Grammy Award For Song of The Year

Adam Clayton
Adam Charles Clayton (born 13 March 1960) is a musician, best known as the bassist of the Irish rock band U2. Clayton has resided in County Dublin since the time his family moved to Malahide when he was five years old in 1965. Clayton is well known for his bass playing on songs such as "New Year's Day", "Bullet the Blue Sky", "With or Without You", "Mysterious Ways", "Get on Your Boots", and "Magnificent". His work on No Line on the Horizon has been cited as his best bass playing. He has worked on several solo projects throughout his career, such as his work with fellow band member Larry Mullen Jr. on the theme of 1996's Mission: Impossible. Clayton, as a part of U2, has won 22 Grammy awards.
Clayton is the elder child of Brian and Jo Clayton, born on 13 March 1960 in Chinnor, Oxfordshire, England. When Clayton was five years old, his family moved from Oxfordshire to Malahide, County Dublin, where Clayton's brother Sebastian was born. The Clayton family became friends with the Evans family, with their sons Dik and Dave (more commonly known as The Edge), who were both in the original group, Feedback, that spawned U2.

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Adele (singer)
Adele Laurie Blue Adkins (born 5 May 1988), better known simply as Adele, is an English singer-songwriter and musician. Adele was offered a recording contract from XL Recordings after a friend posted her demo on MySpace in 2006. The next year she received the Brit Awards "Critics' Choice" award and won the BBC Sound of 2008. Her debut album, 19, was released in 2008 to much commercial and critical success. The album is certified four times platinum in the UK, and double platinum in the US. Her career in the US was boosted by a Saturday Night Live appearance in late 2008. At the 2009 Grammy Awards, Adele received the awards for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.
Adele released her second album, 21, in early 2011. The album was well received critically and surpassed the success of her debut.21 helped Adele earn six Grammy Awards in 2012 including Album of the Year, equalling the record for most Grammy Awards won by a female artist in one night. The album has also helped her receive numerous other awards, including two Brit Awards and three American Music Awards. The album has been certified 16 times platinum in the UK; in the US the album has held the top position longer than any other album since 1985.

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Adolph Green
Adolph Green (December 2, 1914 – October 23, 2002) was an American lyricist and playwright who, with long-time collaborator Betty Comden, penned the screenplays and songs for some of the most beloved movie musicals, particularly as part of Arthur Freed's production unit at MGM, during the genre's heyday. Many people thought the pair were married; they were not, but they shared a unique comic genius and sophisticated wit that enabled them to forge a six-decade-long partnership that produced some of Hollywood and Broadway's greatest hits.
Green was born in The Bronx to Hungarian-Jewish immigrants Daniel and Helen Weiss Green. After high school, he worked as a runner on Wall Street while he tried to make it as an actor. He met Comden through mutual friends in 1938 while she was studying drama at New York University. They formed a troupe called the Revuers, which performed at the Village Vanguard, a club in Greenwich Village. Among the members of the company was a young comedian named Judy Tuvim, who later changed her name to Judy Holliday, and Green's good friend, a young musician named Leonard Bernstein, frequently accompanied them on the piano. The act's success earned them a movie offer and the Revuers traveled west in hopes of finding fame in Greenwich Village, a 1944 movie starring Carmen Miranda and Don Ameche, but their roles were so small they barely were noticed, and they quickly returned to New York.

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Aerosmith
Aerosmith is an American rock band, formed in Boston, Massachusetts in 1970. Guitarist Joe Perry and bassist Tom Hamilton, originally in a band together called the Jam Band, met up with singer Steven Tyler, drummer Joey Kramer, and guitarist Ray Tabano, and formed Aerosmith. In 1971, Tabano was replaced by Brad Whitford, and the band began developing a following in Boston. Their style, which is rooted in blues-based hard rock, has come to also incorporate elements of pop,heavy metal, and rhythm and blues, and has inspired many subsequent rock artists.
They were signed to Columbia Records in 1972, and released a string of multi-platinum albums, beginning with their 1973 eponymous debut album, followed by their 1974 album Get Your Wings. In 1975, the band broke into the mainstream with the album Toys in the Attic, and their 1976 follow-up Rocks cemented their status as hard rock superstars. The band released two more albums, toured extensively, and charted a string of Hot 100 singles. By the end of the 1970s, they were among the most popular hard rock bands in the world and developed a loyal following of fans, often referred to as the "Blue Army". However, drug addiction and internal conflict took their toll on the band, which resulted in the departures of Perry and Whitford in 1979 and 1981, respectively; they were replaced by Jimmy Crespo and Rick Dufay. The band did not fare well between 1980 and 1984, releasing a lone album, Rock in a Hard Place, which went gold but failed to match their previous successes.

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Alan Jay Lerner
Alan Jay Lerner (August 31, 1918 – June 14, 1986) was an American lyricist and librettist. In collaboration with Frederick Loewe, he created some of the world's most popular and enduring works of musical theatre for both the stage and on film. He won three Tony Awards and three Academy Awards, among other honors.
Born in New York City, he was the son of Edith Adelson Lerner and Joseph Jay Lerner, whose brother, Samuel Alexander Lerner, was founder and owner of the Lerner Stores, a chain of dress shops. One of Lerner's cousins was the radio comedian/television game show panelist Henry Morgan. Alan Jay Lerner was educated at Bedales School in England, The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut, (where he wrote "The Choate Marching Song") and Harvard. He attended both Camp Androscoggin and Camp Greylock. At both Choate and Harvard, Lerner was a classmate of John F. Kennedy; at Choate they had worked together on the yearbook staff. Like Cole Porter at Yale and Richard Rodgers at Columbia, his career in musical theater began with his collegiate contributions, in Lerner's case to the annual Harvard Hasty Pudding musicals. During the summers of 1936 and 1937, Lerner studied at Juilliard. While attending Harvard, he lost his sight in his left eye due to an accident in the boxing ring. In 1957, Lerner and Leonard Bernstein, another of Lerner's college classmates, collaborated on "Lonely Men of Harvard," a tongue-in-cheek salute to their alma mater.

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Alan Menken
Alan Menken (born July 22, 1949) is a pianist and composer of American musical theatre and film.
Menken is best known for his scores for films produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios. His scores for The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Pocahontas have each won him two Academy Awards. He also composed the scores for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Home on the Range, The Shaggy Dog, Enchanted, and most recently, Tangled. Menken has collaborated on several occasions with lyricists including Howard Ashman, Tim Rice, Glenn Slater, and Stephen Schwartz. With nineteen nominations and eight wins, Menken has won the third most Oscars of any person, after Walt Disney (twenty-two wins) and Alfred Newman (nine wins).

Menken was born in New York, NY to a Jewish family, the son of Judith and Norman Menken, a dentist. He developed an interest in music at an early age, studying piano and violin. He went to New Rochelle High School in New Rochelle, New York. He attended college as a pre-med student, but later changed his focus to music at NYU Steinhardt. After college, he attended the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop. He performed frequently in local clubs and worked as a composer of jingles and songs and as an accompanist.

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Alanis Morissette
Alanis Nadine Morissette (born June 1, 1974) is a Canadian singer-songwriter, guitarist, record producer, and actress. She has won 16 Juno Awards and seven Grammy Awards, was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards and also shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination. Morissette began her career in Canada, and as a teenager recorded two dance-pop albums, Alanis and Now Is the Time, under MCA Records Canada.
Her first international album was the rock-influenced Jagged Little Pill, released in 1995. Jagged has sold more than 33 million units globally. Her following album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, was released in 1998 and was a success as well. Morissette took up producing duties for her subsequent albums, which include Under Rug Swept, So-Called Chaos and Flavors of Entanglement. Morissette has sold more than 60 million albums worldwide. Morissette is also known for her powerful and emotive mezzo-soprano voice.
Morissette acquired United States citizenship in 2005.
Morissette was born June 1, 1974 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, the daughter of Georgia Mary Ann (née Feuerstein), a teacher of Hungarian descent, and Alan Richard Morissette, a French-Canadian high school principal. She has a twin brother, Wade Morissette, (also a musician) who was born 12 minutes after her. Morissette was raised Catholic. She attended Glebe Collegiate Institute (Ottawa, Canada) for high school.

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Alicia Keys
Alicia Augello Cook (born January 25, 1981), better known by her stage name Alicia Keys, is an American R&B singer-songwriter, record producer, and actress. Keys was raised by a single mother in the Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan in New York City. At age seven, Keys began playing the piano. She attended Professional Performing Arts School and graduated at 16 as valedictorian. Keys released her debut album with J Records, having had previous record deals first with Columbia and then Arista Records.
Keys' debut album, Songs in A Minor, was a commercial success, selling over 12 million copies worldwide. She became the best-selling new artist and best-selling R&B artist of 2001. The album earned Keys five Grammy Awards in 2002, including Best New Artist and Song of the Year for "Fallin'". Her second studio album, The Diary of Alicia Keys, was released in 2003 and was also another success worldwide, selling eight million copies. The album garnered her an additional four Grammy Awards in 2005. Later that year, she released her first live album, Unplugged, which debuted at number one in the United States. She became the first female to have an MTV Unplugged album to debut at number one and the highest since Nirvana in 1994.

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Allen Shamblin
Allen Shamblin is a country music songwriter who was born in Tennessee, and was brought up in Texas.
After graduating from Sam Houston State University he worked in Austin as a real estate appraiser. In 1987, he quit his job and moved to Nashville to pursue a career as a song writer. He supported himself by parking cars and working in a warehouse. During live shows he tells stories about his parents sending him money so he could survive. In 1990, Randy Travis took a song Shamblin wrote, about his grandfather, to number one on the country charts. After "He Walked on Water", he followed it up with four more number one songs. He often co-writes with other songwriters. He co-wrote with Steve Seskin for number one hits with Life is a Dance and Don't Laugh at Me. "Don't Laugh at Me" was a hit for Mark Wills and was later recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary resulting in a school program designed to teach tolerance and prevent bulling to school children. His biggest song, "I Can't Make You Love Me," was co-written with Mike Reid and was a hit for Bonnie Raitt.

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Allen Toussaint
Allen Toussaint (IPA: /ˈtuːseɪnt/; born January 14, 1938) is an American musician, composer, record producer, and influential figure in New Orleans R&B.
Many of Toussaint's songs have become familiar through numerous cover versions, including "Working in the Coalmine", "Ride Your Pony", "Fortune Teller", "Play Something Sweet (Brickyard Blues)", "Southern Nights," "Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky", "I'll Take a Melody" and "Mother-in-Law".
Toussaint grew up in a shotgun house in the New Orleans neighborhood of Gert Town, where his mother welcomed and fed all manner of musicians as they practiced and recorded with her son. After a lucky break at age 17 in which he stood in for Huey Smith at a performance with Earl King's band in Prichard, Alabama, Toussaint was introduced to a group of local musicians who performed regularly at a night club on LaSalle street Uptown; they were known as the Dew Drop Set. Initially, he recorded for RCA Victor as Al Tousan and recorded an album of instrumentals, including the song "Java", which years later became a big hit for Al Hirt (also on RCA).

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Amanda Ghost
Amanda Ghost (born Amanda Louisa Gosein) is a singer and songwriter from Enfield, North London. After an initial period in which she performed as a solo artist, she formed a band which performed under her name, and of which she was the lead singer. From February 2009 until December 2010, Ghost was also president of Epic Records, however she left the role to resume her career as a songwriter and music producer.
Born in North London to a Gibraltarian mother and an Indian father, Ghost was encouraged at an early age to play guitar. Her first recording contract was with Warner Bros. Records in Los Angeles, California, for whom she recorded her first album, Ghost Stories.
For the past couple of years she has worked and performed with her long-term collaborator and partner in 'Amanda Ghost', Ian Dench (formerly a guitarist with EMF). Ghost's second album was released in autumn 2006 on her own record label, Plan A Records, and was preceded by a limited edition EP, Blood On The Line.
As a songwriter, Ghost was a co-writer for James Blunt’s “You're Beautiful”; "Beautiful Liar" by Beyoncé and Shakira; and Jordin Sparks' first single, "Tattoo". She co-wrote the theme music to the NBC drama, Journeyman. The song uses the melody from the swedish song Vandraren (Swedish wiki) performed by Nordman (Swedish wiki). [She has co-written four songs for Beyonce's third album, I Am… Sasha Fierce; "Disappear", "Satellites" and "Ave Maria" and "Once In A Lifetime". She also co-wrote and sang backing vocals on "Colours", which was on the Prodigy's 2009 album, Invaders Must Die as well as working collaboratively with John Legend on the lyrics for the track "Getting Nowhere" by Magnetic Man.

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Amanda McBroom
Amanda McBroom (born August 9, 1947) is an American singer, songwriter actress and cabaret performer. Notable among the songs she has written is "The Rose", which Bette Midler sang in the film of the same name, and which has been covered by many other recording artists. McBroom is also known for her collaborations as lyricist with songwriter Michele Brourman, including some of the songs in the The Land Before Time film series, Balto II: Wolf Quest, and the musical Dangerous Beauty based on the film of the same name, which was scheduled to have its world premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse in February 2011.
McBroom starred in the New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and European productions of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, and made her Broadway debut in the Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields musical Seesaw.
As an actress, McBroom has had guest-starring or recurring roles on such television series as Starsky and Hutch, Star Trek: The Next Generation ("The Measure of a Man"), Hart to Hart, Taxi, Charlie's Angels, Remington Steele, Hawaii Five-O, Magnum, P.I., M*A*S*H, Lou Grant, Love, American Style and Gunsmoke to her credit. She has also worked as a voice actress for children's cartoon shows, including Wildfire, The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang, Challenge of the GoBots, The Smurfs, Super Friends and The Richie Rich/Scooby-Doo Show and Scrappy Too!

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Amy Grant
Amy Lee Grant (born November 25, 1960) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, author, media personality and actress, best known for her Christian music. She has been referred to as "The Queen of Christian Pop". As of 2009, Grant remains the best-selling contemporary Christian music singer ever, having sold over 30 million units worldwide.
Grant made her debut as a teenager, and gained fame in Christian music during the 1980s with such hits as "Father's Eyes," "El Shaddai", and "Angels". In 1986, she scored her first Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 song in a duet with Peter Cetera The Next Time I Fall. During the 1980s and 1990s, she became one of the first gospel artists to cross over into mainstream pop on the heels of her successful albums Unguarded and Heart in Motion, the latter of which included the No. 1 single "Baby Baby."
Grant has won six Grammy Awards, 25 Gospel Music Association Dove Awards, and had the first Christian album ever to go Platinum.Heart in Motion is her highest-selling album, with over five million copies sold in the United States alone. She was honored with a star on Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005 for her contributions to the entertainment industry.

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Amy Winehouse
Amy Jade Winehouse (14 September 1983 – 23 July 2011) was an English singer and songwriter known for her powerful deep contralto vocals and her eclectic mix of musical genres including R&B, soul and jazz. Winehouse's 2003 debut album, Frank, was critically successful in the UK and was nominated for the Mercury Prize. Her 2006 follow-up album, Back to Black, led to six Grammy Award nominations and five wins, tying the then record for the most wins by a female artist in a single night, and made Winehouse the first British female to win five Grammys, including three of the "Big Four": Best New Artist, Record of the Year and Song of the Year.
In 2007 she won a Brit Award for Best British Female Artist; she had also been nominated for Best British Album. She won the Ivor Novello Award three times: once in 2004 for Best Contemporary Song (musically and lyrically) for "Stronger Than Me", once in 2007 for Best Contemporary Song for "Rehab", and once in 2008 for Best Song Musically and Lyrically for "Love Is a Losing Game".

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Andreas Carlsson
Andreas Carlsson (born 3 April 1973) is a Swedish music producer, composer, and pop songwriter.
Carlsson was part of the Cheiron Studios team until the studio was closed down in 2000.
In January 2001, former Cheiron-members Andreas Carlsson, Kristian Lundin and Jake Schulze assumed the lease of the legendary Cheiron studios. Two years later, they launched production-company The Location and publishing-company Location Songs, where writer Savan Kotecha is signed.
In 2008 Andreas Carlsson formed production/publishing company Meriola with fellow producer, composer and songwriter Anders Bagge, who has written and produced songs for Madonna, Janet Jackson and Jennifer Lopez among others.
In 2009, Carlsson wrote his autobiography "Live to win - låtarna som skrev mitt liv" (The songs which wrote my life), about his career and journey to where he is today.
Carlsson frequently collaborates with writers Desmond Child and Chris Braide. Together they have written many recent American hit songs, including "Invisible" for the American Idol contestant Clay Aiken. The song became one of the most performed on American radio in 2004. A more recent collaboration is Katy Perry's "Waking Up In Vegas", featured on her album "One of the Boys". Andreas also made the song Strange, Alice in Wonderland's soundtrack, which was performed by Tokio Hotel and Kerli Kõiv.

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Andrew Wyatt
Andrew Wyatt is an American musician and producer. Born and raised in Manhattan, he has played in New York bands such as The A.M., and is currently the vocalist in the Swedish electronic pop band Miike Snow. He has worked extensively with other artists, writing and/or producing songs with Carl Barat, Mark Ronson, Dragons of Zynth, Coco Sumner and others.
Wyatt grew up on Perry Street in Manhattan in the 1980s. At 18, he and musician Greg Kurstin formed the short-lived experimental pop band Funkraphiliacs, whereupon he was signed to Capitol Records as a solo artist. He worked on the album in Bath, UK, at Peter Gabriel's Real World studios for about a year, with the Pet Shop Boys and Siouxie Sioux producer Stephen Hague, until chemical dependency and psychological issues forced him into hospitalization at New York's Paine Whitney clinic. Surmising that a major label release with its incumbent pressures was not realistic, it was decided that a period of respite was needed. Wyatt moved to a small mountain town in Colorado for several years.

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André Previn
André George Previn, KBE (born Andreas Ludwig Priwin; April 6, 1929) is a German-American pianist, conductor, and composer. He is considered one of the most versatile musicians in the world and is the winner of four Academy Awards for his film work and ten Grammy Awards for his recordings.
Previn was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Charlotte (née Epstein) and Jack Previn, who was a lawyer, judge, and music teacher. He is said to be "a distant relative of" the composer Gustav Mahler. However, In a pre-concert public interview at the Lincoln Center, in May 2012, Previn laughed at the suggestion that he is related to Mahler. The year of his birth is uncertain. Whilst most published reports give 1929, Previn himself has stated that 1930 is his birth year. This situation is a consequence of his the family losing Previn's birth certificate when they left Germany in 1938.^{[citation needed]} His elder brother was director Steve Previn.^{[citation needed]} The Previn family, which was Jewish,^{[citation needed]} emigrated to the United States in 1939 to escape the Nazi regime in Germany.^{[citation needed]}

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Andy Williams
Howard Andrew "Andy" Williams (born December 3, 1927) is an American singer who has recorded 18 Gold- and three Platinum-certified albums. He hosted The Andy Williams Show, a TV variety show, from 1962 to 1971, as well as numerous television specials, and owns the Moon River Theatre in Branson, Missouri named after the song "Moon River", with which he is closely identified.
Williams was born in Wall Lake, Iowa, the son of Jay Emerson and Florence (née Finley) Williams. He first performed in a children's choir at the local Presbyterian church. Williams and his three older brothers Bob, Don, and Dick formed the Williams Brothers quartet in late 1938, and they performed on radio in the Midwest, first at WHO in Des Moines, Iowa, and later at WLS in Chicago and WLW in Cincinnati. Williams graduated from Western Hills High School in Cincinnati and his brother was engaged to Gene Ingram's car-pool partner, Peggy. The Williams Brothers appeared with Bing Crosby on the hit record "Swinging on a Star" (1944). They appeared in 4 musical films: Janie (1944), Kansas City Kitty (1944), Something in the Wind (1947) and Ladies' Man (1947). This led to a nightclub act with entertainer Kay Thompson from 1947 to 1951.

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Anne Murray
Morna Anne Murray CC ONS (born June 20, 1945) is a multiple award-winning Canadian singer in pop, country and adult contemporary music whose albums have sold over 54 million copies.
Murray was the first Canadian female solo singer to reach #1 on the U.S. charts, and also the first to earn a Gold record for one of her signature songs, "Snowbird" (1970). She is often cited as the woman who paved the way for other Canadian international success stories such as Céline Dion, Sarah McLachlan and Shania Twain. She is also the first woman and the first Canadian to win "Album of the Year" at the Country Music Association Awards for her 1984 album A Little Good News.
Murray has received four Grammy Awards, 24 Juno Awards (she holds the record for the most Junos awarded to an artist), three American Music Awards, three Country Music Association Awards and three Canadian Country Music Association Awards. She has been inducted into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame, the Juno Hall of Fame, The Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Hit Parade Hall of Fame. She is a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame Walkway of Stars in Nashville, and has her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles and on Canada's Walk of Fame in Toronto.

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Anthony Newley
Anthony George Newley (24 September 1931 – 14 April 1999) was an English actor, singer and songwriter. He enjoyed success as a performer in such diverse fields as rock and roll and stage and screen acting.
Newley was born in the London working class district of Hackney, the son of Frances Grace Newley and George Kirby, a shipping clerk. He had 5 siblings, Maxene (b. 1926), John (b. 1927), Joanne (1928–1965), Linda (b. 1929), Belinda (b. 1932). He was Jewish on his mother's side. His parents, who had never married, separated during his early childhood, and he was brought up by his single mother.
Although recognised as very bright by his teachers back in London, he was uninterested in school, and by the age of fourteen was working as an office boy for an insurance company. When he read an ad in the Daily Telegraph, headed "Boy Actors Urgently Wanted" he applied to the advertisers, the prestigious Italia Conti Stage School, only to discover that the fees were too high. Nevertheless, after a brief audition, he was offered a job as an office boy on a salary of 30 shillings (£1.50) a week plus tuition at the school. While serving tea one afternoon he caught the eye of producer Geoffrey de Barkus, who cast Newley as "Dusty" in the children's serial, The Adventures of Dusty Bates.^{[citation needed]}

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Armando Manzanero
Armando Manzanero Canché (born in Mérida, Mexico on December 7, 1935) is a Mexican musician and composer of Maya descent, widely considered the premier Mexican romantic composer of the postwar era and one of the most successful composers of Latin America.
At the age of eight he was introduced into the world of music in the Escuela de Bellas Artes (School of Fine Arts) of his native city, later furthering his musical studies in Mexico City. In 1950, at the age of fifteen, he composed his first melody titled Nunca en el Mundo (Never in the World), of which twenty-one versions in different languages have been recorded to date. The following year he began his professional career as a pianist.
In 1957 he was signed as musical director by the Mexican branch of CBS International and as Musical Promoter for EMI, becoming the next year the pianist of Latin American artists such as Pedro Vargas, Lucho Gatica and Raphael.
In 1959, an executive of RCA Victor urged him to record his first album of love songs, which he named Mi Primera Grabación (My First Record).

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B. A. Robertson
B. A. Robertson (born Brian Alexander Robertson, 12 September 1956, Glasgow) is a Scottish musician, actor, composer and songwriter.
Robertson was educated at the former Allan Glen's School, Glasgow.
He released his debut album Wringing Applause, recorded with Terry Manning, on the Ardent Records label (also home of Big Star) in 1973, but it was to be a further six years until he found success in the UK charts.
Robertson had hits between 1979 and 1981 in the UK Singles Chart, the first of which – "Bang Bang" – reached number 2 in August 1979. Follow-up singles "Knocked It Off", "Kool In The Kaftan" and "To Be Or Not To Be" reached chart positions 8, 17 and 9 respectively. All the singles came from his third album Initial Success, which reached number 32 in the UK Albums Chart. In 1981 he had his last Top 40 hit performing a duet with Maggie Bell, of a cover version of "Hold Me" which reached number 11.
He wrote or co-wrote "Carrie", "Hot Shot" and "Wired for Sound" for Cliff Richard and wrote "Language of Love" which Richard released as a B-side. Robertson also penned and sang the theme music to the television series Maggie and Multi-Coloured Swap Shop ("Hello, Hello"), and wrote and sang backing vocals for the Swap Shop spin-off group Brown Sauce's UK Top 20 hit, "I Wanna Be a Winner".

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Barbra Streisand
Barbra Joan Streisand (/ˈstraɪsænd/; born April 24, 1942) is an American singer, actress, writer, film producer and director. She has won two Academy Awards, eight Grammy Awards, five Emmy Awards including one Daytime Emmy, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Peabody Award, and is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award.
She is one of the most commercially and critically successful entertainers in modern entertainment history, with more than 71.5 million albums shipped in the United States and 140 million albums sold worldwide. She is the best-selling female artist on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) Top Selling Artists list, the only female recording artist in the top ten, and the only artist outside of the rock and roll genre. Along with Frank Sinatra, Cher, and Shirley Jones, she shares the distinction of being awarded an acting Oscar and also recording a number-one single on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart.

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Barry Manilow
Barry Manilow (born June 17, 1943) is an American singer-songwriter and producer. He is best known for such recordings as "Could It Be Magic", "Mandy", "Can't Smile Without You", and "Copacabana (At the Copa)."
In 1978, five of his albums were on the best-selling charts simultaneously, a feat equalled only by Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and Johnny Mathis. He has recorded a string of Billboard hit singles and multi-platinum albums that have resulted in his being named Radio & Records number one Adult Contemporary artist and winning three straight American Music Awards for Favorite Pop/Rock Male Artist. Between 1974 - 1983 Manilow had three number 1 singles and 25 that reached the top 40. Several well-known entertainers have praised Manilow, including Sinatra, who was quoted in the 1970s saying, "He's next." In 1988, Bob Dylan stopped Manilow at a party, hugged him and said, "Don't stop what you're doing, man. We're all inspired by you."
As well as producing and arranging albums for other artists, including Bette Midler and Dionne Warwick, Manilow has written songs for musicals, films, and commercials. From February 2005 to December 30, 2009, he was the headliner at the Las Vegas Hilton, performing hundreds of shows before ending his relationship with the hotel. From March 2010, he has headlined at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas. He has sold more than 80 million records worldwide.

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Barry Mann
Barry Mann (born Barry Imberman, 9 February 1939, Brooklyn, New York) is an American songwriter, and part of a successful songwriting partnership with his wife, Cynthia Weil.
Mann and lyricist Cynthia Weil operated a publishing company called Dyad Music. Mann's first hit single as a writer was "She Say (Oom Dooby Doom)", a Top 20 song for The Diamonds in 1959. Mann co-wrote the song with Gerry Goffin. In 1961, Mann had his biggest hit to that time with "I Love How You Love Me", written with Larry Kolber and a No. 5 single for The Paris Sisters. (Seven years later, Bobby Vinton would take the song into the Top 10.) Also in 1961, Mann himself hit the Top 40 as a performer with a novelty song co-written with Goffin, "Who Put The Bomp", which parodied the nonsense words of the then-popular doo-wop genre and made the Top 40.
Despite his success as a singer with "Who Put the Bomp", Mann chose to channel the bulk of his creativity into songwriting, forming a prolific partnership with Weil, a lyricist he met while both were staff songwriters at Don Kirshner's and Al Nevin's Aldon Music, whose offices were located near the famed composing-and-publishing factory, the Brill Building. Mann and Weil, who married in 1961, helped pioneer the more socially conscious side of the Brill Building-era songbook with hits such as "Uptown" by The Crystals, "We Gotta Get out of This Place" by the Animals, "Magic Town" by the Vogues and "Kicks" by Paul Revere & the Raiders. (Mann and Weil were upset when "Only in America", a song they'd written with the team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and originally conceived for and recorded by The Drifters as a cynical broadside against racial prejudice, was re-worked by Leiber and Stoller into a uncontroversial hit for Jay & the Americans.)

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Bass Brothers
Bass Brothers is the professional name for the team of Mark and Jeff Bass, the Detroit producers responsible for grooming megastar Eminem in his early days and collaborating on much of his subsequent music. Before that they worked with George Clinton. Tracks from those sessions ended up on the P-Funk All Stars album Dope Dogs. Jeff Bass is considered one of the most influential people in Eminem's career.
On their work with Eminem, Mark and Jeff Bass are credited as F.B.T. Productions. Although Interscope marketed Dr. Dre as Eminem's major producer in order to boost his credibility as a white rapper in the hip-hop community, the Bass Brothers have in fact produced more individual tracks for the rapper than Dre. Jeff Bass performed the "Public Service Announcements" that introduce both The Slim Shady LP and The Marshall Mathers LP. Most recently, he performed the "Another Public Service Announcement" from D12's album Devil's Night when he got punched by Rondell Benne, who replaces him as the announcer for that album.

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Bee Gees
The Bee Gees were a musical group founded in 1958. The group's line-up consisted of brothers Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb. The trio were successful for most of their decades of recording music, but they had two distinct periods of exceptional success: as a pop act in the late 1960s/early 1970s, and as prominent performers of the disco music era in the late 1970s.
The group sang three-part tight harmonies that were instantly recognisable; Robin's clear vibrato lead was a hallmark of their earlier hits, while Barry's R&B falsetto became their signature sound during the late 1970s and 1980s. The brothers wrote all of their own hits, as well as writing and producing several major hits for other artists.
Born in the Isle of Man to English parents, the Gibb brothers lived their first few years in Chorlton, Manchester, England, then moved in the late 1950s to Redcliffe, Queensland, Australia, where they began their musical careers. After achieving their first chart success in Australia with "Spicks and Specks" (their 12th single), they returned to the United Kingdom in January 1967 where producer Robert Stigwood began promoting them to a worldwide audience.

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Ben Lovett
Ben Lovett (born May 3, 1978) is a current American recording artist, film composer, songwriter and producer from Georgia. Lovett is the founder of record label, Lovers Label.
Previous work includes recording and producing musical projects, Chris Wollard & The Ship Thieves with Chris Wollard (of Hot Water Music), and Heavens with Matt Skiba (of Alkaline Trio).
In 2009, Lovett won Best Score at The Brooklyn International Film Festival for The Last Lullaby (2008).
LPs:
EPs:
Singles:
Produced Records:
Co-Writes:
Composer:
The Last Lullaby
The Signal.
Last Goodbye
Ship Thieves

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Ben Mink
Ben Mink (born January 22, 1951) is a Canadian songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer.
Born of Polish parents, Mink was raised in Toronto Ontario. He got his start performing with the rock/country group Mary-Lou Horner, which became the house band at "The Rockpile" bar and nightclub.. They opened for Led Zeppelin and Muddy Waters, along with being a backup band for Chuck Berry.
He plays several string instruments, including the guitar, violin and the mandolin, and is an award-winning music producer.
Ben is best known as a long-time collaborator with Canadian singer k.d. lang, whom he met at Expo '85 while doing a gig with CANO. Mink has performed on, along with co-writing and producing several of her albums, which often combine voice with string arrangements.. Mink subsequently performed as violinist, guitarist, and mandolinist with lang's band, the Reclines. A performance was recorded as part of the MTV Unplugged series at the Ed Sullivan Theater, New York City, December 16, 1992 (aired in 1993).

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Bert Kaempfert
Bert Kaempfert (born Berthold Kämpfert; 16 October 1923 – 21 June 1980) was a German orchestra leader and songwriter. He made easy listening and jazz-oriented records, and wrote the music for a number of well-known songs, such as Strangers in the Night and Spanish Eyes.
He was born in Hamburg, Germany - where he received his lifelong nickname, Fips - and studied at the School of Music there. A multi-instrumentalist, he was hired by Hans Busch to play with his orchestra before serving as a bandsman in the German Navy during World War II. He later formed his own big band, toured with them, then worked as an arranger and producer, making hit records with Freddy Quinn and Ivo Robić. In 1961, he hired The Beatles to back Tony Sheridan for an album called My Bonnie. The album and its singles, released by Polydor, were the Beatles' first commercially released recordings.
Kaempfert's own first hit with his orchestra had been in 1960, with Wonderland by Night. Many of his tunes became better known as hits for other artists:

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Bette Midler
Bette Midler (born December 1, 1945) is an American singer, actress, and comedian, also known by her informal stage name, The Divine Miss M. She became famous as a cabaret and concert headliner, and went on to star in successful and acclaimed films such as The Rose, Ruthless People, Beaches, and For The Boys. During her more than forty-year career, Midler has been nominated for two Academy Awards, and won three Grammy Awards, four Golden Globes, three Emmy Awards, and a special Tony Award. She has sold over 30 million albums worldwide. Her voice type is categorized as deep mezzo soprano.
Midler was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her parents moved from Paterson, New Jersey to Honolulu before she was born, and hers was one of the few Jewish families in a mostly Asian neighborhood. Her mother, Ruth (née Schindel), was a seamstress and housewife, and her father, Fred Midler, worked at a Navy base in Hawaii as a painter. She was named after actress Bette Davis, though Davis pronounced her first name in two syllables, and Midler uses one, /ˈbɛt/. She was raised in Aiea and attended Radford High School, in Honolulu. She was voted "Most Talkative" in the 1961 school Hoss Election, and in her Senior Year (Class of 1963), "Most Dramatic". Midler majored in drama at the University of Hawaii, but left after three semesters. She earned money in the 1966 film Hawaii as an extra, playing an uncredited seasick passenger named Miss David Buff.

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Betty Comden
Betty Comden (May 3, 1917 – November 23, 2006) was one-half of the musical-comedy duo Comden and Green, who provided lyrics, libretti, and screenplays to some of the most beloved and successful Hollywood musicals and Broadway shows of the mid-20th century. Her writing partnership with Adolph Green lasted for six decades, during which time they collaborated with other leading entertainment figures such as the famed "Freed Unit" at MGM, Jule Styne and Leonard Bernstein.
Betty Comden was born Basya Cohen in New York City, attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, and studied drama at New York University. In 1938, mutual friends introduced her to Adolph Green, an aspiring actor. Along with the young Judy Holliday and Leonard Bernstein, Comden and Green formed a troupe called the Revuers, which performed at the Village Vanguard, a club in Greenwich Village. Due to the act's success, the Revuers appeared in the 1944 film Greenwich Village, but their roles were so small they barely were noticed, and they quickly returned to New York.

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Beyoncé
Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter (née Beyoncé Giselle Knowles; September 4, 1981), known mononymously as Beyoncé (

/biˈjɒnseɪ/ bee-YON-say), is an American singer, songwriter, record producer and actress. Born and raised in Houston, Texas, she enrolled in various performing arts schools and was first exposed to singing and dancing competitions as a child. Knowles rose to fame in the late 1990s as the lead singer of the R&B girl group Destiny's Child, one of the world's best-selling girl groups of all time.
During the hiatus of Destiny's Child, Knowles released her debut solo album, Dangerously in Love, in 2003, which spawned two number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100—"Crazy in Love" and "Baby Boy"—and became one of the most successful albums of that year, earning her a then record-tying five Grammy Awards. Following the disbandment of Destiny's Child in 2005, Knowles released her second solo album, B'Day, in 2006, which spawned the top 10 singles "Déjà Vu", "Irreplaceable" and "Beautiful Liar". Her third solo album I Am... Sasha Fierce (2008), spawned the hit singles "If I Were a Boy", "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)", "Halo" and "Sweet Dreams". The album helped Knowles earn six Grammys in 2010, breaking the record for most Grammy Awards won by a female artist in one night. Knowles' fourth solo album, 4 (2011), became her fourth consecutive number one album on the Billboard 200 as a solo artist. This made her the third artist in history to have her first four studio albums debut atop the chart.

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Beyoncé Knowles
Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter (née Beyoncé Giselle Knowles; September 4, 1981), known mononymously as Beyoncé (

/biˈjɒnseɪ/ bee-YON-say), is an American singer, songwriter, record producer and actress. Born and raised in Houston, Texas, she enrolled in various performing arts schools and was first exposed to singing and dancing competitions as a child. Knowles rose to fame in the late 1990s as the lead singer of the R&B girl group Destiny's Child, one of the world's best-selling girl groups of all time.
During the hiatus of Destiny's Child, Knowles released her debut solo album, Dangerously in Love, in 2003, which spawned two number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100—"Crazy in Love" and "Baby Boy"—and became one of the most successful albums of that year, earning her a then record-tying five Grammy Awards. Following the disbandment of Destiny's Child in 2005, Knowles released her second solo album, B'Day, in 2006, which spawned the top 10 singles "Déjà Vu", "Irreplaceable" and "Beautiful Liar". Her third solo album I Am... Sasha Fierce (2008), spawned the hit singles "If I Were a Boy", "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)", "Halo" and "Sweet Dreams". The album helped Knowles earn six Grammys in 2010, breaking the record for most Grammy Awards won by a female artist in one night. Knowles' fourth solo album, 4 (2011), became her fourth consecutive number one album on the Billboard 200 as a solo artist. This made her the third artist in history to have her first four studio albums debut atop the chart.

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Bill Berry
William Thomas "Bill" Berry (born July 31, 1958 in Duluth, Minnesota) is a retired American musician, multi-instrumentalist, best known as the drummer for the alternative rock band R.E.M. In addition to his drumming duties, Berry played many other instruments including guitar, bass guitar, and piano, both for songwriting and on R.E.M. records. After 17 years with the band, Berry retired to become a farmer, and has since maintained a low profile, making sporadic reunions with R.E.M. and appearing on other artists' records.
Berry was born in Duluth, the fifth child of Don and Anna. At three years old, Berry moved with his family to Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, where they would remain for the next seven years. In 1968, they were on the move again, this time to Sandusky, Ohio, on the banks of Lake Erie.
In 1972, the Berry family made their final move, to Macon, Georgia, literally just in time to start high school at Mount de Sales Academy. It was there that he met bassist Mike Mills, and they played together in several different bands. Their first attempt at a career in music was short-lived. He and Mills decided to make money by getting day jobs. They rented an apartment on Arlington Street in Macon and Bill landed a job at the Paragon booking agency next door.

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Bill Bottrell
Bill Bottrell (born 1952) is an American record producer, songwriter and musician, probably best known for his Grammy Award-winning collaborations with Michael Jackson, E.L.O. and Sheryl Crow.
Between 1967 and 1970, Bottrell attended Crescenta Valley Senior High in La Crescenta, California, where he graduated in 1970. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara between 1970 and 1972, studying for a Bachelor's Degree in Music.
In 1974, he married Elizabeth Jordan, whom he met in high school. That same year, Bottrell got his first job in music, as an engineer at California Recording Studio in Hollywood. In 1978, he moved over to Soundcastle Studios in Silverlake, where he met Jeff Lynne, who eventually hired him to engineer for ELO. In 1979 his daughter Adrianne was born. The 1980s were spent freelance engineering between Europe and Los Angeles, with clients including: The Jacksons, ELO, Michael Jackson, Madonna, George Harrison, Starship and Tom Petty. Daughter Laura was born in 1983. He worked for Michael Jackson at his house in Encino between 1984 and 1986, recording tracks for Bad. In 1988, Bottrell co-produced his first record, Aliens Ate My Buick by Thomas Dolby. In 1989, Michael Jackson asked him to co-produce, engineer and write songs for his album Dangerous, co-writing the album’s biggest hit, "Black or White". The song spent 7 weeks at number one on the U.S. Hot 100 chart in the fall of 1991.

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Bill Champlin
William Bradford "Bill" Champlin (born May 21, 1947, Oakland, California) is an American singer, guitarist, keyboard player, arranger, producer, and songwriter. His performance work is principally associated with the bands Chicago and the Sons of Champlin. He has won multiple Grammy Awards for songwriting.
As a child, Champlin demonstrated a talent for piano, and eventually picked up the guitar after being inspired by Elvis Presley. He started a band, The Opposite Six, while at Tamalpais High School, in Mill Valley, California and went on to study music in college, but was encouraged by a professor to drop out of school and pursue music professionally.
The Opposite Six, Champlin's band from high school, changed their name to the Sons of Champlin, and eventually recorded a number of well-reviewed but poorly-selling albums (including Loosen Up Naturally and Circle Filled With Love) by 1977, when the 30 year old Champlin moved to Los Angeles.
In LA he began extensive studio session work. He was especially in demand for his singing, appearing on hundreds of recordings throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) awarded Champlin the Most Valuable Player peer award for male background vocalists in 1980.

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Bill Danoff
William T. "Bill" Danoff (born May 7, 1946, Springfield, Massachusetts) is an American songwriter and singer. His best known song as a performer is "Afternoon Delight", which Danoff performed as a member of the Starland Vocal Band. As a songwriter, he also wrote or co-wrote hits for John Denver, Emmylou Harris and Doug and the Slugs.
Danoff and his then-wife, Taffy Nivert, wrote "I Guess He'd Rather Be in Colorado" and "Take Me Home, Country Roads," both of which were hits for John Denver. The latter song is the de facto state song of West Virginia, although it has no official status as such (and was written in a house in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C.).^{[citation needed]} Danoff has stated he had never been in West Virginia before writing the song.^{[citation needed]} He had even briefly considered using "Massachusetts" rather than "West Virginia", as both four-syllable state names would have fit the song's meter. Denver recorded about a dozen Danoff compositions from 1972 through the end of his career.

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Bill Withers
William Harrison "Bill" Withers, Jr. (born July 4, 1938) is an American singer-songwriter and musician who performed and recorded from 1970 until 1985. He recorded a number of hits such as "Lean on Me", "Ain't No Sunshine", "Use Me", "Just the Two of Us", "Lovely Day", and "Grandma's Hands". His life was recently the subject of the documentary film Still Bill.
Withers was born the youngest of six children in the small coal-mining town of Slab Fork, West Virginia. Raised in nearby Beckley, West Virginia, Withers was twelve years old when his father died. He enlisted with the United States Navy at age eighteen and served for nine years, during which time he became interested in singing and writing songs. Soon after his discharge from the Navy in 1965, he relocated to Los Angeles in 1967 for a musical career.
Withers worked as an assembler for several different companies, including Douglas Aircraft Corporation, while recording demo tapes with his own money, shopping them around and performing in clubs at night. When he debuted with the song "Ain't No Sunshine" he refused to resign his job because of his belief that the music business was a fickle industry and that he was still a novice compared to other acts.

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Billy Joel
William Martin "Billy" Joel (born May 9, 1949) is an American pianist, singer-songwriter, and composer. Since releasing his first hit song, "Piano Man," in 1973, Joel has become the sixth best-selling recording artist and the third best-selling solo artist in the United States, according to the RIAA.
Joel had Top 40 hits in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, achieving 33 Top 40 hits in the United States, all of which he wrote himself. He is also a six-time Grammy Award winner, a 23-time Grammy nominee and has sold over 150 million records worldwide. He was inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame (1992), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1999), the Long Island Music Hall of Fame (2006), and the Hit Parade Hall of Fame (2009). In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of the Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists to celebrate the US singles chart's 50th anniversary, with Billy Joel positioned at No. 23. With the exception of the 2007 songs "All My Life" and "Christmas in Fallujah," Joel stopped recording pop/rock material after 1993's River of Dreams, but he continued to tour extensively until 2010.

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Bob Merrill
Bob Merrill (May 17, 1921 – February 17, 1998) was an American songwriter, theatrical composer, lyricist, and screenwriter.
Merrill was born Henry Merrill Levan in Atlantic City, New Jersey and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Following a stint with the Army during World War II, he moved to Hollywood, where he worked as a dialogue director for Columbia Pictures. He began his songwriting career writing tunes for Dorothy Shay. One of his first major hits was a country song co-written by Moon Mullican in 1950 entitled "You Don't Have To Be a Baby To Cry", and the 1950 novelty song "If I Knew You Were Comin' I'd've Baked a Cake", co-written with Al Hoffman and Clem Watts and recorded by Eileen Barton.
The other eight songs which round out the Top Ten for which he is most well-known include
Guy Mitchell recorded many of Merrill's songs including "Sparrow in the Tree Top", She Wears Red Feathers, and "My Truly, Truly Fair".
Merrill made his Broadway debut in 1957 with New Girl in Town, a musical adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie. His greatest theatrical success was the Barbra Streisand vehicle Funny Girl, which introduced the standard "People" and "Don't Rain on My Parade". When the stage show was adapted for the screen, he and songwriting partner Jule Styne were asked to write a title tune, which eventually garnered them both Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Song entitled "Funny Girl". Producer David Merrick employed Merrill to write additional songs for the musical Hello, Dolly/ Merrill contributed two songs, "Motherhood March" and "Elegance", and some additional lyrics to Jerry Herman's It Takes a Woman . Merrill did not accept billing or credit for his additions to the score.

