| Name | Keith Andes |
|---|---|
| Caption | Andes in Split Second (1953) |
| Birthname | John Charles Andes |
| Birthdate | July 12, 1920 |
| Birthplace | Ocean City, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Deathdate | November 11, 2005 |
| Deathplace | Newhall, Santa Clarita, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Yearsactive | 1944-1980 |
| Spouse | (divorced) 2 children Shelah Hackett (divorced) |
Keith Andes (July 12, 1920 – November 11, 2005) was an American film, radio, musical theatre, stage and television actor.
Andes found work on radio singing and acting throughout his years at Upper Darby High School. He attended Oxford University and graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia in 1943 with a bachelor's degree in education. He studied voice at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music. He began his Broadway career while serving in the Air Force during World War II.
In 1952, he appeared as Marilyn Monroe's sweetheart and Barbara Stanwyck's brother in the cult film Clash by Night (directed by Fritz Lang and co-written by Clifford Odets). He appeared with Robert Newton in Blackbeard the Pirate. In 1958, Andes starred as crusading former Louisiana State Police Superintendent Francis Grevemberg in the film Damn Citizen. His co-stars were Margaret Hayes as Dorothy Maguire Grevemberg and Gene Evans as police Major Al Arthur.
On television, he appeared in the short-lived police show This Man Dawson (1959–1960). He played an amateur sleuth on the 1963 Desilu sitcom on CBS, Glynis, starring Glynis Johns as his wife. The next year, he guest-starred in Mickey Rooney's short-lived Mickey sitcom on ABC.
Andes starred opposite Lucille Ball in the Broadway musical Wildcat in 1960, and later appeared on her 1960s sitcom, The Lucy Show. His career spanned three decades, appearing in episodes of Cannon, Death Valley Days, Daniel Boone, I Spy, The Andy Griffith Show,The Rifleman, and (in the episode ""). His work included voice acting in the animated Birdman and the Galaxy Trio (1967). Late in life, he appeared in films such as ...And Justice for All and Tora! Tora! Tora! (about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor). He also appeared as Prime Minister Darius in the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century episode "Buck's Duel to the Death".Category:Actors from New Jersey Category:Actors who committed suicide Category:American film actors Category:American musical theatre actors Category:American television actors Category:American voice actors Category:Deaths from asphyxiation Category:People from the Greater Los Angeles Area Category:People from Cape May County, New Jersey Category:Suicides by asphyxiation Category:Suicides in California Category:1920 births Category:2005 deaths
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| Name | Robert Newton |
|---|---|
| Caption | Newton (left) in The High and the Mighty |
| Birth date | June 01, 1905 |
| Birth place | Shaftesbury, Dorset, England |
| Death date | March 25, 1956 |
| Death place | Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California |
| Years active | 1932 - 1956 |
| Spouse | Petronella Walton 1929-?) (divorced) 1 child Annie McLean (m. 1936) Natalie Newhouse (1947-1952) (divorced) 1 child) Vera Budnik (?- 25 March 1956) (his death) 1 child) |
Newton's film career included notable ruffians and villains, mostly comedic ones like Bill Walker in George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara (1941) and Long John Silver in Walt Disney's Treasure Island (1950), but also deadly serious Bill Sikes in David Lean's 1948 film version of Oliver Twist. One interesting exception shows his acting versatility; in Alfred Hitchcock's film Jamaica Inn, he played a virtuous law-officer who is alert, benevolent, serious, dedicated, professional, gallant and calm in the face of danger, modest and altogether unlike Long John Silver. He portrayed disciplinarians such as Inspector Javert in the 1952 Les Misérables, Dr. Arnold in the 1951 film version of Tom Brown's Schooldays and Inspector Fix in his last film, Around the World in 80 Days (1956), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Newton appeared in major roles in two films based on the novella The Vessel of Wrath by W. Somerset Maugham. He played the Dutch contrôleur in the 1938 version (released in the U.S. as The Beachcomber), and the lead role of Edward "Ginger Ted" Wilson in The Beachcomber (1954). He starred as the Scottish hatter, James Brodie, in Hatter's Castle, a 1941 film based on the novel by A. J. Cronin. He also played Ancient Pistol in Laurence Olivier's 1944 film of Henry V and Lukey in Carol Reed's Odd Man Out; this performance was later immortalised in Harold Pinter's play Old Times. In 1949, he played Dr. Clive Riordan in the thriller Obsession against type. (A good example of Newton playing a sympathetic lead role is Noel Coward's This Happy Breed directed by David Lean in 1944.)
He is best remembered for portraying the feverish-eyed Long John Silver and inventing the phrase "Arrrgh, matey!" in the Walt Disney version of Treasure Island. His Disney portrayal became the standard for screen portrayals of pirates and he is often credited with inventing the stereotypical "pirate voice" by exaggerating the accent of his native West Country. Newton has become the "patron saint" of the annual International Talk Like a Pirate Day on September 19.
He again played Long John Silver in a 1954 Australian-made film, Long John Silver. It was shot at Pagewood Studios, Sydney and directed by Byron Haskin, who had directed Treasure Island. The company went on to make a 26-episode 1955 TV series, The Adventures of Long John Silver, in which Newton also starred.
Newton portrayed Bristol's other famous pirate Blackbeard the Pirate, but was never able to shake off the legacy of Long John Silver.
Robert Newton was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. Years later Nicholas Newton scattered his father's ashes in the sea in Mount's Bay, Cornwall, near Lamorna where he had spent his childhood.
Category:English film actors Category:English stage actors Category:English television actors Category:People from Shaftesbury Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:1905 births Category:1956 deaths
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| 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) |
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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| Name | Harold Arlen |
|---|---|
| Imagesize | 220px |
| Caption | Harold Arlen, 1939 |
| Birth name | Hyman Arluck |
| Birth date | February 15, 1905 |
| Birth place | Buffalo, New York |
| Death date | April 23, 1986 |
| Death place | New York City, New York |
| Spouse | Anya Taranda (1937-1970) |
| Academyawards | Best Original Song 1939 The Wizard of Oz for Over the Rainbow |
In 1929, Arlen composed his first well-known song: "Get Happy" (with lyrics by Ted Koehler). Throughout the early and mid-1930s, Arlen and Koehler wrote shows for the Cotton Club, a popular Harlem night club, as well as for Broadway musicals and Hollywood films. Arlen and Koehler's partnership resulted in a number of hit songs, including the familiar standards "Let's Fall in Love" and "Stormy Weather." Arlen continued to perform as a pianist and vocalist with some success, most notably on records with Leo Reisman's society dance orchestra.
Arlen's compositions have always been popular with jazz musicians because of his facility at incorporating a blues feeling into the idiom of the conventional American popular song.
In the mid-1930s, Arlen married, and spent increasing time in California, writing for movie musicals. It was at this time that he began working with lyricist E.Y. "Yip" Harburg. In 1938, the team was hired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to compose songs for The Wizard of Oz. The most famous of these is the song "Over the Rainbow" for which they won the Academy Award for Best Music, Original Song. They also wrote "Down with Love", a song later featured in the 2003 movie Down with Love.
Arlen was a longtime friend and former roommate of actor Ray Bolger who would star in The Wizard of Oz, the film for which "Over the Rainbow" was written.
In the 1940s, he teamed up with lyricist Johnny Mercer, and continued to write hit songs like "Blues in the Night", "That Old Black Magic," "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive," "Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home" and "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" .
Arlen composed two defining tunes which bookend Judy Garland's musical persona: as a yearning, innocent girl in "Over the Rainbow" and a world-weary, "chic chanteuse" with "The Man that Got Away".
*1920 (age 15) He formed his first professional band, Hyman Arluck's Snappy Trio.
*1921 (16) Against his parent's wishes he left home.
*1923 (18) With his new band - The Southbound Shufflers, performed on the Crystal Beach lake boat "Canadiana" during the summer of 1923.
*1924 (19) Performed at Lake Shore Manor during the summer of 1924.
*1924 (19) Wrote his first song, collaborating with friend Hyman Cheiffetz to write "My Gal, My Pal". Copyrighting the song as "My Gal, Won't You Please Come Back to Me?" and listed lyrics by Cheiffetz and music by Harold Arluck.
*1925 (20) Makes his way to New York City with the group, The Buffalodians, with Arlen playing piano.
*1926 (21) Had first published song, collaborating with Dick George to compose "Minor Gaff (Blues Fantasy)" under the name Harold Arluck.
*1928 (23) Chaim (Life) (or Hyman) Arluck renames himself Harold Arlen, a name that combined his parents' surnames (his mother's maiden name was Orlin).
*1929 (24) Landed a singing and acting role as Cokey Joe in the musical "The Great Day"
*1929 (24) Composed his first well known song - (Get Happy) under the name Harold Arlen.
*1929 (24) Signed a yearlong song writing contract with the George and Arthur Piantadosi firm.
*1930–1934 (25-29) Wrote music for the Cotton Club.
*1933 (28) At a party, along with partner Ted Koehler, wrote the major hit song "Stormy Weather"
*1933 (28) Billboard heralded Shakespeare as the most prolific playwright in history, and Arlen as the most prolific composer.
*1935 (30) Went back to California after being signed by Samuel Goldwyn to write songs for the film "Strike Me Pink"
*1937 (32) Married 22-year-old Anya Taranda, a celebrated Powers Agency model and former Earl Carroll and Busby Berkeley showgirl, actress, and one of the Original "Breck Girls."
.]]
*1938 (33) While driving along Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and stopping in front of Schwab's Drug Store came up with the song "Over the Rainbow"
*1941 (36) Wrote "Blues in the Night"
*1942 (37) Along with Johnny Mercer, he wrote one of his most famous songs, "That Old Black Magic"
*1943 (38) Wrote "My Shining Hour"
*1944 (39) While driving with songwriter partner Johnny Mercer came up with the song "Accentuate the Positive".
*1945 (40) In a single evening's work in October with Johnny Mercer came up with the song "Come Rain or Come Shine"
*1949 (44) Collaborated with Ralph Blane to write the score for "My Blue Heaven".
*1950 (45) Worked with old pal Johnny Mercer on the film "The Petty Girl", out of which came the song "Fancy Free".
*1951 (46) His wife Anya was institutionalized in a sanitarium for 7 years after repeatedly threatening her husband and others with physical harm.
*1952 (47) Teamed up with Dorothy Fields on the film "The Farmer Takes a Wife"
*1953 (48) Harold's father, Cantor Samuel Arluck, died.
*1954 (49) The Musical "A Star is Born" starring Judy Garland singing the now classic, Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin collaboration, "The Man That Got Away"
*1954 (49) Becomes dangerously ill with a bleeding ulcer and is hospitalized but recovers to work with Truman Capote on the musical House of Flowers.
*1956 (51) His mother Celia Arluck dies and Harold doesn't touch music for over a year, mourning her loss.
*1962 (56) Wrote the score for the animated musical Gay Purr-ee, lyrics by E.Y. Harburg.
*1961–1976 (55-71) Wrote over 50 songs and continued a successful career.
*1970 (65) Arlen's wife Anya Taranda dies from a brain tumor. Arlen begins to lose interest in life, withdrawing from friends and family and becoming more reclusive.
*1974 (69) Composes theme song for the ABC sitcom Paper Moon, based on a 1973 Peter Bogdanovich film of the same name. [Paper Moon was a hit song in *1933* and gave its name to the movie, not the other way around.]
*1986 (81) Harold Arlen dies in New York City and is interred next to his wife at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.
Category:1905 births Category:1986 deaths Category:American musical theatre composers Category:Best Song Academy Award winning songwriters Category:Burials at Ferncliff Cemetery Category:Jewish American composers and songwriters Category:American Jews Category:People from Buffalo, New York Category:Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees Category:Vaudeville performers
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| Caption | Henderson at the 1989 Emmy Awards |
|---|---|
| Birthname | Florence Agnes Henderson |
| Birth date | February 14, 1934 |
| Birth place | Dale, Indiana, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actress/Singer |
| Yearsactive | 1954–present |
| Spouse | Ira Bernstein (1956-1985) (divorced) John Kappas (1987-2002) (his death) |
| Website | http://www.flohome.com/ |
Florence Agnes Henderson (born February 14, 1934) is an American actress and singer, best known for playing the role of Carol Brady in the television program The Brady Bunch, which ran from 1969 to 1974. As of 2010, she hosts the American TV talk show The Florence Henderson Show.
