Andrew Lloyd Webber (1948-)

Love changes everything...

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Pete Seeger (1919-)

I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it.

Sheet music: Pete Seeger

Stan Rogers (1949-1983)

God damn them all! / I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold / We'd fire no guns-shed no tears / Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier / The last of Barrett's Privateers. - from Barrett's Privateers

Sheet music: Stan Rogers

John Prine (1946-)

Have you ever noticed / When you're feeling really good / There's always a pigeon / That'll come shit on your hood / Or you're feeling your freedom / And the world's off your back / Some cowboy from Texas / Starts his own war in Iraq.

Sheet music: John Prine

Elvis Aaron Presley (1935-1977)

There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.

Sheet music: Elvis Aaron Presley

Glenn Miller (1904-1944)

By giving the public a rich and full melody, distinctly arranged and well played, all the time creating new tone colors and patterns, I feel we have a better chance of being successful. I want a kick to my band, but I don't want the rhythm to hog the spotlight.

Sheet music: Glenn Miller

Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter) (1885-1949)

Quotation

The blues is like this. You lay down some night and you turn from one side of the bed to the other: all night long. It's not too cold in that bed, and it ain't too hot. But what's the matter? The blues has got you.

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Biographical

Leadbelly was an influential blues singer and guitarist. He was born January 29, 1885 , in Mooringsport, Louisiana and died on December 6, 1949, in New York. Born Huddie William Ledbetter, Leadbelly was a monumental figure in the history of US folk music. He was "discovered" by John and Alan Lomax, in prison in Louisiana, where he was recorded on portable recording equipment. It is claimed by Alan Lomax that he was pardoned by the state governor, OK Allen after Allen heard his recordings. Leadbelly subsequently toured extensively but ended up back in prison in 1939 convicted of assault. (He served four separate prison terms for his violent behaviour.) After this last prison term, Leadbelly moved to New York in 1940 and associated with Woody Guthrie and the young Pete Seeger among others. His best recordings were made for Capitol records in California during the mid 1940's. Leadbelly played a twelve string guitar and had a high clear voice. One of his best known songs Goodnight Irene, recorded by many artists, was a number one hit for the Weavers in 1950. [This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and uses material adapted in whole or in part from the Wikipedia article on Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter.]

Woody Guthrie (1912-1967)

Quotation

I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.

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Biographical

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, known almost universally as "Woody", was a folk singer and raconteur who wrote some of America's best loved songs. He is best known for This Land is Your Land, a protest song written in response to Irving Berlin's God Bless America. This song has become one of the most frequently performed patriotic songs, having lost its protest element. Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, on July 14, 1912, the year his namesake was elected President. At a young age he left home to adopt an itinerant lifestyle, travelling across the United States as the Jazz Age turned into the Great Depression. The poverty he saw on these early trips affected him greatly, and many of his songs are concerned with the inequities faced by America's working men and women. A lifelong socialist and trade unionist, he also contributed articles to the Daily Worker. In 1935 he achieved fame in California as a radio performer of both traditional folk music and his protest songs. His interest in the working class was also shown in the specially commisioned songs he wrote at this time for the Bonneville Power Authority in Washington State, the best known of which are Grand Coulee Dam and Roll On Columbia, and his Ballad of Tom Joad based on John Houston's film of The Grapes of Wrath.

With the outbreak of World War II Guthrie, a devout anti-fascist -- he often played with the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists written on his guitar -- joined the Merchant Marine, where he served with fellow folk singer Cisco Houston. He also wrote the first volume of his autobiography Bound for Glory. By the 1950s his output had fallen off, and he was diagnosed as suffering from the degenerative nervous disorder Huntinton's chorea, and hospitalised, where he remained until his death on October 3, 1967. By that time his work had been discovered by a new audience, introduced to him through Bob Dylan, who described Guthrie as "my last hero". His son Arlo Guthrie has achieved some success as a singer as well. [This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and uses material adapted in whole or in part from the Wikipedia article on Woody Guthrie.]

Bob Dylan (1941-)

Quotation

In writing songs I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie.

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Biographical

Bob Dylan born Robert Allen Zimmerman May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota in the USA, is widely regarded amongst America's greatest popular songwriters and performers. Much of his best work is from the 1960s when his musical shadow was so large that he took on political influence. The civil rights movement has no more moving anthem than his song Blowin' in the Wind. Millions of young people embraced his song The Times They Are A-Changin' The radical political group The Weathermen named themselves after a lyric in Dylan's song Subterranean Homesick Blues ("You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows").

Dylan was raised in a Jewish family in Hibbing, Minnesota and spent much of his youth listening to the radio, at first the powerful blues and country music stations and later early rock and roll. He formed his first band, The Golden Chords, while still at high school. An able, but by no means brilliant student, he started university studies 1959 in Minneapolis, during which time he was actively involved in the local "Dinkytown" folk music circuit. However, he quit studying in early 1961 moving to New York City to perform, and to visit the ailing Woody Guthrie. Living in Greenwich Village and playing in small clubs, he gained some recognition after a review in New York Times (September 29/1961) by critic Robert Shelton, that led to (Jazz legend) John Hammond signing him to Columbia Records.

