Hillerich & Bradsby

Hillerich & Bradsby Company is a company located in Louisville, Kentucky that produces the famous Louisville Slugger baseball bat. The Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory in downtown Louisville features a retrospective of the product and its use throughout baseball history. H&B also makes baseball gloves, golf clubs, golf gloves and other equipment (under the PowerBilt brand).

The company announced plans on March 23, 2015 to sell its Louisville Slugger division to sporting goods manufacturer Wilson Sporting Goods.

History

J. F. Hillerich opened his woodworking shop in Louisville in 1855. During the 1880s, Hillerich hired his seventeen-year-old son, John "Bud" Hillerich. Legend has it that Bud, who played baseball himself, slipped away from work one afternoon in 1884 to watch Louisville's major league team, the Louisville Eclipse. The team's star, Pete "The Gladiator" Browning, mired in a hitting slump, broke his bat.

Bud invited Browning to his father's shop to hand-craft him a new bat to his own specifications. Browning accepted the offer, and got three hits to immediately break out of his slump with his new bat the first day he used it. Browning told his teammates, which began a surge of professional ball players to the Hillerich woodworking shop.

Carrie Underwood

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Carrie Marie Underwood (born March 10, 1983) is an American singer, songwriter and actress. She rose to fame as the winner of the fourth season of American Idol in 2005. She has since become one of the most successful artists in any musical genre. Her achievements led her to be inducted into the Grand Ole Opry in 2008 and into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 2009. She has won numerous music awards, including seven Grammy Awards, 17 Billboard Music Awards, 11 Academy of Country Music Awards and nine American Music Awards.

Her debut album, Some Hearts, was released in 2005. Carrie grew up with religion being very important to her and that carried over to some of her music.  An example is in her 2^nd single titled “Jesus Take the Wheel.”Bolstered by the huge crossover success of the singles "Jesus, Take the Wheel" and "Before He Cheats", it became the fastest selling debut country album in Nielsen SoundScan history, the best-selling solo female debut album in country music history and the best-selling country album of the last ten years. Underwood won three Grammy Awards for the album, including Best New Artist. Released in 2007, her second album, Carnival Ride, had one of the biggest ever opening weeks by a female artist and earned Underwood two Grammy Awards. Her next album, 2009's Play On, was a commercial success led by the single "Cowboy Casanova". Underwood's fourth album, Blown Away (2012), earned her a Grammy Award and was that year's second best-selling release by a female artist. Her first compilation album (2014) was a chart and sales success and earned her a Grammy Award. Her fifth album, Storyteller (2015), made her the only country artist to have all first five studio albums reach either numbers one or two on the Billboard 200. She has sold more than 65 million records worldwide.

Louisville, Kentucky

Louisville (generally pronounced ⁱ/ˈluːəvəl/ or ⁱ/ˈlʌvəl/ by natives, and ⁱ/ˈluːiːvɪl/ by others) is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the 30th-most populous city in the United States. It is one of two cities in Kentucky designated as first-class, with the other being the state's second-largest city of Lexington. Louisville is the historical seat and, since 2003, the nominal seat of Jefferson County.

Louisville was founded in 1778 by George Rogers Clark and is named after King Louis XVI of France, making Louisville one of the oldest cities west of the Appalachian Mountains. Sited beside the Falls of the Ohio, the only major obstruction to river traffic between the upper Ohio River and the Gulf of Mexico, the settlement first grew as a portage site. It was the founding city of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, which grew into a 6,000-mile (9,700 km) system across 13 states. Today, the city is known as the home of the Kentucky Derby, Kentucky Fried Chicken, the University of Louisville and its Louisville Cardinals athletic teams, Louisville Slugger baseball bats, and three of Kentucky's six Fortune 500 companies. Its main airport is also the site of UPS's worldwide air hub.