smile" - Parenthood

*1982: Nominee - Original Song - "One More Hour" - Ragtime

Grammy

*2011: Nominee - Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media - Toy Story 3

*2011: Nominee - Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media - "Down in New Orleans" - The Princess and the Frog

*2007: Winner - Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media - "Our Town" - Cars

*2004: Nominee - Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media - Seabiscuit

*2003: Winner - Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media- "If I Didn't Have You" - Monsters, Inc.

*2003: Nominee - Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media - Monsters, Inc.

*2001: Winner - Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media- "When She Loved Me" - Toy Story 2

*2001: Nominee - Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media - Toy Story 2

*2000: Winner - Instrumental Composition Written for Motion Picture or Television - A Bug's Life

*2000: Nominee - Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media - "The Time Of Your Life" - A Bug's Life

*1992: Nominee - Instrumental Composition Written for Motion Picture or Television - Avalon

*1992: Nominee - Instrumental Composition Written for Motion Picture or Television - Awakenings

*1990: Nominee - Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media - Parenthood

*1983: Nominee - Best Album of Original Score Written for a Motion Picture or a Television Special- Ragtime

Emmy

*2010: Winner - Original Music and Lyrics ("When I'm Gone") - Monk

*2004: Winner - Main Title Theme Music ("It's a Jungle out There") - Monk

*1991: Winner - Achievement in Music and Lyrics - Cop Rock

Annie Award

*2007: Winner - Music in an Animated Feature Production - Cars

*2003: Nominee - Music in an Animated Feature Production - Monsters, Inc.

*2000: Winner - Music in an Animated Feature Production - Toy Story 2

*1997: Winner - Music in an Animated Feature Production - Cats Don't Dance

*1996: Winner - Music in an Animated Feature Production - Toy Story

BAFTA Award

*1983: Nominee - Original Song - "One More Hour" - Ragtime

Chicago Film Critics Association Award

*1999: Nominee - Original Score - A Bug's Life

*1996: Winner - Original Score - Toy Story

Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award

*1981: Winner - Music - Ragtime

Online Film Critics Society Award

*1999: Winner - Original Score - Pleasantville

References

External links

RandyNewman.com

Randy Newman: American Dreams, Kevin Courrier (2005) ISBN 1-55022-690-8

Interview with Randy Newman on the Art of Songwriting

Randy Newman in NPR's All Songs Considered

Category:1943 births Category:Alumni of University High School (Los Angeles, California) Category:American film score composers Category:Jewish American composers and songwriters Category:American pianists Category:American satirists Category:American male singer-songwriters Category:Annie Award winners Category:Best Song Academy Award winning songwriters Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Jewish singers Category:Living people Category:Musicians from New Orleans, Louisiana Category:Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees Category:People from New Orleans, Louisiana Category:University of California, Los Angeles alumni

Coordinates	29°57′53″N90°4′14″N
Name	Paul Newman
Caption	Paul Newman in 1975
Birth name	Paul Leonard Newman
Birth date	January 26, 1925
Birth place	Shaker Heights, Ohio, U.S.
Death date	September 26, 2008
Death place	Westport, Connecticut, U.S.
Occupation	Actor, director, humanitarian, entrepreneur
Years active	1952–2008
Spouse	(divorced) (his death)

Paul Leonard Newman (January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008) was an American actor, film director, entrepreneur, humanitarian, and auto racing enthusiast. He won numerous awards, including an Academy Award for best actor for his performance in the 1986 Martin Scorsese film The Color of Money and eight other nominations, three Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Cannes Film Festival Award, an Emmy award, and many honorary awards. He also won several national championships as a driver in Sports Car Club of America road racing, and his race teams won several championships in open wheel IndyCar racing.

Newman was a co-founder of Newman's Own, a food company from which Newman donated all post-tax profits and royalties to charity. As of August 2010, these donations had exceeded $300 million. and Arthur Samuel Newman, who ran a profitable sporting goods store. Newman's father was Jewish, the son of immigrants from Poland and Hungary; Newman had no religion as an adult, but described himself as "a Jew", stating that "it's more of a challenge". Newman's mother worked in his father's store, while raising Paul and his brother, Arthur, who later became a producer and production manager.

Newman showed an early interest in the theater, which his mother encouraged. At the age of seven, he made his acting debut, playing the court jester in a school production of Robin Hood. Graduating from Shaker Heights High School in 1943, he briefly attended Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, where he was initiated into the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity. He was sent instead to boot camp and then received further training as a radioman and gunner. Qualifying as a rear-seat radioman and gunner in torpedo bombers, in 1944, Aviation Radioman Third Class Newman was sent to Barber's Point, Hawaii. He was subsequently assigned to Pacific-based replacement torpedo squadrons (VT-98, VT-99, and VT-100). These torpedo squadrons were responsible primarily for training replacement pilots and combat air crewmen, placing particular importance on carrier landings.

After the war, he completed his English degree at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, graduating in 1949.

Career

Early work

Newman made his Broadway theater debut in the original production of William Inge's Picnic with Kim Stanley. He later appeared in the original Broadway productions of The Desperate Hours and Sweet Bird of Youth with Geraldine Page. He would later star in the film version of Sweet Bird of Youth, which also starred Page.

His first movie for Hollywood was The Silver Chalice (1954), followed by The Rack (1956) and acclaimed roles in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), as boxer Rocky Graziano; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), opposite Elizabeth Taylor; and The Young Philadelphians (1959), with Barbara Rush and Robert Vaughn. However, predating all of these above was a small but notable part in an August 8, 1952 episode of the science fiction TV series Tales of Tomorrow entitled "Ice from Space", in which he played Sergeant Wilson, his first credited TV or film appearance.