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Bobbie Gentry
Roberta Lee Streeter (born July 27, 1944), professionally known as Bobbie Gentry, is an American former singer-songwriter notable as one of the first female country artists to compose and produce her own material. Her songs typically drew on her Mississippi roots to compose vignettes of the Southern United States.
Gentry shot to international fame with her intriguing Southern Gothic narrative "Ode to Billie Joe" in 1967. The track was fourth in the Billboard year-end chart of 1967 and earned her Grammy awards for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 1968. Gentry charted eleven singles on the Billboard Hot 100 and four singles on the United Kingdom Top 40. Her album Fancy brought her a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. After her first albums, she had a successful run of variety shows on the Las Vegas Strip. She lost interest in performing in the late 1970s and has since lived privately in Los Angeles.
Gentry was born Roberta Streeter and is of English and Portuguese ancestry.^{[citation needed]} She was born in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, to Robert and Ruby (Bullington) Streeter. She has an older brother, Robert Streeter, Jr. Her parents divorced shortly after her birth, and her mother moved to California. She was raised on her grandparents' farm in Chickasaw County. Her grandmother traded one of the family's milk cows for a neighbor's piano, and seven-year-old Bobbie composed her first song, "My Dog Sergeant Is a Good Dog". She attended school in Greenwood, Mississippi, and began teaching herself to play the guitar, bass, banjo, and vibes.

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Bobby Goldsboro
Bobby Goldsboro (born January 18, 1941) is an American country and pop singer-songwriter. He had a string of Pop and Country hits during the 1960s and 1970s, including his signature #1 classic "Honey," which sold well over one million copies in the United States.
Goldsboro was born in Marianna, Florida. In 1941, Goldsboro's family moved 35 miles north from Marianna to Dothan, Alabama. He graduated from Dothan High School in 1959 and later enrolled at Auburn University. Goldsboro left college after his second year to pursue a musical career. He played guitar for Roy Orbison from 1962 to 1964 while releasing a few unsuccessful singles.
Goldsboro's solo career picked up steam with the "Top Ten" hit "See the Funny Little Clown." The single, penned by Goldsboro, reached #9 on the U.S. national charts in early 1964. It sold over one million copies and was awarded a gold disc. It was to be the first of a string of similar awards. Goldsboro would go on to have 11 Top 40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 and 12 on the country chart. In 1966 he recorded "Too Many People" with "It's Too Late" on the B-side. Although Goldsboro was not a prolific performer of dance music, both of these songs were popular within Northern soul and were played at Wigan Casino. His biggest hit was 1968's "Honey," a maudlin tearjerker about the death of a man's young wife. The song, written by Bobby Russell, was recorded in one take. It topped the Hot 100 for five weeks, reached #2 in the UK Singles Chart on two separate occasions (1968 and 1975), and was a #1 single in Australia, selling in excess of one million copies there. It also became his first country hit and marked a career transition, as his songs became more successful on the country chart than on the pop side. Bobby remained a fixture in the country top 40 into the early 1980s.

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Bobby McFerrin
Robert "Bobby" McFerrin, Jr. (born March 11, 1950) is a virtuoso American vocalist and conductor. He is best known for his 1988 hit song "Don't Worry, Be Happy". He is a ten-time Grammy Award winner. He is well known for his unique vocal techniques and singing styles.
Bobby McFerrin was born in Manhattan, New York City, the son of operatic baritone Robert McFerrin and singer Sara Copper. Robert Sr. was the first African American to be a regular with New York's Metropolitan Opera. Sara is a former soloist with regional opera companies and in Broadway shows, and is a professor emeritus of music at Fullerton College in Fullerton, California.
Bobby McFerrin married Debbie Green in 1975. They have three children.
McFerrin's song "Don't Worry, Be Happy" was a No. 1 U.S. pop hit in 1988 and won Song of the Year and Record of the Year honors. McFerrin has also worked in collaboration with instrumental performers, including pianists Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and Joe Zawinul, drummer Tony Williams, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

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Bobby Russell
Bobby Russell (19 April 1940, Nashville, Tennessee — 19 November 1992) was an American singer and songwriter. Between 1966 and 1973, he charted five singles on the Hot Country Songs charts, including the crossover pop hit "Saturday Morning Confusion." Russell was also married to singer and actress Vicki Lawrence from 1972 to 1974.

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Bobby Womack
Robert Dwayne "Bobby" Womack (

/ˈwoʊmæk/; born March 4, 1944) is an American singer-songwriter and musician. An active recording artist since the early 1960s where he started his career as the lead singer of his family musical group The Valentinos and as Sam Cooke's backing guitarist, Womack's career has spanned more than 50 years and has spanned a repertoire in the styles of R&B, soul, rock and roll, doo-wop, gospel, and country.
Womack wrote and originally recorded The Rolling Stones' first UK No. 1 hit, "It's All Over Now" and New Birth's "I Can Understand It" among other songs. As a singer he is most notable for the hits "Lookin' For a Love", "That's The Way I Feel About Cha", "Woman's Gotta Have It", "Harry Hippie", "Across 110th Street" and his 1980s hit "If You Think You're Lonely Now".
In 2009, Womack was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Born and raised in Cleveland's East 85th & Quincy area to Naomi Womack and Friendly Womack, Womack was the third of five brothers. Raised Baptist, their mother played organ in their church and their father was a minister and musician, often known to play guitar though he advised his sons to not touch the instrument while he was away. One night, eight-year-old Bobby, who was often playing it, broke a guitar string. After Friendly Womack fixed the string, he let Bobby play the guitar for him. According to Bobby later, Friendly was shocked by his son's talents as well as the talents of his other sons. Soon afterwards, he bought Bobby his own guitar and formed The Womack Brothers. The group toured the gospel circuit with their parents accompanying them on organ and guitar respectively. In 1954, the group under the moniker Curtis Womack and the Womack Brothers, the group issued the Pennant single, "Buffalo Bill". Bobby was only ten years old at the time.

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Bono
Paul David Hewson (born 10 May 1960), most commonly known by his stage name Bono (/ˈbɒnoʊ/ BON-oh), is an Irish singer, musician, and humanitarian best known for being the main vocalist of the Dublin-based rock band U2. Bono was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, and attended Mount Temple Comprehensive School where he met his future wife, Alison Stewart, and the future members of U2. Bono writes almost all U2 lyrics, often using political, social, and religious themes. During their early years, Bono's lyrics contributed to U2's rebellious and spiritual tone. As the band matured, his lyrics became inspired more by personal experiences shared with members of U2.
Outside the band, he has collaborated and recorded with numerous artists, is managing director and a managing partner of Elevation Partners, and has refurbished and owns The Clarence Hotel in Dublin with The Edge. Bono is also widely known for his activism concerning Africa, for which he co-founded DATA, EDUN, the ONE Campaign and Product Red. He has organised and played in several benefit concerts and has met with influential politicians. Bono has been praised and criticised for his activism and involvement with U2. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, was granted an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, and was named as a Person of the Year by Time, among other awards and nominations.

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Brenda Russell
Brenda Russell (born Brenda Gordon, April 8, 1949, Brooklyn, New York) is an American-Canadian singer-songwriter and keyboardist. Known for her eclectic musical style, her recordings have encompassed several different genres, including pop, soul, dance, jazz and adult contemporary. As well as composing and recording her own material, Russell's songwriting and vocal talents have been used by Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Earth, Wind & Fire, Joni Mitchell, Donna Summer, and Sting.
Born to musical parents (her father Gus was a one-time member of The Ink Spots), she spent her early years in Canada after moving to Hamilton, Ontario, age 12. As a teenager she began performing in local bands and in her late teens joined the Toronto production of Hair, during which time she had begun to play the piano. In the early 1970s she married musician Bryan Russell and (as Brian & Brenda) they released two albums on Elton John's Rocket label, Word Called Love (1976) and Supersonic Lover (1977). The Russells also performed on two tracks from Robert Palmer's breakout soul-pop album Double Fun. Their daughter, Lindsay, was born in 1977, but the couple had divorced by the late 1970s, and Brenda, now living in Los Angeles, had set out on a solo career.

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Bruce Johnston
Bruce Arthur Johnston (born Benjamin Baldwin on June 27, 1942) is a member of The Beach Boys and a songwriter, remembered especially for composing "I Write the Songs". Johnston was not one of the original members of the band. He joined the band on April 9, 1965 after Glen Campbell (who was substituting on stage for the group's chief song writer Brian Wilson) decided to embark on a solo career. Johnston's first vocal recording with the Beach Boys was "California Girls."
As a child Johnston was adopted by William and Irene Johnston of Chicago, and grew up on the West side of Los Angeles in Brentwood and Bel-Air. His adoptive father was president of the Owl Rexall Drug Company in Los Angeles after moving from Walgreens in Chicago. Johnston attended private school Bel-Air Town And Country School (later renamed John Thomas Dye School) in Los Angeles and also studied classical piano in his early years. In high school, Johnston switched to contemporary music. He performed in a few "beginning" bands during this time and then moved on to working with young musicians such as Sandy Nelson, Kim Fowley and Phil Spector. Soon Johnston began backing people such as Ritchie Valens, the Everly Brothers, and even Eddie Cochran. In 1959 while still in high school, Johnston arranged and played on his first hit record called "Teenbeat" by Sandy Nelson. The single record reached the Billboard Top Ten. The same year Johnston made his first single under his own name, "Take This Pearl" on Arwin Records (a record label owned by Doris Day) as part of the Bruce & Terry duo.

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Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen (born September 23, 1949), nicknamed "The Boss," is an American singer-songwriter-performer who records and tours with the E Street Band. Springsteen is widely known for his brand of heartland rock, poetic lyrics, and Americana sentiments centered on his native New Jersey.
Springsteen's recordings have included both commercially accessible rock albums and more somber folk-oriented works. His most successful studio albums, Born in the U.S.A. and Born to Run, showcase a talent for finding grandeur in the struggles of daily American life; he has sold more than 65 million albums in the United States and more than 120 million worldwide and he has earned numerous awards for his work, including 21 Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes and an Academy Award. He is widely regarded by many as one of the most influential songwriters of the 20th century, and in 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him as the 23rd Greatest Artist of all time.
Springsteen was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and spent his childhood and high school years in Freehold Borough. He lived on South Street in Freehold Borough and attended Freehold Borough High School. His father, Douglas Frederick Springsteen, was of Dutch and Irish ancestry and worked, among other vocations, as a bus driver, although he was frequently unemployed; his surname is Dutch for jump stone. His mother, Adele Ann (née Zerilli), was a legal secretary and was of Italian ancestry. His maternal grandfather was born in Vico Equense, a city near Naples. He has two younger sisters, Virginia and Pamela. Pamela had a brief film career, but left acting to pursue still photography full time; she took photos for the Human Touch and Lucky Town albums.

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Bruno Mars
Peter Gene Hernandez (born October 8, 1985), better known by his stage name Bruno Mars, is an American singer-songwriter and record producer. Raised in Honolulu, Hawaii by a family of musicians, Mars began making music at a young age. He performed in various musical venues in his hometown throughout his childhood. He graduated from high school and then moved to Los Angeles, California to pursue a musical career. Mars produced songs for other artists, joining production team The Smeezingtons.
Mars had an unsuccessful stint with Motown Records, but then signed with Atlantic Records in 2009. He became recognized as a solo artist after lending his vocals and co-writing the hooks for the songs "Nothin' on You" by B.o.B, and "Billionaire" by Travie McCoy. He also co-wrote the hits "Right Round" by Flo Rida featuring Ke$ha, and "Wavin' Flag" by K'naan. In October 2010, he released his debut album, Doo-Wops & Hooligans. Anchored by the worldwide number-one singles "Just the Way You Are" and "Grenade", the album peaked at number three on the Billboard 200. Mars was nominated for seven Grammys at the 53rd Grammy Awards, winning Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for "Just the Way You Are".

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Bryan Adams
Bryan Adams, OC OBC (born Bryan Guy Adams, 5 November 1959) is a Canadian rock singer-songwriter, guitarist, bassist, producer, actor and photographer. For his contributions to music, Adams has many awards and nominations, including 20 Juno Awards among 56 nominations, 15 Grammy Award nominations including a win for Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or Television in 1992. He has also won MTV, ASCAP, and American Music awards. In addition, he has won two Ivor Novello Awards for song composition and has been nominated for several Golden Globe Awards and three times for Academy Awards for his songwriting for films.
Adams was awarded the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia for contributions to popular music and philanthropic work via his own foundation, which helps improve education for people around the world.
Adams was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with the 2,435th star in March 2011 and Canada's Walk of Fame in 1998, and in April 2006 he was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame at Canada's Juno Awards. In 2008, Bryan was ranked 38 on the list of All-Time top artists by the Billboard Hot 100 50th Anniversary Charts. On 13 January 2010, he received the Allan Waters Humanitarian Award for his part in numerous charitable concerts and campaigns during his career, and on 1 May 2010 was given the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for his 30 years of contributions to the arts.

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Bryan-Michael Cox
Bryan-Michael Cox (born December 1, 1977) is an American songwriter and record producer. In 2009, Cox was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame.
Bryan-Michael Cox was born in Miami and grew up in Houston, where he attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. While in the eleventh grade he met and was mentored by Greg Curtis (who produced and co-wrote Keyshia Cole's 2006 hit, "Love"). Under Curtis, Cox learned the basic foundation of creating songs, including production, using audio equipment, recording, as well as structuring and writing songs. During his senior year, he was joined at the school by singer Beyoncé Knowles and her former Destiny's Child group member LeToya Luckett. He was part of a recording session, which consisted of three demo songs, for the group then known only as "Destiny".
In 1997, he moved to Atlanta to attend Clark Atlanta University (CAU), where he majored in music. He obtained an unpaid internship with the Noontime production company. He worked with Jagged Edge, which resulted in him meeting Jermaine Dupri, which lead to Cox producing and writing for Usher Raymond, Mariah Carey, Nivea, Monica, Da Brat and Lil' Bow Wow. Cox has co-written and co-produced hits such as Carey's "Don't Forget About Us", Usher's "Burn" and U Got It Bad's "Confessions, Pt. 2". He has won two Grammy awards his for work on albums by Carey and Usher. Mary J. Blige's "Be Without You" marked his first Hot 100 Top 5 hit without Dupri.

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Carnie Wilson
Carnie Wilson (born April 29, 1968) is an American singer and television hostess, perhaps best known as a member of the pop music group Wilson Phillips.
The daughter of American 1960s pop icon Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, and his first wife, former singer Marilyn Rovell of The Honeys, she co-founded Wilson Phillips with her younger sister Wendy and childhood friend Chynna Phillips when they were in their teens. They released two albums, Wilson Phillips and Shadows and Light, sold 12 million albums, and charted three #1 singles and six top 20 hits before breaking up in 1993.
Carnie & Wendy Wilson continued to record together, releasing the Christmas album Hey Santa! in 1993, and they joined with their father for a critically successful (yet commercially unsuccessful) 1997 album, The Wilsons. She also sang "Our Time Has Come" with James Ingram for the 1997 animated film Cats Don't Dance.
In 2003, Carnie attempted to launch a solo music career with the album For the First Time. The album featured a remake of the Olivia DiNucci penned Samantha Mumba ballad "Don't Need You To (Tell Me I'm Pretty)," retitled "I Don't Need You To," as its first single. However, the single failed to gain interest and the album was ultimately shelved when Carnie regrouped with Wendy and Chynna as Wilson Phillips in 2004.

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Carole King
Carole King (born February 9, 1942) is an American singer, songwriter, and pianist. King and her former husband Gerry Goffin wrote more than two dozen chart hits for numerous artists during the 1960s, many of which have become standards. As a singer, her Tapestry album topped the U.S. album chart for 15 weeks in 1971, and remained on the charts for more than six years.
She was most successful as a performer in the first half of the 1970s, although she was a successful songwriter long before and long after. She had her first number 1 hit as a songwriter in 1961 at age 18, with "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", which she wrote with Goffin. In 1997, she co-wrote "The Reason" for Aerosmith, but instead it was sung by Celine Dion.
In 2000, Joel Whitburn, a Billboard Magazine pop music researcher, named her the most successful female songwriter of 1955–99, because she wrote or co-wrote 118 pop hits on the Billboard Hot 100.
King has made 25 solo albums, the most successful being Tapestry. Her most recent non-compilation album is Live at the Troubadour, a collaboration with James Taylor, which reached number 4 on the charts in its first week, and has sold over 600,000 copies.

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Carolyn Leigh
Carolyn Leigh (August 21, 1926 – November 19, 1983) was an American lyricist for Broadway, movies, and popular songs. She is best known as the writer with partner Cy Coleman of the pop standards "Witchcraft" and "The Best Is Yet to Come."
Leigh, born in the Bronx, New York, graduated from Hunter College High School, Queens College and New York University, and worked as a copy writer for radio stations and advertising agencies. Her lyrics for Broadway shows include Peter Pan, Wildcat, Little Me, and How Now, Dow Jones. The last was derived from an original idea of Leigh's, though Max Shulman wrote the script. At the time of her death, she was working with Marvin Hamlisch on the musical Smile. She provided lyrics for the scores to the films The Cardinal in 1963 and Father Goose in 1964. Leigh died on November 19, 1983 of a heart attack. She was divorced from David Cunningham, Jr. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1985.

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Carrie Underwood
Carrie Marie Underwood (born March 10, 1983) is an American country singer, songwriter and actress who rose to fame as the winner of the fourth season of American Idol, in 2005. Underwood has since become a multi-platinum selling recording artist, a winner of several Grammy Awards, Billboard Music Awards and American Music Awards, a Golden Globe Award nominee, a three-time Academy of Country Music and Country Music Association Female Vocalist winner, and a two-time ACM Entertainer of the Year. She is the first-ever female artist to win back-to-back Academy of Country Music (ACM) Awards for Entertainer of the Year (2009/10). Underwood was inducted into and became a member of the Grand Ole Opry in 2008. She was also inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 2009.Billboard named Underwood Country Music's reigning Queen in 2012.

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Cee Lo Green
Thomas DeCarlo Callaway (born May 30, 1974), better known by his stage name Cee Lo Green, is an American singer-songwriter, rapper, record producer and actor. Originally came to prominence as a member of the southern hip hop group Goodie Mob, later launching a critically acclaimed solo career and forming Gnarls Barkley with DJ Danger Mouse.
Internationally, Cee Lo is best known for his hip hop work, his most popular was Gnarls Barkley's 2006 worldwide hit "Crazy", which reached number one in various singles charts worldwide, including the UK. In the United States, "Crazy" reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100. Parent album St. Elsewhere was also a hit, reaching number one on the UK Albums Chart and number four on the US Billboard 200 album charts. Gnarls Barkley's second album, The Odd Couple (2008), was less successful and missed the top ten in both the UK and U.S., where it charted at number 12 in the U.S. and 18 in the UK.
In 2010, Cee Lo took a break from recording with Gnarls Barkley and released the single "F**k You!" on August 19 as a solo recording artist. The song was an instant hit, with the radio-edit version "Forget You" reaching the top spot in the UK and the Netherlands and charted at number two on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. The parent album, The Lady Killer (2010) saw similar success, peaking within the top five of the UK Albums Chart and debuting within the top ten on the Billboard 200 album charts, and received a Gold certification from the BPI in the UK shortly after its release. His second single "It's OK" was a hit in Europe and the third single, "Bright Lights Bigger City" has also seen similar charting success. Cee Lo is also currently a vocal coach on the NBC reality talent show The Voice with Adam Levine, Christina Aguilera, and Blake Shelton.

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Celine Dion
Céline Marie Claudette Dion, CC OQ, (French pronunciation: [selin djɔ̃] (

listen); born March 30, 1968), is a Canadian singer. Born to a large family from Charlemagne, Quebec, Dion emerged as a teen star in the French-speaking world after her manager and future husband René Angélil mortgaged his home to finance her first record. In 1990, she released the English-language album Unison, establishing herself as a viable pop artist in North America and other English-speaking areas of the world.
Dion had first gained international recognition in the 1980s by winning both the 1982 Yamaha World Popular Song Festival and the 1988 Eurovision Song Contest. Following a series of French albums in the early 1980s, she signed on to CBS Records Canada in 1986. During the 1990s, with the help of Angélil, she achieved worldwide fame after signing with Epic Records and releasing several English albums along with additional French albums, becoming one of the most successful artists in pop music history. However, in 1999 at the height of her success, Dion announced a hiatus from entertainment in order to start a family and spend time with her husband, who had been diagnosed with cancer. She returned to the top of pop music in 2002 and signed a three-year (later extended to almost five years) contract to perform nightly in a five-star theatrical show at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace, Paradise, Nevada.

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Charles Kelley
Charles Burgess Kelley (born September 11, 1981) is an American country music singer-songwriter and founding member of Lady Antebellum, a country rock trio formed in 2006 and signed to Capitol Nashville.
Kelley was born in Augusta, Georgia, and began his musical career at the age of 11. His older brother, Josh Kelley, is also a musician and singer. As teenagers, Charles, Josh and oldest brother John formed a band called Inside Blue; the band released a five-song CD that garnered the attention of a major label. In middle school, Kelley met Dave Haywood and, at the age of 14, they wrote their first song. They both graduated from Lakeside High School in Evans, Georgia.
Kelley attended the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, where he was a member of the Nu Zeta chapter of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. He graduated in 2004 with a degree in finance.
Before moving to Nashville, Tennessee, in mid-2005 to pursue a musical career, Kelley worked in his brother John's construction business in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, as an accountant for an affiliated waste management company. Kelley made the move after his brother Josh, who was a pop musician at the time, bought a house in Nashville and convinced him to come live there so they could write songs together.

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Chris Martin
Christopher Anthony John "Chris" Martin (2 March 1977) is an English singer-songwriter, who is the lead vocalist, pianist and rhythm guitarist of the band Coldplay. He is well known by fans for his distinctive tenor voice. He is married to actress Gwyneth Paltrow.
Chris Martin was born in Exeter, Devon and is the eldest of five children. His father, Anthony Martin, is a retired accountant, and his mother, Alison Martin, is a music teacher. Martin started his education at the pre-preparatory Hylton School and then went on to preparatory Exeter Cathedral School. It was at the prep school that Martin formed his first band, The Rocking Honkies, with Nick Repton & Iwan Gronow. Their debut performance was met with boos from the crowd. After Exeter Cathedral, Martin boarded at Sherborne School, a boys' independent school in Dorset. He also met future Coldplay manager Phil Harvey at the school. Martin continued his studies at University College London, staying at Ramsay Hall where he read Ancient World Studies and graduated with First Class honours in Greek and Latin. It is here he met future Coldplay bandmates Jonny Buckland, Will Champion and Guy Berryman.

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Christina Aguilera
Christina María Aguilera (born December 18, 1980) is an American recording artist and actress. Aguilera first appeared on national television in 1990 as a contestant on the Star Search program, and went on to star in Disney Channel's television series The Mickey Mouse Club from 1993 to 1994. Aguilera signed to RCA Records after recording "Reflection", the theme song for the animated film Mulan (1998).
In 1999, Aguilera came to prominence following her debut album Christina Aguilera, which was a commercial success spawning three number one singles on the Billboard Hot 100—"Genie in a Bottle", "What a Girl Wants", and "Come On Over Baby (All I Want Is You)." Her sophomore and her debut Latin-pop album, Mi Reflejo (2000), a Christmas third studio album, My Kind of Christmas (2000), and several collaborations followed which garnered Aguilera worldwide success, though she was displeased with her lack of input in her music and image. After parting from her management, Aguilera took creative control over her fourth studio album, Stripped (2002). The album's second single, "Beautiful", was a commercial success and helped the album's commercial performance amidst controversy over Aguilera's image. Aguilera followed up Stripped with the soul, jazz and blues inspired, Back to Basics (2006), released to positive critical acclaim. The album produced three singles "Ain't No Other Man", "Hurt" and "Candyman". Four years later Aguilera released her sixth studio album, Bionic (2010), which incorporated aspects of R&B, electropop, and synthpop and was met with mixed reviews and low sales. Aguilera's seventh studio album is set to be released in 2012.

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Chynna Phillips
Chynna Phillips (born February 12, 1968) is an American singer and actress, known for being a member of Wilson Phillips. She is also known for being the daughter of The Mamas & the Papas band members John and Michelle Phillips and the half-sister of Mackenzie Phillips, Bijou Phillips, Jeffrey Phillips, Tamerlane Phillips, and Austin Hines.
Phillips was born Gilliam Chynna Phillips in Los Angeles, California. Phillips began her career in acting. She appeared in films such as 1987's Some Kind of Wonderful, 1988's Caddyshack II,1988's "Moving Target", 1989's Say Anything and as the title character Roxanne Pulitzer in the 1989 television biopic Roxanne: The Prize Pulitzer.
In 1995, she returned to acting appearing as Kim MacAfee in the television movie Bye Bye Birdie. In 2004, she voiced the character of Kitty along with her husband William Baldwin as Johnny 13 in Danny Phantom.
Phillips was a contestant on the 13th season of Dancing with the Stars. Her professional partner was two-time finalist Tony Dovolani. While she seemed to be one of the frontrunners to win, Phillips was unexpectedly eliminated in the fourth week of competition. Despite her early exit, Phillips held a much higher average of scores compared to celebrities who lasted much longer than she did. She is married to Baldwin

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Claude Kelly
Claude Kelly is an American singer-songwriter. He has a prolific discography, well known for writing for artists such as Britney Spears, Akon, Jason Derulo, Christina Aguilera, Toni Braxton, Tamia, Whitney Houston, Jordin Sparks, Kelly Clarkson, Jay Sean, Adam Lambert, The Wanted, Jessie J and Charice.
He began playing the piano at the age of 3 and by middle school was playing the flute. He attended Riverdale Country School and then Boston's Berklee College of Music. He then returned to New York City. Through networking and word of mouth, Kelly met as many producers as he could, and by 2002 had written a song that ended up a compilation by A Bathing Ape. "It was a lucky break," he said. "It boosted my confidence."
Kelly got his big break when he wrote the song, "Daddy’s Little Girl" for Frankie J’s 2006 album, Priceless. Although it didn’t chart well, he said, watching his song go from recording to mixing to mastering to music video was the confirmation that he needed to press on. Kelly’s work so impressed Akon that in late 2007, the singer suggested Kelly write to some of his music, one of which was "Forgive Me", written for Leona Lewis’ debut album and produced by Akon respectively. Another song he wrote was "Hold My Hand" which was set to feature on Akon’s third album, however the song leaked and it was decided not to be included in the album. The song, which features Michael Jackson, is the first single to be released from Michael (Jackson's first posthumous studio album). At present, he’s working with Whitney Houston; and Christina Aguilera .

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Commodores
The Commodores are an American funk/soul band of the 1970s and 1980s. The members of the group met as mostly freshmen at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in 1968, and signed with Motown in November 1972, having first caught the public eye opening for The Jackson 5 while on tour.
This group is best known for their ballads, such as "Easy" and "Three Times a Lady", but, for the most part, the group mainly recorded funky, driven dance-floor hits which include "Brick House", "The Bump", "Fancy Dancer", and "Too Hot ta Trot". The Commodores originally called themselves the Mystics, but wanted to change the name. To choose a new name William King opened a dictionary and randomly picked a word. "We lucked out," he remarked with a laugh when telling this story to People magazine. "We almost became The Commodes!"^{[citation needed]}

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Corinne Bailey Rae
Corinne Bailey Rae (born Corinne Jacqueline Bailey on 26 February 1979) is a British singer-songwriter and guitarist from Leeds, West Yorkshire. Bailey Rae was named the number-one predicted breakthrough act of 2006 in an annual BBC poll of music critics, Sound of 2006. She released her debut album, Corinne Bailey Rae, in February 2006, and became the fourth female British act in history to have her first album debut at number one. In 2007, Bailey Rae was nominated for three Grammy Awards and three Brit Awards, and won two MOBO Awards. In 2008, she won a Grammy Award for Album of the Year (for her work as a featured artist in Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters).
Bailey Rae released her second album, The Sea, on 26 January 2010, after a hiatus of almost three years. It was produced by Steve Brown and Steve Chrisanthou (who produced her debut album in 2006). She was nominated for the 2010 Mercury Prize for Album of the Year. In 2012, she won a Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance (for "Is This Love)". Bailey Rae was married to fellow musician Jason Rae from 2001 until his death in 2008, and as part of the grieving process, she channeled her emotions into her music. Her two albums have together sold over five million copies worldwide.

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Craig Wiseman
Craig Michael Wiseman (born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi) is an American country music songwriter. Active since the late 1980s as a songwriter, he has had his songs recorded by Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Kenny Chesney, LeAnn Rimes, and several other acts.
His credits include the Number One singles "The Good Stuff" by Kenny Chesney and "Live Like You Were Dying" by Tim McGraw, which were declared by Billboard as the Number One country songs for the years of 2002 and 2004, respectively; "Live Like You Were Dying" also earned Wiseman the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Country Song.
Three of his compositions won awards for being among the most played songs of 2007: Rimes' Top Five hit "Something's Gotta Give", Chesney's Number One hit "Summertime", and Brooks & Dunn's Top 20 "Hillbilly Deluxe".
Several more of Wiseman's compositions have been Number One hits, including "Just Another Day in Paradise" and "In a Real Love" by Phil Vassar, "Love Me If You Can" by Toby Keith, "If the Good Die Young" by Tracy Lawrence, "She's Got It All" for Chesney, and "Tell Her" by Lonestar, as well as "Everywhere", "Where the Green Grass Grows", and "The Cowboy in Me" for McGraw and "Hillbilly Bone" by Blake Shelton and Trace Adkins.

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Cyndi Lauper
Cynthia Ann Stephanie Lauper (born June 22, 1953 in Queens, New York) is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and LGBT rights activist.
She achieved success in the mid-1980s with the release of the debut solo album She's So Unusual in 1983, which spawned four Billboard Hot 100 top-five songs—"Girls Just Wanna Have Fun", "Time After Time", "She Bop" and "All Through the Night"—She's So Unusual was the first album in history to have four top five singles by a female. The album earned Lauper Best New Artist at the 27th Grammy Awards in 1985.
Her success continued with the follow-up, True Colors in 1986, which spawned two Billboard Hot 100 top-ten songs—"True Colors" and "Change of Heart", and earned two nominations at the 29th Grammy Awards.
Since 1989 released from a nine studio albums acclaimed critical, A Night to Remember (1989), Hat Full of Stars (1993), Sisters of Avalon (1996), Merry Christmas... Have a Nice Life (1998),Shine (2001), At Last (2003), The Body Acoustic (2005), Bring Ya to the Brink (2008).

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Cynthia Weil
Cynthia Weil (born October 18, 1940, New York) is a prominent American songwriter. She is famous for having written many songs together with her husband Barry Mann.
Weil was trained as an actress and dancer but soon demonstrated a songwriting ability that led to her collaboration with Barry Mann whom she would marry in August, 1961. Weil became one of the Brill Building songwriters of the 1960s, and one of the most important writers during the emergence of rock and roll.
She and her husband went on to create songs for numerous contemporary artists, winning a number of Grammy Awards and Academy Award nominations for their compositions for film. As their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame biography put it, in part: "Mann and Weil ... [works went from] epic ballads (“On Broadway,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’”) to outright rockers (“Kicks,” “We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place”) [and they also] placed an emphasis on meaningful lyrics in their songwriting. With Weil writing the words and Mann the music, they came up with a number of songs that addressed such serious subjects as racial and economic divides[,] “Uptown,” ... and the difficult reality of making it in the big city (“On Broadway,” ...). “Only in America” ... tackled segregation and racism, making it rather too controversial for the Drifters, who were the intended artists. “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” ... became an anthem for [the] Vietnam soldier, antiwar protesters, and young people who viewed it as an anthem of greater opportunities."

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Dallas Austin
Dallas Austin (born December 29, 1970) is an American songwriter, record producer, and musician, based in Atlanta, Georgia. Some of his most notable clients include Michael Jackson, TLC, Boyz II Men, Pink, Monica, Madonna, Gwen Stefani, Stacie Orrico, Another Bad Creation, Fishbone, Sugababes, Anastacia, Namie Amuro, Kim Zolciak from the Real Housewives of Atlanta and McFly.
Austin was a member of Highland Place Mobsters on the influential hip hop label LaFace in the early 1990s before embarking on a career as a full-time producer. Highland Place Mobsters, a derivative of MCA Records 80's group "Glasswurk", contributed to the soundtracks for the movies White Men Can't Jump and Boomerang.^{[citation needed]}
As a producer and songwriter, Austin was first noticed in the mid 80's when his childhood manager, producer/drummer William "Vybe Chyle" Burke introduced him to Joyce Irby ('80s all-girl band Klymaxx) who signed him to Diva One Music. Since then Austin has crafted hits for LaFace and TLC (with which he won two Grammys for co-producing CrazySexyCool and FanMail), including the hit singles "Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg", "What About Your Friends", "Creep", "Silly Ho" and "Unpretty". As a teenager, Irby took Austin to Sylvia Rhone, Motown head Jheryl Busby, L.A. Reid, and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, asking them to give him a shot as a producer. Other credits of Austin's include the number-two single "Hit 'Em Up Style (Oops!)" recorded by Blu Cantrell, "Don't Let Me Get Me" and "Just Like a Pill" by Pink, and the hit "Secret" by Madonna. In more recent times, Austin's work has returned him to the charts, writing and producing the successful "Trick Me" for Kelis as well as "Left Outside Alone" and "Sick and Tired" for Anastacia.^{[citation needed]}

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Darnell Bristol
Darnell "Dee" Bristol is a member of The Deele and a songwriter who co-wrote The Deele's "Two Occasions." Years later, he would be credited as a co-writer of Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together", when Carey would reusing portions of "Two Occasions." He has also been credited on certain releases with co-writing Bobby Brown's hits "Roni" and "Rock Wit' Cha" [1].
Bristol is currently performing in a reformed Deele that includes three other original bandmembers, Carlos "Satin" Greene, Kevin "Kayo" Roberson, and Stanley "Stick" Burke.
Bristol's children include Kevin, Nikki, Jeremy, and Jade.

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Dave Haywood
David Wesley Haywood (born July 5,1982 in Augusta, Georgia) is an American country music singer. He is one-third of the band Lady Antebellum, in which he plays piano, guitar and mandolin, and sings backing vocals.
Haywood's father, Van, is a dental instructor/dentist who invented a teeth-whitening method and his mother Angie is a teacher. Both are involved in music in their church.
Haywood's mother taught him to play piano and his father taught him to play guitar. Their family sang and played instruments together as he was growing up. He also sang in Trinity-on-the-Hill United Methodist Church's youth choir called Love Unlimited where he served as the president during his senior year of high school.
Dave and his family lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina for about a decade when his father taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Dentistry. In 1993, the Haywood's moved back to Augusta. Haywood first met Charles Kelley at Riverside Middle School in Evans, GA. He was in a jazz band with Charles's brother Josh Kelley when he attended Lakeside High School and graduated in 2000. He attended college at the University of Georgia where he graduated in 2004. Haywood formed the country music group Lady Antebellum in 2006 in Nashville, TN along with Charles Kelley and Hillary Scott.

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David Baerwald
David Baerwald (born on July 11, 1960 in Oxford, Ohio) is an American singer-songwriter, composer, and musician. He has one son, Beker Baerwald, who is a nationally ranked basketball player. He is the son of Hans Baerwald, a political scientist, and Diane Moore, a psychologist. He has two sisters: Andrea, a Braille translator; and Jan, a paralegal.^{[citation needed]}
His songs can be found on 27 million albums sold in the US and Europe.
David Baerwald first came to prominence in 1987 as one half of the duo David & David, with David Ricketts. David and David's sole album, Boomtown, went platinum and stayed on the Billboard album chart for over a year, winning substantial critical acclaim. The duo split up following the success of that album for unexplained reasons.
Following the breakup of David and David, Baerwald focused on writing for others, often under pseudonyms, though he found time to record and release two albums: Bedtime Stories, a romantic album based on tales of suburban ennui and decay; and Triage, an ambitious narrative song-suite about the fringe-dwellers of America's paranoid and disaffected subcultures. Both albums were released to critical acclaim but did not see the commercial success that Boomtown did.

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David Clayton-Thomas
David Clayton-Thomas (born David Henry Thomsett; 13 September 1941) is a Canadian musician and singer best known as the lead vocalist for the American band; Blood, Sweat & Tears. Clayton-Thomas has also maintained a busy solo career over the years as well.
Clayton-Thomas was born in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, UK, the son of a decorated Canadian soldier of World War II who met his piano-playing mother when she came to entertain the troops at a London hospital. They were married, and when the war ended, the family moved to Willowdale, a suburb of Toronto, when Clayton-Thomas was not yet school-aged.
Growing up, he was taught music by his mother but had difficulties with his father in what was described as a dysfunctional family. He left home in his early teens, and according to his official biography, spent time in jail as a juvenile delinquent until his release in 1962. He idolized the music of John Lee Hooker and began playing guitar and singing, and by the time he was 21 had his own band, The Shays. David Clayton-Thomas & The Shays recorded for Roman Records of Toronto. Clayton-Thomas released two albums on the record label, "A Go Go" (with The Shays) and "Like It Is" (with The Bossmen).

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David Foster
David Walter Foster, OC, OBC (born November 1, 1949), is a Canadian musician, record producer, composer, singer, songwriter, and arranger, noted for discovering singers such as Michael Bublé, Josh Groban, and Charice Pempengco; and for producing some of the most successful artists in the world, such as Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Céline Dion, Andrea Bocelli, Toni Braxton, Madonna, Air Supply and Michael Jackson. Foster has won 16 Grammy Awards from 47 nominations. David Foster is the current Chairman of Verve Music Group.
Throughout his career, he has produced recordings for a wide range of musical artists, including Bryan Adams, Tamia, Christina Aguilera, The Bee Gees, Andrea Bocelli, Boz Scaggs, Mariah Carey, Toni Braxton, Chicago, Destiny's Child, Neil Diamond, Céline Dion, Earth Wind and Fire, Gloria Estefan, Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson, Chaka Khan, Beyonce Knowles, Kenny Loggins, Madonna, Olivia Newton-John, Nsync, All-4-One, Plus One, Charice Pempengco, Prince, LeAnn Rimes, Kenny Rogers, Barbra Streisand, Donna Summer, Shania Twain, Hall & Oates, Tim Feehan, The Tubes, and Jackie Evancho.

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David Paich
David Frank Paich (born June 25, 1954 in Los Angeles, California) is a multi-disciplined musical contributor. His contibutions include performing as a live and studio session musician, keyboard player, recording producer, arranger, vocalist and main composer of the Los Angeles-based rock/pop band Toto. With Toto, Paich has released 17 albums and sold over 30 million records. Additionally, Paich has contributed to a host of artists with his songwriting and arrangements including working with Boz Skaggs extensively in the 1970s and Michael Jackson in the 1980s.
He is the son of the late jazz composer, musician, and arranger Marty Paich, having adopted many of his father's skills for his contribution to music.
A prolific writer of chart-breakers, Paich wrote or co-wrote hits such as "Hold the Line", "Lowdown", "Lido Shuffle", "Georgy Porgy", "Rosanna", "Got To Be Real", and "Lady Love Me (One More Time)". He also performed lead vocals on the Toto hits "Africa", "Lovers in the Night", and "Stranger in Town".

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Dean Pitchford
Dean Pitchford (born July 29, 1951, Honolulu, Hawaii) is an American songwriter, screenwriter, director, actor, and novelist. His work has earned him an Oscar and a Golden Globe Award, as well as nominations for three additional Oscars, two more Golden Globes, seven Grammy Awards and two Tony Awards.
Pitchford was born in Honolulu, where he attended Star Of The Sea School and graduated (1968) from Saint Louis High School.
Pitchford began his performance career as an actor and singer with the Honolulu Community Theatre (now Diamond Head Theatre), the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra and the Honolulu Theatre for Youth, among others.
While studying at Yale University, Pitchford performed with numerous campus drama groups, but his focus gradually turned off-campus, where he worked with the Wooster Square Revival, an experimental theatre company that offered acting opportunities to recovering addicts and alcoholics. In 1969, Pitchford returned to Honolulu as a writers’ assistant to authors Faye Hammel and Sylvan Levey, updating the popular guidebook Hawai’i on $5 and $10 A Day, and researching TWA’s Budget Guide to Hawai’i, the first of a series of guidebooks that would eventually metamorphose into the popular series TWA Getaway Guides.

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Debby Boone
Deborah ("Debby") Anne Boone (born September 22, 1956) is an American singer and stage actress. She is best known for her 1977 hit, "You Light Up My Life," which spent a then record ten weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and led to her winning the Grammy Award for Best New Artist the following year. Boone later focused her music career on country music resulting in the 1980 No. 1 country hit, "Are You on the Road to Lovin' Me Again". In the 1980s, she recorded Christian music which garnered her four top 10 Contemporary Christian albums as well as two more Grammys. Throughout her career, Boone has appeared in several musical theater productions and has co-authored many children's books with husband, Gabriel Ferrer.
Debby Boone was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, the third of four daughters born to singer-actor Pat Boone and Shirley Foley Boone, daughter of country music star Red Foley. When Boone was 14 years old, she began touring with her parents and three sisters: Cherry, Lindy and Laury. The sisters first recorded with their parents as The Pat Boone Family and later as the Boones or Boone Girls. They primarily recorded gospel music, although the sisters also released singles for the Motown and Curb labels that were remakes of secular pop music featuring Debby as the lead vocalist.

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Desmond Child
Desmond Child (born John Charles Barrett, October 28, 1953 in Gainesville, Florida) is an American musician, songwriter, and producer. He is a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
For nearly three decades, songwriter/producer Desmond Child has reigned as one of music's most successful creative forces. His list of accolades includes Grammy awards, 70 Top 40 singles, and songs that have sold over 300 million albums worldwide. His collaborations include Bon Jovi, Bonnie Tyler, Selena, Aerosmith, Scorpions, Ricky Martin, KISS, Kelly Clarkson, Dream Theater, Cher, Rosie Johnson and Alice Cooper. "Desmond's a chameleon," Aerosmith's Steven Tyler told Rolling Stone. "The first time we met, we wrote "Angel" in about an hour and 45 minutes - and I'm not bullshitting. The guy's a fucking genius."
Desmond Child was born in Gainesville, Florida, and raised in Miami and Ponce, Puerto Rico where his Cuban songwriter mother, Elena Casals taught him to play the piano at an early age. In high school, Child formed his first band. It was an acoustic collaboration with a high school friend. Child went on to attend Miami-Dade College. It was in Miami that he formed the group 'Desmond Child and Rouge' in 1973. Soon after, he moved the group to New York City to pursue their musical dreams. "My band Desmond Child and Rouge recorded two albums for Capitol in 1979 and we had a dance hit, "Our Love Is Insane", recalls Child. "But ultimately, we were doing something very different and urban. We weren't really understood by our label." "Our Love Is Insane" reached #50 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1979.