At the time his voice, musicianship and songwriting were still raw. His performances, like his first Columbia album (1962's Bob Dylan), consisted of traditional folk, blues and gospel material interspersed with his own songs. By the time of his next record, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), he had begun to make his name as both a singer and composer, specialising in protest songs, initially in the style of Guthrie but later practically creating his own genre. His songs of the time are typified by Blowing In The Wind: a simple folk melody coupled with lyrics questioning the social and political status quo. Whilst, with hindsight, the lyrics some of these songs appear naive and unsophisticated, compared to the largely anemic popular culture of the 1950s they were a bresh of fresh air, and the songs caught the zeitgeist of the 1960s. Blowing In The Wind itself was widely recorded and a huge hit for Peter, Paul and Mary, and was later the subject of some controversy over its authorship. Somewhat overlooked among the protest songs on Freewheelin', however, was a mixture of finely crafted bittersweet love songs (Don't Think Twice Its Alright, Girl From The North Country) and jokey, frequently surreal talking blues (Talking World War III Blues, I Shall Be Free). This eclecticism would continue to inform his material for much of his career.

Whilst a fine interpreter of songs, Dylan was not widely considered a beautiful singer, and many of his songs first reached the public through versions by other artists. Joan Baez, a friend and sometime lover of Dylan, took it upon herself to record a great deal of his early material as did many others including The Byrds, Sonny and Cher, Jimi Hendrix, and The Hollies. (So ubiquitous were these covers by the mid-1960s that CBS started to promote Bob with the tag: "Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan".)

By 1963, Dylan was becoming increasingly prominent in the civil rights movement, singing at rallies and performing at the same march at which Martin Luther King gave his "I have a dream" speech. Dylan's next album, The Times They Are A-Changin', reflected an more sophisticated, politicised and cynical Dylan. The bleak material, concerned with such subjects as the murder of civil rights worker Medgar Evers and the despair engendered by the breakdown of farming and mining communities (Ballad of Hollis Brown, North Country Blues), was lightened only by a single anti-love song, Boots Of Spanish Leather. By the end of the year, however, he started to feel both manipulated and constrained by the folk-protest movement. Accepting the Tom Paine Award from National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee at a ceremony shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy a drunk and not-entirely-coherent Dylan questioned the role of the committee and claimed he saw something of himself in Lee Harvey Oswald.

The message, both from Dylan and the elements in the crowd that booed, was clear: Dylan and the civil rights movement were drifting apart. Perhaps inevitably then, his next album -- the accurately but prosaically titled Another Side Of Bob Dylan (1964) -- had a lighter mood than its predecessor. The surreal Dylan re-emerged on I Shall Be Free #10 and Motorpsycho Nitemare, Spanish Harlem Incident and To Ramona were touching love songs while Ballad in Plain D and I Don't Believe You mourned his breakup with long-time girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who had been pictured with him on the front of Freewheelin'. Musically, he had changed too. Dylan's piano playing was featured on many of the tracks, with the beat and bass of his left hand presaging his return to rock music the next year. Perhaps more important to his later development, however, were two of the new songs. Chimes Of Freedom was the first of a new type of Dylan song: lengthy and impressionistic its retains an element of social commentary but with the topicality of his earlier work replaced by dense metaphorical landscape, a style later characterised by Allen Ginsberg as "chains of flashing images". "My Back Pages", in a similar style, is even more personal, a scathing attack on the dichotomous simplicity and arch seriousness of his earlier work. By way of excuse, or even apology, he offers only that I was so much older then

I'm younger than that now, and few have summed up the transition in his work from 1963 to 1965 better. Throughout this time Dylan's artistic development moved so fast that he frequently left both critics and fans behind. His March 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home was a further stylistic leap.

Influenced by the The Beatles, the folk rock of The Byrds and the rock and roll of his youth, the first side contained a his first selection of uptempo rock songs. The music, provided by a full electric band of mainly session musicians, was. Lyrically, however, the songs were pure Dylan, exhibiting his dry wit and inhabited by a sequence of grotesque, metaphorical characters. (The raucous first single, Subterranean Homesick Blues -- which owed much to Chuck Berry's Too Much Monkey Business -- was also provided with an early music video courtesy of D. A. Pennebaker's film of his 1965 tour, Don't Look Back.) Side 2 was a different matter, comprised of lengthy acoustic songs whose undogmatic political, social and personal concerns are illuminated with the rich poetic imagery that would become another trademark. (One of these songs, Mr. Tambourine Man had already been a hit for The Byrds, albeit in a truncated form, and would remain one of Dylan's most enduring compositions.) Later that summer he angered folk music purists by performing with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the Newport Folk Festival. Where in previous years he had received a rapturous reception, he was met with boos and after only a few songs, the ignominy of having the power switched off (supposedly by folk legend Pete Seeger). Ignoring the occasional negative criticism Dylan's rapid output (fuelled in part by alcohol, cannabis and amphetamines) continued unabated through 1965 and 1966. The single Like A Rolling Stone, was a US hit, cementing his reputation as a lyricist amongst the general public and, at over six minutes, helping to expand the limits of what would receive radio play. Its signature sound, with a full band and a simple organ riff, would characterise his next album release, Highway 61 Revisited (titled after the road that led from his native Minnesota to the musical hotbed of New Orleans). The songs were in the same vein, more surreal litanies of the grotesque, were flavoured by Bloomfield's blues guitar, a tight rhythm section and Dylan's obvious enjoyment of the sessions. The closer, Desolation Row, a lengthy -- and not entirely succesful -- apocalyptic vision of societyy, wore its poeticism and influences on its sleeve, self-consciously referring to both Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

