On September 12, 2003, John R. “Johnny” Cash died aged 71. He was musician (guitar) singer, songwriter and actor, and author, considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. With more than 90 million albums sold, he is also one of the best-selling music artists of all time. His trademark outfit earned him the nickname “The Man in Black”. Johnny Cash was inducted in the four major music halls of fame: the “Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame” (1977); the “Country Music Hall of Fame” (1980); the “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame” (1992), and the “Memphis Music Hall of Fame” (2013). In 2001, he was awarded the “National Medal of Arts”.
Tag Archives: National Medal of Arts
Benny Carter
On July 12, 2003, Bennett Lester “Benny” Carter, died aged 96. He was musician (alto saxophone, clarinet, trumpet), composer, arranger, and bandleader, regarded a major figure in jazz from the 1930s to the 1990s. In his career the “King” performed with Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Coleman Hawkins, Peggy Lee, Carmen McRae, Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, Miles Davis, Django Reinhardt, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Glenn Miller, Gene Krupa, Tommy Dorsey, Phil Woods, Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Hines, Ben Webster, Billy Eckstine, Pearl Bailey, Lou Rawls, Louis Armstrong, Freddie Slack and Mel Torme.
For his work Benny Carter received big number of awards including: “The NEA Jazz Masters Award by The National Endowment for the Arts”, “Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award” , “Grammy Award” for his solo “Prelude to a Kiss”, “A Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame”, “National Endowment for the Arts”, “National Medal of Arts”.
Ray Charles
On June 10, 2004, Ray Charles Robinson died aged 74. He was a singer, songwriter, musician, and composer, regarded as one of the most important artists in the history of modern music, referred to as “The Genius”. Charles is important not only as a pioneer in combining rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues into soul music but he also played the main role in the racial integration of country and pop music – he was one of the first African-American musicians who gained artistic control by a mainstream record company. In 2004, “Rolling Stone” magazine ranked Charles at number ten on their list of the “100 Greatest Artists of All Time” and number two on the 2008 list of the “100 Greatest Singers of All Time”.
Frank Sinatra: The only true genius in show business.
Billy Joel: This may sound like sacrilege, but I think Ray Charles was more important than Elvis Presley.
Henry Pleasants (music critic and musicologists): Sinatra, and Bing Crosby before him, had been masters of words. Ray Charles is a master of sounds. His records disclose an extraordinary assortment of slurs, glides, turns, shrieks, wails, breaks, shouts, screams and hollers, all wonderfully controlled, disciplined by inspired musicianship, and harnessed to ingenious subtleties of harmony, dynamics and rhythm… It is either the singing of a man whose vocabulary is inadequate to express what is in his heart and mind or of one whose feelings are too intense for satisfactory verbal or conventionally melodic articulation. He can’t tell it to you. He can’t even sing it to you. He has to cry out to you, or shout to you, in tones eloquent of despair—or exaltation. The voice alone, with little assistance from the text or the notated music, conveys the message.
Awards and honors
- In 1979 – induction into the Georgia State Music Hall of Fame. Charles’ version of “Georgia on my mind” was also made the official state song for Georgia.
- In 1981 – star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,
- In 1986 – induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
- In 1986 – awarded with the Kennedy Center Honors
- In 1987 – awarded with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award
- In 1991- induction to the Rhythm & Blues Foundation
- In 1991 – awarded with the George and Ira Gershwin Award for Lifetime Musical Achievement
- In 1993 – awarded the National Medal of Arts.
- In 1998 – awarded with the Polar Music Prize
- In 2004 – induction to the National Black Sports & Entertainment Hall of Fame
- In 2003 – awarded an honorary degree by Dillard University
- In 2005 – The Grammy Awards were dedicated to Ray Charles
- In 2010 – Performing arts center at Morehouse College was named after Ray Charles
- In 2013 – The United States Postal Service issued a forever stamp honoring Ray Charles as part of it Musical Icons
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