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Diana Ross
Diana Ernestine Earle Ross (born March 26, 1944) is an American singer, record producer, and actress.
Diana Ross was lead singer of the Motown group The Supremes during the 1960s. After leaving the group in 1970, Ross began a solo career that has included successful ventures into film and Broadway. She received a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her role as Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues (1972), for which she won a Golden Globe award. She has won seven American Music Awards, was honored with a 2012 Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award, and won a Tony Award for her one-woman show, An Evening with Diana Ross, in 1977.
In 1976, Billboard magazine named her the "Female Entertainer of the Century." In 1993, the Guinness Book of World Records declared Diana Ross the most successful female music artist in history due to her success in the United States and United Kingdom for having more hits than any female artist in the charts with a career total of 18 number one records in the United States. Diana Ross has sold more than 100 million records worldwide.

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Dolly Parton
Dolly Rebecca Parton (born January 19, 1946) is an American singer-songwriter, author, multi-instrumentalist, actress and philanthropist, best known for her work in country music. As a songwriter, she has composed over 3,000 songs, the best known of which include "I Will Always Love You" (a two-time U.S. country chart-topper for Parton, as well an international pop hit for Whitney Houston), "Jolene", "Coat of Many Colors", "9 to 5" and "My Tennessee Mountain Home". As an actress, she starred in the movies 9 to 5, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Steel Magnolias, Straight Talk, Unlikely Angel and Joyful Noise. She is one of the most successful female country artists of all time; with an estimated 100 million in album sales, Dolly Parton is also one of the best selling artists of all time. She is known as "The Queen of Country Music".
She was born in Sevierville, Tennessee, the fourth of twelve children of Avie Lee Parton (née Owens; October 5, 1923 – December 5, 2003) and Robert Lee Parton (March 22, 1921 – November 12, 2000), a tobacco farmer. Her siblings are: Willadeene Parton (born March 24, 1940), David Wilburn Parton (born March 30, 1942), Coy Denver "Denver" Parton (born August 16, 1943), Bobby Lee Parton (born February 18, 1948), Stella Mae Parton (born May 4, 1949), Cassie Nan Parton (February 12, 1951), Randel Huston "Randy" Parton (born December 15, 1953), Larry Gerald Parton (born and died July 6, 1955), Floyd and Frieda Estelle Parton (born June 1, 1957), and Rachel Ann Parton (born August 31, 1959). Her family was, as she has described them, "dirt poor". She outlined her family's lack of money in a number of her early songs, notably "Coat of Many Colors" and "In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)". They lived in a rustic, dilapidated one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, a hamlet just north of the Greenbrier Valley, in the Locust Ridge area of the Great Smoky Mountains in Sevier County, a predominantly Pentecostal area.

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Domenico Modugno
Domenico Modugno (9 January 1928 – 6 August 1994) was an Italian singer, songwriter, actor, and later in life, a member of the Italian Parliament. He is known for his 1958 international hit song "Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu (Volare)". He is considered the first Italian cantautore.
Modugno was born in Polignano a Mare, province of Bari (Puglia).
From a young age he wanted to become an actor and in 1951, after his military service, he enrolled in an acting school. While still studying he had a role in a cinematographic version of Filumena Marturano by Eduardo De Filippo as well as some other films.
In 1935 his father moved to San Pietro Vernotico, in the Province of Brindisi (where his parents are buried). Here Domenico attended primary school and learned San Piertro Vernotico's dialect, which belongs to the linguistic area of Lecce's dialect, which is similar to Sicilian. He attended secondary school in Lecce.
In 1957 his song "Lazzarella," sung by Aurelio Fierro, came second in the Festival della Canzone Napoletana, bringing him his first taste of popularity.

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Don Black (lyricist)
Don Black, OBE (born 21 June 1938) is an English lyricist. His works have included numerous musicals, movie themes and hit songs. He has provided lyrics for John Barry, Charles Strouse, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Quincy Jones, Jule Styne, Henry Mancini, Michael Jackson, Elmer Bernstein, Michel Legrand, Hayley Westenra, A. R. Rahman, Marvin Hamlisch and Debbie Wiseman.
Black was born Gerald Blackstone in London, England, the youngest of five children of Russian Jewish immigrants Morris and Betsy (née Kersh) Blackstone. During his childhood the family lived in a flat in Tornay House, Shore Place, South Hackney.
He began his music industry career as an office boy with a music publishing firm, and later worked as a song-plugger. He also had a brief spell as a comic.
He was personal manager to the singer Matt Monro for many years and also provided songs for him (usually writing English language lyrics to continental songs). These included "Walk Away" (music: Udo Jürgens) and "For Mamma" (music: Charles Aznavour).

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Don Henley
Donald Hugh "Don" Henley (born July 22, 1947, in Gilmer, Texas) is an American singer, songwriter and drummer, best known as a founding member of the Eagles before launching a successful solo career. Henley was the drummer and lead vocalist for the Eagles from 1971–1980, when the band broke up. Henley sings lead vocals on Eagles hits such as "Witchy Woman", "Desperado", "Best of My Love", "One of These Nights", "Hotel California", "Life in the Fast Lane", and "The Long Run". He formed one of the most successful songwriting partnerships with Glenn Frey.
After the Eagles broke up in 1980, Henley pursued a solo career and released his debut album in 1982. He has released four studio albums, two compilation albums, and one live DVD. His solo hits include "Dirty Laundry", "The Boys of Summer", "All She Wants to Do Is Dance", "The Heart of the Matter", "The Last Worthless Evening", "Sunset Grill", "Not Enough Love in the World", "New York Minute" and "The End of the Innocence".
The Eagles have sold over 120 million albums worldwide, won six Grammy Awards, had five #1 singles, 17 Top 40 singles, and six #1 albums. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998 and are the biggest selling American band in history. As a solo artist, Henley has sold over 10 million albums worldwide, had eight Top 40 singles, won two Grammys and five MTV Video Music Awards. Combined with the Eagles and as a solo artist, Henley has released 25 Top 40 singles on the Billboard Hot 100. He has released seven studio albums with the Eagles and four as a solo artist. In 2008, he was ranked the 87th greatest singer of all time by Rolling Stone magazine.

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Don McLean
Donald "Don" McLean (born October 2, 1945, New Rochelle, New York) is an American singer-songwriter. He is most famous for the 1971 album American Pie, containing the renowned songs "American Pie" and "Vincent".
Both McLean's grandfather and father were also named Donald McLean. The Buccis, the family of McLean's mother, Elizabeth, came from Abruzzo in central Italy. They left Italy and settled in Port Chester, New York, at the end of the 19th century. He has other extended family in Los Angeles and Boston.
As a teenager, McLean became interested in folk music, particularly the Weavers' 1955 recording At Carnegie Hall. Childhood asthma meant that McLean missed long periods of school, particularly music lessons, and although he slipped back in his studies, his love of music was allowed to flourish. He often performed shows for family and friends. By age 16 he had bought his first guitar (a Harmony acoustic archtop with a sunburst finish) and begun making contacts in the music business, becoming friends with folk singer Erik Darling, a latter-day member of the Weavers. McLean recorded his first studio sessions (with singer Lisa Kindred) while still in prep school.

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Ed Ames
Ed Ames (born Edmund Dantes Urick on July 9, 1927) is an American popular singer and actor. He is best known for his pop and adult contemporary hits of the 1960s like "When the Snow is on the Roses" and the perennial "My Cup Runneth Over". He was part of a popular 1950s singing group called The Ames Brothers.
Ames was born in Malden, Massachusetts to Jewish parents who had immigrated from Ukraine. He was the youngest of nine children, including five boys and four girls.^{[citation needed]}
Ames grew up in a poor household. He attended the Boston Latin School and was educated in Classical and Opera music, as well as literature.^{[citation needed]}
While still in high school, the brothers formed a quartet and often won competitions around the Boston area. Three of the brothers later formed the Amory Brothers quartet and went to New York, where they were hired by bandleader Art Mooney. Playwright Abe Burrows helped the brothers along the way, suggesting the siblings change their group's name to the Ames Brothers.^{[citation needed]}

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Eddie Snyder
Edward Abraham Snyder (February 22, 1919 – March 10, 2011) was an American composer and songwriter. Snyder is credited with co-writing the English language lyrics and music for Frank Sinatra's 1966 hit, "Strangers in the Night".
Snyder was born in New York City on February 22, 1919. He studied piano at the Juilliard School before taking a job as a songwriter at the Brill Building.
The music for "Strangers in the Night" was originally written by Croatian composer Ivo Robic but when it failed to gain recognition in the song festival for which it had been composed, Robic sold the rights to German bandleader and composer Bert Kaempfert, who used it in the spoof spy film A Man Could Get Killed. Snyder subsequently collaborated with British lyricist Charles Singleton, although Snyder always insisted that he also contributed to the final music form, and the song is now credited to all four.
The first vocal version was cut by Jack Jones in April 1966, but the best-known is that recorded by Frank Sinatra three days later. At the session an angry Sintra turned on guitarist Glen Campbell, who had been brought in at the last moment. Campbell did not know the song and busked his way through the first take while listening to the tune. Sinatra was used to recording in a single take, and when told he would have to sing it again, he glared at Campbell and shouted: "Is that guy with us or is he sleeping?". On take two Sinatra himself added the famous "doo-bie-doo-bie-doo" improvisation at the end. In the original 1966 recording, this fades prematurely, but in a recently remastered version, it continues for an additional nine seconds. Despite its popularity, Sinatra is known to have detested the song and often expressed his distaste for it when performing it in concert.

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Eg White
Francis Anthony "Eg" White (born 22 November 1966) is a British musician, songwriter and producer. White is primarily known for his work with successful commercial pop acts such as Adele, Duffy, Will Young and James Morrison. In 2009 he was named the Ivor Novello Songwriter of the Year.
White started his career in the bands Yip Yip Coyote and, with his brother David, Brother Beyond in the late 1980s, leaving the latter when they became involved with the songwriting team of Stock, Aitken and Waterman and just prior to their chart successes.
In 1990 White teamed up with London model and BMX champion Alice Temple, and together they recorded the critically acclaimed pop album 24 Years of Hunger, which was released in 1991 under the name Eg and Alice. It was described by Allmusic as "one of the finest, most refined and fully realized recordings of the era, employing a much more sophisticated and romantic style than anything else out of England at the time". In spite of the critical acclaim (the album featured in many major music publications top 50 albums of 1991) and two well received singles "Indian" and "Doesn't Mean That Much to Me", the album failed to enter the UK Albums Chart.

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Elton John
Sir Elton Hercules John, CBE (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight on 25 March 1947) is an English rock singer-songwriter, composer, pianist and occasional actor. He has worked with lyricist Bernie Taupin as his songwriter partner since 1967; they have collaborated on more than 30 albums to date.
In his four-decade career John has sold more than 250 million records, making him one of the most successful artists of all time. His single "Candle in the Wind 1997" has sold over 33 million copies worldwide, and is the best selling single in Billboard history. He has more than 50 Top 40 hits, including seven consecutive No. 1 US albums, 56 Top 40 singles, 16 Top 10, four No. 2 hits, and nine No. 1 hits. He has won six Grammy Awards, four Brit Awards, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award and a Tony Award. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him Number 49 on its list of the 100 greatest artists of all time.
John was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. Having been named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1996, John received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II for "services to music and charitable services" in 1998.

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Eminem
Marshall Bruce Mathers III (born October 17, 1972), better known by his stage name Eminem (often stylized as EMINƎM) and by his alter ego Slim Shady, is an American rapper, record producer, songwriter and actor. Eminem's popularity brought his group, D12, to mainstream recognition. As well as being a member of D12, Eminem is also one half of the hip hop duo Bad Meets Evil, with Royce da 5'9". Eminem is one of the best-selling artists in the world and is the best selling artist of the 2000s. He has been listed and ranked as one of the greatest artists of all time by many magazines including the Rolling Stone magazine which has ranked him 82nd on its list of The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. The same magazine has declared him The King of Hip Hop. Including his work with D12 and Bad Meets Evil, Eminem has achieved ten number-one albums on the Billboard 200. He has sold more than 42 million tracks and 41 million albums in the United States, and nearly 90 million albums worldwide.
Eminem quickly gained popularity in 1999 with his major-label debut album, The Slim Shady LP. That first album, The Marshall Mathers LP and his third major album, The Eminem Show, all won Grammy Awards, making Eminem the first artist to win Best Rap Album for three consecutive LPs. The Marshall Mathers LP is also considered one of Eminem's best and most successful albums. Eminem then went on hiatus after touring in 2005. He released his first album since 2004's Encore, titled Relapse, on May 15, 2009. In 2010, Eminem released his seventh studio album Recovery, which was an international success. Recovery was also named the best selling album worldwide of 2010 joining The Eminem Show, which was the best seller of 2002. Eminem won Grammy Awards for both Relapse and Recovery, giving him a total of 13 Grammys in his career. Eminem has named Masta Ace, Big Daddy Kane, Newcleus, the Beastie Boys, Dr. Dre, Tupac Shakur, AZ, Nas, and Ice-T amongst others as his influences.

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Eric Clapton
Eric Patrick Clapton, CBE, (born 30 March 1945) is an English guitarist and singer-songwriter. Clapton is the only three-time inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: once as a solo artist, and separately as a member of The Yardbirds and Cream. Clapton has been referred to as one of the most important and influential guitarists of all time. Clapton ranked second in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and fourth in Gibson's Top 50 Guitarists of All Time.
In the mid 1960s, Clapton departed from the Yardbirds to play blues with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers. In his one-year stay with Mayall, Clapton gained the nickname "Slowhand". Immediately after leaving Mayall, Clapton formed Cream, a power trio with drummer Ginger Baker and bassist Jack Bruce in which Clapton played sustained blues improvisations and "arty, blues-based psychedelic pop." For most of the 1970s, Clapton's output bore the influence of the mellow style of J.J. Cale and the reggae of Bob Marley. His version of Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff" helped reggae reach a mass market. Two of his most popular recordings were "Layla", recorded by Derek and the Dominos, another band he formed and Robert Johnson's "Crossroads", recorded by Cream. A recipient of seventeen Grammy Awards, in 2004 Clapton was awarded a CBE for services to music. In 1998, Clapton, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, founded the Crossroads Centre on Antigua, a medical facility for recovering substance abusers.

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Eric Stefani
Eric Matthew Stefani (born June 17, 1967) is an American musician, composer, writer and animator, best known as a former member of the pop rock band No Doubt. He is the older brother of Gwen Stefani and is also a former animator on the animated sitcom The Simpsons.
Stefani attended Loara High School in Anaheim, California. He worked at a Dairy Queen with his sister Gwen and John Spence; the three of them formed the band No Doubt.
He studied animation at the California Institute of the Arts, but left in 1991.
The group added several members, performing live shows at Fenders Ballroom in Long Beach. The group started writing original material, much of which Eric contributed. Eric left after the band's breakthrough album Tragic Kingdom was recorded. He and Gwen were nominated at the 1998 Grammy Awards for Song of the Year for "Don't Speak".
Eric found time between Cypress College and the band to get brief encounters working as a layout animator for cartoon director John Kricfalusi through Lynne Naylor including Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, Beany and Cecil and the Troop Beverly Hills title sequence. Those jobs led Eric to work at The Bob Clampett Studio for Ruth Clampett, where he traced 35 mm film enlargements of original Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig animation frames to create sericels. During that time Clampett told Eric there was a new project upstairs called The Simpsons and that he should take a look.

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Estelle (musician)
Estelle Fanta Swaray (born 18 January 1980) commonly known as Estelle, and formerly as Est'elle, is an English Grammy Award winning R&B singer-songwriter, rapper and record producer. Estelle was born in London. After meeting John Legend, Estelle signed a record deal with V2 and Atlantic Records.
In 2004 Estelle released her debut album The 18th Day, which peaked with in the top 40 of the official UK charts. The album released three singles "1980", "Free" ,and "Go Gone" which all charted with in the top 40 also of the UK charts. In 2008 Estelle released her second studio album Shine which was certified Gold in the UK. The lead single "Wait A Minute" failed to chart anywhere. The second single "American Boy" peaked at number one in the UK and also became Estelle's first song to chart in the US at a position of nine. The album released a further three singles. In 2012 Estelle released her third album All of Me. The lead single "Break My Heart" featured American rap artist Rick Ross, the single charted at number 30 on the US R&B Chart. The second single "Thankyou" peaked at 120 on the US Billboard and 22 on the US R&B chart and the third single "Back to Love" was released.

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Fergie (singer)
Stacy Ann Ferguson (born March 27, 1975), better known by her stage name Fergie, is an American singer, songwriter, fashion designer, television host and actress. She was a member of the children's television series Kids Incorporated and the girl group Wild Orchid. She is the female vocalist for the hip hop group The Black Eyed Peas with whom she has achieved chart success worldwide. Her debut solo album spawned five Billboard Hot 100 top five singles, three of which went to number one.
Having left Wild Orchid in 2001, Ferguson joined The Black Eyed Peas. With The Black Eyed Peas she enjoyed a series of hits and albums before releasing her debut album The Dutchess, in September 2006, to success. The Black Eyed Peas enjoyed further success with the release of their third album with Ferguson, The E.N.D.; they attained their first string of Billboard Hot 100 number one songs. She began touring in 2009/2010 with her group and she launched her debut fragrance, Outspoken, under Avon in May 2010.

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Frank J. Myers
Frank Joseph Myers (born in Dayton, Ohio) is an American country music singer, songwriter and record producer. In his career, he has written songs for John Michael Montgomery, Eddie Rabbitt, Crystal Gayle, Lonestar and others. In 1995, he and frequent songwriting partner Gary Baker (formerly of The Shooters) recorded one album on Curb Records as the duo Baker & Myers.
Frank is the son of Melvin “Pee Wee” Myers(-1984) and Eva. Frank married Belinda in 1980 and has 2 sons Josh and Nick, and a daughter, Jessica. Frank has 2 brothers Melvin and Doug and 2 sisters Betty and Joyce.
Frank J. Myers grew up in Dayton, Ohio and graduated from Northridge High School. He returns yearly to hold a concert "Country on the 'Ridge" as a fundraiser for the school's Alumni Hall of Fame. His father, Melvin “Pee Wee” Myers, was a champion fiddle player and singer who taught Frank how to play the guitar. Frank started performing at age 11. After winning a local contest called StarTrail he started opening shows at Dayton's Hara Arena. He still has close ties with the community.

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Frank Sinatra
Francis Albert "Frank" Sinatra,

/sɨˈnɑːtrə/, (December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) was an American singer and film actor.
Beginning his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra became an unprecedentedly successful solo artist in the early to mid-1940s, after being signed to Columbia Records in 1943. Being the idol of the "bobby soxers", he released his first album, The Voice of Frank Sinatra in 1946. His professional career had stalled by the 1950s, but it was reborn in 1953 after he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in From Here to Eternity.
He signed with Capitol Records in 1953 and released several critically lauded albums (such as In the Wee Small Hours, Songs for Swingin' Lovers, Come Fly with Me, Only the Lonely and Nice 'n' Easy). Sinatra left Capitol to found his own record label, Reprise Records in 1961 (finding success with albums such as Ring-a-Ding-Ding!, Sinatra at the Sands and Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim), toured internationally, was a founding member of the Rat Pack and fraternized with celebrities and statesmen, including John F. Kennedy. Sinatra turned 50 in 1965, recorded the retrospective September of My Years, starred in the Emmy-winning television special Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music, and scored hits with "Strangers in the Night" and "My Way".

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Frankie Sullivan
Frankie Sullivan (born Frank M. Sullivan III, 1 February 1955, Chicago) is an American guitarist and songwriter. He is best known for being a founding member of the band Survivor, and has been the only constant member of the band since its formation in 1977.
Along with former bandmate, keyboardist/vocalist Jim Peterik, Sullivan co-wrote many of the group's hits including "Eye of the Tiger" and "Burning Heart" from the Rocky III and IV movie soundtracks.
Sullivan began playing guitar in his very early teens by sitting in on local garage band practices and helping with their equipment changes. Eventually he was allowed to play a little after band practice when members realized his serious interest, as stated by local piano/keyboard musician and Northlake, IL resident Jimmy Tranchitelli.

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Fred Ebb
Fred Ebb (April 8, 1928 – September 11, 2004) was an American musical theatre lyricist who had many successful collaborations with composer John Kander. The Kander and Ebb team frequently wrote for such performers as Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera.
Ebb was born in Manhattan to a Jewish family, the son of Anna Evelyn (née Gritz) and Harry Ebb. He worked during the early 1950s bronzing baby shoes, as a trucker's assistant, and was also employed in a department store credit office and at a hosiery company. He graduated from New York University with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature, and also earned his Master’s Degree in English from Columbia University.
One of his early collaborators was Phil Springer, and a song they wrote together ("I Never Loved Him Anyhow") was recorded by Carmen McRae in 1956. Another song Ebb wrote with Springer was "Heartbroken" (1953), which was recorded by Judy Garland, the mother of his future protégée, Liza Minnelli. Other Springer-Ebb tunes include "Moonlight Gambler" and "Nevertheless I Never Lost the Blues". "Don't Forget", which he wrote with Norman Leyden, was recorded by singer Eddy Arnold in 1954.

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Fred Foster
Fred Foster (born Fred Luther Foster, July 26, 1931, Rutherford County, North Carolina) is an American songwriter, record producer, and founder of Monument Records.
Born in North Carolina, Foster struggled to support his mother after the death of his father. At the age of seventeen, Foster left the farm and moved to Washington, D.C., where he would eventually work for Mercury Records and ABC-Paramount Records (1955).
In March 1958, Foster used his life savings and formed the Monument Records with minority partner, Buddy Dean (a disc jockey at WTTG). In 1959, Dean sold his stock back to Foster, and Foster re-located the label to Nashville, Tennessee in 1960. Foster remained active with the label until 1983. Foster is credited with the development of Roy Orbison's career, producing many of Orbison's major hits, including: "Oh, Pretty Woman", "Only the Lonely", "Running Scared", "In Dreams", and "Crying", "It's Over", "Mean Woman Blues", "Candy Man", and "Blue Bayou". Foster also played a significant role in Dolly Parton's early career, signing her to Monument in 1964, shortly after her arrival in Nashville, and overseeing her recordings, culminating with her first top 40 country hit "Dumb Blonde" in 1967. Foster also produced Billy Grammer, Ray Stevens, Kris Kristofferson, Tony Joe White, Larry Gatlin, Charlie McCoy, Al Hirt, Boots Randolph, Jerry Byrd, Billy Joe Shaver, Grandpa Jones, The Velvets and Robert Mitchum.

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Fred Jerkins III
Fred Jerkins III is an American songwriter and record producer, best known for his work with his brother Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins. Jerkins has co-written several hit songs with Rodney Jerkins and LaShawn Daniels, among them "The Boy Is Mine" by Brandy and Monica, "Say My Name" and "Lose My Breath" by Destiny's Child, "It's Not Right (But It's Okay)" by Whitney Houston and multiple tracks from Michael Jackson's album Invincible. He has also produced a number of songs under the Darkchild imprint for artists such as Brandy, Shola Ama, Men Of Vizion, Keith Washington, & JoJo.
On his own, Jerkins is a noted producer of gospel music. He and his family have been residents of Galloway Township, New Jersey.

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Freddie Perren
Frederick "Freddie" Perren (May 15, 1943 – December 16, 2004) was an American songwriter, record producer, arranger, and orchestra conductor best known as co-songwriter and co-producer of such mega-hits as "Boogie Fever" by the Sylvers, "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor, and "Shake Your Groove Thing" by Peaches & Herb.
Perren was born on May 15, 1943, in Englewood, New Jersey, and graduated from Englewood's Dwight Morrow High School in 1961. Perren attended Howard University in Washington, D.C. graduating in 1966. It was here he would meet future songwriting partner Fonce Mizell as well as Larkin Arnold. He met Christine Yarian in 1967, and they married in 1970.
Shortly after moving to California from Washington, D.C., in 1968, Perren and bassist Mizell met guitarist Deke Richards. They started writing songs together. In 1969 Motown president Berry Gordy invited them to be part of his collective The Corporation, a collection of songwriters and record producers for The Jackson 5. "I Want You Back" was the first hit from this new collaboration, going to number one on the Hot 100 in early 1970. They would go on to write and produce more Jackson 5 hits such as "ABC", "The Love You Save", "Mama's Pearl", and "Maybe Tomorrow", among others. Perren and The Corporation continued their work for Motown on soundtracks such as Hell Up in Harlem and Cooley High, which featured "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday" (later a hit for Boyz II Men).

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Frederick Loewe
Frederick Loewe (/ˈloʊ/, originally German Friedrich (Fritz) Löwe [ˈløːvə]; June 10, 1901 – February 14, 1988), was an Austrian-American composer. He collaborated with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner on the long running Broadway musicals My Fair Lady and Camelot, with book and lyrics by Lerner, both of which were made into films.
Loewe was born in Berlin, Germany, to Viennese parents Edmond and Rosa Loewe. His father was a noted Jewish operetta star who performed throughout Europe and in North and South America; he starred as Count Danilo in the original production of The Merry Widow.
Frederick Loewe grew up in Berlin and attended a Prussian cadet school from the age of five until he was thirteen. At an early age Loewe learned to play piano by ear and helped his father rehearse, and he began composing songs at age seven. He eventually attended a music conservatory in Berlin, one year behind virtuoso Claudio Arrau, and studied with Ferruccio Busoni and Eugene d'Albert. He won the coveted Hollander Medal awarded by the school and gave performances as a concert pianist while still in Germany. At 13, he was the youngest piano soloist ever to appear with the Berlin Philharmonic.

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Gallagher and Lyle
Gallagher and Lyle was the Scottish pairing of singer-songwriters Benny Gallagher and Graham Lyle.
They joined forces in 1959, initially as members of the local Largs based band, The Bluefrets. They began writing original material for the band and also wrote "Mr Heartbreak's Here Instead" for Dean Ford and the Gaylords (later to become Marmalade). Their first recognition came in 1968, when they were signed by The Beatles to write for Apple Records' musicians such as Mary Hopkin ("Sparrow", "The Fields of St. Etienne", "International", "Heritage", and "Jefferson").
There was a rare one-off single issued on UK Polydor 56093 in 1967; "Trees" b/w "In The Crowd" issued under the name Gallagher-Lyle, which preceded their success as songwriters at Apple.
By 1970, they were original members of the newly formed McGuinness Flint, and penned the UK Singles Chart Top 10 hit singles "When I'm Dead and Gone" and "Malt and Barley Blues", both produced by Glyn Johns.
In the wake of the singer-songwriter phenomenon, they formed the duo Gallagher and Lyle in 1972, recording four albums: Benny Gallagher and Graham Lyle, Willie and the Lapdog, Seeds, and The Last Cowboy again under the auspices of Glyn Johns. But it was not until their fifth album, Breakaway, in 1976, that they charted again, with the hits "Heart on My Sleeve" and "I Wanna Stay with You", both of which reached Number 6 in the UK Singles Chart.Art Garfunkel's cover of "Breakaway" was also a hit at the time, and Don Williams took "Stay Young" to No. 1 on the U.S. country chart, which saw the song receive in excess of one million airplays on American radio. The duo also penned and performed "A Heart in New York", which was later performed by both Simon & Garfunkel and Garth Brooks in their concerts in Central Park, New York to audiences of 500,000 and 750,000, respectively.^{[citation needed]}

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Gene McDaniels
Gene McDaniels (February 12, 1935 – July 29, 2011) was an American singer and songwriter, who had his greatest recording success in the early 1960s.
Born Eugene Booker McDaniels in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, McDaniels grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. As well as singing gospel music in church, he developed a love of jazz, and learned to play the saxophone and trumpet. After forming a singing group, The Echoes of Joy, later known as The Sultans, in his teens, he studied at the University of Omaha Conservatory of Music before joining the Mississippi Piney Woods Singers, with whom he toured in California. There, he began singing in jazz clubs, and came to the attention of Sy Waronker of Liberty Records.
After recording two unsuccessful singles and an album, he was teamed with producer Snuff Garrett, with whom he recorded his first hit, "A Hundred Pounds of Clay," which reached no. 3 in the Billboard Hot 100 chart in early 1961 and sold over one million copies, earning gold disc status. Its follow-up, "A Tear", was less successful but his third single with Garrett, "Tower of Strength," co-written by Burt Bacharach, reached number 5 and won McDaniels his second gold record. "Tower of Strength" reached number 49 in the UK Singles Chart, losing out to Frankie Vaughan's chart-topping version.

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George Benson
George Benson (born March 22, 1943) is a ten time Grammy Award winning American musician, whose production career began at the age of twenty-one as a jazz guitarist.
Benson first came to prominence in the 1960s playing soul jazz with the likes of Jack McDuff. Benson then launched a successful solo career, alternating between jazz, pop, R&B singing, and scat singing. This one-time child prodigy topped the Billboard 200 in 1976 with the triple-platinum album, Breezin', He was also a major live attraction in the UK during the 1980s and continues to attract a large following today. Benson uses a rest-stroke picking technique similar to that of gypsy jazz players such as Django Reinhardt.
Benson was born and raised in the Hill District in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At the age of 7, Benson first played the ukulele in a corner drug store for which he was paid a few dollars; at the age of 8, he was playing guitar in an unlicensed nightclub on Friday and Saturday nights which was soon closed down by the police. At the age of 10, George recorded his first single record with RCA-Victor in New York, called 'She Makes Me Mad'.

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Gilbert O'Sullivan
Gilbert O'Sullivan (born 1 December 1946) is an Irish-English singer-songwriter, best known for his early 1970s hits "Alone Again (Naturally)", "Clair" and "Get Down". The music magazine Record Mirror voted him the No. 1 UK male singer of 1972.
Worldwide he has charted 16 top 40 discs; including six number one songs, the first of which was 1970's "Nothing Rhymed" (for further information see Gilbert O'Sullivan discography). His most successful recording period was between 1970 and 1980, though he has since recorded nine studio albums up to 2011's "Gilbertville". Speaking in 2009 he said; "I write pop songs. End of story. That's all I wanted to do. That's all I want to do. And that's all I continue to want to do. I have no interest in just touring, and living in the past."
O'Sullivan was born Raymond Edward O'Sullivan in Waterford, Ireland. In 1960, aged 13, his family moved to Swindon, Wiltshire, England. He attended St Joseph's and the Swindon College of Art, where he briefly played drums in a band called Rick's Blues, founded by Rick Davies (who later founded Supertramp) and where he developed his lifelong interests in music and art. According to a 1972 interview with O'Sullivan, Davies taught him how to play both drums and piano. Other semi-professional bands he played with while at college include The Doodles and The Prefects.

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Glenn Frey
Glenn Lewis Frey (pronounced Fry; born November 6, 1948) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and actor, best known as a founding member of the Eagles. Frey formed the Eagles after he met drummer Don Henley in 1970 and the two eventually joined Linda Ronstadt's backup band for her summer tour. The Eagles formed in 1971 and released their debut album in 1972. Glenn Frey would play guitar with the Eagles as well as piano and keyboards, and shared lead vocals with Don Henley. The Eagles broke up in 1980 after becoming one of the most successful bands of all time. Frey sang lead vocals on many Eagles hits such as "Take It Easy", "Peaceful Easy Feeling", "Tequila Sunrise", "Already Gone", "Lyin' Eyes", "New Kid in Town", and "Heartache Tonight". After the breakup of the Eagles in 1980, Frey embarked on a successful solo career. He released his debut album in 1982 and would go on to record such Top 40 hits like "The One You Love", "Smuggler's Blues", "Sexy Girl", "The Heat Is On", and "You Belong to the City". As a member of the Eagles, Frey has won six Grammys, and five American Music Awards. The Eagles have sold over 120 million albums worldwide and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. As a solo artist and with the Eagles combined, Frey has released 24 Top 40 singles on the Billboard Hot 100.

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Gloria Gaynor
Gloria Gaynor (born Gloria Fowles; September 7, 1949) is an American singer, best known for the disco era hits; "I Will Survive" (Hot 100 number 1, 1979), "Never Can Say Goodbye" (Hot 100 number 9, 1974), "Let Me Know (I Have a Right)" (Hot 100 number 42, 1980) and "I Am What I Am" (R&B number 82, 1983).
Gaynor was a singer with the Soul Satisfiers, a jazz/pop band, in the 1960s. Her first solo single was "She'll Be Sorry/Let Me Go Baby" (1965).
Her first real success came in 1975 with the release of her album Never Can Say Goodbye, which established her as a disco artist. The first side of this album consisted of three disco songs ("Honey Bee", "Never Can Say Goodbye" and "Reach Out, I'll Be There"), with no breaks in between the songs. This 19-minute dance marathon proved to be enormously popular, especially at dance clubs. All three songs were released as singles via radio edits, and all of them became hits. The album was instrumental in introducing disco music to the public, "Never Can Say Goodbye" becoming the first song to top Billboard magazine's dance chart. Capitalizing on the success of her first album, Gloria Gaynor quickly released her second album, Experience Gloria Gaynor, later that same year. While this album was also successful, it was not quite as popular as her previous album in the mainstream.

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Gordie Sampson
Gordie Sampson (born July 30, 1971) is a Canadian singer-songwriter and producer from Big Pond, Nova Scotia.
He has written songs for Carrie Underwood ("Jesus, Take the Wheel", "Just A Dream", "Get Out Of This Town"), Martina McBride ("If I Had Your Name", "You're Not Leavin Me"), LeAnn Rimes ("Long Night", "Save Myself"), and George Canyon ("My Name") and produced and sound engineered for Damhnait Doyle, Natalie MacMaster, The Cottars, Bruce Guthro, and Buddy MacMaster.
He worked on Celtic Electric (CBC TV), the Rankin Family's Christmas special and the Cape Breton Summertime Revue.
Sampson attended Riverview Rural High School in the late 1980s. He joined Realworld in the early 1990s with brothers Jamie Foulds and Matthew Foulds. The group released one self-titled CD that featured local radio hits "Angels", "Throwin' It All Away" and "We All Need". He was also a member of the house band on Rita MacNeil's weekly CBC show Rita and Friends. He has produced and co-written Damhnait Doyle's Davnet, and Natalie MacMaster's In My Hands albums.

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Gordon Lightfoot
Gordon Meredith Lightfoot, Jr. CC OOnt (born November 17, 1938) is a Canadian singer-songwriter who achieved international success in folk, folk-rock, and country music, and has been credited for helping define the folk-pop sound of the 1960s and 1970s. He has been referred to as Canada's greatest songwriter and internationally as a folk-rock legend.
Lightfoot's songs, including "For Lovin' Me", "Early Morning Rain", "Steel Rail Blues", "Ribbon of Darkness"—a number one hit on the U.S. country charts with Marty Robbins' cover in 1965— and the 1967 Detroit riot-generated "Black Day In July" brought him international recognition in the 1960s. He experienced chart success in Canada with his own recordings, beginning in 1962 with the Number 3 hit "(Remember Me) I'm the One". Lightfoot's recordings then made an impact on the international music charts as well in the 1970s, with songs such as "If You Could Read My Mind" (1970) (Number 5 on the US charts), "Sundown" (1974), "Carefree Highway" (1974), "Rainy Day People" (1975), all reaching number 1, and "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" (1976) (reaching number 2).

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Guy Berryman
Guy Rupert Berryman (born 12 April 1978, in Kirkcaldy, Scotland) is a Scottish musician and producer known as the bassist for the groups Coldplay and Apparatjik. Berryman is left-handed but plays the bass right-handed.
Berryman started an engineering degree at University College London. Soon after, he dropped out of his engineering course and switched to a seven-year architecture program at The Bartlett. He dropped out of his architecture degree after one year to focus on playing bass with Coldplay. While his bandmates were still continuing their degrees, Berryman worked as a barman in a local London pub.
During the Twisted Logic Tour for the promotion of Coldplay's third album, X&Y, Berryman took candid pictures of the band with disposable cameras and threw them to the audience.
Berryman was educated at an independent school in Scotland, The Edinburgh Academy, and Kent, at Kent College Canterbury, before attending University College London. In 2004, Berryman married Joanna, his childhood sweetheart, in a low key ceremony in the City of Westminster. They have one daughter, Nico, born on 17 September 2006. In March 2007, Coldplay's spokesman confirmed that Guy and Joanna separated after three years of marriage. They are now divorced, but see each other frequently for the wellbeing of their daughter Nico.

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Hal David
Harold Lane "Hal" David (born May 25, 1921) is an American lyricist. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York. David is best known for his collaborations with composer Burt Bacharach.
David was born in New York City, New York, and is credited with popular music lyrics beginning in the 1940s with material written for band leader Sammy Kaye, and Guy Lombardo. He worked with Morty Nevins of The Three Suns on four songs for the feature film Two Gals and a Guy (1951), starring Janis Paige and Robert Alda.
In 1957, David met composer Burt Bacharach at Famous Music in the Brill Building in New York. The two teamed up and wrote their first hit "The Story of My Life", recorded by Marty Robbins in 1957. Later that year Perry Como had a hit with their "Magic Moments". Subsequently, Bacharach and David wrote some of the most enduring songs in American popular music, many for Dionne Warwick, but also for The Carpenters, Dusty Springfield, B. J. Thomas, Gene Pitney, Tom Jones, Jackie DeShannon, and others in the 1960s and early 1970s.

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Hank Cochran
Garland Perry "Hank" Cochran (August 2, 1935 – July 15, 2010) was an American country music singer and songwriter. Starting during the 1960s, Cochran was a prolific songwriter in the genre, including major hits by Patsy Cline, Ray Price, Eddy Arnold and others. Cochran was also a recording artist between 1962 and 1980, scoring seven times on the Billboard (magazine) country music charts, with his greatest solo success being the #20 "Sally Was a Good Old Girl".
Born during the Great Depression in Isola, Mississippi, he contracted pneumonia, whooping cough, measles, and mumps all about the same time at age 2. The doctor didn't believe that he would survive. His parents divorced when he was 9 years old. He relocated with his father to Memphis, Tennessee, but then was put into an orphanage. He was sent to live with his grandparents, in Waynesboro, Mississippi, after he had run away from the orphanage twice. His uncle Otis Cochran taught him how to play the guitar as the pair hitchhiked from Mississippi to southeastern New Mexico to work in the oilfields. After returning to Mississippi in his teens, he went to California and picked olives. While there he formed The Cochran Brothers, a duo with un-related Eddie Cochran.

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Harvey Schmidt
Harvey Lester Schmidt (born September 12, 1929) is an American composer for musical theatre. He is best known for composing the music for the longest running musical in history, The Fantasticks, which ran off-Broadway from 1960 - 2002.
Schmidt was born in Dallas, Texas. He attended the University of Texas to study art, but when he met Tom Jones at the University he started to accompany the drama students on the piano. They soon started writing musicals together, the first being a revue. However, after serving in the Army, Schmidt moved to New York and worked as a graphic artist for NBC Television and later as an illustrator for Life, Harper's Bazaar, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune.
All of Schmidt's major musicals were written with lyricist Tom Jones. The work the duo is known for is the musical The Fantasticks which ran off-Broadway from 1960 - 2002 for a total of 17,162 performances. He also collaborated on the 1995 feature film adaptation. In 1992 he received the Tony Award, Tony Honor for "The Fantasticks," then in its 33rd year.

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Helen Reddy
Helen Reddy (born 25 October 1941) is an Australian-American singer and actress often referred to as the "Queen of 70s Pop". In the 1970s, she enjoyed international success, especially in the United States, where she placed fifteen singles in the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100. Six of those 15 songs made the Top 10 and three of those songs reached No. 1, including her signature hit "I Am Woman." She also placed 25 singles on the Billboard Adult Contemporary charts. Fifteen of those singles made the Top 10 and 8 of those reached No. 1. She was also the first Australian to win a Grammy Award and to have three #1 hits in the same year. In television, Helen was the first Australian to host her own one-hour weekly primetime variety show on an American network, along with several specials that were seen in over forty countries. Helen retired from live performance in 2002 and now practices as a clinical hypnotherapist and motivational speaker. In 2011, Billboard named her the #28 AC artist (#9 among women) of all time. She lives in Australia.

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Henry Mancini
Enrico Nicola "Henry" Mancini (April 16, 1924 – June 14, 1994) was an American composer, conductor and arranger, best remembered for his film and television scores. He won a record number of Grammy Awards (20), plus a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award posthumously in 1995. His best-known works include the jazz-idiom theme to The Pink Panther film series ("The Pink Panther Theme"), the Peter Gunn Theme from the television series, and back-to-back Academy Awards for the songs "Moon River" from the Blake Edwards film Breakfast at Tiffany's and "Days of Wine and Roses" from Edwards' film Days of Wine and Roses. He also composed the score of famous films such as Charade, The Great Race, Wait Until Dark or Silver Streak.
Mancini was born in the Little Italy neighborhood of Cleveland, and grew up near Pittsburgh, in the steel town of West Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. His parents emigrated from the Abruzzo region of Italy. Mancini's father, Quinto, (born March 13, 1893, Scanno, Italy) was a steelworker, who made his only child begin piccolo lessons at the age of eight. When Mancini was 12 years old, he began piano lessons. Quinto and Henry played flute together in the Aliquippa Italian immigrant band, "Sons of Italy". After graduating from Aliquippa High School in 1942, Mancini attended the renowned Juilliard School of Music in New York. In 1943, after roughly one year at Juilliard, his studies were interrupted when he was drafted into the United States Army. In 1945, he participated in the liberation of a concentration camp in southern Germany.

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Howard Ashman
Howard Elliott Ashman (May 17, 1950 – March 14, 1991) was an American playwright and lyricist. Ashman first studied at Boston University and Goddard College (with a stop at Tufts University's Summer Theater) and then went on to achieve his master's degree from Indiana University in 1974. He collaborated with Alan Menken on several films, notably animated features for Disney, Ashman writing the lyrics and Menken composing the music.
Ashman was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Shirley Thelma (née Glass) and Raymond Albert Ashman, an ice cream cone manufacturer. He was the artistic director of the WPA Theater in New York. His first two plays, Cause Maggie's Afraid of the Dark and Dreamstuff, were met with mixed reviews. His play The Confirmation was produced in 1979 at Princeton's McCarter Theater and starred Herschel Bernardi. He first worked with Alan Menken on a 1979 musical adapted from Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. They also collaborated on Little Shop of Horrors with Ashman as director, lyricist, and librettist, winning the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lyrics.

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Howard Greenfield
Howard Greenfield (March 15, 1936 – March 4, 1986) was an American lyricist and songwriter, who for several years in the 1960s worked out of the famous Brill Building. He is best known for his series of successful songwriting collaborations, including one with Neil Sedaka from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, and a near-simultaneous (and equally successful) songwriting partnership with Jack Keller throughout most of the 1960s.
Greenfield co-wrote four songs that reached #1 on the US Billboard charts: "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do", as recorded by Neil Sedaka; "Everybody's Somebody's Fool" and "Breakin' in a Brand New Broken Heart", both as recorded by Connie Francis, and "Love Will Keep Us Together", as recorded by The Captain & Tennille. He also co-wrote numerous other top 10 hits for Neil Sedaka (including "Oh! Carol", "Stairway to Heaven", "Calendar Girl", "Little Devil", "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen", and "Next Door to an Angel"); Connie Francis (including the "Theme to Where The Boys Are" and "My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own"); The Everly Brothers ("Crying In The Rain"); Jimmy Clanton ("Venus In Blue Jeans") and The Shirelles ("Foolish Little Girl"). As well, Greenfield co-wrote the theme songs to numerous 1960s TV series, including Bewitched, The Flying Nun and Hazel.