In February 1954, Newman appeared in a screen test with James Dean, directed by Gjon Mili, for East of Eden (1955). Newman was testing for the role of Aron Trask, Dean for the role of Aron's fraternal twin brother Cal. Dean won his part, but Newman lost out to Richard Davalos. The same year, Newman co-starred with Eva Marie Saint and Frank Sinatra in a live —and color —television broadcast of Our Town, a musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder's stage play with the same name. Newman was a last-minute replacement for James Dean. In 2003, Newman acted in a remake of Our Town, taking on the role of the stage manager.

Major films

Newman was one of the few actors who successfully made the transition from 1950s cinema to that of the 1960s and 1970s. His rebellious persona translated well to a subsequent generation. Newman starred in Exodus (1960), The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), Harper (1966), Hombre (1967), Cool Hand Luke (1967), The Towering Inferno (1974), Slap Shot (1977), and The Verdict (1982). He teamed with fellow actor Robert Redford and director George Roy Hill for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973).

He appeared with his wife, Joanne Woodward, in the feature films The Long, Hot Summer (1958), Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!, (1958), From the Terrace (1960), Paris Blues (1961), A New Kind of Love (1963), Winning (1969), WUSA (1970), The Drowning Pool (1975), Harry & Son (1984), and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990). They both also starred in the HBO miniseries Empire Falls, but did not have any scenes together.

In addition to starring in and directing Harry & Son, Newman also directed four feature films (in which he did not act) starring Woodward. They were Rachel, Rachel (1968), based on Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God, the screen version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972), the television screen version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Shadow Box (1980), and a screen version of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (1987).

Twenty-five years after The Hustler, Newman reprised his role of "Fast" Eddie Felson in the Martin Scorsese-directed The Color of Money (1986), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He told a television interviewer that winning an Oscar at the age of 62 deprived him of his fantasy of formally being presented with it in extreme old age.

Last works

In 2003, he appeared in a Broadway revival of Wilder's Our Town, receiving his first Tony Award nomination for his performance. PBS and the cable network Showtime aired a taping of the production, and Newman was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie.

His last screen appearance was as a conflicted mob boss in the 2002 film Road to Perdition opposite Tom Hanks, although he continued to provide voice work for films.

In 2005 at age 80, Newman was profiled alongside Robert Redford as part of the Sundance Channel's TV series Iconoclasts.

In keeping with his strong interest in car racing, he provided the voice of Doc Hudson, a retired race car in Disney/Pixar's Cars. Similarly, he served as narrator for the 2007 film Dale, about the life of the legendary NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, which turned out to be Newman's final film performance in any form. Newman also provided the narration for the film documentary The Meerkats, which was released in 2008.

Retirement from acting

Newman announced that he would entirely retire from acting on May 25, 2007. He stated that he did not feel he could continue acting at the level he wanted to. "You start to lose your memory, you start to lose your confidence, you start to lose your invention. So I think that's pretty much a closed book for me."

Philanthropy

With writer A.E. Hotchner, Newman founded Newman's Own, a line of food products, in 1982. The brand started with salad dressing, and has expanded to include pasta sauce, lemonade, popcorn, salsa, and wine, among other things. Newman established a policy that all proceeds, after taxes, would be donated to charity. As of early 2006, the franchise has donated in excess of $250 million.

One beneficiary of his philanthropy is the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, a residential summer camp for seriously ill children, which is located in Ashford, Connecticut. Newman co-founded the camp in 1988; it was named after the gang in his film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Newman's college fraternity, Phi Kappa Tau, adopted Hole in the Wall as their "national philanthropy" in 1995. One camp has expanded to become several Hole in the Wall Camps in the U.S., Ireland, France, and Israel. The camps serve 13,000 children every year, free of charge.

On June 1, 2007, Kenyon College announced that Newman had donated $10 million to the school to establish a scholarship fund as part of the college's current $230 million fund-raising campaign. Newman and Woodward were honorary co-chairs of a previous campaign.

Paul Newman was one of the founders of the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP), a membership organization of CEOs and corporate chairpersons committed to raising the level and quality of global corporate philanthropy. Founded in 1999 by Newman and a few leading CEOs, CECP has grown to include more than 175 members and, through annual executive convenings, extensive benchmarking research, and best practice publications, leads the business community in developing sustainable and strategic community partnerships through philanthropy.

Newman was named the Most Generous Celebrity of 2008 by Givingback.org. He contributed $20,857,000 for the year of 2008 to the Newman's Own Foundation, which distributes funds to a variety of charities.

Upon Newman's death, the Italian newspaper (a "semi-official" paper of the Holy See) L'Osservatore Romano published a notice lauding Newman's philanthropy. It also commented that "Newman was a generous heart, an actor of a dignity and style rare in Hollywood quarters."

Marriages and family

Newman was married twice. He was married to Jackie Witte appeared in the films Breakheart Pass, The Towering Inferno, and the 1977 film Fraternity Row. Paul Newman started the Scott Newman Center for drug abuse prevention in memory of his son.

Susan is a documentary filmmaker and philanthropist and has Broadway and screen credits, including a starring role as one of four Beatles fans in I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), and also a small role opposite her father in Slap Shot. She also received an Emmy nomination as co-producer of his telefilm, The Shadow Box. Newman had two grandsons.