In support of the record, Dylan was booked for two US concerts, and set about assembling a band. Finding what he was looking for in "The Hawks", then backing R'n'B singer Ronnie Hawkins, he persuaded the group to join him on tour. From August to September 1965 at Forest Hills Auditorium and the Hollywood Bowl the group were heckled by the audience who, Newport notwithstanding, still expected the acoustic troupadour of previous years. Undaunted, Dylan returned to the studio that October with to begin the work on his next album, the double Blonde On Blonde. In the studio, the musicians, who would slowly metamorphose into The Band, perfected their sound, ("the wild mercury sound" Dylan called it, and it defies any other description), and the result was another classic record. The surrealism now seemed tempered with more humanity, and the record more coherent than its predecessors, with knowing nods to The Beatles, amongst others. In his personal life, Dylan secretly married Sara Lowndes on November 22, 1965. Touring to promote the record remained hectic, however, taking him to Europe and Australia through the summer of 1966, including a famously raucous confrontation with an audience at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in England. At the same time, he was pressured to produce his first novel (the largely unreadable Tarantula) and it appeared that something would have to give. On July 30 of that year, whilst riding his Triumph 500 motorcycle in New York State, Dylan was injured in a motorcycle accident. The extent of his injuries was never fully disclosed and, whether through necessity or opportunism, Dylan used his convalescence to escape the pressures of stardom. Retiring to Woodstock in New York with The Band and recording for their own entertainment, they produced the widely bootlegged The Basement Tapes (officially relased in 1974) playing traditional US and country music. Unsurprisingly his official output was strongly influenced by these, which can be heard on his next two albums. The first, John Wesley Harding (1968), was a contemplative record influenced by the Old Testament, which included All Along The Watchtower, later immortalised by Jimi Hendrix. The second, Nashville Skyline (1969), was a more mainstream country record, featuring a mellow voiced, contented Dylan and a duet with Johnny Cash and is often considered to mark the beginning of an artistic decline. The same year, Dylan returned to live performance at the Isle Of Wight rock festival (having made a brief appearance at Woody Guthrie's memorial concert in 1968).

In the early 1970s Dylan's output was of variable quality. ("What the hell is this shit?" asked Rolling Stone magazine about Self Portrait (1970)). He occasionally reached his previous heights on New Morning (1970) and the movie soundtrack album Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid included Knockin' On Heaven's Door, amongst his best known songs. In 1973 he left Columbia Records for David Geffen's newly formed Asylum records, for whom he recorded Planet Waves (1974) with The Band. Columbia's release of studio out-takes and cover versions on the appalling Dylan (1973) did not stop him returning to his old label the next year. Following a US tour with The Band, which would be captured on the live Before The Flood (1975), he re-entered the studio with a clutch of new songs inspired, if that is the word, by his recent estrangement from his wife. Each song, from the slow blues Meet Me In The Morning to the lengthy Idiot Wind, offers an insight into their relationship, and Dylan's talent is to stretch the personal until it appears universal and use the universal to elucidate the intensely personal. The resulting album, Blood On The Tracks (1974), was widely heralded as a return to form. At a time when many other artists, including Bruce Springsteen, were lumbered with the tag the New Bob Dylan it was evidence that it was too early to count out the old Bob Dylan.

In 1975 Dylan wrote his first explicit "protest" song for 10 years. Angered by an apparent miscarriage of justice, he championed the cause of boxer Ruben "Hurricane" Carter, who had been wrongfully imprisoned for a robbery/homicide. After visiting Carter in jail, Dylan wrote "Hurricane", a straight retelling of Carter's version of the events. Despite its length, the song was released as a single and performed at every date of Dylan's next tour, the "Rolling Thunder Revue". The tour was a departure, an open ended evening of entertainment featuring performers picked up on the way, including reuniting Dylan with Joan Baez. Running through the winter of 1975/76 the tour also encompassed the release of the album Desire (1976), with many of Dylan's new songs featuring a more narrative style, the influence of his new collaborator, the playwright Jacques Levy. Rolling Thunder also provided the backdrop to his film Renaldo and Clara, a sprawling, improvised and frequently baffling record of the tour. His 1978 album Street Legal was well reviewed, and its use of Steve Douglas on saxophone reminded many of the work of Clarence Clemons in Bruce Springsteen's band. The remainder of Dylan's work in the late 1970s was dominated by his becoming, in 1978, a born-again Christian. He released three albums of primarily religious songs; of these three, some fans regard Slow Train Coming (1979) as most worth attention.

He remained in the doldrums throughout the 1980s, with his work varying from the adequate (1983's Infidels) to the dreadful (1988's Down In The Groove), all the while crossing the world on his "Neverending Tour." He did take part in the Travelling Wilburys album project. The 1990s again saw something of a renaissance, first with Oh Mercy (1989) and later returning to his folk roots with two albums covering old folk and blues numbers: Good As I've Been To You (1992), World Gone Wrong (1993). In 1997, he released an album of original songs, Time Out Of Mind (1997) for which he won a Grammy Award. In 2001, his song Things Have Changed, from the movie Wonder Boys, won an Academy Award for best original song in a motion picture, and recieved further plaudits for the Love and Theft album. [This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and uses material adapted in whole or in part from the Wikipedia article on Bob Dylan.]

Walt Disney (1902-1966)

Quotation

I only hope that we don't lose sight of one thing - that it was all started by a mouse.

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Biographical

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney (December 5, 1901 - December 15, 1966), was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, and animator.

One of the most well-known motion picture producers in the world, Disney was also the cartoon artist of comic books and newspaper comic strips, the creator of an American-based theme park called Disneyland, and is the co-founder with his brother Roy O. Disney of Walt Disney Productions, the corporation now known as The Walt Disney Company.

Walt Disney is particularly noted for being a successful storyteller, a hands-on film producer, and a popular showman. He and his staff created a number of the world's most popular animated properties, including the one many consider Disney's alter ego, Mickey Mouse.

