The Grammy Hall of Fame Award is a special Grammy award established in 1973 to honor recordings that are at least twenty-five years old and that have "qualitative or historical significance". The Award honors recordings (singles and albums) in all genres, including classical, rock, country, Hip hop music, R&B, opera, theatre and film, from the turn of the 20th century through the current eligibility cutoff date. To date (2010), there are approximately 850 Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients out of perhaps hundreds of thousands of albums and singles that have been recorded since 1900. A complete list of recordings awarded this title appear below, divided into four sections.

Alphabetical listing by title:

• List of Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients A-D
• List of Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients E-I
• List of Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients J-P
• List of Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients Q-Z

See also[link]

• Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award

External links[link]

• Official website

Jesse Jane holding two F.A.M.E. Awards in 2007

Alexis Texas, Tori Black, and Lexi Belle displaying their trophies backstage at the F.A.M.E. Awards in 2010

The Fans of Adult Media and Entertainment Awards (or F.A.M.E) were created in 2006 by Genesis, Adam & Eve, WantedList and AVN as a means for the general public to vote for their favorites. The awards are presented during the Erotica LA show.

Voting consists of two rounds. The first round is the nomination round; the top eight names from the first round are then forwarded to the final voting round. For the 2007 awards, over 100,000 votes were cast.^[1] Below are the winners for 2006,^[2] 2007,^[3] 2008^[4] and 2009.^[5]

Winners[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official site
• 2008 F.A.M.E Award Winners

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (February 2012)

Dionne Warwick
Background information
Birth name	Marie Dionne Warrick
Born	(1940-12-12) December 12, 1940 (age 71) East Orange, New Jersey, United States
Genres	R&B, soul, urban, soft rock, adult contemporary, quiet storm, pop
Occupations	Singer, actress
Instruments	Vocals
Years active	1962–present
Labels	Scepter (1962–1971) Warner Bros. (1972–1977) Arista (1979–1995) Concord (2005–2007) Rhino (2008–present)
Associated acts	Burt Bacharach, The Spinners, Isaac Hayes, Sacha Distel, Whitney Houston, Jeffrey Osborne, June Pointer, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Dieter Bohlen, Gladys Knight, Patti LaBelle, Smokey Robinson, Chuck Jackson, Barry Manilow, Bee Gees, Luther Vandross, Marvin Gaye, Kashif, Howard Hewett, Johnny Mathis

Dionne Warwick (born Marie Dionne Warrick; December 12, 1940) is an American singer, actress and TV show host, who became a United Nations Global Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization, and a United States Ambassador of Health.

Having been in a partnership with Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Warwick ranks among the 40 biggest hit makers of the entire rock era (1955–1999), based on the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles Charts. Warwick ranks second only to Aretha Franklin as the most-charted female vocalist with 56 singles making the Billboard Hot 100 between 1962 and 1998. She is also a cousin of Whitney Houston.

Biography[link]

Early life and career[link]

Warwick was born in East Orange, New Jersey, to Mancel Warwick (1911–1977), who began his career as a Pullman porter and subsequently became a chef, a gospel record promoter for Chess Records and later a Certified Public Accountant; and Lee Drinkard Warwick (1920–2005), manager of The Drinkard Singers (see below). Warwick had a sister Delia "Dee Dee" and a brother, Mancel Jr., who was killed in an accident in 1968 at the age of 21.^{[citation needed]}. She has African American, Native American, Brazilian and Dutch ancestry.^[1]

Dionne's career as a singer was almost inevitable considering her family background. Dionne's mother, aunts and uncles were members of the Drinkard Singers, the renowned family gospel group and RCA recording artists that frequently performed throughout the New York metropolitan area. The Drinkard family originated in Blakley, Georgia and migrated to Newark, New Jersey in the late '20s. The family was composed of Nitcholas "Nitch" Drinkard, and Delia Drinkard, Warwick's grandparents, and their children: William, Lee (Warwick's mother), Marie "Rebbie" (Warwick's namesake), Hansom, Anne, Larry, Nicky, and Emily "Cissy" (who is the mother of Warwick's late cousin, Whitney Houston). Dionne's paternal grandfather Elzae Warrick was the preacher at St. Luke's AME, the church attended by the Drinkard family. Lee Drinkard and the preacher's son, Mancel, were later married, and Dionne became the Drinkard family's first grandchild on December 12, 1940. The original Drinkard Singers (known as the Drinkard Jubilairs) consisted of Cissy, Anne, Larry, and Nicky. Marie instructed the group and they were managed by Lee. As they became more successful, Lee and Marie also began performing with the group, and they were augmented by Judy Guoins, later known as pop/R&B singer Judy Clay, whom Lee had unofficially adopted. Elvis Presley eventually expressed an interest in having them join his touring entourage. Dionne began singing gospel as a child at the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey.^[2] She performed her first gospel solo at the age of six and frequently joined The Drinkard Singers. Her first televised performances were in the mid-and late 1950s with the Drinkard Singers on local television stations in New Jersey and New York City. Warwick grew up in a racially mixed middle-class neighborhood. She stated in an interview on The Biography Channel in 2002 that the neighborhood in East Orange "was literally the United Nations of neighborhoods. We had every nationality, every creed, every religion right there on our street." Warwick was untouched by the harsher aspects of racial intolerance and discrimination until her early professional career, when she began touring nationally.

Warwick graduated from East Orange High School in 1958 and was awarded a Scholarship in Music Education to the Hartt College of Music in Hartford, Connecticut (a school from which she earned her Doctorate of Music Education in 1973).

Also, in 1958, Warwick, Myrna Utley, Carol Slade, and Warwick's sister Delia, who by this time had begun to be known professionally as Dee Dee Warwick, formed their own group, which they called called "The Gospelaires."^[3] Their first performance together was at the Apollo Theater, where they won the weekly amateur contest.^[4] Various other singers joined The Gospelaires from time to time, including Judy Clay, Cissy Houston, and Doris Troy, whose chart selection "Just One Look," when she recorded it in 1963, featured backing vocals from the Gospelaires. After various personnel changes (Dionne and Doris left the group after achieving solo success) The Gospelaires eventually became the recording group the Sweet Inspirations, which had minor chart success but were much sought-after as studio background singers. The Gospelaires and later the Sweet Inspirations performed on dozens and dozens of records cut in New York City for artist such as Garnet Mims, the Drifters, Jerry Butler, and later Dionne's recordings, Aretha Franklin, and Elvis Presley.

Warwick recalled, in her 2002 A&E Biography, that "a man came running frantically backstage at The Apollo and said he needed background singers for a session for Sam 'The Man' Taylor and old big-mouth here spoke up and said 'We'll do it!' and we left and did the session. I wish I remembered the gentleman's name because he was responsible for the beginning of my professional career."

The backstage encounter led to the group being asked to sing background sessions at recording studios in New York. Soon, the group was in demand in New York music circles for their background work for such artists as The Drifters, Ben E. King, Chuck Jackson, Dinah Washington, Ronnie "The Hawk" Hawkins, and Solomon Burke among many others.

Warwick remembered, in her A&E Biography, that after school, they would catch a bus from East Orange to the Port Authority Terminal, and then subway to recording studios in Manhattan, perform their background gigs and be back at home in East Orange in time to do their school homework. The background vocal work would continue while Warwick pursued her studies at Hartt.

While she was performing background on The Drifters's recording of "Mexican Divorce," Warwick's voice and star presence were noticed by the song's composer, Burt Bacharach, a Brill Building songwriter who was writing songs with many other songwriters, including lyricist Hal David. According to a July 14, 1967, article on Warwick from Time, Bacharach stated, "She has a tremendous strong side and a delicacy when singing softly—like miniature ships in bottles." Musically, she was "no play-safe girl. What emotion I could get away with!" And what complexity, compared with the usual run of pop songs.

During the session, Bacharach asked Warwick, if she would be interested in recording demonstration recordings of his compositions to be used to pitch the tunes to record labels. One such demo, "It's Love That Really Counts" -- destined to be recorded by Scepter-signed act The Shirelles -- caught the attention of Scepter Records President Florence Greenberg. Greenberg, according to Current Biography 1969 Yearbook, told Bacharach, "Forget the song, get the girl!"

Warwick was signed to Bacharach's and David's production company, according to Warwick, which in turn was signed to Scepter Records in 1962 by Greenberg. The partnership would provide Bacharach with the freedom to produce Warwick without the control of recording company executives and company A&R men. Warwick's musical ability and education would also allow Bacharach to compose more challenging tunes. The demo version of "It's Love That Really Counts," along with her original demo of "Make It Easy on Yourself," would surface on Dionne's debut Scepter album, titled Presenting Dionne Warwick, which was released early in 1963.

Early stardom[link]

Her first solo single for Scepter Records was released in November, 1962. The song was titled "Don't Make Me Over", the title (according to the A&E Biography of Dionne Warwick) supplied by Warwick herself, when she snapped the phrase at producers Burt Bacharach and Hal David in anger. Warwick found "Make It Easy on Yourself" —- a song on which she had recorded the original demo and had wanted to be her first single release —- had been given to another artist, Jerry Butler. From the phrase, Bacharach and David created their first top 40 pop hit (#21) and a top 5 U.S. R&B hit. Warrick's name was misspelled on the single's label, and she began using the new spelling (i.e., "Warwick") both professionally and personally.^[5] According to the July 14, 1967 Time magazine article, after "Don't Make Me Over" hit in 1962, she answered the call of her manager ("C'mon, baby, you gotta go"), left school and went on a tour of France, where critics crowned her "Paris' Black Pearl," having been introduced on stage at Paris Olympia that year by Marlene Dietrich. Rhapsodized Jean Monteaux in Arts: "The play of this voice makes you think sometimes of an eel, of a storm, of a cradle, a knot of seaweed, a dagger. It is not a voice so much as an organ. You could write fugues for Warwick's voice."

The two immediate follow-ups to "Don't Make Me Over" —- "This Empty Place" (with "B" Side "Wishin' and Hopin'" later covered by Dusty Springfield) and "Make The Music Play" -— charted briefly in the top 100. Her fourth single, "Anyone Who Had a Heart," released in December 1963, was Warwick's first top 10 pop hit (#8) in the U.S. and also an international hit. This was followed by "Walk On By" in April 1964, a major international hit and million seller that solidified her career. For the rest of the 1960s, Warwick was a fixture on the U.S. and Canadian charts, and much of Warwick's output from 1962 to 1971 was written and produced by the Bacharach/David team.

Warwick weathered the British Invasion better than most American artists. Her UK hits were most notably "Walk On By" and "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" In the UK, a number of Bacharach-David-Warwick songs were covered by UK singers Cilla Black, Sandie Shaw and Dusty Springfield, most notably Black's "Anyone Who Had a Heart" which went to #1 in the UK. This upset Warwick and she has described feeling insulted when told that in the UK, record company executives wanted her songs recorded by someone else. Warwick even met Cilla Black while on tour in the UK. She recalled what she said to her: "I told her that "You're My World" would be my next single in the States. I honestly believe that if I'd sneezed on my next record, then Cilla would have sneezed on hers too. There was no imagination in her recording." [1] [2] "You're My World"--recorded in no time by Black—was not released as a single by Warwick, but it did appear on a later album, Dionne Warwick in Valley of the Dolls, released in 1968.

Warwick was named the Bestselling Female Vocalist in the Cash Box Magazine Poll in 1964, with six chart hits in that year.^{[citation needed]} Cash Box also named her the Top Female Vocalist in 1969, 1970 and 1971. In the 1967 Cash Box Poll, she was second to Petula Clark, and in 1968's poll second to Aretha Franklin. Playboy's influential Music Poll of 1970 named her the Top Female Vocalist^{[citation needed]}. In 1969, Harvard's Hasty Pudding Society named her Woman of the Year.^{[citation needed]}

In a May 21, 1965 Time Magazine cover article entitled "The Sound of the Sixties," Dionne Warwick's sound was described as follows:
"Swinging World. Scholarly articles probe the relationship between the Beatles and the nouvelle vague films of Jean-Luc Godard, discuss 'the brio and elegance' of Dionne Warwick's singing style as a 'pleasurable but complex' event to be 'experienced without condescension.' In chic circles, anyone damning rock 'n' roll is labeled not only square but uncultured. For inspirational purposes, such hip artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers and Andy Warhol occasionally paint while listening to rock 'n' roll music. Explains Warhol: 'It makes me mindless, and I paint better.' After gallery openings in Manhattan, the black-tie gatherings often adjourn to a discotheque."

Mid-1960s to early 1970s[link]

The mid-1960s to early 1970s became an even more successful time period for Warwick, who saw a string of Gold selling albums and Top 20 and Top 10 hit singles. "Message to Michael", a Bacharach-David composition that the duo was certain was a "man's song", became a top 10 hit for Warwick in May 1966. The January 1967 LP Here Where There Is Love was her first RIAA certified Gold Album and featured "Alfie", and two 1966 hits: "Trains and Boats and Planes" and "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself". "Alfie" had become a radio hit when disc jockeys across the nation began to play the album cut early in 1967. "Alfie" was released as the "B" side of a Bacharach/David ballad, "The Beginning of Loneliness" in which charted in the Hot 100. Disc jockeys flipped the single and made it a double-sided hit. Bacharach had been contracted to produce "Alfie" for the Michael Caine film of the same name and wanted Dionne Warwick to sing the tune but the British producers wanted a British subject to cut the tune. Cilla Black was selected to record the song, and her version peaked at #95 upon its release in the USA. A cover version by Cher used in the USA prints of the film peaked at #33. In the UK and Australia, Black's version was a Top 10 hit.^{[citation needed]} In a 1983 concert appearance televised on PBS, Warwick states she was the 43rd person to record "Alfie", at Bacharach's insistence, who felt Dionne could make it a big hit. Warwick, at first, balked at recording the tune and asked Bacharach "How many more versions of Alfie do you need?" to which Bacharach replied "Just one more, yours." Bacharach took Warwick into the studio with his new arrangement and cut the tune the way he wanted it to be, which she nailed in one take. Warwick's version peaked at #15 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #1 on both the R&B Chart and the AC Charts.^{[citation needed]} Warwick performed the song at the Academy Awards in 1967. Today, "Alfie" is considered a signature song for Warwick.

