A00062 - Faith Ringgold, Artist of Quilts

Faith Ringgold (b. October 8, 1930, New York, New York), was an artist and author who became famous for innovative, quilted marrations that communicate her political beliefs.

Ringgold grew up in New York City's Harlem, and while still in high school she decided to be an artist.  She attended City College of New York, where she received B. S. (1955) and M. A. (1959) degrees.  In the mid-1950s she began teaching art in New York public schools.  By the 1960s, her work had matured, reflecting her burgeoning political consciousness, study of African arts and history, and appreciation for the freedom of form used by her young students.

In 1963 Ringgold began a body of paintings called the American People series, which portrays the civil rights m ovement from a female perspective. In the 1970s she created African-style masks, painted political posters, lectured frequently at feminist art conferences, and actively sought the racial integration of the New York art world. She originated a demonstration against the Whitney Museum of American Art and helped win admission for black artists to the exhibit schedule at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1970 she cofounded, with one of her daughters, the advocacy group Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation.

Among Ringgold’s most renowned works, her “story quilts” were inspired by the Tibetan tankas (paintings framed in cloth) that she viewed on a visit to museums in Amsterdam. She painted these quilts with narrative images and original stories set in the context of African American history. Her mother frequently collaborated with her on these. Examples of this work includes Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?(1984), Sonny’s Quilt (1986), and Tar Beach (1988), which Ringgold adapted into a children’s book in 1991. The latter book, which was named Caldecott Honor Book in 1992, tells of a young black girl in New York City who dreams about flying. Ringgold’s later books for children include Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky (1992) and My Dream of Martin Luther King (1995). Her memoirs, We Flew over the Bridge, were published in 1995.

A00061 - Odetta, The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement

Odetta (also known as Odetta Holmes) (b. December 31, 1930, Birmingham, Alabama - d. December 2, 2008, New York, New York) was a folk singer who was noted especially for her versions of spirituals and who became for many the voice of the civil rights movement of the early 1960s.

After her father's death in 1937, Odetta moved with her mother to Los Angeles.  She began classical voice training at age 13, and she earned a degree in classicl music from Los Angeles City College.  Though she had heard the music of the Deep South as a child.  It was not until 1950, on a trip to San Francisco, that she began to appreciate and participate in the emergent folk scene.  She soon learned to play, the guitar and began to perform traditional songs.  Her distinctive blend of folk, blues, ballads, and spirituals was powered by her rich vocal style, wide range, and deep passion.  Within a few years her career took off.  In the early 1950s, she moved to New York City, where she met singers Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte, who became loyal supporters.  Her debut solo recording, Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues (1956), was soon followed by At the Gate of Horn (1957).  Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan later said that hear Odetta on record "turned me on to folk singing."  She performed at the Newport (Rhode Island) Folk Festival four times during 1959-65, and she subsequently appeared on television and in several films.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Odetta continued to record as a leading folk musician -- although recordings did not do her performances justice.  Her music and her politics suited the growing civil rights movement, and in 1963, she sang at the historic March on Washington led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.  Inevitably, as the movement waned and interest in folk music declined, Odetta's following shrank, although she continued to perform.  In 1999, President Bill Clinton awarded her the National Medal of Arts, the highest award given in the arts in the United States, and in 2003 she was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.

A00060 - Ray Charles, The "Genius" of Soul

Ray Charles (also known as Ray Charles Robinson) (b. September 23, 1930, Albany, Georgia - d. June 10, 2004, Beverly Hills, California) was an pianist, singer, composer, and bandleader, a leading African American entertainer billed as "the Genius."  Charles was credited with the early development of soul music, a style based on a melding of gospel, rhythm and blues, and jazz music. 

When Charles was an infant his family moved to Greenville, Florida, and he began his musical career at age five on a piano in a neighborhood cafe.  He began to go blind at six, possibly from glaucoma, and had completely lost his sight by age seven.  He attended the St. Augustine School for the Deaf and Blind, where he concentrated on musical studies, but left school at age 15 to play the piano professionally after his mother died from cancer (his father had died when the boy was 10).  Charles built a remarkable career based on the immediacy of emotion in his performances.  After emerging as a blues and jazz pianist indebted to Nat King Cole's style in the late 1940s.  Charles recorded the boogie-woogie classic "Mess Around" and the novelty song "It Should've Been Me" in 1952-53. His arrangement for Guitar Slim's "The Things That I Used To Do" became a blues million-seller in 1953.  By 1954, Charles had created a successful combination of blues and gospel influences and signed on with Atlantic Records.  Propelled by Charles' distinctive raspy voice,"I've Got a Woman" and "Hallelujah I Love You So" became hit records.  "What'd I Say" led the rhythm and blues sales charts in 1959 and was Charles' own first million-seller. 