1901-1919: Childhood

Disney was born in Chicago, Illinois to Elias Disney and the former Flora Call. Disney's paternal grandparents, Kepple Disney and Mary Richardson, were Irish immigrants. Walt was named after his father and after his father's close friend Walter Parr, the minister at St. Paul Congregational Church. In 1906, his family moved to a farm near Marceline, Missouri. The family sold the farm in 1909 and lived in a rented house until 1910, when they moved to Kansas City. Disney was nine years old at the time.

According to the Kansas City Public School District records, Disney began attending the Benton Grammar School in 1910, and graduated on June 8, 1911. During this time, Disney also enrolled in classes at the Chicago Art Institute. He left school at the age of sixteen and became a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I, after he changed his birth certificate to show his year of birth as 1900 instead of 1901, in order to be able to enlist in the service. He served as a member of the American Red Cross Ambulance Force in France until 1919.

1920-1936: Early years in animation

Kansas City animation studios

Disney returned to the USA, moved to Kansas City and, with Ub Iwerks, formed a company called "Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists" in January1920. The company faltered and Disney and Iwerks soon gained employment at the Kansas City Film Ad Corporation, working on primitive animated advertisements for local movie houses.

In 1922, Disney started Laugh-O-Grams, Inc., which produced short cartoons based on popular fairy tales and children's stories. Among his employees were Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Rudolph Ising, Carmen Maxwell, and Friz Freleng. The shorts were popular in the local Kansas City area, but their costs exceeded their returns. After creating one last short, the live-action/animation Alice's Wonderland, the studio declared bankruptcy in July1923. Disney's brother Roy invited him to move to Hollywood, California, and Disney earned enough money for a one-way train ticket to California, leaving his staff behind, but taking the finished reel of Alice's Wonderland with him.

Alice Comedies: Contract and new California studio

Disney set up shop with his brother Roy, started the Disney Brothers Studio in their Uncle Robert's garage, and got a distribution deal for the Alice Comedies with New York City states-rights distributors Margaret Winkler and her fiancee Charles Mintz. Virginia Davis, the live-action star of Alice's Wonderland, was sequestered from Kansas, as was Ub Iwerks. By 1926, the Disney Brothers Studio had been renamed as the Walt Disney Studio; the name Walt Disney Productions would be adopted in 1928. One of the studio's employees, Lillian Bounds, became Walt Disney's wife; they were married on July 13, 1925.

The Alice Comedies were reasonably successful, and featured both Dawn O'Day and Margie Gay as Alice after Virginia Davis' parents pulled her out of the series because of a pay cut. Lois Hardwick also briefly assumed the role. By the time the series ended in 1927, the focus was more on the animated characters, in particular a cat named Julius who recalled Felix the Cat, rather than the live-action Alice.

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit

By 1927, Charles Mintz had married Margaret Winkler and assumed control of her business, and ordered a new all-animated series to be put into production for distribution through Universal Pictures. The new series, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, was an almost instant success, and the Oswald character became a popular property. The Disney studio expanded, and Walt hired Harman, Ising, Maxwell, and Freleng from Kansas City.

In February1928, Disney went to New York to negotiate a higher fee per short from Mintz, but was shocked when Mintz announced that not only did he want to reduce the fee he paid Disney per short, but that he had most of his main animators, including Harman, Ising, Maxwell, and Freleng, but notably excepting Ub Iwerks, under contract and would start his own studio if Disney did not accept the reduced production budgets. Universal, not Disney, owned the Oswald trademark, and could make the films without Disney. Disney declined, lost most of his animation staff, and he, Iwerks, and the few non-defecting animators secretly began work on a new mouse character to take Oswald's place. The defectors became the nucleus of the Winkler Studio, run by Mintz and his brother-in-law George Winkler. When that studio went under after Universal assigned production of the Oswald shorts to an in-house division run by Walter Lantz, Mintz focused his attentions on the studio making the Krazy Kat shorts, which later became Screen Gems, and Harman, Ising, Maxwell, and Freleng marketed an Oswald-like character named Bosko to Leon Schlesinger and Warner Bros., and began work on the first entries in the Looney Tunes series.

The creation of Mickey Mouse

Christened by Lillian Disney, Mickey Mouse made his film debut in a short called Plane Crazy, which was, like all of Disney's previous works, a silent film. After failing to find distributor interest in Plane Crazy or its follow-up, The Gallopin' Gaucho, Disney created a Mickey cartoon with sound called Steamboat Willie. A businessman named Pat Powers provided Disney with both distribution and the Cinephone, a bootlegged sound-synchronization process. Steamboat Willie became a success, and Plane Crazy, The Galloping Gaucho, and all future Mickey cartoons were released with soundtracks. Disney himself provided the vocal effects for the earliest cartoons and performed as the voice of Mickey Mouse until 1947.

Joining the Mickey Mouse series in 1929 were a series of musical shorts called Silly Symphonies, which began with The Skeleton Dance. Although both series were successful, the Disney studio was not seeing its rightful share of profits from Pat Powers, and in 1930, Disney signed a new distribution deal with Columbia Pictures, leaving behind Powers and Ub Iwerks, who had been lured into an exclusive contract with Powers. After heading the only mildly successful Ub Iwerks Studio, Iwerks would return to Disney in 1940 and, in the studio's research and development department, pioneer a number of film processes and specialized animation technologies.

By 1932, Mickey Mouse became the most popular cartoon character on the screen, and many competing studios such as Van Beuren and Screen Gems created Mickey Mouse clones in hopes of cashing in on Disney's success. After moving from Columbia to United Artists in 1932, Walt began producing the Silly Symphonies in the new 3-strip Technicolor process, making them the first commercial films presented in a true-color process. The first color Symphony was Flowers and Trees, which won the first Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons in 1932. The same year, Disney received a special Academy Award for the creation of Mickey Mouse, whose series was moved into color in 1935 and soon launched spin-off series for supporting characters such as Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto.