Later that same year, Warwick earned her first RIAA Gold Single for U.S. sales of over one million units for the single "I Say a Little Prayer" (from her album The Windows of the World). When disc jockeys across the nation began to play the track from the album in the fall of 1967 and demanded its release as a single, Florence Greenberg, President of Scepter Records, complied and "I Say a Little Prayer" became Warwick's biggest US hit to that point, reaching #4 on the U.S. and Canadian Charts and # 8 on the R & B Charts. Aretha Franklin would cover the tune a year later hitting #10 on the hot 100,#3 on the R&B charts as well a turning the song into a million seller as well. The tune was also the first RIAA certified USA million seller for Bacharach-David.^{[citation needed]}

Her follow-up to "I Say a Little Prayer", "(Theme from) Valley of the Dolls", was unusual in several respects. It was not written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, it was the "B" side of her "I Say a Little Prayer" single, and it was a song that she almost didn't record. While the film version of Valley of the Dolls was being made, actress Barbara Parkins suggested that Warwick be considered to sing the film's theme song, written by songwriting team Andre and Dory Previn. The song was to be recorded by Judy Garland, who was fired from the film. Warwick performed the song, and when the film became a success in the early weeks of 1968, disc jockeys flipped the single and made the single one of the biggest double-sided hits of the rock era and another million seller. At the time, RIAA rules allowed only one side of a double-sided hit single to be certified as Gold, but Scepter awarded Warwick an "in-house award" to recognize "(Theme from) Valley of the Dolls" as a million selling tune.

Warwick had re-recorded a Pat Williams-arranged version of the theme at A&R Studios in New York because contractual restrictions would not allow the Warwick version from the film to be included in the 20th Century Fox soundtrack LP. The LP Dionne Warwick in Valley of the Dolls, released in early 1968 and containing the re-recorded version of the movie theme (#2–4 weeks), "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" and several new Bacharach-David compositions, hit the #6 position on the Billboard Hot 100 Album Chart and would remain on the chart for over a year. The film soundtrack LP, without Warwick vocals, failed to impress the public, while Dionne Warwick in Valley of the Dolls earned an RIAA Gold certification.

The single "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?", an international million seller and a Top 10 hit in several countries, including the UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Japan and Mexico, was also a double sided hit with the "B" side "Let Me Be Lonely" charting at #79.

More hits followed into 1971 including "Promises, Promises" (#19, 1968); "Who Is Gonna Love Me" (#32, 1968) with "B" side, "(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me" becoming another double-sided hit; "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" (#6, 1969); "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" (#15, 1969); "This Girl's in Love with You" (#7, 1969); "Make It Easy on Yourself" (#37, 1970); "Who Is Gonna Love Me" (#33, 1968); "The April Fools" (#37, 1969); "Let Me Go to Him" (#32, 1970); and "Paper Mache" (#43, 1970). Warwick's final Bacharach/David penned single was March 1971's "Who Gets the Guy" and her final "official" Scepter single release was "He's Moving On" backed with "Amanda" both from the soundtrack of the motion picture adaptation of Jacqueline Susann's The Love Machine.

Warwick had become the priority act of Scepter Records, according to the website "The Scepter Records Story" and producer/A&R chief, Luther Dixon in a 2002 A&E Biography of Burt Bacharach, with the release of "Anyone Who Had a Heart" in 1963. Other Scepter LPs certified RIAA Gold include Dionne Warwick's Golden Hits Part 1 released in 1967 and The Dionne Warwicke Story: A Decade of Gold released in 1971. By the end of 1971, Dionne Warwick had sold an estimated thirty-five million singles and albums internationally in less than nine years and more than 16 million singles in the USA alone. Exact figures of Warwick's sales are unknown and probably underestimated, due to Scepter Records apparently lax accounting policies and the company policy of not submitting recordings for RIAA audit. Dionne Warwick became the first Scepter artist to request RIAA audits of her recordings in 1967 with the release of "I Say a Little Prayer."

On Wednesday, September 17, 1969, CBS Television aired Dionne Warwick's first television special entitled "The Dionne Warwick Chevy Special." Dionne's guests were Burt Bacharach, George Kirby, Glen Campbell, and Creedence Clearwater Revival.

In 1971, Dionne Warwick left the family atmosphere of Scepter Records for Warner Bros. Records, for a $5 million contract, the most lucrative recording contract ever given to a female vocalist up to that time, according to Variety. Warwick's last LP for Scepter was the aforementioned soundtrack for the motion picture The Love Machine (in which she appeared in an uncredited cameo), released in July 1971. In 1975, Bacharach and David sued Scepter Records for an accurate accounting of royalties due the team from their recordings with Warwick and labelmate B.J. Thomas. They were awarded almost $600,000 and the rights to all Bacharach/David recordings on the Scepter label. The label, with the defection of Warwick to Warner Bros. Records, filed for bankruptcy in 1975 and was sold to Springboard International Records in 1976.

Following her signing with Warners, with Bacharach and David as writers and producers, Dionne returned to New York City's A&R Studios in late 1971 to begin recording her first album for the new label, the self-titled album Dionne (not to be confused with her later Arista debut album) in January 1972. The album peaked at #57 on the Billboard Hot 100 Album Chart. In 1972, Burt Bacharach and Hal David scored and wrote the tunes for the motion picture Lost Horizon. But the film was panned by the critics, and in the fallout from the film, the songwriting duo decided to terminate their working relationship. The break-up left Dionne devoid of their services as her producers and songwriters. Dionne was contractually obligated to fulfill her contract with Warners without Bacharach and David and she would team with a variety of producers during her tenure with the label.

Faced with the prospect of being sued by Warner Bros. Records due to the breakup of Bacharach/David and their failure to honor their contract with Dionne, she filed a $5.5 million lawsuit against her former partners for breach of contract. The suit was settled out of court in 1979 for $5 million including the rights to all Warwick recordings produced by Bacharach and David.

Warwick, for years an aficionado of psychic phenomena, was advised by astrologer Linda Goodman in 1971 to add a small "e" to her last name, making Warwick "WARWICKe" for good luck and to recognize her married name and her spouse, actor and drummer William "Bill" Elliott. Goodman convinced Warwick that the extra small "e" would add a vibration needed to balance her last name and bring her even more good fortune in her marriage and her professional life. Unfortunately, Goodman proved to be mistaken about this. The extra "e," according to Dionne, "was the worst thing I could have done in retrospect, and in 1975 I finally got rid of that damn 'e' and became 'Dionne Warwick' again." She is a great admirer of Brazilian music, and in addition to a summer house in Bahia and another in the Jardim Botanico in Rio de Janeiro Dionne performs on a somewhat regular basis alongside renowned artists such as Ivan Lins, Simone, Jorge Ben Jor, among others.

Warner era (1972–1978)[link]

Dionne Warwick in 1973 by Allan Warren.

Without the guidance and songwriting that Bacharach/David had provided, Warwick's career stalled in the 1970s. There were no big hits during the decade aside from 1974's "Then Came You", recorded as a duet with the Spinners and produced by Thom Bell. Bell later noted, "Dionne made a (strange) face when we finished [the song]. She didn't like it much, but I knew we had something. So we ripped a dollar in two, signed each half and exchanged them. I told her, 'If it doesn't go number one, I'll send you my half.' When it took off, Dionne sent hers back. There was an apology on it." It was her first U.S. #1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. Other than this success, Warwick's five years on Warner Bros. Records produced no other major hits. Two notable songs recorded during this period were "His House and Me" and "Once You Hit The Road" (#79 pop, #5 R&B, #22 Adult Contemporary) — both of which were produced in 1975 by Thom Bell.

Warwick recorded five unsuccessful albums with Warners: Dionne (1972), produced by Bacharach and David; Just Being Myself (1973), produced by Holland-Dozier-Holland; Then Came You (1975), produced by Jerry Ragovoy; Track of the Cat (1975), produced by Thom Bell; and Love at First Sight (1977), produced by Steve Barri and Michael Omartian. The singer's five-year contract with Warners expired in 1977, and with that, Warwick ended her stay at the label.

The '80s: Move to Arista[link]

With the move to Arista Records and the release of her RIAA certified million seller "I'll Never Love This Way Again" in 1979, Dionne was again enjoying top success on the charts. The song was produced by Barry Manilow. The accompanying album Dionne was certified Platinum in the United States for sales exceeding one million units. The album peaked at #12 on the Billboard Album Chart and made the Top 10 of the Billboard R&B Albums Chart. Warwick had been personally signed and guided by the label's founder Clive Davis, who stated to Dionne "You may be ready to give the business up, but the business is not ready to give you up." Dionne's next single release was another major hit for her. "Deja Vu" was co-written by Isaac Hayes and hit #1 Adult Contemporary as well as #15 on Billboard's Hot 100. In 1980, Dionne won the NARAS Grammy Awards for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female for "I'll Never Love This Way Again" and Best R&B Vocal Performance, Female for "Déjà Vu". Dionne became the first female artist in the history of the awards to win in both categories the same year. Her second Arista album, 1980's No Night So Long sold 500,000 U.S. copies and featured the title track which became a major success - hitting #1 Adult Contemporary and #23 on Billboard's Hot 100 - and the album peaked at #23 on the Billboard Albums Chart.

In January 1980, while under contract to Arista Records, Dionne Warwick hosted a two-hour TV special called Solid Gold '79. This was adapted into the weekly one-hour show Solid Gold, which she hosted throughout 1980 and 1981 and again in 1985-86. Major highlights of each show were the duets she performed with her co-hosts, which often included some of Dionne's hits and her co-hosts' hits intermingled and arranged by Solid Gold musical director, Michael Miller. Another highlight in each show was Dionne's vocal rendition of the Solid Gold Theme, composed by Michael Miller (with lyrics by Dean Pitchford).

After a brief appearance in the Top Forty in early 1982 with Johnny Mathis on "Friends in Love" - from the album of the same name - Warwick's next hit later that same year was her full-length collaboration with Barry Gibb of The Bee Gees for the album Heartbreaker. The song 44444 became one of Dionne's biggest international hits, returning her to the Top 10 of Billboard's Hot 100 - for the first time since 1979 - as well as #1 Adult Contemporary and #2 in the UK. Internationally, the tune was also a Top 10 hit throughout continental Europe, Australia (#1), Japan, South Africa, Canada, and Asia. The title track was taken from the album of the same name which sold over 3 million copies internationally and earned Dionne an RIAA USA Gold record award for the album. The album peaked at #25 on the Billboard Album Chart, #13 on the R&B Albums Chart and #3 in the UK. Dionne stated to Wesley Hyatt in his The Billboard Book of Number One Adult Contemporary Hits that she was not fond of "Heartbreaker" but recorded the tune because she trusted The Bee Gees' judgment that it would be a hit. The project came about when Clive Davis was attending his aunt's wedding in Orlando, Florida in early 1982 and spoke with Barry Gibb. Barry mentioned that he had always been a fan of Dionne's and Clive arranged for Dionne and The Bee Gees to discuss a project. Dionne and the brothers Gibb hit it off and the album and the title single were released in October 1982.

In 1983, Dionne released How Many Times Can We Say Goodbye produced by Luther Vandross. The album's most successful single was the title track, "How Many Times Can We Say Goodbye", a Warwick/Vandross duet, which peaked at #27 on the Billboard Hot 100. It also became a Top 10 hit on the Adult Contemporary and R&B charts. The album peaked at #57 on the Billboard album chart. Of note was a reunion with the original Shirelles on Warwick's cover of "Will You (Still) Love Me Tomorrow?" The album Finder Of Lost Loves followed in 1985 and reunited her with both Barry Manilow and Burt Bacharach, who was writing with his then current lyricist partner and wife, Carole Bayer Sager.

In 1985, Warwick contributed her voice to the multi-Grammy Award winning charity song We Are the World, along with vocalists like Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and Ray Charles. The song spent four consecutive weeks at #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart. It was the year's biggest hit - certified four times Platinum in the United States alone.

In 1985, Warwick recorded the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR) benefit single "That's What Friends Are For" alongside Gladys Knight, Elton John, and Stevie Wonder. The single, credited to "Dionne and Friends" was released in October and eventually raised over three million dollars for that cause. The tune was a triple #1 - R&B, Adult Contemporary, and four weeks at the summit on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1986 - selling close to two million 45s in the United States alone. In 1988, the Washington Post wrote: So working against AIDS, especially after years of raising money for work on many blood-related diseases such as sickle-cell anemia, seemed the right thing to do. "You have to be granite not to want to help people with AIDS, because the devastation that it causes is so painful to see. I was so hurt to see my friend die with such agony", Warwick remembers. "I am tired of hurting and it does hurt." The single won the performers the NARAS Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, as well as Song of the Year for its writers, Bacharach and Bayer Sager. It also was ranked by Billboard magazine as the most popular song of 1986. With this single Warwick also released her most successful album of the 1980s, titled Friends, which reached #12 on Billboard's album chart.

In 1987 Dionne scored another hit with "Love Power". Her eighth career #1 Adult Contemporary hit, it also reached #5 in R&B and #12 on Billboard's Hot 100. A duet with Jeffrey Osborne, it was also written by Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager, and it was featured in Warwick's album Reservations for Two. The album's title song, a duet with Kashif, was also a chart hit. Other artists featured on the album included Smokey Robinson and the late June Pointer.

1990s to present[link]

During the 1990s, Warwick hosted infomercials for the Psychic Friends Network, which featured psychic Linda Georgian. The 900 number psychic service was active from 1991 to 1998. According to press statements throughout the 1990s, the program was the most successful infomercial for several years and Warwick earned in excess of three million dollars per year as spokesperson for the network. In 1998, Inphomation, the corporation owning the network, filed for bankruptcy and Warwick ended her association with the organization. Warwick's longtime friend and tour manager Henry Carr acknowledged in a 2002 Biography Channel interview that "when Dionne was going through an airport and a child recognized her as 'that psychic lady on TV' Dionne was crushed and said she had worked too hard as an entertainer to become known as 'the psychic lady'."

Warwick's most publicized album during this period was 1993's "Friends Can Be Lovers", which was produced in part by Ian Devaney and Lisa Stansfield. Featured on the album was "Sunny Weather Lover", which was the first song that Burt Bacharach and Hal David had written together for Warwick since 1972. It was Warwick's lead single in the United States, and was heavily promoted by Arista, but failed to chart. A follow-up "Where My Lips Have Been" peaked at #95 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles & Tracks. 1994 marked the end of Warwick's contract with Arista Records.

In 1990 Dionne recorded a song "It's All Over" with former member of Modern Talking Dieter Bohlen (Blue System). The single peaked at #60 (#33 airplay) on the German pop charts and it appears on Blue System's album "Déjà Vu".