Her most widely seen role was as Carol Brady in The Brady Bunch which aired on ABC from 1969 until 1974. Shirley Jones had previously turned down the role. Primarily owing to her role in The Brady Bunch, Henderson was ranked by TV Land and Entertainment Weekly as one of the 100 Greatest TV Icons.
Henderson was a frequent panelist on the original version of the television game show Hollywood Squares and made occasional appearances on The $25,000 Pyramid.
Henderson was the spokeswoman for Wesson cooking oil from 1976 to 1996. During that time, she hosted a cooking show on TNN called Country Kitchen, and also did ads for Prange's, a former Wisconsin department store chain. Henderson co-hosted the talk show Later Today on NBC (1999–2000) with co-hosts Jodi Applegate and Asha Blake. As of the late 2000s, she is the spokeswoman for Polident denture cleanser. In 2003, Henderson seemed to poke fun at her wholesome image by appearing in a Pepsi Twist television commercial with Ozzy Osbourne.
Henderson has also appeared with her TV children, as with Christopher Knight on the reality television series My Fair Brady. She is also in the sixth season of VH1's Surreal Life.
In most years since the mid-1990s, the song "God Bless America" has been performed by Henderson at the Indianapolis 500 accompanied by the Purdue All-American Marching Band, Henderson being a friend of the Hulman-George family, the owners of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
She appeared in the "Weird Al" Yankovic video for "Amish Paradise" and co-hosted the daily talk show "Living Live" with former Designing Women star Meshach Taylor on Retirement Living TV. The show was reworked to focus on her and was renamed "The Florence Henderson Show". In 2002 she made a memorable guest appearance on comedy improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway?, participating in on-screen kisses with Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie.
Since 2008, Henderson has been the host of her own television series, The Florence Henderson Show, which airs on RLTV (Retirement Living TV). The show was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2010. In May 2010, Henderson did a series of promotional radio ads for Fox TV. On the July 12, 2010 edition of WWE Raw, Henderson appeared as the night's guest host.
Henderson was one of twelve celebrities competing on the eleventh season of Dancing with the Stars which premiered on September 20, 2010. Her professional partner was Corky Ballas. On October 19, 2010 she was voted off the show.
Category:American female singers Category:American film actors Category:American musical theatre actors Category:American stage actors Category:American Roman Catholics Category:American television actors Category:Actors from Indiana Category:People from Spencer County, Indiana Category:American Academy of Dramatic Arts alumni Category:1934 births Category:Living people Category:Participants in American reality television series Category:Dancing with the Stars (US TV series) participants
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| Name | Elvis Presley |
|---|---|
| Img alt | A young man dancing, swiveling his hips. He has dark hair, short and slicked up a bit. He wears an unbuttoned band-collared jacket over a shirt with bold black-and-white horizontal stripes. Behind him, on either side, are a pair of barred frames, like prison doors. |
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | Elvis Aaron Presley |
| Born | January 08, 1935 Tupelo, Mississippi, United States |
| Died | August 16, 1977 Memphis, Tennessee, United States |
| Genre | Rock and roll, pop, rockabilly, country, blues, gospel, R&B; |
| Associated acts | The Blue Moon Boys, The Jordanaires, The Imperials |
| Occupation | Musician, actor |
| Instrument | Vocals, guitar, piano |
| Years active | 1954–77 |
| Label | Sun, RCA Victor |
| Url |
Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, Presley moved to Memphis, Tennessee, with his family at the age of 13. He began his career there in 1954 when Sun Records owner Sam Phillips, eager to bring the sound of African American music to a wider audience, saw in Presley the means to realize his ambition. Accompanied by guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, Presley was one of the originators of rockabilly, an uptempo, backbeat-driven fusion of country and rhythm and blues. RCA Victor acquired his contract in a deal arranged by Colonel Tom Parker, who would manage the singer for over two decades. Presley's first RCA single, "Heartbreak Hotel", released in January 1956, was a number one hit. He became the leading figure of the newly popular sound of rock and roll with a series of network television appearances and chart-topping records. His energized interpretations of songs, many from African American sources, and his uninhibited performance style made him enormously popular—and controversial. In November 1956, he made his film debut in Love Me Tender.
Conscripted into military service in 1958, Presley relaunched his recording career two years later with some of his most commercially successful work. He staged few concerts, however, and, guided by Parker, proceeded to devote much of the 1960s to making Hollywood movies and soundtrack albums, most of them critically derided. In 1968, after seven years away from the stage, he returned to live performance in a celebrated comeback television special that led to an extended Las Vegas concert residency and a string of profitable tours. In 1973, Presley staged the first concert broadcast globally via satellite, Aloha from Hawaii, seen by approximately 1.5 billion viewers. Prescription drug abuse severely compromised his health, and he died suddenly in 1977 at the age of 42.
Presley is regarded as one of the most important figures of 20th-century popular culture. He had a versatile voice and unusually wide success encompassing many genres, including country, pop ballads, gospel, and blues. He is the best-selling solo artist in the history of popular music. Nominated for 14 competitive Grammys, he won three, and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award at age 36. He has been inducted into four music halls of fame.
Presley's ancestry was primarily a Western European mix—Scots-Irish, with some French Norman; one of Gladys's great-great-grandmothers was Cherokee. According to a third cousin of Presley's, one of Gladys's great-grandmothers was Jewish. Gladys was regarded by relatives and friends as the dominant member of the small family. Vernon moved from one odd job to the next, evidencing little ambition. The family often relied on help from neighbors and government food assistance. In 1938, they lost their home after Vernon was found guilty of altering a check written by the landowner. He was jailed for eight months, and Gladys and Elvis moved in with relatives.
In September 1941, Presley entered first grade at East Tupelo Consolidated, where his instructors regarded him as "average". He was encouraged to enter a singing contest after impressing his schoolteacher with a rendition of Red Foley's country song "Old Shep" during morning prayers. The contest, held at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show on October 3, 1945, saw his first public performance: dressed as a cowboy, the ten-year-old Presley stood on a chair to reach the microphone and sang "Old Shep". He recalled placing fifth. A few months later, Presley received for his birthday his first guitar. He had hoped for something else—by different accounts, either a bicycle or a rifle. Over the following year, he received basic guitar lessons from two of his uncles and the new pastor at the family's church. Presley recalled, "I took the guitar, and I watched people, and I learned to play a little bit. But I would never sing in public. I was very shy about it."
Entering a new school, Milam, for sixth grade in September 1946, Presley was regarded as a loner. The following year, he began bringing his guitar in on a daily basis. He would play and sing during lunchtime, and was often teased as a "trashy" kid who played hillbilly music. The family was by then living in a largely African American neighborhood. A devotee of Mississippi Slim's show on the Tupelo radio station WELO, Presley was described as "crazy about music" by Slim's younger brother, a classmate of Presley's, who often took him in to the station. Slim supplemented Presley's guitar tuition by demonstrating chord techniques. When his protégé was 12 years old, Slim scheduled him for two on-air performances. Presley was overcome by stage fright the first time, but succeeded in performing the following week.
During his junior year, Presley began to stand out more among his classmates, largely because of his appearance: he grew out his sideburns and styled his hair with rose oil and Vaseline. On his own time, he would head down to Beale Street, the heart of Memphis's thriving blues scene, and gaze longingly at the wild, flashy clothes in the windows of Lansky Brothers. By his senior year, he was wearing them. Overcoming his reticence about performing outside the Courts, he competed in Humes's Annual "Minstrel" show in April 1953. Singing and playing guitar, he opened with "Till I Waltz Again With You", a recent hit for Teresa Brewer. Presley recalled that the performance did much for his reputation: "I wasn't popular in school ... I failed music—only thing I ever failed. And then they entered me in this talent show ... when I came onstage I heard people kind of rumbling and whispering and so forth, 'cause nobody knew I even sang. It was amazing how popular I became after that."
Presley, who never received formal music training or learned to read music, studied and played by ear. He frequented record stores with jukeboxes and listening booths. He knew all of Hank Snow's songs and he loved records by other country singers such as Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Ted Daffan, Jimmie Rodgers, Jimmie Davis, and Bob Wills. The Southern Gospel singer Jake Hess, one of his favorite performers, was a significant influence on his ballad-singing style. He was a regular audience member at the monthly All-Night Singings downtown, where many of the white gospel groups that performed reflected the influence of African American spiritual music. He adored the music of black gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Like some of his peers, he may have attended blues venues—of necessity, in the segregated South, only on nights designated for exclusively white audiences. He certainly listened to the regional radio stations that played "race records": spirituals, blues, and the modern, backbeat-heavy sound of rhythm and blues. Many of his future recordings were inspired by local African American musicians such as Arthur Crudup and Rufus Thomas. B.B. King recalled that he knew Presley before he was popular when they both used to frequent Beale Street. By the time he graduated high school in June 1953, Presley had already singled out music as his future.
Not long after, he failed an audition for a local vocal quartet, the Songfellows. He explained to his father, "They told me I couldn't sing." Songfellow Jim Hamill later claimed that he was turned down because he did not demonstrate an ear for harmony at the time. In April, Presley began working for the Crown Electric company as a truck driver. His friend Ronnie Smith, after playing a few local gigs with him, suggested he contact Eddie Bond, leader of Smith's professional band, which had an opening for a vocalist. Bond rejected him after a tryout, advising Presley to stick to truck driving "because you're never going to make it as a singer."
Phillips, meanwhile, was always on the lookout for someone who could bring the sound of the black musicians on whom Sun focused to a broader audience. As Keisker reported, "Over and over I remember Sam saying, 'If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.'" In June, he acquired a demo recording of a ballad, "Without You", that he thought might suit the teenaged singer. Presley came by the studio, but was unable to do it justice. Despite this, Phillips asked Presley to sing as many numbers as he knew. He was sufficiently affected by what he heard to invite two local musicians, guitarist Winfield "Scotty" Moore and upright bass player Bill Black, to work something up with Presley for a recording session. }} The session, held the evening of July 5, proved entirely unfruitful until late in the night. As they were about to give up and go home, Presley took his guitar and launched into a 1946 blues number, Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right". Moore recalled, "All of a sudden, Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam, I think, had the door to the control booth open ... he stuck his head out and said, 'What are you doing?' And we said, 'We don't know.' 'Well, back up,' he said, 'try to find a place to start, and do it again.'" Phillips quickly began taping; this was the sound he had been looking for. Three days later, popular Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips played "That's All Right" on his Red, Hot, and Blue show. Listeners began phoning in, eager to find out who the singer was. The interest was such that Phillips played the record repeatedly during the last two hours of his show. Interviewing Presley on-air, Phillips asked him what high school he attended in order to clarify his color for the many callers who had assumed he was black. During the next few days the trio recorded a bluegrass number, Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky", again in a distinctive style and employing a jury-rigged echo effect that Sam Phillips dubbed "slapback". A single was pressed with "That's All Right" on the A side and "Blue Moon of Kentucky" on the reverse.