Charles' rhythmic piano playing and band arranging revived the "funky" quality of jazz, but he also recorded in many other musical genres.  He entered the pop market with the best-sellers "Georgia on My Mind" (1960) and "Hit the Road Jack" (1961).  His album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962) sold more than a million copies, as did its single "I Can't Stop Loving You."  Thereafter, his music emphasized jazz standards and renditions of pop and show tunes.  From 1955, Charles toured extensively in the United States and elsewhere with his own big band nd in gospel-style female backup quartet called the Raeletts.  He also appeared on television and worked in films such as Ballad in Blue (1964) and The Blues Brothers (1980) as a featured act and sound track composer.  He formed his own custom recording labels, Tangerine in 1962 and Crossover Records in 1973.  The recipient of many national and international awards, he received 13 Grammy Awards, including a lifetime achievement award in 1987.  In 1986, Charles was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and received a Kennedy Center Honor.  He published an autobiography, Brother Ray, Ray Charles' Own Story (1978), written with David Ritz. 

In 2003, Charles had successful hip replacement surgery and was planning to go back on tour, until he began suffering from other ailments. On June 10, 2004, as a result of acute liver disease, Charles died at his home in Los Angeles, California, surrounded by family and friends. He was 73 years old. His funeral took place on June 18, 2004, at the First AME Church in Los Angeles, with musical peers such as Little Richard in attendance.  B. B. King, Glen Campbell, Stevie Wonder and Wynton Marsalis each played a tribute at Charles' funeral. Charles was interred in the Inglewood Park Cemetery. 

Ray Charles Robinson was sometimes referred to as "The Genius".  He pioneered the genre of soul music during the 1950s by combining rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues styles into the music he recorded for Atlantic Records.  He also contributed to the racial integration of country and pop music during the 1960s with his crossover success on ABC Records,  most notably with his two Modern Sounds albums. While he was with ABC, Charles became one of the first African-American musicians to be granted artistic control by a mainstream record company.

Charles was blind from the age of seven. Charles cited Nat King Cole as a primary influence, but his music was also influenced by jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, and country artists of the day, including Art Tatum, Louis Jordan, Charles Brown and Louis Armstrong. Charles' playing reflected influences from country blues, barrelhouse and stride piano styles.  His best friend in music was South Carolina-born James Brown, the "Godfather of Soul".

Frank Sinatra called him "the only true genius in show business", although Charles downplayed this notion. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Charles at number ten on their list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time", and number two on their November 2008 list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time". 

A00059 - Betty Carter, Innovative Jazz Vocalist

Betty Carter (also known as Lillie Mae Jones, Lorraine Carter, Lorene Carter or Betty Bebop) (b. May 16, 1930, Flint, Michigan - d. September 26, 1998, Brooklyn, New York) was an American jazz singer who is best remembered for the scat and other complex musical interpretations that showcased her remarkable vocal flexibility and musical imagination.

Carter studied piano at the Detroit Conservatory of Music in her native Michigan.  At age 16, she began singing in Detroit jazz clubs, and after 1946, she worked in African American bars and theaters in the Midwest, at first under the name Lorene Carter.  

Influenced by the improvisational nature of bebop and inspired by vocalists Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan.  Carter strove to create a style of her own.  Lionel Hampton asked Carter to join his band in 1948.  However, her insistence on improvising annoyed Hampton and prompted him to fire her seven times in two and a half years.  Carter left Hampton's band for good in 1951 and performed around the country in such jazz clubs as Harlem's Apollo Theater and the Vanguard in New York, the Showboat in Philadelphia, and Blues Alley in Washington, D. C., with such jazz artists as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, and Thelonious Monk.

After touring with Ray Charles from 1960 to 1963 and making a recording of duets with him in 1961, Carter put her career on hold to get married.  Her marriage did not last, however, and she returned to the stage in 1969 backed by a small acoustic ensemble consisting of piano, drums, and bass.  In 1971, she released her first album on her own label, Bet-Car Productions.

Beginning in the 1970s, Carter performed on the college circuit and conducted several jazz workshops.  After appearing at Carnegie Hall as part of the Newport Jazz Festival in 1977 and 1978, she went on concert tours throughout the United States and Europe.  Her solo albums include Betty Carter (1953), Out There (1958), The Modern Sound of Betty Carter (1960), The Audience with Betty Carter (1979), and Look What I Got! (1988), which won a Grammy Award.  Determined to encourage an interest in jazz among younger people, in April 1993 Carter initiated a program she called Jazz Ahead, an annual event at which twenty young jazz musicians spend a week training and composing with her.  In 1997, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts by United States President Bill Clinton.

A00058 - Ornette Coleman, "Free Jazz" Innovator

Ornette Coleman (Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman) (b. March 9, 1930, Fort Worth, Texas), was an American jazz saxophonist, composer, and bandleader who was the principal initiatior and leading exponent of free jazz in the late 1950s.