In 1993, Forrest Sawyer, host of the ABC News/Entertainment program "Day One", alleged financial improprieties by the Warwick Foundation, founded in 1989 to benefit AIDS patients, particularly Dionne Warwick's charity concert performances organized to benefit the organization. ABC alleged the Foundation was operating at a near 90 % administrative cost. ABC also alleged that Warwick flew first class and was accommodated at first class hotels for charity concerts and events in which she participated for the Foundation. Warwick, who had no executive, administrative or management role in the organization, challenged ABC to investigate the foundation further and alleged that the ABC report was racially motivated. An Internal Revenue Service investigation of the Warwick Foundation found no wrongdoing or criminal activity on the part of the Board of Directors or Warwick and its status as a non-profit charity was upheld. ABC maintained the report to be factually correct but the item has not been repeated since the original air date. The Foundation was later dissolved.

On October 16, 2002, Dionne Warwick was nominated Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

In 2004, Dionne Warwick's first Christmas album was released. The CD, entitled "My Favorite Time of the Year" featured jazzy interpretations of many holiday classics. In 2007, Rhino Records re-released the CD with new cover art.

In 2005, Dionne Warwick was honored by Oprah Winfrey at her Legends Ball.

Warwick appeared on the May 24, 2006, fifth-season finale of American Idol. Millions of U.S. viewers watched Warwick sing a medley of "Walk On By" and "That's What Friends Are For", with longtime collaborator Burt Bacharach accompanying her on the piano.

In 2006, Warwick signed with Concord Records after a fifteen-year tenure at Arista, which had ended in 1994. Her first and only release for the label was My Friends and Me, a duets album containing reworkings of her old hits, very similar in fashion to her 1998 CD "Dionne Sings Dionne" . Among her singing partners were Gloria Estefan, Olivia Newton-John, Wynonna Judd and Reba McEntire. The album peaked at #66 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. The album was produced by her son, Damon Elliott. A followup album featuring Warwick's old hits as duets with male vocalists was planned but the project was cancelled. The relationship with Concord concluded with the release of My Friends and Me.

A compilation CD of her greatest hits and love songs "The Love Collection" entered the UK pop charts at number 27 on February 16, 2008.

Dionne Warwick's second gospel album, "Why We Sing", was released on February 26, 2008 in the UK and on April 1, 2008 in the USA. The album features guest spots by her sister Dee Dee Warwick and BeBe Winans.

On October 18, 2008, Warwick's sister Dee Dee Warwick died in a nursing home in Essex County, New Jersey. She had been in failing health for several months, which lead up to her death. Warwick was with her sister Dee Dee, when she died.

On November 24, 2008 Dionne was the star performer on "Divas II" a UK ITV1 special. The show also featured Rihanna, Leona Lewis, Sugababes, Pink, Gabriella Climi and Anastacia.

In 2008 Dionne began recording an album of songs from the Sammy Cahn and Jack Wolf songbooks. The finished recording, entitled "Only Trust Your Heart," will be released in the US by MPCA Records distributed by SonyRed, on March 15, 2011.

On October 20, 2009, Starlight Children's Foundation and New Gold Music Ltd. released a song that Dionne recorded about 10 years prior called "Starlight". The lyrics had been written by Dean Pitchford, prolific writer of Fame, screenwriter of—and sole or joint lyricist of every song in the soundtrack of—the original 1984 film Footloose, and lyricist of the Solid Gold theme, and the music had been composed by Bill Goldstein, whose versatile career included the original music for NBC's Fame TV series. Dionne, Dean and Bill announced that they were donating 100% of their royalties to Starlight Children's Foundation as a way to raise money to support Starlight's mission to help seriously ill children and their families cope with their pain, fear and isolation through entertainment, education and family activities.

“When Bill and Dean brought this song to me, I instantly felt connected to its message of shining a little light into the lives of people who need it most”, said Warwick. “I admire the work of Starlight Children’s Foundation and know that if the song brings hope to even just one sick child, we have succeeded.”

In March 2011, Warwick appeared on The Celebrity Apprentice 4. Dionne's charity was The Hunger Project. She was dismissed from her "apprenticeship" to Donald John Trump during the fourth task of the season.

In February 2012, Warwick performed "Walk On By" on The Jonathan Ross Show. She also received the Goldene Kamera Musical Lifetime Achievement Award in Germany,^[6] and performed "That's What Friends Are For" at the ceremony.

Personal life[link]

Warwick with First Lady Pat Nixon, 1971‎

Dionne Warwick married actor and drummer William Elliott (CBS's Bridget Loves Bernie-1972–73) in 1966; they divorced in May 1967. They reconciled and were remarried in Milan, Italy, in August 1967, according to Time. Warwick has stated in many interviews that "It was a case of can't do with, can't do without, so I married him again." On January 18, 1969, while living in East Orange, New Jersey, Warwick gave birth to her first son, David Elliott. In 1973, her second son Damon Elliott was born. On May 30, 1975, the couple separated and Warwick was granted a divorce in December 1975 in Los Angeles. The court denied Elliott's request for $2000 a month in support pending a community property trial and for $5000, when Elliott insisted he was making $500 a month in comparison to Warwick making $100,000 a month. Dionne stated in "Don't Make Me Over: Dionne Warwick", a 2002 Biography Channel interview, "I was the breadwinner. The male ego is a fragile thing. It's hard when the woman is the breadwinner. All my life, the only man, who ever took care of me financially was my father. I have always taken care of myself."

Warwick has been connected romantically with Philadelphia Eagles great Timmy Brown, French singer-songwriter Sacha Distel, actor Philip Michael Thomas (Miami Vice), Seagram heir and CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr., and Las Vegas restaurateur and actor Gianni Russo (The Godfather).

Warwick made the Top 250 Delinquent Taxpayers List published in October 2007. California Revenue & Taxation Code Section 19195 directs the Franchise Tax Board to publish an annual list of the top 250 taxpayers with liened state income tax delinquencies greater than $100,000 in an effort to collect money from those taxpayers, some of whom have been delinquent since 1987. Dionne Warwick was listed with a tax delinquency of $2,665,305.83 in personal income tax and a tax lien was filed July 24, 1997.^[7] As of 2010, Warwick was still listed as a delinquent, although by then, she owed $2,185,901.08 in back taxes.^[8] Her publicist stated, that she was actively paying off the debt.^[9]

On May 8, 2010, she received an honorary Doctor of Arts from Lincoln College in Lincoln, Illinois.^[10]

Warwick lived in Brazil, a country she first visited in the early 1960s until 2005, according to an interview with JazzWax, when she moved back to the United States, when her mother and sister became ill. She became so entranced by Brazil, that she studied Portuguese and commenced to divide her time between Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. In April 2010, in an interview on talk-show Programa do Jô, she said Brazil was the place, where she intended to spend the rest of her life after she had retired.^[11]

In 1993, her older son David, a former Los Angeles police officer, co-wrote with Terry Steele the Warwick – Whitney Houston duet "Love Will Find a Way", featured on her album, Friends Can Be Lovers. Since 2002, he has toured with and performed duets with his mother periodically, and had his acting debut in the film "Ali" as the singer Sam Cooke. David became a singer-songwriter, with Luther Vandross' "Here and Now" among others to his credit.

Her second son, Damon Elliott, is also a noted music producer, who has worked with Mýa, Pink, and Keyshia Cole. He arranged and produced his mother's 2006 Concord release My Friends and Me.

Relations[link]

• Warwick's sister Dee Dee Warwick also had a successful singing career, scoring several notable R&B hits, notably "I'm Gonna Make You Love Me" and "Oh No Not My Baby". Dee Dee died in 2008, at age 66, in a nursing home in Essex County, New Jersey, after a long series of illnesses and well documented narcotic addictions.
• Warwick's cousin was singer Whitney Houston, and her aunt is Gospel-trained vocalist Cissy Houston, Whitney's mother.
• In her 2010 autobiography, My Life, as I See It, Warwick notes that opera diva, Leontyne Price, is also a maternal cousin.

Discography[link]

Awards and Honors[link]

Grammy Awards

Grammy Hall of Fame

American Music Awards

Billboard Music Awards

RIAA

People's Choice Awards

NAACP Image Awards

ASCAP Awards

Rhythm & Blues Foundation

Women's World Awards

Trumpet Awards

NARM Best Seller Awards

Cash Box Magazine

• National Academy of Popular Music/Songwriters Hall of Fame - Hitmaker Award-2001
• Woman of the Year-1969 Harvard Hasty Pudding Society
• Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or Nominee-Slaves-1969

• Playboy Magazine Music Poll-Top Female Vocalist-1971;Playboy's All-Star Band for 1971-Female Vocals
• National Association of Television and Radio Announcers-#1 R&B Vocalist-1971
• Memphis Music Awards-Outstanding Female Vocalist-1971

• WINNER-1980 Tokyo Intl POP Music Festival for her performance of "FEELING OLD FEELINGS" from her Arista debut album "Dionne" produced by Barry Manilow. The song was awarded Song of the Year (the equivalent of the Japanese Grammy)
• Mayors Award and Key to the City-San Jose, California-1968
• ACE Award Nominee for "Sisters in the Name of Love" - Dionne Warwick (HBO-1987)
• United States Ambassador of Health - Appointed by Ronald Reagan-1987
• Kleenex American Hero Award-1987

• American Society of Young Musicians - Luminary Award-1997
• National Music Foundation - Cultural Impact Award-1998

• United Nations Global Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)-appointed 2002
• NABFEME Shero Award (The National Association of Black Female Executives in Music & Entertainment)-2006
• The Temecula Valley International Film & Music Festival-Lifetime Career Achievement Award-2006
• Miami Dade Life Time Achievement Award-2007 and Dionne Warwick Day-May 25

• Starlight Foundation - Humanitarian of the Year Award
• Bella Rackoff Women in Film - Humanitarian Award
• Lincoln Elementary School in East Orange, NJ, honored her by renaming it to the Dionne Warwick Institute of Economics and Entrepreneurship

Filmography[link]

Notes[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Dionne Warwick

• Official website
• Dionne's AllMusic Guide page
• VH1 Site
• Rolling Stone Site
• Billboard Chart History (since 1983)
• Dionne Warwick at the Internet Movie Database
• The Scepter Records Story
• New York Times obituary (11/4/1995) of Florence Greenberg, founder of Scepter Records
• Dionne Warwick's Artist page at RedEntertainment.com

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. It needs additional citations for verification. Tagged since January 2008. It may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Tagged since September 2010. It reads more like a story than an encyclopedia entry. Please help to introduce a more formal style and remove any personally invested tone. Tagged since September 2010.

John Gale "Johnny" Horton (April 30, 1925–November 5, 1960) was an American country music and rockabilly singer most famous for his semi-folk, so-called "saga songs" which began the "historical ballad" craze of the late 1950s and early 1960s. With them, he had several major successes, most notably during 1959 with the song "The Battle of New Orleans" (written by Jimmy Driftwood) which was awarded the 1960 Grammy Award for Best Country & Western Recording. The song was awarded the Grammy Hall of Fame Award, and during 2001 ranked No. 333 of the Recording Industry Association of America's "Songs of the Century".

During 1960, Horton had two other successes with "North to Alaska" for John Wayne's movie, North to Alaska, and "Sink the Bismarck." Horton is a member of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

Horton was born in Los Angeles, California, to John and Claudia Horton, the youngest of five siblings, and raised in Rusk, Texas. His family often traveled to California, frequently as migrant fruit pickers. After graduation from Gallatin High School in 1944, he attended the Methodist-affiliated Lon Morris Junior College in Jacksonville, Texas, with a basketball scholarship. He later attended Seattle University and briefly attended Baylor University, although he did not graduate from any of these institutions.

Horton soon went back to California where he found work in the mail room of Hollywood's Selznick Studio. It was here that he met his future wife, secretary Donna Cook.

Horton and his older brother Frank briefly pursued the study of geology at Seattle during 1948 but both ended after a few weeks. He went to Florida, then back to California before leaving for Alaska to look for gold. It was during this period that he began writing songs. He joined Frank in Seattle, went south to Los Angeles, then after Frank married, left for Texas. After much prompting from his sister Marie, he entered a talent contest at the Reo Palm Isle club in Longview, Texas, sponsored by radio station KGRI in Henderson and hosted by station radio announcer and future country music star Jim Reeves. Horton won first prize—an ashtray on a pedestal. Encouraged by the contest, he went back to California, bought some Western-style clothes and entered talent contests.

Horton came to the attention of entrepreneur Fabor Robison, whose first job as manager was to give him a job with Cliffie Stone's Hometown Jamboree on KXLA-TV in Pasadena. During his early guest performances he worked with musicians such as Merle Travis and Tennessee Ernie Ford. The station then gave him a regular half-hour Saturday night program billed as the Singing Fisherman, during which he sang and displayed his casting skills with a fishing rod. Around this time he also hosted the radio program Hacienda Party Time for KLAC-TV in Los Angeles.

A mixture of Horton's television performances and Robison's acquaintances earned him a couple of singles with the minor Cormac recording company. The first single coupled "Plaid And Calico" with "Done Rovin'" and the second "Coal Smoke, Valve Oil and Steam" with "Birds and Butterflies". The company then terminated and Robinson acquired the masters and started his own company named Abbott Records. By mid 1952, ten Horton singles had been issued but none were very successful. They were, for the most part, ordinary Western-style songs.

After marriage to Donna and a honeymoon in Palm Springs, he relocated back east to be near the Louisiana Hayride where he was then scheduled to appear on a regular basis. Robison persuaded Mercury Records A&R man Walter Kilpatrick to hire Horton, who began with his songs "First Train Headin' South" b/w "(I Wished for an Angel) The Devil Sent Me You" (Mercury 6412), with good reviews by the trade newspapers.

Horton was married twice. His first marriage, to Donna Cook, ended with a divorce granted in Rusk. During September 1953, he married Billie Jean Jones. Jones was the widow of country music singer Hank Williams, to whom she had been married for the two and one-half months prior to his death. With Billie Jean, Horton had two daughters, Yanina (Nina) and Melody. Billie Jean's daughter, Jeri Lynn was also legally adopted by Johnny and was also part of the family.

Louisiana Hayride[link]

During September 1952, Horton acquired a full-time band, the Rowley Trio from Nederland, Texas. Featuring Jerry Rowley playing fiddle, his wife Evelyn playing piano and sister Vera (Dido) playing bass or guitar, they were working at KFDM in Beaumont following some gigs backing Lefty Frizzell. While playing in Beaumont, Horton and Robison heard the Trio and were sufficiently impressed to offer them a job touring. They started driving Johnny to their engagements, but he kept stopping to fish and hunt, so they soon bought him his own car with which he met them at the various venues. The new foursome recruited Bob Stegall but still termed themselves The Singing Fisherman and the Rowley Trio, before changing the name to Johnny Horton and the Roadrunners.

Louisiana Hayride had been playing for more than four years when Horton joined its cast, and during this time he helped many careers including those of Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, Webb Pierce and Bob Luman.