Disney's daughters

As Mickey's co-creator and producer, Disney was almost as famous as his mouse cartoon character, but remained a largely private individual. His greatest hope was to give birth to a child-preferably a son-but he and Lillian tried with no luck. Lillian finally gave birth to a daughter, Diane Marie Disney, on December 18, 1933; and the couple would adopt a second, Sharon Mae Disney, who was born December 21, 1936.

1937-1954: Animated feature films

"Disney's Folly": Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Although his studio produced the two most successful cartoon series in the industry, the returns were still dissatisfying to Disney, and he began plans for a full-length feature in 1934. When the rest of the film industry learned of Disney's plans to produce an animated feature-length version of Snow White, they dubbed the project "Disney's Folly" and were certain that the project would destroy the Disney studio. Both Lillian and Roy tried to talk Disney out of the project, but he continued plans for the feature. He employed Chouinard Art InstituteprofessorDon Graham to start a training operation for the studio staff, and used the Silly Symphonies as a platform for experiments in realistic human animation, distinctive character animation, special effects, and the use of specialized processes and apparatus such as the multiplane camera.

All of this development and training was used to elevate the quality of the studio so that it would be able to give the feature the quality Disney desired. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as the feature was named, was in full production from 1935 until mid-1937, when the studio ran out of money. To acquire the funding to complete Snow White, Disney had to show a rough cut of the motion picture to loan officers at the Bank of America, who gave the studio the money to finish the picture. The finished film premiered at the Carthay Circle Theater on December 21, 1937; at the conclusion of the film the audience gave Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs a standing ovation. The first animated feature in English and Technicolor, Snow White was released in February1938 under a new distribution deal with RKO Radio Pictures. The film became the most successful motion picture of 1938 and earned over US$8 million (today US$98 million) in its original theatrical release, all the more amazing because children were only charged a dime to watch it. The success of Snow White allowed Disney to build a new campus for the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, which opened for business on December 24, 1939. The feature animation staff, having just completed Pinocchio, continued work on Fantasia and Bambi, while the shorts staff continued work on the Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto cartoon series, ending the Silly Symphonies at this time.

Wartime troubles

Pinocchio and Fantasia followed Snow White into movie theatres in 1940, but both were financial disappointments. The inexpensive Dumbo was planned as an income generator, but during production of the new film, most of the animation staff went on strike, permanently straining the relationship between Disney and his artists.

Shortly after Dumbo was released in October1941 and became a successful moneymaker, the United States entered World War II. The U.S. Army contracted for most of the Disney studio's facilities and had the staff create training and instructional films for the military, as well as home-front morale such as Der Fuehrer's Face and the feature film Victory Through Air Power in 1943. The military films did not generate income, however, and Bambi underperformed when it was released in April1942. Disney successfully re-issued Snow White in 1944, establishing the seven-year re-release tradition for Disney features.

Inexpensive package films, containing collections of cartoon shorts, were created and issued to theaters during this period as well. The most notable and successful of these were Saludos Amigos (1942), its sequel The Three Caballeros (1945), Song of the South (the first Disney feature to feature dramatic actors, 1946), Fun and Fancy Free (1947), and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949). The later had only two sections: the first based on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving and the second based on The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.

By the late 1940s, the studio had recovered enough to continue production on the full-length features Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, which had been shelved during the war years and began work on Cinderella. The studio also began a series of live-action nature films, entitled True-Life Adventures, in 1948 with On Seal Island.

Testimony Before Congress

In 1947, during the early years of the Cold War, Walt Disney testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he named one of his employees as a communist. Some historians believe that the animosity from the 1941 strike of Disney Studio employees caused him to bear a grudge. His dislike and distrust of labor unions may have also led to his testimony. Others suggest that it was his zealous patriotism.

1955-1966: Theme Parks and Beyond

Carolwood Pacific Railroad

In 1949, when Disney and his family moved to a new home on large piece of property in the Holmby Hills district of Los Angeles, California, with the help of his friends Ward and Betty Kimball, owners of their own backyard railroad, Disney developed the blueprints and immediately set to work creating his own miniature Live steam railroad in his backyard. The name of the railroad, Carolwood Pacific Railroad, originated from the address of his home that was located on Carolwood Drive. The railroad's half-mile long layout included a 46-foot-long trestle, loops, overpasses, gradients, an elevated dirt berm, and a 90-foot tunnel underneath Mrs. Disney's flowerbed. He named the miniature working steam locomotive built by Roger E. Broggie of the Disney Studios Lilly Belle in his wife's honor. He had his attorney draw up right-of-way papers giving the railroad a permanent, legal easement through the garden areas, which his wife dutifully signed; however, there is no evidence the documents were ever recorded as a restriction on the property's title.

Planning Disneyland

On a business trip to Chicago in the late 1940s, Disney drew sketches of his ideas for an amusement park where he envisioned his employees spending time with their children. These ideas developed into a concept for a larger enterprise that was to become Disneyland. Disney spent five years of his life developing Disneyland and created a new subsidiary of his company, called WED Enterprises to carry out the planning and production of the park. A small group of Disney studio employees joined the Disneyland development project as engineers and planners, and were dubbed Imagineers.

When presenting his plan to the Imagineers, Disney said, "I want Disneyland to be the most amazing place on Earth, and I want a train circling it". Entertaining his daughters and their friends in his backyard and taking them for rides on his Carolwood Pacific Railroad had inspired Disney to include a railroad in the plans for Disneyland.