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India.Arie
India.Arie (born India Arie Simpson; October 3, 1975) is a Grammy Award-winning American singer-songwriter and record producer . She has sold over 3.3 million records in the U.S. and 10 million worldwide. She has won four Grammy Awards from her 15 nominations, including Best R&B Album.
Simpson was born in Denver, Colorado. Her musical skills were encouraged by both parents early in life. Her mother Joyce is a former singer (she was signed to Motown as a teenager and opened for Stevie Wonder and Al Green) and is now her stylist. She has an older brother named J'On. After her parents divorced, Simpson's mother moved the family to Atlanta, Georgia when she was thirteen. Simpson had taken up a succession of musical instruments throughout her schooling in Denver, but her interest in the guitar while attending the Savannah College of Art and Design, in Savannah, led to a personal revelation about songwriting and performing. "When I started tapping into my own sensitivity, I started to understand people better. It was a direct result of writing songs", she said at the press release of her debut album, Acoustic Soul.

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Irene Cara
Irene Cara (born March 18, 1959) is an American singer and actress. She became famous for her role in the 1980 film Fame, earning her a Golden Globe nomination, and her recording of the song "Fame" became an international hit. Cara won an Academy Award in 1984 in the category of Best Original Song for co-writing "Flashdance... What a Feeling, which also became an international hit."
She married Hollywood stuntman Conrad Palmisano in 1986. They divorced in 1991.
Cara's father, Gaspar Cara, was Puerto Rican and Cara's mother, Louise, was an American of Cuban descent. Cara has two sisters and two brothers. At age three, Irene Cara was one of five finalists for the 'Little Miss America' pageant. Cara began to play the piano "by ear" and soon thereafter, she began seriously studying music, acting, and dance. Cara's performing career started when she was a child on Spanish-language television, professionally singing and dancing. She made early TV appearances on the Original Amateur Hour (singing in Spanish) and Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show. She was a regular on PBS’s educational program The Electric Company, which starred Bill Cosby, Rita Moreno, and Morgan Freeman. As a child, Cara recorded a Latin-market Spanish-language record; an English Christmas album soon followed. She also appeared in a major concert tribute to Duke Ellington which also featured Stevie Wonder, Sammy Davis Jr, and Roberta Flack.

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Irving Gordon
Irving Gordon (February 14, 1915 – December 1, 1996) was an American songwriter.
Irving Gordon was born in Brooklyn, New York. As a child, he studied violin, and after attending public schools in New York City, went to work in the Catskill Mountains at some of the resort hotels in the area. While working in the hotels, he took to writing parody lyrics to some of the popular songs of the day. In the 1930s, he took a job with the music publishing firm headed by talent agent Irving Mills, at first writing only lyrics but subsequently writing music as well.
After Gordon was introduced to Duke Ellington in 1937, Ellington sometimes invited Gordon to put words to his compositions. Working with Ellington was probably the most difficult commission there was, because most of the Ellington songs were really instrumental pieces whose singable potential only emerged after they had been played and recorded by one or another of the soloists in the Ellington orchestra.
After writing "Mister and Mississippi", Gordon decided he enjoyed puns on state names, and some years later wrote "Delaware." He is perhaps best known for his song, "Allentown Jail", which was played by numerous other musicians, and told the story of a man who stole a diamond for his girlfriend and ended up in the Allentown jail, unable to make bail. Late in his life he won a Grammy for Song of the Year when Natalie Cole re-recorded her father's (Nat "king" Cole) earlier hit of "Unforgettable".

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Itaal Shur
Itaal Shur is an American composer, producer and musician. He has written songs for a number of musicians, including Maxwell, Jewel and Enrique Iglesias, and has produced records for various artists, including Kronos Quartet, The Scumfrog and Lucy Woodward. He was the founding member of the acid jazz group Groove Collective, and has released three solo albums.
One of Shur's most notable works is the song "Smooth", which he co-wrote with Matchbox 20's Rob Thomas for Santana's Grammy Award winning album Supernatural. "Smooth" reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1999, and won Shur and Thomas the 1999 Grammy Award for Song of the Year.
Itaal Shur was born in Los Angeles, but was raised in Seattle and Cincinnati, Ohio. His parents are Bonia Shur, a composer of Israeli music and director of Liturgic Arts at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, who had emigrated to the United States from Russia via Israel, and Fanchon Wechsler Shur, born in Chicago, Illinois, a former dancer and a choreographer. Shur attended middle school at The School for Creative and Performing Arts (SCPA) in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated from Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, and studied jazz and composition for a year at the College Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati. In the early 1990s he joined a local art rock band called Sleep Theater with Rob Hamrick and Chris Sherman (later known as Freekbass).

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Jackie DeShannon
Jackie DeShannon (born August 21, 1942) is an American singer-songwriter with a string of hit song credits from the 1960s onwards. She was one of the first female singer-songwriters of the rock 'n' roll period.
She was born Sharon Lee Myers in Hazel, Kentucky, the daughter of musically inclined farming parents, Sandra Jean and James Erwin Myers, and was singing country tunes on a local radio show at the age of six. By the age of 11, DeShannon was hosting her own radio program. When life on the farm became too difficult, the family moved to Aurora, Illinois, her mother's home town, and her father resumed his other career as a barber. After a year, they moved up the Fox River to Batavia, Illinois, where Sharon attended high school.
She began to record under various names such as Sherry Lee, Jackie Dee, and Jackie Shannon, but had little success. However, her interpretations of country songs "Buddy" and "Trouble" gained the attention of Rock'n'Roll star Eddie Cochran, who arranged for her to travel to California to meet his girlfriend, singer-songwriter Sharon Sheeley, who formed a writing partnership with DeShannon in 1960. The partnership produced hits such as "Dum Dum" for Brenda Lee.

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Jacques Demy
Jacques Demy (5 June 1931 – 27 October 1990) was one of the most approachable filmmakers to appear in the wake of the French New Wave. Uninterested in the formal experimentation of Alain Resnais, or the political agitation of Jean-Luc Godard, Demy instead created a self-contained fantasy world closer to that of François Truffaut, drawing on musicals, fairytales and the golden age of Hollywood.
After working with the animator Paul Grimault and the filmmaker Georges Rouquier, Demy directed his first feature film, Lola, in 1961, with Anouk Aimée playing the eponymous cabaret singer. The Demy universe here emerges full-fledged. Characters burst into song (courtesy of composer and lifelong Demy-collaborator Michel Legrand); iconic Hollywood imagery is lovingly appropriated as in the opening scene with the man in a white Stetson in the Cadillac, daringly set to Beethoven's "Seventh Symphony"); plot is dictated by the director's fascination with fate, and stock themes of chance encounters and long-lost love; and the setting, as with so many of Demy's films, is the French Atlantic coast of his childhood, specifically the seaport town of Nantes.

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James Blunt
James Hillier Blount (born 22 February 1974), better known by his stage name James Blunt, is an English singer-songwriter and former army officer, whose debut album, Back to Bedlam and single releases, including "You're Beautiful" and "Goodbye My Lover", brought him to fame in 2005. His repertoire can be best described as a mix of acoustic-tinged pop, rock and folk. After recording on the independent American label Custard Records, Blunt won two Brit Awards, two MTV Video Music Awards, two Ivor Novello Awards, and by 2006 was nominated for five Grammy Awards. The following year, he released his second album All the Lost Souls (2007). Blunt's third studio album, Some Kind of Trouble, was released in November 2010. Worldwide, Blunt has sold over 18 million albums, and his debut album, Back to Bedlam, is the best-selling album of the 2000s in the UK.
Blunt was an officer in the Life Guards, a cavalry regiment of the British Army, and served under NATO in Kosovo during the conflict there in 1999. While posted to Kosovo, Blunt was introduced to the work of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF or "Doctors Without Borders"). Since then, Blunt has supported MSF by holding meet-and-greet auctions at many of his concerts.

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James Horner
James Roy Horner (born August 14, 1953) is an American composer, orchestrator, and conductor of orchestral and film music. He is noted for the integration of choral and electronic elements in many of his film scores, and for frequent use of Celtic musical elements. His score to the 1997 film Titanic remains the best selling orchestral film soundtrack of all time.
In addition, Horner has scored over 100 films, frequently collaborating with acclaimed directors such as James Cameron and Ron Howard. Some of his most noteworthy works include Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), Cocoon (1985), An American Tail (1986), Aliens (1986), The Land Before Time (1988), Willow (1988), Glory (1989), Field of Dreams (1989), The Rocketeer (1991), Legends of the Fall (1994), Apollo 13 (1995), Braveheart (1995), The Mask of Zorro (1998), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Troy (2004), and Avatar (2009).
Horner has won two Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, three Satellite Awards, three Saturn Awards, and has been nominated for three BAFTA Awards. His body of work is also notable for including the scores to the two highest-grossing films of all time; Titanic (1997) and Avatar (2009), both of which were directed by James Cameron.

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James Ingram
James Ingram (born February 16, 1952, Akron, Ohio) is an American soul musician. He is best known as a vocalist. He is also a self-taught musician who plays piano, guitar, bass, drums and keyboards. Additionally, he is a producer and songwriter.
Born in 1952, Ingram lived with his mother and father until he was 10, then moved in with his grandmother.
In 1981, Ingram provided the vocals to "Just Once" and "One Hundred Ways" on Quincy Jones's album The Dude. He won a Grammy award for best R&B vocal performance for his work on this album. Ingram's debut album, It's Your Night, appeared in 1983, including the ballad "There's No Easy Way." He also worked with other notable R&B artists such as Ray Charles, Anita Baker, Viktor Lazlo, Nancy Wilson, Natalie Cole, and Kenny Rogers. In October, 1990, he scored a No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with the love ballad "I Don't Have the Heart", from his It's Real album.
But Ingram was best known throughout the decade for his hit collaborations. He went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in Feb. 1983 with Patti Austin on "Baby, Come to Me", a song made popular on TV's General Hospital. A second Austin–Ingram duet, "How Do You Keep the Music Playing?", was featured in the movie Best Friends and earned an Oscar nomination. A few years later, he won a 1985 Grammy Award for "Yah Mo B There", a duet with Michael McDonald. And he teamed up with Kenny Rogers and Kim Carnes for the Top 40 ballad "What About Me?" in 1984. In 1985, he participated in the charity single "We Are the World".

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James Taylor
James Vernon Taylor (born March 12, 1948) is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. A five-time Grammy Award winner, Taylor was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2000.
Taylor achieved his major breakthrough in 1970 with the #3 single "Fire and Rain" and had his first #1 hit the following year with "You've Got a Friend", a recording of Carole King's classic song. His 1976 Greatest Hits album was certified Diamond and has sold 12 million US copies. Following his 1977 album, JT, he has retained a large audience over the decades. His commercial achievements declined slightly until a big resurgence during the late 1990s and 2000s, when some of his best-selling and most-awarded albums (including Hourglass, October Road and Covers) were released.
James Taylor was born at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 12, 1948, where his father, Isaac M. Taylor, was a resident physician. His father was from a well-off family of Southern Scottish ancestry. His mother, the former Gertrude Woodard, had studied singing with Marie Sundelius at the New England Conservatory of Music and was an aspiring opera singer before the couple's marriage in 1946. James was the second of five children, the others being Alex (1947-1993), Kate (born 1949), Livingston (born 1950), and Hugh (born 1952).

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Janis Ian
Janis Ian (born Janis Eddy Fink, April 7, 1951) is an American songwriter, singer, musician, columnist, and science fiction author. Ian first entered the folk music scene while still a teenager in the mid-sixties; most active musically in that decade and the 1970s, she has continued recording into the 21st century. In 1975, Ian won a Grammy Award for her song, "At Seventeen".
Born to a Jewish family in New York City, she was primarily raised in New Jersey, initially on a farm, and attended East Orange High School and the New York City High School of Music & Art. Her parents, Victor (a music teacher) and Pearl, ran a summer camp in upstate New York. In that Cold War era they were frequently under government surveillance because of their left-wing politics. Ian would allude to these years later in her song "God and the FBI". Young Janis admired the work of folk pioneers such as Joan Baez and Odetta. Starting with piano lessons at the age of 6 or 7, by the time she hit her teens, Ian had learned the organ, harpsichord, French horn, flute and guitar. At the age of 12, Ian wrote her first song, "Hair of Spun Gold," which was subsequently published in the folk publication Broadside and was later recorded for her debut album. In 1964, she legally changed her name to Janis Ian, using as her new last name her brother Eric's middle name.

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Janis Joplin
Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970) was an American singer and songwriter from Port Arthur, Texas. As a youth Joplin was ridiculed by her fellow students due to her unconventional appearance and personal beliefs. She later sang about her experience at school through her song "Ego Rock". Early in her life, Joplin cultivated a rebellious and unconventional lifestyle, becoming a beatnik poet. She began her singing career as a folk and blues singer in San Francisco, playing clubs and bars with her guitar and auto-harp.
Joplin first rose to prominence in the late 1960s as the lead singer of the psychedelic-acid rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company, and later as a solo artist with her more soulful and bluesy backing groups, The Kozmic Blues Band and The Full Tilt Boogie Band. She was one of the more popular acts at the Monterey Pop Festival and later became one of the major attractions to the Woodstock festival and the Festival Express train tour.
Janis Joplin only charted five singles in her life but her hits and other popular songs from throughout her short four year career include "Down On Me", "Bye, Bye Baby", "Coo Coo", "Summertime", "Piece of My Heart", "Turtle Blues", "Ball 'n' Chain", "Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)", "Maybe", "To Love Somebody", "Kozmic Blues", "Work Me, Lord", "Move Over", "Cry Baby", "A Woman Left Lonely" "Get It While You Can", "My Baby", "Trust Me", "Mercedes Benz", "One Night Stand", "Raise Your Hand" and her only number one hit, "Me and Bobby McGee".

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Jason Mraz
Jason Mraz (

/məˈræz/; born June 23, 1977 in Mechanicsville, Virginia) is an American singer-songwriter. Mraz released his debut album, Waiting for My Rocket to Come, which contained the hit single "The Remedy (I Won't Worry)", in 2002, but it was not until the release of his second album, Mr. A-Z, in 2005, that Mraz achieved major commercial success. The album peaked at number five on the Billboard 200 and sold over 100,000 copies in the US. In 2008, Mraz released his third studio album, We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things. The album debuted at number three on the Billboard 200 and was a commercial success worldwide, peaking in the top ten of many international charts.
Mraz's international breakthrough came with the release of the single "I'm Yours" from the album We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things. The single peaked at number six on the Billboard Hot 100, giving Mraz his first top ten single. The song was on the Hot 100 for 76 weeks, beating the previous record of 69 weeks held by LeAnn Rimes' "How Do I Live". The song was a huge commercial success in the US, receiving a 5x platinum certification from the RIAA for sales of over five million. The song was successful internationally, topping the charts in New Zealand and Norway and peaking in the top ten of multiple international charts.

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Jay Graydon
Jay Graydon is a Los Angeles songwriter, recording artist, guitarist, singer, producer, arranger, and recording engineer. He is the winner of two Grammy Awards (in the R&B category) with twelve Grammy nominations, among them the title "Producer of the Year" and "Best Engineered Recording". Jay Graydon has mastered many different styles and genres. In his career his recordings have been featured on record, film, television, and on stage.
Graydon made his singing debut on his second birthday on the "Joe Graydon Show," the first music/talk television show in Los Angeles, hosted by his father, Joe Graydon.
During and for a brief time after his college days Jay Graydon played in the Don Ellis Band, whose style can be described as experimental post-bop jazz. He can be heard on the live double album "Don Ellis at Fillmore".
From the late 60s to the late 70s he was a session musician in Los Angeles, working with such artists as Gino Vannelli, Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton, Diana Ross, The Jackson Five, Alice Cooper, Cheap Trick,Al Jarreau, Christopher Cross, Ray Charles, Cher, Joe Cocker, Marvin Gaye, Hall & Oates, Olivia Newton-John, and Albert King. He is perhaps best known for his guitar solo for Steely Dan's "Peg".

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Jay Livingston
Jay Livingston (March 28, 1915 – October 17, 2001) was an American composer and singer best known as half of a songwriting duo with Ray Evans that specialized in songs composed for films. Livingston wrote the music and Evans the lyrics.
Livingston was born Jacob Harold Levison in McDonald, Pennsylvania; he was Jewish. Livingston studied piano with Harry Archer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and worked as a musician at local clubs while still in high school. He attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he organized a dance band and met Evans, a fellow student in the band. Their professional collaboration began in 1937. Livingston and Evans won the Academy Award for Best Original Song three times, in 1948 for the song Buttons and Bows, written for the movie The Paleface; in 1950 for the song Mona Lisa, written for the movie Captain Carey, U.S.A.; and in 1956 for the song "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)," featured in the movie The Man Who Knew Too Much. Livingston and Evans wrote popular TV themes for shows including Bonanza and Mr. Ed. They also wrote the Christmas song Silver Bells in 1951 for the film The Lemon Drop Kid as well as "Never Let Me Go" for the 1956 film The Scarlet Hour.

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Jeannie C. Riley
File:Jeannie.jpg|Jeannie on The cover of Her 1981 album Jeannie C. Riley's Greatest Hits
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Jeannie C. Riley (born Jeanne Carolyn Stephenson, October 19, 1945) is an American country music and gospel singer. She is best known for her 1968 country and pop hit "Harper Valley PTA" (written by Tom T. Hall), which missed (by one week) becoming the Billboard Country and Pop number one hit at the same time. In subsequent years, she had moderate chart success with country music, but never again duplicated the success of "Harper Valley PTA". She became a born-again Christian and began recording gospel music during the late 1970s.
Riley was born in 1945 in Anson, Texas. As a teenager, she married Mickey Riley and gave birth to a daughter, Kim Michelle Riley on January 11, 1966. Later, they moved to Nashville, Tennessee after receiving a letter from Weldon Myrick, who heard a demo tape of Jeannie's and believed she could be successful. In Nashville, Riley worked as a secretary for Passkey Music while recording demos on the side.

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Jeff Barry
Jeff Barry (born Joel Adelberg, April 3, 1938, Brooklyn, New York) is an American pop music songwriter, singer, and record producer.
His parents divorced when he was seven, and his mother moved him and his sister to Plainfield, New Jersey, where they resided for several years before returning to New York.
After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School, Barry served in the Army, then returned to New York where he attended City College. Although he leaned toward a degree in engineering, his main aspiration was to become a singer. He left college in the late '50s to sign with RCA Records, courtesy of music publisher Arnold Shaw. Around this time, he adopted a new name more in tune with show business, borrowing "Jeff" from actor Jeff Chandler and "Barry" from family friends.
Barry recorded several singles for RCA label, including the self-penned "It's Called Rock and Roll", backed with "Hip Couple", released in 1959. The following year, Barry garnered his first significant success as a songwriter with two songs targeting the burgeoning teen market. First, Sam Cooke took Barry's "Teenage Sonata" to No. 22 on the Billboard R&B charts. Later that year, the teen-tragedy ballad "Tell Laura I Love Her", written with lyricist Ben Raleigh, went to No. 1 on the U.S. pop charts for Ray Peterson and to No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart for British singer Ricky Valance.

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Jerry Herman
Jerry Herman (born July 10, 1931) is an American composer and lyricist, known for his work in Broadway musical theater. He composed the scores for the hit Broadway musicals Hello, Dolly!, Mame, and La Cage aux Folles. He has been nominated for the Tony Award five times, and won twice, for Hello, Dolly! and La Cage aux Folles. In 2009, Herman received the Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre. He is a recipient of the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors.

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Jesse Harris
Jesse Harris (born 1969) is a Grammy Award winning American singer-songwriter. He has collaborated with several musical artists including Norah Jones, Melody Gardot, Madeleine Peyroux, Nikki Yanofsky, and Lizz Wright.
Harris was born in New York City, along with his fraternal twin sister. He graduated from Cornell University in 1991 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, in English.
Harris gave guitar lessons and performed in "various musical groups" before he formed the duo Once Blue with singer/songwriter Rebecca Martin.Once Blue released its self-titled debut on EMI Records in 1995 and nine additional songs were included in the album's re-release in 2003.
Harris became a songwriter for Sony Publishing for a time and then created three self-released recordings with his new band, the Ferdinandos consisting of Harris, Tony Scherr, Tim Luntzel, and Kenny Wollesen. The band released two more albums on Verve Records and Harris later recorded three solo albums Mineral, Feel, and Watching the Sky on his own label, Secret Sun Recordings. In 2003 he was awarded a Grammy Award for Song of the Year for "Don't Know Why," performed by Norah Jones.

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Jim Reeves
James Travis "Jim" Reeves (August 20, 1923 – July 31, 1964) was an American country and popular music singer-songwriter. With records charting from the 1950s to the 1980s, he became well known as a practitioner of the Nashville sound (a mixture of older country-style music with elements of popular music). Known as Gentleman Jim, his songs continued to chart for years after his death. Reeves died at age 40 in the crash of a private airplane. He is a member of both the Country Music and Texas Country Music Halls of Fame.
Reeves was born in Galloway, Texas, a small rural community near Carthage. Winning an athletic scholarship to the University of Texas, he enrolled to study speech and drama, but quit after only six weeks to work in the shipyards in Houston. Soon he resumed baseball, playing in the semi-professional leagues before contracting with the St. Louis Cardinals "farm" team during 1944 as a right-handed pitcher. He played for the minor leagues for three years before severing his sciatic nerve while pitching, which ended his athletic career.^{[citation needed]}

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Jim Steinman
James Richard "Jim" Steinman (born November 1, 1947) is an American composer, lyricist, and Grammy Award-winning record producer responsible for several hit songs. He has also worked as an arranger, pianist, and singer. His work has included songs in the adult contemporary, rock and roll, dance, pop, musical theater, and film score genres. Beginning his career in musical theater, Steinman's most notable work in the area includes lyrics for Whistle Down the Wind and music for Tanz der Vampire.
His work includes such albums as Meat Loaf's Bat out of Hell and Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell, and producing albums for Bonnie Tyler. His most successful chart singles include Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart", Air Supply's "Making Love Out of Nothing at All", Meat Loaf's "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)", The Sisters of Mercy's "This Corrosion" and "More", Barry Manilow's "Read 'Em and Weep" (originally released by Meat Loaf), Celine Dion's cover of "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" (originally released by Steinman's project Pandora's Box) and Boyzone's "No Matter What". The album Bad for Good was released in his own name in 1981.

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Jimmy Dean
Jimmy Ray Dean (August 10, 1928 – June 13, 2010) was an American country music singer, television host, actor and businessman. Although he may be best known today as the creator of the Jimmy Dean sausage brand, he became a national television personality starting in 1957, rising to fame for his 1961 country crossover hit "Big Bad John" and his television series, The Jimmy Dean Show, which also gave puppeteer Jim Henson his first national media exposure. His acting career included a supporting role as Willard Whyte in the 1971 James Bond movie, Diamonds Are Forever. He lived near Richmond, Virginia, and was nominated for the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2010, although he was formally inducted posthumously.
Dean was born in Olton, Texas, in 1928 the son of George Otto Dean, and his second wife Ruth (née Taylor) Dean. He attributed his interest in music to the Seth Ward Baptist Church. He dropped out of high school and became a professional entertainer after a stint in the U.S. Air Force in the late 1940s. Dean was 22 and just starting in show business when he married his first wife Mary Sue in 1950.

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Jimmy Driftwood
James Corbitt Morris (June 20, 1907–July 12, 1998), known professionally as Jimmy Driftwood or Jimmie Driftwood, was a prolific American folk music songwriter and musician, most famous for his songs "The Battle of New Orleans" and "Tennessee Stud". Driftwood wrote more than 6,000 folk songs, of which more than 300 were recorded by various musicians.
Driftwood was born in Timbo, Arkansas on June 20, 1907. His father was folk singer Neil Morris. Driftwood learned to play guitar at a young age on his grandfather's homemade instrument. Driftwood used that unique guitar throughout his career and noted that its neck was made from a fence rail, its sides from an old ox yoke, and the head and bottom from the headboard of his grandmother's bed. This homemade instrument produced a pleasant distinctive resonant sound. Driftwood attended John Brown College in northwest Arkansas and later received a degree in education from Arkansas State Teacher's College. He started writing songs during his teaching career to teach his students history in an entertaining manner.

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Jimmy Van Heusen
Jimmy Van Heusen (January 26, 1913 - February 6, 1990), was an American composer. He wrote songs mainly for films and television (but also for the theater), and won an Emmy and four Academy Awards for Best Original Song.
Born Edward Chester Babcock in Syracuse, New York, he began writing music while at high school. He renamed himself at age 16, after the famous shirt makers, Phillips-Van Heusen, to use as his off-air name during local shows. His close friends called him "Chet."
Studying at Cazenovia Seminary and Syracuse University, he became friends with Jerry Arlen, the younger brother of Harold Arlen. With the elder Arlen's help, Van Heusen wrote songs for the Cotton Club revue, including "Harlem Hospitality."
He then became a staff pianist for some of the Tin Pan Alley publishers, and wrote "It's the Dreamer in Me" (1938) with lyrics by Jimmy Dorsey.
Collaborating with lyricist Eddie DeLange, on songs such as "Heaven Can Wait", "So Help Me", and "Darn That Dream", his work became more prolific, writing over 60 songs in 1940 alone. It was in 1940 that he teamed up with the lyricist Johnny Burke.

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Jimmy Webb
Jimmy Webb (born August 15, 1946) is an American songwriter, composer, and singer. He wrote numerous platinum-selling classics, including "Up, Up and Away", "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", "Wichita Lineman", "Galveston", "The Worst That Could Happen", "All I Know", and "MacArthur Park". His songs have been performed by many popular contemporary singers, including Glen Campbell, The 5th Dimension, Thelma Houston, The Supremes, Richard Harris, Johnny Maestro, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Isaac Hayes, Art Garfunkel, Amy Grant, America, Linda Ronstadt, R.E.M., Michael Feinstein, Donna Summer and Carly Simon. According to BMI, his song "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" was the third most performed song in the fifty years between 1940 to 1990. Webb is the only artist ever to have received Grammy Awards for music, lyrics, and orchestration.
Jimmy Layne Webb was born August 15, 1946 in Elk City, Oklahoma. His father, Robert Lee Webb, was a Baptist minister and former member of the United States Marine Corps who presided over rural churches in southwestern Oklahoma and west Texas. With his mother's encouragement, Webb learned piano and organ, and by the age of 12 was playing in the choir of his father's churches, accompanied by his father on guitar and his mother on accordion. Webb grew up in a conservative religious home where his father restricted radio listening to country music and white gospel music.

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Joe Allison
Joe Marion Allison (October 3, 1924 – August 2, 2002) was an American Hall of Fame songwriter, a radio and television personality, a record producer, and a country music business executive.
Born in McKinney, Texas. Allison worked as a commercial artist before embarking on a career in the entertainment industry, first as a disc jockey on a Paris, Texas radio station. In 1945, after a few years on radio, Allison took a job as the emcee for the North American tour of country music singing star Tex Ritter. While working on tour, he offered Ritter a song he had written which the singer turned into a No. 1 hit on the country music charts. This success ultimately led to Allison moving to a radio station in Nashville, Tennessee where he remained until accepting an offer from a station in Pasadena, California.
While working on radio and television on the West Coast, Allison continued writing music, many of which were co-authored with his first wife, Audrey. He scored a success with a song recorded by country singer Faron Young and a major hit when teen idol Tommy Sands recorded his song, Teen Age Crush. In 1959, Allison wrote his most famous song for Jim Reeves. He'll Have to Go would become not only a platinum record for Reeves, but a song that would be recorded successfully by more than one hundred other artists including Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby, Tom Jones, Eddy Arnold and even big band leader Guy Lombardo. That same year, Allison was hired by Liberty Records to create their country music department. At Liberty he signed Willie Nelson to his first recording contract.

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Joe South
Joe South (born Joseph Alfred Souter, February 28, 1940, in Atlanta, Georgia) is a multi-talented American singer-songwriter and guitarist.
South opened his pop career in July 1958 with the novelty hit "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor". Thereafter South's music grew increasingly serious.
In 1959, South wrote two songs which were recorded by Gene Vincent: "I Might Have Known", which was on the album Sounds Like Gene Vincent (Capitol Records, 1959) and "Gone Gone Gone" which was included on the album The Crazy Beat of Gene Vincent (Capitol Records, 1963).
He had met and was encouraged by Bill Lowery,^{[citation needed]} an Atlanta music publisher and radio personality. He began his recording career in Atlanta with National Recording Corporation, where he served as staff guitarist along with other NRC artists Ray Stevens and Jerry Reed. South's earliest recordings have been re-released by NRC on CD.
South was also a prominent sideman, playing guitar on Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools",Tommy Roe's "Sheila", and Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde album. Some list South on the electric guitar part that was added to Simon & Garfunkel's first hit, "The Sounds of Silence", although others credit Al Gorgoni and/or Vinnie Bell instead.

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John Beck (musician)
John Beck is an English musician in progressive rock band, It Bites.
John Beck is a writer, producer, keyboard player and guitarist known for his work with Tasmin Archer and Corinne Bailey Rae. John was signed to EMI along with Tasmin after writing her first hit "Sleeping Satellite", which went on to be number 1 in 16 countries. The album sold 1.5 million and went on to receive a Brit Award.
John has subsequently been Grammy and Ivor nominated and in 2008 won ASCAP song of the year award for "Put Your Records On" performed by Corinne Bailey Rae.
John has recently been working in New York with Claude Kelly and Andrea Martin, two of America's most influential writers, and whilst there was asked to work on a rare co-write with Ashford and Simpson, as well as being invited by Amanda Ghost to write for Epic recent signing Alice Smith.
John has also worked with and written for Will Young, Paloma Faith, Lisa Mitchell, Pearl and the Puppets, Rebecca Ferguson, Eliza Doolittle (singer), Delilah, Daley, Newton Faulkner, Lianne LaHvas and many more. Joe Goddard recently re-mixed John's track "Gabriel" featuring Valentina which became number 1 in the dance charts.

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John Hartford
John Cowan Hartford (December 30, 1937 – June 4, 2001) was an American folk, country and bluegrass composer and musician known for his mastery of the fiddle and banjo, as well as for his witty lyrics, unique vocal style, and extensive knowledge of Mississippi River lore. Hartford performed with a variety of ensembles throughout his career, and is perhaps best known for his solo performances where he would interchange the guitar, banjo, and fiddle from song to song. He also invented his own shuffle tap dance move, and clogged on an amplified piece of plywood while he played and sang.
John Harford (he would change his name to Hartford later in life at the behest of Chet Atkins) was born on December 30, 1937 in New York City to parents Dr. Carl and Mary Harford. He spent his childhood in St. Louis, Missouri. There he was exposed to the influence that would shape much of his career and music—the Mississippi River. From the time he got his first job on the river, at age 16, Hartford was on, around, or singing about the river.

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John Kander
John Harold Kander (born March 18, 1927) is the American composer of a number of musicals as part of the songwriting team of Kander and Ebb.
Kander was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of Bernice (née Aaron) and Harold S. Kander. Kander attended The Pembroke Country-Day School and Oberlin College before earning a Master's degree at Columbia University where he was a protégé of Douglas Moore and studied composition with Jack Beeson.
Kander began his Broadway career as substitute rehearsal pianist for West Side Story. The stage manager for West Side Story then asked Kander to play the auditions for her next show, Gypsy. During the auditions, Kander met the choreographer, Jerome Robbins, who suggested that Kander compose the dance music for the show in 1959. After that experience, he wrote dance arrangements for Irma la Douce in 1960.
His first produced musical was A Family Affair, written with James and William Goldman. He met lyricist Fred Ebb in 1962 and began a songwriting collaboration that would last for more than four decades. Later that year rising star Barbra Streisand recorded two of the duo's songs, "My Coloring Book" and "I Don't Care Much." In 1965, Kander and Ebb landed their first show on Broadway, Flora the Red Menace, produced by Hal Prince, directed by George Abbott, and with book by George Abbott and Robert Russell,^{[disambiguation needed ]} in which Liza Minnelli made her initial Broadway appearance. Kander and Ebb have since been associated with writing material for both Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera, and have produced special material for their appearances live and on television.

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John Legend
John Roger Stephens (born December 28, 1978), better known by his stage name John Legend, is an American singer-songwriter and actor. He has won nine Grammy Awards, and in 2007, he received the special Starlight award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Prior to the release of his debut album, Stephens' career gained momentum through a series of successful collaborations with multiple established artists. Stephens added his voice to those of other artists, assisting in them reaching chart-topper hits. He lent his voice to Kanye West's All of the Lights, on Slum Village's "Selfish" and Dilated Peoples' "This Way". Other artists included Jay-Z's "Encore", and he sang backing vocals on Alicia Keys' 2003 song "You Don't Know My Name" and Fort Minor's "High Road." Stephens played piano on Lauryn Hill's "Everything Is Everything."
Stephens was born on December 28, 1978, in Springfield, Ohio. He is the son of Phyllis, a seamstress, and John Mills, a factory worker and former National Guardsman. Throughout his childhood, Stephens was homeschooled on and off by his mother. At the age of four, he began playing the piano and at the age of seven, he performed with his church choir. When he was ten, his parents divorced, causing his mother to suffer a breakdown. At the age of 12, Stephens attended North High School, from which he graduated four years later. He graduated salutatorian.

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John Lennon
John Winston Ono Lennon, MBE (9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founder members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Together with Paul McCartney, he formed one of the most celebrated songwriting partnerships of the 20th century.
Born and raised in Liverpool, Lennon became involved as a teenager in the skiffle craze; his first band, The Quarrymen, evolved into The Beatles in 1960. As the group disintegrated towards the end of the decade, Lennon embarked on a solo career that produced the critically acclaimed albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, and iconic songs such as "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine". After his marriage to Yoko Ono in 1969, he changed his name to John Ono Lennon. Lennon disengaged himself from the music business in 1975 to devote time to raising his infant son Sean, but re-emerged with Ono in 1980 with the new album Double Fantasy. He was murdered three weeks after its release.

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John Leventhal
John Leventhal (born December 18, 1952) is a Grammy Award-winning musician, producer, songwriter, and recording engineer who has produced albums for Michelle Branch, Rosanne Cash, Marc Cohn, Shawn Colvin, Rodney Crowell, Jim Lauderdale, Joan Osborne, Loudon Wainwright, The Wreckers and many others. As a musician he has worked with all of the above as well as artists such as Jackson Browne, Willie Nelson, Bruce Hornsby, Elvis Costello, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Charlie Haden, David Crosby, Levon Helm, Edie Brickell, Paul Simon, Patty Larkin, Susan Tedeschi, Steve Forbert, Kelly Willis and Johnny Cash. As a songwriter he has had over 100 songs recorded by various artists. In 1998 he won a Grammy Award for Record and Song of the year for producing and co-writing the song "Sunny Came Home" (a 1997 hit for Colvin). Albums he has produced have been nominated for a total of 11 Grammy Awards. In 2005 he composed the score for the film Winter Solstice.
Leventhal lives with his wife Rosanne Cash and their children in New York City.

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John Mayer
John Clayton Mayer (

/ˈmeɪ.ər/ MAY-ər; (born October 16, 1977) is an American pop and blues rock musician, singer-songwriter, recording artist, and music producer. Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut and raised in Fairfield, Connecticut, he attended Berklee College of Music in Boston. He moved to Atlanta in 1997, where he refined his skills and gained a following, and he now lives in New York City. His first two studio albums, Room for Squares and Heavier Things, did well commercially, achieving multi-platinum status. In 2003, he won a Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for "Your Body Is a Wonderland."
Mayer began his career performing mainly acoustic rock, but gradually began a transition towards the blues genre in 2005 by collaborating with renowned blues artists such as B. B. King, Buddy Guy, and Eric Clapton, and by forming the John Mayer Trio. The blues influence can be heard throughout his 2005 live album Try! with the John Mayer Trio and his third studio album Continuum, released in September 2006. At the 49th Annual Grammy Awards in 2007 Mayer won Best Pop Vocal Album for Continuum and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for "Waiting on the World to Change". He released his fourth studio album, Battle Studies, in November 2009. His fifth album, Born and Raised, was released on May 22, 2012. He has sold over 10 million albums in the U.S. and 20 million albums worldwide.

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John Rzeznik
John Joseph Theodore Rzeznik (born December 5, 1965), also known as Johnny Rzeznik, is an American songwriter, guitarist, vocalist and producer. He is best known as the lead guitarist, vocalist, frontman, and primary songwriter of the rock band the Goo Goo Dolls, of which he is a founding member and with whom he has recorded nine studio albums.
Rzeznik was born in Buffalo, New York, the youngest of five children of Edith (née Pomeroy) and Joseph Rzeznik, a bar proprietor and postal clerk. His name is pronounced (r)ZHEZ-nik and means 'butcher' in Polish. Both of Rzeznik's parents were musicians, playing the clarinet and flute. Rzeznik had a strict Catholic upbringing on Buffalo's working-class East Side and attended Corpus Christi Grammar School. Rzeznik's father died from diabetic coma at the age of fifty-five when Rzeznik was fifteen years old. Six months later his mother died from a sudden heart attack. Having lost both of his parents, he was brought up by his four older sisters. It was during this period and while attending McKinley Vocational High School that Rzeznik began playing the guitar. Rzeznik briefly attended Buffalo State College, dropping out after freshman year. Both sides of Rzeznik's grandparents were born in Poland.

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Johnny Mandel
Johnny Mandel (November 23, 1925) is an American composer and arranger of popular songs, film music and jazz. Among the musicians he has worked with are Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Anita O'Day, Barbra Streisand, and Shirley Horn.
Born John Alfred Mandel, New York, N.Y., to Alfred, a garment manufacturer, and Hannah, an opera singer, who discovered when he was aged 5 that he had perfect pitch. Piano lessons ensued but Johnny switched to the trumpet and later the trombone. Mandel married Martha Blanner in 1970 and has a daughter, Marrisa, born in 1976.
He studied at the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School. In 1943 he played the trumpet with Joe Venuti, in 1944 with Billy Rogers and trombone in the bands of Boyd Raeburn, Jimmy Dorsey, Buddy Rich, Georgie Auld and Chubby Jackson. In 1949 he accompanied the singer June Christy in the orchestra of Bob Cooper. From 1951 till 1953 he played and arranged music in Elliot Lawrence's orchestra, and in 1953 with Count Basie. Later he resided in Los Angeles, where he played the bass trumpet for Zoot Sims. A 1944 Band graduate of New York Military Academy, in Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY, he wrote jazz compositions like "Not Really the Blues" for Woody Herman in 1949, "Hershey Bar" (1950) and "Pot Luck" (1953) for Stan Getz, "Straight Life" (1953) and "Low Life" (1956) for Count Basie as well as "Tommyhawk" (1954) for Chet Baker.

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Johntá Austin
Johntá Austin (born June 28, 1980) is an American singer-songwriter, who is currently signed to Jermaine Dupri's So So Def Recordings. He is commonly known for collaborating with Producers Bryan-Michael Cox, Jermaine Dupri & The Production Team StarGate. Austin was awarded two Grammy Awards for his work on the songs "We Belong Together" by Mariah Carey and "Be Without You" by Mary J. Blige.
Austin grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1989, at the age of eight, Austin hosted the daily television show, Kid's Beat on CNN. Covering current events, sports and the entertainment world, Austin went on to become the Atlanta Bureau Chief for the CNN weekly news program, Real News for Kids and the reporter for the TBS half hour weekly, Feed Your Mind. Austin grew up singing in church choirs and wanted to become an actor, and he interviewed such celebrities as Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan, among others, and in 1993, made his television debut on The Arsenio Hall Show, where he admitted he loved singing and was offered to sing with Arsenio Hall's band.

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Jon Lind
Jon Lind is an American songwriter and performer.
Jon Lind was raised in New York City. He studied classical guitar at the Mannes College of Music. His first break was in the 1970s where he worked with Bob Cavallo. At this period he met Maurice White who recorded two of his songs. He was also a member of the band Howdy Moon and The Fifth Avenue Band. He has written songs for soulful artists such as The Emotions, Jennifer Holliday, D.J. Rogers, Atlantic Starr and Ramsey Lewis. In 1984, Lind signed with Warner Brothers. He is currently the Vice President Of A&R at Hollywood Records.
The Fifth Avenue Band (Reprise 1969) The Fifth Avenue Band - Really (Pony Canyon, Japan, 1990)
Howdy Moon (A&M 1974)
White Horse (Capitol 1977)

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Jon Pareles
Jon Pareles is an American journalist who is the chief popular music critic in the arts section of the New York Times. He played jazz flute and piano, and graduated from Yale University with a degree in music. In the 1970s he was an associate editor of Crawdaddy!, and in the 1980s an associate editor at Rolling Stone and the music editor at The Village Voice. He started contributing to the Times in 1982. He currently reviews popular music in the arts section of the New York Times.

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Jorge Calderón
Jorge Calderón, originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, is a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and record producer best known for his collaborations with Warren Zevon. He holds the unique distinction of having been credited on all of Zevon's post-1976 albums with the exception of My Ride's Here. Additionally, he produced Zevon's final album The Wind (for which he co-wrote many of the tracks), as well as the Zevon tribute album Enjoy Every Sandwich: Songs of Warren Zevon. On The Wind, he plays bass, acoustic guitar, various percussion, electric guitar, as well as background vocals.
Calderón released one album featuring his own songs on Warner Bros. Records in 1975 titled City Music. [1].

City Music

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Josh Kear
Joshua Peter "Josh" Kear is an American songwriter. His credits include Carrie Underwood's number-one "Before He Cheats," for which Kear won the Grammy Award for Best Country Song in 2007 and Lady Antebellum's number-one "Need You Now," for which Kear won an Academy of Country Music Award for Best Country Song in 2010 and also won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year and Best Country Song for the 53rd Grammy Awards in 2011. Both songs were awarded the ASCAP Country Song Of The Year. Kear also co-wrote "Inventing Shadows," the debut single for The Voice's Dia Frampton which hit #1 on the iTunes song chart. In 2011 Kear was awarded ASCAP's Global Impact Award.

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Jule Styne
Jule Styne (December 31, 1905 – September 20, 1994) was a British-born American songwriter especially famous for a series of Broadway musicals, which included several very well known and frequently revived shows.
Styne was born in London, England as Julius Kerwin Stein of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. At the age of eight he moved with his family to Chicago, where at an early age he began taking piano lessons. He proved to be a prodigy and performed with the Chicago, St. Louis, and Detroit Symphonies before he was ten years old.
Styne attended Chicago Musical College, but before then he had already attracted attention of another teenager, Mike Todd, later a successful film producer, who commissioned him to write a song for a musical act that he was creating. It would be the first of over 1,500 published songs Styne would compose in his career.
Styne established his own dance band, which brought him to the notice of Hollywood, where he was championed by Frank Sinatra and where he began a collaboration with lyricist Sammy Cahn, with whom he wrote many songs for the movies, including "It's Been a Long, Long Time" (#1 for 3 weeks for Harry James and His Orchestra in 1945), "Five Minutes More," and the Oscar-winning "Three Coins in the Fountain". He collaborated on the score for the 1955 musical film My Sister Eileen with Leo Robin. Ten of his songs were nominated for the Oscar, many written with Cahn, including "I've Heard That Song Before" (#1 for 13 weeks for Harry James and His Orchestra in 1943), "I'll Walk Alone", "It's Magic" (a #2 hit for Doris Day in 1948) and "I Fall in Love Too Easily".