Newman married actress Joanne Woodward on February 2, 1958. They had three daughters: Elinor "Nell" Teresa (1959), Melissa "Lissy" Stewart (1961), and Claire "Clea" Olivia (1965). Newman directed Elinor (stage name Nell Potts) in the central role alongside her mother in the film The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.

The Newmans lived away from the Hollywood environment, making their home in Westport, Connecticut. Paul Newman was well known for his devotion to his wife and family. When asked about infidelity, he famously quipped, "Why go out for hamburger when you have steak at home?"

Political activism

in 1968]] For his support of Eugene McCarthy in 1968 (and effective use of television commercials in California) and his opposition to the War in Vietnam, Newman was placed nineteenth on Richard Nixon's enemies list, which he claimed was his greatest accomplishment.

Consistent with his work for liberal causes, Newman publicly supported Ned Lamont's candidacy in the 2006 Connecticut Democratic Primary against Senator Joe Lieberman, and was even rumored as a candidate himself, until Lamont emerged as a credible alternative. He donated to Chris Dodd's presidential campaign.

He attended the first Earth Day event in Manhattan on April 22, 1970. Newman was also a vocal supporter of gay rights, including same-sex marriage.

Newman was concerned over global warming and supported nuclear energy development as a solution.

Auto racing

Newman was an avid auto racing enthusiast, and first became interested in motorsports ("the first thing that I ever found I had any grace in") while training at the Watkins Glen Racing School for the filming of Winning, a 1969 film. Newman's first professional event was in 1972, in Thompson, Connecticut, and he was a frequent competitor in Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) events for the rest of the decade, eventually winning four national championships. He later drove in the 1979 24 Hours of Le Mans in Dick Barbour's Porsche 935 and finished in second place. Newman reunited with Barbour in 2000 to compete in the Petit Le Mans.

From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, he drove for the Bob Sharp Racing team, racing mainly Datsuns (later rebranded as Nissans) in the Trans-Am Series. He became closely associated with the brand during the 1980s, even appearing in commercials for them. At the age of 70 years and 8 days, he became the oldest driver to be part of a winning team in a major sanctioned race, winning in his class at the 1995 24 Hours of Daytona. Among his last races were the Baja 1000 in 2004 and the 24 Hours of Daytona once again in 2005.

Newman initially owned his own racing team, which competed in the Can-Am series, but later co-founded Newman/Haas Racing with Carl Haas, a Champ Car team, in 1983. The 1996 racing season was chronicled in the IMAX film Super Speedway, which Newman narrated. He was also a partner in the Atlantic Championship team Newman Wachs Racing. Newman owned a NASCAR Winston Cup car, before selling it to Penske Racing, where it now serves as the #12 car.

Newman was inducted into the SCCA Hall of Fame at the national convention in Las Vegas, Nevada on February 21, 2009.

Illness and death

Newman was scheduled to make his professional stage directing debut with the Westport Country Playhouse's 2008 production of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, but he stepped down on May 23, 2008, citing health issues.

In June 2008 it was widely reported that Newman, a former chain smoker, had been diagnosed with lung cancer and was receiving treatment at Sloan-Kettering hospital in New York City. Photographs taken of Newman in May and June showed him looking gaunt. Writer A.E. Hotchner, who partnered with Newman to start the Newman's Own company in the 1980s, told the Associated Press that Newman told him about the disease about eighteen months prior to the interview. Newman's spokesman told the press that the star was "doing nicely," but neither confirmed nor denied that he had cancer. In August, after reportedly finishing chemotherapy, Newman told his family he wished to die at home.

He died on September 26, 2008, aged 83, surrounded by his family and close friends. His remains were subsequently cremated after a private funeral service near his home in Westport.

Filmography, awards, and nominations

As actor

As director or producer

Additional awards and honors

In addition to the awards Newman won for specific roles, he received an honorary Academy Award in 1986 for his "many and memorable and compelling screen performances" and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for his charity work in 1994.

He received the Golden Globe New Star of the Year — Actor award for ''The Silver Chalice (1957), the Henrietta Award World Film Favorite — Male in 1964 and 1966 and the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1984.

Newman won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for The Long, Hot Summer and the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for Nobody's Fool.

In 1968, Newman was named "Man of the Year" by Harvard University's performance group, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals.

Newman Day has been celebrated at Kenyon College, Bates College, Princeton University, and other American colleges since the 1970s. In 2004, Newman requested that Princeton University disassociate the event from his name, due to the fact that he did not endorse the behaviors, citing his creation of the Scott Newman Centre in 1980, which is "dedicated to the prevention of substance abuse through education".

Posthumously, Newman was inducted into the Connecticut Hall of Fame, and was honored with a nature preserve in Westport named in his honor. He was also honored by the United States House of Representatives following his death.

Published work

Newman, Paul; Hotchner, A.E. Newman's Own Cookbook. Simon & Schuster, 1998. ISBN 0684848325.

Newman, Paul; Hotchner, A.E. Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good. Doubleday Publishing, 2003. ISBN 0385508026.

See also

Newman Day

List of select Jewish racing drivers

Notes

References

Demers, Jenifer. Paul Newman: the Dream has Ended!. Createspace, 2008. ISBN 1440433232

Lax, Eric. Paul Newman: a Biography. Turner Publishing, Incorporated, 1999. ISBN 1-57036-286-6.

Morella, Joe; Epstein, Edward Z. Paul and Joanne: A Biography of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Delacorte Press, 1988. ISBN 0440500044.

O'Brien, Daniel. Paul Newman. Faber & Faber, Limited, 2005. ISBN 057121987X.

