Doo-wop is a genre of rhythm and blues music that originated among African-American youth in the 1940s, mainly in the large cities of the United States, including New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, Newark, Detroit, and Washington, DC. It features vocal group harmony that carries an engaging melodic line to a simple beat with little or no instrumentation. Lyrics are simple, usually about love, sung by a lead vocal over background vocals, and often featuring, in the bridge, a melodramatically heartfelt recitative addressed to the beloved. Harmonic singing of nonsense syllables is a common characteristic of these songs. Gaining popularity in the 1950s, doo-wop was "artistically and commercially viable" until the early 1960s, but continued to influence performers in other genres.
Skiffle is a genre of folk music with influences from blues, jazz, and American folk music, generally performed with a mixture of manufactured and homemade or improvised instruments. Originating as a form in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, it became extremely popular in the UK in the 1950s, where it was played by such artists as Lonnie Donegan, The Vipers Skiffle Group, Ken Colyer, and Chas McDevitt. Skiffle was a major part of the early careers of some musicians who later became prominent jazz, pop, blues, folk, and rock performers, The Beatles and Rory Gallagher amongst them. It has been seen as a critical stepping stone to the second British folk revival, the British blues boom, and British Invasion of the US popular music.
Electric blues refers to any type of blues music distinguished by the use of electric amplification for musical instruments. The guitar was the first instrument to be popularly amplified and used by early pioneers T-Bone Walker in the late 1930s and John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters in the 1940s. Their styles developed into West Coast blues, Detroit blues, and post-World War II Chicago blues, which differed from earlier, predominantly acoustic-style blues. By the early 1950s, Little Walter was a featured soloist on blues harmonica using a small hand-held microphone fed into a guitar amplifier. Although it took a little longer, the electric bass guitar gradually replaced the stand-up bass by the early 1960s. Electric organs and especially keyboards later became widely used in electric blues.
Mary Theresa Schmich is an American journalist. She has been a columnist for the Chicago Tribune since 1992, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. Her columns are syndicated nationally by Tribune Content Agency. She wrote the comic strip Brenda Starr, Reporter for the last 28 of its 60 years and she wrote the 1997 column "Wear Sunscreen", with the often quoted "Do one thing every day that scares you", frequently misattributed to Eleanor Roosevelt.
The Jazz Age was a period in the 1920s and 1930s in which jazz music and dance styles rapidly gained nationwide popularity in the United States. The Jazz Age's cultural repercussions were primarily felt in the United States, the birthplace of jazz. Originating in New Orleans as mainly sourced from culture of the diaspora. Jazz played a significant part in wider cultural changes in this period, and its influence on popular culture continued long afterward. The Jazz Age is often referred to in conjunction with the Roaring Twenties, and in the United States it overlapped in significant cross-cultural ways with the Prohibition Era. The movement was largely affected by the introduction of radios nationwide. During this time, the Jazz Age was intertwined with the developing cultures of young people. The movement also helped start the beginning of the European Jazz movement. American author F. Scott Fitzgerald is widely credited with coining the term, first using it in his 1922 short story collection titled Tales of the Jazz Age.
Steven Haworth Miller is an American guitarist, singer and songwriter, known as leader of the Steve Miller Band. He began his career in blues and blues rock and evolved to a more pop-oriented sound during the mid-1970s through the early 1980s, releasing popular singles and albums. Miller was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2016.
Ramsey Emmanuel Lewis Jr. is an American jazz composer, pianist and radio personality. Lewis has recorded over 80 albums and has received five gold records and three Grammy Awards so far in his career.
Rufus C. Thomas, Jr. was an American rhythm-and-blues, funk, soul and blues singer, songwriter, dancer, DJ and comic entertainer from Memphis, Tennessee. He recorded for several labels, including Chess Records and Sun Records in the 1950s, before becoming established in the 1960s and 1970s at Stax Records. He is best known for his novelty dance records, including "Walking the Dog" (1963), "Do the Funky Chicken" (1969) and "(Do the) Push and Pull" (1970). According to the Mississippi Blues Commission, "Rufus Thomas embodied the spirit of Memphis music perhaps more than any other artist, and from the early 1940s until his death . . . occupied many important roles in the local scene."
The San Diego Chicken, also known as The Famous Chicken, the KGB Chicken or just The Chicken, is a sports mascot played by Ted Giannoulas.
Swamp pop is a music genre indigenous to the Acadiana region of south Louisiana and an adjoining section of southeast Texas. Created in the 1950s by young Cajuns and Creoles, it combines New Orleans–style rhythm and blues, country and western, and traditional French Louisiana musical influences. Although a fairly obscure genre, swamp pop maintains a large audience in its south Louisiana and southeast Texas homeland, and it has acquired a small but passionate cult following in the United Kingdom, Northern Europe, and Japan.
The term blues ballad is used to refer to a specific form of popular music which fused Anglo-American and Afro-American styles from the late 19th century onwards. Early versions combined elements of the European influenced "native American ballad" with the forms of African American music. From the 20th century on it was also used to refer to a slow tempo, often sentimental song in a blues style.
Raphael Saadiq is an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer. He rose to fame as a member of the multiplatinum group Tony! Toni! Toné! In addition to his solo and group career, he has also produced songs for such artists as Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Stevie Wonder, Joss Stone, D'Angelo, TLC, En Vogue, Kelis, Mary J. Blige, Ledisi, Whitney Houston, Solange Knowles and John Legend. Music critic Robert Christgau has called Saadiq the "preeminent R&B artist of the '90s".
"Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young", commonly known by the title "Wear Sunscreen", is an essay written as a hypothetical commencement speech by columnist Mary Schmich, originally published in June 1997 in the Chicago Tribune. The essay, giving various pieces of advice on how to live a happier life and avoid common frustrations, spread massively via viral email, is often erroneously described as a commencement speech given by author Kurt Vonnegut at MIT.
The culture of Chicago, Illinois is known for the invention or significant advancement of several performing arts, including improvisational comedy, house music, blues, hip hop, gospel, jazz, and soul.
Stroker Ace is a 1983 American action comedy sport film directed by Hal Needham and starring Burt Reynolds as the eponymous Stroker Ace, a NASCAR driver.
Chicken Vesuvio, a specialty of Chicago, is an Italian-American dish made from chicken on the bone and wedges of potato sauteed with garlic, oregano, white wine, and olive oil, then baked until the chicken's skin becomes crisp. The casserole is often garnished with a few green peas for color, although some more modern variations may omit some of these.
George Freeman is an American jazz guitarist from Chicago. His brothers Von Freeman and Eldridge Freeman had jazz careers, as does his nephew, Chico Freeman.
The culture of Louisiana involves its music, food, religion, clothing, language, architecture, art, literature, games, and sports. Often, these elements are the basis for one of the many festivals in the state. Louisiana, while sharing many similarities to its neighbors along the Gulf Coast, is unique in the influence of Cajun culture, due to the historical waves of immigration of French-speaking settlers to Louisiana. Likewise, African-American culture plays a prominent role. While New Orleans, as the largest city, has had an outsize influence on Louisiana throughout its history, other regions both rural and urban have contributed their shared histories and identities to the culture of the state.
"Do the Funky Chicken" is a song written and recorded by American R&B singer and entertainer Rufus Thomas for Stax Records in 1969. It became one of his biggest hits, reaching #5 on the R&B chart in early 1970, #28 on the US pop chart, and #18 in Britain where it was his only chart hit.