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Julie Gold
Julie Gold (born February 3, 1956 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a New York singer-songwriter. She is best known for Bette Midler's version of her song "From a Distance" which won the Grammy for Song of the Year in 1991.
That song has since received close to four million airplays. It has been recited into the Congressional Record (by Senator Barbara Boxer). It has been recorded internationally and translated into many languages. It has been illustrated as a children’s book and mass-produced in music boxes. It has been quoted in books, calendars, and greeting cards. It was used as the wake-up call for astronauts in the Mir space station the first time Americans worked with Russians in space. A wide range of recording artists has covered it, including Jewel, Elaine Paige, Cliff Richard, the African Children's Choir, Judy Collins, the Byrds, Fairport Convention and Donna Summer.
Nanci Griffith, the first to record "From a Distance", has also recorded Gold's songs "Heaven", "Southbound Train", "Good Night New York", and "Mountain of Sorrow". Other artists who have covered Julie Gold songs include Patti LaBelle, Patti LuPone, Lea Salonga, and Andrea Marcovicci. Her song "Thanks to You" was featured in the 1993 film Andre, and her song "Dream Loud" was featured in the 2002 film Unfaithful.

wn.com/Julie_Gold

Justin Vernon
Justin DeYarmond Edison Vernon (born April 30, 1981) is an American singer-songwriter and the frontman for Bon Iver.
Vernon attended Memorial High School in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, graduating in 1999. He then attended college at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. Vernon majored in Religious Studies and minored in Women's Studies. In an interview with Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report, he said that he was not ready to study music.
While in high school and college, Vernon founded the bands Mount Vernon and DeYarmond Edison – both indie-rock bands which originated from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where he still resides. DeYarmond Edison's core consisted of Vernon, Brad and Phil Cook, and Joe Westerlund. The band saw varying line-up changes during its five years of existence.
After a long period of success in the Eau Claire music scene, the four band mates decided to leave their longtime home and move to Raleigh, North Carolina to try their musical hand in a new place. The band released two records themselves, the first self-titled and the second titled Silent Signs and an EP of unreleased material is available on their Myspace page. After nearly a year in Raleigh, Vernon left for Wisconsin after a breakup with the band and a girlfriend. The remaining members of DeYarmond Edison went on to form a new band called Megafaun and remain good friends with Vernon.

wn.com/Justin_Vernon

K.d. lang
Kathryn Dawn Lang, OC (born November 2, 1961), known by her stage name k.d. lang, is a Canadian pop and country singer-songwriter and occasional actress.
Lang has won both Juno Awards and Grammy Awards for her musical performances; hits include "Constant Craving" and "Miss Chatelaine". She has contributed songs to movie soundtracks and has teamed with musicians such as Roy Orbison, Tony Bennett, Elton John, Anne Murray and Jane Siberry. Lang is also known for being a vegan as well as an animal rights, gay rights, and Tibetan human rights activist. She is a tantric practitioner of the old school of Tibetan Buddhism. She performed Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" live at the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada.
Lang was born in Edmonton, Alberta, the daughter of Audrey and Adam Frederick Lang. She is of English, Irish, Scottish, German, Russian Jewish, Icelandic, and Sioux ancestry. When Lang was nine months old, her family moved to Consort, Alberta, where she grew up with two sisters and one brother on the Canadian prairie. Her father was a drug store owner and left the family when she was twelve.

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Kanye West
Kanye Omari West (

/ˈkɑːnjeɪ/; born June 8, 1977) is an American musician, film director and fashion designer. West first rose to fame as a producer for Roc-A-Fella Records, where he eventually achieved recognition for his work on Jay-Z's album The Blueprint, as well as hit singles for musical artists including Alicia Keys, Ludacris, and Janet Jackson. His style of production originally used pitched-up vocal samples from soul songs incorporated with his own drums and instruments. However, subsequent productions saw him broadening his musical palette and expressing influences encompassing '70s R&B, baroque pop, trip hop, arena rock, folk, alternative, electronica, synthpop, and classical music.
West released his debut album The College Dropout in 2004, his second album Late Registration in 2005, his third album Graduation in 2007, his fourth album 808s & Heartbreak in 2008, and his fifth album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in 2010. West released a collaborative album, Watch the Throne with Jay-Z in 2011, which is the duo's first collaborative album. His five solo albums, all of which have gone platinum, have received numerous awards and critical acclaim. As of 2012, West has won a total of eighteen Grammy Awards, making him one of the most awarded artists of all-time. All albums have been very commercially successful, with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy becoming his fourth consecutive No. 1 album in the U.S. upon release. West has had 5 songs exceed 3 million in digital sales as of July 2011, with "Gold Digger" selling 3,086,000, "Stronger" selling 4,402,000, "Heartless" selling 3,742,000, "E.T." selling over 4,000,000 and "Love Lockdown" selling over 3,000,000 placing him third in overall digital sales of the past decade. He has sold over 30 million digital songs in the United States making him one of the best-selling digital artists of all-time.

wn.com/Kanye_West

Kelly Rowland
Kelly Rowland (born Kelendria Trene Rowland on February 11, 1981) is an American recording artist, songwriter, dancer, actress and television personality. Born in Atlanta, Georgia and raised in Houston, Texas, Rowland rose to fame as one of the founding members of the American R&B girl group Destiny's Child, one of the world's best-selling girl groups of all time.
During the hiatus of Destiny's Child, Rowland released her debut solo album Simply Deep in 2002, which contained influences of alternative-R&B and rock music. It included her joint worldwide number-one single "Dilemma" with rapper Nelly, and the international top-ten hit "Stole". Following the group's disbandment in 2005, Rowland released her second solo effort Ms. Kelly in 2007 and despite being less successful than its predecessor, it included the international hit singles "Like This" and "Work". In 2009, Rowland scored her second worldwide number-one hit with French DJ David Guetta, on his single "When Love Takes Over". Her third solo album Here I Am was released in 2011 and included the UK top-ten hits "Commander" and "Down for Whatever", as well as the US R&B number-one "Motivation".

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Ken Ascher
Kenneth "Kenny" Lee Ascher (born October 26, 1944 in Washington, D.C.) is an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger who is active in jazz, rock, classical, and musical theater genres — in live venues, recording studios, and cinema production. He is widely known for co-writing, with Paul Williams, The Rainbow Connection — music from The Muppet Movie. Both Williams and Ascher received Oscar nominations for the 1979 Academy Awards for Best Original Song ("Rainbow Connection") and Best Original Score (The Muppet Movie Soundtrack). The song was also nominated for the Golden Globes for "Best Original Song" that same year.
Ascher's work through the years has included keyboard parts and string arrangements on John Lennon's albums Mind Games, Walls and Bridges and Rock 'n' Roll and Yoko Ono's A Story, music for several songs from Barbra Streisand's remake of A Star Is Born (where he also served as music coordinator), and arrangements for portions of Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf's masterpiece, Bat out of Hell (produced by Todd Rundgren). Ascher's own rendition of The Rainbow Connection was featured in the closing credits of The Break-Up (starring Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston). Ascher is the pianist with the Birdland Big Band, which performs Fridays from 5:15 to 7 at Birdland in New York City. The Birdland Big Band performs The Rainbow Connection, arranged by Lew Anderson.

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Kenny Loggins
Kenneth Clark "Kenny" Loggins (born January 7, 1948) is an American singer and songwriter. He is known for soft rock music beginning during the 1970s, and later for writing and performing for movie soundtracks in the 1980s. Originally a part of the duo Loggins and Messina, he became a solo artist and has written songs for other artists.
Loggins (born in Everett, Washington) is the youngest of three brothers. His mother was Lina (Massie), a stay-at-home mom, and his father, Robert George Loggins, was a salesman. They lived in Detroit and Seattle before settling in Alhambra, California. Loggins attended San Gabriel Mission High School^{[citation needed]}, graduating in 1966. He formed a band called the Second Helping, that released three singles during 1968 and 1969 on Viva Records. Greg Shaw described the efforts as "excellent punky folk-pop records" that were written by Loggins who was likely to be the bandleader and singer as well; Shaw included "Let Me In" on both Highs in the Mid-Sixties, Volume 2 and the Pebbles, Volume 9 CD. Loggins had a short gig playing guitar for the "The New Improved" Electric Prunes in 1969 before writing four songs for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, which were included in their Uncle Charlie & His Dog Teddy album. During his early twenties, he was part of the band Gator Creek with Mike Deasy. An early version of "Danny's Song" (later recorded by Loggins and Messina) was included in a record on Mercury Records.

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Kenny O'Dell
Kenny O'Dell (born Kenneth Gist Jr., 1946 in Oklahoma) is an American country music singer and songwriter.Early in his career he worked with guitar legand,Duane Eddy,and his own band, Guys and Dolls. He is best known for writing the country hit "Behind Closed Doors", which Charlie Rich recorded, and "Mama He's Crazy" for The Judds. "Behind Closed Doors" won a Grammy Award in 1973 for Best Country & Western Recording.
Rich also scored a top 10 hit in 1972 with the O'Dell penned song "I Take It On Home". O'Dell was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. His only Billboard Top 40 appearance came in 1967 when "Beautiful People" climbed to number 38, and his only other Billboard Top 100 appearance came in 1968 with the local hit "Springfield Plane." O'Dell also had a top 10 country hit on his own with "Let's Shake Hands and Come Out Lovin'" in 1978.
When O'Dell first moved to Nashville, he ran Bobby Goldsboro's publishing company. He's had other hit covers including "Trouble in Paradise" by Loretta Lynn in 1974.

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Kenny Rogers
Kenneth Donald "Kenny" Rogers (born August 21, 1938) is an American singer-songwriter, photographer, record producer, actor, and entrepreneur. Though he has been most successful with country audiences, he has charted more than 120 hit singles across various music genres and topping the country and pop album charts for more than 200 individual weeks in the United States alone.
Two of his albums, The Gambler and Kenny, are featured in the About.com poll of "The 200 Most Influential Country Albums Ever". He was voted the "Favorite Singer of All-Time" in a 1986 joint poll by readers of both USA Today and People. He has received numerous such awards as the AMAs, Grammys, ACMs and CMAs, as well as a lifetime achievement award for a career spanning six decades in 2003.
Later success includes the 2006 album release, Water & Bridges, an across the board hit, that peaked at #5 in the Billboard Country Albums sales charts, also charting high in the Billboard 200. The first single from the album, "I Can't Unlove You," was also a chart hit. Remaining a popular entertainer around the world, the following year he completed a tour of the United Kingdom and Ireland, telling BBC Radio 2 DJ Steve Wright his favorite hit was "The Gambler". He has also acted in a variety of movies and television shows, most notably the title roles in Kenny Rogers as The Gambler and the MacShayne series as well as his appearance on The Muppet Show.

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Kevin Gilbert
Kevin Matthew Gilbert (November 20, 1966 - May 17, 1996) was an American songwriter, musician, composer, producer and collaborator born in Sacramento, California, later living in San Mateo, California where he attended Junipero Serra High School. He died at age 29 in Los Angeles from apparent autoerotic asphyxiation.
Kevin Gilbert was an accomplished composer, singer and instrumentalist who played keyboards, guitar, bass guitar, cello, and drums. His talents also extended to production. He toured with Eddie Money before winning the 1988 Yamaha SOUNDCHECK International Rock Music Competition with his progressive rock group Giraffe. Producer Patrick Leonard was impressed with Gilbert's performance at the competition and invited him to join him in forming a new band which became Toy Matinee. During this time, Gilbert worked on the projects of several established pop musicians, including Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Keith Emerson, acting as producer for the latter's album Changing States. The lone Toy Matinee album (eponymously named) was released in 1990 but effectively shelved by the record company, so Gilbert assembled a new backing band to promote it, eventually getting two successful singles released: "The Ballad of Jenny Ledge" and "Last Plane Out".

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Kid Cudi

Scott Ramon Seguro Mescudi (born January 30, 1984), better known by his stage name Kid Cudi (

/ˈkɪd ˈkʌdi/ KID KUD-ee), sometimes stylized KiD CuDi, is an American alternative hip hop recording artist, singer-songwriter, guitarist and actor. He first gained major attention after the release of his debut mixtape A Kid Named Cudi. In 2009, his single "Day 'n' Nite" reached the top five of the Billboard Hot 100 and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs charts. "Day 'n' Nite" was included on Cudi's debut album Man on the Moon: The End of Day, which was later certified Gold. In 2010 he released his second studio album Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager, preceded by the release of two singles "Erase Me" and "Mr. Rager". In October 2010, Cudi announced that he would be forming a rock band with Dot da Genius called 'Wizard', later renamed WZRD. Their self-titled debut album was released on February 28, 2012. Kid Cudi has sold over 4.6 million digital singles and has worked with Kanye West, Common, David Guetta and other artists signed to the GOOD Music label.

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Kuk Harrell
Thaddis "Kuk" Harrell is an American songwriter, vocal producer, arranger and engineer. He is managed by RedZone Entertainment, and is a member of a songwriting–production team composed of himself, Christopher "Tricky" Stewart and Terius "The Dream" Nash. In 2011, Kuk Harrell and partner Tricky Stewart joined the ranks of Fox's American Idol along with music mogul Jimmy Iovine, producing many of the songs performed on television by the contestants and released via iTunes. 2011 marked the highly-anticipated return of Jennifer Lopez and her album LOVE? in which Kuk served as Album Vocal Producer. Earning his fourth Grammy for the vocal production of Rihanna's #1 Billboard Single "Only Girl In The World", Harrell is also the vocal producer and co-writer of Rihanna's Grammy-winning single "Umbrella". A composer and engineer on Beyonce's chart topping "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" from the album I Am... Sasha Fierce, he is also vocal producer and engineer of the Diane Warren-penned "I Was Here" from Beyonce's 2011 album 4. He also produced the majority of the vocals on Mary J. Blige's Platinum album Growing Pains, which recently won a Grammy for "Best Contemporary R&B Album", 2008. The first single from Growing Pains, "Just Fine", earned a Grammy nomination for best R&B vocal performance in 2007.

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Lady Gaga
Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (/ˈstɛfəniː dʒʌrməˈnɑːtə/ STE-fə-nee jurr-mə-NAH-tə; born March 28, 1986), known by her stage name Lady Gaga, is an American singer and songwriter. Born and raised in New York City, she primarily studied at the Convent of the Sacred Heart and briefly attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts before withdrawing to focus on her musical career. She began performing in the rock music scene of Manhattan's Lower East Side, and was signed with Streamline Records by the end of 2007. During her employment as a songwriter for the record company, her vocal abilities captured the attention of recording artist Akon, who signed her to his label Kon Live Distribution.
Lady Gaga came to prominence as a recording artist following the release of her debut album The Fame (2008), which was a critical and commercial success that topped charts around the world and included the international number-one singles "Just Dance" and "Poker Face". After embarking on the The Fame Ball Tour, she followed the album with The Fame Monster (2009), which spawned the worldwide hit singles "Bad Romance", "Telephone" and "Alejandro". The album's success allowed her to embark on the eighteen-month long Monster Ball Tour, which later became one of the highest-grossing concert tours of all time. Her most recent album Born This Way (2011) topped the charts of most major markets and generated more international chart-topping singles, including "Born This Way", "Judas" and "The Edge of Glory". Besides her musical career, she involves herself with humanitarian causes and LGBT activism.

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Larry Henley
Larry Henley is an American singer and songwriter, born June 30, 1941 in Arp, Texas. He is perhaps best known for co-writing (with Jeff Silbar) the 1989 hit record, "Wind Beneath My Wings". The single was a U.S. number one hit for Bette Midler, and has since totaled around six million radio airplays.
The song earned Henley and Silbar the Grammy Award for Song of the Year for 1989, and Bette Midler the Record of the Year award.
He was also the lead singer of pop group The Newbeats in the mid-1960s. The group two hits that charted in the top 20 of Billboard magazine, one. "Bread and Butter," reaching No. 2 on the Billboard charts and selling over a million copies.
Henley has also composed a number of soundtracks in movies.

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Larry Mullen, Jr.
Lawrence Joseph "Larry" Mullen, Jr. (born 31 October 1961) is an Irish musician best known as the drummer for the Irish rock band U2. He is the founder of U2, which he later described as "'The Larry Mullen Band' for about ten minutes, then Bono walked in and blew any chance I had of being in charge." He has worked on numerous side projects during his career, including a collaboration with Michael Stipe and Mike Mills of R.E.M. to form Automatic Baby in 1993 and working with bandmate Adam Clayton on the re-recording of the theme to Mission: Impossible, in 1996. He and U2 have won many awards, including 22 Grammy awards.
Mullen, the middle child and only son of Larry and Maureen Mullen, was born 31 October 1961 in Artane, Dublin, Ireland. Mullen began drumming in 1970, at the age of 9, under the instruction of Irish drummer Joe Bonnie and, later, Bonnie's daughter Monica. His mother died in a car accident in November 1978, two years after U2 was founded.

wn.com/Larry_Mullen,_Jr.

LaShawn Daniels
LaShawn Ameen Daniels is an American songwriter, best known for his work with longtime colleague Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins. Daniels has written several of the Darkchild Team's hit songs, among them "The Boy Is Mine" by Brandy & Monica, "Say My Name" and "Lose My Breath" by Destiny's Child, "You Rock My World" by Michael Jackson, "It's Not Right (But It's Okay)" by Whitney Houston, "Tell Me" by Melanie B, "If You Had My Love" by Jennifer Lopez, and "Can't Leave 'Em Alone" by Ciara. He is also a talented vocal producer, arranging most of the vocals on almost all songs he has been involved in writing.
Most recently Daniels appeared in an episode of the ABC/MTV reality television series Making The Band 3 where he instructed Aundrea on how to complete a difficult vocal. He also lent vocal production to the single of Beyoncé Knowles "Déjà Vu".
new cool song "promise land"

wn.com/LaShawn_Daniels

LeAnn Rimes
Margaret LeAnn Rimes Cibrian (born August 28, 1982), best known as LeAnn Rimes, is an American country/pop singer. She is known for her rich vocals and her rise to fame as an eight-year-old champion on the original Ed McMahon version of Star Search, followed by the release of the Bill Mack song "Blue" when she was 13 to become the youngest country music star since Tanya Tucker in 1972.
Rimes made her breakthrough into country music in 1996 with her debut album, Blue, which reached #1 on the Top Country Albums chart and was certified multiplatinum in sales by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The album's eponymous leadoff single, "Blue," was originally intended to be recorded by Patsy Cline in the early 1960s. It became a Top 10 hit and Rimes gained national acclaim for her similarity to Cline's vocal style. When she released her sophomore studio effort in 1997, You Light up My Life: Inspirational Songs, she moved towards country pop material, which set the trend for a string of albums released into the next decade.

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Lee Ann Womack
Lee Ann Womack (born August 19, 1966 in Jacksonville, Texas, United States) is an American country music singer and songwriter, who is best known for her old fashioned-styled country music songs that often discuss subjects such as cheating and lost love. Her 2000 single, "I Hope You Dance" was a major crossover music hit, reaching #1 on the Billboard Country Chart and the Top 15 of the Billboard Hot 100, becoming her signature song.
Although Lee Ann Womack emerged as a contemporary country artist in 1997 with the release of her first album, her material closely resembled that of Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette, mixing Womack's music with an old fashioned style, as well as contemporary elements, making her different from her counterparts. Her 2000 release I Hope You Dance, however, was an entirely different sound, using pop music elements instead of traditional country, helping to establish Womack as a pop crossover artist. It was not until the release of There's More Where That Came From in 2005 that Womack returned to recording traditional country music.

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Lee Pockriss
Lee Julian Pockriss (20 January 1924 – 14 November 2011) was an American songwriter who wrote many well-known popular songs and several scores for films and Broadway shows.
Born in Brooklyn and graduating from Erasmus Hall High School, Pockriss's education at Brooklyn College was interrupted by World War II, where he served as a cryptographer for the US Air Force. Upon his return he studied English and music at Brooklyn College, and later attended graduate school in musicology at New York University.
With Paul Vance he co-wrote Perry Como's Grammy-nominated "Catch a Falling Star", recorded in 1957; Brian Hyland's "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini", recorded in 1960; and The Cuff Links' "Tracy", recorded in 1969. With Hal Hackady he co-wrote Billy Thornhill's "The Key," recorded in 1968 on Wand Records.
He also wrote Anita Bryant's "My Little Corner of the World", recorded in 1960; Shelley Fabares' "Johnny Angel", recorded in 1962; and Clint Holmes' "Playground In My Mind", recorded in 1972.

wn.com/Lee_Pockriss

Leon Russell
Claude Russell Bridges (born April 2, 1942), known professionally as Leon Russell, is an American musician and songwriter, who has recorded as a session musician, sideman, and maintained a solo career in music.
Born in Lawton, Oklahoma, he began playing piano at the age of four. Russell attended Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. At this time he was already performing at Tulsa nightclubs. After moving to Los Angeles, he became a session musician, working as a pianist on the recordings of many notable musical artists since the 1960s. By the late 1960s, Russell diversified, becoming successful as an arranger and wrote/co-wrote songs. As a musician, he worked his way from gigs as a sideman to well known performers. By 1970 he had graduated to solo recording artist, although he never ended all his previous roles within the music industry.
Russell was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on Monday, March 14, 2011, at a black-tie dinner at The Waldorf-Astoria hotel in Manhattan.

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Leslie Bricusse
Leslie Bricusse (born 29 January 1931) is an English composer, lyricist, and playwright.
Although best known for his partnership with Anthony Newley, Bricusse has worked with many other composers. He was educated at University College School in London and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge University, he was Secretary of Footlights between 1952 and 1953 and Footlights President during the following year. He currently lives in California in the United States, and he is married to the actress Yvonne Romain.
Sammy Davis, Jr. had hits with two of Bricusse's songs - "What Kind of Fool Am I?" (from Stop the World - I Want to Get Off) and the #1 hit "The Candy Man" (from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory). Other recording artists who have had popular success with his songs include Matt Monro and Frank Sinatra ("My Kind of Girl"), Shirley Bassey ("Goldfinger"), Harry Secombe ("If I Ruled the World"), Nancy Sinatra ("You Only Live Twice"), Maureen McGovern ("Can You Read My Mind"), and Diana Krall ("When I Look in Your Eyes"). Bricusse also partnered with George Tipton to write the opening theme of the U.S. television series It's a Living.

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Lester Abrams
Lester Abrams (born 1945) is a singer, songwriter, musician and producer who has played with such artists as B.B. King, Stevie Wonder, Peabo Bryson, Quincy Jones, Manfred Mann, Brian Auger, The Average White Band, The Doobie Brothers, Rufus and many others. Two of his co-compositions appeared on the Grammy Award winning album "Minute by Minute". He has also composed songs for film and television; two of his works can be heard in the Oliver Stone-produced movie, "South Central".
Lester Abrams was also a member of and/or associated with several other bands and people, including Leslie Smith, Arno Lucas, Rick Chudacoff, The Les Smith Soul Band, L.A. Carnival, Crackin' and more recently, Connie Price and the Keystones.
Lester's maternal grandmother moved the Abrams family from the Southwest to Omaha in the early 1900s; Lester’s multi-racial father met his bi-racial mother there. Lester was born in 1945, and, as a child, had serious problems explaining his cultural background, which included ancestry from both Native and Black America.

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Lew Spence
Lew Spence (June 29, 1920, Cedarhurst, New York – January 9, 2008, Los Angeles) was an American songwriter.
Spence received little formal musical training, and led a dance band in his hometown as a teenager. He played piano and sang in his twenties, but did not publish any songs until he was almost 30 years old. For much of his career, he wrote melodies, but toward the end of the 1950s he devoted himself primarily to writing lyrics.
Among Spence's best-known songs was "Nice 'n' Easy", recorded by Frank Sinatra; Spence wrote the melody, while Alan Bergman and Marilyn Keith wrote the lyrics. The song was nominated for thee Grammy awards in 1960. His tune "That Face" was first recorded by Fred Astaire in 1957, and was performed by him on Another Evening with Fred Astaire (1959); the song was later recorded by Rosemary Clooney and Barbra Streisand, among others. He also wrote the standards "Half as Lovely (Twice as True)", "If I Had Three Wishes", "Love Looks So Well on You", and "So Long My Love". Spence's songs were recorded by Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, Bobby Short, Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, Bing Crosby, Billy Eckstine and Dinah Shore.

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Linda Perry
Linda Perry (born April 15, 1965) is an American rock musician, songwriter, and record producer. Once best known as the lead singer and primary songwriter of 4 Non Blondes, Perry has founded two record labels and has become a major songwriter and producer. She has written and produced hit songs for several successful female singers, including P!nk (who had a number 1 hit with Perry's "Get the Party Started"), Christina Aguilera (who had a number 1 hit with Perry's "Beautiful"), and Gwen Stefani ("What You Waiting For?" from her album Love. Angel. Music. Baby.). Perry has also contributed heavily to albums by Courtney Love and Kelly Osbourne as well as signing and distributing James Blunt in the United States.
Linda Perry was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, the daughter of Portuguese-American Alfred Xavier Perry and Brazilian-born Marluce Perry. Her mother has worked as a model, designer, and private detective. Her father, Alfred Xavier (1928–2005), worked as both an engineer and a musician. Linda is one of seven siblings; she has five brothers (Jay, Solomon, Mark, Marcel, and John) and one sister (Sally).

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Liz Rose
Liz Rose (born in Dallas, Texas) is an American country music songwriter best known for her work with Taylor Swift. She has co-written several of Swift's songs and singles, including "White Horse," "Teardrops on My Guitar" and "You Belong with Me," which won her and Swift a Grammy Award in 2009.
Liz Rose was born in Dallas, Texas and raised in Irving, Texas. Rose moved to Nashville, Tennessee with her then-husband, Johnny Rose, and began writing songs through the suggestion of a friend. One of her first cuts was "Elisabeth," which was recorded by Billy Gilman. In 2003, Gary Allan took Rose's "Songs About Rain" (co-written with Pat McLaughlin) into the country top 20.
Rose began writing songs for Taylor Swift on Swift's 2006 self-titled debut album, on which Rose has seven co-writer's credits. Among those cuts were the album's first two singles, "Tim McGraw" and "Teardrops on My Guitar," which helped Rose win a Songwriter of the Year award from SESAC in 2007.
Rose continued to collaborate with Swift on her second album, 2008's Fearless, collaborating on the singles "White Horse" and "You Belong with Me" as well as the title track. "White Horse" won both of them the Grammy Award for Best Country Song in 2010, and "You Belong with Me" was nominated for Song of the Year.

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Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971), nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana.
Coming to prominence in the 1920s as an "inventive" cornet and trumpet player, Armstrong was a foundational influence in jazz, shifting the music's focus from collective improvisation to solo performance. With his instantly recognizable deep and distinctive gravelly voice, Armstrong was also an influential singer, demonstrating great dexterity as an improviser, bending the lyrics and melody of a song for expressive purposes. He was also greatly skilled at scat singing (vocalizing using sounds and syllables instead of actual lyrics).
Renowned for his charismatic stage presence and voice almost as much as for his trumpet-playing, Armstrong's influence extends well beyond jazz music, and by the end of his career in the 1960s, he was widely regarded as a profound influence on popular music in general. Armstrong was one of the first truly popular African-American entertainers to "cross over," whose skin-color was secondary to his music in an America that was severely racially divided. It allowed him socially acceptable access to the upper echelons of American society that were highly restricted for a black man. While he rarely publicly politicized his race, often to the dismay of fellow African-Americans, he was privately a strong supporter of the Civil Rights movement in America.^{[citation needed]}

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Luther Vandross
Luther Vandross (April 20, 1951 – July 1, 2005) was an American singer-songwriter and record producer. During his career, Vandross sold over twenty-five million albums and won eight Grammy Awards including Best Male R&B Vocal Performance four times. He won four Grammy Awards in 2004 including the Grammy Award for Song of the Year for the track "Dance with My Father", co-written with Richard Marx.
Luther Vandross was born on April 20, 1951 at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, New York City, United States. He was the fourth child and second son to Mary Ida Vandross and Luther Vandross, Sr.
Born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City in the NYCHA Alfred E. Smith Houses public housing development, Vandross began playing the piano at the age of three. He grew up in a musical family that moved to the Bronx when he was thirteen. His sister, Patricia, sang with the vocal group The Crests, who had a number two hit in 1958 with "16 Candles", though she left the group before the recording. Vandross's father died of diabetes when Vandross was eight years old. Luther Vandross was in a high school group, Shades of Jade, that once played at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. He was also a member of a theater workshop, "Listen My Brother" who released the singles "Only Love Can Make a Better World" and "Listen My Brother", and appeared on the second and fifth episodes of Sesame Street in November 1969.

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Lynn Anderson
Lynn Rene Anderson (born September 26, 1947) is an American country music singer and equestrian known for a string of hits throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, most notably her Grammy Award-winning, worldwide mega-hit, "(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden." Helped by her regular exposure on national television, Anderson was one of the most popular and successful female country singers of the 1970s. In addition to being named "Top Female Vocalist" by the Academy of Country Music twice and "Female Vocalist of the Year" by the Country Music Association, she has charted 11 #1, 18 Top 10, and more than 50 Top 40 hits. She was the first female country artist to win an American Music Award in 1974, as well as the first to headline and sellout Madison Square Garden that same year. Anderson was named Billboard Magazine's Female Artist of the Decade (1970–1980).
Anderson debuted in 1966, at the age of 19, and had her first major hit with Ride, Ride, Ride. After a series of Top 10 hit singles on the country charts during the late 1960s, Anderson went on to sign with Columbia Records in 1970. Under Columbia, she had her most successful string of hits. Her signature song, (I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden, remains one of the biggest selling country crossover hits of all time. The song even made it to #3 on the Billboard Pop Chart and was later ranked #83 on CMT's "100 Greatest Songs in Country Music History."

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Manuel Seal, Jr.
Manuel Seal, Jr. is an American Hip-Hop/R&B record producer and songwriter.
Formerly^[when?] a contract songwriter and producer at Jermaine Dupri's So So Def Recordings, Manuel Seal, Jr. has co-written many hit songs including Usher's "You Make Me Wanna", "Nice and Slow", "My Way", Destiny's Child's "With Me", "My Boo"; and Mariah Carey's number one singles "Always Be My Baby" and "We Belong Together." Current winner of American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers (ASCAP) 23rd Annual Rhythm & Soul Awards Ceremony in Beverly Hills, CA June 25, 2010 for "Song of the Decade Award" Co-writer of Mariah Carey's, "We Belong Together".

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Marc Cohn
Marc Craig Cohn (born July 5, 1959) is an American folk rock singer-songwriter and musician.
Cohn was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He graduated from Beachwood High School in Beachwood, a Cleveland suburb. He then attended Oberlin College.
Cohn is married to ABC News journalist Elizabeth Vargas, whom he met at the 1999 U.S. Open after being introduced by Andre Agassi. They have two sons: Zachary Raphael, who was born on January 31, 2003, and Samuel Wyatt, who was born on August 16, 2006. Cohn has two other children from a previous marriage, a son, Max and a daughter, Emily.
On August 7, 2005, Cohn was shot in the head during an attempted carjacking in Denver, Colorado, following a concert with Suzanne Vega. The bullet struck him in the temple but did not penetrate his skull. Cohn was hospitalized and released the next day. His remaining concerts on the tour were canceled.

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Marcus Hummon
Marcus Spencer Hummon (born December 28, 1960 in Washington, DC) is an American country music artist. After several years of playing in various bands, he eventually found his way to Nashville, Tennessee, where he was signed to a songwriting contract, and subsequently a record deal with Columbia Records, which released his debut album All in Good Time in 1995 and produced a #73 single on the Hot Country Songs charts in "God's Country." Hummon has also released several studio albums on his own label, Velvet Armadillo.
Hummon has also co-written songs for many country music artists, including Top 40 singles for Tim McGraw, Wynonna Judd, and Alabama, as well as three Number One country hits: "Cowboy Take Me Away" by the Dixie Chicks, "Born to Fly" by Sara Evans, and "Bless the Broken Road" by Rascal Flatts. "Bless the Broken Road" had previously been a minor chart single in 1998 for Melodie Crittenden as well. In 2005, Rascal Flatts' version earned Hummon a Grammy Award for Best Country Song. Hummon also co-produced Last of the Good Guys, the debut album for the country group One Flew South, in addition to co-writing several of the songs on it.

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Maria Muldaur
Maria Muldaur (born September 12, 1943) is a folk-blues singer who was part of the American folk music revival in the early 1960s. She recorded the 1974 hit song "Midnight at the Oasis," and continues to record albums in the folk traditions.
Muldaur was born Maria Grazia Rosa Domenica D'Amato in Greenwich Village, New York City, where she attended Hunter College High School.
Muldaur began her career in the early 1960s as Maria D'Amato, performing with John Sebastian, David Grisman, and Stefan Grossman as a member of the Even Dozen Jug Band. She then joined Jim Kweskin & His Jug Band as a featured vocalist and occasional violinist. During this time, she was part of the Greenwich Village scene that included Bob Dylan, and some of her recollections of the period, particularly with respect to Dylan, appear in Martin Scorsese's 2005 documentary film, No Direction Home. She married fellow Jug Band member Geoff Muldaur, and after the Kweskin outfit broke up the two of them produced two albums. She began her solo career when their marriage ended in 1972, but retained her married name.

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Mariah Carey
Mariah Carey (born March 27, 1970) is an American singer, songwriter, record producer, and actress. She made her recording debut in 1990 under the guidance of Columbia Records executive Tommy Mottola, and released her self-titled debut studio album, Mariah Carey. The album went multi-platinum and spawned four consecutive number one singles, on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart. Following her marriage to Mottola in 1993, a series of hit records, including Emotions (1991), Music Box (1993) and Merry Christmas (1994), established her position as Columbia's highest-selling act. Daydream (1995), made music history when the second single, "One Sweet Day" a duet with Boyz II Men, spent a record sixteen weeks on top of the Billboard Hot 100, and remains the longest running number one song in US chart history. During the recording of the album Carey began to deviate from her pop background, and slowly traversed into R&B and Hip-hop. After her separation from Mottola, this musical change was evident with the release of Butterfly (1997).

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Mark Knopfler
Mark Freuder Knopfler, OBE (born 12 August 1949) is a Scottish-born British guitarist, singer, songwriter, record producer and film score composer. He is best known as the lead guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter for the British rock band Dire Straits, which he co-founded in 1977. After Dire Straits disbanded in 1995, Knopfler went on to record and produce six solo albums, including Golden Heart (1996), Sailing to Philadelphia (2000), and Get Lucky (2009). He has composed and produced film scores for eight films, including Local Hero (1983), Cal (1984), and The Princess Bride (1987). In addition to his work with Dire Straits and as a solo artist and composer, Knopfler has recorded and performed with many prominent musical artists, including Phil Lynott, Chet Atkins, The Chieftains, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Jools Holland, Sonny Landreth, and Van Morrison. He has produced albums for Tina Turner, Bob Dylan, and Randy Newman.
Knopfler is one of the most respected fingerstyle guitarists of the modern rock era, and was ranked 27th on Rolling Stone magazine's list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. Knopfler and Dire Straits have sold in excess of 120 million albums to date. A four-time Grammy Award winner, Knopfler is the recipient of the Edison Award and the Steiger Award, and holds three honorary doctorate degrees in music from universities in the United Kingdom.

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Marvin Hamlisch
Marvin Frederick Hamlisch (born June 2, 1944) is an American composer. He is one of only eleven people to have been awarded Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, and a Tony. He is also one of only two people to have won those four prizes and also a Pulitzer Prize (the other is Richard Rodgers). Hamlisch has also won two Golden Globes.
Hamlisch was born in New York City to Viennese Jewish parents: Lilly Schachter and Max Hamlisch. His father was an accordionist and bandleader. Hamlisch was a child prodigy, and by age five he began mimicking music he heard on the radio on the piano. A few months before he turned seven, in 1951, he was accepted into what is now the Juilliard School Pre-College Division. His first job was as a rehearsal pianist for Funny Girl with Barbra Streisand. Shortly after that, he was hired by producer Sam Spiegel to play piano at Spiegel's parties. This connection led to his first film score, The Swimmer. His favorite musicals growing up were My Fair Lady, Gypsy, West Side Story, and Bye Bye Birdie.

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Mary J. Blige
Mary J. Blige (

/ˈblaɪʒ/; born January 11, 1971) is an American singer, songwriter, record producer and occasional rapper and actress. She is a recipient of nine Grammy Awards and four American Music Awards, and has recorded eight multi-platinum albums. She is the only artist with Grammy Award wins in Pop, Rap, Gospel, and R&B.
Blige started her musical career in 1992, releasing her debut album, What's the 411? on MCA Records and Uptown. With her tenth album, My Life II... The Journey Continues (Act 1) (2011), she had ten consecutive albums debut in the top 10 on the Billboard 200. Blige's work has defined the course of R&B/Hip-Hop music. My Life, in particular, is considered among the greatest albums ever recorded according to Rolling Stone (279/500),Time, and Vibe. For her part in combining hip hop and soul in the early 1990s and its subsequent commercial success, Blige received the World Music Awards "Legends Award". In 2007 the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers awarded her its "Voice of Music" Award. ASCAP official Jeanie Weems stated that "[Blige's] music has been the voice of inspiration to women worldwide in both struggle and triumph." That same year, Time included her in its "Time 100" list, a collection of the year's 100 most influential individuals around the world. In a documentary by BET television, Mary J. Blige said that when she hears music, she sees colors. In other words she has Synesthesia.

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Maurice Jarre
Maurice-Alexis Jarre (13 September 1924 – 28 March 2009) was a French composer and conductor. His son is the electronic composer Jean Michel Jarre.
Although he composed several concert works, Jarre is best known for his film scores, particularly for his collaborations with film director David Lean. Jarre composed the scores to all of Lean's films since Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Other notable scores include The Train (1964), Mohammad, Messenger of God (1976), Witness (1985) and Ghost (1990).
Jarre was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Three of his compositions spent a total of 42 weeks on the UK singles chart chart; the biggest hit was "Somewhere My Love" (to his tune "Lara's Theme", with lyrics by Paul Francis Webster) by the Michael Sammes Singers, which reached Number 14 in 1966 and spent 38 weeks on the chart.
Jarre was a three time Academy Award winner, for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and A Passage to India (1984), all of which were directed by David Lean. He was Oscar nominated a total of eight times.

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Max Steiner
Max Steiner (May 10, 1888 – December 28, 1971) was an Austrian composer of music for theatre productions and films. He later became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Trained by the great classical music composers Brahms and Mahler, he was one of the first composers who primarily wrote music for motion pictures, and as such is often referred to as "the father of film music". Along with such composers as Franz Waxman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman and Miklós Rózsa, Steiner played a major part in creating the tradition of writing music for films.
Steiner composed hundreds of film scores, including The Informer (1935), Now, Voyager (1942), and Since You Went Away (1944), which won him Academy Awards. He was nominated for the Academy Award a total of twenty-four times. He was also the first recipient of the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score, which he won for his score to Life with Father.
Steiner was one of the best-known composers in Hollywood, and is widely regarded today as one of the greatest film score composers in the history of cinema. He was a frequent collaborator with some of the most famous film directors in history, including John Ford and William Wyler. Besides his Oscar-winning scores, some of Steiner's popular works include King Kong (1933), Little Women (1933), Jezebel (1938), Casablanca (1942), and the film score for which he is possibly best known, Gone with the Wind (1939). Despite being one of the most popular film soundtracks ever written, Gone with the Wind failed to win an Oscar for him.

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Maxwell (musician)

Gerald Maxwell Rivera (born May 23, 1973), better known by his stage name Maxwell, is an American R&B, funk and neo soul musician. He played an important role in the development of the soul sub-genre, neo-soul.
Maxwell was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father was Pentecostal and raised in Vieques, Puerto Rico. His mother grew up in a devout Baptist household in Haiti.
Maxwell began working with songwriter Leon Ware and noted guitarist Wah Wah Watson to record his debut Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite in the early 1990s. When the album was finished Columbia had doubts about its potential and shelved it for two years. The album was finally issued in 1996.
Heavily inspired by the sound of classic soul music, Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite did not catch on with audiences until the release of its second single, "Ascension (Don't Ever Wonder)," which became a hit. BET's groundbreaking show, In Your Ear would introduce him to more than 58 million homes and Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite would go on to sell over 2,000,000 copies, earning 2X platinum status, and was nominated for a Grammy Award.

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Meat Loaf
Michael Lee Aday (born Marvin Lee Aday; September 27, 1947), better known by his stage name, Meat Loaf, is an American hard rock musician and actor. He is noted for the Bat Out of Hell album trilogy consisting of Bat Out of Hell, Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell and Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster is Loose. Bat Out of Hell has sold more than 43 million copies. After more than 30 years, it still sells an estimated 200,000 copies annually and stayed on the charts for over nine years, making it one of the best selling albums of all time.
Although he enjoyed success with Bat Out of Hell and Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell and earned a Grammy Award for Best Rock Vocal Performance, Solo for the song "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)" on the latter album, Meat Loaf experienced some initial difficulty establishing a steady career within his native US. However, he has retained iconic status and popularity in Europe, especially the UK, where he ranks 23rd for the number of weeks overall spent on the charts. He ranked 96th on VH1's "100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock".

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Michael Gore
Michael Gore (born March 5, 1951) is an American composer. He, along with lyricist Dean Pitchford, won the Oscar in 1980 for best original song for "Fame" from the film of the same title. He also won the award that year for best original score. Gore is the younger brother of singer/songwriter Lesley Gore.
Gore wrote the music for the notorious Broadway flop Carrie - The Musical. Two of his songs, with lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, were featured in the 2003 movie Camp.
He also composed the theme and score for the 1983 hit film Terms of Endearment starring Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger, notching a hit on the Adult Contemporary chart (and briefly the pop charts) under his own name with the "Theme" from this film.

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Michael Jackson
Michael Joseph Jackson (August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009) was an American recording artist, entertainer, and businessman. Often referred to as the King of Pop, or by his initials MJ, Jackson is recognized as the most successful entertainer of all time by Guinness World Records. His contribution to music, dance, and fashion, along with a much-publicized personal life, made him a global figure in popular culture for over four decades. The seventh child of the Jackson family, he debuted on the professional music scene along with his brothers as a member of The Jackson 5 in 1964, and began his solo career in 1971.
In the early 1980s, Jackson became a dominant figure in popular music. The music videos for his songs, including those of "Beat It", "Billie Jean", and "Thriller", were credited with transforming the medium into an art form and a promotional tool, and the popularity of these videos helped to bring the relatively new television channel MTV to fame. Videos such as "Black or White" and "Scream" made him a staple on MTV in the 1990s. Through stage performances and music videos, Jackson popularized a number of complicated dance techniques, such as the robot and the moonwalk, to which he gave the name. His distinctive musical sound and vocal style influenced numerous hip hop, post-disco, contemporary R&B, pop and rock artists.

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Michael Kamen
Michael Arnold Kamen (April 15, 1948 – November 18, 2003) was an American composer (especially of film scores), orchestral arranger, orchestral conductor, song writer, and session musician.
Kamen was born in New York City, USA. He was the second of four sons. His father Saul Kamen was a dentist, and his mother was a teacher.
While attending the The High School of Music & Art in New York City, Michael Kamen met and became friends with Martin Fulterman (later known as Mark Snow, who composed the theme music for The X-Files among other projects). While studying the oboe, he formed a rock classical fusion band called New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, together with classmates Fulterman and Dorian Rudnytsky. The group performed their music while dressed in tuxedos. In the middle of the concert, Fulterman and Kamen would play an oboe duet. The group backed up friend and classmate Janis Ian in a concert at Alice Tully Hall in late 1967.
After graduating high school, Kamen attended The Juilliard School, also in New York City.