Oumano, Elena. Paul Newman. St. Martin's Press, 1990. ISBN 0-517-05934-7.

Quirk, Lawrence J. The Films of Paul Newman. Taylor Pub., 1986. ISBN 0-8065-0385-8.

Thomson, Kenneth. The Films of Paul Newman. 1978. ISBN 0-912616-87-3.

Further reading

External links

Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing

Newman's Own

Newman's Own Foundation

Paul Newman bio at h2g2

Category:1925 births Category:2008 deaths Category:20th-century actors Category:21st-century actors Category:24 Hours of Le Mans drivers Category:Academy Honorary Award recipients Category:Actors from Ohio Category:Actors Studio alumni Category:American actors of Slovak descent Category:American businesspeople Category:American film actors Category:American film directors Category:American film producers Category:American military personnel of World War II Category:American people of Hungarian descent Category:American people of Jewish descent Category:American people of Slovak descent Category:American philanthropists Category:American racecar drivers Category:American television actors Category:BAFTA winners (people) Category:Best Foreign Actor BAFTA Award winners Category:Best Actor Academy Award winners Category:Best Director Golden Globe winners Category:Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe (television) winners Category:Cancer deaths in Connecticut Category:Cecil B. DeMille Award Golden Globe winners Category:Connecticut Democrats Category:Deaths from lung cancer Category:Emmy Award winners Category:Indy Racing League owners Category:Jewish actors Category:Kennedy Center honorees Category:Kenyon College alumni Category:New Star of the Year (Actor) Golden Globe winners Category:Ohio University alumni Category:Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie Screen Actors Guild Award winners Category:People from Cleveland, Ohio Category:People from Shaker Heights, Ohio Category:People from Westport, Connecticut Category:Trans-Am drivers Category:United States Navy sailors Category:Western (genre) film actors Category:Yale School of Drama alumni

Coordinates	29°57′53″N90°4′14″N
Name	Emmylou Harris
Background	solo_singer
Born	April 02, 1947Birmingham, Alabama, U.S.
Instrument	Voice, guitar
Genre	Folk, country rock, country, bluegrass, rock, pop, alt-country
Occupation	Singer-songwriter, musician, producer, arranger
Years active	1969–present
Label	Jubilee, Reprise, Warner Bros., Elektra, Rhino, Nonesuch
Associated acts	Gram ParsonsJohn PrineJames Burton Rodney Crowell Bob Dylan Ricky Skaggs Beth Neilsen ChapmanDixie ChicksAlbert LeeArlo GuthrieNeil YoungThe BandDon Williams Dolly Parton Little FeatLinda RonstadtDave Matthews Patty Griffin Willie NelsonJohn DenverBruce SpringsteenSteve Earle Ryan AdamsBright Eyes SpyboyMark KnopflerJuice NewtonIris DementThe Nash Ramblers
Url	www.emmylouharris.com

Emmylou Harris (born April 2, 1947 in Birmingham, Alabama) is an American singer-songwriter and musician. In addition to her work as a solo artist and bandleader, both as an interpreter of other composers' works and as a singer-songwriter, she is a sought-after backing vocalist and duet partner, working with numerous other artists including Gram Parsons, Bob Dylan, Linda Ronstadt, John Denver, The Band, Elvis Costello, Conor Oberst, and Dolly Parton.

Biography

Early years

Emmylou Harris is the daughter of career military officer Walter Harris and his wife Eugenia. Walter Harris, a member of the Marine Corps, was reported missing in action in Korea in 1952 and spent ten months as a prisoner of war. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Emmylou Harris spent her childhood in North Carolina and Woodbridge, Virginia, where she graduated from Gar-Field Senior High School as class valedictorian. In high school she also won a drama scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she began to study music seriously, learning to play the songs of Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez on guitar. Leaving college to pursue her musical aspirations, she moved to New York, working as a waitress to support herself while performing folk songs in Greenwich Village coffeehouses. She married fellow songwriter Tom Slocum in 1969 and in the following year recorded her first album, Gliding Bird. Harris and Slocum soon divorced, and Harris and her newborn daughter Hallie moved in with her parents in the Maryland suburbs on the edge of Washington, D.C.

With Gram Parsons

Harris soon returned to performing as part of a trio with Gerry Mule and Tom Guidera. One night in 1971, members of the country rock group The Flying Burrito Brothers happened to be in the audience. Former Byrds member Chris Hillman, who had taken over the band after the departure of its founder Gram Parsons, was so impressed by Harris that he briefly considered asking her to join the band. Instead, Hillman ended up recommending her to Parsons, who was looking for a female vocalist to work with on his first solo album, GP. Harris toured as a member of Parsons' band, The Fallen Angels, in 1973, and the couple shone during vocal harmonies and duets. Harris was quite pleased, and invested a lot emotionally in their relationship. Later that year, Parsons and Harris were working together to record a studio album, Grievous Angel. Parsons died in his motel room near what is now Joshua Tree National Park on September 19, 1973, from an accidental overdose of drugs and alcohol. Parsons's Grievous Angel was released posthumously in 1974, and three more tracks from his last sessions with Harris were included on another posthumous Parsons album, Sleepless Nights, in 1976. There was one more album of recorded material from that period of time that was packaged with the name, Live 1973, but wasn't released until 1982.