Horton was, by now, a Shreveport resident. His marriage didn't survive the increasing touring and Donna relocated back to Los Angeles. He was amenable to a reconciliation, but was unwilling to go back to the West Coast. During August, Louisiana Hayride welcomed back Hank Williams, only 28 years old but banished from Nashville's Grand Ole Opry for what some considered as his drunkenness and unreliability. On October 19, Williams married Billy Jean Jones, the daughter of a local policeman, in front of a paying audience at New Orleans' Municipal Auditorium. On one occasion during the time Billie Jean and Hank were married, Horton talked to the couple backstage, and at that meeting, Hank predicted that Billie Jean would one day marry Horton. He remained a Hayride member until his death.

By New Year's Eve, Hank Williams was dead. He had died in the back seat of a Cadillac traveling to a show in Canton, Ohio. Horton and the Rowleys were driving home from a gig when they heard the news by radio. They were in Milano, Texas and it was there after a show at Austin's Skyline Club (the same venue as Williams' last show) that Horton was killed seven years later in a car accident.

Married to Billie Jean[link]

Johnny and Billie Jean married on 26 September 1953. They lived by Johnny's gig money, his newly established writers-contract with American Music of Los Angeles and the settlement Billie Jean had eked from the Williams estate. Horton and Robison had by now parted company, after a disagreement which concerned in part Horton's frustration at the amount of time Robison was spending with Jim Reeves. Stegall had left, to be replaced by Richard and Betty Lou Spears, but soon the Rowleys left. He starting using pick-up bands together with Billie Jean's brothers, Alton and Sonny Jones. The career had stalled and he became so disillusioned that he got a job working in a fishing tackle shop, playing only weekends for Hayride. Even this ceased during November 1954. His last session for Mercury September 23 didn't generate a single album and the two year hiatus had been a strange period with songs ranging from answer songs like "Back to My Back Street" to "Train With a Rhumba Beat". The best seller was "All for the Love of a Girl" (Mercury 70227) which sold about 35-45,000 copies.

It was during this time that country music was changing due to influence by the new rock music. With the example of Elvis Presley, rockabilly was becoming more common both on records and on country music bills, with Hayride one of the most progressive in this respect. It was during that program that Horton first saw Presley, and apparently he immediately liked the singer and the style.

Horton then asked Hayride stalwart Tillman Franks for some advice. Five years older than Horton, Franks had played bass for Webb Pierce, managed the Carlisles and Jimmy & Johnny, worked as a booking agent, a car salesman in Houston and served on the police force. He too was unemployed. "I hadn't worked in four or five weeks when Johnny Horton come to the door. He was broke too. He and Billie Jean had spent the money they got after Hank died, and she'd told him to get his ass out and make some more". He said, "If I can get Tillman Franks to manage me, I'll get to number one". He came to my house on Summer Street, and I told him that I just didn't like the way he sang. He said, "No problem. I'll sing any way you want me to". And he was serious!".

They'd already met in Mississippi, when Horton had toured with the Carlisles. By mid 1955 Franks had assumed control of the management, and after the end of the Mercury contract, his first job was to find a new company. After communicating with Webb Pierce, who in turn talked to Jim Denny at Cedarwood and Troy Martin at Golden West Melodies, a one-year contract with Columbia was forthcoming. Cedarwood and Golden West Melodies would both get publishing on two songs per session as part of the deal. With no advance and a session due in Nashville, the duo had to borrow David Houston's father's car for the journey, with the promise that they'd try to get Houston a contract while they were there.

First big hit[link]

On the way to the session, Horton and Franks stopped in Memphis at Elvis Presley's house, leaving with ten dollars (they were too poor to buy gas) and the loan of Bill Black on slap bass. Franks had reservations about his own playing and he wanted the sound to be special. On January 11, 1956, Horton entered the Bradley Barn Studio with Bill Black and two of Nashville's major talent agents, Grady Martin and producer Owen Bradley's brother, Harold. The first song played was the mid-tempo rockabilly "I'm a One Woman Man", composed by Horton and Franks. Howard Crockett (Hausey) had played "Honky Tonk Man" to Horton and Franks and after a quick rewriting of the tune, they split the credits three ways. It was the second song cut that day. By midnight, Don Law and Franks had completed two more songs, "I'm Ready if You're Willing" and "I Got a Hole in My Pirogue". Horton and Franks wanted "Honky Tonk Man" to be the lead-off single but Don Law didn't like the song, and it was only after the intervention of Jim Denny that Law relented and issued it with "I'm Ready if You're Willing" on the flip side. Live shows were arranged to advertise the single with the band featuring Franks playing bass and a teenager from Minden, Louisiana, Tommy Tomlinson, playing guitar.

The single was reviewed by the March 10 issue of Billboard, which said of "Honky Tonk Man", "The wine women and song attractions exert a powerful hold on the singer, he admits. The funky sound and pounding beat in the backing suggest the kind of atmosphere he describes. A very good jukebox record." Of the B-side, it read "Horton sings out this cheerful material with amiable personality. This ever more popular stylist ought to expand his circle of fans with this one." By May the record had scored No. 9 on the C&W Jockey chart, as well as No. 14 on the Best Seller chart.

To earn extra money, Horton established a fake ticket agency whereby he telephoned the citizens of Alexandria, Louisiana selling tickets by the name Earl Baker, with Billie Jean delivering them the next day. Franks thought that Billie Jean was keeping some of the money, but discovered he was wrong.

Franks assumed control of the Hayride bookings, organizing performances in the South. Horton was contracted for his Monday night performances on KLTV-TV in Tyler, Texas, which restricted how far away he could tour. He wanted to end the contract, so on one of the shows, when it was time to read a commercial for Hol-Sum Bread, he announced "Friends, we are proud to be here, and proud to be sponsored by Hol-Sum Bread. Tillman Franks my manager eats Hol-Sum Bread, and I eat it too. What I like about Hol-Sum Bread is that it's never touched by hand. That's right, they mix it with their feet". After the show, the station owner called him and said she'd be happier if he stopped working for the station. Now he was free to travel, and he started earning as much as $500 a night.

On May 23 they went back to Music City for a second session. Grady Martin again led the proceedings with Ray Edenton replacing Harold Bradley and Floyd "Lightnin'" Chance standing in on double bass. They began at 7 p.m. with "Take Me Like I Am" before doing the Horton-Hausey composition, "Sugar-Coated Baby". It was one of those mid-tempo tracks at which Horton was to excel, with playful vocals and Martin's bass string guitaring. Claude King's "I Don't Like I Did" was another such song. The fourth cut was Autry Inman's ode to women, "Hooray For That Little Difference".

The next single (Columbia 21538) had "I Don't Like I Did" on the B-side but the header was "I'm a One Woman Man" from the January session. Billboard enthused that "One Woman" was a "Smart and polished job," adding that Horton was "singing with a light, airy touch. Guitar work is just as convincing, adding up to listenable, commercial stuff".

By August, Columbia and Franks ran an advertisement in Billboard claiming their "Sensational New Artist goes on a spree with his newest two-sided hit". The accompanying photo did nothing for the image of a rocker, showing him looking middle-aged with a cowboy hat to hide his receding hair. The campaign continued with a tour of western Texas starting in El Paso with Johnny Cash, Faron Young and Roy Orbison. Booked by Bob Neal Stars Inc. of Memphis, the group moved to Ontario, Canada for six dates commencing on the 18th, culminating in Detroit.

Billboard's first issue in September noted that "Somewhat like his last hit - "Honky Tonk Man" - this release (I'm A One Woman Man) started off rather quietly, but has gradually become a powerful chart contender. This week it made an appearance on the Houston territorial chart and was selling well in Nashville, Dallas, Durham and Birmingham". Within a week or so he was rewarded with a second country hit, this time maximizing at No. 7 on the Jockey chart and No. 9 on both the Best Seller and Jukebox charts.

On October 14, after shows throughout Florida, Horton played in Memphis again for Bob Neal, this time with Johnny Cash, Faron Young, Sonny James, Roy Orbison and the Teen-Kings and Charlene Arthur. They continued around Tennessee until the 23rd, before continuing to New Mexico and West Texas. It must have been a confident crowd that arrived at Bradley's Barn on November 12. Only two songs were produced, the unissued "Over Loving You" and the rockabilly "I'm Coming Home", composed by Horton and Franks.

"I'm Coming Home" was released with "I Got A Hole In My Pirogue" on the flip side (Columbia 40813). Released as the same time as the Johnny Burnette Trio's "Lonesome Train" (Coral 61758) and Rosco Gordon's "Cheese and Crackers" (Sun 257), Billboard predicted that "the singer, has material in I'm Coming Home that could give him his biggest record to date". Horton's vocal against this twangy backing makes a terrific impression. "Pirogue" is a rockabilly type novelty song of great appeal. It's hard to see how this can miss becoming a gold mine". On February 9, Billboard noted that "not only Southern markets are doing good business with this, but Northern cities report that both country and pop customers are going for this in a big way". It was again a success on the country charts (No. 11 Jockey, No. 15 Best Seller) but it failed to score the popular music charts.

He loved fishing as much as, if not more than, singing and was once billed as The Singing Fisherman. His favorite fishing holes were in the Piney Woods of East Texas and in northern Louisiana. His other passion was spiritualism and he was devoted to the writings of spiritualist Edgar Cayce.

Premonitions of death[link]

Horton had premonitions of his death and started telling friends and family that he would soon die at the hands of a drunk. He asked his sister to pray and care for Billie Jean and their daughters, and had his mother visit for the week. He cancelled his scheduled attendance at the premiere of North To Alaska and tried to back out of his next gig, a nightclub date at the Skyline club in Austin, Texas on November 4, 1960.

Death[link]

Johnny Horton bench at Hillcrest Cemetery in Haughton, Louisiana

Horton's grave marker

Another Horton grave inscription

Tommy Tomlinson flew in from Nashville, where he was producing a duet album with Jerry Kennedy (Tom and Jerry). Johnny used the morning to make arrangements to go duck hunting with Claude King once he had returned from Austin and he also telephoned Johnny Cash for a chat. Cash didn't accept the call, and always regretted it. Against his wife's wishes, Franks got out of his sick bed and they began traveling to Austin.

When they got to the Skyline club, Horton stayed in his dressing room, saying that a drunk would kill him if he went near the bar. After the show, they started the 220-mile (350 km) journey back to Shreveport. Tomlinson was in the back, observing that Horton was driving too fast - Franks was asleep in the front. About 2 a.m., near Milano, Texas they were crossing a bridge when a truck came at them, hitting both sides of the bridge before plunging into Horton's Cadillac. Horton had practiced avoiding head-on collisions by driving into ditches, but on the narrow bridge he had no opportunity. He was still breathing when he was pulled out of the car but died on the way to the hospital. The 19-year-old truck driver, James Davis, was intoxicated. Franks suffered head injuries and young Tomlinson had multiple leg fractures and nine months later, had his left leg amputated. Davis was virtually unscathed.

Tillman's preacher brother, Billy, performed the funeral service on November 8, with Billie Jean becoming a widow for the second time at the age of 28. Johnny Cash read Chapter 20 from the Book of John, having flown in on a chartered airplane.

Columbia released various singles and a greatest successes album and on October 5, 1964, Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three overdubbed "Rock Island Line" and "I Just Don't Like This Kind of Livin'" to Horton's demos. Other such sessions were held throughout the sixties for album release. "Sleepy-Eyed John" scored the country charts during April 1961, scoring No. 9 and a year later "Honky Tonk Man" was reissued, scoring No. 11. During February 1963 he made his last appearance in the charts (to date) with "All Grown Up" maximizing at No. 26.

An unfounded rumor was that Horton was on his way to Dallas to meet actor Ward Bond on the night of the crash about a role on the NBC-TV series Wagon Train. Bond was attending a football game in Dallas and died of a heart attack several hours after Horton died. Horton, however, was on his way from Austin to Shreveport, Louisiana, not Dallas. An unrelated actor with the last name Horton did appear on Wagon Train—actor Robert Horton.

Horton is buried in the Hillcrest Cemetery in Haughton, east of Bossier City in northwestern Louisiana.

Legacy[link]

Horton will be remembered for his major contribution to both country and rockabilly music. When Johnny Cash, a good friend of Horton's, learned about the accident he said, "[I] locked myself in one of the hotel's barrooms, and cried."^[1] Cash also dedicated his rendition of "When It's Springtime in Alaska (It's Forty Below)" to Horton on his album Personal File: "Johnny Horton was a good old friend of mine."

Horton was inducted into The Louisiana Music Hall of Fame and posthumously inducted into the Delta Music Museum Hall of Fame in Ferriday, Louisiana.

Some racist songs have sometimes been incorrectly associated with Horton. These songs are by a singer calling himself "Johnny Rebel," who did not began recording until years after Horton's death. The mistake is apparently because Horton recorded the historical song "Johnny Reb."

Discography[link]

Albums[link]

Singles[link]

As per a box set of his work, here is a complete singles discography.

• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 01 - I'm A One Woman Man
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 02 - Honky Tonk Man
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 03 - I'm Ready If You're Willing
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 04 - I Got A Hole In My Pirogue
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 05 - Take Me Like I Am
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 06 - Sugar-Coated Baby
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 07 - I Don't Like I Did
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 08 - Hooray For That Little Difference
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 09 - I'm Coming Home
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 10 - Over-Loving You
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 11 - She Knows Why
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 12 - Honky Tonk Mind (The Woman I Need)
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 13 - Tell My Baby I Love Her
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 14 - Goodbye Lonesome, Hello Baby Doll
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 15 - I'll Do It Everytime
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 16 - You're My Baby
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 17 - Let's Take The Long Way Home
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 18 - Lover's Rock
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 19 - Honky-Tonk Hardwood Floor
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 20 - The Wild One
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 21 - Everytime I'm Kissng You
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 22 - Hot In The Sugarcane Field
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 23 - Lonesome And Heartbroken
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 24 - Seven Come Eleven
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 25 - I Can't Forget You
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 26 - Wise To The Ways Of A Woman
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 27 - Out In New Mexico
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 28 - Tetched In The Head
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 29 - Just Walk A Little Closer
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 30 - Don't Use My Heart For A Stepping Stone
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 31 - I Love You Baby
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 1 / 32 - Wise To The Ways Of A Woman
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 01 - Counterfeit Love
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 02 - Mister Moonlight
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 03 - All Grown Up
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 04 - Got The Bull By The Horns
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 05 - When It's Springtime In Alaska
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 06 - Whispering Pines
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 07 - The Battle Of New Orleans
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 08 - All For The Love Of A Girl
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 09 - Lost Highway
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 10 - Sam Magee
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 11 - Cherokee Boogie
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 12 - The Golden Rocket
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 13 - The Battle Of New Orleans (British Version)
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 14 - Joe's Been A-Gittin' There
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 15 - The First Train Headin' South
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 16 - Got The Bull By The Horns
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 17 - Sal's Got A Sugerlip
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 18 - Words
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 19 - Johnny Reb
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 20 - Sal's Got A Sugarlip
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 21 - Ole Slew Foot
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 22 - I'm Ready If Your Willing
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 23 - Take Me Like I Am
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 24 - They Shined Up Rudolph's Nose
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 25 - The Electrified Donkey
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 26 - The Same Old Tale The Crow Told Me
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 27 - Sink The Bismarck
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 28 - Sink The Bismarck
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 29 - The Same Old Tale The Crow Told Me
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 30 - All Grown Up
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 2 / 31 - Got The Bull By The Horns
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 01 - Ole Slew Foot
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 02 - Miss Marcy
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 03 - Sleepy Eyed John
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 04 - The Mansion You Stole
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 05 - They'll Never Take Her Love From Me
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 06 - The Sinking Of Reuben James
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 07 - Jim Bridger
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 08 - The Battle Of Bull Run
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 09 - Snow-Shoe Thompson
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 10 - John Paul Jones
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 11 - Comanche (The Brave Horse)
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 12 - Young Abe Lincoln
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 13 - O'Leary's Cow
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 14 - Johnny Freedom
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 15 - Go North!
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 16 - North To Alaska
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 17 - North To Alaska
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 18 - I Just Don't Like This Kind Of Livin'
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 19 - Rock Island Line
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 20 - Hank And Joe And Me
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 21 - The Golden Rocket
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 22 - A-Sleeping At The Foot Of The Bed
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 23 - I Just Don't Like This Kind Of Livin'
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 24 - Old Blind Barnabas
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 25 - Evil Hearted Me
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 26 - Hot In The Sugarcane Field
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 27 - You Don't Move Me Baby Anymore
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 28 - The Gosh-Darn Wheel
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 29 - Broken Hearted Gypsy
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 3 / 30 - The Church By The Side Of The Road
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 01 - The Vanishing Race
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 02 - Broken Hearted Gypsy
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 03 - That Boy Got The Habit
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 04 - Hot In The Sugarcane Field
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 05 - You Don't Move Me Baby Anymore
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 06 - The Church By The Side Of The Road
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 07 - I Just Don't Like This Kind Of Livin'
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 08 - Take It Like A Man
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 09 - Hank And Joe And Me
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 10 - The Golden Rocket
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 11 - Old Blind Barnabas
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 12 - Empty Bed Blues
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 13 - Rock Island Line
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 14 - Shake, Rattle And Roll
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 15 - A-Sleeping At The Foot Of The Bed
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 16 - Old Dan Tucker
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 17 - The Gosh Darn Wheel
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 18 - From Memphis To Mobile
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 19 - Back Up Train
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 20 - Schottische In Texas
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 21 - Take It LIke A Man
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 22 - That Boy Got The Habit
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 23 - My Heart Stopped, Trembled And Died
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 24 - Alley Girl Ways
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 25 - How You Gonna Make It
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 26 - Witch Walking Baby
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 27 - Down That River Road
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 28 - Big Wheels Rollin'
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 29 - I Got A Slow Leak In My Heart
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 30 - You Don't Move Me Baby Anymore
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 31 - What Will I Do Without You
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 32 - Janey
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 33 - Streets Of Dodge
• Johnny Horton 1956-1960 - Vol 4 / 34 - Give Me Back My Picture And You Can Keep The Frame

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Escott, Colin. (1998). "Johnny Horton". In The Encyclopedia of Country Music. Paul Kingsbury, Editor. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 247–8.

External links[link]

• The Handbook of Texas Online: Johnny Horton
• Rockabillyhall.com
• Geocities.com^{[dead link]}
• RCS-discography.com
• Rockabilly.nl
• Johnny Horton's Gravesite
• TSHAonline.org

John Lennon MBE
Lennon rehearses "Give Peace a Chance" in Montreal, Canada, in 1969
Background information
Birth name	John Winston Lennon
Born	(1940-10-09)9 October 1940 Liverpool, England, UK
Died	8 December 1980(1980-12-08) (aged 40) New York, New York, US
Genres	Rock, pop
Occupations	Musician, singer-songwriter, record producer, artist, writer
Instruments	Vocals, guitar, piano, harmonica, harmonium, electronic organ, six-string bass
Years active	1957–75, 1980
Labels	Parlophone, Capitol, Apple, EMI, Geffen, Polydor
Associated acts	The Quarrymen, The Beatles, Plastic Ono Band, The Dirty Mac, Yoko Ono
Website	www.johnlennon.com
Notable instruments
Rickenbacker 325 Epiphone Casino Gibson J-160E

Lennon's signature

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.

Lennon revealed a rebellious nature and acerbic wit in his music, writing, drawings, on film, and in interviews. Controversial through his political and peace activism, he moved to New York City in 1971, where his criticism of the Vietnam War resulted in a lengthy attempt by Richard Nixon's administration to deport him, while some of his songs were adopted as anthems by the anti-war movement.

As of 2012 Lennon's solo album sales in the United States exceed 14 million units, and as writer, co-writer or performer, he is responsible for 25 number-one singles on the US Hot 100 chart. In 2002 a BBC poll on the 100 Greatest Britons voted him eighth, and in 2008, Rolling Stone ranked him the fifth-greatest singer of all-time. He was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.

History[link]

1940–57: Early years[link]

Lennon was born in war-time England, on 9 October 1940 at Liverpool Maternity Hospital to Julia and Alfred Lennon, a merchant seaman who was away at the time of his son's birth.^[1] He was named John Winston Lennon after his paternal grandfather, John "Jack" Lennon, and then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill.^[2] His father was often away from home but sent regular pay cheques to 9 Newcastle Road, Liverpool, where Lennon lived with his mother,^[3] but the cheques stopped when he went absent without leave in February 1944.^[4][5] When he eventually came home six months later, he offered to look after the family, but Julia—by then pregnant with another man's child—rejected the idea.^[6] After her sister, Mimi Smith, twice complained to Liverpool's Social Services, Julia handed the care of Lennon over to her. In July 1946 Lennon's father visited Smith and took his son to Blackpool, secretly intending to emigrate to New Zealand with him.^[7] Julia followed them—with her partner at the time, 'Bobby' Dykins—and after a heated argument his father forced the five-year-old to choose between them. Lennon twice chose his father, but as his mother walked away, he began to cry and followed her.^[8] It would be 20 years before he had contact with his father again.^[9]

251 Menlove Avenue, the home of George and Mimi Smith, where Lennon lived for most of his childhood and adolescence

Throughout the rest of his childhood and adolescence he lived with his aunt and uncle, Mimi and George Smith, who had no children of their own, at Mendips, 251 Menlove Avenue, Woolton.^[10] His aunt bought him volumes of short stories, and his uncle, a dairyman at his family's farm, bought him a mouth organ and engaged him in solving crossword puzzles.^[11] Julia visited Mendips on a regular basis, and when he was 11 years old he often visited her at 1 Blomfield Road, Liverpool, where she played him Elvis Presley records, and taught him the banjo, learning how to play "Ain't That a Shame" by Fats Domino.^[12]

In September 1980 he talked about his family and his rebellious nature:

Part of me would like to be accepted by all facets of society and not be this loudmouthed lunatic musician. But I cannot be what I am not. Because of my attitude, all the other boys' parents ... instinctively recognised what I was, which was a troublemaker, meaning I did not conform and I would influence their kids, which I did ... I did my best to disrupt every friend's home ... Partly, maybe, it was out of envy that I didn't have this so-called home, but I really did ... There were five women who were my family. Five strong, intelligent women. Five sisters. Those women were fantastic ... that was my first feminist education ... One happened to be my mother ... she just couldn't deal with life. She had a husband who ran away to sea and the war was on and she couldn't cope with me, and when I was four-and-a-half, I ended up living with her elder sister ... the fact that I wasn't with my parents made me see that parents are not gods.^[13]

He regularly visited his cousin, Stanley Parkes, who lived in Fleetwood. Seven years Lennon's senior, Parkes took him on trips, and to local cinemas.^[14] During the school holidays, Parkes often visited Lennon with Leila Harvey, another cousin, often travelling to Blackpool two or three times a week to watch shows. They would visit the Blackpool Tower Circus and see artists such as Dickie Valentine, Arthur Askey, Max Bygraves and Joe Loss, with Parkes recalling that Lennon particularly liked George Formby.^[15] After Parkes's family moved to Scotland, the three cousins often spent their school holidays together there. Parkes recalled, "John, cousin Leila and I were very close. From Edinburgh we would drive up to the family croft at Durness, which was from about the time John was nine years old until he was about 16."^[16] He was 14 years old when his uncle George died of a liver haemorrhage on 5 June 1955 (aged 52).^[17]

Lennon was raised as an Anglican and attended Dovedale Primary School.^[18] From September 1952 to 1957, after passing his Eleven-Plus exam, he attended Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool, and was described by Harvey at the time as, "A happy-go-lucky, good-humoured, easy going, lively lad."^[19] He often drew comical cartoons which appeared in his own self-made school magazine called The Daily Howl,^[20] but despite his artistic talent, his school reports were damning: "Certainly on the road to failure ... hopeless ... rather a clown in class ... wasting other pupils' time."^[21]

His mother bought him his first guitar in 1956, an inexpensive Gallotone Champion acoustic for which she "lent" her son five pounds and ten shillings on the condition that the guitar be delivered to her own house, and not Mimi's, knowing well that her sister was not supportive of her son's musical aspirations.^[22] As Mimi was sceptical of his claim that he would be famous one day, she hoped he would grow bored with music, often telling him, "The guitar's all very well, John, but you'll never make a living out of it".^[23] On 15 July 1958, when Lennon was 17 years old, his mother, walking home after visiting the Smiths' house, was struck by a car and killed.^[24]

Lennon failed all his GCE O-level examinations, and was accepted into the Liverpool College of Art only after his aunt and headmaster intervened.^[25] Once at the college, he started wearing Teddy Boy clothes and acquired a reputation for disrupting classes and ridiculing teachers. As a result, he was excluded from the painting class, then the graphic arts course, and was threatened with expulsion for his behaviour, which included sitting on a nude model's lap during a life drawing class.^[26] He failed an annual exam, despite help from fellow student and future wife Cynthia Powell, and was "thrown out of the college before his final year."^[27]

1957–70: The Quarrymen to The Beatles[link]

1957–65: Formation, commercial break-out, and touring years[link]

Lennon playing with The Beatles in 1964 at the height of Beatlemania

The Beatles evolved from Lennon's first band, the Quarrymen. Named after Quarry Bank High School, the group was established by him in September 1956 when he was 15, and began as a skiffle group.^[28] By the summer of 1957 the Quarrymen played a "spirited set of songs" made up of half skiffle, and half rock and roll.^[29] Lennon first met Paul McCartney at the Quarrymen's second performance, held in Woolton on 6 July at the St. Peter's Church garden fête, after which McCartney was asked to join the band.^[30]

McCartney says that Aunt Mimi: "was very aware that John's friends were lower class", and would often patronise him when he arrived to visit Lennon.^[31] According to Paul's brother Mike, McCartney's father was also disapproving, declaring Lennon would get his son "into trouble";^[32] although he later allowed the fledgling band to rehearse in the McCartneys' front room at 20 Forthlin Road.^[33][34] During this time, the 18-year-old Lennon wrote his first song, "Hello Little Girl", a UK top 10 hit for The Fourmost nearly five years later.^[35]

George Harrison joined the band as lead guitarist,^[36] even though Lennon thought Harrison (at 14 years old) was too young to join the band, so McCartney engineered a second audition on the upper deck of a Liverpool bus, where Harrison played "Raunchy" for Lennon.^[37] Stuart Sutcliffe, Lennon's friend from art school, later joined as bassist.^[38] Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Sutcliffe became "The Beatles" in early 1960. In August that year The Beatles, engaged for a 48-night residency in Hamburg, Germany, and desperately in need of a drummer, asked Pete Best to join them.^[39] Lennon was now 19, and his aunt, horrified when he told her about the trip, pleaded with him to continue his art studies instead.^[40] After the first Hamburg residency, the band accepted another in April 1961, and a third in April 1962. Like the other band members, Lennon was introduced to Preludin while in Hamburg,^[41] and regularly took the drug, as well as amphetamines, as a stimulant during their long, overnight performances.^[42]

Brian Epstein, The Beatles' manager from 1962, had no prior experience of artist management, but nevertheless had a strong influence on their early dress code and attitude on stage.^[43] Lennon initially resisted his attempts to encourage the band to present a professional appearance, but eventually complied, saying, "I'll wear a bloody balloon if somebody's going to pay me".^[44] McCartney took over on bass after Sutcliffe decided to stay in Hamburg, and drummer Ringo Starr replaced Best, completing the four-piece line-up that would endure until the group's break-up in 1970. The band's first single, "Love Me Do", was released in October 1962 and reached #17 on the British charts. They recorded their debut album, Please Please Me, in under 10 hours on 11 February 1963,^[45] a day when Lennon was suffering the effects of a cold,^[46] which is evident in the vocal on the last song to be recorded that day, Twist and Shout.^[47] The Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership yielded eight of its fourteen tracks. With few exceptions—one being the album title itself—Lennon had yet to bring his love of wordplay to bear on his song lyrics, saying: "We were just writing songs ... pop songs with no more thought of them than that–to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant".^[45] In a 1987 interview, McCartney said that the other Beatles idolised John: "He was like our own little Elvis ... We all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest".^[48]

The Beatles achieved mainstream success in the UK during the beginning of 1963. Lennon was on tour when his first son, Julian, was born in April. During their Royal Variety Show performance, attended by the Queen Mother and other British royalty, Lennon poked fun at his audience: "For our next song, I'd like to ask for your help. For the people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands ... and the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewellery."^[49] After a year of Beatlemania in the UK, the group's historic February 1964 US debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show marked their breakthrough to international stardom. A two-year period of constant touring, moviemaking, and songwriting followed, during which Lennon wrote two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works.^[50] The Beatles received recognition from the British Establishment when they were appointed Members of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen's Birthday Honours of 1965.^[51]

Lennon grew concerned that fans attending Beatles' concerts were unable to hear the music above the screaming of fans, and that the band's musicianship was beginning to suffer as a result.^[52] Lennon's "Help!" expressed his own feelings in 1965: "I meant it ... It was me singing 'help'".^[53] He had put on weight (he would later refer to this as his "Fat Elvis" period),^[54] and felt he was subconsciously seeking change.^[55] The following January he was unknowingly introduced to LSD when a dentist, hosting a dinner party attended by Lennon, Harrison and their wives, spiked the guests' coffee with the drug.^[56] When they wanted to leave, their host revealed what they had taken, and strongly advised them not to leave the house because of the likely effects. Later, in an elevator at a nightclub, they all believed it was on fire: "We were all screaming ... hot and hysterical."^[56] A few months later in March, during an interview with Evening Standard reporter Maureen Cleave, Lennon remarked, "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink ... We're more popular than Jesus now—I don't know which will go first, rock and roll or Christianity."^[57] The comment went virtually unnoticed in England but caused great offence in the US when quoted by a magazine there five months later. The furore that followed—burning of Beatles' records, Ku Klux Klan activity, and threats against Lennon—contributed to the band's decision to stop touring.^[58]

1966–70: Studio years, break-up and solo work[link]

Deprived of the routine of live performances after their final commercial concert on 29 August 1966, Lennon felt lost and considered leaving the band.^[59] Since his involuntary introduction to LSD in January, he had made increasing use of the drug, and was almost constantly under its influence for much of the year."^[60] According to biographer Ian MacDonald, Lennon's continuous experience with LSD during the year brought him "close to erasing his identity".^[61] 1967 saw the release of "Strawberry Fields Forever", hailed by TIME magazine for its "astonishing inventiveness",^[62] and the group's landmark album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which revealed Lennon's lyrics contrasting strongly with the simple love songs of the Lennon–McCartney's early years.