By early 1955, Presley's regular Hayride appearances, constant touring, and well-received record releases had made him a substantial regional star, from Tennessee to West Texas. In January, Neal signed a formal management contract with Presley and brought the singer to the attention of Colonel Tom Parker, whom he considered the best promoter in the music business. Parker—Dutch-born, though he claimed to be from West Virginia—had acquired an honorary colonel's commission from country singer turned Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis. Having successfully managed top country star Eddy Arnold, he was now working with the new number one country singer, Hank Snow. Parker booked Presley on Snow's February tour. When the tour reached Odessa, Texas, a 19-year-old Roy Orbison saw Presley for the first time: "His energy was incredible, his instinct was just amazing. ... I just didn't know what to make of it. There was just no reference point in the culture to compare it." Presley made his television debut on March 3 on the KSLA-TV broadcast of Louisiana Hayride. Soon after, he failed an audition for Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts on the CBS television network. By August, Sun had released ten sides credited to "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill"; on the latest recordings, the trio were joined by a drummer. Some of the songs, like "That's All Right", were in what one Memphis journalist described as the "R&B; idiom of negro field jazz"; others, like "Blue Moon of Kentucky", were "more in the country field", "but there was a curious blending of the two different musics in both". This blend of styles made it difficult for Presley's music to find radio airplay. According to Neal, many country music disc jockeys would not play it because he sounded too much like a black artist and none of the rhythm and blues stations would touch him because "he sounded too much like a hillbilly." The blend came to be known as rockabilly. At the time, Presley was variously billed as "The King of Western Bop", "The Hillbilly Cat", and "The Memphis Flash".
Presley renewed Neal's management contract in August 1955, simultaneously appointing Parker as his special adviser. The group maintained an extensive touring schedule throughout the second half of the year. Neal recalled, "It was almost frightening, the reaction that came to Elvis from the teenaged boys. So many of them, through some sort of jealousy, would practically hate him. There were occasions in some towns in Texas when we'd have to be sure to have a police guard because somebody'd always try to take a crack at him. They'd get a gang and try to waylay him or something." The trio became a quartet when Hayride drummer Fontana joined as a full member. In mid-October, they played a few shows in support of Bill Haley, whose "Rock Around the Clock" had been a number one hit the previous year. Haley observed that Presley had a natural feel for rhythm, and advised him to sing fewer ballads.
At the Country Disc Jockey Convention in early November, Presley was voted the year's most promising male artist. Several record companies had by now shown interest in signing him. After three major labels made offers of up to $25,000, Parker and Phillips struck a deal with RCA Victor on November 21 to acquire Presley's Sun contract for an unprecedented $40,000. Presley, at 20, was still a minor, so his father signed the contract. Parker arranged with the owners of Hill and Range Publishing, Jean and Julian Aberbach, to create two entities, Elvis Presley Music and Gladys Music, to handle all of the new material recorded by Presley. Songwriters were obliged to forego one third of their customary royalties in exchange for having him perform their compositions. By December, RCA had begun to heavily promote its new singer, and before month's end had reissued many of his Sun recordings.
The second Milton Berle Show appearance came on June 5 at NBC's Hollywood studio, amid another hectic tour. Berle persuaded the singer to leave his guitar backstage, advising, "Let 'em see you, son." During the performance, Presley abruptly halted an uptempo rendition of "Hound Dog" with a wave of his arm and launched into a slow, grinding version accentuated with energetic, exaggerated body movements. Presley's gyrations created a storm of controversy. Television critics were outraged: Jack Gould of The New York Times wrote, "Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability. ... His phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner's aria in a bathtub. ... His one specialty is an accented movement of the body ... primarily identified with the repertoire of the blond bombshells of the burlesque runway." Ben Gross of the New York Daily News opined that popular music "has reached its lowest depths in the 'grunt and groin' antics of one Elvis Presley. ... Elvis, who rotates his pelvis ... gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos". Ed Sullivan, whose own variety show was the nation's most popular, declared him "unfit for family viewing". To Presley's displeasure, he soon found himself being referred to as "Elvis the Pelvis", which he called "one of the most childish expressions I ever heard, comin' from an adult."
The next day, Presley recorded "Hound Dog", along with "Any Way You Want Me" and "Don't Be Cruel". The Jordanaires sang harmony, as they had on The Steve Allen Show; they would work with Presley through the 1960s. A few days later, the singer made an outdoor concert appearance in Memphis at which he announced, "You know, those people in New York are not gonna change me none. I'm gonna show you what the real Elvis is like tonight." In August, a judge in Jacksonville, Florida, ordered Presley to tame his act. Throughout the following performance, he largely kept still, except for wiggling his little finger suggestively in mockery of the order. The single pairing "Don't Be Cruel" with "Hound Dog" ruled the top of the charts for 11 weeks—a mark that would not be surpassed for 36 years. Recording sessions for Presley's second album took place in Hollywood during the first week of September. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the writers of "Hound Dog", contributed "Love Me".
Allen's show with Presley had, for the first time, beaten CBS's Ed Sullivan Show in the ratings. Sullivan, despite his June pronouncement, booked the singer for three appearances for an unprecedented $50,000. The first, on September 9, 1956, was seen by approximately 60 million viewers—a record 82.6 percent of the television audience. Actor Charles Laughton hosted the show, filling in while Sullivan recuperated from a car accident. Presley appeared in two segments that night from CBS Television City in Hollywood. According to Elvis legend, Presley was shot only from the waist up. Watching clips of the Allen and Berle shows with his producer, Sullivan had opined that Presley "got some kind of device hanging down below the crotch of his pants–so when he moves his legs back and forth you can see the outline of his cock. ... I think it's a Coke bottle. ... We just can't have this on a Sunday night. This is a family show!" Sullivan publicly told TV Guide, "As for his gyrations, the whole thing can be controlled with camera shots." In fact, Presley was shown head-to-toe in the first and second shows. Though the camerawork was relatively discreet during his debut, with leg-concealing closeups when he danced, the studio audience reacted in customary style: screaming. Presley's performance of his forthcoming single, the ballad "Love Me Tender", prompted a record-shattering million advance orders. More than any other single event, it was this first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show that made Presley a national celebrity of barely precedented proportions.
Accompanying Presley's rise to fame, a cultural shift was taking place that he both helped inspire and came to symbolize. Igniting the "biggest pop craze since Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra ... Presley brought rock'n'roll into the mainstream of popular culture", writes historian Marty Jezer. "As Presley set the artistic pace, other artists followed. ... Presley, more than anyone else, gave the young a belief in themselves as a distinct and somehow unified generation—the first in America ever to feel the power of an integrated youth culture."
Presley returned to the Sullivan show, hosted this time by its namesake, on October 28. After the performance, crowds in Nashville and St. Louis burned him in effigy. His first motion picture, Love Me Tender, was released on November 21. Though he was not top billed, the film's original title—The Reno Brothers—was changed to capitalize on his latest number one record: "Love Me Tender" had hit the top of the charts earlier that month. To further take advantage of Presley's popularity, four musical numbers were added to what was originally a straight acting role. The movie was panned by the critics but did very well at the box office. Presley would receive top billing on every subsequent film he made.
On December 4, Presley dropped into Sun Records where Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis were recording and jammed with them. Though Phillips no longer had the right to release any Presley material, he made sure the session was captured on tape. The results became legendary as the "Million Dollar Quartet" recordings—Johnny Cash was long thought to have played as well, but he was present only briefly at Phillips' instigation for a photo opportunity. The year ended with a front page story in the Wall Street Journal reporting that Presley merchandise had brought in $22 million on top of his record sales, and Billboards declaration that he had placed more songs in the top 100 than any other artist since records were first charted. In his first full year on RCA, one of the music industry's largest companies, Presley had accounted for over 50 percent of the label's singles sales.
Presley undertook three brief tours during the year, continuing to generate a crazed audience response. A Detroit newspaper suggested that "the trouble with going to see Elvis Presley is that you're liable to get killed." Villanova students pelted him with eggs in Philadelphia, and in Vancouver, the crowd rioted after the end of the show, destroying the stage. Frank Sinatra, who had famously inspired the swooning of teenaged girls in the 1940s, condemned the new musical phenomenon. In a magazine article, he decried rock and roll as "brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious. ... It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people. It smells phoney and false. It is sung, played and written, for the most part, by cretinous goons. ... This rancid-smelling aphrodisiac I deplore." Asked for a response, Presley said, "I admire the man. He has a right to say what he wants to say. He is a great success and a fine actor, but I think he shouldn't have said it. ... This is a trend, just the same as he faced when he started years ago."
Leiber and Stoller were again in the studio for the recording of Elvis' Christmas Album. Toward the end of the session, they wrote a song on the spot at Presley's request: "Santa Claus Is Back In Town", an innuendo-laden blues. The holiday release stretched Presley's string of number one albums to four and would eventually become the best selling Christmas album of all time. After the session, Moore and Black—drawing only modest weekly salaries, sharing in none of Presley's massive financial success—resigned. Though they were brought back on a per diem basis a few weeks later, it was clear that they had not been part of Presley's inner circle for some time. On December 20, Presley received his draft notice. He was granted a deferment to finish the forthcoming King Creole, in which $350,000 had already been invested by Paramount and producer Hal Wallis. A couple of weeks into the new year, "Don't", another Leiber and Stoller tune, became Presley's tenth number one seller. It had been only 21 months since "Heartbreak Hotel" had brought him to the top for the first time. Recording sessions for the King Creole soundtrack were held in Hollywood mid-January. Leiber and Stoller provided three songs and were again on hand, but it would be the last time they worked closely with Presley. A studio session on February 1 marked another ending: it was the final occasion on which Black was to perform with Presley. He died in 1965.
Soon after Presley had commenced basic training at Fort Hood, he received a visit from Eddie Fadal, a businessman he had met when on tour in Texas. Fadal reported that Presley had become convinced his career was finished—"He firmly believed that." During a two-week leave in early June, Presley cut five sides in Nashville. He returned to training, but in early August his mother was diagnosed with hepatitis and her condition worsened. Presley was granted emergency leave to visit her, arriving in Memphis on August 12. Two days later, she died of heart failure, aged 46. Presley was devastated; their relationship had remained extremely close—even into his adulthood, they would use baby talk with each other and Presley would address her with pet names.
en route to Germany, September 29, 1958]]
After training at Fort Hood, Presley joined the 3rd Armored Division in Friedberg, Germany, on October 1. Introduced to amphetamines by a sergeant while on maneuvers, he became "practically evangelical about their benefits"—not only for energy, but for "strength" and weight loss, as well—and many of his friends in the outfit joined him in indulging. The Army also introduced Presley to karate, which he studied seriously, later including it in his live performances. Fellow soldiers have attested to Presley's wish to be seen as an able, ordinary soldier, despite his fame, and to his generosity while in the service. He donated his Army pay to charity, purchased TV sets for the base, and bought an extra set of fatigues for everyone in his outfit.
While in Friedberg, Presley met 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu. They would eventually marry after a seven-and-a-half-year courtship. In her autobiography, Priscilla says that despite his worries that it would ruin his career, Parker convinced Presley that to gain popular respect, he should serve his country as a regular soldier rather than in Special Services, where he would have been able to give some musical performances and remain in touch with the public. Media reports echoed Presley's concerns about his career, but RCA producer Steve Sholes and Freddy Bienstock of Hill and Range had carefully prepared for his two-year hiatus. Armed with a substantial amount of unreleased material, they kept up a regular stream of successful releases. Between his induction and discharge, Presley had ten top 40 hits, including "Wear My Ring Around Your Neck", the best-selling "Hard Headed Woman", and "One Night" in 1958, and "(Now and Then There's) A Fool Such as I" and the number one "A Big Hunk o' Love" in 1959. RCA also managed to generate four albums compiling old material during this period, most successfully Elvis' Golden Records (1958), which hit number three on the LP chart.
Presley returned to television on May 12 as a guest on —ironic for both stars, given Sinatra's not-so-distant excoriation of rock and roll. Also known as Welcome Home Elvis, the show had been taped in late March, the only time all year Presley performed in front of an audience. Parker secured an unheard-of $125,000 fee for eight minutes of singing. The broadcast drew an enormous viewership.
G.I. Blues, the soundtrack to Presley's first film since his return, was a number one album in October. His first LP of sacred material, His Hand in Mine, followed two months later. It reached number 13 on the U.S. pop chart and number 3 in Great Britain, remarkable figures for a gospel album. In February 1961, Presley performed two shows for a benefit event in Memphis, on behalf of 24 local charities. During a luncheon preceding the event, RCA presented him with a plaque certifying worldwide sales of over 75 million records. A 12-hour Nashville session in mid-March yielded nearly all of Presley's next studio album, Something for Everybody. As described by John Robertson, it exemplifies the Nashville sound, the restrained, cosmopolitan style that would define country music in the 1960s. Presaging much of what was to come from Presley himself over the next half-decade, the album is largely "a pleasant, unthreatening pastiche of the music that had once been Elvis's birthright." It would be his sixth number one LP. Another benefit concert, raising money for a Pearl Harbor memorial, was staged on March 25, in Hawaii. It was to be Presley's last public performance for seven years.