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Michael Masser
Michael Masser (born Michael William Masser on March 24, 1941 in Chicago), a former stockbroker, is a composer and producer of popular music. He attended the University of Illinois College of Law, but left to pursue his interest in music. Masser and his wife Ogniana live in Palm Desert, California.
Masser's first major composition hit, co-written with Ron Miller, was "Touch Me in the Morning," recorded by Diana Ross. He co-wrote several other hit songs in the 1970s and 1980s, including three made famous by Whitney Houston, "Greatest Love of All," "Didn't We Almost Have It All," and "Saving All My Love for You."
Other hit songs include "Hold Me" (Teddy Pendergrass and Whitney Houston), "Tonight, I Celebrate My Love" (Roberta Flack and Peabo Bryson), "If Ever You're in My Arms Again" (Peabo Bryson), "In Your Eyes" (Jeffrey Osborne, George Benson), "Nothing's Gonna Change My Love for You" (George Benson, Glenn Medeiros), "Miss You Like Crazy" (Natalie Cole) and "Someone That I Used To Love" (Natalie Cole), "The Greatest Love of All" (George Benson), "So Sad the Song" (Teddy Pendergrass, Gladys Knight), and "It's My Turn" and "Last Time I Saw Him" (Diana Ross). A country cover of "Last Time I Saw Him" by Dottie West also became a hit, peaking at #8 on the country charts. Masser was nominated for an Academy Award in 1976 for Best Music, Original Song, for "Theme from Mahogany (Do You Know Where You're Going To)," which he wrote with Gerry Goffin. The song had actually been first recorded (also in 1975) by fellow Motown labelmate Thelma Houston as a planned single but was pulled before release so that Diana Ross could release it as a theme song (and single) for her film Mahogany.

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Michael Sembello
Michael Sembello (b. April 17, 1954) is an American musician and songwriter from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Sembello was born and raised in Philadelphia. He studied with jazz great Pat Martino and began his career in music as a session musician, working increasingly with high-profile artists as a guitarist. By age 17 he was working professionally with Stevie Wonder on electric and acoustic guitar as a studio player on Wonder's Fulfillingness' First Finale. He continued the same year, chosen as one of the core artists who worked on Songs in the Key of Life; an ambitious concept album that took two years in the making. During that time, he is credited as lead and rhythm guitarist on most of the tracks, and shares songwriting credit with Wonder on the song, "Saturn". The list of pop music personalities he worked with, or wrote for, includes Wonder, (from 1974 to 1979), The Temptations, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Chaka Khan, George Benson, Barbra Streisand, Stanley Clarke, David Sanborn, Donna Summer, Miguel Mateos and New Edition among many others.^{[citation needed]}

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Michael Stipe
John Michael Stipe (born January 4, 1960) is an American singer, lyricist and visual artist. He was the lead vocalist of the alternative rock band R.E.M. from their formation in 1980 until their dissolution in 2011.
Stipe is noted and occasionally parodied for the "mumbling" style of his early career as well as his social and political activism. He was in charge of R.E.M.'s visual image; often selecting album artwork and directing many of the band's music videos. Outside of the music industry, he runs his own film production companies: C-00 and Single Cell Pictures.
Stipe was born in Decatur, Georgia on January 4, 1960. Stipe was a military brat; his father was a serviceman in the United States Army whose career resulted in frequent relocations for his family. Stipe and his family moved to various locales during his childhood, including Germany, Texas, Illinois, Alabama and Georgia. He was raised Methodist. Stipe graduated from high school in Collinsville, Illinois in 1978. His senior photo is pictured in the album art work of Eponymous. Stipe also worked at the local Waffle House. Stipe later enrolled at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia as an art major; studying photography and painting.

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Michel Legrand
Michel Jean Legrand (born 24 February 1932, in Bécon-les-Bruyères in the Paris suburbs) is a French musical composer, arranger, conductor, and pianist. His father Raymond Legrand was a conductor and composer renowned for hits such as Irma la douce and his mother, Marcelle Der Mikaëlian (sister of conductor Jacques Hélian), who married Legrand Senior in 1929, was descended from the Armenian bourgeoisie.
Legrand is a prolific composer, having written over 200 film and television scores in addition to many memorable songs. He is best known for his often haunting film music and scores, such as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) featuring the song "The Windmills of Your Mind" for which he won his first Academy Award.
Legrand has composed more than two hundred film and television scores and several musicals and has made well over a hundred albums. He has won three Oscars (out of 13 nominations) and five Grammys and has been nominated for an Emmy. He was twenty-two when his first album, I Love Paris, became one of the best-selling instrumental albums ever released. He is a virtuoso jazz and classical pianist and an accomplished arranger and conductor who performs with orchestras all over the world.

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Mike Mills
Michael Edward "Mike" Mills (born December 17, 1958 in Orange County, California) is an American multi-instrumentalist and composer who was a founding member of the alternative rock group R.E.M.. Though known primarily as a bass guitarist, backing vocalist, and pianist, his musical repertoire includes also keyboards, guitar, and percussion instruments. He contributed to a majority of the band's musical compositions.
As a young boy, Mills moved with his family to Macon, Georgia and attended Northeast High School in the early 1970s. Mills' father Frank was a singer whose appearances included The Ed Sullivan Show, while his mother Adora was a piano teacher, which helped him develop a love of music at an early age. He met and formed a band with drummer friend Bill Berry in high school. They met Peter Buck and Michael Stipe while attending the University of Georgia.
Mills, Berry, Buck, and Stipe decided to drop out of college and focus on their band, now named R.E.M. The band quickly developed a following and were soon signed to I.R.S. Records.

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Miranda Lambert
Miranda Leigh Shelton (née Lambert) (born November 10, 1983) is an American country music artist who gained fame as a finalist on the 2003 season of Nashville Star, where she finished in third place and later signed to Epic Records. Lambert made her debut with the release of "Me and Charlie Talking", the first single from her 2005 debut album Kerosene. This album, which was certified Platinum in the United States, also produced the singles "Bring Me Down", "Kerosene", and "New Strings". All four singles were Top 40 hits on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts.
After Epic's Nashville division closed, Lambert was transferred to Columbia Records Nashville for her second album, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which was released in early 2007. Although the title track failed to make top 40, the next three singles ("Famous in a Small Town", "Gunpowder & Lead", and "More Like Her") were all Top 20 hits, with "Gunpowder & Lead" becoming her first Top 10 country hit in July 2008. Lambert's third album, Revolution, was released in September 2009. Five singles have been released from the album, including Lambert's two Number One hits "The House That Built Me," which spent four weeks at the top of the chart, and "Heart Like Mine". Lambert has also been honored by the Grammy Awards, the Academy of Country Music Awards, and the Country Music Association Awards.

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Mitch Leigh
Mitch Leigh (born January 30, 1928) is an American musical theatre composer and theatrical producer best known for the musical Man Of La Mancha.
Leigh was born in Brooklyn, New York) as Irwin Michnick. He graduated from Yale in 1951 with a Bachelor of Music, and in 1952 received his Master of Music under Paul Hindemith.
He began his career as a jazz musician and writing commercials for radio and television. In 1965 he teamed with lyricist Joe Darion and writer Dale Wasserman to write a musical based on Wasserman's 1959 television play, I, Don Quixote. The resulting show, the musical Man Of La Mancha opened on Broadway in 1965 and in its original engagement ran for 2,328 performances.
Leigh's next show was Chu Chem. This show followed Man of La Mancha by exactly one year, but closed on the road. Produced by Leigh, it opened on Broadway in 1989 for 68 performances.
Cry for Us All, based on the play, Hogan's Goat, opened on Broadway in 1970 but ran for 9 performances. Leigh was the producer as well as composer. His next musical was Home Sweet Homer, starring Yul Brynner, which opened on Broadway officially in January 1976 but closed after 1 performance. He produced as well as was the composer for Saravà which ran for 101 performances in 1979. Leigh both produced and directed the 1985 revival of The King and I starring Yul Brynner. Lee Adams asked Leigh to collaborate on a musical, entitled Mike, about producer Mike Todd, but it closed on its pre-Broadway tryout in 1988. After renaming it Ain't Broadway Grand!, the show made it to Broadway, but closed after 25 performances in 1993.

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Morris Albert
Morris Albert (born Maurício Alberto Kaisermann, 7 September 1951, Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil) is a Brazilian singer and songwriter, famous for his 1975 hit single "Feelings".
In 1973 Produces alone, a single, Feel the Sunshine that, in three weeks time, becomes a success. Signs his first contract with Copacabana Records, in Brazil, as an artist, composer and producer.
1974 Records his first album, and with Feelings becomes number one in Brazil remaining in the charts for six months, consecutively. Feelings, goes number one in South America, Mexico, Central America, South Africa and Europe. First Gold Record – Mexico
1975 Feelings, rises the American, Canadian, Japanese and Australian charts. Leaves Brazil and moves to California.
1976 Receives four Nominations for the Grammy Awards. Make appearances in American, British and European television shows. International guest star, at the Italian Festival of San Remo. Wins the Grand Prize at the International Song Festival of Palma de Mallorca, with the song, So Nice. Finishes the year with a world tour.

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Natalie Cole
Natalie Maria Cole (born February 6, 1950) is an American singer, songwriter and performer. The daughter of jazz legend Nat King Cole, Cole rode to musical success in the mid-1970s as an R&B artist with the hits "This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)", "Inseparable" and "Our Love". After a period of failing sales and performances due to a heavy drug addiction, Cole reemerged as a pop artist with the 1987 album, Everlasting, and her cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Pink Cadillac". In the 1990s, she re-recorded standards by her father, resulting in her biggest success, Unforgettable... with Love, which sold over seven million copies and also won Cole numerous Grammy Awards.
Natalie Cole was born in Los Angeles, the daughter of crooner Nat King Cole and former Duke Ellington Orchestra singer Maria Cole. Raised in the affluent Hancock Park district of Los Angeles; regarding her childhood, Cole has referred to her family as "the black Kennedys" and was exposed to many great singers of jazz, soul, and blues. At the age of six Natalie sang on her father's Christmas album and later began performing at age 11.

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Neil Sedaka
Neil Sedaka (born March 13, 1939) is an American pop/rock singer, pianist, and composer. His career has spanned nearly 55 years, during which time he has sold millions of records as an artist and has written or co-written over 500 songs for himself and other artists, collaborating mostly with lyricists Howard Greenfield and Phil Cody.
Sedaka was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Mac Sedaka (aka Sedacca), a taxi driver, was of Sephardic Turkish-Jewish descent. ("Sedaka" and "Sedacca" are variants of tzedaka, which translates in both Hebrew and Arabic as the word charity). Sedaka's mother, Eleanor (née Appel), was of Polish-Russian Jewish descent (or generally referred to as Ashkenazi-Jewish descent). He grew up in the then-heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach, which lies on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. Sedaka is a cousin of singer Eydie Gormé.
He demonstrated musical aptitude in his second-grade choral class, and when his teacher sent a note home suggesting he take piano lessons, his mother took a part-time job in an Abraham & Straus department store for six months to pay for a second-hand upright. In 1947, he auditioned successfully for a piano scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music's Preparatory Division for Children, which he attended on Saturdays. His mother wanted him to become a renowned classical pianist such as the contemporary of the day, Van Cliburn, but Sedaka was discovering pop music. When Sedaka was 13, a neighbor heard him playing and introduced him to her 16-year-old son, Howard Greenfield, an aspiring poet and lyricist. They became two of the legendary Brill Building's composers.

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Neil Strauss
Neil Darrow Strauss (born October 13, 1973), also known by the pen names Style and Chris Powles, is an American author, journalist and ghostwriter, with both American and Kittitian citizenship.. He is best known for his best-selling book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, where he describes his experiences in the seduction community in an effort to become a "pick-up artist." He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and also writes regularly for The New York Times.
After graduating from high school at the Latin School of Chicago, Strauss attended Vassar College. While in school he began his career writing for Ear, an avant-garde magazine, and editing his first book, Radiotext(e), an anthology of radio-related writings for the postmodern publisher Semiotext(e). He moved on to the Village Voice, where he did everything from copy-editing to fact-checking before becoming a regular reporter and critic. He was invited by Jon Pareles to become a music critic at The New York Times where he wrote the Pop Life column and front-page stories on Wal-Mart’s CD-editing policies, music censorship, radio payola, and the lost wax figures of country-music stars.

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Neil Young
Neil Percival Young,OC,OM (born November 12, 1945) is a Canadian singer-songwriter who is widely regarded as one of the most influential musicians of his generation.
Young began performing as a solo artist in Canada in 1960, before moving to California in 1966, where he co-founded the band Buffalo Springfield along with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay, and later joined Crosby, Stills & Nash as a fourth member in 1969. He forged a successful and acclaimed solo career, releasing his first album in 1968; his career has since spanned over 40 years and 34 studio albums, with a continual and uncompromising exploration of musical styles. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame website describes Young as "one of rock and roll’s greatest songwriters and performers". He has been inducted into the Hall of Fame twice: first as a solo artist in 1995, and second as a member of Buffalo Springfield in 1997.
Young's work is characterized by his distinctive guitar work, deeply personal lyrics and signature alto or high tenor singing voice. Although he accompanies himself on several different instruments, including piano and harmonica, his idiosyncratic electric and clawhammer acoustic guitar playing are the defining characteristics of a varyingly ragged and melodic sound. While Young has experimented with differing music styles, including swing and electronic music throughout a varied career, his best known work usually falls into two primary styles: acoustic (folk and country rock) and electric (amplified hard rock, very often in collaboration with the band Crazy Horse). Young has also adopted elements from newer styles such as alternative rock and grunge. His influence on the latter caused some to dub him the "Godfather of Grunge".

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Nelly Furtado
Nelly Kim Furtado (born December 2, 1978) is a Canadian singer-songwriter, record producer and actress. Furtado first gained fame with her debut album, Whoa, Nelly!, and its single "I'm Like a Bird", which won a 2001 Juno Award for Single of the Year and a 2002 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Her second studio album, Folklore, was released. It was less commercially successful in the US but produced three international singles: "Powerless (Say What You Want)", "Try", and "Força" (the theme of the 2004 European Football Championship). Her third studio album, Loose was her biggest success worldwide. It produced the number-one hits "Promiscuous", "Maneater", "Say It Right" and "All Good Things (Come to an End)". After a three-year break, she released her first full-length Spanish album, Mi Plan. For Mi Plan, Furtado received the Latin Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Album. Furtado's fourth English-language studio album, The Spirit Indestructible, is set for release on September 18, 2012.

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Nino Rota
Nino Rota (December 3, 1911, Milan – April 10, 1979, Rome) was an Italian composer and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. He also composed the music for two of Franco Zeffirelli's Shakespeare films, and for the first two films of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy, receiving for the latter the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1974.
During his long career Rota was an extraordinarily prolific composer, especially of music for the cinema. He wrote more than 150 scores for Italian and international productions from the 1930s until his death in 1979—an average of three scores each year over a 46 year period, and in his most productive period from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s he wrote as many as ten scores every year, and sometimes more, with a remarkable thirteen film scores to his credit in 1954. Alongside this great body of film work, he composed ten operas, five ballets and dozens of other orchestral, choral and chamber works, the best known being his string concerto. He also composed the music for many theatre productions by Visconti, Zeffirelli and Eduardo de Filippo as well as maintaining a long teaching career at the Liceo Musicale in Bari, Italy, where he was the director for almost 30 years.

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Norman Gimbel
Norman Gimbel is an American lyricist of popular songs, television and movie themes whose writing career includes such titles as "Sway", "Canadian Sunset", "Summer Samba", "The Girl from Ipanema", "Killing Me Softly With His Song", "Meditation" and "I Will Wait for You", along with an Oscar for "It Goes Like It Goes" - from the film Norma Rae. During 1984 he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
A native of Brooklyn, Norman Gimbel was self-taught in music and following initial employment with music publisher David Blum, progressed to become a contract songwriter with Edwin H. Morris Music. Small successes and moderate fame came as a result of lively novelty songs "Ricochet", which was popularized in a 1953 recording by Teresa Brewer from which was developed the 1954 Judy Canova film Ricochet Romance, and "A Whale of a Tale", sung by Kirk Douglas in another 1954 production, Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Greater success was earned with Dean Martin's recording of "Sway", which reached #6 on the UK Singles Chart, followed by his first big success, Andy Williams' rendition of "Canadian Sunset", which scored to #1 in 1956.

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O.C. Smith
O.C. Smith (June 21, 1932 – November 23, 2001) was an American musician. His recording of "Little Green Apples", went to number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968, and sold over one million records.
Born Ocie Lee Smith in Mansfield, Louisiana, Smith moved with his parents to Little Rock, Arkansas, and then moved with his mother to Los Angeles, California after his parents divorce.
After completing a psychology degree at Southern University, Smith joined the Air Force, and served throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. While in the Air Force, Smith began entering talent contests and toured with Horace Heidt. After his discharge in July 1955, Smith went into jazz music to pay the bills.
Smith gained his first break as a singer with Sy Oliver and made an appearance on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts. His success on that show led to a recording contract with Cadence Records.
Smith's debut release was a cover of the Little Richard hit "Tutti Frutti" in December 1955. The song was not a hit, but convinced MGM Records to sign Smith to a solo contract, resulting in three more releases, but still no hits.

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Olivia Newton-John
Olivia Newton-John, AO, OBE (born 26 September 1948) is an English-Australian singer and actress. She is a four-time Grammy award winner who has amassed five No. 1 and ten other Top Ten Billboard Hot 100 singles and two No. 1 Billboard 200 solo albums. Eleven of her singles (including two platinum) and 14 of her albums (including two platinum and four double platinum) have been certified gold by the RIAA. Her music has been successful in multiple formats including pop, country and adult contemporary and has sold an estimated over 100 million albums worldwide. She co-starred with John Travolta in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Grease, which featured one of the most successful film soundtracks in Hollywood history.
Newton-John has been a long-time activist for environmental and animal rights issues. Since surviving breast cancer in 1992, she has been an advocate for health awareness becoming involved with various charities, health products and fundraising efforts. Her business interests have included launching several product lines for Koala Blue and co-owning the Gaia Retreat & Spa in Australia.

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Patrick Monahan
Patrick Monahan (born February 28, 1969) is an American singer-songwriter, musician and occasional actor, best known as the lead singer and songwriter for the band Train. He also has recorded a solo album, and has collaborated with multiple artists.
Monahan was born and raised in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is the youngest of seven children. He attended McDowell High School in Erie. He also attended Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.
Monahan, Jimmy Stafford, Scott Underwood, Rob Hotchkiss, and Charlie Colin formed the band Train in 1994 in San Francisco, California. The band took a three year hiatus from 2007 to 2009, during which Monahan released his first solo album, Last of Seven, on September 18, 2007 and began a nationwide tour supporting it. He followed that tour with a small, intimate acoustic tour, which inspired his Last of Seven Acoustic compilation, available via digital download only. His first solo single, "Her Eyes", made the top 10 of Billboard's Hot AC chart. The album's second single was "Two Ways to Say Goodbye."

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Patrick Moten
Patrick Moten (March 1957 – November 22, 1999) was an American musician and songwriter, who co-wrote Bobby Womack's "If You Think You're Lonely Now". Years later, he would be credited as a co-writer of Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together", when Carey would reuse portions of "If You're Think You're Lonely Now" in "We Belong Together".
Born Patrick Lawrence Moten, in March 1957, Moten was a songwriter, arranger, producer and pianist. He was born in Los Angeles. At an early age he displayed a remarkable interest and ability in music. He graduated from Westchester High School in 1975, and later resided in nearby Marina Del Rey, California.
Moten studied classical music with Lucille B. Hughly and Professor William Wilkins, but switched to soul music after witnessing Billy Preston. Moten then formed a band that opened for Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, Rufus, the Dramatics, the Young Hearts, Donny Hathaway, Natalie Cole, New Birth, Undisputed Truth, B.B. King, and others. Later he travelled the world on a Tina Turner tour, and her ex-husband, Ike, instructed him with recording and engineering. Through Ike Turner, he befriended Bobby Womack, working with him on many projects, including both Poet albums and another with Sam Cooke's daughter, Linda Cooke (Womack).

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Paul Epworth
Paul Epworth is a British music producer, musician, and songwriter. His production credits include Adele, Cee Lo Green, Florence and the Machine, Plan B, Friendly Fires, Bloc Party, Chapel Club, Primal Scream, The Rapture, Jack Peñate, Kate Nash, Foster the People and Maxïmo Park. On February 12, 2012 at the 54th Grammy Awards, he won 4 Grammy Awards for Producer of the Year, Album of the Year (Adele's 21), and Song of the Year and Record of the Year (for "Rolling In The Deep").
From 2002–2004 Paul provided lead vocals & guitar for the band Lomax. He later remixed two songs from the band's catalogue – "Reiterator" and "Modern Life".
Epworth is well known for his remix work under the name Phones. He began to gain recognition with this moniker based on his work with Bloc Party's track "Banquet"; he has since provided remix work for New Order, U2, P-Diddy, Goldfrapp, Nine Inch Nails, Simian Mobile Disco, The Streets, Interpol, Tom Vek, Death from Above 1979, and Annie. His debut of original material under the Phones name, "Sharpen The Knives/Worryin", was released on French label Kitsuné in November 2006. In 2008 he announced he had killed off the Phones moniker but has said he continues to remix anonymously.

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Paul Francis Webster
Paul Francis Webster (December 20, 1907 – March 18, 1984) was an American lyricist who won three Academy Awards for Best Song and was nominated sixteen times for the award.
He was born in New York City, the son of Myron Lawrence Webster and Blanche Pauline Stonehill Webster. He attended the Horace Mann School (Riverdale, Bronx, New York), graduating in 1926, and then went to Cornell University from 1927 to 1928 and New York University from 1928 to 1930, leaving without receiving a degree. He served in the United States Navy and then became a dance instructor at a studio in New York City. By 1931, however, he turned his career direction to writing song lyrics. His first professional lyric was Masquerade (music by John Jacob Loeb) which became a hit in 1932, performed by Paul Whiteman.
In 1935 Twentieth Century Fox signed him to a contract to write lyrics for Shirley Temple's films, but shortly afterward he went back to freelance writing. His first hit was a collaboration in 1941 with Duke Ellington on the song "I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)".

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Paul McCartney
Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE, Hon RAM, FRCM (born 18 June 1942) is an English musician, singer-songwriter and composer. Formerly of the Beatles (1960–1970) and Wings (1971–1981), he has been described by Guinness World Records as "The Most Successful Composer and Recording Artist of All Time", with 60 gold discs and sales of over 100 million albums and 100 million singles. With John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, he gained worldwide fame as a member of the Beatles, and with Lennon formed one of the most celebrated songwriting partnerships of the 20th century. After leaving the Beatles, he began a solo career and later formed the band Wings with his first wife, Linda Eastman, and singer-songwriter Denny Laine.
According to the BBC, his Beatles song "Yesterday" has been covered by over 2,200 artists—more than any other song. Wings' 1977 release, "Mull of Kintyre", became one of the best-selling singles ever in the UK, and he is "the most successful songwriter" in UK chart history, according to Guinness. As a songwriter or co-writer, he is included on thirty-one number one titles on the Billboard Hot 100, and as of 2012 he has sold over 15.5 million RIAA certified units in the United States.

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Paul Simon
Paul Frederic Simon (born October 13, 1941) is a grammy award winning American singer-songwriter, poet and guitarist.
Simon's international fame and success began as part of the duo Simon & Garfunkel, launched in 1964 with musical partner Art Garfunkel. Simon wrote most of the pair's songs, including three that reached No. 1 on the U.S. singles charts: "The Sound of Silence", "Mrs. Robinson", and "Bridge Over Troubled Water". The duo split up in 1970 at the height of their popularity, and Simon began a successful solo career, recording three highly acclaimed albums over the next five years. In 1986, he released Graceland, an album inspired by South African township music. Simon also wrote and starred in the film One-Trick Pony in 1980 and co-wrote the Broadway musical The Capeman in 1998.
Simon has earned 12 Grammys for his solo and collaborative work, including the Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2001, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in 2006 was selected as one of the "100 People Who Shaped the World" by Time magazine. Among many other honors, Simon was the first recipient of the Library of Congress' Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2007. In 1986 Simon was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from Berklee College of Music where he currently serves on the Board of Trustees.

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Paul Vance
Paul Vance (born November 4, 1929,Brooklyn, New York, United States) is an American songwriter and record producer.
With over 300 recorded songs, Vance co-wrote such hits as "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini," recorded in 1960 by Brian Hyland, which rose to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and "Catch a Falling Star," recorded in 1957 by Perry Como, which was also a hit and became one of Como's signature songs. "What Will Mary Say", a Top 10 hit for the singer Johnny Mathis in 1963, was written by Vance with Eddie Snyder. Vance got the idea for "Itsy Bitsy Bikini" because his daughter was too shy to wear a bikini in public. The song was a Top 10 hit in other countries around the world.
In 1964, Vance and Lee Pockriss wrote a song entitled "Leader Of The Laundromat," a spoof of the then-popular "Leader of the Pack" by The Shangri-Las, and Vance produced a recording of the track by a trio consisting of Ron Dante, Tommy Wynn, and Vance's nephew Danny Jordan. The record was released under the name The Detergents, and its success led to an album called The Many Faces Of The Detergents, which Vance produced and for which he, along with Pockriss, penned all the songs. The release of "Leader of the Laundromat" earned a lawsuit against the group by "Leader Of The Pack" composers Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, and George "Shadow" Morton. Dante would later work alongside Barry as lead vocalist for The Archies.

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Peggy Lee
Peggy Lee (May 26, 1920 – January 21, 2002) was an American jazz and popular music singer, songwriter, composer, and actress in a career spanning six decades. From her beginning as a vocalist on local radio to singing with Benny Goodman's big band, she forged a sophisticated persona, evolving into a multi-faceted artist and performer. She wrote music for films, acted, and created conceptual record albums—encompassing poetry, jazz, chamber pop, and art songs.
Lee was born Norma Deloris Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota, the seventh of eight children of Marvin Olof Egstrom, a station agent for the Midland Continental Railroad, and his wife Selma Amelia (Anderson) Egstrom. Her mother died when Lee was just four years old. Her father was Swedish American and her mother was Norwegian American.
Lee first sang professionally over KOVC radio in Valley City, North Dakota. She later had her own series on a radio show sponsored by a local restaurant that paid her a "salary" in food. Both during and after her high school years, Lee sang for paltry sums on local radio stations. Radio personality Ken Kennedy, of WDAY in Fargo, North Dakota (the most widely heard station in North Dakota), changed her name from Norma to Peggy Lee.^{[citation needed]} Thereafter, Lee left home and traveled to Los Angeles at the age of 17.

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Perry Como
Pierino Ronald "Perry" Como (May 18, 1912 – May 12, 2001) was an American singer and television personality. During a career spanning more than half a century he recorded exclusively for the RCA Victor label after signing with them in 1943. "Mr. C.", as he was nicknamed, sold millions of records for Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and pioneered a weekly musical variety television show, which set the standards for the genre and proved to be one of the most successful in television history. Como was seen weekly on television from 1949 to 1963, then continued hosting the Kraft Music Hall variety program on a monthly basis until 1967. His television shows and seasonal specials were broadcast throughout the world. Also a popular recording artist, Perry Como produced numerous hit records with record sales so high the label literally stopped counting at Como's behest. His combined success on television and popular recordings was not matched by any other artist of the time. Como's appeal spanned generations and he was widely respected for both his professional standards and the conduct in his personal life. In the official RCA Records Billboard magazine memorial, his life was summed up in these few words: "50 years of music and a life well lived. An example to all." Composer Ervin Drake said of him, "... [o]ccasionally someone like Perry comes along and won't 'go with the flow' and still prevails in spite of all the bankrupt others who surround him and importune him to yield to their values. Only occasionally."

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Peter Buck
Peter Lawrence Buck (born December 6, 1956), is an American rock guitarist who is best known for playing in and co-founding alternative rock band R.E.M.
Throughout his career with R.E.M., which was founded in 1980, Buck has also been an official member of various 'side project' groups. These groups include Hindu Love Gods, The Minus 5, Tuatara, The Baseball Project, Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3 and Tired Pony each of which have released at least one full-length album. Additionally, another side project group called Full Time Men released an EP while Buck was a member; ad hoc "supergroups" Bingo Hand Job (Billy Bragg and R.E.M.) and Nigel & The Crosses (Robyn Hitchcock, Peter Buck, Glenn Tilbrook and others) have each commercially released one track; and a current side project group called Slow Music plays semi-regular gigs. Buck also collaborated with Saint John and the Revelations in 2011.
Buck also has a notable career as a record producer (including releases by Uncle Tupelo, Dreams So Real, The Fleshtones, Charlie Pickett, and The Feelies), as well as a session musician (for the likes of The Replacements, Billy Bragg, and Eels.)

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Peter Gabriel
Peter Brian Gabriel (born 13 February 1950) is an English singer, musician, and songwriter who rose to fame as the lead vocalist and flautist of the progressive rock group Genesis. After leaving Genesis, Gabriel went on to a successful solo career. His 1986 album, So, is his most commercially successful, and the album's biggest hit, "Sledgehammer", won a record nine MTV Awards at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards, and the song is the most played music video in the history of the station.
More recently, Gabriel has focused on producing and promoting world music and pioneering digital distribution methods for music. He has also been involved in various humanitarian efforts. Gabriel has won numerous music awards throughout his career, including three Brit Awards—winning Best British Male in 1987, six Grammy Awards, thirteen MTV Video Music Awards, and in 2007 he was honoured as a BMI Icon at the 57th annual BMI London Awards for his “influence on generations of music makers.” Gabriel was also awarded the Polar Music Prize in 2009, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Genesis in 2010.

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Phil Collins
Philip David Charles "Phil" Collins, LVO (born 30 January 1951) is an English singer-songwriter, drummer, pianist and actor best known as a drummer and vocalist for British progressive rock group Genesis and as a solo artist.
Collins sang the lead vocals on several chart hits in the United Kingdom and the United States between 1975 and 2010, either as a solo artist or with Genesis. His singles, sometimes dealing with lost love, ranged from the drum-heavy "In the Air Tonight", dance pop of "Sussudio", piano-driven "Against All Odds", to the political statements of "Another Day in Paradise".
Collins's professional music career began as a drummer, originally in a band called The Real Thing with Andrea Bertorelli, who later became his first wife. Collins played drums and shared lead vocals (with Brian Chatton) in Flaming Youth which recorded one album, (Ark II). In 1970, he took over drums for Genesis, which had already recorded two albums. In Genesis, Collins originally supplied backing vocals for front man Peter Gabriel, singing lead on only two songs: "For Absent Friends" from 1971's Nursery Cryme album and "More Fool Me" from Selling England by the Pound, which was released in 1973. Following Gabriel's departure in 1975, Collins became the group's lead singer.

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Philip Lawrence
Philip Ambrose Lawrence (21 August 1947 — 8 December 1995) QGM, was a London-based headmaster who was stabbed to death outside the gates of his school when he went to the aid of a pupil who was being attacked by a gang.
Lawrence was born in Dublin, the son of a retired Indian Army colonel, and brought up in County Wicklow. He attended Ampleforth College and won an exhibition to read English at Queens' College, Cambridge, being awarded his BA in 1969 and his MA in 1970.
In the 1970s, he taught English at St. Benedict's School at Ealing Abbey, a Roman Catholic independent school. On 10 February 1973, he married Frances Huntley, a fellow teacher at the school; they had three daughters and a son.
Lawrence later became the Head of English at Gunnersbury Boys' School in Brentford, Deputy Headmaster at St. Mark's R.C. School, Hounslow, and later was named Headmaster of the Dick Sheppard School, a Lambeth comprehensive school. In 1993, he was appointed headmaster of St. George's Roman Catholic School, Maida Vale, regarded as a rough school with poor exam results. He improved the academic reputation of the school, but problems with violence continued.^{[citation needed]}

wn.com/Philip_Lawrence

Prince (musician)
Prince (born Prince Rogers Nelson; June 7, 1958) is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and actor. Prince has produced ten platinum albums and thirty Top 40 singles during his career. Prince founded his own recording studio and label; writing, self-producing and playing most, or all, of the instruments on his recordings. In addition, Prince has been a "talent promoter" for the careers of Sheila E., Carmen Electra, The Time and Vanity 6, and his songs have been recorded by these artists and others (including Chaka Khan, The Bangles, Sinéad O'Connor, and even Kim Basinger). He also has several hundred unreleased songs in his "vault".
Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Prince developed an interest in music at an early age, writing his first song at age seven. After recording songs with his cousin's band 94 East, seventeen-year-old Prince recorded several unsuccessful demo tapes before releasing his debut album, For You, in 1978. His 1979 album, Prince, went platinum due to the success of the singles "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?" and "I Wanna Be Your Lover". His next three records, Dirty Mind (1980), Controversy (1981), and 1999 (1982) continued his success, showcasing Prince's trademark of prominently sexual lyrics and incorporation of elements of funk, dance and rock music. In 1984, he began referring to his backup band as The Revolution and released the album Purple Rain, which served as the soundtrack to his film debut of the same name.

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R. Kelly
Robert Sylvester Kelly (born January 8, 1967), better known by his stage name R. Kelly, is an American singer-songwriter and record producer. Often referred to as the King of R&B, Kelly is recognized as one of the most successful R&B artists of all-time. A native of Chicago, Kelly began performing during the late 1980s and debuted in 1992 with the group Public Announcement. In 1993, Kelly went solo with the album 12 Play. He is known for a collection of major hit singles including "Bump n' Grind", "Your Body's Callin'", "I Believe I Can Fly", "Gotham City", "Ignition (Remix)", "If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time", "The World's Greatest", "I'm a Flirt", and the hip-hopera "Trapped in the Closet". In 1998, Kelly won three Grammy Awards for "I Believe I Can Fly".
Kelly has written, produced, and remixed songs for many artists including The Winans, The Isley Brothers, Charlie Wilson, Quincy Jones, K-Ci & JoJo, Aaliyah, Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, Toni Braxton, Michael Jackson, Hi-Five, Nivea, Ciara, Mary J. Blige, Luther Vandross, Gerald LeVert, Raheem DeVaughn, Ruben Studdard, Jaheim, Kelly Price, Tamia, Maxwell, Celine Dion, Britney Spears, Usher, B2K, Twista, Tyrese, Jennifer Lopez, Trey Songz, and others in the U.S. and abroad.

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Ralph MacDonald
Ralph MacDonald (March 15, 1944 – December 18, 2011) was a Trinbagonian-American percussionist, song-writer, musical arranger, record producer, steelpan virtuoso and philanthropist.
Growing up in Harlem, U.S.A. under the close mentorship of his Trinbagonian father, Patrick MacDonald (a calypsonian and bandleader originally from Trinidad and Tobago who went by the stage name "Macbeth the Great"), MacDonald began showing his musical talent, particularly with the steelpan, and when he was seventeen he landed a job playing pan for the Harry Belafonte show.
He remained with the Belafonte outfit for a decade before deciding to strike out on his own. In 1967, together with Bill Eaton and William Salter, he formed the Antisia Music Incorporated. Anisitia is based in Stamford, Connecticut.
In 1971, Roberta Flack recorded Where Is the Love, which MacDonald and Salter had written. The duet with Donny Hathaway won a Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. The single was awarded gold status and sold more than one million copies. MacDonald played on the session for the song.

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Randy Goodrum
Randy Goodrum (born July 7, 1947 in Hot Springs, Arkansas) is an American songwriter. Goodrum has written (or co-written) numerous popular songs, including Anne Murray's #1 hit "You Needed Me" (1978) and "Broken Hearted Me" (1979), Michael Johnson's "Bluer Than Blue" (1978), England Dan & John Ford Coley's "It's Sad to Belong" (1977), Steve Perry's "Oh Sherrie" (1984), DeBarge's "Who's Holding Donna Now", cowritten with David Foster and Jay Graydon, Toto's "I'll Be Over You" (1986) and Chicago's "If She Would Have Been Faithful..." (1987). He also co-wrote with Brent Maher a number of Dottie West's hits in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including her No. 1 Country hit in 1980, "A Lesson in Leavin'". He also has performed as a keyboardist on recordings by Amy Grant and other artists.
Randy Goodrum toured extensively with guitarist Chet Atkins and performed and produced cuts on many of Atkins’ albums. As a co-writer with Chet Atkins, Randy wrote “To B or not to B” and “Waltz for the Lonely” among others. Goodrum’s song “So Soft Your Goodbye” won a Grammy award for Chet Atkins, and Mark Knopfler, in 1991.

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Ray Conniff
Joseph Raymond Conniff (November 6, 1916 – October 12, 2002) was an American bandleader and arranger best known for his Ray Conniff Singers during the 1960s.
Conniff was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, and learned to play the trombone from his father. He studied music arranging from a course book. After serving in the U.S. Army in World War II (where he worked under Walter Schumann), he joined the Artie Shaw big band and wrote many arrangements for him. After his stint with Shaw he was then hired by Mitch Miller, then head of A&R at Columbia Records, as their home arranger, working with several artists including Rosemary Clooney, Marty Robbins, Frankie Laine, Johnny Mathis, Guy Mitchell and Johnnie Ray. He wrote a top 10 arrangement for Don Cherry's "Band of Gold" in 1955, a single that sold more than a million copies.
Among the hit singles he backed with his orchestra (and eventually with a male chorus) were "Yes Tonight Josephine" and "Just Walkin' in the Rain" by Johnnie Ray; "Chances Are" and "It's Not for Me to Say" by Johnny Mathis; "A White Sport Coat" and "The Hanging Tree" by Marty Robbins; "Moonlight Gambler" by Frankie Laine; "Up Above My Head," a duet by Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray; and "Pet Me, Poppa" by Rosemary Clooney. He also backed up the albums Tony by Tony Bennett, Blue Swing by Eileen Rodgers, Swingin' for Two by Don Cherry, and half the tracks of The Big Beat by Johnnie Ray.

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Ray Evans
Raymond Bernard Evans (February 4, 1915 – February 15, 2007) was an American songwriter. He was a partner in a composing and songwriting duo with Jay Livingston, known for the songs they composed for films. Evans wrote the lyrics and Livingston the music for the songs.
Evans, who was born Jewish, but later moved away from organized religion, citing it as a major cause of violence in the world was born in Salamanca, New York. He was valedictorian of his high school class, where he played clarinet in the band, and received a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School in 1937. He was elected that same year to Pi Gamma Mu, the honor society in the social sciences for his outstanding academic performance at the Wharton School.
Livingston and Evans, both members of ASCAP, won three Academy Awards, in 1948 for the song "Buttons and Bows", written for the movie The Paleface; in 1950 for the song "Mona Lisa", written for the movie Captain Carey, U.S.A.; and in 1956 for the song "Que Sera Sera", featured in the Alfred Hitchcock movie The Man Who Knew Too Much and sung by Doris Day. Another popular song that he and Livingston wrote for a film was the song "Tammy", written for the 1957 movie Tammy and the Bachelor. The song was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song. Livingston and Evans also wrote popular TV themes for shows including Bonanza and Mr. Ed. Their Christmas song Silver Bells intended for the 1951 Bob Hope film The Lemon Drop Kid, has become a Christmas standard.

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Ray LaMontagne
Raymond "Ray" Charles Jack LaMontagne (

/lɑːmɒnˈteɪn/; born June 18, 1973) is a Grammy-award winning American singer-songwriter. LaMontagne has released four studio albums, Trouble, Till the Sun Turns Black, Gossip in the Grain and God Willin' & the Creek Don't Rise. He was born in New Hampshire and was inspired to create music after hearing an album by Stephen Stills. Critics have compared LaMontagne's music to The Band, Van Morrison, Nick Drake, and Tim Buckley. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two children.
LaMontagne was born in Nashua, New Hampshire, in 1973. Despite his father's background in music, LaMontagne avoided the activity and spent time reading fantasy novels in the forest. He spent time in several different states in his youth. In his early teens he lived in Morgan, Utah, a small rural town of 2000 people. He was known for being an aloof, and indifferent to his education. He was much more interested in drawing images of Dungeons and Dragons than he was in his school work. He was well liked, and revered as somewhat of a mild nuisance. After graduating from high school, LaMontagne moved to Lewiston, Maine and found work in a shoe factory.

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Ray Stevens
Ray Stevens (born Harold Ray Ragsdale, January 24, 1939) is an American country music, pop singer-songwriter who has become equally well known for his serious material as he has for his novelty songs.
Stevens was born Harry Ray Ragsdale on January 24, 1939, in Clarkdale, Georgia. While attending high school, Stevens formed his first band, a rhythm and blues group he named the Barons. Following his graduation from high school, Stevens enrolled in Georgia State University as a music major.
Capitol Records signed Stevens to their Prep Records division in 1957, and produced the singles "Silver Bracelet," that Billboard predicted to be a teen favorite, and "Rang Tang Ding Dong," about a Japanese sandman, for which Billboard credited the 16-year-old Stevens' vocals as "strong, attractive." The latter song was a cover of a song recorded by Manhattan doo-wop group The Cellos in 1957, and written by Cellos bass singer Alvin Williams.
In 1958, Bill Lowery created the National Recording Corporation (NRC), and brought Stevens on board playing numerous instruments, arranging music, and performing background vocals for its band. Around that time, he had adopted the professional name of "Ray Stevens," which was inspired by his middle name and his mother's maiden name. Lowery was unable to collect debts from his own accounts and was forced into bankruptcy.

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RedOne
Nadir Khayat (Arabic: نادر الخياط‎), professionally known by the stage name RedOne, is a Moroccan-born Swedish producer and songwriter. Renowned for co-producing hit singles such as "Just Dance" (with Akon), "Poker Face", "LoveGame" and many more, he is attributed as the key to Lady Gaga's success. He has worked with Jennifer Lopez, Pitbull, Enrique Iglesias, Nicole Scherzinger, Nicki Minaj, Alexandra Burke,, Porcelain Black, Nayer, and One Direction producing songs such as "On the Floor", "Papi","I Like It", "Poison", "Start Without You", "Starships", Mannequin Factory and "Save You Tonight", from the album "Up All Night". RedOne has established his own record label named 2101 Records as a joint venture with Universal International Music, an administrative unit of Universal Music Group.
He has been nominated for six Grammy awards, winning two. In 2009, he was the number one producer on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, ranking number three as songwriter.
RedOne penned many of the songs sung by Alexey Vorobyov, who represented Russia in the Eurovision Song Contest of 2011 and eventually recruited the singer to his record label. He is producing the Cher and Lady Gaga duet, "The Greatest Thing". Scheduled to be released at Christmas 2011, the single will appear on Cher's twenty-sixth studio album. He is also working on the debut albums for Porcelain Black and Ash Stymest.

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Regina Belle
Regina Belle (born July 17, 1963) is a singer-songwriter who first surfaced in the late 1980s. She is notable for her Grammy award winning duet with Peabo Bryson, "A Whole New World".
Regina Belle was born in Englewood, New Jersey. It was at Englewood's Mount Calvary Baptist Church, and then Paterson's Friendship Baptist Church (presided over by Belle's uncle, the Reverend Fred Belle), that Regina Belle began attracting attention with her vocal abilities. She sang her first solo in church at age 8; and by age 17, she was the church's star singer. Belle attended Dwight Morrow High School where she studied trombone, tuba and steel drums. After graduation, she studied opera at the Manhattan School of Music. At Rutgers University, she became the first female vocalist with the school's jazz ensemble. Belle's musical influences include Phyllis Hyman, Billie Holiday, Donny Hathaway, and Nancy Wilson.
She was introduced to the Manhattans by New York radio DJ Vaughn Harper and began working as their opening act. She recorded the duet "Where Did We Go Wrong" with the group which helped to attract the attention of Columbia Records. They eventually signed her to a record deal.

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Rhymefest
Che Smith (born July 6, 1977), known by the stage name of Rhymefest, is an American hip hop artist from Chicago, Illinois whose first official album, Blue Collar, was released on July 11, 2006. He co-wrote Kanye West's "Jesus Walks", which won a Grammy at the 47th Grammy Awards. In October, 2010, Rhymefest announced his candidacy for Chicago's 20th ward alderman. He placed second in the February 22nd, 2011 election, and was defeated by incumbent Willie Cochran in the April 5th, 2011 runoff election, placing 45.4 to Cochran's 54.6.
Rhymefest was seen on the MTV show Punk'd when Kanye West was the subject of a practical joke on the set of his second music video for "Jesus Walks." Rhymefest was the first to greet West as he stepped out of a van after it had been revealed to him that he had just been "Punk'd." Rhymefest was on the set of the video to give his input as he was writing the track. Also appeared on TRL along with Kanye West and other stars introducing new artists to the game such as Pharrell Williams introducing Robin Thicke.

