In 1966, a gruff-voiced blues singer was looking to put a band together that might finally propel his straggling career to the next level. Joe Cockerโborn John Robert Cocker in 1944โ lived on Tasker Road in the English city of Sheffield. As early as 1960, at the age of sixteen, Cocker was already well under…
Back in 1967, Aretha Franklin won theย respectย of the public and press, not to mention her musical peers, who crowned her Queen of Soul or Lady Soul. As disco began to supplant soul in the mid-seventies, two women each sought to become successor to Arethaโs throne: glorious Gloria Gaynor and diva-esque Donna Summer. The former got…
A 12-year-old kid is at a local Woolworthโs store on Ashland Avenue on the South Side of Chicago. Itโs the early โ70s, and heโs spending his few allowance dollars on cheap โcut-outโ vinyl albums, shelved at the front end of the checkout counter, neatly tiered, four rows high and ten albums deep. That twelve-year-old was…
I was born in the โ60s, a decade when records and radio waves were in perfect sync. You could hear every kind of music, at any time of day or night; all you had to do was cruise up and down the AM dial. We had a station in ChicagoโWVONโthat played great urban music. My…