Of Presley's films in the 1960s, 15 were accompanied by soundtrack albums and another 5 by soundtrack EPs. The movies' rapid production and release schedules—he frequently starred in three a year—affected his music. According to Jerry Leiber, the soundtrack formula was already evident before Presley left for the Army: "three ballads, one medium-tempo [number], one up-tempo, and one break blues boogie". As the decade wore on, the quality of the soundtrack songs grew "progressively worse". Julie Parrish, who appeared in Paradise, Hawaiian Style (1966), says that he hated many of the songs chosen for his films. The Jordanaires' Gordon Stoker describes how Presley would retreat from the studio microphone: "The material was so bad that he felt like he couldn't sing it." Most of the movie albums featured a song or two from respected writers such as the team of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. But by and large, according to biographer Jerry Hopkins, the numbers seemed to be "written on order by men who never really understood Elvis or rock and roll." Regardless of the songs' quality, it has been argued that Presley generally sang them well, with commitment. Critic Dave Marsh heard the opposite: "Presley isn't trying, probably the wisest course in the face of material like 'No Room to Rumba in a Sports Car' and 'Rock-a-Hula Baby.'"
In the first half of the decade, three of Presley's soundtrack albums hit number one on the pop charts, and a few of his most popular songs came from his films, such as "Can't Help Falling in Love" (1961) and "Return to Sender" (1962). ("Viva Las Vegas", the title track to the 1964 film, was a minor hit as a B-side, and became truly popular only later.) But, as with artistic merit, the commercial returns steadily diminished. During a five-year span—1964 through 1968—Presley had only one top ten hit: "Crying in the Chapel" (1965), a gospel number recorded back in 1960. As for non-movie albums, between the June 1962 release of Pot Luck and the November 1968 release of the soundtrack to the television special that signaled his comeback, only one LP of new material by Presley was issued: the gospel album How Great Thou Art (1967). It won him his first Grammy Award, for Best Sacred Performance. As described in The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, Presley was "arguably the greatest white gospel singer of his time [and] really the last rock & roll artist to make gospel as vital a component of his musical personality as his secular songs."
Shortly before Christmas 1966, more than seven years since they first met, Presley proposed to Priscilla Beaulieu. They were married on May 1, 1967, in a brief ceremony in their suite at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. The flow of formulaic movies and assembly-line soundtracks rolled on. It was not until October 1967, when the Clambake soundtrack LP registered record low sales for a new Presley album, that RCA executives recognized a problem. "By then, of course, the damage had been done", as historians Connie Kirchberg and Marc Hendrickx put it. "Elvis was viewed as a joke by serious music lovers and a has-been to all but his most loyal fans."
Recorded in late June, the special, called simply Elvis, aired on December 3, 1968. Later known as the '68 Comeback Special, the show featured lavishly staged studio productions as well as songs performed with a band in front of a small audience—Presley's first live performances since 1961. The live segments saw Presley clad in tight black leather, singing and playing guitar in an uninhibited style reminiscent of his early rock and roll days. Director and coproducer Steve Binder had worked hard to reassure the nervous singer and to produce a show that was far from the hour of Christmas songs Parker had originally planned. The show, NBC's highest rated that season, captured 42 percent of the total viewing audience. Jon Landau of Eye magazine remarked, "There is something magical about watching a man who has lost himself find his way back home. He sang with the kind of power people no longer expect of rock 'n' roll singers. He moved his body with a lack of pretension and effort that must have made Jim Morrison green with envy." The New Rolling Stone Album Guide calls the performance one of "emotional grandeur and historical resonance."
By January 1969, the single "If I Can Dream", written for the special, reached number 12. The soundtrack album broke into the top ten. According to friend Jerry Schilling, the special reminded Presley of what "he had not been able to do for years, being able to choose the people; being able to choose what songs and not being told what had to be on the soundtrack. ... He was out of prison, man." Binder said of Presley's reaction, "I played Elvis the 60-minute show, and he told me in the screening room, 'Steve, it's the greatest thing I've ever done in my life. I give you my word I will never sing a song I don't believe in.'"
Presley was keen to resume regular live performing. Following the success of the Comeback Special, offers came in from around the world. The London Palladium offered Parker $28,000 for a one-week engagement. He responded, "That's fine for me, now how much can you get for Elvis?" In May, the brand new International Hotel in Las Vegas, boasting the largest showroom in the city, announced that it had booked Presley. He was scheduled to perform 57 shows over four weeks beginning July 31. Moore, Fontana, and the Jordanaires declined to participate, afraid of losing the lucrative session work they had in Nashville. Presley assembled new, top-notch accompaniment, led by guitarist James Burton and including two gospel groups, The Imperials and Sweet Inspirations. Nonetheless, he was nervous: his only previous Las Vegas engagement, in 1956, had been dismal. Parker, who intended to make Presley's return the show business event of the year, oversaw a major promotional push. For his part, hotel owner Kirk Kerkorian arranged to send his own plane to New York to fly in rock journalists for the debut performance.
Presley took to the stage without introduction. The audience of 2,200, including many celebrities, gave him a standing ovation before he sang a note and another after his performance. A third followed his encore, "Can't Help Falling in Love" (a song that would be his closing number for much of the 1970s). At a press conference after the show, when a journalist referred to him as "The King", Presley gestured toward Fats Domino, who was taking in the scene. "No," Presley said, "that's the real king of rock and roll." The next day, Parker's negotiations with the hotel resulted in a five-year contract for Presley to play each February and August, at an annual salary of $1 million. Newsweek commented, "There are several unbelievable things about Elvis, but the most incredible is his staying power in a world where meteoric careers fade like shooting stars." Rolling Stone called Presley "supernatural, his own resurrection." In November, Presley's final non-concert movie, Change of Habit, opened. The double album From Memphis To Vegas/From Vegas To Memphis came out the same month; the first LP consisted of live performances from the International, the second of more cuts from the American Sound sessions. "Suspicious Minds" reached the top of the charts—Presley's first U.S. pop number one in over seven years, and his last.
Cassandra Peterson, later television's Elvira, met Presley during this period in Las Vegas, where she was working as showgirl. She recalls of their encounter, "He was so anti-drug when I met him. I mentioned to him that I smoked marijuana, and he was just appalled. He said, 'Don't ever do that again.'" Presley was not only deeply opposed to recreational drugs, he also rarely drank. Several of his family members had been alcoholics, a fate he intended to avoid.
The album That's the Way It Is, produced to accompany the documentary and featuring both studio and live recordings, marked a stylistic shift. As music historian John Robertson notes, "The authority of Presley's singing helped disguise the fact that the album stepped decisively away from the American-roots inspiration of the Memphis sessions towards a more middle-of-the-road sound. With country put on the back burner, and soul and R&B; left in Memphis, what was left was very classy, very clean white pop—perfect for the Las Vegas crowd, but a definite retrograde step for Elvis." After the end of his International engagement on September 7, Presley embarked on a week-long concert tour, largely of the South, his first since 1958. Another week-long tour, of the West Coast, followed in November.
in the White House Oval Office, December 21, 1970]] On December 21, 1970, Presley engineered a bizarre meeting with President Richard Nixon at the White House, where he expressed his patriotism and his contempt for the hippie drug culture. He asked Nixon for a Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs badge, to add to similar items he had begun collecting and to signify official sanction of his patriotic efforts. Nixon, who apparently found the encounter awkward, expressed a belief that Presley could send a positive message to young people and that it was therefore important he "retain his credibility". Presley told Nixon that The Beatles, whose songs he regularly performed in concert during the era, exemplified what he saw as a trend of anti-Americanism and drug abuse in popular culture. (Presley and his friends had had a four-hour get-together with The Beatles five years earlier.) On hearing reports of the meeting, Paul McCartney later said that he "felt a bit betrayed. ... The great joke was that we were taking [illegal] drugs, and look what happened to him", a reference to Presley's death, hastened by prescription drug abuse.
The U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce named Presley one of its annual Ten Most Outstanding Young Men of the Nation on January 16, 1971. Not long after, the City of Memphis named the stretch of Highway 51 South on which Graceland is located "Elvis Presley Boulevard". The same year, Presley became the first rock and roll singer to be awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award (then known as the Bing Crosby Award) by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the Grammy Award organization. Three new, non-movie Presley studio albums were released in 1971, as many as had come out over the previous eight years. Best received by critics was Elvis Country, a concept record that focused on genre standards. The biggest seller was Elvis Sings the Wonderful World of Christmas, "the truest statement of all", according to Greil Marcus. "In the midst of ten painfully genteel Christmas songs, every one sung with appalling sincerity and humility, one could find Elvis tom-catting his way through six blazing minutes of 'Merry Christmas, Baby,' a raunchy old Charles Brown blues. ... If [Presley's] sin was his lifelessness, it was his sinfulness that brought him to life".
Presley and his wife, meanwhile, had become increasingly distant, barely cohabiting. In 1971, an affair he had with Joyce Bova resulted—unbeknownst to him—in her pregnancy and an abortion. He often raised the possibility of her moving in to Graceland, saying that he was likely to leave Priscilla. The Presleys separated on February 23, 1972, after Priscilla disclosed her relationship with Mike Stone, a karate instructor Presley had recommended to her. Priscilla relates that when she told him, Presley "grabbed ... and forcefully made love to" her, declaring, "This is how a real man makes love to his woman." Five months later, Presley's new girlfriend, Linda Thompson, a songwriter and one-time Memphis beauty queen, moved in with him. Presley and his wife filed for divorce on August 18.
In January 1973, Presley performed two benefit concerts for the Kui Lee Cancer Fund in connection with a groundbreaking TV special, Aloha from Hawaii. The first show served as a practice run and backup should technical problems affect the live broadcast two days later. Aired as scheduled on January 14, Aloha from Hawaii was the first global concert satellite broadcast, reaching approximately 1.5 billion viewers live and on tape delay. Presley's costume became the most recognized example of the elaborate concert garb with which his latter-day persona became closely associated. As described by Bobbie Ann Mason, "At the end of the show, when he spreads out his American Eagle cape, with the full stretched wings of the eagle studded on the back, he becomes a god figure." The , released in February, went to number one and eventually sold over 5 million copies in the United States. It proved to be Presley's last U.S. number one pop album during his lifetime.
At a midnight show the same month, four men rushed onto the stage in an apparent attack. Security men leapt to Presley's defense, and the singer's karate instinct took over as he ejected one invader from the stage himself. Following the show, he became obsessed with the idea that the men had been sent by Stone to kill him. Though they were shown to have been only overexuberant fans, he raged, "There's too much pain in me ... Stone [must] die." His outbursts continued with such intensity that a physician was unable to calm him, despite administering large doses of medication. After another two full days of raging, Red West, his friend and bodyguard, felt compelled to get a price for a contract killing and was relieved when Presley decided, "Aw hell, let's just leave it for now. Maybe it's a bit heavy."
Presley's condition declined precipitously in September. Keyboardist Tony Brown remembers the singer's arrival at a University of Maryland concert: "He fell out of the limousine, to his knees. People jumped to help, and he pushed them away like, 'Don't help me.' He walked on stage and held onto the mike for the first thirty minutes like it was a post. Everybody's looking at each other like, Is the tour gonna happen?" Guitarist John Wilkinson recalled, "He was all gut. He was slurring. He was so fucked up. ... It was obvious he was drugged. It was obvious there was something terribly wrong with his body. It was so bad the words to the songs were barely intelligible. ... I remember crying. He could barely get through the introductions". Wilkinson recounted that a few nights later in Detroit, "I watched him in his dressing room, just draped over a chair, unable to move. So often I thought, 'Boss, why don't you just cancel this tour and take a year off...?' I mentioned something once in a guarded moment. He patted me on the back and said, 'It'll be all right. Don't you worry about it.'" Presley continued to play to sellout crowds. As cultural critic Marjorie Garber describes, he was now widely seen as a garish pop crooner: "in effect he had become Liberace. Even his fans were now middle-aged matrons and blue-haired grandmothers."
