Curated category
20th-century American composers
- Marvin GayeOn the 1st of April 1984, in a house in the Western Heights area of West Adams in Los Angeles, Marvin Gaye was shot twice by his own father.
- Arnold SchoenbergArnold Schoenberg was born on the 13th of September 1874 at Obere Donaustraße 5 in Vienna's Leopoldstadt, a district that had historically served as a Jewish…
- James BrownJames Brown was supposed to be named Joseph James Brown. A clerk reversed his first and middle names on his birth certificate, and the mistake stuck.
- John CageJohn Milton Cage Jr. spent his entire life asking a single question: what is music? He was born on the 5th of September, 1912, in Los Angeles, and for nearly…
- Jerry Lee LewisJerry Lee Lewis walked into Sun Records in Memphis in November 1956 with nothing but nerve. Label owner Sam Phillips was out of town, so producer Jack…
- John WilliamsJohn Williams played two notes for Steven Spielberg, alternating, low and ominous, and Spielberg laughed because he thought it was a joke. The film was Jaws.
- Dolly PartonDolly Rebecca Parton was born on the 19th of January 1946 in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in Pittman Center, Tennessee.
- J. J. AbramsOn a day in 1982, Jeffrey Jacob Abrams composed the music for a horror movie called Nightbeast. He was only sixteen years old when he wrote that score.
- Sean LennonSean Lennon was born on the 9th of October 1975, at Weill Cornell Medical Center in the Lenox Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, sharing a birthday with his…
- Joe RomersaJoe Romersa was nineteen years old when the road turned on him. A touring drummer who had just started his professional career, he found himself homeless in…