Expanding into new areas

As Walt Disney Productions began work on Disneyland, it also began expanding its other entertainment operations. 1950's Treasure Island became the studio's first all-live-action feature, and was soon followed by such successes as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (in CinemaScope, 1954), The Shaggy Dog (1959), and The Parent Trap (1960). The Walt Disney Studio was one of the first to take full advantage of the then-new medium of television, producing its first TV special, One Hour in Wonderland, in 1950. Walt Disney began hosting a weekly anthology series on ABC named Disneyland after the park, where he showed clips of past Disney productions, gave tours of his studio, and familiarized the public with Disneyland as it was being constructed in Anaheim, California. In 1955, he debuted the studio's first daily television show, the popular Mickey Mouse Club, which would continue in many various incarnations into the 1990s.

As the studio expanded and diversified into other media, Disney devoted less of his attention to the animation department, entrusting most of its operations to his key animators, whom he dubbed the Nine Old Men. During Disney's life time, the animation department created the successful Lady and the Tramp (in CinemaScope, 1955) and One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and the financially disappointing Sleeping Beauty (in Super Technirama 70mm, 1959) and The Sword in the Stone (1963).

Production on the short cartoons had kept pace until 1956, when Disney shut down the shorts division. Special shorts projects would continue to be made for the rest of the studio's duration on an irregular basis.

These productions were all distributed by Disney's new subsidiary Buena Vista Distribution, which had assumed all distribution duties for Disney films from RKO by 1955. Disneyland, one of the world's first theme parks, finally opened on July 17, 1955, and was immediately successful. Visitors from around the world came to visit Disneyland, which contained attractions based upon a number of successful Disney properties and films. After 1955, the Disneyland TV show became known as Walt Disney Presents, went from black-and-white to color in 1961-- changing its name to Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color--and eventually evolved into what is today known as The Wonderful World of Disney, which continues to air on ABC as of 2005.

During the mid-1950s, Disney produced a number of educational films on the space program in collaboration with NASA rocket designer Wernher von Braun: Man in Space and Man and the Moon in 1955, and Mars and Beyond in 1957. The films attracted the attention of not only the general public, but also the Soviet space program.

The TV series and book Our Friend the Atom (1956, together with Heinz Haber) were produced in an effort of the Eisenhower administration to enhance the image of nuclear energy.

Early 1960s successes

By the early 1960s, the Disney empire was a major success, and Walt Disney Productions had established itself as the world's leading producer of family entertainment. After decades of trying, Disney finally procured the rights to P.L. Travers' books about a magical nanny. Mary Poppins, released in 1964, was the most successful Disney film of the 1960s, and many hailed the live-action/animation combination feature as his greatest achievement. The same year, Disney debuted a number of exhibits at the 1964 New York World's Fair, including Audio-Animatronic figures, all of which later were integrated into attractions at Disneyland and a new theme park project, to be established on the east coast, which Disney had been planning since Disneyland opened.

"The Florida Project"

In 1964, Walt Disney Productions began quietly purchasing land in central Florida west of Orlando in a largely rural area of marginal orange groves for Disney's "Florida Project." The company acquired over 27,000 acres (109Â sq. km) of land, and arranged favorable state legislation which would provide unprecedented quasi-governmental control over the area to be developed in 1966, founding the Reedy Creek Improvement District. Disney and his brother Roy then announced plans for what they called "Disney World."

Plans for Disney World and EPCOT

Disney World was to include a larger, more elaborate version of Disneyland to be called the Magic Kingdom, and would also feature a number of golf courses and resort hotels. The heart of Disney World, however, was to be the Experimental Prototype City (or Community) of Tomorrow, or EPCOT for short. EPCOT was designed to be an operational city where residents would live, work, and interact using advanced and experimental technology, while scientists would develop and test new technologies to improve human life and health.

Death of Walt Disney

However, Disney's involvement in Disney World ended in late 1966, when he was diagnosed with lung cancer in his left lung, after a life-long habit of chain smoking. He was checked into the St. Joseph's Hospital across the street from the Disney Studio lot and his health eventually deteriorated. He was pronounced dead at 3 AM PST on December 15, 1966, having just celebrated his 65th birthday ten days earlier.

Roy Disney carried out the Florida project, insisting that the name become Walt Disney World in honor of his brother. Roy O. Disney died three months after the Magic Kingdom opened for business in 1971.

1967-present: Legacy

The Epcot theme park

When the second phase of the Walt Disney World theme park was built, EPCOT was translated by Walt Disney's successors into EPCOT Center (now simply called Epcot), which opened in 1982. As it currently exists, Epcot is essentially a living world's fair, a far cry from the actual functional city that Disney had envisioned. In 1992 Walt Disney Imagineering took the step closer to Walt's vision and dedicated Celebration, Florida, a town built by the Walt Disney Company adjacent to Walt Disney World, harkens back to the spirit of EPCOT.

The Disney entertainment empire

Today, Walt Disney's animation/motion picture studios and theme park have developed into a multi-billion dollar television, motion picture, vacation destination and media corporation that carries his name. The Walt Disney Company today owns, among other assets, five vacationresorts, eleven theme parks, two water parks, thirty-nine hotels, eight motion picture studios, six record labels, eleven cable television networks, and one terrestrial television network.

Disney theme parks today

Today, what was known as the Florida Project is now the largest and most popular private-run tourist destination on the planet, but the Walt Disney shine is still there. From the 'Partners' statue at the Magic Kingdom to the Tree of Life at Animal Kingdom, Walt Disney is still remembered and his vision is still continued. His fascination with mass transportation lives in the Walt Disney World Monorail which runs through two theme parks and four hotels, and his dreams of the future live on at Epcot in ahead-of-their-time attractions and technological breakthroughs.