On July 13, 1976, Vernon Presley—who had become deeply involved in his son's financial affairs—fired "Memphis Mafia" bodyguards Red West (Presley's friend since the 1950s), Sonny West, and David Hebler, citing the need to "cut back on expenses". Presley was in Palm Springs at the time, and some suggest the singer was too cowardly to face the three himself. Another associate of Presley's, John O'Grady, argued that the bodyguards were dropped because their rough treatment of fans had prompted too many lawsuits. However, Presley's stepbrother David Stanley has claimed that the bodyguards were fired because they were becoming more outspoken about Presley's drug dependency. Presley and Linda Thompson split in November, and he took up with a new girlfriend, Ginger Alden. He proposed to Alden and gave her an engagement ring two months later, though several of his friends later claimed that he had no serious intention of marrying again.
RCA, which had enjoyed a steady stream of product from Presley for over a decade, grew anxious as his interest in spending time in the studio waned. After a December 1973 session that produced 18 songs, enough for almost two albums, he did not enter the studio in 1974. Parker sold RCA on another concert record, . Recorded on March 20, it included a version of "How Great Thou Art" that would win Presley his third and final competitive Grammy Award. (All three of his competitive Grammy wins—out of 14 total nominations—were for gospel recordings.) Presley returned to the studio in Hollywood in March 1975, but Parker's attempts to arrange another session toward the end of the year were unsuccessful. In 1976, RCA sent a mobile studio to Graceland that made possible two full-scale recording sessions at Presley's home. Even in that comfortable context, the recording process was now a struggle for him.
}} For all the concerns of his label and manager, in studio sessions between July 1973 and October 1976, Presley recorded virtually the entire contents of six albums. Though he was no longer a major presence on the pop charts, five of those albums entered the top five of the country chart, and three went to number one: Promised Land (1975), From Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee (1976), and Moody Blue (1977). The story was similar with his singles—there were no major pop hits, but Presley was a significant force in not just the country market, but on adult contemporary radio as well. Eight studio singles from this period released during his lifetime were top ten hits on one or both charts, four in 1974 alone. "My Boy" was a number one AC hit in 1975, and "Moody Blue" topped the country chart and reached the second spot on the AC in 1976. Perhaps his most critically acclaimed recording of the era came that year, with what Greil Marcus described as his "apocalyptic attack" on the soul classic "Hurt". "If he felt the way he sounded", Dave Marsh wrote of Presley's performance, "the wonder isn't that he had only a year left to live but that he managed to survive that long."
The book Elvis: What Happened?, cowritten by the three bodyguards fired the previous year, was published on August 1. It was the first exposé to detail Presley's years of drug misuse. He was devastated by the book and tried unsuccessfully to halt its release by offering money to the publishers. By this point, he suffered from multiple ailments—glaucoma, high blood pressure, liver damage, and an enlarged colon, each aggravated, and possibly caused, by drug abuse.
Presley was scheduled to fly out of Memphis on the evening of August 16, 1977, to begin another tour. That afternoon, Alden discovered him unresponsive on his bathroom floor. Attempts to revive him failed, and death was officially pronounced at 3:30 pm at Baptist Memorial Hospital.
President Jimmy Carter issued a statement that credited Presley with having "permanently changed the face of American popular culture". Thousands of people gathered outside Graceland to view the open casket. One of Presley's cousins, Billy Mann, accepted $18,000 to secretly photograph the corpse; the picture appeared on the cover of the National Enquirers biggest-selling issue ever. Alden struck a $105,000 deal with the Enquirer for her story, but settled for less when she broke her exclusivity agreement. Presley left her nothing in his will.
Presley's funeral was held at Graceland, on Thursday, August 18. Outside the gates, a car plowed into a group of fans, killing two women and critically injuring a third. Approximately 80,000 people lined the processional route to Forest Hill Cemetery, where Presley was buried next to his mother. Within a few days, "Way Down" topped the country and UK pop charts. Following an attempt to steal the singer's body in late August, the remains of both Elvis Presley and his mother were reburied in Graceland's Meditation Garden on October 2.
Presley has been inducted into four music halls of fame: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1986), the Country Music Hall of Fame (1998), the Gospel Music Hall of Fame (2001), and the Rockabilly Hall of Fame (2007). In 1984, he received the W. C. Handy Award from the Blues Foundation and the Academy of Country Music's first Golden Hat Award. In 1987, he received the American Music Awards' Award of Merit.
A Junkie XL remix of Presley's "A Little Less Conversation" (credited as "Elvis Vs JXL") was used in a Nike advertising campaign during the 2002 FIFA World Cup. It topped the charts in over 20 countries, and was included in a compilation of Presley's number one hits, ELV1S, that was also an international success. In 2003, a remix of "Rubberneckin'", a 1969 recording of Presley's, topped the U.S. sales chart, as did a 50th-anniversary re-release of "That's All Right" the following year. The latter was an outright hit in Great Britain, reaching number three on the pop chart.
In 2005, another three reissued singles, "Jailhouse Rock", "One Night"/"I Got Stung", and "It's Now or Never", went to number one in Great Britain. A total of 17 Presley singles were reissued during the year—all made the British top five. For the fifth straight year, Forbes named Presley the top-earning deceased celebrity, with a gross income of $45 million. In 2009, he was ranked fourth. The following year, Viva Elvis: The Album was released, setting his voice to newly recorded instrumental tracks.
Presley holds the records for most songs charting in Billboards top 40 and top 100: chart statistician Joel Whitburn calculates the respective totals as 104 and 151; Presley historian Adam Victor gives 114 and 138. Presley's rankings for top ten and number one hits vary depending on how the double-sided "Hound Dog/Don't Be Cruel" and "Don't/I Beg of You" singles, which precede the inception of Billboards unified Hot 100 chart, are analyzed. According to Whitburn, Presley holds the record for most top ten hits with 38; per Billboards current assessment, he ranks second with 36 behind Madonna's 37. Whitburn and Billboard concur that The Beatles hold the record for most number one hits with 20 and that Mariah Carey is second with 18. Whitburn has Presley also with 18 and thus tied for second; Billboard has him third with 17. Presley retains the record for cumulative weeks at number one: alone at 80, according to Whitburn and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; tied with Carey at 79, according to Billboard. He holds the records for most British number one hits, with 21, and top ten hits, with 76.
At RCA, Presley's rock and roll sound grew distinct from rockabilly with group chorus vocals, more heavily amplified electric guitars and a tougher, more intense manner. While he was known for taking songs from various sources and giving them a rockabilly/rock and roll treatment, he also recorded songs in other genres from early in his career, from the pop standard "Blue Moon" at Sun to the country ballad "How's the World Treating You?" on his second LP to the blues of "Santa Claus Is Back In Town". In 1957, his first gospel record was released, the four-song EP Peace in the Valley. Certified as a million seller, it became the top-selling gospel EP in recording history. Presley would record gospel periodically for the rest of his life. }} After his return from military service in 1960, Presley continued to perform rock and roll, but the characteristic style was substantially toned down. His first post-Army single, the number one hit "Stuck on You", is typical of this shift. RCA publicity materials referred to its "mild rock beat"; discographer Ernst Jorgensen calls it "upbeat pop". The modern blues/R&B; sound captured so successfully on Elvis Is Back! was essentially abandoned for six years until such 1966–67 recordings as "Down in the Alley" and "Hi-Heel Sneakers". The singer's output during most of the 1960s emphasized pop music, often in the form of ballads such as "Are You Lonesome Tonight?", a number one in 1960. While that was a dramatic number, most of what Presley recorded for his movie soundtracks was in a much lighter vein.
While Presley performed several of his classic ballads for the '68 Comeback Special, the sound of the show was dominated by aggressive rock and roll. He would record few new straight-ahead rock and roll songs thereafter; as he explained, they were "hard to find". A significant exception was "Burning Love", his last major hit on the pop charts. Like his work of the 1950s, Presley's subsequent recordings reworked pop and country songs, but in markedly different permutations. His stylistic range now began to embrace a more contemporary rock sound as well as soul and funk. Much of Elvis In Memphis, as well as "Suspicious Minds", cut at the same sessions, reflected his new rock and soul fusion. In the mid-1970s, many of his singles found a home on country radio, the field where he first became a star.
The competence and ethics of two of the centrally involved medical professionals were seriously questioned. Before the autopsy was complete and toxicology results known, Medical Examiner Dr. Jerry Francisco declared the cause of death as cardiac arrhythmia, a condition that can be determined only in someone who is still alive. Allegations of a cover-up were widespread. While Presley's main physician, Dr. Nichopoulos, was exonerated of criminal liability for the singer's death, the facts were startling: "In the first eight months of 1977 alone, he had [prescribed] more than 10,000 doses of sedatives, amphetamines and narcotics: all in Elvis's name." His license was suspended for three months. It was permanently revoked in the 1990s after the Tennessee Medical Board brought new charges of over-prescription.
In 1994, the Presley autopsy was reopened. Coroner Dr. Joseph Davis declared, "There is nothing in any of the data that supports a death from drugs. In fact, everything points to a sudden, violent heart attack." Whether or not combined drug intoxication was in fact the cause, there is little doubt that polypharmacy contributed significantly to Presley's premature death.
Despite the largely positive view of Presley held by African Americans, a rumor spread in mid-1957 that he had at some point announced, "The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes." A journalist with the national African American weekly Jet, Louie Robinson, pursued the story. On the set of Jailhouse Rock, Presley granted him an interview, though he was no longer dealing with the mainstream press. He denied making such a statement or holding in any way to its racist view. Robinson found no evidence that the remark had ever been made, and on the contrary elicited testimony from many individuals indicating that Presley was anything but racist. Blues singer Ivory Joe Hunter, who had heard the rumor before he visited Graceland one evening, reported of Presley, "He showed me every courtesy, and I think he's one of the greatest." Though the rumored remark was wholly discredited at the time, it was still being used against Presley decades later. The identification of Presley with racism—either personally or symbolically—was expressed most famously in the lyrics of the 1989 rap hit "Fight the Power", by Public Enemy: "Elvis was a hero to most / But he never meant shit to me / Straight-up racist that sucker was / Simple and plain."
The persistence of such attitudes was fueled by resentment over the fact that Presley, whose musical and visual performance idiom owed much to African American sources, achieved the cultural acknowledgment and commercial success largely denied his black peers. Into the 21st century, the notion that Presley had "stolen" black music still found adherents. Notable among African American entertainers expressly rejecting this view was Jackie Wilson, who argued, "A lot of people have accused Elvis of stealing the black man's music, when in fact, almost every black solo entertainer copied his stage mannerisms from Elvis." And throughout his career, Presley plainly acknowledged his debt. Addressing his '68 Comeback Special audience, he said, "Rock 'n' roll music is basically gospel or rhythm and blues, or it sprang from that. People have been adding to it, adding instruments to it, experimenting with it, but it all boils down to [that]." Nine years earlier, he had said, "Rock 'n' roll has been around for many years. It used to be called rhythm and blues."
By 1967, Parker had contracts with Presley that gave him 50 percent of most of the singer's earnings on recordings, films, and merchandise. Beginning in February 1972, he took a third of the profit from live appearances; a January 1976 agreement entitled him to half of that as well. Priscilla Presley noted that "Elvis detested the business side of his career. He would sign a contract without even reading it." Presley's friend Marty Lacker regarded Parker as a "hustler and a con artist. He was only interested in 'now money'—get the buck and get gone."
