The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for biographies .(September 2020) |
Tad Richards | |
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Born | James Richards March 31, 1940 Washington, D.C., U.S. |
Occupation |
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Nationality | American |
Education | Bard College Iowa Writers' Workshop (MFA) |
James (Tad) Richards (born March 31, 1940) is an American writer and visual artist. He is also artistic director and former president of Opus 40 , the sculpture park in Saugerties, New York.
Richards was born in Washington, D.C. in 1940. In 1943, his mother married the sculptor Harvey Fite, who created Opus 40 from 1939 to 1976. [1] He attended Bard College (where Fite was on the faculty) before earning a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. At Iowa, he studied with Paul Engle, Donald Justice and Philip Roth. He has taught literature, composition and creative writing at several institutions, including Winona State University, the State University of New York at New Paltz and Marist College.
Richards began publishing in 1964, with three poems in Poetry Magazine. [2] During the 1960s, he was a regular contributor to The Realist , Paul Krassner's satirical magazine. [3] His first non-pseudonymous novel, Cherokee Bill (a collaboration with his brother Jonathan Richards), was published by Dell Books in 1974. Since then, he has published 18 novels, including a novelization of the Mel Brooks movie Blazing Saddles (1974). His most recent novel is Nick and Jake (Arcade Publishing). [4] Nick and Jake has also been produced as an audio play starring Alan Arkin, Tom Conti and Ali MacGraw. His screenwriting credits include The Cheerleaders (1973), a sexploitation film characteristic of the era.
Richards has written 16 works of nonfiction. Struggle and Lose, Struggle and Win: The Story of the United Mine Workers (written with Elizabeth Levy) [5] was listed by The New York Times as one of the best young adult books of 1977. Several of his books on finance with Neale Godfrey have been bestsellers. He has also written extensively on music and poetry; additionally, several of his songs have been recorded by Orleans, the John Hall Band, and Fred Koller.
Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It originated from African-American music such as jazz, rhythm and blues, boogie-woogie, gospel, jump blues, as well as country music. While rock and roll's formative elements can be heard in blues records from the 1920s and in country records of the 1930s, the genre did not acquire its name until 1954.
Rhythm and blues, frequently abbreviated as R&B or R'n'B, is a genre of popular music that originated in African-American communities in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly to African Americans, at a time when "rocking, jazz based music ... [with a] heavy, insistent beat" was becoming more popular. In the commercial rhythm and blues music typical of the 1950s through the 1970s, the bands usually consisted of a piano, one or two guitars, bass, drums, one or more saxophones, and sometimes background vocalists. R&B lyrical themes often encapsulate the African-American experience of pain and the quest for freedom and joy, as well as triumphs and failures in terms of relationships, economics, and aspirations.
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Henry Roeland "Roy" Byrd, better known as Professor Longhair or "Fess" for short, was an American singer and pianist who performed New Orleans blues. He was active in two distinct periods, first in the heyday of early rhythm and blues and later in the resurgence of interest in traditional jazz after the founding of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1970. His piano style has been described as "instantly recognizable, combining rumba, mambo, and calypso".
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Opus 40 is a large environmental sculpture in Saugerties, New York, created by sculptor and quarryman Harvey Fite (1903—1976). It comprises a sprawling series of dry-stone ramps, pedestals and platforms covering 6.5 acres (2.6 ha) of a bluestone quarry.
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The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.
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Jonathan Richards is an American author, journalist, actor, and cartoonist. He was born in Washington, DC, in 1941, and educated at South Kent School and Brown University.