The working relationship between Harris and Parsons is one of great importance in country and country-rock music history. Parsons offered Harris a study in true country music, introducing her to artists like The Louvin Brothers, and provided her with a musical identity; Harris's harmony and duet vocals, on the other hand, were lauded by those who heard them, and helped inspire Parsons' performances. His death left her devastated at an emotional and musical crossroads. She eventually carried on with her own version of Parsons' musical vision, and was instrumental in bringing attention to his achievements. Harris's earliest signature song, and arguably her most personal one, "Boulder to Birmingham", written shortly after Gram's death, showed the depth of her shock and pain at losing Parsons. It was, according to her best friend Linda Ronstadt, the beginning of a "lifetime effort to process what had happened", and was just the first of many songs written and/or performed by Harris about her life with (and without) Parsons.

I would rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham I would hold my life in his saving grace. I would walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham If I thought I could see, I could see your face. --"Boulder to Birmingham"

lyrics by Emmylou Harris''

Harris moved back to Washington D.C., and formed an electric band, The Angel Band, consisting of Bruce Archer on guitar, Tom Guidera on bass, Danny Pendleton on pedal steel and Mark Cuff on drums. Friend Linda Ronstadt invited Harris to join her in Los Angeles. Ronstadt, having a deep admiration for Harris's musicianship, informed everyone she could of Harris's talents and was instrumental in helping to get her work in musical venues (often singing with her), along the Sunset Strip. In fact, Harris credits Ronstadt with being the force behind her getting a record contract.

The Hot Band

Warner Brothers A&R; representative Mary Martin introduced Harris to Canadian producer Brian Ahern, who produced her major label debut album, Pieces of the Sky, released in 1975 on Reprise Records. The album was surprisingly eclectic, especially by Nashville standards, including cover versions of The Beatles' "For No One", Merle Haggard's "Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down" and The Louvin Brothers' "If I Could Only Win Your Love". It also featured "Bluebird Wine", a composition by young Texas songwriter Rodney Crowell, who was the first in a long line of songwriters whose talents Harris has championed. The record was one of the most expensive country records produced at the time, featuring the talents of James Burton, Glen Hardin, Ron Tutt, Ray Pohlman, and Bill Payne, as well as two tracks ("Before Believing" and "Queen of the Silver Dollar") that were cut with the Angel Band. Two singles were released: "Too Far Gone", which initially charted at #73 (a 1979 reissue hit #13), and Harris's first big hit, "If I Could Only Win Your Love", a duet with Herb Pedersen (later to be a founding member of The Desert Rose Band), which peaked at #4.

Executives of Warner Bros. Records (Reprise Records's parent company) told Harris they would agree to record her if she would "get a hot band". Harris did so, enlisting guitarist James Burton and pianist Glen Hardin, both of whom had played with Elvis Presley as well as Parsons. Burton was a renowned guitarist, starting in Ricky Nelson's band in the 1950s, and Hardin had been a member of The Crickets. Other Hot Band members were drummer John Ware, pedal steel guitarist Hank DeVito, and bassist Emory Gordy, Jr., with whom Harris had worked while performing with Parsons. Singer-songwriter Crowell was enlisted as a rhythm guitarist and duet partner. Harris's first tour schedule originally dovetailed around Presley's, owing to Burton and Hardin's continuing commitments to Presley's band. The Hot Band lived up to its name, with most of the members moving on with fresh talent replacing them as they continued on to solo careers of their own.

Elite Hotel, released in December 1975, established that the buzz created by Pieces of the Sky was well-founded. Unusual for country albums at the time, which largely revolved around a hit single, Harris's albums borrowed their approach from the album-oriented rock market; in terms of quality and artistic merit, tracks like "Sin City", "Wheels", and "Till I Gain Control Again", which weren't singles, easily stood against tracks like "Together Again", "Sweet Dreams", and "One of These Days", which were. While Elite Hotel was a #1 country album, the album did sufficiently well as a crossover success with the rock audience. Harris appealed to those who normally disapproved of the country market's pull toward crossover pop singles ("Together Again" and "Sweet Dreams" both topped the country charts). Elite Hotel won a Grammy in 1976 for Best Country Vocal Performance, Female.

Harris's reputation for guest work continued. Aside from contributing to albums by Linda Ronstadt, Guy Clark and Neil Young, Harris was tapped by Bob Dylan to perform on his Desire album. Harris also filmed one of the studio sequences, owing to her touring schedule, in The Band's The Last Waltz, singing "Evangeline."

Burton left the Hot Band in 1976, choosing to remain with Elvis Presley's band, and was replaced by English guitarist Albert Lee. Harris's commercial apex was Luxury Liner, released in 1977, which remains one of her definitive records. On Luxury Liner, Harris's mix of songs from Chuck Berry ("(You Never Can Tell) C'est La Vie"), Gram Parsons (the title track and "She"), The Carter Family ("Hello Stranger") and Kitty Wells ("Making Believe") illustrate a continuity and artistic merit to country music often overlooked at the time. Despite Top Ten singles with "C'est La Vie" and "Making Believe," the album's best known track is the first recorded cover of Townes Van Zandt's classic "Pancho & Lefty", which would be a #1 hit for Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard in 1983. At the end of 1977, Crowell left the Hot Band to pursue a solo career; his replacement was bluegrass multi-instrumentalist and singer Ricky Skaggs.

Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town signalled a slight change of direction from Harris's previous three albums. Rather than mixing classic and contemporary, the album is made up largely of recently written songs, though from a wide variety of writers. "Two More Bottles of Wine", written by Delbert McClinton, became Harris's third #1 single, "To Daddy", written by Dolly Parton, went to #3, and a third single, "Easy From Now On", went Top Twenty. The album included two songs apiece from Crowell ("I Ain't Living Long Like This" and "Leaving Louisiana In The Broad Daylight") and Canadian songwriter Jesse Winchester ("Defying Gravity" and "My Songbird"), and Utah Phillips' "Green Rolling Hills."