Lacker was instrumental in convincing Presley to record with Memphis producer Chips Moman and his handpicked musicians at American Sound Studio in early 1969. The American Sound sessions represented a significant departure from the control customarily exerted by Hill and Range. Moman still had to deal with the publisher's staff on site, whose song suggestions he regarded as unacceptable. He was on the verge of quitting, until Presley ordered the Hill and Range personnel out of the studio. Although RCA executive Joan Deary was later full of praise for the producer's song choices and the quality of the recordings, Moman, to his fury, received neither credit on the records nor royalties for his work.
Throughout his entire career, Presley performed in only three venues outside the United States—all of them in Canada, during brief tours there in 1957. Rumors that he would play overseas for the first time were fueled in 1974 by a million-dollar bid for an Australian tour. Parker was uncharacteristically reluctant, prompting those close to Presley to speculate about the manager's past and the reasons for his apparent unwillingness to apply for a passport. Parker ultimately squelched any notions Presley had of working abroad, claiming that foreign security was poor and venues unsuitable for a star of his magnitude.
Parker arguably exercised tightest control over Presley's movie career. In 1957, Robert Mitchum asked Presley to costar with him in Thunder Road, on which Mitchum was both writer and producer. According to George Klein, one of his oldest friends, Presley was offered starring roles in West Side Story and Midnight Cowboy. In 1974, Barbra Streisand approached Presley to star with her in the remake of A Star is Born. In each case, any ambitions the singer may have had to play such parts were thwarted by his manager's negotiating demands or flat refusals. In Lacker's description, "The only thing that kept Elvis going after the early years was a new challenge. But Parker kept running everything into the ground." The operative attitude may have been summed up best by the response Leiber and Stoller received when they brought a serious film project for Presley to Parker and the Hill and Range owners for their consideration. In Leiber's telling, Jean Aberbach warned them to never again "try to interfere with the business or artistic workings of the process known as Elvis Presley".
Larry Geller became Presley's hairdresser in 1964. Unlike others in the Memphis Mafia, he was interested in spiritual questions and recalls how, from their first conversation, Presley revealed his secret thoughts and anxieties: "I mean there has to be a purpose...there's got to be a reason...why I was chosen to be Elvis Presley. ... I swear to God, no one knows how lonely I get. And how empty I really feel." Thereafter, Geller supplied him with books on religion and mysticism, which the singer read voraciously. Presley would be preoccupied by such matters for much of his life, taking trunkloads of books with him on tour.
While Presley was marketed as an icon of heterosexuality, some cultural critics have argued that his image was ambiguous. In 1959, Sight and Sounds Peter John Dyer described his onscreen persona as "aggressively bisexual in appeal". Brett Farmer places the "orgasmic gyrations" of the title dance sequence in Jailhouse Rock within a lineage of cinematic musical numbers that offer a "spectacular eroticization, if not homoeroticization, of the male image". In the analysis of Yvonne Tasker, "Elvis was an ambivalent figure who articulated a peculiar feminised, objectifying version of white working-class masculinity as aggressive sexual display."
Reinforcing Presley's image as a sex symbol were the reports of his dalliances with various Hollywood stars and starlets, from Natalie Wood in the 1950s to Connie Stevens and Ann-Margret in the 1960s to Candice Bergen and Cybill Shepherd in the 1970s. June Juanico of Memphis, one of Presley's early girlfriends, later blamed Parker for encouraging him to choose his dating partners with publicity in mind. Presley, however, never grew comfortable with the Hollywood scene, and most of these relationships were insubstantial.
Presley's rise to national attention in 1956 transformed the field of popular music and had a huge effect on the broader scope of popular culture. As the catalyst for the cultural revolution that was rock and roll, he was central not only to defining it as a musical genre but in making it a touchstone of youth culture and rebellious attitude. With its racially mixed origins—repeatedly affirmed by Presley—rock and roll's occupation of a central position in mainstream American culture facilitated a new acceptance and appreciation of black culture. In this regard, Little Richard said of Presley, "He was an integrator. Elvis was a blessing. They wouldn't let black music through. He opened the door for black music." Al Green agreed: "He broke the ice for all of us." Presley also heralded the vastly expanded reach of celebrity in the era of mass communication: at the age of 21, within a year of his first appearance on American network television, he was one of the most famous people in the world. in 1988]]
Presley's name, image, and voice are instantly recognizable around the globe. He has inspired a legion of impersonators. In polls and surveys, he is recognized as one of the most important popular music artists and influential Americans. "Elvis Presley is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century", said composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. "He introduced the beat to everything and he changed everything—music, language, clothes. It's a whole new social revolution—the sixties came from it." Bob Dylan described the sensation of first hearing Presley as "like busting out of jail".
A New York Times editorial on the 25th anniversary of Presley's death observed, "All the talentless impersonators and appalling black velvet paintings on display can make him seem little more than a perverse and distant memory. But before Elvis was camp, he was its opposite: a genuine cultural force. ... Elvis's breakthroughs are underappreciated because in this rock-and-roll age, his hard-rocking music and sultry style have triumphed so completely." Not only Presley's achievements, but his failings as well, are seen by some cultural observers as adding to the power of his legacy, as in this description by Greil Marcus:
Elvis Presley is a supreme figure in American life, one whose presence, no matter how banal or predictable, brooks no real comparisons. ... The cultural range of his music has expanded to the point where it includes not only the hits of the day, but also patriotic recitals, pure country gospel, and really dirty blues. ... Elvis has emerged as a great artist, a great rocker, a great purveyor of schlock, a great heart throb, a great bore, a great symbol of potency, a great ham, a great nice person, and, yes, a great American.
A vast number of recordings have been issued under Presley's name. The total number of his original master recordings has been variously calculated as 665 and 711. His career began and he was most successful during an era when singles were the primary commercial medium for pop music. In the case of his albums, the distinction between "official" studio records and other forms is often blurred. In addition, for most of the 1960s, his recording career focused on soundtrack albums. In the 1970s, his most heavily promoted and best-selling LP releases tended to be concert albums. This summary discography lists only the albums and singles that reached the top of one or more of the following charts: the main U.S. Billboard pop chart; the Billboard country chart, the genre chart with which he was most identified (there was no country album chart before 1964); and the official British pop chart. In the United States, Presley also had five or six number one R&B; singles and seven number one adult contemporary singles; in 1964, his "Blue Christmas" topped the Christmas singles chart during a period when Billboard did not rank holiday singles in its primary pop chart. He had number one hits in many countries beside the United States and United Kingdom, as well.
Category:1935 births Category:1977 deaths Category:1950s singers Category:1960s singers Category:1970s singers Category:Actors from Mississippi Category:Actors from Tennessee Category:American baritones Category:American country singers Category:American crooners Category:American expatriates in West Germany Category:American film actors Category:American gospel singers Category:American male singers Category:American Pentecostals Category:American people of Cherokee descent Category:American people of English descent Category:American people of French descent Category:American people of Scotch-Irish descent Category:American performers of Christian music Category:American rock singers Category:Blues musicians from Mississippi Category:Burials in Tennessee Category:Country Music Hall of Fame inductees Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:English-language singers Category:Gospel Music Hall of Fame inductees Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:Identical twins Category:American karateka Category:Las Vegas musicians Category:Mississippi Blues Trail Category:Musicians from Mississippi Category:Musicians from Nevada Category:Musicians from Tennessee Category:People from the Las Vegas metropolitan area Category:People from Memphis, Tennessee Category:People from Tupelo, Mississippi Category:RCA Victor artists Category:Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Category:Rockabilly Hall of Fame inductees Category:Rockabilly musicians Category:Southern gospel performers Category:Sun Records artists Category:Traditional pop music singers Category:Twin people from the United States Category:United States Army soldiers
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| Name | Edward Teach |
|---|---|
| Lived | c. 1680 – 22 November 1718 |
| Caption | Blackbeard (c. 1736 engraving) |
| Nickname | Blackbeard |
| Placeofbirth | (presumed) Bristol, England |
| Placeofdeath | Ocracoke, Province of North Carolina |
| Serviceyears | 1716–1718 |
| Base of operations | Atlantic |
| Rank | Captain |
| Commands | Queen Anne's Revenge, Adventure |
| Dayofbirth | c.1680 |
| Dayofdeath | 22 November 1718 |
Teach was most likely born in Bristol. Little is known about his early life, but in 1716 he joined the crew of Benjamin Hornigold, a pirate who operated from the Caribbean island of New Providence. He quickly acquired his own ship, Queen Anne's Revenge, and from 1717 to 1718 became a feared pirate. His cognomen was derived from his thick black beard and fearsome appearance; he was reported to have tied lit fuses under his hat to frighten his enemies.
After parting company with Hornigold, Teach formed an alliance of pirates, and with his cohort blockaded the port of Charleston, South Carolina. He successfully ransomed its inhabitants and then ran his ship aground. Teach accepted a royal pardon but was soon back at sea, where he attracted the attention of the Governor of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood. Spotswood arranged for a party of soldiers and sailors to find and capture the pirate, which they did on 22 November 1718. During a ferocious battle, Teach was killed by a small force of sailors led by Lieutenant Robert Maynard.
A shrewd and calculating leader, Teach used his fearsome image instead of force to elicit the response he desired from those he robbed. Contrary to the modern-day image of the traditional tyrannical pirate, he commanded his vessels with the permission of their crews, and there are no known accounts of his ever having harmed or murdered those he held captive. He was romanticised after his death, and became the inspiration for a number of pirate-themed works of fiction across a range of genres.
The 17th-century rise of England's American colonies and the rapid 18th-century expansion of the Atlantic slave trade had made Bristol an important international sea port, and Teach was most likely raised in what was the second-largest city in England. Teach could almost certainly read and write; he communicated with merchants, and on his death had in his possession a letter addressed to him by the Chief Justice and Secretary of the Province of Carolina, Tobias Knight. The author Robert Lee speculated that Teach may therefore have been born into a respectable, wealthy family. Teach may have arrived in the Caribbean in the last years of the 17th century, on a merchant vessel (possibly a slave ship). The 18th-century author Charles Johnson claimed that Teach was for some time a sailor operating from Jamaica on privateer ships during Queen Anne's War, and that "he had often distinguished himself for his uncommon boldness and personal courage". At what point during the war Teach joined the fighting is, like most of his life before he became a pirate, unknown.
Teach was one of those who came to enjoy the island's benefits. Probably shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht he moved there from Jamaica, and along with most of those who had been privateers during the war became involved in piracy. Possibly about 1716, Teach joined the crew of Captain Benjamin Hornigold, a renowned pirate who operated from New Providence's safe waters. In 1716, Hornigold placed Teach in charge of a sloop he had taken as a prize. In early 1717, Hornigold and Teach, each captaining a sloop, set out for the mainland. They captured a boat from Havana which carried 120 barrels of flour, and shortly thereafter took 100 barrels of wine from a sloop from Bermuda. A few days later they stopped a vessel sailing from Madeira to Charleston, South Carolina. Teach and his quartermaster, William Howard, may at this time have been struggling to control their crews. By now they had probably developed a taste for Madeira wine, and on 29 September near Cape Charles all they took from the Betty of Virginia was her cargo of Madeira, before they scuttled her with the remaining cargo.
It was during this cruise with Hornigold that the earliest known report of Teach was made—recorded as a pirate in his own right, and in command of a large crew. In a report made by a Captain Mathew Munthe on an anti-piracy patrol for North Carolina, "Thatch" was described as operating "a sloop 6 gunns [sic] and about 70 men". In September Teach and Hornigold encountered Stede Bonnet. A landowner and military officer from a wealthy family, he had turned to piracy earlier that year but his crew of about 70 were reportedly dissatisfied with his command. With Bonnet's permission, Teach took control of his ship Revenge. The pirate flotilla now consisted of three ships; Teach on Revenge, accompanied by his old sloop, and Hornigold's Ranger. By October, another vessel had been captured and added to the small fleet. The sloops Robert of Philadelphia and Good Intent of Dublin were stopped on 22 October 1717, and their cargo holds emptied.