Disneyland has developed from a cramped theme park to an open resort of two theme parks, three hotels and a large shopping complex. Walt Disney World is a popular destination for vacations by tourists worldwide, and Tokyo Disneyland is the most visited theme park in the world (its sister park Tokyo DisneySea is the second). In September2005, The Walt Disney Company will open Hong Kong Disneyland Resort in China.

On May 5, 2005, The Walt Disney Company opened the Happiest Homecoming on Earth celebration in front of Walt's Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland, celebrating fifty years of the world's most famous theme park. Walt Disney Parks and Resorts are renowned over the world for their attentions to detail, hygiene and standards, all set by Walt Disney at Disneyland.

Disney Animation today

Traditional hand-drawn animation, with which Walt Disney built the success of his company, no longer continues at the Walt Disney Feature Animation studio. After a stream of financially unsuccessful traditionally-animated features in the late-1990s and early 2000s, the two satellite studios in Paris and Orlando were closed, and the main studio in Burbank was converted to a computer animation production facility. In 2004, Disney released their final traditionally animated feature film for the foreseeable future, Home on the Range. The DisneyToons studio in Australia, which produced lower-budget traditionally animated films, at first appeared to survive the purge, but its closing was announced in July 2005.

CalArts

Disney devoted substantial time in his later years funding The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), which was formed in 1961 through a merger of the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and the Chouinard Art Institute, which had helped in the training of the animation staff during the 1930s. When he died, one fourth of his estate went towards CalArts, which greatly helped the building of its campus. Walt also donated 38 acres (154,000Â sq. m.) of the Golden Oaks ranch in Valencia for the school to be built on. CalArts moved onto the Valencia campus in 1971.

Lillian Disney devoted a lot of her time after Walt died to pursuing CalArts and organized hundreds of fund raising events for the university in her late husband's honor (as well as funding the Walt Disney Symphony Hall). After Lillian's passing, the legacy continued with daughter Diane and husband Ron continuing the tradition. CalArts is today one of the largest independent universities in California today, mostly because of the contributions of the Disneys.

Trivia

• In the fifth grade, Walt memorized the Gettysburg Address (for fun) and surprised everyone by arriving at school dressed as Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States. His costume consisted of his father's old coat and a homemade beard. He even pasted a putty wart to his cheek. His teacher was delighted. Little wonder that years later, when his studio created the first fully functioning audio-animatronic human figure for the 1964 New York World's Fair, the figure looked like Abraham Lincoln.
  
• Disney had very simple tastes in food. According to his daughter Diane, "He liked fried potatoes, hamburgers, western omelets, hotcakes, canned peas, hash, stew, roast beefsandwiches. He doesn't go for vegetables, but loves chickenlivers or macaroni and cheese." Lillian Disney would complain, "Why should I plan a meal when all Disney really wants is a can of chili or a can of spaghetti?" [1]
  
• Although a baptized Christian, Walt Disney was not a frequent visitor to churches. Religious people would occasionally ask him to make religious films but Walt declined.
  
• In 1940, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation recruited Disney as an Official Informant. He was later designated as a Special Agent in Charge contact.
  
• Walt had several hobbies over the years, among them model railroads, polo playing, and a backyard railroad.
  
• Walt spent countless afternoons, after his typical early morning inspection of the park, in the Main Street Station breakroom or on the line of the Disneyland Railroad (previously known as the Atcheson, Topeka, Santa Fe and Disneyland Railroad). Among his closest friends in his last decade of life were Bob Hannah, the trainmaster, and Lorne Cline, lead brakeman, who later regaled park guests with stories about Walt into the late 1970s. Walt did not ever want to lose control of the railroad to the financial backers of Disneyland and so placed the steam train and monorail attractions into a free-standing company called "RETLAW" (which is "Walter" spelled backwards), which he and his wife were sole owners. Prior to its dissolution into the Disney Corp in the 1980s, he (and heirs) would recieve $0.60 for each person through the turnstile at the train stations, and supervisors could be seen currying favor with the owner by spinning the turnstiles to increase the count (and revenues) before park opening and after closing.
  
• 'Uncle Walt' could be seen around 1950sDisneyland doing menial chores, like getting strollers for people, tinkering under the hood of a car on Main Street U.S.A., fishing in Rivers of America, or piloting the Mark Twain Riverboat.
  
• In the fall of 1963, while seeking the site for Disney's new "Florida Project", Walt and Roy Disney first flew over a coastal area of Florida, and then the forest and swamps near Orlando which were selected as the site to become Walt Disney World. Shortly later, their plane landed in New Orleans on the way back to California where the Disney brothers learned of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States. He had been assassinated earlier that same afternoon in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.
  
• One of the audio animatronic pirates on The Pirates of the Caribbean ride introduced in 1967 has Walt Disney's face. It was taken from the same life cast mold that was used to make the statue of Disney that adorns the central square.
  
• A number of rumors have been attributed to Walt Disney:
  "Walt Disney was an illegitimate child."
  "Walt Disney received a dishonorable discharge from the military during World War I."
  "Disney had his body frozen after his death and remains in cryonic storage."
  These are all untrue. Widely spread and retold, like many other rumors, they have become urban legends.

Resources

• Barrier, Michael (1999). Barrier, Michael (1999). Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 019-516729-5.
  
• Barrier, Michael (1999). Mosley, Leonard. Disney's World: A Biography (1985, 2002). Chelsea, MI: Scarborough House. ISBN 081-288514-7.
  
• Barrier, Michael (1999). Schickel, Richard and Dee, Ivan R (1967, 1985, 1997). The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher. ISBN 156-663158-0.
  
• Barrier, Michael (1999). Thomas, Bob (1991). Disney's Art of Animation: From Mickey Mouse to Beauty and the Beast. New York: Hyperion. ISBN 156-282899-1

[This article in part is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and uses material adapted in whole or in part from the Wikipedia article on Walt Disney.]

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Elizabeth (Libba) Cotten (1896-1987)

Summary

Libba Cotten began recording and performing after the age of 60. "Freight Train" was written when she was just twelve years old and has long been considered an American folk song classic. The self taught Cotten learned to play guitar upside down and left-handed. Cotten worked as a domestic for the famous folk-singing Seeger family (Charles, Ruth, and their children, Pete, Mike, and Peggy). Mike Seeger recorded Cotten for Folkways Records in 1958. Cotten performed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 and at the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife from 1968 to 1971. Cotten won the National Folk Association's Burl Ives Award for her contribution to American folk music in 1972. Her last album, Elizabeth Cotten Live! was recorded in 1985. Cotten's songs have been recorded by the Grateful Dead, Taj Mahal, and Peter, Paul and Mary. [Adapted from Blue Flame Cafe]

Books

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Research

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Leonard Cohen (1934-)

Quotation

The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape.

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Novel: Beautiful Losers
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Joan Baez (1941)

Quotation

You don't get to choose how you are going to die or when. You can only decide how you're going to live.

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Biographical

Joan Baez was born in Staten Island, New York, into a Quaker family. Her father Albert Baez, a physicist, refused lucrative war industry jobs, probably influencing Joan's political activism in the American and international civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960's to the present. In the late 1950s, Dr. Baez accepted a faculty position at MIT, and moved his family to the Boston area, at the time the epicenter of the up-and-coming folk music scene, and Joan began performing locally in Boston/Cambridge area clubs.

Her most noted venue was the Club 47 Mount Auburn, in Cambridge, where she performed twice a week for $20 per show. It was with other performers from the same club that she recorded her first album, Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square.

Baez' true professional career began at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival and she recorded her first album for a major company, Joan Baez, the following year on Vanguard Records. The collection of traditional folk ballads, blues and laments sung to her own guitar accompaniment sold moderately well. Her second release, Joan Baez, Vol. 2 in 1961 went gold, as did 1962's Joan Baez in Concert, parts 1 and 2. From the early to mid-1960s, Baez emerged at the forefront of the American roots revival, where she introduced her audiences to the less prominent Bob Dylan (the two became romantically involved in late 1962, remaining together through early 1965), and was emulated by artists such as Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raitt.

During this period, as the war in Vietnam and the Civil Rights struggle in the American south both became more prominent issues, Baez focused more of her attention on both areas, until eventually her music and her political involvement became inseperable. Her performance of "We Shall Overcome" at Martin Luther King's March on Washington permanently linked her with the anthem, and she frequently joined Civil Rights marches in the south. She also became more vocal about her disagreement with the U.S. war in Vietnam, publicly disclosing that she was withholding sixty percent of her income taxes (as that was the figure commonly determined to fund the military), and encouraging draft resistance at her concerts. In 1965 she founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence.
Like Dylan, Baez was profoundly influenced by the British Invasion and began augmenting her acoustic guitar on 1965's Farewell Angelina just after Dylan began experimenting with folk-rock. Later in the decade, Baez experimented with poetry (1968's Baptism: A Journey Through Our Time) and country music (1969's David's Album and 1970's One Day at a Time).

In 1968, Baez married David Harris, a prominent anti-Vietnam War protester eventually imprisoned for draft evasion. The couple divorced in 1973. Harris, a country music fan, turned Baez toward more complex country rock influences beginning with David's Album. That same year, Baez' appearance at the historic Woodstock music festival in upstate New York afforded her an international musical and political podium, particularly upon the successful release of the like-titled documentary film. Her 1971 cover of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by (The Band) was a top 10 hit in the US.

Meanwhile, Baez' political involvement had by no means ceased. During Christmas of 1972, she joined a peace delegation traveling to North Vietnam, both to address human rights in the region, as well as to deliver Christmas mail to American POW's. During her time there, she was caught in Richard Nixon's "Christmas bombing" of Hanoi, during which the city was carpet bombed for eleven straight days. She also devoted a substantial amount of her time in the early 1970s to helping establish a U.S. branch of Amnesty International, and has since worked on improving human rights, both in Latin America and Southeast Asia.

With 1972's Come from the Shadows, Baez switched to A&M Records, flirting with mainstream pop music as well as writing her own songs for her best-selling 1975 release Diamonds & Rust. She then switched to CBS Records briefly, but found herself without an American label for 1984's Live -Europe '83. She didn't have an American release until 1987's Recently on Gold Castle Records, and then switched to Virgin Records for 1992's Play Me Backwards. Her 2003 album, Dark Chords on a Big Guitar, found her performing songs by composers half her age.

Baez played a significant role in the 1985 Live Aid concert for African famine relief, opening the U.S. segment of the show in Philadelphia. She also has toured on behalf of many other causes, including Amnesty International.

She has one son, Gabriel Harris, and lives in Woodside, California.

Joan Baez is not to be confused with the mathematician John Baez, her cousin. Her sister was the singer and guitarist Mimi Farina (born Margarita Mimi Baez [1945-2001]).

Baez toured with Bob Dylan in 1964 and 1965, during his 1975 and 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue tours, and, abortively, in Europe in 1984. [This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and uses material adapted in whole or in part from the Wikipedia article on Joan Baez.]