The Roots Records

In 1977 (January), Harris married Brian Ahern. Their (Harris's second) daughter, Meghann, was born in 1979. During this time, Harris cut three studio albums that reflected a shift toward traditional country (the industry, on the other hand, was about to embrace Urban Cowboy). The first key to the change in direction was her Grammy Award-winning 1979 album Blue Kentucky Girl. Apart from a cover of The Drifters' "Save The Last Dance For Me", the album was largely made up of classic-styled country material in the vein of Loretta Lynn and Kitty Wells. One of her best-loved albums, the record includes songs ranging from The Louvin Brothers' "Everytime You Leave" to Willie Nelson's "Sister's Coming Home" to Gram Parson's signature "Hickory Wind". Wesley Rose took special interest in Harris's recording of "Beneath Still Waters", which became a #1 smash.

A Christmas album, Light of the Stable, was released in 1979; its title track featured backing vocals by Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Neil Young, all three of whom Harris had been working with sporadically since the mid-1970s, and would continue to collaborate with through the 2000s. (Harris, Parton and Ronstadt began working on a planned trio album during this time, though it would remain unfinished for nearly a decade; a few of the tracks recorded for the project surfaced on the women's' respective solo albums in the interim.) The album is largely acoustic, featuring readings of traditional fare such as "Silent Night," "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and "The First Noel."

In the 1980s, Harris pursued country music's history even further with the bluegrass-oriented recording of Roses in the Snow, featuring Ricky Skaggs, Tony Rice, Albert Lee, Emory Gordy Jr. and Jerry Douglas. Harris's versions of the traditional "Wayfaring Stranger" and Paul Simon's "The Boxer" were strong singles.

In 1980, Harris recorded "That Lovin' You Feelin' Again" with Roy Orbison. The duet was a Top 10 hit on both the Country and Adult Contemporary charts. They would win the Grammy Award for Best Country Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group. She would also be featured on Paul Kennerley's concept album The Legend of Jesse James, which also featured Levon Helm of The Band and Johnny Cash.

Pop-chart success, songwriting

In 1981, Harris reached the Top 40 on the Billboard pop chart with a cover of "Mister Sandman"—again Top 10 Country as well as Adult Contemporary—from her Evangeline album. (The album version of the song was a track from the ill-fated Trio sessions with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt, but neither Parton's nor Ronstadt's record companies would allow their artists' vocals to be used on the single, so Harris re-recorded the song, singing all three parts.)

White Shoes in 1983 included an eclectic pairing of the rockish reading of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" with a remake of the Donna Summer hit "On the Radio", as well as tracks from a diverse group of songwriters such as Hot Band member Crowell, Sandy Denny and T-Bone Burnett.

Harris's major-label releases thus far had included few self-penned songs, but in 1985 her songwriting skills were much in evidence with the release of The Ballad of Sally Rose, for which she co-wrote all of the songs. The album was semi-autobiographical in theme, based loosely on her relationship with Parsons. Harris described it as a "country opera". Her co-writer and producer on the album was English songwriter and musician Paul Kennerley, writer of the hit singles "Born to Run" (on Harris's 1981 Cimarron album) and "In My Dreams" (on White Shoes). Kennerley also produced her next album, Thirteen. They were married in 1985 and divorced in 1993.

In 1987, nearly a full decade after they'd first attempted to do so, Harris teamed up with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt for their long-promised and much-anticipated Trio disc. The album proved to be the biggest commercial success of Harris's long and varied career, spending five weeks at #1 on Billboard's Country Albums chart (also quickly reaching the Top 10 on the Pop Albums chart), sold several million copies and produced four Top 10 Country hits, including "To Know Him Is To Love Him", which hit #1. The disc was nominated for the coveted Album Of The Year Grammy award (given to U2 that year for The Joshua Tree) and the three women won the statuette for Best Country Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal; the album's Linda Thompson-penned track "Telling Me Lies" reached #3 Country, #25 Adult Contemporary, and was also nominated for a Grammy as 1987's Best Country Song.

Harris also found time in 1987 to release a solo album, Angel Band, featuring traditional gospel songs, on which she worked with, among others, rising country star Vince Gill.

In 1989, she recorded two songs with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on their album, . In a snippet of studio chatter included on one of the tracks, she talked during the recording session about her beginnings and how music had changed:

Years ago I had the experience of sitting around in a living room with a bunch of people and singing and playing, and it was like a spiritual experience, it was wonderful. And I decided then that was what I was going to do with my life was play music, do music. In the making of records, I think over the years we've all gotten a little too technical, a little too hung up on getting things perfect. We've lost the living room. The living room has gone out of the music, but today I feel like we got it back.

Around 1991, she dissolved The Hot Band and formed a new band of acoustic musicians—Sam Bush on fiddle, mandolin and vocals, Roy Huskey, Jr. on bass and vocals, Larry Atamanuik on drums, Al Perkins on banjo, guitar, Dobro guitar and vocals, and Jon Randall on guitar, mandolin and vocals—which she named The Nash Ramblers. They recorded a Grammy Award-winning live album in 1992 at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, which led to the $8 million restoration of the facility into a premium concert and event venue. It was her last album with Reprise Records.