As a former British privateer, Hornigold attacked only his former enemies. For his crew, the sight of British vessels filled with valuable cargo passing by unharmed became too much, and at some point toward the end of 1717 Hornigold was demoted. Whether Teach had any involvement in this decision is unknown, but Hornigold soon retired from piracy. Hornigold took with him Ranger and one of the sloops, leaving Teach with Revenge and the remaining sloop. The two pirates never met again, and along with many of the other occupants of New Providence, Hornigold accepted the King's pardon from Woodes Rogers in June the following year.
On 28 November Teach's two ships attacked a French merchant vessel off the coast of Saint Vincent. They each fired a broadside across its bulwarks, killing several of its crew, and forcing its captain to surrender. The ship turned out to be La Concorde of Saint-Malo, a large French guineaman carrying a cargo of slaves. Teach and his crews sailed the vessel south along Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, to Bequia, where they disembarked her crew and cargo, and converted the ship for their own use. The smaller of Teach's two sloops was left for the crew of La Concorde, who renamed her Mauvaise Rencontre (Bad Meeting) and sailed for Martinique. Teach may have recruited some of the slaves, but the remainder were left on the island and were later recaptured by the returning crew of Mauvaise Recontre.
On 5 December 1717 Teach stopped the merchant sloop Margaret off the coast of Crab Island, near Anguilla. Captain Henry Bostock and his crew remained Teach's prisoners for about eight hours, and were forced to watch as their sloop was ransacked. Bostock, who had been held unharmed aboard Queen Anne's Revenge, was returned to Margaret, and was allowed to leave with his crew. He returned to his base of operations on Saint Christopher Island, and reported the matter to Governor Walter Hamilton, who requested that he sign an affidavit explaining the encounter. Bostock's deposition details Teach's command of two vessels: a sloop, and a large French guineaman, Dutch-built, with 36 cannon and a crew of 300 men. The captain believed that the larger ship carried valuable gold dust, silver plate, and "a very fine cup" supposedly taken from the commander of Great Allen.|group="nb"}} Teach's crew informed Bostock that they had destroyed several other vessels, and that they intended to sail to Hispaniola and lie in wait for an expected Spanish armada, supposedly laden with money to pay the garrisons. Teach questioned Bostock about the movements of local ships, but seemed unsurprised when Bostock told him of an expected royal pardon from London for all pirates.
Bostock's deposition describes Teach as a "tall spare man with a very black beard which he wore very long". This provides the first recorded account of Teach's appearance, and is the source of his cognomen, Blackbeard. Later descriptions mention that his thick black beard was braided into pigtails, and sometimes tied in with small coloured ribbons. Johnson (1724) described Teach as "such a figure that imagination cannot form an idea of a fury from hell to look more frightful." Whether Johnson's description of Teach was entirely truthful or embellished is unclear, but it seems likely that Teach understood the value of appearances; better to strike fear into the heart of one's enemies, than rely on bluster alone. Teach was tall, with broad shoulders. He wore knee-length boots and dark clothing, topped with a wide hat, and sometimes a long coat of brightly-coloured silk or velvet. Johnson also described Teach in times of battle as wearing "a sling over his shoulders, with three brace of pistols, hanging in holsters like bandoliers; and stuck lighted matches under his hat",|group="nb"}} the latter apparently to emphasise the fearsome appearance he wished to present to his enemies. Despite his ferocious reputation, there are no verified accounts of his ever having murdered or harmed those he held captive. According to economist Peter Leeson at the University of Chicago, he apparently did not need to.|group="nb"}} Teach may also have used other aliases; on 30 November, the Monserrat Merchant encountered two ships and a sloop, commanded by a Captain Kentish and Captain Edwards (the latter a known alias of Stede Bonnet).
Pardons were often made when England was on the verge of war; the services of pirates were a valuable commodity at such times. Teach may have understood this, and surrendered to a pardon of 5 September 1717. The proclamation offered rewards to those persons who captured pirates who refused to surrender, covered incidences of murder committed during acts of piracy, and allowed those who had suffered the theft of their property the right to recover their goods—but only through legal channels. Teach therefore would have been under no obligation to surrender his loot to the Crown. According to Lee (1974), if Teach did surrender, Queen Anne's Revenge would likely have been anchored at Ocracoke Inlet, from which place he would have travelled to Bath, North Carolina. --> In March 1718, while taking on water at Turneffe Island east of Belize, both ships spotted Adventure (a sloop from Jamaica) making for the harbour. The sloop was quickly stopped and its captain, David Harriot, invited to join the pirates. Harriot and his crew agreed, and Teach sent over a crew to run Adventure. They sailed for the Bay of Honduras, where they added another ship and four sloops to their flotilla. On 9 April Teach's enlarged fleet of ships looted and burnt Protestant Caesar. His fleet then sailed to Grand Cayman where they captured a "small turtler". Teach probably sailed toward Havana, where he may have captured a small Spanish vessel that had left the Cuban port. They then sailed to the wrecks of the 1715 Spanish fleet, off the western coast of Florida. There he disembarked the crew of the captured Spanish sloop, before proceeding north to the port of Charleston, South Carolina, attacking three vessels along the way.
Wragg agreed to Teach's demands. A Mr. Marks and two pirates were given two days to collect the drugs, and Teach moved his fleet, and the captured ships, about five or six leagues from land. After three days, a messenger, sent by Marks, returned to the fleet; Marks's boat had capsized and delayed their arrival in Charleston. Teach granted a reprieve of two days, but still the party did not return. Teach called a meeting of his fellow sailors, and eight ships were moved into the harbour. General panic within the town ensued, before Marks's small boat finally approached the fleet. Marks had presented the pirates' demands to the Governor, and the drugs were quickly gathered. Marks's escort had not been so easy to find; they had been busy drinking with friends and were finally discovered, drunk.
Teach kept to his side of the bargain, and released the captured ships and his prisoners—albeit relieved of their valuables, including the fine clothing worn by some of them.
Teach had at some stage learnt of the offer of a royal pardon, and probably confided in Bonnet that he intended to accept it. The pardon was open to all pirates who surrendered on or before 5 September 1718, but contained a caveat which stipulated that immunity was offered only against crimes committed before 5 January. Although in theory this left Bonnet and Teach at risk of hanging for their actions at Charleston Bar, most authorities could waive such conditions. Teach thought that Governor Charles Eden was a man he could trust, but to make sure he waited to see what would happen to another captain. Bonnet left immediately for Bath Town on a small sailing boat where he surrendered to Governor Eden and received his pardon. He then travelled back to Beaufort Inlet to collect the Revenge and the remainder of his crew, intending to sail to Saint Thomas Island where he would receive his commission. Unfortunately for him, Teach had stripped the vessel of all its valuables and provisions, and marooned its crew; Bonnet set out for revenge, but was unable to find him. He and his crew returned to piracy, and were captured on 27 September 1718 at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. All but four of those caught were later tried and hanged in Charleston. The captured Revenge was later included in a fleet of ships commanded by the Governor of South Carolina, which made a ferocious attack on a group of pirates near the entrance to Charleston Harbour, resulting in the execution of 49 pirates inside a month. Their bodies were hung in gibbets near White Point.
The author Robert Lee surmised that Teach and Hands ran both ships aground on purpose, to reduce the crew complement of the fleet and therefore increase their share of the spoils. During the trial of Bonnet's crew Revenge
Teach settled in Bath, on the eastern side of Bath Creek at Plum Point, near the home of Eden. During July and August he travelled between his base in the town and his sloop off Ocracoke. Johnson's account stated that he married the daughter of a local plantation owner, although his is the only known evidence for this. Eden gave Teach permission to sail to St Thomas to seek a commission as a privateer (a useful way of removing bored and troublesome pirates from the small settlement), and Teach was given official title to his remaining sloop, which he renamed Adventure. By the end of August, Teach had returned to piracy, and in the same month the Governor of Pennsylvania issued a warrant for his arrest, but by this time Teach was probably operating in Delaware Bay, some distance from the colony. Teach then took two French ships leaving the Caribbean, moved one crew across to the other, and took the remaining ship back to Ocracoke. In September 1718 he told Eden that he had found the French ship at sea, deserted. A Vice Admiralty Court was quickly convened, presided over by Tobias Knight and the Collector of Customs. The ship was judged as a derelict found at sea, 20 hogsheads of sugar were awarded to Knight, and sixty to Eden; Teach and his crew were given the rest of the boat's cargo.
Ocracoke Inlet was Teach's favourite anchorage. It was a perfect location from which to view ships travelling between the settlements of northeast Carolina, and it was from this vantage point that Teach first spotted the approaching ship of another English pirate, Charles Vane. Vane had rejected the pardon brought by Woodes Rogers, and escaped the men-of-war the English Captain brought with him to Nassau, on 26 July 1718. He had also been pursued by Benjamin Hornigold (Teach's old commander, now turned pirate-hunter). The two captains spent several nights on the southern tip of Ocracoke Island, accompanied by such notorious figures as Israel Hands, Robert Deal, and Calico Jack.
Spotswood learnt that the former quartermaster of Queen Anne's Revenge, William Howard, was in the area, and believing that he might know of Teach's whereabouts, had the pirate and his two slaves arrested. However, Spotswood had no legal authority to have pirates tried, and Howard's attorney, John Holloway, brought charges against Captain Brand of HMS Lyme (where Howard was imprisoned). He also sued on Howard's behalf for damages of £500, claiming wrongful arrest.
Spotswood's council claimed that Teach's presence was a crisis, and that under a statute of William III the governor was entitled to try Howard without a jury present. The charges referred to several acts of piracy supposedly committed after the cut-off date of the pardon, in "a sloop belonging to ye subjects of the King of Spain", but ignored the fact that they took place outside Spotswood's jurisdiction, and in a vessel now legally owned. Another charge cited two attacks, one of which was the capture of a slave ship off Charleston Bar from which one of Howard's slaves was presumed to have come. Howard was sent to await trial before a Court of Vice-Admiralty on the charge of piracy, but Captain Brand and his colleague, Captain Gordon (of HMS Pearl) refused to serve with Holloway present. Incensed, Holloway had no option but to stand down, and was replaced by the Attorney General of Virginia, John Clayton, who Spotswood described as "an honester man [than Holloway]". Howard was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged, but was however saved by a commission from London which directed Spotswood to pardon all acts of piracy committed by surrendering pirates before 23 July 1718.
Meanwhile, Spotswood had obtained from Howard valuable information on Teach's whereabouts, and planned to send his forces across the border into North Carolina to capture him. Spotswood gained the support of two men keen to discredit North Carolina's Governor—Edward Moseley and Colonel Maurice Moore. He also wrote to the Lords of Trade, suggesting that the Crown might benefit financially from Teach's capture. Spotswood personally financed the operation, possibly believing that Teach had fabulous treasures hidden away. He ordered Captains Gordon and Brand of HMS Pearl and HMS Lyme to travel overland to Bath. Robert Maynard of HMS Pearl would take charge of two commandeered sloops, and approach the town from the sea.|group="nb"}} Extra incentive for Teach's capture was given by the offer of a reward from the Assembly of Virginia, over and above any that might be received from the Crown.
Lieutenant Maynard took command of the two armed sloops on 17 November. He was given 57 men—33 from HMS Pearl and 24 from HMS Lyme. Maynard and the detachment from HMS Pearl took the larger of the two vessels and named her Jane; the rest took Ranger, commanded by one of Maynard's officers, a Mister Hyde. Some of the civilian crews of the two ships remained aboard. They sailed out from Kecoughtan, along the James River, on 17 November. The two sloops moved slowly, to allow Brand's force time to reach Bath. Brand set out for North Carolina six days later, arriving within three miles of Bath on 23 November. They had with them Colonel Moore and Captain Jeremiah Vail, along with a number of other North Carolinians, to dissuade the locals from objecting to the presence of foreign soldiers. Moore went into the town to see if Teach was there, and reported back that he was not, but was expected at "every minute." Brand then went to Governor Eden's home, and informed him of his purpose. The next day, Brand sent two canoes down Pamlico River to Ocracoke Inlet, to see if Teach could be seen. They returned two days later, and reported on what had transpired.