Coleman began playing alto, then tenor saxophone as a teenager and soon became a working musician in dance bands and rhythm-and-blues groups.  Early in his career, his approach to harmony was already unorthodox and led to his rejection by established musicians in Los Angeles, where he lived for most of the 1950s.  While working as an elevator operator, he studied harmony and played an inexpensive plastic alto saxophone at obscure nightclubs.  Until the, all jazz improvisation had been based on fixed harmonic patterns.  In the "harmolodic theory" that Coleman developed in the 1950s, however, improvisers abandoned harmonic patterns ("chord changes") in order to improvise more extensively and directly upon melodic and expressive elements.  Because the tonal centers of such music changed at the improvisers' will, it became known as "free jazz."

In the late 1950s Coleman formed a group with trumpeter Don Cherry, drummery Billy Higgins, and bassist Charlie Haden, with whom he recorded his first album, Something Else (1958).  His classic recordings, The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century in 1959 preceded his move that year to New York City, where his radical conception of structure and the urgent emotionality of his improvisations aroused widespread controversy.  His recordings Free Jazz (1960), which used two simultaneously improvising jazz quartets, and Beauty Is a Rare Thing (1961), in which he successfully experimented with free meters and tempos, also proved influential.

In the 1960s, Coleman taught himself to play the violin and trumpet, using unorthodox techniques.  By the 1970s, he was performing only irregularly, preferring instead to compse.  His most notable extended composition is the suite Skies of America, which was recorded in 1972 by the London Symphony Orchestra joined by Coleman on alto saxophone.  Influenced by his experience of improvising with Rif musicians of Morocco in 1973, Coleman formed an electric band called Prime Time, whose music was a fusion of rock rhythms with harmonically free collective improvisations, this band remained his primary performance vehicle until the 1990s.

Coleman's early style influenced not only fellow saxophonists but also players of all other instruments in jazz.  In recognition of such accomplishment, Coleman received the Japan Art Association's Praemium Imperiale prize for music in 2001.  In 2005, with a quartet made up of two acoustic double bass players (one bowing his instrumennt, the other plucking), a drummer, and Coleman himself (playing alto saxophone, trumpet, and violin), he recorded Sound Grammar during a live performance in Italy; the work, which was said to hearken back to his music of the 1960s, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2007. 

A00057 - Richard "Blue" Mitchell, Jazz Trumpeter

Richard Allen (Blue) Mitchell (March 13, 1930 – May 21, 1979) was an American jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, rock, and funk trumpeter, known for many albums recorded as leader and sideman on Blue Note Records. 

Mitchell was born and raised in Miami, Florida. He began playing trumpet in high school where he acquired his nickname, Blue. 

After high school he played in the rhythm and blues ensembles of Paul Williams, Earl Bostic, and Chuck Willis. After returning to Miami he was noticed by Cannonball Adderley, with whom he recorded for Riverside Records in New York in 1958. He then joined the Horace Silver Quintet playing with tenor Junior Cook, bassist Gene Taylor and drummer Roy Brooks. Mitchell stayed with Silver’s group until the band’s break-up in 1964. After the Silver quintet disbanded, Mitchell formed a group employing members from the Silver quintet substituting the young pianist Chick Corea for Silver and replacing a then sick Brooks with drummer Al Foster. This group produced a number of records for Blue Note disbanding in 1969, after which Mitchell joined and toured with Ray Charles until 1971. From 1971 to 1973 Mitchell performed with John Mayall on Jazz Blues Fusion. From the mid – 70s he recorded, and worked as a session man, performed with the big band leaders Louie Bellson, Bill Holman and Bill Berry and was principal soloist for Tony Bennett and Lena Horne. Other band leaders Mitchell recorded with include Lou Donaldson, Grant Green, Philly Joe Jones, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Johnny Griffin, Al Cohn, Dexter Gordon and Jimmy Smith. Blue Mitchell kept his hard-bop playing going with the Harold Land quintet up until his death from cancer on May 21, 1979, in Los Angeles, at the age of 49.

A00056 - Anne Moody, Author of "Coming of Age in Mississippi"

Anne Moody (aka Essie Mae Moody) (b. September 15, 1940, near Centerville, Mississippi - d. February 5, 2015, Gloster, Mississippi), was an American civil rights activist and writer whose autobiographical account of her personal and political struggles against racism in the South became a classic.

Moody, the daughter of poor African American sharecroppers, received her early education in the segregated school system of the South.  In 1959, she was awarded a basketball scholarship and attended Natchez Junior College, later transferring to Tougaloo (Mississippi) College.  While a student at Tougaloo, Moody became active in the Civil Rights Movement.  She helped organize the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and in 1963 participated in a widely publicized sit-in demonstration at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter.

After graduating from Tougaloo in 1964, Moody worked as the civil rights project coordinator for Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, until 1965.  Eventually, she became disenchanted with certain aspects of the Civil Rights Movement and moved to New York City, where she began to write her autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi.  Published in 1968, the book provides an eloquent and poignant account of Moody's impoverished childhood, her struggle against the pervasive racism of the Deep South, and her work as a civil rights activist.  It received high praise as both a historical and a personal document and is considered of major importance in the study of the Civil Rights Movement.  Her only other published work is Mr. Death: Four Stories (1975).