In August, after having been introduced to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the group attended a weekend of personal instruction at his Transcendental Meditation seminar in Bangor, Wales,^[63] and were informed of Epstein's death during the seminar. "I knew we were in trouble then", Lennon said later. "I didn't have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music, and I was scared".^[64] They later travelled to Maharishi's ashram in India for further guidance, where they composed most of the songs for The Beatles and Abbey Road.^[65]

The anti-war, black comedy How I Won the War, featuring Lennon's only appearance in a non–Beatles' full-length film, was shown in cinemas in October 1967.^[66] McCartney organised the group's first post-Epstein project,^[67] the self-written, -produced and -directed television film Magical Mystery Tour, released in December that year. While the film itself proved to be their first critical flop, its soundtrack release, featuring Lennon's acclaimed, Lewis Carroll-inspired "I am the Walrus", was a success.^[68][69] With Epstein gone, the band members became increasingly involved in business activities, and in February 1968 they formed Apple Corps, a multimedia corporation comprising Apple Records and several other subsidiary companies. Lennon described the venture as an attempt to achieve, "artistic freedom within a business structure",^[70] but his increased drug experimentation and growing preoccupation with Yoko Ono, and McCartney's own marriage plans, left Apple in need of professional management. Lennon asked Lord Beeching to take on the role, but he declined, advising Lennon to go back to making records. Lennon approached Allen Klein, who had managed The Rolling Stones and other bands during the British Invasion. Klein was appointed as Apple's chief executive by Lennon, Harrison and Starr,^[71] but McCartney never signed the management contract.^[72]

	"Give Peace a Chance" noicon Sample of "Give Peace a Chance", recorded in 1969 during Lennon and Ono's second Bed-In for Peace. As described by biographer Bill Harry, Lennon wanted to "write a peace anthem that would take over from the song 'We Shall Overcome'—and he succeeded ... it became the main anti-Vietnam protest song."[73]
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

At the end of 1968, Lennon featured in the film The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (not released until 1996) in the role of a Dirty Mac band member. The supergroup, comprising Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Mitch Mitchell, also backed a vocal performance by Ono in the film.^[74] Lennon and Ono were married on 20 March 1969, and soon released a series of 14 lithographs called "Bag One" depicting scenes from their honeymoon,^[75] eight of which were deemed indecent and most of which were banned and confiscated.^[76] Lennon's creative focus continued to move beyond The Beatles and between 1968 and 1969 he and Ono recorded three albums of experimental music together: Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins^[77] (known more for its cover than for its music), Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions and Wedding Album. In 1969 they formed The Plastic Ono Band, releasing Live Peace in Toronto 1969. In protest at Britain's involvement in the Nigerian Civil War,^[78] Lennon returned his MBE medal to the Queen, though this had no effect on his MBE status, which could not be renounced.^[79] Between 1969 and 1970 Lennon released the singles "Give Peace a Chance" (widely adopted as an anti-Vietnam-War anthem in 1969),^[80] "Cold Turkey" (documenting his withdrawal symptoms after he became addicted to heroin^[81]) and "Instant Karma!".

Lennon left the group in September 1969,^[82] and agreed not to inform the media while the band renegotiated their recording contract, but he was outraged that McCartney publicised his own departure on releasing his debut solo album in April 1970. Lennon's reaction was, "Jesus Christ! He gets all the credit for it!"^[83] He later wrote, "I started the band. I disbanded it. It's as simple as that."^[84] In later interviews with Rolling Stone magazine, he revealed his bitterness towards McCartney, saying, "I was a fool not to do what Paul did, which was use it to sell a record."^[85] He spoke too of the hostility he perceived the other members had towards Ono, and of how he, Harrison, and Starr "got fed up with being sidemen for Paul ... After Brian Epstein died we collapsed. Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us when we went round in circles?"^[86]

1970–80: Solo career[link]

1970–72: Initial solo success and activism[link]

Advertisement for "Imagine" from Billboard, 18 September 1971.

In 1970, Lennon and Ono went through primal therapy with Dr. Arthur Janov in Los Angeles, California. Designed to release emotional pain from early childhood, the therapy entailed two half-days a week with Janov for four months; he had wanted to treat the couple for longer, but they felt no need to continue and returned to London.^[87] Lennon's emotional debut solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970), was received with high praise. Critic Greil Marcus remarked, "John's singing in the last verse of 'God' may be the finest in all of rock."^[88] The album featured the songs "Mother", in which Lennon confronted his feelings of childhood rejection,^[89] and the Dylanesque "Working Class Hero", a bitter attack against the bourgeois social system which, due to the lyric "you're still fucking peasants", fell foul of broadcasters.^[90][91] The same year, Tariq Ali's revolutionary political views, expressed when he interviewed Lennon, inspired the singer to write "Power to the People". Lennon also became involved with Ali during a protest against Oz magazine's prosecution for alleged obscenity. Lennon denounced the proceedings as "disgusting fascism", and he and Ono (as Elastic Oz Band) released the single "God Save Us/Do the Oz" and joined marches in support of the magazine.^[92]

	"Imagine" noicon Sample of "Imagine", Lennon's "most famous post-Beatles' track."[93] Like "Give Peace a Chance", the song became an anti-war anthem, but its lyrics offended religious groups. Lennon's explanation was, "If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion—not without religion, but without this 'my God is bigger than your God' thing—then it can be true."[94]
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With Lennon's next album, Imagine (1971), critical response was more guarded. Rolling Stone reported that "it contains a substantial portion of good music" but warned of the possibility that "his posturings will soon seem not merely dull but irrelevant".^[95] The album's title track would become an anthem for anti-war movements,^[96] while another, "How Do You Sleep?", was a musical attack on McCartney in response to lyrics from Ram that Lennon felt, and McCartney later confirmed,^[97] were directed at him and Ono. However, Lennon softened his stance in the mid-1970s and said he had written "How Do You Sleep?" about himself.^[98] He said in 1980: "I used my resentment against Paul ... to create a song ... not a terrible vicious horrible vendetta ... I used my resentment and withdrawing from Paul and The Beatles, and the relationship with Paul, to write 'How Do You Sleep'. I don't really go 'round with those thoughts in my head all the time".^[99]

Lennon and Ono moved to New York in August 1971, and in December released "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)".^[100] To advertise the single, they paid for billboards in 12 cities around the world which declared, in the national language, "WAR IS OVER—IF YOU WANT IT".^[101] The new year saw the Nixon Administration take what it called a "strategic counter-measure" against Lennon's anti-war propaganda, embarking on what would be a four-year attempt to deport him: embroiled in a continuing legal battle, he was denied permanent residency in the US until 1976.^[102]

Recorded as a collaboration with Ono and with backing from the New York band Elephant's Memory, Some Time in New York City was released in 1972. Containing songs about women's rights, race relations, Britain's role in Northern Ireland, and Lennon's problems obtaining a green card,^[103] the album was poorly received—unlistenable, according to one critic.^[104] "Woman Is the Nigger of the World", released as a US single from the album the same year, was televised on 11 May, on The Dick Cavett Show. Many radio stations refused to broadcast the song because of the word "nigger".^[105] Lennon and Ono gave two benefit concerts with Elephant's Memory and guests in New York in aid of patients at the Willowbrook State School mental facility.^[106] Staged at Madison Square Garden on 30 August 1972, they were his last full-length concert appearances.^[107]

1973–75: "Lost weekend"[link]

Publicity photo of John Lennon and host Tom Snyder from the television program Tomorrow. Done in 1975, this was the last television interview Lennon gave before his death in 1980.

While Lennon was recording Mind Games (1973), he and Ono decided to separate. The ensuing 18-month period apart, which he later called his "lost weekend",^[108] was spent in Los Angeles and New York in the company of May Pang. Mind Games, credited to the "Plastic U.F.Ono Band", was released in November 1973. Lennon also contributed "I'm the Greatest", to Starr's album Ringo (1973), released the same month. (an alternate take, from the same 1973 Ringo sessions, with Lennon providing a guide vocal, appears on John Lennon Anthology).

In early 1974, Lennon was drinking heavily and his alcohol-fuelled antics with Harry Nilsson made headlines. Two widely publicised incidents occurred at The Troubadour club in March, the first when Lennon placed a menstruation "towel" on his forehead and scuffled with a waitress, and the second, two weeks later, when Lennon and Nilsson were ejected from the same club after heckling the Smothers Brothers.^[109] Lennon decided to produce Nilsson's album Pussy Cats and Pang rented a Los Angeles beach house for all the musicians^[110] but after a month of further debauchery, with the recording sessions in chaos, Lennon moved to New York with Pang to finish work on the album. In April, Lennon had produced the Mick Jagger song "Too Many Cooks (Spoil the Soup)" which was, for contractual reasons, to remain unreleased for more than 30 years. Pang supplied the recording for its eventual inclusion on The Very Best of Mick Jagger (2007).^[111]

Settled back in New York, Lennon recorded the album Walls and Bridges. Released in October 1974, it yielded his only number-one single in his lifetime, "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night", featuring Elton John on backing vocals and piano.^[112] A second single from the album, "#9 Dream", followed before the end of the year. Starr's Goodnight Vienna (1974) again saw assistance from Lennon, who wrote the title track and played piano.^[113] On 28 November, Lennon made a surprise guest appearance at Elton John's Thanksgiving concert at Madison Square Garden, in fulfilment of his promise to join the singer in a live show if "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night"—a song whose commercial potential Lennon had doubted—reached number one. Lennon performed the song along with "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "I Saw Her Standing There", which he introduced as "a song by an old estranged fiancee of mine called Paul".^[114]

Lennon co-wrote "Fame", David Bowie's first US number one, and provided guitar and backing vocals for the January 1975 recording.^[115] The same month, Elton John topped the charts with his cover of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", featuring Lennon on guitar and back-up vocals (Lennon is credited on the single under the moniker of "Dr. Winston O'Boogie"). He and Ono were reunited shortly afterwards. Lennon released Rock 'n' Roll (1975), an album of cover songs, in February. "Stand by Me", taken from the album and a US and UK hit, became his last single for five years.^[116] He made what would be his final stage appearance in the ATV special A Salute to Lew Grade, recorded on 18 April and televised in June.^[117] Playing acoustic guitar, and backed by an eight-piece band, Lennon performed two songs from Rock 'n' Roll ("Stand By Me", which was not broadcast, and "Slippin' and Slidin'") followed by "Imagine".^[117]

1975–80: Retirement and return[link]

With the birth of his second son Sean on 9 October 1975, Lennon took on the role of househusband, beginning what would be a five-year hiatus from the music industry during which he gave all his attention to his family.^[13] Within the month, he fulfilled his contractual obligation to EMI/Capitol for one more album by releasing Shaved Fish, a compilation album of previously recorded tracks.^[13] He devoted himself to Sean, rising at 6 am daily to plan and prepare his meals and to spend time with him.^[118] He wrote "Cookin' (In the Kitchen of Love)" for Starr's Ringo's Rotogravure (1976), performing on the track in June in what would be his last recording session until 1980.^[119] He formally announced his break from music in Tokyo in 1977, saying, "we have basically decided, without any great decision, to be with our baby as much as we can until we feel we can take time off to indulge ourselves in creating things outside of the family."^[120] During his career break he created several series of drawings, and drafted a book containing a mix of autobiographical material and what he termed "mad stuff",^[121] all of which would be published posthumously.