At daybreak Maynard's two sloops entered the channel, just behind a small boat taking soundings for the two larger vessels. It was quickly spotted by Adventure, and fired upon as soon as it was within range of her guns. The boat made a quick retreat to the Jane, while Teach cut the Adventure's anchor cable. As his crew hoisted the sails, the Adventure manoeuvred to point her starboard guns toward Maynard's sloops, which were now slowly closing the gap. Hyde moved Ranger to the port side of Jane and the Union flag was unfurled on each ship. Adventure then turned toward the beach of Ocracoke Island, heading for a narrow channel. What happened next is uncertain. Johnson claimed that there was an exchange of small-arms fire before Adventure ran aground, while Maynard anchored and then lightened his ship to pass over the sandbar. Another version claimed that Jane and Ranger ran aground, but Maynard made no mention of this in his log.
|group="nb"}} | align = right | width = 33%}} What is certain though is that Adventure turned her guns on the two ships and fired. The broadside was devastating; in an instant, Maynard had lost as much as a third of his forces. About 20 on Jane were either wounded or killed and 9 on Ranger. Hyde was dead, and his second and third officers either dead or seriously injured. His sloop was so badly damaged that it played no further role in the attack. Again, contemporary accounts of what happened next are confused, but small-arms fire from Jane may have cut Adventure's jib sheet, causing her to lose control and run onto the sandbar. In the aftermath of Teach's overwhelming attack, Jane and Ranger may also have been grounded; the battle thenceforth would have become a race to see who could float their ship first.
The lieutenant had kept many of his men below deck, and in anticipation of being boarded told them to prepare for close fighting. Teach watched as the gap between the vessels closed, and ordered his men to be ready. The two vessels contacted one another as the Adventure
The rest of Maynard's men then burst from the hold, shouting and firing. The plan to surprise Teach and his crew worked; the pirates were apparently taken aback at the assault. Teach rallied his men and the two groups fought across the deck, which was already slick with blood from those killed or injured by Teach's broadside. Maynard and Teach fired their flintlocks at each other, before throwing them away. Teach drew his cutlass and managed to break Maynard's sword. Against superior training and a slight advantage in numbers, the pirates were pushed back toward the bow, leaving Teach and Maynard isolated, allowing the Jane's crew to surround them. As Maynard drew back to fire once again, Teach moved in to attack him, but was slashed across the neck by one of Maynard's men. Badly wounded, Teach was then attacked and killed by several more of Maynard's crew. The remaining pirates quickly surrendered. Those left on the Adventure were captured by the crew of Ranger, including one who planned to set fire to the powder room and blow up the ship. Varying accounts exist of the battle's list of casualties; Maynard reported that 8 of his men and 12 pirates were killed. Captain Brand reported that 10 pirates and 11 of Maynard's men were killed. Spotswood claimed ten pirates and ten of the King's men dead.
Maynard later examined Teach's body, noting that it had been shot no fewer than five times, and cut about twenty. He also found several items of correspondence, including a letter to the pirate from Tobias Knight. The decapitated corpse was then thrown into the inlet and its head suspended from the bowsprit of Maynard's sloop (to enable the reward to be collected).
The remainder of Teach's crew and former associates were found by Brand in Bath,|group="nb"}} The remaining 13 pirates were hanged and left to rot in gibbets along Williamsburg's Capitol Landing Road (later known as Gallows Road).
Governor Eden was certainly embarrassed by Spotswood's invasion of North Carolina. Spotswood disavowed himself of any part of the seizure. He defended his actions, writing to Lord Carteret, a shareholder of the Province of Carolina, that he might benefit from the sale of the seized property and reminding the Earl of the number of Virginians who had died to protect his interests. He defended the secrecy of the operation by suggesting that Eden "could contribute nothing to the Success of the Design", and told Eden that his authority to capture the pirates came from the King. Eden was heavily criticised for his involvement with Teach, and was accused of being his accomplice. By criticising Eden, Spotswood intended to bolster the legitimacy of his invasion. Lee (1974) concludes that although Spotswood may have thought that the ends justified the means, he had no legal authority to invade North Carolina, to capture the pirates, and to seize and auction their goods. Eden doubtless shared the same view. As Spotswood had also accused Tobias Knight of being in league with Teach, Eden had Knight brought in for questioning on 4 April 1719. Israel Hands had, weeks earlier, testified that Knight had been on board the Adventure in August 1718, shortly after Teach had brought a French ship to North Carolina as a prize. Four pirates had testified that with Teach, they had visited Knight's home to give him presents. This testimony and the letter found on Teach's body by Maynard appeared compelling, but Knight conducted his defence with competence. Despite being very sick, and dying, he questioned the reliability of Spotswood's witnesses. Israel Hands he claimed had given information under duress, and the other witness, an African, was under North Carolinian law unable to offer his testimony. The sugar, he argued, was stored at his house legally, and Teach had visited him only on business in his official capacity. The board found Knight innocent of all charges, and he died later that year.
Eden was annoyed that the accusations against Knight had arisen during a trial in which he played no part. The goods which Captain Brand had seized were officially North Carolinian property, and Eden considered him a thief. The argument raged back and forth between the colonies until 17 March 1722, when Eden died. His will named one of Spotswood's opponents, John Holloway, a beneficiary. In the same year Spotswood, who for years had fought his enemies in the House of Burgesses and the Council, was finally replaced by Hugh Drysdale, once Robert Walpole was convinced to act.
Since the end of this so-called golden age of piracy, Teach and his exploits have become the stuff of lore, inspiring books, films, and amusement park rides. Much of what is known about him can be sourced to Charles Johnson's A General Historie of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, published in Britain in 1724. A recognised authority on the pirates of his time, Johnson's descriptions of such figures as Anne Bonny and Mary Read were for years required reading for those interested in the subject. Neither the log of the Scarborough nor the letters of its captain mention such an encounter; historian Colin Woodard believes that Johnson confused and conflated two actual events: the Scarborough
Despite his infamy, Teach was not the most successful of pirates. Henry Every captured a fortune and retired on the proceeds, and Bartholomew Roberts took an estimated five times the amount Teach stole. Treasure hunters have long busied themselves searching for any trace of his rumoured hoard of gold and silver, but nothing found in the numerous sites explored along the east coast of the US has ever been connected to Teach. Some tales suggest that pirates often killed a prisoner on the spot where they buried their loot. Teach is no exception in these stories, but that no finds have come to light is not exceptional—buried pirate treasure is often considered a modern myth for which almost no supporting evidence exists. In the available records about pirates there is nothing to suggest that the burial of treasure was a common practice, except in the imaginations of the writers of such fictional accounts as Treasure Island. Such hoards would necessitate a wealthy owner, and their supposed existence ignores the command structure of a pirate vessel, in which the crew often served by free suffrage. The only pirate ever known to bury treasure was William Kidd, and the only treasure so far recovered from Teach's exploits is the wreckage of the Queen Anne's Revenge. In 1997, it was found and excavated, and as of 2007 more than 15,000 objects have been rescued and preserved, some of which are on display at the North Carolina Maritime Museum.
Various superstitious tales exist of Teach's ghost. Unexplainable lights at sea are often referred to as "Teach's light", and some recitals claim that the notorious pirate now roams the afterlife searching for his head, for fear that his friends, and the Devil, will not recognise him. A North Carolinian tale holds that Teach's skull was used as the basis for a silver drinking chalice; a local judge even claimed to have drunk from it one night in the 1930s. The name of Blackbeard has been attached to many local attractions, such as Charleston's Blackbeard's Cove.
Blackbeard's name and persona have featured heavily in literature. He is the main subject of Matilda Douglas's fictional 1835 work Blackbeard: A page from the colonial history of Philadelphia. In Gregory Keyes' fictional The Age of Unreason, Blackbeard appears as the governor of a colony, and Tim Powers' 1988 novel On Stranger Tides has him forming an alliance of pirates. Film renditions of his life include Blackbeard the Pirate (1952), Blackbeard's Ghost (1968), Blackbeard: Terror at Sea (2005), and the 2006 Hallmark Channel miniseries Blackbeard. Parallels have also been drawn between Johnson's Blackbeard, and the character of Captain Jack Sparrow in the 2003 adventure film, .
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;Bibliography
Category:1680s births Category:1718 deaths Category:1716 crimes Category:American folklore Category:Deaths by decapitation Category:English folklore Category:English pirates Category:People from Bristol Category:Privateers Category:Recipients of British royal pardons
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| Name | Barbara Cook |
|---|---|
| Background | solo_singer |
| Born | October 25, 1927 |
| Origin | Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. |
| Genre | Musical theatre, traditional pop |
| Occupation | Singer, actress |
| Years active | 1951–present |
| Label | Urania (1958–1959) Columbia (1975–1977) Moss Music Group (1981-1988) |
| Url | www.barbaracook.com |
Barbara Cook (born October 25, 1927) is an American singer and actress who first came to prominence in the 1950s after starring in the original Broadway musicals Candide (1956) and The Music Man (1957) among others, winning a Tony Award for the latter. She continued performing mostly in theatre until the mid 1970s, when she began a second career that continues to this day as a cabaret and concert singer.
During her years as Broadway’s leading ingénue Cook was lauded for her excellent lyric soprano voice. She was particularly admired for her vocal agility, wide range, warm sound, and emotive interpretations. As she has aged her voice has taken on a darker quality, even in her head voice, that was less prominent in her youth. Today Cook is widely recognized as one of the "premier interpreters" of musical theatre songs and standards, in particular the songs of composer Stephen Sondheim. Her subtle and sensitive interpretations of American popular song continue to earn high praise even into her eighties.
Cook also tried her hand at non-musical roles, replacing Sandy Dennis in the play Any Wednesday and originating the role of Patsy Newquist in Jules Feiffer's Little Murders. Her last original musical role on Broadway came in 1971 when she played Dolly Talbo in The Grass Harp. In 1972, she returned to the dramatic stage in the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center's production of Gorky's Enemies. As she began struggling with depression, obesity, and alcoholism in the seventies (she eventually quit drinking in 1977), Cook began finding trouble getting stage work. On October 22, 2007, Cook sang at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts (Fort Lauderdale, FL) with the Fort Lauderdale Gay Men's Chorus in the chorus's concert entitled "An Evening With Barbara Cook". Upon completion of the concert, an almost full house greeted her with a round of "Happy Birthday" in honor of her impending 80th birthday. On December 2, 2007, Cook celebrated her birthday in the UK with a concert at the home of English National Opera - The Coliseum Theatre, in London's West End.
Most notably as she entered her ninth decade, she performed in two sold-out concerts with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center. The New York Times reviewer threw his hat in the air, writing of Miss Cook as "a performer spreading the gospel of simplicity, self-reliance and truth" who is "never glib" and summoning adjectives such as "astonishing" and "transcendent," concluding that she sings with "a tenderness and honesty that could break your heart and mend it all at once."
In June 2008, Cook appeared in Strictly Gershwin at the Royal Albert Hall in London, England with the full company of English National Ballet. She appeared with the Ulster Orchestra as the Closing Concert of the Ulster Bank Belfast Festival at Queen's at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast on 31 October 2008. Her other 2008 appearances included concerts in Chicago, West Palm Beach and San Francisco. In 2009 she performed with the Princeton Symphony, Detroit Symphony, and gave concerts in Boca Raton, Florida and at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton. She is currently performing in a cabaret show in New York City which opened in April 2009.
Cook returned to Broadway in the Roundabout Theatre's Stephen Sondheim revue "Sondheim on Sondheim", created and directed by long-time Sondheim collaborator James Lapine,currently running at Studio 54. She starred opposite Vanessa L. Williams. Cook was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in the category of Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical, opposite notables like Angela Lansbury and Katie Finneran (the winner).
Cast and studio cast recordings
Compilations
Category:American musical theatre actors Category:American stage actors Category:American singers Category:American sopranos Category:Drama Desk Award winners Category:People from Atlanta, Georgia Category:Theatre World Award winners Category:Tony Award winners Category:1927 births Category:Living people
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
