Curated playlist
American rock singers
- Michael JacksonMichael Joseph Jackson was born on the 29th of August 1958 in Gary, Indiana, the eighth of ten children in an African-American working-class household crammed into a two-bedroom home on Jackson Street. His father Joe operated a crane at US…
- Bob DylanBob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on the 24th of May, 1941, at St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota. His Hebrew name was Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham. He grew up in a small, close-knit Jewish community, and by the time he reached…
- Elvis PresleyElvis Aaron Presley walked onto the stage of the International Hotel in Las Vegas on the 31st of July 1969, without a single word of introduction. The audience of 2,200 people gave him a standing ovation before he sang a note. Another…
- Jimi HendrixJimi Hendrix died in London on the 18th of September 1970, at the age of 27, from barbiturate-related asphyxia. He was, by then, the world's highest-paid rock musician. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which inducted his band in 1992, calls…
- Buddy HollyBuddy Holly was 22 years old when he died in a cornfield five miles northwest of Clear Lake, Iowa, on the 3rd of February 1959. He had been performing for less than a decade. He had topped the charts on two continents. He had shaped the…
- Prince (musician)Prince Rogers Nelson arrived at Mount Sinai Hospital in Minneapolis on the 7th of June, 1958, and for the next 57 years he operated at a pitch that most musicians never approach. He sold more than 100 million records worldwide. He played…
- Little RichardIn October 1947, a fourteen-year-old boy was singing Sister Rosetta Tharpe's songs to himself before her performance at the Macon City Auditorium. Tharpe overheard him, invited him onstage to open her show, and paid him afterward. That…
- Sam CookeSam Cooke walked into a recording session in the mid-1950s and began singing George Gershwin. Art Rupe, the head of Specialty Records, was furious. That moment of artistic defiance captures everything about Cooke: a man who had charted his…
- Chuck BerryChuck Berry was buried with a cherry-red Gibson ES-355 guitar bolted to the inside lid of his coffin. That image captures something essential about the man: even in death, the instrument came with him. Born on the 18th of October 1926, in…
- George Clinton (funk musician)George Edward Clinton was born on the 22nd of July, 1941, in Kannapolis, North Carolina. He grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey, where as a teenager he did two things at once: straightened hair at a barbershop and assembled a doo-wop group…
- Jim MorrisonJim Morrison was found dead in a Paris bathtub on the morning of Saturday, the 3rd of July, 1971. He was 27 years old. No doctor had been called. No autopsy would be performed. The cause of death listed as heart failure was a placeholder,…
- Johnny CashJohnny Cash began his concerts the same way for decades, walking to the microphone and saying four words: "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash." The man who said them was born J. R. Cash on the 26th of February 1932, the son of poor cotton farmers in…
- Brian WilsonBrian Douglas Wilson was born on the 20th of June, 1942, in Inglewood, California, and by the age of two he could reproduce a melody after hearing only a few verses of a march song. That detail, remembered by his father, points to…
- 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 Clement hit record anyway, capturing Lewis playing Ray Price's "Crazy Arms" and one of…
- Eddie CochranEddie Cochran played his last concert on the night of the 16th of April 1960, at the Bristol Hippodrome. He was 21 years old. Within hours, a cream-coloured Ford Consul was speeding toward London along the Bath Road when the teenage driver…
- Linda McCartneyLinda McCartney was born Linda Louise Eastman in Manhattan on the 24th of September 1941, and by the time she died on the 17th of April 1998, she had been a photographer exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a keyboardist in one of…
- Gene VincentGene Vincent was born Vincent Eugene Craddock on the 11th of February 1935 in Norfolk, Virginia, and he died at 36, largely forgotten in his home country, while sitting with his father in Saugus, California. Between those two points lay a…
- Roy OrbisonRoy Kelton Orbison left a room feeling different after he sang. Where other male performers of his era projected confidence and ease, Orbison sang about fear, grief, and longing with a voice that one conductor described as causing the hair…
- Frank ZappaFrank Vincent Zappa was born on the 21st of December, 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland, into a household where Italian was spoken by his grandparents and gas masks hung by the door. His father, a chemist and mathematician who worked in the…
- Bo DiddleyBo Diddley stepped onto The Ed Sullivan Show on the 20th of November, 1955, and promptly ignored every instruction he had been given. He had been asked to perform "Sixteen Tons", a popular Tennessee Ernie Ford hit. Instead, he launched…
- Roger McGuinnJames Joseph McGuinn III arrived in Chicago on the 13th of July 1942. His parents worked in journalism and public relations during his childhood years. They wrote a bestseller titled Parents Can't Win while raising him in that city. He…
- Billy PrestonBilly Preston was the only artist to receive a co-performer credit on a Beatles recording after the band began recording as independent artists. The 1969 single "Get Back" bore the label "The Beatles with Billy Preston" not as a courtesy…
- 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 New Jersey after what he would later describe as a tragic early tour. For most…