New directions

By the 1990s, Harris started receiving less airplay as mainstream country stations began shifting their focus to the youth-oriented "new country" format. Harris's albums Bluebird and Brand New Dance (1989 and 1990, respectively) received ample critical acclaim and sold reasonably well, yet her chart success was on the wane. 1993's Cowgirl's Prayer—the first album since her switch to Elektra Records—was critically praised but received very little airplay, and its lead single, "High Powered Love" charted very low, peaking at #63, prompting her to shift her career in a new direction.

In 1995, Harris released one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the decade, Wrecking Ball, produced by Daniel Lanois, best known for his work with U2, Peter Gabriel and Bob Dylan. An experimental album for Harris, the record included Harris's rendition of the Neil Young-penned title track (Young himself provided guest vocals on two of the album's songs), Steve Earle's "Goodbye", Julie Miller's "All My Tears", Jimi Hendrix's "May This Be Love", Kate and Anna McGarrigle's "Goin' Back to Harlan" and Gillian Welch's "Orphan Girl". U2's Larry Mullen, Jr. showed up to play drums for the project. The album received virtually no country airplay whatsoever, but did bring Harris to the attention of alternative rock listeners, many of whom had never listened to her music before.

Harris then took her Wrecking Ball material on the road, releasing the live Spyboy in 1998, backed with a power trio comprising Nashville producer, songwriter and guitarist Buddy Miller and New Orleans musicians, drummer Brady Blade and bassist-vocalist-percussionist Daryl Johnson. In addition to performing songs from Wrecking Ball, the album updated many of Harris's career hits, including "Boulder to Birmingham".

Also in 1998, she appeared prominently on Willie Nelson's moody, instrumentally sparse Teatro album, produced by Wrecking Ball producer Lanois.

During the summer of 1997 and 1998, Harris joined Sarah McLachlan's all-woman musical touring festival, the Lilith Fair, where new artists like Patty Griffin could share new experiences and ideas with seasoned musicians like Harris and Bonnie Raitt.

In January 1999, Harris released Trio 2 with Parton and Ronstadt. Much of the album had actually been recorded in 1994, but remained unreleased for nearly five years because of record label and personnel disputes, conflicting schedules, and career priorities of the three artists. Trio 2 was much more contemporary-sounding than its predecessor and was certified Gold. It included their version of Neil Young's classic "After The Gold Rush", which became a popular music video and won another Grammy—this one for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. Harris and Ronstadt then released a duet album, , later the same year. The two superstars toured together during the fall months in support of the disc. Both albums made the Top 10 of Billboard's Country Albums chart and did well on the pop side as well.

Also in 1999, Harris paid tribute to her former singing partner Gram Parsons by co-executive producing , an album that gathered together more than a dozen artists. Harris performed duets with Beck, Sheryl Crow and The Pretenders on this album's tracks.

In 2000, Harris released her solo follow-up to Wrecking Ball, Red Dirt Girl, produced by Lanois protege Malcolm Burn. For the first time since The Ballad of Sally Rose, the album contained a number of Harris's own compositions. Like Wrecking Ball, the album's sound leaned more toward alternative rock than country. Nevertheless it reached #5 on Billboard's Country Albums chart as well as a healthy #54 on the pop side. It also won Harris another of her 12 Grammy awards, in the category of Best Contemporary Folk Album.

Harris also accompanied on alternative country singer Ryan Adams' solo debut Heartbreaker.

Also in 2000, Harris joined an all-star group of traditional country, folk and blues artists for the T-Bone Burnett-produced soundtrack to the Coen Brothers film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? The soundtrack won multiple CMA, ACM and Grammy awards. A documentary/concert film, Down from the Mountain, featured the artists performing music from the film and other songs at the Ryman Auditorium. Harris and many of the same artists took their show on the road for the Down from the Mountain Tour in 2002. In 2003, Harris supplied the finishing touches in harmonizing with the Dixie Chicks on a song they were recording in the studio, "Godspeed".

On September 9, 2005, Harris participated in "", a series of concerts simulcast by most American television stations to raise money for victims of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. She performed with Beth Neilsen Chapman and the Dixie Chicks, harmonizing on Patty Griffin's song, "Mary."

Recent work

Harris released Stumble into Grace, her follow-up to Red Dirt Girl, in 2003. Like its predecessor, it contained mostly self-penned material. In 2004, Harris led the Sweet Harmony Traveling Revue tour with Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Buddy Miller and Patty Griffin. They performed singly and together and swapped instruments.

, Netherlands (2006)]] In 2005, Harris worked with Conor Oberst on Bright Eyes' release, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, performing backup vocals on three tracks. In July, she joined Elvis Costello on several dates of his U.S. tour, performing alongside Costello and his band on several numbers each night. Harris and Costello recorded a version of Costello's song, "The Scarlet Tide", from the soundtrack of the movie Cold Mountain. July also saw the release of The Very Best of Emmylou Harris: Heartaches and Highways, a single-disc retrospective of Harris's career, on the Rhino Entertainment label. This same year, Harris appeared as a guest vocalist on Neil Young's widely acclaimed Prairie Wind. She also appeared in the Jonathan Demme documentary-concert film , released in 2006. All the Roadrunning, an album of collaborations with former Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler, was released in April 2006 and supported by a tour of Europe and the USA. The album was a commercial success, reaching #8 in the UK and #17 in the USA. Selections recorded during the All the Roadrunning tour performance at the Gibson Amphitheatre were released as a CD/DVD package titled Real Live Roadrunning in November 2006. In addition to several of the compositions that Harris and Knopfler recorded together in the studio, Real Live Roadrunning features solo hits from both members of the duo, as well as a few classic tracks from Knopfler's days with Dire Straits.