He emerged from retirement in October 1980 with the single "(Just Like) Starting Over", followed the next month by the album Double Fantasy, which contained songs written during a journey to Bermuda on a 43-foot sailing boat the previous June,^[122] that reflected Lennon's fulfilment in his new-found stable family life.^[123] Sufficient additional material was recorded for a planned follow-up album Milk and Honey (released posthumously in 1984).^[124] Released jointly with Ono, Double Fantasy was not well received, drawing comments such as Melody Maker's "indulgent sterility ... a godawful yawn".^[125]

8 December 1980: Death[link]

At around 10:50 pm on 8 December 1980, as Lennon and Ono returned to their New York apartment in The Dakota, Mark David Chapman shot Lennon in the back four times at the entrance to the building. Lennon was taken to the emergency room of the nearby Roosevelt Hospital and was pronounced dead on arrival at 11:07 pm.^[126] Earlier that evening, Lennon had autographed a copy of Double Fantasy for Chapman.^[127]

Ono issued a statement the next day, saying "There is no funeral for John", ending it with the words, "John loved and prayed for the human race. Please pray the same for him."^[128] His body was cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Ono scattered his ashes in New York's Central Park, where the Strawberry Fields memorial was later created.^[129] Chapman pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years to life; as of 2011, he remains in prison, having been denied parole six times.^[130][131]

Personal relationships[link]

Cynthia Lennon[link]

Lennon and Cynthia Powell met in 1957 as fellow students at the Liverpool College of Art.^[132] Although being scared of Lennon's attitude and appearance, she heard that he was obsessed with French actress Brigitte Bardot, so she dyed her hair blonde. Lennon asked her out, but when she said that she was engaged, he screamed out, "I didn't ask you to fuckin' marry me, did I?"^[133] She often accompanied him to Quarrymen gigs and travelled to Hamburg with McCartney's girlfriend at the time to visit him.^[134] Lennon, jealous by nature, eventually grew possessive and often terrified Powell with his anger and physical violence.^[135] Lennon later said that until he met Ono, he had never questioned his chauvinistic attitude to women. The Beatles' song "Getting Better", he said, told his own story, "I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically—any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace".^[13]

Recalling his reaction in July 1962 on learning that Cynthia was pregnant, Lennon said, "There's only one thing for it Cyn. We'll have to get married."^[136] The couple were married on 23 August at the Mount Pleasant Register Office in Liverpool. His marriage began just as Beatlemania took hold across the UK. He performed on the evening of his wedding day, and would continue to do so almost daily from then on.^[137] Epstein, fearing that fans would be alienated by the idea of a married Beatle, asked the Lennons to keep their marriage secret. Julian was born on 8 April 1963; Lennon was on tour at the time and did not see his son until three days later.^[138]

Cynthia attributes the start of the marriage breakdown to LSD, and as a result, she felt that he slowly lost interest in her.^[139] When the group travelled by train to Bangor, Wales, in 1967, for the Maharishi Yogi's Transcendental Meditation seminar, a policeman did not recognise her and stopped her from boarding. She later recalled how the incident seemed to symbolise the ending of their marriage.^[140] After arriving home at Kenwood, and finding Lennon with Ono, Cynthia left the house to stay with friends. Alexis Mardas later claimed to have slept with her that night, and a few weeks later he informed her that Lennon was seeking a divorce and custody of Julian on grounds of her adultery with him. After negotiations, Lennon capitulated and agreed to her divorcing him on the same grounds. The case was settled out of court, with Lennon giving her £100,000, and custody of Julian.^[141]

Brian Epstein[link]

The Beatles were performing at Liverpool's Cavern Club in 1962, when all four Beatles were introduced to Epstein after a midday concert. Epstein was homosexual. According to biographer Philip Norman, one of his reasons for wanting to manage the group was that he was physically attracted to Lennon. Almost as soon as Julian was born, Lennon went on holiday to Spain with Epstein, leading to speculation about their relationship. Questioned about it later, Lennon said, "Well, it was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship. It was my first experience with a homosexual that I was conscious was homosexual. We used to sit in a café in Torremolinos looking at all the boys and I'd say, 'Do you like that one? Do you like this one?' I was rather enjoying the experience, thinking like a writer all the time: I am experiencing this."^[142] Soon after their return from Spain, at McCartney's twenty-first birthday party in June 1963, Lennon physically attacked Cavern Club MC Bob Wooler for saying "How was your honeymoon, John?" The MC, known for his wordplay and affectionate but cutting remarks, was making a joke,^[143] but ten months had passed since Lennon's marriage, and the honeymoon, deferred, was still two months in the future.^[144] To Lennon, who was intoxicated with alcohol at the time, the matter was simple: "He called me a queer so I battered his bloody ribs in".^[145]

Lennon delighted in mocking Epstein for his homosexuality and for the fact that he was Jewish.^[146] When Epstein invited suggestions for the title of his autobiography, Lennon offered Queer Jew; on learning of the eventual title, A Cellarful of Noise, he parodied, "More like A Cellarful of Boys".^[147] He demanded of a visitor to Epstein's flat, "Have you come to blackmail him? If not, you're the only bugger in London who hasn't."^[146] During the recording of "Baby, You're a Rich Man", he sang altered choruses of "Baby, you're a rich fag Jew".^[148][149]

Julian Lennon[link]

Julian Lennon at the unveiling of the John Lennon Peace Monument in Liverpool, 2010

Lennon's first son, Julian, was born as his commitments with The Beatles intensified at the height of Beatlemania during his marriage to Cynthia. Lennon was touring with The Beatles when Julian was born on 8 April 1963. Julian's birth, like his mother Cynthia's marriage to Lennon, was kept secret because Epstein was convinced public knowledge of such things would threaten The Beatles' commercial success. Julian recalls how some four years later, as a small child in Weybridge, "I was trundled home from school and came walking up with one of my watercolour paintings. It was just a bunch of stars and this blonde girl I knew at school. And Dad said, 'What's this?' I said, 'It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds.'"^[150] Lennon used it as the title of a Beatles' song, and though it was later reported to have been derived from the initials LSD, Lennon insisted, "It's not an acid song."^[151] McCartney corroborated Lennon's explanation that Julian innocently came up with the name.^[151] Lennon was distant from Julian, who felt closer to McCartney than to his father. During a car journey to visit Cynthia and Julian during Lennon's divorce, McCartney composed a song, "Hey Jules", to comfort him. It would evolve into The Beatles song "Hey Jude". Lennon later said, "That's his best song. It started off as a song about my son Julian ... he turned it into 'Hey Jude'. I always thought it was about me and Yoko but he said it wasn't."^[152]

Lennon's relationship with Julian was already strained, and after Lennon and Ono's 1971 move to New York, Julian would not see his father again until 1973.^[153] With Pang's encouragement, it was arranged for him (and his mother) to visit Lennon in Los Angeles, where they went to Disneyland.^[154] Julian started to see his father regularly, and Lennon gave him a drumming part on a Walls and Bridges track.^[155] He bought Julian a Gibson Les Paul guitar and other instruments, and encouraged his interest in music by demonstrating guitar chord techniques.^[155] Julian recalls that he and his father "got on a great deal better" during the time he spent in New York: "We had a lot of fun, laughed a lot and had a great time in general."^[156]

In a Playboy interview with David Sheff shortly before his death, Lennon said, "Sean was a planned child, and therein lies the difference. I don't love Julian any less as a child. He's still my son, whether he came from a bottle of whiskey or because they didn't have pills in those days. He's here, he belongs to me, and he always will." He said he was trying to re-establish a connection with the then 17-year-old, and confidently predicted, "Julian and I will have a relationship in the future."^[13] After his death it was revealed that he had left Julian very little in his will.^[157]

Yoko Ono[link]

John Lennon with Yoko Ono by Jack Mitchell, 1980

Two versions exist of how Lennon met Ono. According to the first, on 9 November 1966 Lennon went to the Indica Gallery in London, where Ono was preparing her conceptual art exhibit, and they were introduced by gallery owner John Dunbar.^[158] Lennon was intrigued by Ono's "Hammer A Nail": patrons hammered a nail into a wooden board, creating the art piece. Although the exhibition had not yet begun, Lennon wanted to hammer a nail into the clean board, but Ono stopped him. Dunbar asked her, "Don't you know who this is? He's a millionaire! He might buy it." Ono had supposedly not heard of The Beatles, but relented on condition that Lennon pay her five shillings, to which Lennon replied, "I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in."^[13] The second version, told by McCartney, is that in late 1965, Ono was in London compiling original musical scores for a book John Cage was working on, Notations, but McCartney declined to give her any of his own manuscripts for the book, suggesting that Lennon might oblige. When asked, Lennon gave Ono the original handwritten lyrics to "The Word".^[159]

Ono began telephoning and calling at Lennon's home, and when his wife asked for an explanation, he explained that Ono was only trying to obtain money for her "avant-garde bullshit".^[160] In May 1968, while his wife was on holiday in Greece, Lennon invited Ono to visit. They spent the night recording what would become the Two Virgins album, after which, he said, they "made love at dawn."^[161] When Lennon's wife returned home she found Ono wearing her bathrobe and drinking tea with Lennon who simply said, "Oh, hi."^[162] Ono became pregnant in 1968 and miscarried a male child they named John Ono Lennon II on 21 November 1968,^[129] a few weeks after Lennon's divorce from Cynthia was granted.^[163]

During Lennon's last two years in The Beatles, he and Ono began public protests against the Vietnam War. They were married in Gibraltar on 20 March 1969, and spent their honeymoon in Amsterdam campaigning with a week-long Bed-In for peace. They planned another Bed-In in the United States, but were denied entry,^[164] so held one instead at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, where they recorded "Give Peace a Chance".^[165] They often combined advocacy with performance art, as in their "Bagism", first introduced during a Vienna press conference. Lennon detailed this period in The Beatles' song "The Ballad of John and Yoko".^[166] Lennon changed his name by deed poll on 22 April 1969, adding "Ono" as a middle name. The brief ceremony took place on the roof of the Apple Corps building, made famous three months earlier by The Beatles' Let It Be rooftop concert. Although he used the name John Ono Lennon thereafter, official documents referred to him as John Winston Ono Lennon, since he was not permitted to revoke a name given at birth.^[167] After Ono was injured in a car accident, Lennon arranged for a king-sized bed to be brought to the recording studio as he worked on The Beatles' last album, Abbey Road.^[168] To escape the acrimony of the band's break-up, Ono suggested they move permanently to New York, which they did on 31 August 1971.

They first lived in the St. Regis Hotel on 5th Avenue, East 55th Street, then moved to a street-level flat at 105 Bank Street, Greenwich Village, on 16 October 1971. After a robbery, they relocated to the more secure Dakota at 1 West 72nd Street, in May 1973.^[169]

May Pang[link]

May Pang

ABKCO Industries, formed in 1968 by Allen Klein as an umbrella company to ABKCO Records, recruited May Pang as a receptionist in 1969. Through involvement in a project with ABKCO, Lennon and Ono met her the following year. She became their personal assistant. After she had been working with the couple for three years, Ono confided that she and Lennon were becoming estranged from one another. She went on to suggest that Pang should begin a physical relationship with Lennon, telling her, "He likes you a lot." Pang, 22, astounded by Ono's proposition, eventually agreed to become Lennon's companion. The pair soon moved to California, beginning an 18-month period he later called his "lost weekend".^[108] In Los Angeles, Pang encouraged Lennon to develop regular contact with Julian, whom he had not seen for two years. He also rekindled friendships with Starr, McCartney, Beatles' roadie Mal Evans, and Harry Nilsson. Whilst drinking with Nilsson, after misunderstanding something Pang said, Lennon attempted to strangle her, relenting only when physically restrained by Nilsson.^[170]

On moving to New York, they prepared a spare room in their newly rented apartment for Julian to visit.^[170] Lennon, hitherto inhibited by Ono in this regard, began to reestablish contact with other relatives and friends. By December he and Pang were considering a house purchase, and he was refusing to accept Ono's telephone calls. In January 1975, he agreed to meet Ono—who said she had found a cure for smoking. But after the meeting he failed to return home or call Pang. When Pang telephoned the next day, Ono told her Lennon was unavailable, being exhausted after a hypnotherapy session. Two days later, Lennon reappeared at a joint dental appointment, stupefied and confused to such an extent that Pang believed he had been brainwashed. He told her his separation from Ono was now over, though Ono would allow him to continue seeing her as his mistress.^[171]

Sean Lennon[link]

When Lennon and Ono were reunited, she became pregnant, but having previously suffered three miscarriages in her attempt to have a child with Lennon, she said she wanted an abortion. She agreed to allow the pregnancy to continue on condition that Lennon adopt the role of househusband; this he agreed to do.^[172] Sean was born on 9 October 1975, Lennon's 35th birthday, delivered by Caesarean section. Lennon's subsequent career break would span five years. He had a photographer take pictures of Sean every day of his first year, and created numerous drawings for him, posthumously published as Real Love: The Drawings for Sean. Lennon later proudly declared, "He didn't come out of my belly but, by God, I made his bones, because I've attended to every meal, and to how he sleeps, and to the fact that he swims like a fish."^[173]

Former Beatles[link]

Lennon (left) and the rest of The Beatles arriving in the US in 1964

Although his friendship with Starr remained consistently warm during the years following The Beatles' break-up in 1970, Lennon's relationship with McCartney and Harrison varied. He was close to Harrison initially, but the two drifted apart after Lennon moved to America. When Harrison was in New York for his December 1974 Dark Horse tour, Lennon agreed to join him on stage, but failed to appear after an argument over Lennon's refusal to sign an agreement that would finally dissolve The Beatles' legal partnership. (Lennon eventually signed the papers while holidaying in Florida with Pang and Julian.^[174]) Harrison incensed Lennon in 1980 when he published an autobiography that made little mention of him. Lennon told Playboy, "I was hurt by it. By glaring omission ... my influence on his life is absolutely zilch ... he remembers every two-bit sax player or guitarist he met in subsequent years. I'm not in the book."^[175]

Lennon's most intense feelings were reserved for McCartney. In addition to attacking him through the lyrics of "How Do You Sleep?", Lennon argued with him through the press for three years after the group split. The two later began to reestablish something of the close friendship they had once known, and in 1974 even played music together again, before growing apart once more. Lennon said that during McCartney's final visit, in April 1976, they watched the episode of Saturday Night Live in which Lorne Michaels made a $3,000 cash offer to get The Beatles to reunite on the show.^[176] The pair considered going to the studio to make a joke appearance, attempting to claim their share of the money, but were too tired.^[13] Lennon summarised his feelings towards McCartney in an interview three days before his death: "Throughout my career, I've selected to work with...only two people: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono....That ain't bad picking."^[177]

Along with his estrangement from McCartney, Lennon always felt a musical competitiveness with him and kept an ear on his music. During his five-year career break he was content to sit back so long as McCartney was producing what Lennon saw as mediocre "product".^[178] When McCartney released "Coming Up" in 1980, the year Lennon returned to the studio and the last year of his life, he took notice. "It's driving me crackers!" he jokingly complained, because he could not get the tune out of his head.^[178] Asked the same year whether the group were dreaded enemies or the best of friends, he replied that they were neither, and that he had not seen any of them in a long time. But he also said, "I still love those guys. The Beatles are over, but John, Paul, George and Ringo go on."^[13]

Political activism[link]

Recording "Give Peace a Chance" during the Bed-In for Peace at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Montreal

Lennon and Ono used their honeymoon as what they termed a "Bed-In for Peace" at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel; the March 1969 event attracted worldwide media ridicule.^[179][180] At a second Bed-In three months later at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal^[181] Lennon wrote and recorded "Give Peace a Chance". Released as a single, it was quickly taken up as an anti-war anthem and sung by a quarter of a million demonstrators against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC, on 15 October, the second Vietnam Moratorium Day.^[80][182]

Later that year, Lennon and Ono supported efforts by the family of James Hanratty, hanged for murder in 1962, to prove his innocence.^[183] Those who had condemned Hanratty were, according to Lennon, "the same people who are running guns to South Africa and killing blacks in the streets. ... The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything, it's the whole bullshit bourgeois scene."^[184] In London, Lennon and Ono staged a "Britain Murdered Hanratty" banner march and a "Silent Protest For James Hanratty",^[78] and produced a 40-minute documentary on the case. At an appeal hearing years later, Hanratty's conviction was upheld.^[185]