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Richard Kiley
Richard Paul Kiley (March 31, 1922 – March 5, 1999) was an American stage, television, and film actor. He is best known for his voice work, as narrator of various documentary series, and for having played Don Quixote in the original 1965 production of the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha. Kiley was the first to sing and record "The Impossible Dream", the hit song from the show. In the 1953 hit musical Kismet, he played the Caliph, and introduced the song "Stranger in Paradise". He won three Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards and two Tony Awards during his career.
Kiley was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised Roman Catholic. He graduated from Mt. Carmel High School in 1940, and after a year at Loyola University Chicago he left to study acting at Chicago's Barnum Dramatic School. In the late 40s, he performed in Chicago-area summer stock theaters with actors such as Alan Furlan. Following a stint in the Navy, he returned to Chicago working as an actor and announcer on radio before moving to New York City. In New York he studied singing with Ray Smolover.

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Richard Marx
Richard Noel Marx (born September 16, 1963 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American adult contemporary and pop/rock singer, songwriter, musician, and record producer. He had a string of hit singles in the late 1980s and 1990s, including "Endless Summer Nights", "Right Here Waiting", "Now and Forever", and "Hazard". Although most of his major hit songs were slow ballads, many of his songs had a classic rock style, such as "Don't Mean Nothing", "Should've Known Better," "Satisfied," and "Too Late To Say Goodbye". Marx placed himself in the record books by being the first solo artist to have his first seven singles hit the Top 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart (3, 3, 2, 1, 1, 1, 4). His record sales worldwide exceed 30 million. Aside from songs that he's written and recorded for himself, he has written, co-written, and produced successful tracks for other artists such as "This I Promise You" by NSYNC and "Dance With My Father" by Luther Vandross. The latter song won several Grammy Awards. His 14th and latest chart topper, "Long Hot Summer," performed by Keith Urban, gave Marx the distinction of having a song he wrote or co-write top the charts in four different decades.

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Richard Rodgers
Richard Charles Rodgers (June 28, 1902 – December 31, 1979) was an American composer of music for more than 900 songs and for 43 Broadway musicals. He also composed music for films and television. He is best known for his songwriting partnerships with the lyricists Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II. His compositions have had a significant impact on popular music down to the present day, and have an enduring broad appeal.
Rodgers was the first person to win what are considered the top show business awards in television, recording, movies and Broadway—an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony—now known collectively as an EGOT. He has also won a Pulitzer Prize, making him one of two people (Marvin Hamlisch is the other) to receive each award.
Born into a prosperous ethnic German Jewish family in Arverne, Queens, New York City, Rodgers was the son of Mamie Levy and Dr. William Abrahams Rodgers, a prominent physician who had changed the family name from Abrahams. Richard began playing the piano at age six. He attended P.S. 10, Townsend Harris Hall and DeWitt Clinton High School. Rodgers spent his early teenage summers in Camp Wigwam (Waterford, Maine) where he composed some of his first songs.

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Rickie Lee Jones
Rickie Lee Jones (born November 8, 1954) is an American vocalist, musician, songwriter, and producer. Over the course of a five-decade career, Jones has recorded in various musical styles including rock, R&B, blues, pop, soul, and jazz standards. Her songwriting has been characterized as "a blend of bravado and vulnerability [that] wavers on indefinable borders." She is also known for her unique singing style, especially in live performances. One concert reviewer, describing her rendering of "We Belong Together," states she "reached her apex, skating from swells into near screams into breathy whispers, from pontillist stacatto scats into brassy, trumpetlike bursts."
In 1999, Jones was listed at #30 in the VH1 list of 100 greatest women of rock.
Rickie Lee Jones was born on the north side of Chicago to Bettye and Richard Jones. Her paternal grandfather, Frank 'Peg Leg' Jones, and her grandmother, Myrtle Lee, a dancer, were Vaudevillians based in Chicago, Illinois. A singer/dancer/comedian, Peg Leg Jones' routine consisted of playing the ukelele, singing ballads, and telling stories. One of four children, her father was a WW2 veteran. A singer, song writer, painter, and trumpet player, Mr. Jones worked as a waiter. Her mother, Bettye, was raised in orphanages in Ohio with her three brothers until she was old enough to leave. Bettye and Richard met in a drug store coffee shop. Rickie Lee was born the third child of four, in Chicago, 1954.

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Ricky Martin
Enrique "Ricky" Martín Morales (born December 24, 1971), better known as Ricky Martin, is a Puerto Rican pop singer and actor who achieved prominence, first as a member of the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, then as a solo artist since 1991. Throughout his career, he has sold more than 60 million albums worldwide. He is the founder of the Ricky Martin Foundation (in Spanish Fundación Ricky Martin), a non-profit charity organization aimed at human trafficking.
Martin got his start at age twelve with the all-boy pop group Menudo; after five years with the group, he released his Spanish-language solo album, Ricky Martin, in 1991. He also acted on stage and on TV in Mexico, becoming a modest star in the country. In 1994 he starred on the American TV soap opera General Hospital, playing a Puerto Rican singer. In 1999, after several albums in Spanish, he released his first English-language album (also titled Ricky Martin), which included "Livin' la Vida Loca". The album sold 22 million copies and brought Martin international fame. His other studio albums include: Me Amarás (1993), A Medio Vivir (1995), Vuelve (1998), Sound Loaded (2000), Almas del Silencio (2003), Life (2005), and Música + Alma + Sexo (2011).

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Ritchie Valens
Ritchie Valens (born Richard Steven Valenzuela; May 13, 1941 – February 3, 1959) was a Mexican-American singer, songwriter and guitarist.
A rock and roll pioneer and a forefather of the Chicano rock movement, Valens' recording career lasted only eight months. During this time, however, he scored several hits, most notably "La Bamba", which was originally a Mexican folk song that Valens transformed with a rock rhythm and beat that became a hit in 1958, making Valens a pioneer of the Spanish-speaking rock and roll movement.
On February 3, 1959, on what has become known as The Day the Music Died, Valens was killed in a small-plane crash in Iowa, a tragedy that also claimed the lives of fellow musicians Buddy Holly and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson. Valens was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.
Ritchie Valens was born in Pacoima, a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, on May 13, 1941. His parents were Joseph Steven Valenzuela and Concepcion Reyes. Brought up hearing traditional Mexican mariachi music, as well as flamenco guitar, R&B and jump blues, he expressed an interest in making music of his own by the age of 5. He was encouraged by his father to take up guitar and trumpet, and later taught himself the drums. One day, a neighbor came across Ritchie trying to play a guitar that had only two strings. He re-strung the instrument, and taught Ritchie the fingerings of some chords. While Ritchie was left-handed, he was so eager to learn the guitar that he mastered the traditionally right-handed version of the instrument.^{[citation needed]} Valens had attended Pacoima Junior High School (now Pacoima Middle School). By the time he was attending junior high school, his proficiency on the guitar was such that he brought the instrument to school and would sing and play songs to his friends on the bleachers.^{[citation needed]}

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Rob Hyman
Robert Andrew "Rob" Hyman (born April 24, 1950 in Meriden, Connecticut, U.S.) is an American singer, songwriter, keyboard player, accordion player, producer, arranger and recording studio owner, best known for being a founding member of the rock band The Hooters.
Hyman started taking piano lessons at the age of four and grew up playing in local bands in Meriden, Connecticut, including The Trolls and the Pro-Teens.
He attended Francis T Maloney High School, where he was the editor of the yearbook, was voted as Most Likely to Succeed, and was the class valedictorian.
While attending the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in biology, Hyman met future bandmate and composing partner Eric Bazilian and producer Rick Chertoff. In the late 1960s, Hyman and Chertoff, along with local singer David Kagan formed a band called Wax, who recorded an album in the early 1970s. Hyman and Kagan later formed a new band with Bazilian called Baby Grand in the late 1970s, with Chertoff acting as producer. Baby Grand released two albums on Arista Records, one eponymous and the other called Ancient Medicine. While the band had some critical success, it never achieved any commercial success and eventually disbanded.

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Robert Lange
Robert John "Mutt" Lange (

/ˈlæŋ/; born 11 November 1948) is a Zambian-born British record producer and songwriter, usually known by his nickname "Mutt". Lange is one of the most successful producers in rock history. He has produced albums for artists such as AC/DC, Nickelback, Def Leppard, Graham Parker and the Rumour, Outlaws, Foreigner, The Cars, Bryan Adams, Billy Ocean, Savoy Brown, The Corrs and Maroon 5. His past projects included producing and writing songs with Canadian country singer and ex-wife Shania Twain. Her 1997 album, Come on Over, which he produced, is the all time best selling album by a female artist. Lange's latest project is a track called "You and I" on Lady Gaga's second studio album, Born This Way. He also wrote a song called "Who Are You", which will appear on country singer Carrie Underwood's upcoming album, Blown Away.
A strict vegetarian and a follower of Sant Mat, Lange has not given an interview of any kind for decades, and prefers to live a secluded life, mainly in Switzerland. He is known for his endurance in the studio and innovations in multitrack recording.

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Robin Gibb
Robin Hugh Gibb, CBE (22 December 1949 – 20 May 2012) was a singer and songwriter, best known as a member of the Bee Gees, co-founded with his fraternal twin brother Maurice and older brother Barry. Their younger brother Andy was also a singer.
Born in the Isle of Man to English parents, the family later moved to Manchester before settling in Brisbane, Australia. Gibb began his career as part of the family trio and when the group found their first success they returned to the United Kingdom where they achieved worldwide fame. In 2004, the Bee Gees received their CBEs from the Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace for their "contribution to music". With record sales estimated in excess of 200 million units, the Bee Gees became one of the most successful pop groups of all time. Music historian Paul Gambaccini described Gibb as "one of the major figures in the history of British music" and "one of the best white soul voices ever".
After a career spanning six decades, Gibb last performed on stage in February 2012 supporting injured British servicemen and women at a charity concert at the London Palladium. On 20 May 2012, Gibb died at the age of 62 from liver and kidney failure.

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Rodney Jerkins
Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins (born July 29, 1977) is an American songwriter, record producer and musician. He has worked with a range of popular artists, including Michael Jackson,Whitney Houston and the Spice Girls, and in 2011 he received two Grammy nominations.
Jerkins' father was an Evangelical pastor and he began playing piano at 5 years of age, following his brother and father who both played at church gatherings. At the age of 14, Jerkins was mentored by his idol, Teddy Riley, but he did not accept a contract offer to work with the producer due to an aspiration to build an "empire" without such support.
Jerkins' first recorded output was a "gospel rap" collaboration with his brother, Fred Jerkins III, entitled On The Move. He later incorporated the name "Darkchild", at the age of 17, subsequently accepting a worldwide publishing deal with the EMI music corporation. The producer then proceeded to establish a commercial music career, initially working with artists such as Joe, Mary J. Blige and Brandy.

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Roger Miller
Roger Dean Miller (January 2, 1936 – October 25, 1992) was an American singer, songwriter, musician and actor, best known for his honky tonk-influenced novelty songs. His most recognized tunes included the chart-topping country/pop hits "King of the Road", "Dang Me" and "England Swings", all from the mid-1960s Nashville sound era.
After growing up in Oklahoma and serving in the United States Army, Miller began his musical career as a songwriter in the late 1950s, penning such hits as "Billy Bayou" and "Home" for Jim Reeves and "Invitation to the Blues" for Ray Price. He later started a recording career and reached the peak of his fame in the late-1960s, but continued to record and tour into the 1990s, charting his final top 20 country hit "Old Friends" with Willie Nelson in 1982. Later in his life, he wrote the music and lyrics for the 1985 Tony-award winning Broadway musical Big River, in which he also acted.
Miller died from lung cancer in 1992, and was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame three years later. His songs continued to be recorded by younger artists, with covers of "Tall, Tall Trees" by Alan Jackson and "Husbands and Wives" by Brooks & Dunn, each reaching the number one spot on country charts in the 1990s. The Roger Miller Museum in his home town serves as a tribute to Miller.

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Sacha Distel
Sacha Distel (29 January 1933 – 22 July 2004) was a French singer and guitarist who had hits with a cover version of the Academy Award-winning "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head" (originally recorded by B. J. Thomas), "Scoubidou", and "The Good Life". He was born in Paris.
Sacha Distel, born Alexandre Distel, was a son of Russian White émigré Leonid Distel. Sacha's uncle, Ray Ventura, was a prominent jazz promoter. In the 1930s Ventura promoted and participated in the development of swing in France. When his uncle settled in Paris with his orchestra, “Les Collégiens”, Distel gave up his piano for the guitar.
In 1948, Ventura invited Distel to listen to Dizzy Gillespie perform with his orchestra, along with Bruno Coquatrix, Paul Misraki and André Hornez. Distel's efforts led to the orchestra's split, which gave birth to two rival bands: Guy Wormser's New Orleans die-hards and the cool jazz and bebop aficionados led by Distel. After meeting Hubert Damisch, a saxophone player, Sacha founded the band that would allow him to be up with the leaders. With help from Jean Marie Ingrand (bass), Mimi Perrin (piano) and Jean Louis Viale (drums), the band won the Coliseum's Night of Jazz “Meilleur Petit Orchestre Moderne” award, with Damisch and Distel winning prizes as musicians on the same night. Distel became a professional jazz guitarist. Over his career he worked alongside Dizzy Gillespie and Tony Bennett and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in the late 1950s after establishing himself as a French crooner.

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Sacha Skarbek
Sacha Skarbek is a songwriter and producer.
Sacha Skarbek showed early talent as a musician, winning many piano competitions from the age of seven. Awarded music scholarships to Northbourne Park and King's School Canterbury, Sacha was taught by the distinguished pianist Ronald Smith and played French horn, clarinet and percussion. He went on to study at Oxford Brookes University where he gained a degree in music.
Sacha's musical empathy and classical background bring an unmistakable quality to his songs and compositions. The breadth of his talent is reflected by the artists he has worked with including: Neneh Cherry, Samantha Mumba (no.2 hit Body to Body), Adele (Cold Shoulder), Jason Mraz,Tristan Prettyman, Sir Paul McCartney, Beverley Knight, Duffy (Save it for your prayers), Jon Bon Jovi, Cherie (BMI award winning song I am Ready) and Sacha played a key role in the development of James Blunt with whom he wrote the Worldwide no.1 hit, You're Beautiful and a further six co-writes on the multi-platinum selling debut album, "Back to Bedlam", including follow up singles Wisemen and Goodbye My lover.

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Sammy Cahn
Sammy Cahn (June 18, 1913 – January 15, 1993) was an American lyricist, songwriter and musician. He is best known for his romantic lyrics to films and Broadway songs, as well as stand-alone songs premiered by recording companies in the Greater Los Angeles Area. He and his collaborators had a series of hit recordings with Frank Sinatra during the singer's tenure at Capitol Records, but also enjoyed hits with Dean Martin, Doris Day and many others. He played the piano and violin. He won the Academy Award four times for his songs, including the popular song "Three Coins in the Fountain".
Cahn was born as Samuel Cohen in the Lower East Side of New York City, the only son (he had four sisters) of Abraham and Elka Reiss Cohen, who were Jewish immigrants from Galicia, Austria. His sisters, Sadye, Pearl, Florence, and Evelyn, all studied the piano. His mother did not approve of Sammy studying it though, for she thought the piano was a woman's instrument, so he took violin lessons. After three lessons and following his bar mitzvah, he joined a small dixieland band called Pals of Harmony, that would tour the Catskill Mountains in the summer and also did private parties. This new dream of Cahn's destroyed any hopes his parents had for him to be a professional man.

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Sammy Davis, Jr.
Samuel George "Sammy" Davis Jr. (December 8, 1925 – May 16, 1990) was an American entertainer and was also known for his impersonations of actors and other celebrities.
Primarily a dancer and singer, Davis started as a child vaudevillian who became known for his performances on Broadway and Las Vegas. He went on to become a world famous recording artist, television and film star. Davis was also a member of Frank Sinatra's "Rat Pack".
At the age of three Davis began his career in vaudeville with his father and "uncle" as the Will Mastin Trio, toured nationally, and after military service, returned to the trio. Davis became an overnight sensation following a nightclub performance at Ciro's after the 1951 Academy Awards. With the trio, he became a recording artist. In 1954, he lost his left eye in an automobile accident.
His film career began as a child in 1933. In 1960 he appeared in the first Rat Pack film, Ocean's 11. After a starring role on Broadway in 1956's Mr Wonderful, Davis returned to the stage in 1964's Golden Boy, and in 1966 had his own TV variety show, The Sammy Davis Jr. Show. Davis' career slowed in the late sixties, but he had a hit record with "The Candy Man", in 1972, and became a star in Las Vegas earning him the nickname Mister Show Business.

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Sara Bareilles
Sara Beth Bareilles (

/bəˈrɛlɪs/ bə-REL-is; born December 7, 1979) is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. She achieved mainstream success in 2007 with the hit single "Love Song", which brought her into the number one spot on the Billboard Pop 100 chart. She has sold over 1 million records in the United States alone and has been nominated for a Grammy Award three times. In the third season of NBC's The Sing-Off, Bareilles was a celebrity judge alongside Ben Folds and Shawn Stockman of Boyz II Men. In February of 2012, VH1 placed Bareilles in the #80 spot of the Top 100 Greatest Women in Music.
Bareilles was born and raised in Eureka, California, the youngest of three daughters of Bonnie Halvorsen (née Capellas), a funeral home worker, and Paul Bareilles, an insurance adjuster. She is of Italian, German, Portuguese, and French descent (she speaks Italian and lived in Italy for a year). Bareilles was raised Catholic and participated in the high school choir, Limited Edition, and local community theater musical productions, including her high school's production of Little Shop of Horrors as Audrey.

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Seal (musician)
Seal Henry Olusegun Olumide Adeola Samuel (born 19 February 1963 in Paddington, London, England), popularly known simply as Seal, is a British soul and R&B singer-songwriter, of Nigerian and Brazilian background. Seal has won numerous music awards throughout his career, including three Brit Awards—winning Best British Male in 1992, four Grammy Awards, and an MTV Video Music Award. Seal is known for his numerous international hits; the best known being "Kiss from a Rose", which appeared in the soundtrack to the 1995 film Batman Forever. He has sold more than 20 million albums worldwide. He is a coach on The Voice Australia.
Seal Henry Olusegun Olumide Adeola Samuel was born on 19 February 1963 in Paddington, London, England. He is the son of Adebisi and Francis Samuel. His mother is Nigerian, while his father is Brazilian. Seal's name, Olusegun, means "God is victorious" in the Yoruba language. He was raised in a district of the City of Westminster in inner London by his foster family. He received a two-year diploma, or associate's degree, in architecture and worked in various jobs in the London area. Although there have long been rumours as to the cause of the scars on his face, they are in fact the result of a type of Lupus called Discoid lupus erythematosus – a condition that specifically affects the skin above the neck.

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Shania Twain
Shania Twain, OC (

/ʃəˌnaɪ.ə ˈtweɪn/; born Eilleen Regina Edwards; August 28, 1965) is a Canadian country pop singer-songwriter. Her album The Woman in Me (1995), brought her fame and her 1997 album Come On Over, became the best-selling album of all time by a female musician in any genre, and the best-selling country album of all time. It has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide and is the ninth best-selling album in the U.S. Her fourth album, Up!, was released in November 2002. To date it has sold 20 million copies worldwide.
Twain has won five Grammy Awards and 27 BMI Songwriter awards. She has had three albums certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America and is the second best-selling artist in Canada, behind Céline Dion, with three of her studio albums certified double diamond by the Canadian Recording Industry Association. She is the first (and currently only) female artist in history to have 3 consecutive albums reach diamond status, indicating sales of at least 10 million, certified by the RIAA. Sometimes referred to as "The Queen of Country Pop", Twain has sold more than 75 million albums worldwide and is ranked 10th best-selling artist of the Nielsen SoundScan era. She was also ranked 72nd on Billboard's "Artists of the decade" (2000–10). Most recently, Twain has her own TV series, Why Not? with Shania Twain, that premiered on the OWN on May 8, 2011. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on June 2, 2011.

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Shawn Colvin
Shawn Colvin (b. January 10, 1956) is an American singer-songwriter and musician.
Colvin was born in Vermillion, South Dakota and spent her youth in London, Ontario and Carbondale, Illinois. She learned to play guitar at the age of 10 and grew listening to her father's collection of music, which included artists such as Peter Seeger and the Kingston Trio.
Colvin moved to Austin, Texas and joined a Western swing band called the Dixie Diesels. She then entered the the folk circuit in Illinois and San Francisco, California before forming the Shawn Colvin Band. She "strained her voice" singing rock songs took a sabbatical from singing at the age of 24.
Colvin later moved to New York City and with a renewed voice became involved in the Fast Folk cooperative of Greenwich Village. Over time she became progressively more popular on the new folk circuit and while appearing in the off-Broadway shows, Diamond Studs, Pump Boys and Dinettes, and Lie of the Mind. She was featured in Fast Folk magazine, and in 1987 sang backup vocals on the song Luka by Suzanne Vega.

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Sheryl Crow
Sheryl Suzanne Crow (born February 11, 1962) is an American singer-songwriter, record producer, musician, and actress. Her music incorporates elements of rock, folk, hip hop, country and pop. She has won nine Grammy Awards from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.
She has performed with The Rolling Stones and has sung duets with Mick Jagger,Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton, Luciano Pavarotti, John Mellencamp, Kid Rock, Michelle Branch, and Sting among others. She has performed backing vocals for Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Don Henley and Belinda Carlisle. She also sang as part of the back up vocals for the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary celebrating Dylan's 30 years as a recording artist. Crow has released seven studio albums, two compilations, and a live album, and has contributed to film soundtracks. She has sold 16 million albums in the United States and 35 million albums worldwide and her newest album, 100 Miles from Memphis, was released on July 20, 2010. Recently she appeared on NBC's 30 Rock, ABC's GCB and Cougar Town, Disney Channel's Hannah Montana Forever, and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.

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Shirley Bassey
Dame Shirley Bassey, DBE (born 8 January 1937), is a Welsh singer. She found fame in the mid-1950s and was "one of the most popular female vocalists in Britain during the last half of the 20th century". In the US, in particular, she is best known for recording the theme songs to the James Bond films Goldfinger (1964), Diamonds Are Forever (1971), and Moonraker (1979) and is the only artist to record more than one Bond theme song. Bassey is also a UNESCO Artist for Peace.
"Born above a brothel in a docklands slum", Shirley Veronica Bassey was the sixth and last child of Eliza Jane Start and Henry Bassey in Tiger Bay, Cardiff, Wales (now called Cardiff Bay), of paternal Nigerian and maternal English descent. Bassey's mother also had four children from previous relationships, two of whom lived in the Bassey household. Eliza had married previously, to Alfred Metcalfe, and upon her marriage to Bassey, Eliza Jane Metcalfe listed Alfred Metcalfe as her father on the marriage registry. It has thus been theorized that she never divorced Alfred, and that her marriage to Bassey was bigamous. Eliza and Henry's second child died in infancy, so Shirley was born into a household of three sisters, two half-sisters, and one brother. A year later her father was arrested and charged with having sex with a minor, was tried, imprisoned for five years, then deported. After Henry's arrest, Eliza and the children moved to the nearby steelworking district of Splott.

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Sid Wayne
Sid Wayne (1922 – 1991) was an American songwriter, lyricist and composer, who wrote a number of well-known songs from the 1950s to the 1980s. Almost every Elvis Presley film contained one or more works written by Wayne and his partner Ben Weisman.
His most known works are "See You In September" written with Sherman Edwards, "It's Impossible", which is the English lyric of Armando Manzanero's "Somos Novios", "Mangos" written with Dee Libbey, "Two Different Worlds" and "Relax Max" written with Al Frisch, "I Need Your Love Tonight" written with Bix Reichner, and "Got a Feeling" for Herman's Hermits. From 1960 to 1962, Wayne was the musical director of the CBS game show Video Village, which debuted shortly after the scandal-tainted rigged quizzes of the 1950s left the air.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Wayne, a self-taught musician had many successes in New York. In 1961, when Video Village moved from New York to Los Angeles, he moved his young family to West Hollywood, California to start the west coast phase of his career. There he teamed up with Weisman for work on the Elvis Presley films. As Elvis' film career tapered off, Wayne returned to his New York roots to have his biggest Grammy nominated hit with the Perry Como recording of "It's Impossible". This song, a love ballad for his wife Rhea, was commissioned as the English lyric to Manzanero's "Somos Novios". The English version, "It's Impossible", was originally performed by Perry Como and nominated for a Grammy Award in 1972. This success was marred by the verdict of an American court, which ruled against Manzanero in a plagiarism case involving the Spanish lyric to "Somos Novios".

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Simon & Garfunkel
Simon & Garfunkel were an American music duo consisting of singer-songwriters Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. They formed the group Tom & Jerry in 1957 and had their first success with the minor hit "Hey, Schoolgirl". As Simon & Garfunkel, the duo rose to fame in 1965, largely on the strength of the hit single "The Sound of Silence". Their music was featured in the landmark film The Graduate (1967), propelling them further into the public consciousness.
They are well known for their vocal close harmonies and were among the most popular recording artists of the 1960s. Their biggest hits – including "The Sound of Silence" (1964), "I Am a Rock" (1965), "Homeward Bound" (1965), "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" (1966), "A Hazy Shade of Winter" (1966), "Mrs. Robinson" (1968), "Bridge over Troubled Water" (1969), "The Boxer" (1969), and "Cecilia" (1969) – peaked at number one in several charts. They have received several Grammys and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990 and the Long Island Music Hall of Fame in 2007.

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Sinéad O'Connor
Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor (

/ʃɪˈneɪd oʊˈkɒnər/; born 8 December 1966) is an Irish singer-songwriter who rose to fame in the late 1980s with her debut album The Lion and the Cobra. O'Connor achieved worldwide success in 1990 with a cover of the song "Nothing Compares 2 U".
Since then, while maintaining her singing career, she has occasionally encountered controversy, partly due to her statements and gestures such as her ordination as a priest despite being female with a Roman Catholic background, and her expressed strong views on organized religion, women's rights, war, and child abuse.
In addition to her nine solo albums her work includes many singles, songs for films, collaborations with many other artists, and appearances at charity fundraising concerts.
Sinéad O'Connor was born in Glenageary in County Dublin and was named after Sinéad de Valera, wife of Irish President Éamon de Valera and mother of the doctor presiding over the delivery, and Saint Bernadette of Lourdes. She is the third of five children, sister to Joseph, Eimear, John, and Eoin. Joseph O'Connor is a novelist.

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Skylar Grey
Holly Brook Hafermann (born February 23, 1986) better known by her stage name Skylar Grey, is an five-time Grammy-nominated American multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, and record producer. Grey was signed to Machine Shop Recordings under the name Holly Brook. She released her debut album as Holly Brook, Like Blood Like Honey, in 2006. She co-wrote the three versions of "Love the Way You Lie" (for Eminem and Rihanna) with Alex da Kid, who signed her to his Wonderland Music label. She was featured as a guest vocalist on Fort Minor's "Where'd You Go" and "Be Somebody", Diddy-Dirty Money's "Coming Home", Dr. Dre's "I Need a Doctor", Lupe Fiasco's "Words I Never Said" and Kaskade's "Room for Happiness".
Grey performed professionally as a child in a folk duo with her mother called Generations. Together, (with producer/engineer Randy Green) they independently produced three albums, Dream Maker, Lift Me, and Millennial Child/Waiting For You. Grey started her first band at the age of fifteen after 'sneaking' into bars, working with jazz musicians including Jeff Eckles, Tim Whalen and Leo Sidran in Madison, Wisconsin.

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Stephanie Bentley
Stephanie Kay Bentley (born April 29, 1963 in Thomasville, Georgia) is an American country music artist. She made her debut in 1996 as a duet partner on Ty Herndon's single "Heart Half Empty", which peaked at #21 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks charts. The single was included both on Herndon's 1995 debut album What Mattered Most and on Bentley's 1996 debut album Hopechest. It produced three more singles for her on the country charts, although only one ("Who's That Girl") reached Top 40.
Bentley never recorded an album or charted a single after the release of Hopechest. However, she did find success as a songwriter, having penned Faith Hill's 1999 crossover single "Breathe", as well as Martina McBride's 2002 Top 5 hit "Concrete Angel". She has also co-written album cuts for Céline Dion, Pam Tillis and Jo Dee Messina, and recorded a song to the soundtrack for the film Holes.
Bentley's musical interests began at age nine, when she, her sister, and a friend entered and won a talent contest. The three later toured briefly as a musical group, even singing for Jimmy Carter, who was President of the United States at the time. In 1984, she formed a band called Special Delivery.

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Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Joshua Sondheim (

/ˈsɒnd.haɪm/) (born March 22, 1930) is an American composer and lyricist known for his contributions to musical theatre. He is the winner of an Academy Award, eight Tony Awards (more than any other composer) including the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, multiple Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and the Laurence Olivier Award. Described by Frank Rich of the New York Times as "the greatest, and perhaps best-known artist working in musical theatre", his most famous works include (as composer/lyricist) A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods. He also wrote the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy.
Sondheim has also written material for movies, including the 1981 Warren Beatty film Reds, contributing the song "Goodbye For Now". He also wrote five songs for the 1990 movie Dick Tracy, including "Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)", which won the Academy Award for Best Song.

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Steve Winwood
Stephen Lawrence "Steve" Winwood (born 12 May 1948) is an English songwriter and musician whose genres include blue-eyed soul, R&B, rock, blues-rock, pop-rock, and jazz. A multi-instrumentalist, he plays the electric organ, synthesizers, bass, drums, guitar, mandolin, violin and other strings. A star performer for nearly 50 years, he has also done notable work as a producer.
In addition to his solo career, Winwood was a key member of The Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, Blind Faith and Go. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Traffic in 2004.
In 2005, Winwood was honoured as a BMI Icon at the annual BMI London Awards for his "enduring influence on generations of music makers." In 2008, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Winwood #33 in its 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. Winwood has won numerous Grammy Awards in the United States.
Stephen Lawrence Winwood was born in Handsworth, Birmingham, England. His father, Lawrence, a foundryman by trade, was a semi-professional musician, playing mainly the saxophone and clarinet. Young Winwood became interested in swing and Dixieland jazz as a boy and began playing drums, guitar, and piano. He first performed with his father and older brother Muff in the Ron Atkinson Band at the age of eight. Winwood was a choirboy at St John's Church Perry Barr and later admitted to having "sneaked a few plays" of the organ there. While he was still young the family moved from Handsworth to the semi-rural suburb of Kingstanding at the northern edge of the city.

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Stevie Wonder
Stevland Hardaway Morris (born May 13, 1950 as Stevland Hardaway Judkins), known by his stage name Stevie Wonder, is an American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, a child prodigy who developed into one of the most creative musical figures of the late 20th century. Blind since shortly after birth, Wonder signed with Motown's Tamla label at the age of eleven, and continues to perform and record for Motown to this day.
Among Wonder's best known works are singles such as "Superstition", "Sir Duke", "I Wish" and "I Just Called to Say I Love You". Well known albums also include Talking Book, Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life. He has recorded more than thirty U.S. top ten hits and received twenty-two Grammy Awards, the most ever awarded to a male solo artist. Wonder is also noted for his work as an activist for political causes, including his 1980 campaign to make Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a holiday in the United States. In 2009, Wonder was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace. In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of the Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists to celebrate the US singles chart's fiftieth anniversary, with Wonder at number five.

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Sting (musician)
Gordon Matthew Thomas SumnerCBE (born October 2, 1951), known by his stage name Sting, is an English musician, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, activist, actor and philanthropist, born on 2 October 1951. Prior to starting his solo career, he was the principal songwriter, lead singer and bassist of the New Wave band The Police.
Sting has varied his musical style throughout his career, incorporating distinct elements of jazz, reggae, classical, New Age, and worldbeat into his music. As a solo musician and member of The Police, Sting has received sixteen Grammy Awards for his work, receiving his first Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance in 1981, three Brit Awards — winning Best British Male in 1994, a Golden Globe, an Emmy Award, and several Oscar nominations for Best Original Song. He is a member of both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Sting was born in Wallsend, Newcastle upon Tyne, England, the eldest of four children born to Audrey (née Cowell), a hairdresser, and Ernest Matthew Sumner, a milkman and engineer. His siblings were Philip, Angela and Anita. Young Gordon would often assist his father with the early-morning milk-delivery rounds, and by age 10 he became obsessed with an old Spanish guitar that had been left behind by an emigrating friend of his father.

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Suzanne Vega
Suzanne Nadine Vega (born July 11, 1959) is an American songwriter and singer known for her eclectic folk-inspired music.
Two of Vega's songs (both from her second album Solitude Standing, 1987) reached the top 10 of various international chart listings: "Luka" and "Tom's Diner". The latter was originally an a cappella version on Vega's album, which was then remade in 1990 as a dance track produced by the British dance production team DNA.
Vega was born July 11, 1959 in Santa Monica, California. Her mother, Pat Vega, is a computer systems analyst of German-Swedish heritage. Her father, Richard Peck, is of Scottish-English-Irish origin. They divorced soon after her birth. Her stepfather, Ed Vega, also known as Edgardo Vega Yunque, was a writer and teacher from Puerto Rico.
When Vega was two and a half, the family moved to New York City. She grew up in Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side. At the age of nine she began to write poetry; she wrote her first song at age fourteen. Later she attended New York's prestigious High School of Performing Arts (now called LaGuardia High School). There she studied modern dance and graduated in 1977.

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Taylor Swift
Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter and occasional actress. Raised in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, Swift moved to Nashville, Tennessee at the age of fourteen to pursue a career in country music. She signed to the independent label Big Machine Records and became the youngest songwriter ever hired by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house. The release of Swift's self-titled debut album in 2006 established her as a country music star. "Our Song", her third single, made her the youngest sole writer and singer of a number one song on the country chart. She received a Best New Artist nomination at the 50th Grammy Awards.
Swift's second album, Fearless, was released in late 2008. Buoyed by the chart success of the singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me", Fearless attracted a crossover audience and became the top-selling album of 2009. The record won four Grammy Awards, with Swift becoming the youngest ever Album of the Year winner. Fearless also received Album of the Year plaudits at the American Music Awards, Academy of Country Music Awards and Country Music Association Awards, making it the most awarded album in country music history. In 2010, Swift released her third album, Speak Now, which sold over one million copies in its first week. She then embarked on the 111-date Speak Now World Tour, which was attended by over 1.6 million fans and has become one of the highest-grossing concert tours of all time. The album's third single, "Mean", won two Grammy Awards for Best Country Song and Best Country Solo Performance. Swift is currently recording her fourth studio album, due for release in the fall of 2012.

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Terry Britten
Terry Britten is a prolific English singer-songwriter, who has written songs for Tina Turner and Sir Cliff Richard, Olivia Newton-John, Status Quo, Michael Jackson and many others.
A native of Manchester, Britten began writing for Adelaide, Australia bands Hurricanes^{[disambiguation needed ]} and The Twilights, a popular 1960s band for which he played lead guitar. At times he co-wrote with Glenn Shorrock and Peter Brideoake. He also recorded a single under his own name, "2000 Weeks" / "Bargain Day".
Britten was a band member of Quartet with Kevin Peek, Alan Tarney and Trevor Spencer who recorded one album with Decca records in the UK which remains unreleased but 2 singles were released on Decca: "Joseph"/"Mama where did you fail" (1970) F13072 and "Now"/"will my lady come" (1969) F12974.
In 1973 he was part of Cliff Richard's Eurovision song contest entry in 1973 along with John Farrar, Tarney and Spencer with 6 songs in which Power to all our friends was chosen and came 3rd.
After the Twilights broke up, he moved to London and wrote for Cliff Richard; eventually coming up with "Devil Woman". He was a guitarist in Richard's band for years. Richard called "Devil Woman" his best song ever, and it brought him the heavier pop-rock image that partly typify his concerts up to today. The track became a Top 10 hit in the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart.

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The Edge
David Howell Evans (born 8 August 1961), more widely known by his stage name The Edge (or just Edge), is a musician best known as the guitarist, backing vocalist, and keyboardist of the Irish rock band U2. A member of the group since its inception, he has recorded 12 studio albums with the band and has released one solo record. As a guitarist, The Edge has crafted a minimalistic and textural style of playing. His use of a rhythmic delay effect yields a distinctive ambient, chiming sound that has become a signature of U2's music.
The Edge was born in England to a Welsh family, but was raised in Ireland after moving there as an infant. In 1976, at Mount Temple Comprehensive School, he formed U2 with his fellow students and his older brother Dik. Inspired by the ethos of punk rock and its basic arrangements, the group began to write its own material. They eventually became one of the most popular acts in popular music, with successful albums such as 1987's The Joshua Tree and 1991's Achtung Baby. Over the years, The Edge has experimented with various guitar effects and introduced influences from several genres of music into his own style, including American roots music, industrial music, and alternative rock. With U2, The Edge has also played keyboards, co-produced their 1993 record Zooropa, and occasionally contributed lyrics. The Edge met his second and current wife, Morleigh Steinberg, through her collaborations with the band.

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The Smeezingtons
The Smeezingtons is the name of a songwriting and production team consisting of Bruno Mars, Philip Lawrence and Ari Levine.
They have produced and written songs for artists and groups such as the Sugababes,Travie McCoy,B.o.B, Brandy Norwood, K'naan, Lil Wayne, Flo Rida, Chad Hugo,Lil Eddie, Bad Meets Evil, Cee Lo Green and Charice among others. They have produced many smash hits including the #1 hit Nothin' on You by B.o.B, as well as being involved in the writing of the #1 hit Right Round by Flo Rida.
Initially formed following Mars' disillusionment with his first solo deal with Motown, The Smeezingtons have since gone on to provide the springboard for Mars' international-chart-topping solo success as an artist with Elektra Records. Philip Lawrence is a publishing songwriter signed to Jay-Z's label Roc Nation since 2011.

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The-Dream
Terius Youngdell Nash (Born September 20, 1977), better known by his stage name The-Dream, is an American singer-songwriter and record producer. He is known for co-writing chart topping hits such as "Baby" for Justin Bieber, "Umbrella" for Rihanna and "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" for Beyoncé, as well as for his three solo albums, Love Hate, Love vs. Money, and Love King.
Terius Nash was born in Rockingham, North Carolina and moved with his mother, Reva Nash, to Atlanta at the age of 3. He played trumpet, drums, and guitar as a child. His mother died in 1992 when Nash was fifteen years old, an event which would inspire him to write songs. He states that the death of his mother gave him a "soft spot" for women, which he credits to his desire to write songs about female empowerment such as Rihanna's "Umbrella". He moved in with his grandfather, a concrete mason who instilled a strong work ethic in young Nash. Of his grandfather, Nash recalls "He came out of a bad time for blacks in the South, but even though we lived in the hood, we had a boat, some cars and a house that was paid for. So I’ve always had a different outlook on life. There’s nothing I can’t do."

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Tim McGraw
Samuel Timothy "Tim" McGraw (born May 1, 1967) is an American country singer and actor. Many of McGraw's albums and singles have topped the country music charts with total album sales in excess of 40 million units in the US, making him the eighth best-selling artist, and the third best-selling country singer, in the Soundscan era. He is married to country singer Faith Hill and is the son of former baseball player Tug McGraw.
McGraw had 11 consecutive albums debut at Number One on the Billboard albums charts. Twenty-one singles hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. He has won 3 Grammys, 14 Academy of Country Music awards, 11 Country Music Association (CMA) awards, 10 American Music Awards, and 3 People's Choice Awards. His Soul2Soul II Tour with Faith Hill is the highest grossing tour in country music history, and one of the top five among all genres of music.
McGraw has ventured into acting, with supporting roles in The Blind Side (with Sandra Bullock), Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom, and Four Christmases (with Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon), and lead roles in Flicka (2006) and Country Strong (2010). He was a minority owner of the Arena Football League's Nashville Kats. Taylor Swift's debut single, "Tim McGraw", refers to him and his song, "Can't Tell Me Nothin'".

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Tina Turner
Tina Turner (born Anna Mae Bullock; November 26, 1939) is an American singer and actress whose career has spanned more than 50 years. She has won numerous awards. Turner started out her music career with husband Ike Turner as a member of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. Success followed with a string of hits including "River Deep, Mountain High" and the 1971 hit "Proud Mary". With the publication of her autobiography I, Tina (1986), Turner revealed severe instances of spousal abuse against her by Ike Turner prior to their 1976 split and subsequent 1978 divorce. After virtually disappearing from the music scene for several years following her divorce from Ike Turner, she rebuilt her career, launching a string of hits beginning in 1983 with the single "Let's Stay Together" and the 1984 release of her fifth solo album Private Dancer.
Her musical career led to film roles, beginning with a prominent role as The Acid Queen in the 1975 film Tommy, and an appearance in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. She starred opposite Mel Gibson as Aunty Entity in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome for which she received the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Motion Picture, and her version of the film's theme, "We Don't Need Another Hero", was a hit single. She appeared in the 1993 film Last Action Hero.

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Tom Jones (writer)
Tom Jones (born in 1928 in Littlefield, Texas) is a lyricist (and often librettist) of musical theatre. His best known work is The Fantasticks, which ran off-Broadway from 1960 until 2002, and the hit song from the same, Try to Remember. Other songs from "The Fantasticks" include "Soon It's Gonna Rain", "Much More" and "I Can See It". He also wrote the screenplay for the 1995 feature film adaptation.
Jones acted in a New York City revival of The Fantasticks which he also directed. He played the part of the Old Actor, which he played when the musical opened in 1960, from April 26, 2010, to June 6, 2010. He was credited as an actor in the show as Thomas Bruce.
Jones is also the author of Making Musicals: An Informal Introduction to the World of Musical Theater, about which Elyse Sommer wrote on January 15, 1998 in CurtainUp:
All of Jones' major musicals were written with Harvey Schmidt, whom he met at the University of Texas at Austin.

wn.com/Tom_Jones_(writer)

Tom T. Hall
Thomas "Tom T." Hall (born May 25, 1936, in Olive Hill, Kentucky) is an American country music singer-songwriter. He has written 11 #1 hit songs, with 26 more that reached the Top 10, including the #1 international pop crossover smash "Harper Valley PTA" and the hit "I Love", which reached #12 on the Billboard Hot 100. He became known to fans as "The Storyteller," thanks to his storytelling skills in his songwriting.
As a teenager, Hall organized a band called the Kentucky Travelers that performed before movies for a traveling theater. During a stint in the Army, Hall performed over the Armed Forces Radio Network and wrote comic songs about Army experiences. His early career included being a radio announcer at WRON, a local radio station in Ronceverte, West Virginia. Hall was also an announcer at WVRC Radio in Spencer, West Virginia in the 1960s.
Hall's big songwriting break came in 1963, when country singer Jimmy C. Newman recorded his song, "DJ For a Day." Soon, Hall moved to Nashville, and within months, he had songs climbing the charts. Hall has been nicknamed "The Story Teller," and he has written songs for dozens of country stars, including Johnny Cash, George Jones, Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings, Alan Jackson, and Bobby Bare.

wn.com/Tom_T._Hall

Tommy Sims
Tommy Sims is a bassist, songwriter, record producer and bandleader.
From 1987 to 1989 he was the bassist of the popular Christian rock band White Heart which he left to become a studio musician and producer. During 1992-1993, he played bass on the Bruce Springsteen and the "Other Band" Tour. He is also a songwriter, who wrote Eric Clapton's "Change the World" which won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 1997. Other songs of his have been recorded by Bonnie Raitt, Susan Tedeschi, Garth Brooks, Cher, BlackStreet, Toni Braxton and BabyFace among others. Tommy has also worked with Michael Bolton, Amy Grant, Kelly Clarkson, CeCe Winans, Israel, The Neville Brothers, Michelle Williams of Destiny's Child, and others.
In addition to writing and producing, Sims also released a solo album in August 2000 entitled Peace and Love. A song from this release, "It Don't Matter to the Sun", was featured on the soundtrack of the hit television drama Grey's Anatomy. Sims' film contributions include Bruce Springsteen's recording "Streets of Philadelphia" which appeared in the Tom Hanks film Philadelphia, widely regarded as the first major film to deal openly with subject of AIDS and gay rights. The film and the song also went on to be heavy recognized at the following year's Academy Awards garnering several "Oscars" including the Best Song trophy. Sims' "Change The World was also featured in John Travolta's film Phenomenon and while winning the Grammy Award for Song Of The Year was rendered ineligible for nomination at that year's Academy Awards because of its prior release by Wynonna Judd. Sims has gone on to have his songs featured in several other blockbuster films including Kevin Costner's For Love Of The Game and Natalie Portman and Ashley Judd's Where The Heart Is.

wn.com/Tommy_Sims

Tony Bennett
Anthony Dominick Benedetto, better known as Tony Bennett (born August 3, 1926), is an American singer of popular music, standards, show tunes, and jazz. Bennett is also a serious and accomplished painter, having created works — under the name Benedetto — that are on permanent public display in several institutions. He is the founder of Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in New York City.
Raised in New York City, Bennett began singing at an early age. He fought in the final stages of World War II as an infantryman with the U.S. Army in the European Theatre. Afterwards, he developed his singing technique, signed with Columbia Records, and had his first number one popular song with "Because of You" in 1951. Several top hits such as "Rags to Riches" followed in the early 1950s. Bennett then further refined his approach to encompass jazz singing. He reached an artistic peak in the late 1950s with albums such as The Beat of My Heart and Basie Swings, Bennett Sings. In 1962, Bennett recorded his signature song, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco". His career and his personal life then suffered an extended downturn during the height of the rock music era.