Harris is featured on A Tribute To Joni Mitchell, released on April 24, 2007. Harris covered the song "The Magdalene Laundries" (originally on Mitchell's 1994 album, Turbulent Indigo). She sang "Another Pot O' Tea" with Anne Murray on Murray's album , released November 13, 2007, in Canada and January 15, 2008, in the U.S.

Harris wrote a song called "In Rodanthe" for the 2008 film Nights In Rodanthe.

A new solo album, All I Intended to Be, was released on June 10, 2008, to critical acclaim. Contributors include Buddy Miller, the McGarrigle sisters, Vince Gill, Phil Madeira, and Dolly Parton. She toured with an ensemble she dubbed the Red Dirt Boys, featuring Phil Madeira on accordion, guitar, and keyboards, Colin Linden on guitar and banjo, Rickie Simpkins on mandolin and fiddle, Chris Donohoe on bass, and Bryan Owings on drums. It did not include Miller, who was touring with Robert Plant, Alison Krauss and T Bone Burnett at the time. In 2009, Harris toured with Patty Griffin, Shawn Colvin, and Miller as "Three Girls and Their Buddy". Madeira, Simpkins, and Donohue performed with her in late 2008, and in 2009, appearing on "A Prairie Home Companion" and at MerleFest and the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. In September 2009, Owings rejoined the Red Dirt Boys with Miller for the remainder of 2009.

In April 2009 Harris became a grandmother. Her daughter gave birth to a daughter, Prudence.

In 2010, Harris regrouped with the latest version of the Red Dirt Boys: Madeira, Owings, Donohue, and Simpkins for Lilith Fair summer dates and a scheduled US autumn tour.

According to an interview with Bonnie Tyler by Digital Spy, Emmylou Harris will be teaming up with her on Tyler's upcoming album. Harris will do backing vocals on a song, written and produced by Wayne Warner.

Activism

In 1997 and 1998, Harris performed in Sarah McLachlan's Lilith Fair, promoting feminism in music. Since 1999, Harris has been organizing an annual benefit tour called Concerts for a Landmine Free World. All proceeds from the tours support the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation's (VVAF) efforts to assist innocent victims of conflicts around the world. The tour also benefits the VVAF's work to raise America's awareness of the global landmine problem. Artists that have joined Harris on the road for these dates include Mary Chapin Carpenter, Bruce Cockburn, Sheryl Crow, Steve Earle, Joan Baez, Patty Griffin, Nanci Griffith, Willie Nelson, and Lucinda Williams. Harris is a supporter of animal rights and an active member of PETA. She founded, and in her spare time assists at, an animal shelter in Nashville.

Awards and other honours

Grammy Awards

2005 Best Female Country Vocal Performance ("The Connection")

2001 Album of the Year (O Brother, Where Art Thou?)

2000 Best Contemporary Folk Album (Red Dirt Girl)

1999 Best Country Collaboration with Vocals ("After The Gold Rush", with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt)

1998 Best Country Collaboration with Vocals ("Same Old Train", with Alison Krauss, Clint Black, Dwight Yoakam, Earl Scruggs, Joe Diffie, Marty Stuart, Merle Haggard, Pam Tillis, Patty Loveless, Randy Travis, Ricky Skaggs & Travis Tritt)

1995 Best Contemporary Folk Album (Wrecking Ball)

1992 Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal (Emmylou Harris & The Nash Ramblers At the Ryman, as Emmylou Harris & The Nash Ramblers)

1987 Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal (Trio, with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt)

1984 Best Country Vocal Performance, Female ("In My Dreams")

1980 Best Country Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group ("That Lovin' You Feelin' Again", with Roy Orbison)

1979 Best Country Vocal Performance, Female (Blue Kentucky Girl)

1976 Best Country Vocal Performance, Female (Elite Hotel)

Country Music Association Awards

2001 Album of the Year (O Brother, Where Art Thou?)

1980 Female Vocalist Of The Year

1988 Vocal Event of the Year (Trio, with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt)

Other honors

VH1's 100 Most Influential Women in Rock and Roll (1998) - Number 22 out of 100

Billboard's Century Award recipient (1999) - inducted by Sarah McLachlann

CMT's 40 Greatest Women of Country Music - #5 ranking (2002)

Inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame on February 12, 2008]

Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.

Awarded an honorary doctorate of music from Berklee College of Music in 2009.

Discography

Collaborations and other appearances

References

Sources

In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music, Nicholas Dawidoff, Vintage Books, 1998. ISBN 0-679-41567-X

Emmylou Harris: Angel in Disguise, Jim Brown, Fox Music Books, 2004. ISBN 1-894997-03-4

Fong-Torres, Ben. (1998). "Emmylou Harris". In The Encyclopedia of Country Music. Paul Kingsbury, Editor. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 230.

External links

Official Site (requires Flash player)

Emmylou Harris Comprehensive former official site

Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

Emmylou Harris Questionnaire (June 2008)

Pitchfork article

Gibson interview

Interview

Category:American country singers Category:American female singers Category:American female guitarists Category:American singer-songwriters Category:American vegetarians Category:Grand Ole Opry members Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Country Music Hall of Fame inductees Category:Jubilee Records artists Category:Musicians from Alabama Category:People from Birmingham, Alabama Category:People from North Carolina Category:People from Woodbridge, Virginia Category:1947 births Category:Living people