Lennon and Ono showed their solidarity with the Clydeside UCS workers' work-in of 1971 by sending a bouquet of red roses and a cheque for £5,000.^[186] On moving to New York City in August that year, they befriended two of the Chicago Seven, Yippie peace activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.^[187] Another peace activist, John Sinclair, poet and co-founder of the White Panther Party, was serving ten years in prison for selling two joints of marijuana after previous convictions for possession of the drug.^[188] In December 1971 at Ann Arbor, Michigan, 20,000 people attended the "John Sinclair Freedom Rally", a protest and benefit concert with contributions from Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger, Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party, and others.^[189] Lennon and Ono, backed by David Peel and Rubin, performed an acoustic set of four songs from their forthcoming Some Time in New York City album including "John Sinclair", whose lyrics called for his release. The day before the rally, Michigan State had drastically reduced the penalties for Sinclair's crimes and three days after the rally, he was released on bail.^[190] The performance was recorded and two of the tracks later appeared on John Lennon Anthology (1998).^[191]

Following the Bloody Sunday incident in Northern Ireland in 1972, in which 13 unarmed civil rights protesters were shot dead by the British Army, Lennon said that given the choice between the army and the IRA (who were not involved in the incident) he would side with the latter. Lennon and Ono wrote two songs protesting British presence and actions in Ireland for their Some Time in New York City album: "Luck of the Irish" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday". In 2000, David Shayler, a former member of Britain's domestic security service MI5 suggested that Lennon had given money to the IRA though this was swiftly denied by Ono.^[192] Biographer Bill Harry records that following Bloody Sunday, Lennon and Ono financially supported the production of the film The Irish Tapes, a political documentary with a Republican slant.^[193]

According to FBI surveillance reports (and confirmed by Tariq Ali in 2006) Lennon was sympathetic to the International Marxist Group, a Trotskyist group formed in Britain in 1968.^[194] However, the FBI considered Lennon to have limited effectiveness as a revolutionary since he was "constantly under the influence of narcotics".^[195]

Deportation attempt[link]

Following the impact of "Give Peace a Chance" and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)", both strongly associated with the anti–Vietnam War movement, the Nixon administration, hearing rumours of Lennon's involvement in a concert to be held in San Diego at the same time as the Republican National Convention,^[196] tried to have him deported. Nixon believed that Lennon's anti-war activities could cost him his re-election;^[197] Republican Senator Strom Thurmond suggested in a February 1972 memo that "deportation would be a strategic counter-measure" against Lennon.^[198] The next month the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began deportation proceedings, arguing that his 1968 misdemeanor conviction for cannabis possession in London had made him ineligible for admission to the United States. Lennon spent the next three and a half years in and out of deportation hearings until on 8 October 1975, when a court of appeals barred the deportation attempt, stating " ... the courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds."^[199][103] While the legal battle continued, Lennon attended rallies and made television appearances. Lennon and Ono co-hosted the Mike Douglas Show for a week in February 1972, introducing guests such as Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale to mid-America.^[200] In 1972, Bob Dylan wrote a letter to the INS defending Lennon, stating:

John and Yoko add a great voice and drive to the country's so-called art institution. They inspire and transcend and stimulate and by doing so, only help others to see pure light and in doing that, put an end to this dull taste of petty commercialism which is being passed off as Artist Art by the overpowering mass media. Hurray for John and Yoko. Let them stay and live here and breathe. The country's got plenty of room and space. Let John and Yoko stay!^[201][202]

On 23 March 1973, Lennon was ordered to leave the US within 60 days.^[203] Ono, meanwhile, was granted permanent residence. In response, Lennon and Ono held a press conference on 1 April 1973 at the New York City Bar Association, where they announced the formation of the state of Nutopia; a place with "no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people".^[204] Waving the white flag of Nutopia (two handkerchiefs), they asked for political asylum in the US. The press conference was filmed, and would later appear in the 2006 documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon.^[205] Lennon's Mind Games (1973) included the track "Nutopian International Anthem", which comprised three seconds of silence.^[206] Soon after the press conference, Nixon's involvement in a political scandal came to light, and in June the Watergate hearings began in Washington, DC. They led to the president's resignation 14 months later. Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, showed little interest in continuing the battle against Lennon, and the deportation order was overturned in 1975. The following year, his US immigration status finally resolved, Lennon received his "green card" certifying his permanent residency, and when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president in January 1977, Lennon and Ono attended the Inaugural Ball.^[207]

FBI surveillance and declassified documents[link]

The FBI conducted clandestine surveillance on Lennon in the early 1970s. Here is a confidential letter from J. Edgar Hoover to the Attorney General about the surveillance. Historian Jon Wiener used the Freedom of Information Act with help from ACLU lawyers to push for the eventual release of these documents.

After Lennon's death, historian Jon Wiener filed a Freedom of Information Act request for FBI files documenting the Bureau's role in the deportation attempt.^[208] The FBI admitted it had 281 pages of files on Lennon, but refused to release most of them on the grounds that they contained national security information. In 1983, Wiener sued the FBI with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. It took 14 years of litigation to force the FBI to release the withheld pages.^[209] The ACLU, representing Wiener, won a favourable decision in their suit against the FBI in the Ninth Circuit in 1991.^[210] The Justice Department appealed the decision to the Supreme Court in April 1992, but the court declined to review the case.^[211] In 1997, respecting President Bill Clinton's newly instigated rule that documents should be withheld only if releasing them would involve "foreseeable harm", the Justice Department settled most of the outstanding issues outside court by releasing all but 10 of the contested documents.^[211] Wiener published the results of his 14-year campaign in January 2000. Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files contained facsimiles of the documents, including "lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges".^[212] The story is told in the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon. The final 10 documents in Lennon's FBI file, which reported on his ties with London anti-war activists in 1971 and had been withheld as containing "national security information provided by a foreign government under an explicit promise of confidentiality", were released in December 2006. They contained no indication that the British government had regarded Lennon as a serious threat; one example of the released material was a report that two prominent British leftists had hoped Lennon would finance a left-wing bookshop and reading room.^[213]

Further information: Jon_Wiener#Wiener_battles_with_the_FBI

Writing and art[link]

Lennon's biographer Bill Harry writes that Lennon began drawing and writing creatively at an early age with the encouragement of his uncle. He collected his stories, poetry, cartoons, and caricatures in a Quarry Bank High School exercise book that he called the Daily Howl. The drawings were often of crippled people, and the writings satirical, and throughout the book was an abundance of wordplay. According to classmate Bill Turner, Lennon created the Daily Howl to amuse his best friend and later Quarrymen band mate, Pete Shotton, to whom he would show his work before he let anyone else see it. Turner said that Lennon "had an obsession for Wigan Pier. It kept cropping up", and in Lennon's story A Carrot In A Potato Mine, "the mine was at the end of Wigan Pier." Turner described how one of Lennon's cartoons depicted a bus stop sign annotated with the question, "Why?". Above was a flying pancake, and below, "a blind man wearing glasses leading along a blind dog—also wearing glasses".^[214]

Lennon's love of wordplay and nonsense with a twist found a wider audience when he was 24. Harry writes that In His Own Write (1964) was published after "Some journalist who was hanging around The Beatles came to me and I ended up showing him the stuff. They said, 'Write a book' and that's how the first one came about". Like the Daily Howl it contained a mix of formats including short stories, poetry, plays and drawings. One story, "Good Dog Nigel", tells the tale of "a happy dog, urinating on a lamp post, barking, wagging his tail—until he suddenly hears a message that he will be killed at three o'clock". The Times Literary Supplement considered the poems and stories "remarkable ... also very funny ... the nonsense runs on, words and images prompting one another in a chain of pure fantasy". Book Week reported, "This is nonsense writing, but one has only to review the literature of nonsense to see how well Lennon has brought it off. While some of his homonyms are gratuitous word play, many others have not only double meaning but a double edge." Lennon was not only surprised by the positive reception, but that the book was reviewed at all, and suggested that readers "took the book more seriously than I did myself. It just began as a laugh for me".^[215]

In combination with A Spaniard in the Works (1965), In His Own Write formed the basis of the stage play The John Lennon Play: In His Own Write, co-adapted by Victor Spinetti and Adrienne Kennedy. After negotiations between Lennon, Spinetti and the artistic director of the National Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier, the play opened at the Old Vic in 1968. Lennon and Ono attended the opening night performance, their second public appearance together to date.^[216] After Lennon's death, further works were published, including Skywriting by Word of Mouth (1986); Ai: Japan Through John Lennon's Eyes: A Personal Sketchbook (1992), with Lennon's illustrations of the definitions of Japanese words; and Real Love: The Drawings for Sean (1999). The Beatles Anthology (2000) also presented examples of his writings and drawings.

Musicianship[link]

Instruments played[link]

Lennon's Les Paul Jr.

His playing of a mouth organ during a bus journey to visit his cousin in Scotland caught the driver's ear. Impressed, the driver told Lennon of a harmonica he could have if he came to Edinburgh the following day, where one had been stored in the bus depot since a passenger left it on a bus.^[217] The professional instrument quickly replaced Lennon's toy. He would continue to play harmonica, often using the instrument during The Beatles' Hamburg years, and it became a signature sound in the group's early recordings. His mother taught him how to play the banjo, later buying him an acoustic guitar. At 16, he played rhythm guitar with the Quarrymen.^[218] As his career progressed, he played a variety of electric guitars, predominantly the Rickenbacker 325, Epiphone Casino and Gibson J-160E, and, from the start of his solo career, the Gibson Les Paul Junior.^[219][220] Occasionally he played a six-string bass guitar, the Fender Bass VI, providing bass on some Beatles' numbers that occupied McCartney with another instrument.^[221] His other instrument of choice was the piano, on which he composed many songs, including "Imagine", described as his best-known solo work.^[222] His jamming on a piano with McCartney in 1963 led to the creation of The Beatles' first US number one, "I Want to Hold Your Hand".^[223] In 1964, he became one of the first British musicians to acquire a Mellotron keyboard, though it was not heard on a Beatles' recording until "Strawberry Fields Forever" in late 1966.^[224]

Vocal style[link]

When Lennon recorded "Twist and Shout", the final track during the mammoth one-day session that captured the band's 1963 debut album Please Please Me, his voice, already compromised by a cold, came close to giving out. Lennon said, "I couldn't sing the damn thing, I was just screaming."^[225] In the words of biographer Barry Miles, "Lennon simply shredded his vocal cords in the interests of rock 'n' roll."^[226] The Beatles' producer, George Martin, tells how Lennon "had an inborn dislike of his own voice which I could never understand. He was always saying to me: 'DO something with my voice! ... put something on it ... Make it different.'"^[227] Martin obliged, often using double-tracking and other techniques. Music critic Robert Christgau says that Lennon's "greatest vocal performance ... from scream to whine, is modulated electronically ... echoed, filtered, and double tracked."^[228]

As his Beatles' era segued into his solo career, his singing voice found a widening range of expression. Biographer Chris Gregory writes that Lennon was, "tentatively beginning to expose his insecurities in a number of acoustic-led 'confessional' ballads, so beginning the process of 'public therapy' that will eventually culminate in the primal screams of 'Cold Turkey' and the cathartic John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band."^[229] David Stuart Ryan notes Lennon's vocal delivery to range from, "extreme vulnerability, sensitivity and even naivety" to a hard "rasping" style.^[230] Wiener too describes contrasts, saying the singer's voice can be "at first subdued; soon it almost cracks with despair"^[231] Music historian Ben Urish recalls hearing The Beatles' Ed Sullivan Show performance of "This Boy" played on the radio a few days after Lennon's murder: "As Lennon's vocals reached their peak ... it hurt too much to hear him scream with such anguish and emotion. But it was my emotions I heard in his voice. Just like I always had."^[232]

Legacy[link]

John Lennon Peace Monument, Liverpool

Music historians Schinder and Schwartz, writing of the transformation in popular music styles that took place between the 1950s and the 1960s, say that The Beatles' influence cannot be overstated: having "revolutionized the sound, style, and attitude of popular music and opened rock and roll's doors to a tidal wave of British rock acts", the group then "spent the rest of the 1960s expanding rock's stylistic frontiers".^[233] Liam Gallagher, his group Oasis among the many who acknowledge the band's influence, identifies Lennon as a hero; in 1999 he named his first child Lennon Gallagher in tribute.^[234] On National Poetry Day in 1999, after conducting a poll to identify the UK's favourite song lyric, the BBC announced "Imagine" the winner.^[94]

In a 2006 Guardian article, Jon Wiener wrote: "For young people in 1972, it was thrilling to see Lennon's courage in standing up to [US President] Nixon. That willingness to take risks with his career, and his life, is one reason why people still admire him today."^[235] Whilst for music historians Urish and Bielen, Lennon's most significant effort was "the self-portraits ... in his songs [which] spoke to, for, and about, the human condition."^[236]

Lennon continues to be mourned throughout the world and has been the subject of numerous memorials and tributes. In 2010, on what would have been Lennon's 70th birthday, the John Lennon Peace Monument was unveiled in Chavasse Park, Liverpool, by Cynthia and Julian Lennon.^[237] The sculpture entitled 'Peace & Harmony' exhibits peace symbols and carries the inscription "Peace on Earth for the Conservation of Life · In Honour of John Lennon 1940–1980".

Awards and sales[link]

Statue in John Lennon Park, Havana, Cuba

The Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership is regarded as one of the most influential and successful of the 20th century. As performer, writer or co-writer Lennon has had 25 number one singles on the US Hot 100 chart.^a His album sales in the US stand at 14 million units.^[238] Double Fantasy, released shortly before his death, and his best-selling, post-Beatles' studio album^[239] at three million shipments in the US,^[240] won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year.^[241] The following year, the BRIT Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music went to Lennon.^[242]

Participants in a 2002 BBC poll voted him eighth of "100 Greatest Britons".^[243] Between 2003 and 2008, Rolling Stone recognised Lennon in several reviews of artists and music, ranking him fifth of "100 Greatest Singers of All Time"^[244] and 38th of "100 Greatest Artists of All Time",^[245] and his albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, 22nd and 76th respectively of "The RS 500 Greatest Albums of All Time".^[245][246] He was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) with the other Beatles in 1965.^[51] He was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987^[247] and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.^[107]

Discography[link]

Statue outside the Cavern Club, Liverpool

• Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins (with Yoko Ono) (1968)
• Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions (with Yoko Ono) (1969)
• Wedding Album (with Yoko Ono) (1969)
• John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970)
• Imagine (1971)
• Some Time in New York City (with Yoko Ono) (1972)
• Mind Games (1973)
• Walls and Bridges (1974)
• Rock 'n' Roll (1975)
• Double Fantasy (with Yoko Ono) (1980)
• Milk and Honey (with Yoko Ono) (1984)
• Menlove Ave. (1986)

Notes[link]

Citations[link]