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Toto (band)
Toto is an American rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1976. The group currently consists of Joseph Williams (lead vocals), David Paich (keyboards), Steve Porcaro (keyboards), Steve Lukather (guitars, vocals), Mike Porcaro (bass), and Simon Phillips (drums). Toto is known for a musical style that combines elements of pop, rock, soul, funk, progressive rock, hard rock, R&B and jazz. They are regularly associated with the soft rock genre.
David Paich and Jeff Porcaro had played together as session musicians on several albums and decided to form a band. David Hungate, Steve Lukather, Steve Porcaro and Bobby Kimball were recruited before their first album release. The band enjoyed great commercial success in the late 1970s and 1980s, beginning with the band's self-titled debut released in 1978. With the release of the critically acclaimed and commercially successful Toto IV (1982), Toto became one of the best-selling music groups of their era. They are best known for the Top 5 hits "Hold the Line", "Rosanna", "Africa" and "Georgy Porgy". Although their popularity in the United States diminished in the 1990s and 2000s, they remained popular internationally, playing only a small number of shows in the USA. Several changes to the lineup have been made over the years. In 2008, Lukather announced his departure from the band, and the remaining band members later went their separate ways. In the summer of 2010, Toto reformed and went on a short European tour, with a new lineup, to benefit Mike Porcaro, who had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

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Trisha Yearwood
Patricia Lynn Yearwood, professionally known as Trisha Yearwood (born September 19, 1964), is an American country music artist. She is best known for her ballads about vulnerable young women from a female perspective that have been described by some music critics as "strong" and "confident."
Trisha Yearwood signed with MCA Records in 1990. She came to prominence with her debut single, "She's in Love with the Boy" which became a number 1 on the Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart in 1991. Her second album release, Hearts in Armor (1992) reflected Yearwood's own personal issues, which won her widespread critical acclaim among music critics and further success in country music. Her later album releases such as The Song Remembers When (1993), Thinkin' About You (1995) and Everybody Knows (1996) also demonstrated her creative control, featuring collaborations from Rodney Crowell, Willie Nelson and Garth Brooks.
Yearwood also found major success in country radio during much of the 1990s, including with the 1997 song "How Do I Live." Initially released on the soundtrack of the film, Con Air, the song was also issued on her "greatest hits" compilation entitled (Songbook) A Collection of Hits (1997) and would eventually win Best Female Country Vocal Performance from the Grammy Awards. In addition she would also win accolades from the Academy of Country Music and Country Music Association Awards in 1997 and 1998. Aside from her success in country music, she has also donated her time as a philanthropist, working with Habitat for Humanity and the Make a Wish Foundation. In addition she also set aside a project to release her first cookbook in April 2008 titled Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen, which consisted of southern cooking recipes from Yearwood, her mother and sister.

wn.com/Trisha_Yearwood

Vanessa L. Williams
Vanessa Lynn Williams (born March 18, 1963) is an American pop-R&B recording artist, producer, dancer, model and actress. In 1983, she became the first woman of African-American descent to be crowned Miss America, but a scandal arose when Penthouse magazine bought and published nude photographs of her. She relinquished her title early and was succeeded by the first runner-up, Suzette Charles of New Jersey – who was also African-American. Williams rebounded by launching a career as an entertainer, earning multiple Grammy, Emmy, and Tony Award nominations.
Williams released her debut album The Right Stuff in 1988, which spawned the hits "The Right Stuff", a #1 on Hot Dance Songs, and "Dreamin'" a #1 on R&B and #8 on Billboard Hot 100. Her second studio album The Comfort Zone in 1991 topped the Billboard R&B Album Chart, which spawned the Billboard Hot 100 number-one hit "Save the Best for Last". In 1994 she debuted on Broadway in the musical Kiss of the Spider Woman. In 1995 she recorded "Colors of the Wind", the Oscar-winner for Best Original Song from the Disney animated feature film Pocahontas, which reached #4 on the Billboard Hot 100.

wn.com/Vanessa_L._Williams

Warren Zevon
Warren William Zevon /ˈziːvɒn/ (January 24, 1947 – September 7, 2003) was an American rock singer-songwriter and musician noted for including his sometimes sardonic opinions of life in his musical lyrics, composing songs that were sometimes humorous and often had political or historical themes.
Zevon's work has often been praised by well-known musicians, including Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young. His best-known compositions include "Werewolves of London", "Lawyers, Guns and Money", "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" and "Johnny Strikes Up The Band," all of which are featured on his third album, Excitable Boy (1978). Other well-known songs written by Zevon have been recorded by other artists, including "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" (a top 40 hit by Linda Ronstadt), "Accidentally Like a Martyr," "Mohammed's Radio", "Carmelita", and "Hasten Down the Wind".
Along with his own compositions, Zevon recorded or performed occasional covers, including Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and Leonard Cohen's "First We Take Manhattan". He was a frequent guest on Late Night with David Letterman and The Late Show with David Letterman. Letterman later performed guest vocals on "Hit Somebody! (The Hockey Song)" with Paul Shaffer and members of the CBS Orchestra on Warren Zevon's "My Ride Is Here" album.

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Wayne Carson
Wayne Carson Thompson is an American country musician. He is a songwriter, producer and plays percussion, piano, guitar, and bass. His most famous songs include "Neon Rainbow", "The Letter", "Always on My Mind" (with Mark James and Johnny Christopher), and "Soul Deep".
Born in Denver, Colorado, his parents, Odie and Olivia Thompson, played music professionally. They met in Nebraska while working for radio station KMMJ, moved to Colorado and eventually to Springfield, Missouri to join the KWTO-AM music staff. By then, they were better known by their stage names, Shorty and Sue Thompson. Shorty Thompson was perhaps best known around the Ozarks as a member of radio and television mainstay the Tall Timber Boys.
Carson wanted to pick up a guitar when he was about 14, after hearing a recording by Merle Travis. Even so, he was quickly taken by the newer sound of rock 'n' roll. He lived in several cities, including Denver, as a young man leading bands; and moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 1962.
He eventually came back to Springfield where he began working with music publisher and promoter Si Siman. Together they pitched songs for years, but without success until Siman's friend and producer Chet Atkins took a liking to a tune called "Somebody Like Me" and wanted to have Eddy Arnold record it. Carson was taken aback when he got a call from Arnold, one of the most successful country acts of all time.

wn.com/Wayne_Carson

Wayne Kirkpatrick
Wayne Kirkpatrick is an American singer/songwriter and musician born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana but now lives in Nashville, Tennessee. He graduated from Baton Rouge Magnet High School in 1979.
Kirkpatrick has spent most of his career in the background, often providing background vocals, playing guitar, playing keyboards or writing songs for other artists. His songs have been recorded by Little Big Town, Faith Hill, Garth Brooks, Babyface, Amy Grant, Joe Cocker, Kathy Mattea, Martina McBride, Wynonna Judd, Trisha Yearwood, Bonnie Raitt, Susan Ashton, Michael W. Smith, Jill Phillips, Michael Crawford, Peter Frampton, Casting Crowns and Eric Clapton, whose version of Kirkpatrick's "Change the World" won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year.
At the 24th GMA Dove Awards, Kirkpatrick received the award for Producer of the Year.
In 2005, Kirkpatrick started to produce Little Big Town alongside the group starting with their second album The Road to Here and also the next 2 A Place to Land (Little Big Town album) & The Reason Why. He also co-wrote most of the songs on all 3 albums with the group.

wn.com/Wayne_Kirkpatrick

Whitney Houston
Whitney Elizabeth Houston (August 9, 1963 – February 11, 2012) was an American recording artist, actress, producer, and model. In 2009, the Guinness World Records cited her as the most-awarded female act of all-time. Houston was one of the world's best-selling music artists, having sold over 170 million albums, singles and videos worldwide. She released seven studio albums and three movie soundtrack albums, all of which have diamond, multi-platinum, platinum or gold certification. Houston's crossover appeal on the popular music charts, as well as her prominence on MTV, starting with her video for "How Will I Know", influenced several African American female artists to follow in her footsteps.
Houston is the only artist to chart seven consecutive No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hits. She is the second artist behind Elton John and the only female artist to have two number-one Billboard 200 Album awards (formerly "Top Pop Album") on the Billboard magazine year-end charts. Houston's 1985 debut album Whitney Houston became the best-selling debut album by a female act at the time of its release. The album was named Rolling Stone's best album of 1986, and was ranked at number 254 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Her second studio album Whitney (1987) became the first album by a female artist to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 albums chart.

wn.com/Whitney_Houston

Will Jennings
Wilbur H. "Will" Jennings (born June 27, 1944, in Kilgore, Texas) is an American songwriter who is popularly known for writing the lyrics for My Heart Will Go On, the theme for the film Titanic. He has been inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame and has won several awards including a Grammy, two Golden Globe awards, and two Academy Awards.
Jennings attended school just outside Tyler, Texas, in the nearby Chapel Hill Independent School District. In 1967, Jennings earned his B.A. from Stephen F. Austin State University, located in Nacogdoches, Texas. He then taught at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire for three years and eventually attended the same institution in 1982.
Throughout his career, Jennings has written for a wide variety of artists including Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Joe Sample, Rodney Crowell, Mariah Carey, Jimmy Buffett, Barry Manilow and Roy Orbison.
With Steve Winwood, Jennings wrote a series albums including While You See A Chance, Arc of a Diver and Back in the High Life, an album which contained the hits Higher Love, The Finer Things, and Back in the High Life Again. Winwood won the Record Of The Year and Outstanding Male Vocal Performance. Both Jennings and Winwood were nominated for the Song of the Year award for "Higher Love."

wn.com/Will_Jennings

Willie Nelson
Willie Hugh Nelson (pronounced /wɪli nɛlsən /; born April 30, 1933) is an American country music singer-songwriter, as well as an author, poet, actor, and activist. The critical success of the album Shotgun Willie (1973), combined with the critical and commercial success of Red Headed Stranger (1975) and Stardust (1978), made Nelson one of the most recognized artists in country music. He was one of the main figures of outlaw country, a subgenre of country music that developed at the end of the 1960s as a reaction to the conservative restrictions of the Nashville sound. Nelson has acted in over 30 films, co-authored several books, and has been involved in activism for the use of biofuels and the legalization of marijuana.

wn.com/Willie_Nelson

Wilson Phillips
Wilson Phillips is an American vocal group consisting of Carnie Wilson, Wendy Wilson, and Chynna Phillips.
Their 1990 self-titled debut album sold over 10 million copies worldwide and scored three number one singles on the Billboard Hot 100, making the trio the best-selling female group at the time. In 1990, the group won the Billboard Music Award for Hot 100 Single of the Year for "Hold On," and in addition was nominated for four Grammy Awards and two American Music Awards.
The Wilson sisters and Phillips grew up together in Southern California in the 1970s and 1980s. The three shared a love of music and songwriting, and developed their own style of vocal harmonies. In 1989, the trio signed with SBK Records.
The group is also known for being the offspring of prominent musicians; the Wilsons are the daughters of Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, while Phillips's parents are John Phillips and Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas.
Wilson Phillips released their debut album, Wilson Phillips, in 1990. Their debut single, "Hold On," hit #1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart on June 9, 1990, bumping Madonna's "Vogue" off the top spot. The single was also #1 on the US Billboard Adult Contemporary and became a worldwide hit, peaking at #2 in Australia, #6 in the UK, #7 in Ireland, #10 in Sweden, and at #15 in the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland. The single also won Wilson Phillips the Billboard Music Award for Hot 100 Single of the Year for 1990.

wn.com/Wilson_Phillips

Grammy Award for Song of the Year
Gilded gramophone trophy presented to Grammy Award winners
Awarded for	quality songs containing both lyrics and melody
Presented by	National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences
Country	United States
First awarded	1959
Last awarded	2012
Official website	grammy.com

Year^[I]	Songwriter(s)	Nationality	Work	Performing artist(s)^[II]	Nominees	Ref.
1959	Domenico Modugno	Italy	"Volare" *	Domenico Modugno	Paul Vance and Lee Pockriss for "Catch a Falling Star" performed by Perry Como Johnny Davenport and Eddie Conley for "Fever" performed by Peggy Lee Alan Jay Lerner & Frederick Loewe for "Theme to Gigi" performed by Various Artists Cy Coleman & Carolyn Leigh for "Witchcraft" performed by Frank Sinatra	^[4]
1960	Jimmy Driftwood	United States	"The Battle of New Orleans"	Johnny Horton	Sammy Cahn & Jimmy Van Heusen for "High Hopes" performed by Frank Sinatra Karl Stutz & Edith Linderman for "I Know" performed by Perry Como Paul Francis Webster & André Previn for "Like Young" performed by André Previn Jule Styne & Stephen Sondheim for "Small World" performed by Johnny Mathis	^[5]
1961	Ernest Gold	United States	"Theme from Exodus"	Various Artists	Charles Randolph Grean, Joe Allison & Audrey Allison for "He'll Have to Go" performed by Jim Reeves Lew Spence, Marilyn Keith & Alan Bergman for "Nice 'n' Easy" performed by Frank Sinatra Sammy Cahn & Jimmy Van Heusen for "Second Time Around" performed by Andy Williams Max Steiner for "Theme from A Summer Place" performed by Percy Faith	^[6]
1962	Henry Mancini Johnny Mercer	United States	"Moon River"	Andy Williams	Jimmy Dean for "Big Bad John" performed by Jimmy Dean Hank Cochran for "A Little Bitty Tear" performed by Burl Ives Tony Velona for "Lollipops and Roses" performed by Jack Jones Jule Styne, Betty Comden & Adolph Green for "Make Someone Happy" performed by Various Artists	^[7]
1963	Leslie Bricusse Anthony Newley	United Kingdom	"What Kind of Fool Am I?"	Sammy Davis, Jr.	Lionel Bart for "As Long as He Needs Me" performed by Shirley Bassey Douglas Cross & George Cory for "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" performed by Tony Bennett John Kander & Fred Ebb for "My Coloring Book" performed by Sandy Stewart Richard Rodgers for "The Sweetest Sounds" performed by Various Artists	^[8]
1964	Henry Mancini Johnny Mercer	United States	"Days of Wine and Roses"	Andy Williams	Sammy Cahn & Jimmy Van Heusen for "Call Me Irresponsible" performed by Frank Sinatra Sacha Distel & Jack Reardon for "The Good Life" performed by Tony Bennett Sadie Vimmerstedt & Johnny Mercer for "I Wanna Be Around" performed by Tony Bennett Burt Bacharach & Hal David for "Wives and Lovers" performed by Jack Jones	^[9]
1965	Jerry Herman	United States	"Hello, Dolly!"	Louis Armstrong	John Lennon & Paul McCartney for "A Hard Day's Night" performed by The Beatles Henry Mancini, Ray Evans & Jay Livingston for "Dear Heart" performed by Andy Williams Jule Styne & Bob Merrill for "People" performed by Barbra Streisand Leslie Bricusse & Anthony Newley for "Who Can I Turn To?" performed by Tony Bennett	^[10]
1966	Paul Francis Webster Johnny Mandel	United States	"The Shadow of Your Smile"	Tony Bennett	Michel Legrand, Norman Gimbel & Jacques Demy for "I Will Wait for You" performed by Connie Francis Jimmy Van Heusen & Sammy Cahn for "The September of My Years" performed by Frank Sinatra John Lennon & Paul McCartney for "Yesterday" performed by The Beatles Roger Miller for "King of the Road" performed by Roger Miller
1967	John Lennon Paul McCartney	United Kingdom	"Michelle"	The Beatles	John Barry & Don Black for "Born Free" performed by Andy Williams Mitch Leigh & Joe Darion for "The Impossible Dream" performed by Richard Kiley Paul Francis Webster & Maurice Jarre for "Somewhere, My Love" performed by Ray Conniff Bert Kaempfert, Charles Singleton & Eddie Snyder for "Strangers in the Night" performed by Frank Sinatra
1968	Jimmy Webb	United States	"Up, Up, and Away" *	The 5th Dimension	Jimmy Webb for "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" performed by Glen Campbell Tom Jones & Harvey Schmidt for "My Cup Runneth Over" performed by Ed Ames Bobbie Gentry for "Ode to Billie Joe" performed by Bobbie Gentry John Hartford for "Gentle on My Mind" performed by Glen Campbell	^[11]
1969	Bobby Russell	United States	"Little Green Apples"	O.C. Smith	Tom T. Hall for "Harper Valley PTA" performed by Jeannie C. Riley John Lennon & Paul McCartney for "Hey Jude" performed by The Beatles Bobby Russell for "Honey" performed by Bobby Goldsboro Paul Simon for "Mrs. Robinson" performed by Simon & Garfunkel	^[12]
1970	Joe South	United States	"Games People Play"	Joe South	Larry Kusik, Eddie Snyder & Nino Rota for "A Time For Us" performed by Henry Mancini David Clayton-Thomas for "Spinning Wheel" performed by Blood, Sweat & Tears Burt Bacharach & Hal David for "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" performed by Dionne Warwick Burt Bacharach & Hal David for "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" performed by B. J. Thomas	^[13]
1971	Paul Simon	United States	"Bridge over Troubled Water" *	Simon & Garfunkel	Ray Stevens for "Everything Is Beautiful" performed by Ray Stevens James Taylor for "Fire and Rain" performed by James Taylor John Lennon & Paul McCartney for "Let it Be" performed by The Beatles Roger Nichols & Paul Williams for "We've Only Just Begun" performed by The Carpenters	^[14]
1972	Carole King	United States	"You've Got a Friend"	James Taylor & Carole King	Kris Kristofferson for "Help Me Make It Through the Night" performed by Kris Kristofferson Sid Wayne & Armando Manzanero for "It's Impossible" performed by Perry Como Kris Kristofferson & Fred Foster for "Me and Bobby McGee" performed by Janis Joplin Joe South for "(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden" performed by Lynn Anderson	^[15]
1973	Ewan MacColl	United Kingdom	"The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" *	Roberta Flack	Gilbert O'Sullivan for "Alone Again (Naturally)" performed by Gilbert O'Sullivan Don McLean for "American Pie" performed by Don McLean Neil Diamond for "Song Sung Blue" performed by Neil Diamond Marilyn Bergman, Alan Bergman & Michel Legrand for "The Summer Knows" performed by Michel Legrand	^[16]
1974	Norman Gimbel Charles Fox	United States	"Killing Me Softly with His Song" *	Roberta Flack	Kenny O'Dell for "Behind Closed Doors" performed by Charlie Rich Stevie Wonder for "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" performed by Stevie Wonder Carly Simon for "You're So Vain" performed by Carly Simon Irwin Levine & L. Russell Brown for "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree" performed by Dawn featuring Tony Orlando	^[17]
1975	Marilyn Bergman Alan Bergman Marvin Hamlisch	United States	"The Way We Were"	Barbra Streisand	Gene McDaniels for "Feel Like Makin' Love" performed by Roberta Flack Jeff Barry & Peter Allen for "I Honestly Love You" performed by Olivia Newton-John David Nichtern for "Midnight at the Oasis" performed by Maria Muldaur Paul Williams & Ken Ascher for "You and Me Against the World" performed by Helen Reddy
1976	Stephen Sondheim	United States	"Send in the Clowns"	Judy Collins	Janis Ian for "At Seventeen" performed by Janis Ian Morris Albert for "Feelings" performed by Morris Albert Neil Sedaka & Howard Greenfield for "Love Will Keep Us Together" performed by Captain & Tennille Larry Weiss for "Rhinestone Cowboy" performed by Glen Campbell	^[18]
1977	Bruce Johnston	United States	"I Write the Songs"	Barry Manilow	Bill Danoff for "Afternoon Delight" performed by Starland Vocal Band Neil Sedaka & Howard Greenfield for "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" performed by Neil Sedaka Leon Russell for "This Masquerade" performed by George Benson Gordon Lightfoot for "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" performed by Gordon Lightfoot	^[19]
1978 (tie)	Barbra Streisand Paul Williams — Joe Brooks	United States — United States	"Evergreen (Love Theme from A Star Is Born)" — "You Light Up My Life"	Barbra Streisand — Debby Boone	Richard Leigh for "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue" performed by Crystal Gayle Don Felder, Don Henley & Glenn Frey for "Hotel California" performed by the Eagles Marvin Hamlisch & Carole Bayer Sager for "Nobody Does It Better" performed by Carly Simon Allen Toussaint for "Southern Nights" performed by Glen Campbell	^[20]
1979	Billy Joel	United States	"Just the Way You Are" *	Billy Joel	Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb & Maurice Gibb for "Stayin' Alive" performed by Bee Gees Lionel Richie for "Three Times a Lady" performed by the Commodores Neil Diamond, Alan Bergman & Marilyn Bergman for "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" performed by Neil Diamond & Barbra Streisand Randy Goodrum for "You Needed Me" performed by Anne Murray	^[21]
1980	Kenny Loggins Michael McDonald	United States	"What a Fool Believes" *	The Doobie Brothers	David Foster, Jay Graydon & Bill Champlin for "After the Love Has Gone" performed by Earth, Wind & Fire Rickie Lee Jones for "Chuck E.'s in Love" performed by Rickie Lee Jones Billy Joel for "Honesty" performed by Billy Joel Dino Fekaris & Freddie Perren for "I Will Survive" performed by Gloria Gaynor Lester Abrams & Michael McDonald for "Minute by Minute" performed by The Doobie Brothers Dino Fekaris & Freddie Perren for "Reunited" performed by Peaches & Herb Steve Gibb for "She Believes in Me" performed by Kenny Rogers	^[22]
1981	Christopher Cross	United States	"Sailing" *	Christopher Cross	Michael Gore & Dean Pitchford for "Fame" performed by Irene Cara Amanda McBroom for "The Rose" performed by Bette Midler Lionel Richie for "Lady" performed by Kenny Rogers John Kander & Fred Ebb for "Theme from New York, New York" performed by Frank Sinatra Barry Gibb & Robin Gibb for "Woman in Love" performed by Barbra Streisand	^[23]
1982	Donna Weiss Jackie DeShannon	United States	"Bette Davis Eyes" *	Kim Carnes	Peter Allen, Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager & Christopher Cross for "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)" performed by Christopher Cross Lionel Richie for "Endless Love" performed by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie Bill Withers, William Salter & Ralph MacDonald for "Just the Two of Us" performed by Grover Washington, Jr. with Bill Withers Dolly Parton for "9 to 5" performed by Dolly Parton	^[24]
1983	Johnny Christopher Mark James Wayne Carson	United States	"Always on My Mind"	Willie Nelson	Paul McCartney for "Ebony and Ivory" performed by Paul McCartney & Stevie Wonder David Paich for "Rosanna" performed by Toto Frankie Sullivan & Jim Peternik for "Eye of the Tiger" performed by Survivor Donald Fagen for "I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World)" performed by Donald Fagen	^[25]
1984	Sting	United Kingdom	"Every Breath You Take"	The Police	Lionel Richie for "All Night Long (All Night)" performed by Lionel Richie Michael Jackson for "Beat It" performed by Michael Jackson Michael Jackson for "Billie Jean" performed by Michael Jackson Michael Sembello & Dennis Matkosky for "Maniac" performed by Michael Sembello
1985	Graham Lyle Terry Britten	United States	"What's Love Got to Do with It" *	Tina Turner	Phil Collins for "Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)" performed by Phil Collins Lionel Richie for "Hello" performed by Lionel Richie Stevie Wonder for "I Just Called to Say I Love You" performed by Stevie Wonder Cyndi Lauper & Rob Hyman for "Time after Time" performed by Cyndi Lauper	^[26]
1986	Michael Jackson Lionel Richie	United States	"We Are the World" *	USA for Africa	Mark Knopfler & Sting for "Money for Nothing" performed by Dire Straits Don Henley & Mike Campbell for "The Boys of Summer" performed by Don Henley Daryl Hall for "Everytime You Go Away" performed by Paul Young Mick Jones for "I Want to Know What Love Is" performed by Foreigner	^[27]
1987	Burt Bacharach Carole Bayer Sager	United States	"That's What Friends Are For"	Dionne Warwick & Friends	Peter Gabriel for "Sledgehammer" performed by Peter Gabriel Robert Palmer for "Addicted to Love" performed by Robert Palmer Steve Winwood & Will Jennings for "Higher Love" performed by Steve Winwood Paul Simon for "Graceland" performed by Paul Simon	^[28]
1988	James Horner Barry Mann Cynthia Weil	United States	"Somewhere Out There"	Linda Ronstadt & James Ingram	Ritchie Valens for "La Bamba" performed by Los Lobos U2 for "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" performed by U2 Suzanne Vega for "Luka" performed by Suzanne Vega Michael Masser & Will Jennings for "Didn't We Almost Have It All" performed by Whitney Houston	^[29]
1989	Bobby McFerrin	United States	"Don't Worry, Be Happy" *	Bobby McFerrin	Anita Baker, Skip Scarborough & Randy Holland for "Giving You the Best That I Got" performed by Anita Baker Tracy Chapman for "Fast Car" performed by Tracy Chapman Sting for "Be Still My Beating Heart" performed by Sting Brenda Russell, Jeff Hall & Scott Cutler for "Piano in the Dark" performed by Brenda Russell	^[30]
1990	Larry Henley Jeff Silbar	United States	"Wind Beneath My Wings" *	Bette Midler	Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil & Tom Snow for "Don't Know Much" performed by Linda Ronstadt & Aaron Neville Don Henley & Bruce Hornsby for "The End of the Innocence" performed by Don Henley Billy Joel for "We Didn't Start the Fire" performed by Billy Joel Mike Rutherford & B. A. Robertson for "The Living Years" performed by Mike + The Mechanics	^[31]
1991	Julie Gold	United States	"From a Distance"	Bette Midler	Mariah Carey & Ben Margulies for "Vision of Love" performed by Mariah Carey Phil Collins for "Another Day in Paradise" performed by Phil Collins Prince for "Nothing Compares 2 U" performed by Sinéad O'Connor Chynna Phillips, Glen Ballard & Carnie Wilson for "Hold On" performed by Wilson Phillips	^[32]
1992	Irving Gordon	United States	"Unforgettable" *	Natalie Cole with Nat King Cole	Bryan Adams, Robert Lange & Michael Kamen for "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You" performed by Bryan Adams Amy Grant & Keith Thomas for "Baby Baby" performed by Amy Grant Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills & Michael Stipe for "Losing My Religion" performed by R.E.M. Marc Cohn for "Walking in Memphis" performed by Marc Cohn	^[33]
1993	Eric Clapton Will Jennings	United Kingdom	"Tears in Heaven" *	Eric Clapton	Don Von Tress for "Achy Breaky Heart" performed by Billy Ray Cyrus Alan Menken & Howard Ashman for "Beauty and the Beast" performed by Celine Dion & Peabo Bryson k.d. lang & Ben Mink for "Constant Craving" performed by k.d. lang Wendy Waldman, Jon Lind & Phil Galdston for "Save the Best for Last" performed by Vanessa Williams	^[34]
1994	Alan Menken Tim Rice	United States	"A Whole New World"	Peabo Bryson & Regina Belle	Billy Joel for "The River of Dreams" performed by Billy Joel Jim Steinman for "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)" performed by Meat Loaf Sting for "'If I Ever Lose My Faith in You" performed by Sting Neil Young for "Harvest Moon" performed by Neil Young	^[35]
1995	Bruce Springsteen	United States	"Streets of Philadelphia"	Bruce Springsteen	David Baerwald, Bill Bottrell, Wynn Cooper, Sheryl Crow & Kevin Gilbert for "All I Wanna Do" performed by Sheryl Crow Elton John & Tim Rice for "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" performed by Elton John Elton John & Tim Rice for "Circle of Life" performed by Elton John Gary Baker & Frank J. Myers for "I Swear" versions performed by John Michael Montgomery & All-4-One	^[36]
1996	Seal	United Kingdom	"Kiss from a Rose" *	Seal	Eric Bazilian for "One of Us" performed by Joan Osborne Maribeth Derry, Sam Diamond & Jennifer Kimball for "I Can Love You Like That" versions performed by John Michael Montgomery & All-4-One R. Kelly for "You Are Not Alone" performed by Michael Jackson Glen Ballard & Alanis Morissette for "You Oughta Know" performed by Alanis Morissette	^[37]
1997	Gordon Kennedy Wayne Kirkpatrick Tommy Sims	United States	"Change the World" *	Eric Clapton	Tracy Chapman for "Give Me One Reason" performed by Tracy Chapman Diane Warren for "Because You Loved Me" performed by Celine Dion Bill Mack for "Blue" performed by LeAnn Rimes Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds for "Exhale (Shoop Shoop)" performed by Whitney Houston	^[38]
1998	Shawn Colvin John Leventhal	United States	"Sunny Came Home" *	Shawn Colvin	Eric Stefani & Gwen Stefani for "Don't Speak" performed by No Doubt Diane Warren for "How Do I Live" versions performed by LeAnn Rimes & Trisha Yearwood Paula Cole for "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" performed by Paula Cole R. Kelly for "I Believe I Can Fly" performed by R. Kelly	^[39]
1999	James Horner Will Jennings	Canada	"My Heart Will Go On" *	Celine Dion	Diane Warren for "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" performed by Aerosmith John Rzeznik for "Iris" performed by The Goo Goo Dolls Kirk Franklin for "Lean on Me" performed by Kirk Franklin Robert Lange & Shania Twain for "You're Still the One" performed by Shania Twain	^[40]
2000	Itaal Shur Rob Thomas	United States	"Smooth" *	Santana featuring Rob Thomas	Andreas Carlsson & Max Martin for "I Want It That Way" performed by Backstreet Boys Desmond Child & Robi Dräco Rosa for "Livin' la Vida Loca" performed by Ricky Martin Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins & Dallas Austin for "Unpretty" performed by TLC Shania Twain & Robert Lange for "You've Got a Way" performed by Shania Twain	^[41]
2001	Adam Clayton David Evans Larry Mullen, Jr. Paul Hewson	Ireland	"Beautiful Day" *	U2	Beyoncé, Rodney Jerkins, LaShawn Daniels, Fred Jerkins III, LeToya, LaTavia Roberson & Kelly Rowland for "Say My Name" performed by Destiny's Child Macy Gray, Jinsoo Lim, Jeremy Ruzumna & David Wilder for "I Try" performed by Macy Gray Stephanie Bentley & Holly Lamar for "Breathe" performed by Faith Hill Mark Sanders & Tia Sillers for "I Hope You Dance" performed by Lee Ann Womack	^[42]
2002	Alicia Keys	United States	"Fallin'"	Alicia Keys	India.Arie, Carlos "Six July" Broady & Shannon Sanders for "Video" performed by India.Arie Charlie Colon, Rob Hotchkiss, Patrick Monahan, Jimmy Stafford & Scott Underwood for "Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)" performed by Train U2 for "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of" performed by U2 Nelly Furtado for "I'm Like a Bird" performed by Nelly Furtado	^[43]
2003	Jesse Harris	United States	"Don't Know Why" *	Norah Jones	Vanessa Carlton for "A Thousand Miles" performed by Vanessa Carlton Avril Lavigne & The Matrix for "Complicated" performed by Avril Lavigne Bruce Springsteen for "The Rising" performed by Bruce Springsteen Alan Jackson for "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)" performed by Alan Jackson	^[44]
2004	Richard Marx Luther Vandross	United States	"Dance with My Father"	Luther Vandross	Linda Perry for "Beautiful" performed by Christina Aguilera Avril Lavigne & The Matrix for "I'm with You" performed by Avril Lavigne Jorge Calderón & Warren Zevon for "Keep Me In Your Heart" performed by Warren Zevon Jeff Bass, Eminem & Luis Resto for "Lose Yourself" performed by Eminem	^[45]
2005	John Mayer	United States	"Daughters"	John Mayer	Alicia Keys for "If I Ain't Got You" performed by Alicia Keys Rhymefest & Kanye West for "Jesus Walks" performed by Kanye West Tim Nichols & Craig Wiseman for "Live Like You Were Dying" performed by Tim McGraw Daniel Estrin & Douglas Robb for "The Reason" performed by Hoobastank	^[46]
2006	Adam Clayton David Evans Larry Mullen, Jr. Paul Hewson	Ireland	"Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own"	U2	Johntá Austin, Babyface, Mariah Carey, Jermaine Dupri, Manuel Seal, Jr., Darnell Bristol, Sid Johnson, Patrick Moten, Sandra Sully & Bobby Womack for "We Belong Together" performed by Mariah Carey Bobby Boyd, Jeff Hanna & Marcus Hummon for "Bless the Broken Road" performed by Rascal Flatts Bruce Springsteen for "Devils & Dust" performed by Bruce Springsteen John Legend & will.i.am for "Ordinary People" performed by John Legend	^[47]
2007	Emily Robison Martie Maguire Natalie Maines Dan Wilson	United States	"Not Ready to Make Nice" *	Dixie Chicks	Johnta Austin, Mary J. Blige, Bryan-Michael Cox & Jason Perry for "Be Without You" performed by Mary J. Blige James Blunt, Amanda Ghost & Sacha Skarbek for "You're Beautiful" performed by James Blunt John Beck, Steve Chrisanthou & Corinne Bailey Rae for "Put Your Records On" performed by Corinne Bailey Rae Brett James, Hillary Lindsey & Gordie Sampson for "Jesus, Take the Wheel" performed by Carrie Underwood	^[48]
2008	Amy Winehouse	United Kingdom	"Rehab" *	Amy Winehouse	Josh Kear & Chris Tompkins for "Before He Cheats" performed by Carrie Underwood Tom Higgenson for "Hey There Delilah" performed by Plain White T's Corinne Bailey Rae for "Like a Star" performed by Corinne Bailey Rae Kuk Harrell, Jay-Z, Christopher Stewart & The-Dream for "Umbrella" performed by Rihanna featuring Jay-Z	^[49]
2009	Guy Berryman Jonathan Buckland Will Champion Chris Martin	United Kingdom	"Viva la Vida"	Coldplay	Estelle, Keith Harris, John Legend, Josh Lopez, Caleb Speir, Kanye West & will.i.am for "American Boy" (by Estelle featuring Kanye West) Adele Adkins & Eg White for "Chasing Pavements" performed by Adele Jason Mraz for "I'm Yours" performed by Jason Mraz Sara Bareilles for "Love Song" performed by Sara Bareilles	^[50]
2010	Thaddis Harrell Beyoncé Knowles Terius Nash Christopher Stewart	United States	"Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)"	Beyoncé	Lady Gaga & RedOne for "Poker Face" performed by Lady Gaga Hod David & Musze for "Pretty Wings" performed by Maxwell Caleb Followill, Jared Followill, Matthew Followill & Nathan Followill for "Use Somebody" performed by Kings of Leon Liz Rose & Taylor Swift for "You Belong With Me" performed by Taylor Swift	^[51]
2011	Dave Haywood Josh Kear Charles Kelley Hillary Scott	United States	"Need You Now" *	Lady Antebellum	Ray LaMontagne for "Beg Steal Or Borrow" performed by Ray LaMontagne and The Pariah Dogs Brody Brown, Cee Lo Green, Ari Levine, Philip Lawrence & Bruno Mars for "F*** You" performed by Cee Lo Green Tom Douglas & Allen Shamblin for "The House That Built Me" performed by Miranda Lambert Alexander Grant, Skylar Grey & Marshall Mathers for "Love the Way You Lie" performed by Eminem featuring Rihanna	^[52]
2012	Adele Adkins Paul Epworth	United Kingdom	"Rolling in the Deep"*	Adele	Jeff Bhasker, Malik Jones, Warren Trotter & Kanye West for "All of the Lights" performed by Kanye West, Rihanna, Kid Cudi & Fergie Ted Dwane, Ben Lovett, Marcus Mumford & Country Winston for "The Cave" performed by Mumford & Sons Brody Brown, Claude Kelly, Philip Lawrence, Ari Levine, Bruno Mars & Andrew Wyatt for "Grenade" performed by Bruno Mars Justin Vernon for "Holocene" performed by Bon Iver	^[53]

Grammy Awards
54th Grammy Awards
The Grammy awards are named for the trophy: a small, gilded gramophone statuette.
Awarded for	Outstanding achievements in the music industry
Presented by	National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences
Country	United States
First awarded	1959
Official website	grammy.com
Television coverage
Network	NBC (1959–1970) ABC (1971–1972) CBS (1973–present)

Melissa Etheridge
Etheridge at a ceremony to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in September 2011
Background information
Birth name	Melissa Lou Etheridge
Born	(1961-05-29) May 29, 1961 (age 51)
Origin	Leavenworth, Kansas, U.S.
Genres	Heartland rock,^[1] folk rock, blues rock
Occupations	Singer-songwriter, activist
Instruments	Vocals, guitar, piano, harmonica, mandolin
Years active	1988–present
Labels	Island
Website	www.melissaetheridge.com

Year	Nominated work	Award	Result
1989	"Bring Me Some Water"	Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female	Nominated
1990	"Brave and Crazy"	Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female	Nominated
1991	"The Angels"	Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female	Nominated
1993	"Ain't It Heavy"	Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female	Won
1995	"Come to My Window"	Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female	Won
	"Come to My Window"	Best Rock Song	Nominated
	"I'm the Only One"	Best Rock Song	Nominated
2000	"Angels Would Fall"	Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female	Nominated
	"Angels Would Fall"	Best Rock Song	Nominated
	Breakdown	Best Rock Album	Nominated
2001	"Enough of Me"	Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female	Nominated
2002	"I Want To Be In Love"	Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female	Nominated
2003	"The Weakness in Me"	Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female	Nominated
2005	"Breathe"	Best Rock Vocal Performance, Solo	Nominated
2007	"I Need To Wake Up"	Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media	Nominated

Rank	1st	2nd	3rd
Artist	Georg Solti	Quincy Jones, Alison Krauss	Pierre Boulez
Total awards	31	27	26

Persondata
Name	Etheridge, Melissa
Alternative names
Short description	Musician
Date of birth	May 29, 1961
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death

Blake Shelton
Shelton in April 2010
Background information
Birth name	Blake Tollison Shelton
Born	(1976-06-18) June 18, 1976 (age 36)^[1] Ada, Oklahoma, United States
Genres	Country
Occupations	Singer
Instruments	Vocals, guitar
Years active	2001–present
Labels	Giant, Warner Bros. Nashville, Reprise Nashville
Associated acts	Bobby Braddock, Miranda Lambert, Trace Adkins, Adam Levine, Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green
Website	blakeshelton.com

Year	Association	Category	Result
2001	Academy of Country Music	Top New Male Vocalist	Nominated
2002		Top New Male Vocalist	Nominated
2003		Vocal Event of the Year – "The Truth About Men" (with Tracy Byrd, Andy Griggs and Montgomery Gentry)	Nominated
2003	Country Music Association	Horizon Award	Nominated
2003	Country Music Association	Vocal Event of the Year – "The Truth About Men" (with Tracy Byrd, Andy Griggs and Montgomery Gentry)	Nominated
2010	Academy of Country Music	Vocal Event of the Year – "Hillbilly Bone" (with Trace Adkins)	Won
	CMT Music Awards	Collaborative Video of the Year – "Hillbilly Bone" (with Trace Adkins)	Won
	Country Music Association	Male Vocalist of The Year	Won
	Country Music Association	Vocal Event of the Year – "Hillbilly Bone" (with Trace Adkins)	Won
2011	CMT Music Awards	Male Video of the Year – "Who Are You When I'm Not Looking"	Won
	CMT Music Awards	Best Web Video of the Year – "Kiss My Country Ass"	Won
	Teen Choice Awards	Choice Music: Male Country Artist	Nominated
	Teen Choice Awards	Choice Music: Country Single – "Honey Bee"	Nominated
	Country Music Association	Entertainer of the Year	Nominated
		Male Vocalist of the Year	Won
		Single of the Year – "Honey Bee"	Nominated
		Album of the Year – All About Tonight	Nominated
		Music Video of the Year – "Honey Bee"	Nominated
	American Music Awards	Favorite Country Male Artist	Won
2012	Peoples Choice Awards	Favorite Male Artist	Nominated
	Peoples Choice Awards	Favorite Country Artist	Nominated
	Grammy Award	Best Country Album – "Red River Blue"	Nominated
		Best Country Solo Performance – "Honey Bee"	Nominated
		Best Country Song – "God Gave Me You"	Nominated
	CMT Teddy Awards^[22]	Best Flirting Video – "Honey Bee"	Won
	Academy of Country Music Awards	Entertainer of The Year	Nominated
	Academy of Country Music Awards	Male Vocalist of The Year	Won
	CMT Music Awards	Video of The Year - "God Gave Me You"	Pending
		Male Video of The Year - "God Gave Me You"	Pending
		CMT Performance of The Year - "Footlose"	Pending
	Teen Choice Awards	Male Country Artist	Pending
		Country Song - "God Gave Me You"	Pending
		Male Artist	Pending

Persondata
Name	Shelton, Blake
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1976-06-18
Place of birth	Ada, Oklahoma
Date of death
Place of death

Make changes yourself !

Contents

Related pages:

Contents

Related pages:

Contents

[edit] 2004–present: Lucky, cancer diagnosis, Academy Awards and Fearless Love

Related pages:

Contents

[edit] 1998–2002: Blake Shelton

[edit] 2002–2003: The Dreamer

[edit] 2004–2006: Blake Shelton's Barn & Grill

[edit] 2006–2008: Pure BS

[edit] 2008–2009: Startin' Fires

[edit] 2009–2011: Hillbilly Bone and All About Tonight

[edit] 2011–present: Red River Blue

[edit] 2011–present: The Voice

Related pages: