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Coretta Scott King

Coretta Scott King (/kɔːˈrɛtə/; April 27, 1927 – January 30, 2006) was an American author, activist, civil rights leader, and the wife of Martin Luther King, Jr. from 1953 until his death in 1968. Coretta Scott King helped lead the African-American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. King was an active advocate for African-American equality. King met her husband while in college, and their participation escalated until they became central to the movement. In her early life, Coretta was an accomplished singer, and she often incorporated music into her civil rights work.

King played a prominent role in the years after her husband's 1968 assassination when she took on the leadership of the struggle for racial equality herself and became active in the Women's Movement and the LGBT rights movement. King founded the King Center and sought to make his birthday a national holiday. King finally succeeded when Ronald Reagan signed legislation which established Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. She later broadened her scope to include both opposition to apartheid and advocacy for LGBT rights. King became friends with many politicians before and after Martin Luther King's death, most notably John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Robert F. Kennedy. John F. Kennedy's phone call to her during the 1960 election was what she liked to believe was behind his victory.

In August 2005, King suffered a stroke and was left paralyzed on her right side and unable to speak. Five months later, she died of respiratory failure due to complications from ovarian cancer. King's funeral was attended by four of five living U.S. Presidents and by over 10,000 people. She was temporarily buried on the grounds of the King Center, until she was interred next to her husband. King was honored for her activism in promoting human rights. King was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 2009. She was the first African-American to lie in State in the Georgia State Capitol upon her death. King has been referred to as "First Lady of the Civil Rights Movement."

Childhood and education

Coretta Scott was born in Marion, Alabama, the third of four children of Obadiah Scott (1899–1998) and Bernice McMurry Scott (1904–1996). She was born in her parents' home with her paternal great-grandmother Delia Scott, a former slave, presiding as midwife. Coretta's mother became known for her musical talent and singing voice. As a child Bernice attended the local Crossroads School and only had a fourth grade education. Bernice's older siblings, however, attended boarding school at the Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Institute. The senior Mrs. Scott worked as a school bus driver, a church pianist, and for her husband in his business ventures. She served as Worthy Matron for her Eastern Star chapter and was a member of the local Literacy Federated Club.

Obie, Coretta's father, was the first black person in their neighborhood to own a vehicle. Before starting his own businesses he worked as a policeman. Along with his wife, he ran a clothes shop far from their home and later opened a general store. He also owned a lumber mill, which was burned down by white neighbors after Scott refused to lend his mill to a white male logger Her maternal grandparents were Mollie (née Smith; 1868 – d.) and Martin van Buren McMurry (1863–1950) – both were of African-American and Irish descent. Mollie was born a slave to plantation owner Jim Blackburn and Adeline (Blackburn) Smith. Coretta's maternal grandfather, Martin, was born to a slave of Black Native American ancestry, and her white master who never acknowledged Martin as his son. He eventually owned a 280-acre farm. Because of his diverse origins, Martin appeared to be White; however, he displayed contempt for the notion of passing. As a self-taught reader with little formal education, he is noted for having inspired Coretta's passion for education. Coretta's paternal grandparents were Cora (née McLaughlin; 1876 – 1920) and Jefferson F. Scott (1873–1941). Cora died before Coretta's birth. Jeff Scott was a farmer and a prominent figure in the rural black religious community; he was born to former slaves Willis and Delia Scott.

At age 10, Coretta worked to increase the family's income. She had an older sister named Edythe Scott Bagley (1924–2011) an older sister named Eunice who did not survive childhood, and a younger brother named Obadiah Leonard (1930–2012). According to a DNA analysis, she was partly descended from the Mende people of Sierra Leone. The Scott family had owned a farm since the American Civil War, but were not particularly wealthy. During the Great Depression the Scott children picked cotton to help earn money and shared a bedroom with their parents. At age 12, Coretta Scott entered Lincoln School as a seventh grader, and with temperament changes. Scott also developed an interest in the opposite sex.

Coretta described herself as a tomboy during her childhood, primarily because she could climb trees and recalled wrestling boys. In addition, she also mentioned having been stronger than a male cousin and threatening before accidentally cutting that same cousin with an axe. His mother threatened her, and along with the words of her siblings, stirred her to becoming more ladylike once she got older. She saw irony in the fact that despite this early physical activities, she still was involved in nonviolent movements. Her brother Obadiah thought she always "tried to excel in everything she did." Her sister Edythe believed her personality was like their grandmother Cora McLaughlin Scott's, after whom she was named. Though lacking formal education themselves, Coretta Scott's parents intended for all of their children to be educated. Coretta quoted her mother as having said, "My children are going to college, even if it means I only have but one dress to put on."

The Scott children attended a one room elementary school 5 miles (8 km) from their home and were later bused to Lincoln Normal School, which despite being 9 mi (14 km) from their home, was the closest black high school in Marion, Alabama, due to racial segregation in schools. The bus was driven by Coretta's mother Bernice, who bused all the local black teenagers. By the time Scott had entered the school, Lincoln had suspended tuition and charged only four dollars and fifty cents per year. In her last two years there, Scott became the leading soprano for the school's senior chorus. Scott directed a choir at her home church in North Perry Country. Coretta Scott graduated valedictorian from Lincoln Normal School in 1945 where she played trumpet and piano, sang in the chorus, and participated in school musicals and enrolled at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio during her senior year at Lincoln. After being accepted to Antioch, Scott applied for Interracial Scholarship Fund for financial aid. During her last two years in high school, Coretta lived with her parents. Her older sister Edythe already attended Antioch as part of the Antioch Program for Interracial Education, which recruited non-white students and gave them full scholarships in an attempt to diversify the historically white campus. Coretta said of her first college:

Antioch had envisioned itself as a laboratory in democracy, but had no black students. (Edythe) became the first African American to attend Antioch on a completely integrated basis, and was joined by two other black female students in the fall of 1943. Pioneering is never easy, and all of us who followed my sister at Antioch owe her a great debt of gratitude.

Coretta studied music with Walter Anderson, the first non-white chair of an academic department in a historically white college. She also became politically active, due largely to her experience of racial discrimination by the local school board. She became active in the nascent civil rights movement; she joined the Antioch chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the college's Race Relations and Civil Liberties Committees. The board denied her request to perform her second year of required practice teaching at Yellow Springs public schools, for her teaching certificate Coretta Scott appealed to the Antioch College administration, which was unwilling or unable to change the situation in the local school system and instead employed her at the college's associated laboratory school for a second year.

New England Conservatory of Music and Martin Luther King Jr.

Coretta transferred out of Antioch when she won a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. It was while studying singing at that school with Marie Sundelius that she met Martin Luther King, Jr. after mutual friend Mary Powell gave King her phone number after he asked about girls on the campus. Coretta was the only one remaining after Powell named two girls and King proved to not be impressed with the other. Scott initially showed little interest in meeting him, even after Powell told her that he had a promising future, but eventually relented and agreed to the meeting. King called her on the telephone and when the two met in person, Scott was surprised by how short he was. King would tell her that she had all the qualities that he was looking for in a wife, which Scott dismissed since the two had only just met. She told him "I don't see how you can say that. You don't even know me." But King was assured and asked to see her again. She readily accepted his invitation to a weekend party.

She continued to see him on a regular basis in the early months of 1952. Two weeks after meeting Scott, King wrote to his mother that he had met his wife. Their dates usually consisted of political and racial discussions, and in August of that year Coretta met King's parents Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King. Before meeting Martin, Coretta had been in relationships her entire time in school, but never had any she cared to develop. Once meeting with her sister Edythe face-to-face, Coretta detailed her feelings for the young aspiring minister and discussed the relationship as well. Edythe was able to tell her sister had legitimate feelings for him, and she also became impressed with his overall demeanor.

Despite envisioning a career for herself in the music industry, Coretta knew that would not be possible if she were to marry Martin Luther King. However, since King possessed many of the qualities she liked in a man, she found herself "becoming more involved with every passing moment." When asked by her sister what made King so "appealing" to her she responded, "I suppose it's because Martin reminds me so much of our father." At that moment, Scott's sister knew King was "the one."

King's parents visited him in the fall and had suspicions about Coretta Scott after seeing how clean his apartment was. While the Kings had tea and meals with their son and Scott, Martin, Sr. turned his attention to her and insinuated that her plans of a career in music were not fitting for a Baptist minister's wife. After Coretta did not respond to his questioning of their romance being serious, Martin, Sr. asked if she took his son "seriously". King's father also told her that there were many other women his son was interested in, and had "a lot to offer." After telling him that she had "a lot to offer" as well, Martin Luther King, Sr. and his wife went on to try and meet with members of Coretta's family. Once the two obtained Edythe's number from Coretta, they sat down with her and had lunch with her. During their time together, Martin Luther King, Sr. tried to ask Edythe about the relationship between her sister and his son. Edythe insisted that her sister was an excellent choice for Martin Luther King, Jr., but also felt that Coretta did not need to bargain for a husband.

On Valentine's Day 1953, the couple announced their plans to marry in the Atlanta Daily World. With a wedding set in June, only four months away at that time, Coretta still did not have a commitment to marrying King and consulted with her sister in a letter sent just before Easter Vacation. King's father had expressed resentment in his choice of Coretta over someone from Alabama, and accused his son of spending too much time with her and neglecting his studies. Martin took his mother into another room and told her of his plans to marry Coretta and told her the same thing when he drove her home later while also berating her for not having made a good impression on his father. When Martin declared his intentions to get a doctorate and marry Coretta after, Martin, Sr. finally gave his blessing. In 1964, the Time profile of Martin Luther King, Jr., when he was chosen as Time's "Man of the Year", referred to her as "a talented young soprano." She was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority

Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King, Jr. were married on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her mother's house; the ceremony was performed by Martin Jr.'s father, Martin Luther King, Sr. Coretta had the vow to obey her husband removed from the ceremony, which was unusual for the time. After completing her degree in voice and piano at the New England Conservatory, she moved with her husband to Montgomery, Alabama, in September 1954. Mrs. King recalled: "After we married, we moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where my husband had accepted an invitation to be the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Before long, we found ourselves in the middle of the Montgomery bus boycott, and Martin was elected leader of the protest movement. As the boycott continued, I had a growing sense that I was involved in something so much greater than myself, something of profound historic importance. I came to the realization that we had been thrust into the forefront of a movement to liberate oppressed people, not only in Montgomery but also throughout our country, and this movement had worldwide implications. I felt blessed to have been called to be a part of such a noble and historic cause."

Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968)

On September 1, 1954, Martin Luther King, Jr. became the full-time pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. It was a sacrifice for Coretta, who had to give up her dreams of becoming a classical singer. Her devotion to the cause while giving up on her own ambitions would become symbolic of the actions of African-American women during the movement. The couple moved into the church's parsonage on South Jackson Street shortly after this. Coretta became a member of the choir and taught Sunday school, as well as participating in the Baptist Training Union and Missionary Society. She made her first appearance at the First Baptist Church on March 6, 1955, where according to E. P. Wallace, she "captivated her concert audience."

The Kings welcomed their first child Yolanda on November 17, 1955, who was named at Coretta's insistence and became the church's attention. After her husband became involved in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King often received threats directed towards him. In January 1956, King answered numerous phone calls threatening her husband's life, as rumors intended to make African-Americans dissatisfied with King's husband spread that Martin had purchased a Buick station wagon for her. Martin Luther King, Jr. would give her the nickname "Yoki," and thereby, allow himself to refer to her out of her name. By the end of the boycott, Mrs. King and her husband had come to believe in nonviolent protests as a way of expression consistent with biblical teachings. Two days after the integration of Montgomery's bus service, on December 23, a gunshot rang through the front door of the King home while King, her husband and Yolanda were asleep. The three were not harmed. On Christmas Eve of 1955, King took her daughter to her parents's house and met with her siblings as well. Yolanda was their first grandchild. King's husband joined them the next day, at dinner time.

On February 21, 1956, King's husband announced he would return to Montgomery after picking up Coretta and their daughter from Atlanta, who were staying with his parents. During Martin Luther King, Sr.'s opposition to his son's choice to return to Montgomery, Mrs. King picked up her daughter and went upstairs, which he would express dismay in later and tell her that she "had run out on him." Two days later, Coretta and her husband drove back to Montgomery. Coretta took an active role in advocating for civil rights legislation. On April 25, 1958, King made her first appearance at a concert that year at Peter High School Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama. With a performance sponsored by the Omicron Lambda chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, King changed a few songs in the first part of the show but still continued with the basic format used two years earlier at the New York gala as she told the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The concert was important for Coretta as a way to continue her professional career and participate in the movement. The concert gave the audience "an emotional connection to the messages of social, economic, and spiritual transformation."

On September 3, 1958, King accompanied her husband and Ralph Abernathy to a courtroom. Her husband was arrested outside the courtroom for "loitering" and "failing to obey an officer." A few weeks later, King visited Martin's parents in Atlanta. At that time, she learned that he had been stabbed while signing copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom on September 20, 1958. King rushed to see her husband, and stayed with him for the remainder of his time in the hospital recovering. On February 3, 1959, King, her husband and Lawrence Reddick started a five-week tour of India. The three were invited to hundreds of engagements. During their trip, Coretta used her singing ability to enthuse crowds during their month long stay. The two returned to the United States on March 10, 1959.

House bombing

On January 30, 1956, Coretta and Dexter congregation member Roscoe Williams's wife Mary Lucy heard the "sound of a brick striking the concrete floor of the front porch." Coretta suggested that the two women get out of the front room and went into the guest room, as the house was disturbed by an explosion which caused the house to rock and fill the front room with smoke and shattered glass. The two went to the rear of the home, where Yolanda was sleeping and Coretta called the First Baptist Church and reported the bombing to the woman who answered the phone. Martin returned to their home, and upon finding Coretta and his daughter unharmed, went outside. He was confronted by an angry crowd of his supporters, who had brought guns. He was able to turn them away with an impromptu speech.

A white man was reported by a lone witness to have walked halfway up to King's door and throwing something against the door before running back to his car and speeding off. Ernest Walters, the lone witness, did not manage to get the license plate number because of how quickly the events transpired. Both of the couple's fathers contacted them over the bombing. The two arrived nearly at the same time, along with her husband's mother and brother. Coretta's father Obie said he would take her and her daughter back to Marion if his son-in-law did not take them to Atlanta. Coretta refused the proclamation, and insisted on staying with her husband. Despite Martin Luther King, Sr. also advocating that she leave with her father, King persisted in leaving with him. Author Octavia B. Vivian wrote "That night Coretta lost her fear of dying. She committed herself more deeply to the freedom struggle, as Martin had done four days previously, when jailed for the first time in his life." Coretta would later call it the first time she realized "how much I meant to Martin in terms of supporting him in what he was doing".

John F. Kennedy phone call

Martin Luther King was jailed on October 19, 1960, for picketing in a department store. After being released three days later, Coretta's husband was sent back to jail on October 22 for driving with an Alabama license while being a resident of Georgia and was sent to jail for four months of hard labor. After her husband's arrest, King believed he would not make it out alive and telephoned her friend Harris Wofford and cried while saying "They're going to kill him. I know they are going to kill him." Directly after speaking with her, Wofford contacted Sargent Shriver in Chicago, where presidential candidate John F. Kennedy was campaigning at the time, and told Shriver of King's fears for her husband. After Shriver waited to be with Kennedy alone, he suggested that he telephone King and express sympathy. Kennedy called King, after agreeing with the proposal.

Sometime afterward, Bobby Kennedy obtained King's release from prison. Martin Luther King, Sr. was so grateful for the release that he voted for Kennedy and said "I'll take a catholic or the devil himself if he'll wipe the tears from my daughter-in-law's eyes." According to Coretta, Kennedy said "I want to express my concern about your husband. I know this must be very hard on you. I understand you are expecting a baby, and I just want you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King. If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me." Kennedy's contact with King was learned about quickly by reporters, with Coretta admitting that it "made me feel good that he called me personally and let me know how he felt."

Kennedy presidency

During Kennedy's presidency, she and her husband had come to respect him and understood his reluctance at times to not get involved openly with civil rights. In April 1962, Coretta served as delegate for the Women's Strike for Peace Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. Martin drove her to the hospital on March 28, 1963, where King gave birth to their fourth child Bernice. After King and her daughter were due to come home, Martin rushed back to drive them himself. After her husband's arrest on April 12, 1963, King tried to make direct contact with President Kennedy at the advisement of Wyatt Tee Walker, and succeeded in speaking with Robert F. Kennedy. President Kennedy was with his father Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr, who was not feeling well. In what has been noted as making Kennedy seem less sympathetic towards the Kings, the president redirected Mrs. King's call to the White House switchboard.

The next day, President Kennedy reported to King that the FBI had been sent into Birmingham the previous night and confirmed that her husband was fine. He was allowed to speak with her on the phone and told her to inform Walker of Kennedy's involvement. She told her husband of her assistance from the Kennedys, which her husband took as the reason "why everybody is suddenly being so polite." In regards to the March on Washington, Coretta said, "It was as though heaven had come down." Coretta had been home all day with their children, since the birth of their daughter Bernice had not allowed her to attend Easter Sunday church services. Since Mrs. King had issued her own statement regarding the aid of the president instead of doing as her husband had told her and report to Wyatt Walker, this according to author Taylor Branch, made her portrayed by reports as "an anxious new mother who may have confused her White House fantasies with reality."

Coretta went to a Women Strike for Peace rally in New York, in the early days of November 1963. After speaking at the meeting held in the National Baptist Church, King joined the march from Central Park to the United Nations Headquarters. The march was timed to celebrate the group's second anniversary and celebrated the successful completion of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Coretta and Martin learned of John F. Kennedy's assassination when reports initially indicated he had only been seriously wounded. King joined her husband upstairs and watched Walter Cronkite announce the president's death. King sat with her visibly shaken husband following the confirmation.

FBI tapes

The FBI planned to mail tapes of her husband's alleged affairs to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference office since surveillance revealed that Coretta opened her husband's mail when he was traveling. The FBI learned that King would be out of office by the time the tapes were mailed and that his wife would be the one to open it. J. Edgar Hoover even advised to mail "it from a southern state." Coretta sorted the tapes with the rest of the mail, listened to them, and immediately called her husband, "giving the Bureau a great deal of pleasure with the tone and tenor of her reactions." King played the tape in her presence, along with Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy and Joseph Lowery. Publicly, Mrs. King would say "I couldn't make much out of it, it was just a lot of mumbo jumbo." The tapes were part of a larger attempt by J. Edgar Hoover to denounce King by revelations in his personal life.

Johnson presidency

Most prominently, perhaps, she worked hard to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. King spoke with Malcolm X days before his assassination. Malcolm X told her that he was not in Alabama to make trouble for her husband, but instead to make white people have more appreciation for King's protests, seeing his alternative. On March 26, 1965, King's father joined her and her husband for a march that would later end in Montgomery. Her father "caught a glimpse of America's true potential" and for the called it "the greatest day in the whole history of America" after seeing chanting for his daughter's husband by both Caucasians and African-Americans.

Coretta Scott King criticized the sexism of the Civil Rights Movement in January 1966 in New Lady magazine, saying in part, "Not enough attention has been focused on the roles played by women in the struggle. By and large, men have formed the leadership in the civil rights struggle but...women have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement." Martin Luther King, Jr. himself limited Coretta's role in the movement, and expected her to be a housewife. King participated in a Women Strike for Peace protest in January 1968, at the capital of Washington, D.C. with over five thousand women. In honor of the first woman elected to the House of Representatives, the group was called the Jeannette Rankin Brigade. Coretta co-chaired the Congress of Women conference with Pearl Willen and Mary Clarke.

Assassination of husband

Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. She learned of the shooting after being called by Jesse Jackson when she returned from shopping with her eldest child Yolanda. King had difficulty settling her children with the news that their father was deceased. She received a large number of telegrams, including one from Lee Harvey Oswald's mother, which she regarded as the one that touched her the most.

In an effort to prepare her daughter Bernice, then only five years old, for the funeral, she tried to explain to her that the next time she saw her father he would be in a casket and would not be speaking. When asked by her son Dexter when his father would return, King lied and told him that his father had only been badly hurt. Senator Robert Kennedy ordered three more telephones to be installed in the King residence for King and her family to be able to answer the flood of calls they received and offered a plane to transport her to Memphis. Coretta spoke to Kennedy the day after the assassination and asked if he could persuade Jacqueline Kennedy to attend her husband's funeral with him.

Robert Kennedy promised her that he would help "any way" he could. King was told to not go ahead and agree to Kennedy's offer by Southern Christian Leadership Conference members, who told her about his presidential ambitions. She ignored the warnings and went along with his request. On April 5, 1968, King arrived in Memphis to retrieve her husband's body and decided that the casket should be kept open during the funeral with the hope that her children would realize upon seeing his body that he would not be coming home. Mrs. King called photographer Bob Fitch and asked for documentation to be done, having known him for years. On April 7, 1968, former Vice President Richard Nixon visited Mrs. King and recalled his first meeting with her husband in 1955. Nixon also went to Mrs. King's husband's funeral on April 9, 1968, but did not walk in the procession. Nixon believed participating in the procession would be "grandstanding."

On April 8, 1968, Mrs. King and her children headed a march with sanitation workers that her husband had planned to carry out before his death. After the marchers reached the staging area at the Civic Center Plaza in front of Memphis City Hall, onlookers proceeded to take pictures of King and her children but stopped when she addressed everyone at a microphone. She said that despite the Martin Luther King, Jr. being away from his children at times, "his children knew that Daddy loved them, and the time that he spent with them was well spent." Prior to Martin's funeral, Jacqueline Kennedy met with her. The two spent five minutes together and despite the short visit, Coretta called it comforting. King's parents arrived from Alabama. Robert Kennedy and his wife Ethel came, the latter being embraced by Mrs. King. Mrs. King and her sister-in-law Christine King Farris tried to prepare the children for seeing Martin's body. With the end of the funeral service, Mrs. King led her children and mourners in a march from the church to Morehouse College, her late husband's alma mater.

Early widowhood

Two days after her husband's death, King spoke at Ebenezer Baptist Church and made her first statement on his views since he had died. She said her husband told their children, "If a man had nothing that was worth dying for, then he was not fit to live." She brought up his ideals and the fact that he may be dead, but concluded that "his spirit will never die." Not very long after the assassination, Coretta took his place at a peace rally in New York City. Using notes he had written before his death, King constructed her own speech. Coretta approached the African-American entertainer and activist Josephine Baker to take her husband's place as leader of the Civil Rights Movement. Baker declined after thinking it over, stating that her twelve adopted children (known as the "rainbow tribe") were "...too young to lose their mother". Shortly after that Mrs. King decided to take the helm of the movement herself.

Coretta Scott King eventually broadened her focus to include women's rights, LGBT rights, economic issues, world peace, and various other causes. As early as December 1968, she called for women to "unite and form a solid block of women power to fight the three great evils of racism, poverty and war", during a Solidarity Day speech. On April 27, 1968, King spoke at an anti-war demonstration in Central Park in place of her husband. King made it clear that there was no reason "why a nation as rich as ours should be blighted by poverty, disease and illiteracy." King used notes taken from her husband's pockets upon his death, which included the "Ten Commandments on Vietnam." On June 5, 1968, Bobby Kennedy was shot after winning the California primary for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. After he died the following day, Ethel Kennedy, who King had spoken to with her husband only two months earlier, was widowed. King flew to Los Angeles to comfort Ethel over Bobby's death. On June 8, 1968, while King was attending the late senator's funeral, the Justice Department made the announcement of James Earl Ray's arrest.

Not long after this, the King household was visited by Mike Wallace, who wanted to visit her and the rest of her family and see how they were fairing that coming Christmas. She introduced her family to Wallace and also expressed her belief that there would not be another Martin Luther King, Jr. because he comes around "once in a century" or "maybe once in a thousand years". She furthered that she believed her children needed her more than ever, and that there was hope for redemption in her husband's death. In January 1969, King and Bernita Bennette left for a trip to India. Before arriving in the country, the two stopped in Verona, Italy and King was awarded the Universal Love Award. King became the first non-Italian to receive the award. King traveled to London with her sister, sister-in-law, Bernita and several others to preach at St. Paul's Cathedral. Before, no woman had ever delivered a sermon at a regularly appointed service in the cathedral.

As a leader of the movement, Mrs. King founded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. She served as the center's president and CEO from its inception until she passed the reins of leadership to son Dexter Scott King. Removing herself from leadership, allowed her to focus on writing, public speaking and spend time with her parents.

She published her memoirs, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1969. President Richard Nixon was advised against visiting her on the first anniversary of his death, since it would "outrage" many people.

Coretta Scott King was also under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1968 until 1972. Her husband's activities had been monitored during his lifetime. Documents obtained by a Houston, Texas television station show that the FBI worried that Coretta Scott King would "tie the anti-Vietnam movement to the civil rights movement." The FBI studied her memoir and concluded that her "selfless, magnanimous, decorous attitude is belied by...[her] actual shrewd, calculating, businesslike activities." A spokesman for the King family said that they were aware of the surveillance, but had not realized how extensive it was.

Later life

Every year after the assassination of her husband in 1968, Coretta attended a commemorative service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to mark his birthday on January 15. She fought for years to make it a national holiday. In 1972, she said that there should be at least one national holiday a year in tribute to an African-American man, "and, at this point, Martin is the best candidate we have." Murray M. Silver, an Atlanta attorney, made the appeal at the services on January 14, 1979. Coretta Scott King later confirmed that it was the "...best, most productive appeal ever..." Coretta Scott King was finally successful in this campaign in 1986, when Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was made a federal holiday.

After the death of J. Edgar Hoover, King made no attempt to hide her bitterness towards him for his work against her husband in a long statement. Coretta Scott King attended the state funeral of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1973, as a very close friend of the former president. On July 25, 1978, King held a press conference in defense of then-Ambassador Andrew Young and his controversial statement on political prisoners in American jails. On September 19, 1979, Mrs. King visited the Lyndon B. Johnson ranch to meet with Lady Bird Johnson. In 1979 and 1980 Dr. Noel Erskine and Mrs. King co-taught a class on "The Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr." at the Candler School of Theology (Emory University). On September 29, 1980, King's signing as a commentator for CNN was announced by Ted Turner.

On August 26, 1983, King resented endorsing Jesse Jackson for president, since she wanted to back up someone she believed could beat Reagan and dismissed her husband becoming a presidential candidate had he lived. On June 26, 1985, King was arrested with her daughter Bernice and son Martin Luther King III while taking part in an anti-apartheid protest at the Embassy of South Africa in Washington, D.C.

When President Ronald Reagan signed legislation establishing the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, she was at the event. Reagan called her to personally apologize for a remark he made during a nationally televised conference, where he said we would know in "35 years" whether or not King was a communist sympathizer. Reagan clarified his remarks came from the fact that the papers had been sealed off until the year 2027. King accepted the apology and pointed out the Senate Select Committee on Assassinations had not found any basis to suggest her husband had communist ties. On February 9, 1987, eight civil rights activists were jailed for protesting the exclusion of African-Americans during the filming of The Oprah Winfrey Show in Cumming, Georgia. Oprah Winfrey tried to find out why the "community has not allowed black people to live there since 1912." King was outraged over the arrests, and wanted members of the group, "Coalition to End Fear and Intimidation in Forsyth County," to meet with Georgia Governor Joe Frank Harris to "seek a just resolution of the situation." On March 8, 1989, King lectured hundreds of students about the civil rights movement at the University of San Diego. King tried to not get involved in the controversy around the naming of the San Diego Convention Center after her husband. She maintained it was up to the "people within the community" and that people had tried to get her involved in with "those kind of local situations."

On January 17, 1993, King showed disdain for the U.S. missile attack on Iraq. In retaliation, she suggested peace protests. On February 16, 1993, King went to the FBI Headquarters and gave an approving address on Director William S. Sessions for having the FBI "turn its back on the abuses of the Hoover era." King commended Sessions for his "leadership in bringing women and minorities into the FBI and for being a true friend of civil rights." King admitted that she would not have accepted the arrangement had it not been for Sessions, the then-current director. On January 17, 1994, the day marking the 65th birthday of her husband, King said "No injustice, no matter how great, can excuse even a single act of violence against another human being." In January 1995, Qubilah Shabazz was indicted on charges of using telephones and crossing state lines in a plot to kill Louis Farrakhan. King defended her, saying at Riverside Church in Harlem that federal prosecutors targeted her to tarnish her father Malcolm X's legacy. During the fall of 1995, King chaired an attempt to register one million African-American female voters for the presidential election next year with fellow widows Betty Shabazz and Myrlie Evers and was saluted by her daughter Yolanda in a Washington hotel ballroom. On October 12, 1995, King spoke about the O. J. Simpson murder case, which she negated having a longterm affect on relations between races when speaking to an audience at Soka University in Calabasas. On January 24, 1996, King delivered a 40-minute speech at the Loyola University's Lake Shore campus in Rogers Park. She called for everyone to "pick up the torch of freedom and lead America towards another great revolution." On June 1, 1997, Betty Shabazz suffered extensive and life-threatening burns after her grandson Malcolm Shabazz started a fire in their home. In response to the hospitalization of her longtime friend, Mrs. King donated $5,000 to a rehabilitation fund for her. Shabazz died on June 23, 1997, three weeks after being burned.

During the 1990s, King was subject to multiple break-ins and encountered Lyndon Fitzgerald Pace, a man who admitted killing women in the area. He broke in the house in the middle of the night and found Coretta while she was sitting in her bed. After nearly eight years of staying in the home following the encounter, King moved to a condominium unit which had also been the home, albeit part-time, for singers Elton John and Janet Jackson. In 1999, the King family finally succeeded in getting a jury verdict saying her husband was the victim of a murder conspiracy after suing Loyd Jowers, who claimed six years prior to having paid someone other than James Earl Ray to kill her husband. On April 4, 2000, King visited her husband's grave with her sons, daughter Bernice and sister-in-law. In regards to plans to construct a monument for her husband in Washington, D.C., King said it would "complete a group of memorials in the nation's capital honoring democracy's greatest leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and now Martin Luther King, Jr." She became a vegan in the last 10 years of her life.

Opposition to apartheid

During the 1980s, Coretta Scott King reaffirmed her long-standing opposition to apartheid, participating in a series of sit-in protests in Washington, D.C. that prompted nationwide demonstrations against South African racial policies.

King had a 10-day trip to South Africa in September 1986. On September 9, 1986, she cancelled meeting President P. W. Botha and Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi. The next day, she met with Allan Boesak. The UDF leadership, Boesak and Winnie Mandela had threatened avoiding meeting King if she met with Botha and Buthelezi. She also met with Mandela that day, and called it "one of the greatest and most meaningful moments of my life." Mandela's husband was still being imprisoned in Pollsmoor Prison after being transferred from Robben Island in 1982. Prior to leaving the United States for the meeting, King drew comparisons between the civil rights movement and Mandela's case. Upon her return to the United States, she urged Reagan to approve economic sanctions against South Africa.

Peacemaking

Coretta Scott King was a long-time advocate for world peace. Author Michael Eric Dyson has called her "an earlier and more devoted pacifist than her husband." Although Mrs. King would object to the term "pacifism"; she was an advocate of non-violent direct action to achieve social change. In 1957, Mrs. King was one of the founders of The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (now called Peace Action), and she spoke in San Francisco while her husband spoke in New York at the major anti-Vietnam war march on April 15, 1967 organized by the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

Mrs. King was vocal in her opposition to capital punishment and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

LGBT equality

Corretta Scott King was an early supporter in the struggle for lesbian and gay civil rights. In August, 1983 in Washington, DC she urged the amendment of the Civil Rights Act to include gays and lesbians as Protected class.

In response to the Supreme Court's 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that there was no constitutional right to engage in consensual sodomy, King's longtime friend, Winston Johnson of Atlanta, came out to her and was instrumental in arranging King as the featured speaker at the September 27, 1986 New York Gala of the Human Rights Campaign Fund. As reported in the New York Native King stated that she was there to express her solidarity with the gay and lesbian movement. She applauded gays and lesbians as having "always been a part of the civil rights movement."

On April 1, 1998 at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, Mrs. King called on the civil rights community to join in the struggle against homophobia and anti-gay bias. "Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood", she stated. "This sets the stage for further repression and violence that spread all too easily to victimize the next minority group."

In a speech in November 2003 at the opening session of the 13th annual Creating Change Conference, organized by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Coretta Scott King made her now famous appeal linking the Civil Rights Movement to LGBT rights: "I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people. ... But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King, Jr. said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream, to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people."

Coretta Scott King's support of LGBT rights was strongly criticized by some black pastors. She called her critics "misinformed" and said that Martin Luther King's message to the world was one of equality and inclusion.

In 2003, she invited the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to take part in observances of the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. It was the first time that an LGBT rights group had been invited to a major event of the African-American community.{{}}

On March 23, 2004, she told an audience at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Pomona, New Jersey, that same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue. She denounced a proposed amendment advanced by President George W. Bush to the United States Constitution that would ban equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. In her speech King also criticized a group of black pastors in her home state of Georgia for backing a bill to amend that state's constitution to block gay and lesbian couples from marrying. Scott King is quoted as saying "Gay and lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil union. A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriage."

The King Center

Established in 1968 by Coretta Scott King, The King Center is the official memorial dedicated to the advancement of the legacy and ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr., leader of a nonviolent movement for justice, equality and peace. Two days after her husband's funeral, King began planning $15 million for funding the memorial. She handed the reins as CEO and president of the King Center down to her son, Dexter Scott King, who still runs the center today. The Kings initially had difficulty gathering the papers since they were in different locations, including colleges he attended and archives. King had a group of supporters begin gathering her husband's papers in 1967, the year before his death. After raising funds from a private sector and the government, she financed the building of the complex in 1981.

In 1984, she came under criticism by Hosea Williams, one of Martin's earliest followers, for having used the King Center to promote "authentic material" on her husband's dreams and ideals, and disqualified the merchandise as an attempt to exploit her husband. She sanctioned the kit, which contained a wall poster, five photographs of King and his family, a cassette of the I Have a Dream speech, a booklet of tips on how to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and five postcards with quotations from King himself. She believed it to be the authentic way to celebrate the holiday honoring her husband, and denied Hosea's claims.

King sued her husband's alma mater of Boston University over who would keep over 83,000 documents in December 1987, and said the documents belonged with the King archives. However, her husband was held to his word by the university; he had stated after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 that his papers would be kept at the college. Coretta's lawyers argued that the statement was not binding and mentioned that King had not left a will at the time of his death. King testified that President of Boston University John R. Silber in a 1985 meeting demanded that she send the university all of her husband's documents instead of the other way around. King released the statement, "Dr. King wanted the south to be the repository of the bulk of his papers. Now that the King Center library and archives are complete and have one of the finest civil-rights collections in all the world, it is time for the papers to be returned home."

On January 17, 1992, President George H. W. Bush laid a wreath at the tomb of her husband and met with and was greeted by Mrs. King at the center. King praised Bush's support for the holiday, and joined hands with him at the end of a ceremony and sang "We Shall Overcome." On May 6, 1993, a court rejected her claims to the papers after finding that a July 16, 1964 letter King's husband wrote to the institute had constituted a binding charitable pledge to the university and outright stating that Martin Luther King retained ownership of his papers until giving them to the university as gifts or his death. King however, said her husband had changed his mind about allowing Boston University to keep the papers. After her son Dexter took over as the president of the King Center for the second time in 1994, King was given more time to write, address issues and spend time with her parents.

Illness and death

By the end of her 77th year, Coretta began experiencing health problems. Her husband's former secretary, Dora McDonald, assisted her part-time in this period. Hospitalized in April 2005, a month after speaking in Selma at the 40th anniversary of the Selma Voting Rights Movement, she was diagnosed with a heart condition and was discharged on her 78th and final birthday. Later, she suffered several small strokes. On August 16, 2005, she was hospitalized after suffering a stroke and a mild heart attack. Initially, she was unable to speak or move her right side. King's daughter Bernice reported that she had been able to move her leg on Sunday, August 21 while her other daughter and oldest child Yolanda asserted that the family expected her to fully recover. She was released from Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta on September 22, 2005, after regaining some of her speech and continued physiotherapy at home. Due to continuing health problems, Mrs. King cancelled a number of speaking and traveling engagements throughout the remainder of 2005. On January 14, 2006, Coretta made her last public appearance in Atlanta at a dinner honoring her husband's memory. On January 26, 2006, King checked into a rehabilitation center in Rosarito Beach, Mexico under a different name. Doctors did not learn her real identity until her medical records arrived the next day, and did not begin treatment due to her condition.

Coretta Scott King died on the late evening of January 30, 2006, at the rehabilitation center in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, In the Oasis Hospital where she was undergoing holistic therapy for her stroke and advanced stage ovarian cancer. The main cause of her death is believed to be respiratory failure due to complications from ovarian cancer. The clinic at which she died was called the Hospital Santa Monica, but was licensed as Clinica Santo Tomas. After reports indicated that it was not legally licensed to "perform surgery, take X-rays, perform laboratory work or run an internal pharmacy, all of which it was doing," as well as reports of it being operated by highly controversial medical figure Kurt Donsbach, it was shut down by medical commissioner Dr. Francisco Versa. King's body was flown from Mexico to Atlanta on February 1, 2006.

King's eight-hour funeral at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia was held on February 7, 2006. Bernice King did her eulogy. U.S. Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter attended, as did their wives, with the exception of former First Lady Barbara Bush who had a previous engagement. The Ford family was absent due to the illness of President Ford (who himself died later that year). Senator and future President Barack Obama, among other elected officials, attended the televised service.

President Jimmy Carter and Rev. Joseph Lowery delivered funeral orations, and were critical of the Iraq War and the wiretapping of the Kings. Mrs. King was temporarily laid in a mausoleum on the grounds of the King Center until a permanent place next to her husband's remains could be built. She had expressed to family members and others that she wanted her remains to lie next to her husband's at the King Center. On November 20, 2006, the new mausoleum containing the bodies of both Dr. and Mrs. King was unveiled in front of friends and family. The mausoleum is the third resting place of Martin Luther King, and the second of Mrs. King.

Family life

Martin often called Coretta "Corrie," even when the two were still only dating. The FBI captured a dispute between the couple in the middle of 1964, where the two both blamed each other for making the Civil Rights Movement even more difficult. Martin confessed in a 1965 sermon of his secretary having to remind him of his wife's birthday and the couple's wedding anniversary. For a time, many accompanying her husband would usually hear Coretta argue with him in telephone conversations. King resented her husband whenever he failed to call her about the children while he was away, and learned of his plans to not include her in formal visits, such as the White House. However, when King failed to meet to his own standards by missing a plane and fell into a level of despair, Coretta told her husband over the phone that "I believe in you, if that means anything." Author Ron Ramdin wrote "King faced many new and trying moments, his refuge was home and closeness to Coretta, whose calm and soothing voice whenever she sang, gave him renewed strength. She was the rock upon which his marriage and civil rights leadership, especially at this time of crisis, was founded." After she succeeded in getting Martin Luther King, Jr. Day made a federal holiday, King said her husband's dream was "for people of all religions, all socio-economic levels and all cultures to create a world community free from violence, poverty, racism and war so that they could live together in what he called the beloved community or his world house concept."

King considered raising children in a society that discriminated against them serious, and spoke against her husband whenever the two disagreed on financial needs of their family. The Kings had four children; Yolanda, Martin III, Dexter and Bernice. All four children later followed in their parents' footsteps as civil rights activists. King thought she raised them to be proud of the color of their skin, until being asked by her daughter Yolanda why "white people are pretty and Negroes are ugly?" Her daughter Bernice referred to her as "My favorite person." Years after King's death, Bernice would say her mother "spearheaded the effort to establish the King Center in Atlanta as the official living memorial for Martin Luther King Jr., and then went on to champion a national holiday commemorating our father's birthday, and a host of other efforts; and so in many respects she paved the way and made it possible for the most hated man in America in 1968 to now being one of the most revered and loved men in the world." Dexter Scott King's resigning four months after becoming president of the King Center has often been attributed to differences with his mother. Dexter's work saw a reduction of workers from 70 to 14, and also removed a child care center his mother had founded.

Lawsuits

The King family has mostly been criticized for their handling of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s estate, both while Coretta was alive and after her death. The King family sued a California auction in 1992, the family's attorneys filed claims of stolen property against Superior Galleries in Los Angeles Superior Court for the document's return. The King family additionally sued the auction house for punitive damages. In 1994, USA Today paid the family $10,000 in attorney's fees and court costs and also a $1,700 licensing fee for using the "I Have a Dream" speech without permission from them. CBS was sued by the King estate for copyright infringement in November 1996. The network marketed a tape containing excerpts of the "I Have a Dream" speech. CBS had filmed the speech when Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered it in 1963 and did not pay the family a licensing fee.

On April 8, 1998, Mrs. King met with Attorney General Janet Reno as requested by President Bill Clinton. Their meeting took place at the Justice Department four days after the thirtieth anniversary of her husband's death. On July 29, 1998, Mrs. King and her son Dexter met with Justice Department officials. The following day, Associate Attorney General Raymond Fisher told reporters "We discussed with them orally what kind of process we would follow to see if that meets their concerns. And we think it should, but they're thinking about it." On October 2, 1998, the King family filed a suit against Loyd Jowers after he stated publicly he had been paid to hire an assassin to kill Martin Luther King. Mrs. King's son Dexter met with Jowers, and the family contended that the shot that killed Mrs. King's husband came from behind a dense bushy area behind Jim's Grill. The shooter was identified by James Earl Ray's lawyers as Earl Clark, a police officer at the time of King's death, who had been dead for several years before the trial and lawsuits emerged. Jowers himself refused to identify the man he claimed kill Martin Luther King, as a favor to who he confirmed as the deceased killer with alleged ties to organized crimes. The King lawsuit sought unspecified damages from Jowers and other "unknown coconspirators." On November 16, 1999, Mrs. King testified that she hoped the truth would be brought about, regarding the assassination of her husband. Mrs. King believed that while Ray might have had a role in her husband's death, she did not believe he was the one to "really, actually kill him." She was the first to testify of her family, and indicated that they all believed Ray did not act alone. It was at this time that King called for President Bill Clinton to establish a national commission to investigate the assassination, as she believed "such a commission could make a major contribution to interracial healing and reconciliation in America."

Legacy

Coretta was viewed during her lifetime and posthumously as having striven to preserve her husband's legacy. The King Center, which she created the year of his assassination, allowed her husband's tomb to be memorialized. King was buried with her husband after her death, on February 7, 2006. King "fought to preserve his legacy" and her construction of the King Center is said to have aided in her efforts.

King has been linked and associated with Jacqueline Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy, as the three all lost their husbands to assassinations. The three were together when Coretta flew to Los Angeles after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy to be with Ethel and shared "colorblind compassion." She has also been compared to Michelle Obama, the first African-American First Lady of the United States.

She is seen as being primarily responsible for the creation of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. The holiday is now observed in all fifty states, and has been since 2000. The first observance of the holiday after her death was commemorated with speeches, visits to the couple's tomb and the opening of a collection of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s papers. Her sister-in-law Christine King Farris said "It is in her memory and her honor that we must carry this program on. This is as she would have it."

Portrayals in film

Cicely Tyson, in the 1978 television miniseries King

Angela Bassett, in the 2013 television movie Betty and Coretta

Carmen Ejogo played Coretta King in both the 2001 HBO film Boycott and the 2014 film Selma.

Recognition and tributes

Coretta Scott King was the recipient of various honors and tributes both before and after her death. She received honorary degrees from many institutions, including Princeton University, Duke University, and Bates College. She was honored by both of her alma maters in 2004, receiving a Horace Mann Award from Antioch College and an Outstanding Alumni Award from the New England Conservatory of Music.

In 1970, the American Library Association began awarding a medal named for Coretta Scott King to outstanding African-American writers and illustrators of children's literature.

In 1978, Women's Way awarded King with their first Lucretia Mott Award for showing a dedication to the advancement of women and justice similar to Lucretia Mott's.

Many individuals and organizations paid tribute to Scott King following her death, including U.S. President George W. Bush, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Human Rights Campaign, the National Black Justice Coalition, her alma mater Antioch College.

In 1983 she received the Four Freedom Award for the Freedom of Worship. In 1987 she received a Candace Award for Distinguished Service from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women.

In 1997, Coretta Scott King was the recipient of the Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award.

In 2004, Coretta Scott King was awarded the prestigious Gandhi Peace Prize by the Government of India.

In 2006, the Jewish National Fund, the organization that works to plant trees in Israel, announced the creation of the Coretta Scott King forest in the Galilee region of Northern Israel, with the purpose of "perpetuating her memory of equality and peace", as well as the work of her husband. When she learned about this plan, King wrote to Israel's parliament:

"On April 3, 1968, just before he was killed, Martin delivered his last public address. In it he spoke of the visit he and I made to Israel. Moreover, he spoke to us about his vision of the Promised Land, a land of justice and equality, brotherhood and peace. Martin dedicated his life to the goals of peace and unity among all peoples, and perhaps nowhere in the world is there a greater appreciation of the desirability and necessity of peace than in Israel."

In 2007, The Coretta Scott King Young Women's Leadership Academy (CSKYWLA) was opened in Atlanta, Georgia. At its inception, the school served girls in grade 6 with plans for expansion to grade 12 by 2014. CSKYWLA is a public school in the Atlanta Public Schools system. Among the staff and students, the acronym for the school's name, CSKYWLA (pronounced "see-skee-WAH-lah"), has been coined as a protologism to which this definition has given – "to be empowered by scholarship, non-violence, and social change." The school is currently under the leadership of Dione Simon (Principal). There Is Also A High School With A Graduating Class Next Year. The High School Is Currently Under The Leadership Of Termerion McCrary Lakes. That year was also the first observance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day following her death, and she was honored.

Super Bowl XL was dedicated to King and Rosa Parks. Both were memorialized with a moment of silence during the pregame ceremonies. The children of both Parks and King then helped Tom Brady with the ceremonial coin toss. In addition two choirs representing the states of Georgia (King's home state) and Alabama (Park's home state) accompanied Dr. John, Aretha Franklin and Aaron Neville in the singing of the National Anthem.

She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 2009.

Congressional resolutions

Upon the news of her death, moments of reflection, remembrance, and mourning began around the world. In the United States Senate, Majority Leader Bill Frist presented Senate Resolution 362 on behalf of all U.S. Senators, with the afternoon hours filled with respectful tributes throughout the U.S. Capitol.

On August 31, 2006, following a moment of silence in memoriam to the death of Coretta Scott King, the United States House of Representatives presented House Resolution 655 in honor of her legacy. In an unusual action, the resolution included a grace period of five days in which further comments could be added to it.

Wikipedia

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lboogie1906 · 2 years ago

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yegarts · 7 years ago

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astra-business-centre-calgary · 1 year ago

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Top Places to Visit in Bowness, Calgary

Bowness is a neighborhood and former town in west Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The former town was amalgamated into the City of Calgary in 1964. The neighborhood is bordered by the Bow River to the north and east, 16 Avenue to the south, and Stoney Trail to the west.

Edworthy Park

Edworthy Park is a city park located in the Northwest section of Calgary along the south shore of the Bow River. The Canadian Pacific Railway crosses the length of the park. It was named after Thomas Edworthy, who immigrated to the Calgary area in 1883 from Devon, England. The trees that can be found in Edworthy Park include riparian woodland with aspen, willow, and balsam poplar. There is also some grassland mixed shrubland, and an escarpment where white spruce dominates. The spruce is an isolated population of Douglas-fir, some more than 400 years old.

Edworthy Park is built on the former site of a sandstone quarry. The land was purchased by the City of Calgary in 1962 for the development of the park. Prior to the mid-1990s, the City of Calgary intended to eventually replace Edworthy Park with an extension of the Shaganappi Trail freeway. The extension would have linked Shaganappi Trail, Sarcee Trail, and Bow Trail at a major interchange that would take up most of the southwest part of Edworthy Park. During the development of the Calgary Transportation Plan (also known as "The Go Plan") in 1995, public opposition to the roadway led to it being removed from future consideration.

Calgary Stampede

The Calgary Stampede is an annual rodeo, exhibition, and festival held every July in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The ten-day event, which bills itself as "The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth", attracts over one million visitors per year and features one of the world's largest rodeos, a parade, a midway, stage shows, concerts, agricultural competitions, chuckwagon racing, and First Nations exhibitions. In 2008, the Calgary Stampede was inducted into the ProRodeo Hall of Fame.

The event's roots are traced to 1886 when the Calgary and District Agricultural Society held its first fair. In 1912, American promoter Guy Weadick organized his first rodeo and festival, known as the Stampede. He returned to Calgary in 1919 to organize the Victory Stampede in honor of soldiers returning from World War I. Weadick's festival became an annual event in 1923 when it merged with the Calgary Industrial Exhibition to create the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede.

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mitchbeck · 5 years ago

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CANTLON: PACK HIT THE ROAD FOR THREE-IN-THREE

BY: Gerry Cantlon, Howlings CROMWELL, CT - The Hartford Wolf Pack have passed the halfway mark on the 2019-20 season and they do so sitting atop the Atlantic Division with a 19-8-2-5 (45 points) record. It's hard to imagine that back in September anyone would have picked this group to be heading into the second half of the season in first place in the Atlantic Division and among the best teams in the AHL. One of the factors for the Pack resurgence and current position in the race to the Calder Cup is their persistence and growth as a team-unit. It cannot be overlooked. “The biggest thing is, we have won so many one-goal games and a big factor is a mature team wins a majority of those games. We have handled leads well late (in games) and have had very strong third periods." Pack head coach Kris Knoblauch said. The Pack are unbeaten with the lead after two periods with a 15-0-1-2 record. Hartford has also scored their share of miraculous goals late in games and did that twice to send it to overtime. "The other big reason (for the turnaround) is our goaltending of Igor (Shesterkin) and Adam (Huska). They have made stop-after-stop and our defense has done such a good job with blocks like we did Tuesday (a 3-2 win over Bridgeport). Right now we're a little fortunate,” Knoblauch stated. Knoblauch is enthusiastic about his team, but does not want to be over-confident. Because the Pack are in first place, Knoblauch was honored by being named one of the AHL All-Star game's coaches. The game will be played at the end of January in Ontario, CA. Before that though, the Wolf Pack have a lot of work to do starting Friday when they head to Providence to take on the Bruins. The game will be their seventh of the season, and they won’t see the Baby Bruins, who they've been trading first place with back-and-forth for the past month, until March 1st. Shesterkin will start Friday night, making it his first three-consecutive-game-starts for the Wolf Pack as he transitions and adjusts to North American rinks. “We're going to enjoy Igor for as long as we have him, because he will be in the NHL at some point. Providence is a very good team, well-coached and they have very good structure. Our records are similar, but Shesterkin has been the difference in several games. We also have capitalized in key situations against them, and that has been the difference.” After the trip to the Dunkin Donuts Arena in Providence, the Wolf Pack travel to Utica to play the red-hot Comets who are 7-2-1-0 in their last 10. The Comets are in second place in AHL North Division percentage points behind the Rochester Americans. Each team has 44 points. Next Wednesday, the Wolf Pack complete this road game grouping with a drive down to Hershey to face the Bears before they return home on January 10th against the Charlotte Checkers where they will seek to improve on their home record of 14-1-0-2. NOTES: Knoblauch would neither confirm nor deny that defenseman Libor Hajak would be making a rehabilitation assignment in Hartford. The Rangers are on a four-game Canadian road trip. “We haven’t received any notifications or instructions at this point," is all the head coach would say on the subject. So far, Hajak has missed 13 games with a right knee injury he suffered on December 5th after playing the first 27 games. When Hajak does eventually come to Hartford on his rehab assignment, as is being highly speculated among beat writers in New York, somebody will either sit in Hartford or a player will head to New York. The Rangers have dropped three games, including last night’s 4-3 loss to Calgary to ex-Wolf Pack and Ranger goalie Cam Talbot. The team completes the Canadian trip in Vancouver on Saturday night. The Rangers did make two transactions from the Wolf Pack. They recalled center, Ryan Dmowski (Old Lyme/Gunnery Prep) from their ECHL affiliate, the Maine Mariners. In return, after two games, forward, Dillan Fox, was released from his PTO deal and returned to the Mariners. Forward, Patrick Newell, will return to the lineup after a three-game absence the result of an upper-body injury he suffered against Providence. Wolf Pack’s leading scorer, Vinni Lettieri, (11 goals and 24 points in 34 games) and defensemen Joey Keane, and Yegor Rykov, spent nearly a half-hour post-practice working on their shooting techniques. Lettieri has one point, an assist, in his last five games. Former Qunnipiac Bobcat, Brogan Rafferty, was named CCM/AHL Rookie of the Month with three goals and 16 points in 13 games. Rafferty signed as a free agent by the Vancouver Canucks after his junior season. He's third in assists with 25 and leads all defensemen in scoring with 30 points in 34 games, He's also sporting a healthy plus-17 so far. Forward Kieffer Bellows of Bridgeport was named the AHL Forward of the Month with 10 goals in 11 games. Bridgeport sent defenseman, Mike Cormell, and right-wing, Ben Thomson, who's coming off an injury suffered early in the season, to the Worcester Railers (ECHL). Providence got defenseman Jeremy Lauzon back from his recall to the Boston Bruins. Mason Marchment, the son of former Hartford Whaler, Bryan Marchment, was recalled from the Toronto Marlies by the Maple Leafs. Ex-Sound Tiger, Aaron Ness, was returned to the Tucson Roadrunners by the Arizona Coyotes. Goalie, Parker Milner, (Avon Old Farms) was sent to the South Carolina Stingrays (ECHL) by Hershey. Dalton Smith, the nephew of former Whaler, Keith Primeau, was released by Rochester. Ex-Wolf Pack/Ranger, Dale Weise, was recalled from the Laval Rocket by the Montreal Canadiens and got into a first period scrap against the Tampa Bay Lightning’s Patrick Maroon. Rangers President, and one-time New Haven Nighthawk, John Davidson, was selected to enter the Alberta Sports Hall-of-Fame along with six other inductees. The ceremony will be held on July 19th in Canmore, Alberta. The only other CT connection is former Whaler and Ranger, Mike Rogers, who was inducted last year. The WJC semifinals are set, and the US will not be in it. Finland upset the US 1-0 despite a strong game from goalie Spencer Knight (Darien/Avon Old Farms) who made 26 saves. The Canadians took care of business on the Slovaks winning 6-1. Sweden's team saw Rangers prospect, Nils Lundkvist, get an assist and have the second best ice time of 19:30. He shutout and knocked out the host Czech Republic, 5-0 and then Russia upended Switzerland 3-1. The Russians play Sweden in the first semi-final at 3:00 PM local time. The Finns play the Canadians in the other semifinal on Saturday. Finland is coached by ex-Ranger and New Haven Nighthawk, Raimo Helminen, who was in a record-setting six Olympics. He led Finland to a silver as a player in the 1984 WJC, and was the tournament's top scorer. He could gain gold by the end of the weekend. Read the full article

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justonesongmore · 7 years ago

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XXII: 1922

On Cavalier Adoptions, Damned Conventions, and the Inertia of the Dispossessed

1. A. C. (Eck) Robertson: “Sallie Gooden”

The story goes that the two Texans entered New York City in full fancy dress, 35-year-old Eck Robertson in a spangled cowboy outfit, and his 75-year-old partner Henry C. Gilliland in old Confederate Army togs, his own. They went straight to the Victor offices and insisted on cutting a record; whether because the talent manager thought he could sell it, or just to get the hicks out of the office, “Sallie Gooden” b/w “Arkansas Traveler” was the result. “Traveler” was the duet, “Gooden” a solo piece by Eck: and if it’s not exactly the first country record (studio professionals had been cutting Ozark reels and string-band minstrelsy for years), it’s the first made by genuine rural Southerners. Thirteen variations in three minutes: Robertson rarely recorded again, but he laid a pattern for all old-time to follow.

2. Ory’s Sunshine Orchestra: “Society Blues”

Meanwhile, the first genuine Black New Orleans jazz records were recorded in the sleepy backwater then still becoming the cinematic boomtown of Los Angeles, California, to be sold out of a store also owned by the proprietor of the recording studio. Edward “Kid” Ory was a successful Creole jazz trombonist whose band had included King Oliver and a young cornetist named Armstrong back in the Crescent City; he had decamped to the West Coast after Storyville’s closure in 1917, and the band he put together in the Golden State was, if not the toast of Rampart Street, respectable. Ory would wend to Chicago within the next few years, where he would fall in with old Orleanian friends, but that’s a story for another time. “Society Blues,” halfway between classy and kidding, is mellow as a porch conversation.

3. Alberta Hunter: “Down Hearted Blues”

Another legendary figure of twentieth-century music bows onto the stage. Alberta Hunter, who was born and bred in Memphis but made her name in Chicago, is of the generation of performers who, like her fellow Southern-born, Northern-famed peers Ethel Waters and Florence Mills, fell halfway between the stools of cabaret and the blues, and was nearly forgotten by a history that prized the blues over cabaret and (which would come to mean the same thing) men over women. She had already toured Europe to great acclaim by the time she settled down to a Harlem club gig and cut this immortal blues, co-written with pianist (and possibly sometime lover) Lovie Austin. The following year, the century’s most famous blues shouter would notch it as her first smash record, but Hunter’s sly, sashaying take emphasizes its essential theatricality.

4. Marion Harris: “I’m Just Wild about Harry”

The biggest hit from Shuffle Along, the all-Black musical which took New York by storm in 1921 and kickstarted a decade of Black excellence, “I’m Just Wild about Harry” took a year to get onto record. Partly the delay served to deracinate the tune, to transform it from an unembarrassed declaration of Black love (it was originally written as a waltz, in an even more overt challenge to racial norms) to a raggy burst of pep that anyone, in these dance-band days, could turkey-trot or whistle: F. Scott Fitzgerald coined “the Jazz Age” in 1922, the perfect descriptor of such cavalier white adoption of Black forms. Marion Harris had always sung Black, sometimes exaggeratedly so, but only the broad syncopation and extra pep of the last few choruses gestures in that direction here; she simply sounds American.

5. Ed Gallagher and Al Shean: “Oh! Mister Gallagher and Mister Shean”

The background hum to popular culture in the 1920s—as it had been since the 1880s—was vaudeville, the stage circuit mechanism by which the entire country absorbed roughly the same songs, dances, slapstick, patter, and acrobatics as the big cities, though delayed. Ephemeral by design, but calcified enough that the right act could get forty years out of the same routine, the ethos of vaudeville was desperation; you never knew what would work, so you played as broad as possible. Gallagher and Shean, an Irishman and a German Jew respectively, reportedly loathed each other, but their shared song, as tightly structured as a sonnet, was bigger than either of them: they could and did swap out verses every time, which makes this double-sided record’s domestic-abuse and skin-color jokes revealing as an indication of what sold.

6. Jack Buchanan: “And Her Mother Came Too”

While the Broadway theatrical songwriting machine was entering its second decade of eminence, its West End equivalent was rather more sedate. The young British songwriter who posed the greatest challenge to the imported Berlins, Kerns, and Gershwins was Welshman Ivor Novello. “Keep the Home Fires Burning” had been a wartime favorite, but it was in the 1920s that his songwriting really bloomed. This entry, on the surface a mere one-note mother-in-law joke in age-old music-hall tradition, has a more nuanced harmonic structure than strictly necessary, and especially given eternal Drones Club habitué Jack Buchanan’s urbane, ever so slightly camp delivery, the joke destabilizes, becoming less about a too-enthusiastic chaperone and more like a Wodehousian parody of Vincent O’Sullivan’s classic 1912 Decadent novella The Good Girl, about a simpleton increasingly entangled by a family of moral vampires.

7. Sara Martin: “Tain’t Nobody's Bus’ness if I Do”

On the right hand side of the label is printed the legend “Contralto Solo / Piano Accomp. by T. Waller.” And so another of the giants of early jazz piano bobs to the surface here, accompanying Miss Sara Martin, one of the half-dozen or so essential blues-not-blues singers of the decade, on a song that will become an urban blues standard, evolving in many directions over the course of the century. But here, in its original ragtime-blues form, written by African-American songwriter Porter Grainger and Mamie Smith sideman Everett Robbins, “Nobody’s Business” is a perfect marriage of defiant, antisocial (because society is dangerous) blues tradition and Tin Pan Alley hokum, setting the template for the theatrical blues tradition of the 1930s and 40s which songwriters like Harold Arlen or Hoagy Carmichael would turn into vernacular American pop.

8. Lucille Hegamin and her Blue Flame Syncopaters: “Aggravatin’ Papa (Don’t You Try to Two-Time Me)”

In fact, some white songwriters were there already. Composer J. Russel Robinson, a Hoosier, was a ragtime pianist who had supplied W. C. Handy’s publishing company, and lyricist Roy Turk was a New York native whose slangy, sentimental songs helped to define the Jazz Age. Three years earlier, “Aggravatin’ Papa” might have been a Coon song—the Southern setting, the stereotypically trifling man, the understated threats of violence could all have been delivered by a blackface singer for laughs—but instead Black singers and players adopted it and turned it into a blues standard, starting with Lucille Hegamin. Her delivery, using the blues trick of repeating the end of a line where a solo would otherwise go, is cheerful, almost delighted to tear into the juicy threats she’s making, while her Syncopaters swoon woozily around her.

9. Trixie Smith and the Jazz Masters: “My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)”

The confluence of the words “rock” and “roll” in such a way that makes it obvious they were already conjoined in a familiar phrase decades before they got pinned to a backbeat is perhaps the least noteworthy thing about this record. Trixie Smith was a genuine Southern Black singer, born and raised in Georgia, but not a gutbucket blues singer: her upbringing had been genteel, and her singing, as here, tended toward the light and winsome. Nevertheless, “My Man Rocks Me” is among the first great single-entendre blues records, so hot (though entirely by implication) that a parental warning logo would have had to be slapped on it in the CD era. Written by Chicago-based songwriter and publisher J. Berni Barbour, it’s performed here at such a languorous drag, with a deep-stroking trombone, that it’s practically tantric.

10. Eva Tanguay: “I Don’t Care”

In 1922 she was forty-four and long past her wasp-waisted prime; but back when she was the chaotic, hair-flowing, man-eating, lung-bursting Quebecois-born sensation of the Naughty Oughts, she hadn’t bothered to step before a recording horn, and so this is all we have of her: her signature song, some fifteen years late. But if this is a shadow of her former self, what must she have been like in her strength? Her voice is blown out, her tempos all scattered as the studio musicians attempt to keep up with her lurches from faux-maudlin verses to the roaring, flippant chorus, still as strong a fuck-you to the propriety, daintiness, and demureness of the ideal woman as it ever was. If the fuck-you sounds rather more ghostly today, it isn’t because women are expected to care any less.

11. Georgel: “La garçonne”

But the “I-Don’t-Care Girl” had been a model for a whole generation of women now reaching adulthood who disdained the voluminous skirts and hairstyles of their mothers. The flapper, as she was known in English, had her equivalent in every nation: but when Victor Margueritte’s sensationalistic lesbian 1922 French novel La garçonne was bowdlerized into English the same year, it was called The Bachelor Girl. The topical song of the same name by Vincent Scotto (lyrics by a pair of hacks) sneers at women who bob their hair, dress in mannish attire, and choose not to flirt with men, predicting a lonely, cruel dotage for any woman who doesn’t embrace motherhood. Georgel’s rendition was a hit, but the last verse was often omitted, and the androgynous garçonne’s sleek, stylish, and damn-the-conventions poise became a decade’s aspiration.

12. Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra: “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise”

Having come into a minor fortune on the unexpected success of “Swanee,” the young, prolific, and ambitious composer George Gershwin soon found himself writing music for George White’s Scandals, meant as stiff competition for Ziegfeld’s Follies. The first (and perhaps only) immortal song from that series of revues, “Stairway to Paradise” was the young man’s first compositional triumph, a winding musical ascent to match the twin curved staircases in the stage show, with blues harmonics to accentuate its modernity and jazz it away from typical revue politesse. The orchestra pit for the number was directed by celebrity conductor Paul Whiteman, and his later recording with his Orchestra, leaving out the less-impressive lyrics, is one of the great dance-band records of the era, sweetly winging Gershwin’s hypermelodic expression of that rarest of emotions in pop music—joy.

13. Conchita Piquer: “El florero”

Among the many sensations which took place seemingly nightly on New York stages in the early 1920s, the debut of a sixteen-year-old Valencian soubrette in drag as a flower-selling boy in El gato montés (The Wild Cat), a successful Spanish operetta undergoing a respectable Broadway run, has largely been forgotten in English-language circles. But the tale goes that a representative from Columbia rushed backstage during the intermission to sign her to a two-year recording contract, only to discover that not only didn’t she speak English, she had only a vague grasp of Castilian. Thirty years later Concha Piquer would be the grand dame of Spanish copla, a long-reigning movie star and one of the most recognizable Spanish-language singers in the world; Broadway’s ability to generate stars without even noticing was at its peak in the 1920s.

14. Baiano: “Eu só quero é beliscá”

In February of 1922, the Teatro Municipal of São Paulo hosted a week of art exhibitions, lectures, concerts, and poetry readings called the Semana de Arte Moderna: it was ground zero for Brazilian modernism, an explosive, controversial, and thoroughly regional rejection of European norms in favor of miscegenated, tropical Brasilidade. But the middle-class intellectuals and artists promoted by the Semana were conflicted about the street-level sambas and batuques with which the urban masses—not to mention hustling commercial songwriters—expressed themselves, just as Anglo modernists were ambivalent or worse towards jazz. This cateretê (tr. “I Just Want a Pinch”) by Eduardo Souto, with its dense paulista slang, faux-tribal rhythms, and anti-authoritarian stance (the song’s satirical object is cops shaking down street vendors) was just as modernist as Oswald de Andrade’s poems or Tarsila do Amaral’s paintings.

15. Alcides Briceño y Jorge Añez: “La soldadera”

Belisario de Jesús García was a soldier in the Mexican Revolution who fought on the side of the Carrancista revolutionaries who murdered Emiliano Zapata; the same year, he published his first song, “La soldadera.” The word literally means “the woman who receives payment for taking care of a soldier,” and could refer to a wife or domestic or (more likely) camp follower, but in the Mexican Revolution it was applied to the hundreds and thousands of women who took up arms in the cause, whether perforce or otherwise. This version of García’s imitation corrido was recorded in New York by a Panamanian-Colombian duo who would sing anything in Spanish regardless of nationality, with studio hacks on instrumentation; despite which, it’s been wisely adopted by Mexico as one of the great early records of Mexican vernacular pop.

16. Carlos Gardel: “El tango de la muerte”

Not the “Tango de la muerte” written by the little-known Horacio Mackintosh in 1917, which is an instrumental; this tango was written (music and lyrics) by Alberto Navión, a French-born, Uruguay-raised composer for the Argentine theater whose work was often uneven; the sainete which introduced this song has been dismissed as mediocre, but Gardel getting his pipes on any song elevates it. And in fact, a song of typically Latin despair which may have been risible or banal in the theater is transformed into a throbbing report from the depths of depression on record. Bounded by the strict strums of guitarists Guillermo Barbieri and José Ricardo, Gardel’s voice moors in self-pitying baritone melancholy, and flutters up to keening tenor remorse. He wants to die, and only the milonga (criollo dancehall, birthplace of tango) keeps him alive.

17. La Niña de los Peines: “Tango de la tontona”

It is a great piece of foolishness that she has not appeared here before: her first record was cut in 1905, when she was fifteen. But in 1922, the distinguished Spanish composer Manuel de Falla and a young, scarcely-known poet named García Lorca organized the first Concurso de Cante Jondo, or Deep Song Contest, in Granada, the Andalusian city which could reasonably claim to be among the birthplaces of flamenco. Pastora Pavón, already at thirty-two the greatest cantaora of all time, was the only woman on the judging panel. This song (set to the relatively new “tango” palo) addressing a foolish, heartbreaking girl was an early favorite of her repertoire, and one of a series of records she cut in 1922, accompanied by guitarist Luis Molina. It only hints at the astonishing depths of her voice.

18. El Tenazas de Morón: “Yo he andaito la Francia (Seguiriyas de Silverio)”

But the great revelation of the Granada Concurso was Diego Bermúdez of the Sevillian town Morón de la Frontera, a septuagenarian who had retired from flamenco singing in the nineteenth century after having been stabbed: flamenco was once a disreputable, dangerous field. His archaic style was received rapturously by the musicologists and mystic nationalists in the audience, who considered it a direct link to the authentic Roma origins of flamenco song as represented by the legendary prototypical cantaor Silverio Franconetti, and as opposed to modern syncretic theatricalized flamenco, sullied by commercialism and mass media. On being (re)discovered, Bermúdez (nicknamed Tenazas, or Tongs) recorded several platters of quavering, ancient flamenco, a set which Falla would carry with him into exile. But his moment in the sun was short-lived; the following year, El Tenazas was laid to rest.

19. Naftule Brandwein: “Kallarash”

We have heard him before on records credited to other bandleaders, particularly Abe Schwartz, but this is the moment where the foremost klezmer clarinetist of the era before anyone called the music klezmer struck out on his own. Born into a family of Hasidic musicians in what was then called Polish Galicia (present-day Ukraine) and having emigrated to the US in 1908 at nineteen, Brandwein was a showman, even a showboat, who would sometimes perform with a self-promoting neon sign around his neck, or play with his back to the audience so as not to give away his proprietary fingering techniques. “Kallarash,” subtitled “A Bridal Dedication,” is a slow-then-fast dance memorializing a town in Romanian Bessarabia. It’s a perfect showcase for his overtly emotional, flashily sentimental style, a virtuosic display for a Hendrix of the clarinet.

20. A. Z. Idelsohn und Männerchor: “Hava Nagila”

Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, born in present-day Latvia, worked as a cantor in Europe and South Africa before emigrating to Palestine in the years of the Second Aliyah, when European Jews fled pogroms in the Russian Empire in the hope of establishing a Zionist state in Palestine. Idelsohn’s musical training led him to take an interest in the Jewish music of Palestine, and his ethnomusicological work is some of the most comprehensive in the field. In setting his own words to an old melody traced to the diaspora in the Ukraine, he is considered the author of “Hava Nagila,” and when the German label Polydor, then making one of the first music-industry attempts to comprehensively document folkloric music, invited him to record some of his collection, he conducted a choir in one of the era’s folk-art hybrids.

21. Fisk University Jubilee Singers: “I Ain’t Goin’ to Study War No More”

The ancient Jewish poetic image, given in the prophet Isaiah, of reshaping implements of warfare into implements of agriculture is one of the most powerful in all religion: and one of its most beautiful expressions was the work of anonymous (to us, if not to Heaven) men and women enslaved in the southern United States, probably less than two hundred years ago. As with most art made by Black Americans, there are double and treble meanings to “Down by the Riverside”— the Ohio was perhaps more salient than the Jordan, whether the one in Israel or the one in Bunyan, and ending the study of war doesn’t necessarily mean forgoing violent struggle anymore than the end of school is the end of work. Even the pious, unhurried reading given by four Fisk men here contains multitudes.

22. Feodor Chaliapin: “Ey, ukhnem!”

First attested by Russian composer and folk song-collector Mily Balakirev in 1866, the title of this work chant could be transliterated “Hey, Heave To!” but became known in English as “The Song of the Volga Boatmen,” thanks to the widespread popularity of Russian basso Feodor Chaliapin, who toured constantly in Europe and the Americas starting in 1901. It became his signature song in solo concerts, as his rich voice raised in the cry of the vodoliv, or leader of a gang of burlaks (dispossessed peasants with nothing but muscle and the collective force of their own inertia to sell) who were hired to tow barges down the Volga, from Moscow to the Caspian Sea, in the ages before ships could run under their own power. That Russian solution of throwing raw population at a problem would recur.

#1920s

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mikemortgage · 6 years ago

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Colleen Johnston Joins Shopify’s Board of Directors

OTTAWA, Ontario — Shopify Inc. (NYSE:SHOP)(TSX:SHOP) (“Shopify”) announced today that Colleen Johnston has been appointed to its board of directors, effective immediately.

Colleen is the former Chief Financial Officer of Toronto-Dominion Bank, where as a member of TD’s Senior Executive Team, she led a team of over 16,000 professionals. Prior to her retirement in 2018, Colleen spent 14 years at TD, ten of which she spent as Group Head, Finance, Sourcing, Corporate Communications and Chief Financial Officer. Prior to TD, Colleen held senior leadership roles at Scotiabank over the course of 15 years, including as CFO of Scotia Capital.

“We are thrilled to welcome Colleen to the Shopify board of directors,” said Tobi Lütke, founder and CEO of Shopify. “Colleen brings deep expertise in financial services, strategic growth, and organizational development acquired over the course of an impressive career. I have great confidence that Shopify will benefit greatly from Colleen’s decades of experience.”

“Helping entrepreneurs strive for independence and success is a mission I’m proud to be a part of,” said Colleen Johnston. “I’m looking forward to contributing to the next phase of Shopify’s growth.”

Colleen was recognized as Canada’s CFO of the Year in 2012, an award that is presented annually by Financial Executives International Canada, PwC and Robert Half International. She was named one of the 25 Most Powerful Women in Banking by American Banker three years in a row from 2009 to 2011. She was chosen by the Women’s Executive Network as one of Canada’s Most Powerful Women three years in a row and in 2007 Johnston was inducted into Canada’s Most Powerful Women: Top 100 Hall of Fame.

Colleen has a Bachelor of Business Administration from York University’s Schulich School of Business as well as her Chartered Accountant designation. In 2006, she was elected a Fellow Chartered Accountant, the highest designation conferred by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario.

Colleen currently serves on the board of directors of WestJet (TSX), a global airline based in Calgary, Alberta, McCain Foods, Unity Health Toronto, and the Shaw Festival Theatre.

About Shopify Shopify is the leading multi-channel commerce platform. Merchants use Shopify to design, set up, and manage their stores across multiple sales channels, including mobile, web, social media, marketplaces, brick-and-mortar locations, and pop-up shops. The platform also provides merchants with a powerful back-office and a single view of their business, from payments to shipping. The Shopify platform was engineered for reliability and scale, making enterprise-level technology available to businesses of all sizes. Headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, Shopify currently powers over 600,000 businesses in approximately 175 countries and is trusted by brands such as Nestle, Kylie Cosmetics, Allbirds, MVMT, and many more.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190124005240/en/

Contacts

INVESTORS: Katie Keita Senior Director, Investor Relations 613-241-2828 x 1024 [email protected]

MEDIA: Darrell Etherington Public Relations Manager 416-238-6705 x 302 [email protected]

from Financial Post http://bit.ly/2B3sulP via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

#IFTTT #Financial Post

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blackkudos · 7 years ago

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Marvin Gaye

Marvin Gaye (/ɡeɪ/; born Marvin Pentz Gay Jr.; April 2, 1939 – April 1, 1984) was an American singer, songwriter and record producer. Gaye helped to shape the sound of Motown in the 1960s, first as an in-house session player and later as a solo artist with a string of hits, including "Ain't That Peculiar", "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)" and "I Heard It Through the Grapevine", and duet recordings with Mary Wells, Kim Weston, Diana Ross and Tammi Terrell, later earning the titles "Prince of Motown" and "Prince of Soul".

During the 1970s, he recorded the concept albums What's Going On and Let's Get It On and became the first artist in Motown (followed by Stevie Wonder) to break away from the reins of their production company.

Gaye's later recordings influenced several contemporary R&B subgenres, such as quiet storm and neo soul. Following a period in Europe as a tax exile in the early 1980s, Gaye released the 1982 Grammy Award-winning hit "Sexual Healing" and its parent album Midnight Love.

On April 1, 1984, Gaye's father, Marvin Gay Sr., fatally shot him at their house in the West Adams district of Los Angeles. Since his death, many institutions have posthumously bestowed Gaye with awards and other honors—including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Early life

Marvin Gaye was born Marvin Pentz Gay Jr. on April 2, 1939, at Freedman's Hospital in Washington, D.C., to church minister Marvin Gay Sr., and domestic worker Alberta Gay (née Cooper). His first home was in a public housing project, the Fairfax Apartments (now demolished) at 1617 1st Street SW in the Southwest Waterfront neighborhood. Although one of the city's oldest neighborhoods, with many elegant Federal-style homes, Southwest was primarily a vast slum. Most buildings were small, in extensive disrepair, and lacked both electricity and running water. The alleys were full of one- and two-story shacks, and nearly every dwelling was overcrowded. Gaye and his friends nicknamed the area "Simple City", owing to its being "half-city, half country".

Gaye was the second eldest of the couple's four children. He had two sisters, Jeanne and Zeola, and one brother, Frankie Gaye. He also had two half-brothers: Michael Cooper, his mother's son from a previous relationship, and Antwaun Carey Gay, born as a result of his father's extramarital affairs.

Gaye started singing in church when he was four years old; his father often accompanied him on piano. Gaye and his family were part of a Pentecostal church known as the House of God. The House of God took its teachings from Hebrew Pentecostalism, advocated strict conduct, and adhered to both the Old and New Testaments. Gaye developed a love of singing at an early age and was encouraged to pursue a professional music career after a performance at a school play at 11 singing Mario Lanza's "Be My Love". His home life consisted of "brutal whippings" by his father, who struck him for any shortcoming. The young Gaye described living in his father's house as similar to "...living with a king, a very peculiar, changeable, cruel, and all powerful king." He felt that had his mother not consoled him and encouraged his singing, he would have killed himself. His sister later explained that Gaye was beaten often, from age seven well into his teenage years.

Gaye attended Syphax Elementary School and then Randall Junior High School. Gaye began to take singing much more seriously in junior high, and he joined and became a singing star with the Randall Junior High Glee Club.

In 1953 or 1954, the Gays moved into the East Capitol Dwellings public housing project in D.C.'s Capitol View neighborhood. Their townhouse apartment (Unit 12, 60th Street NE; now demolished) was Marvin's home until 1962.

Gaye briefly attended Spingarn High School before transferring to Cardozo High School. At Cardozo, Gaye joined several doo-wop vocal groups, including the Dippers and the D.C. Tones. Gaye's relationship with his father worsened during his teenage years, as his father would kick him out of the house often. In 1956, 17-year-old Gaye dropped out of high school and enlisted in the United States Air Force as a basic airman. Disappointed in having to perform menial tasks, he faked mental illness and was discharged shortly afterwards. Gaye's sergeant stated that he refused to follow orders.

Career

Early career

Following his return, Gaye and good friend Reese Palmer formed the vocal quartet The Marquees. The group performed in the D.C. area and soon began working with Bo Diddley, who assigned the group to Columbia subsidiary OKeh Records after failing to get the group signed to his own label, Chess. The group's sole single, "Wyatt Earp" (co-written by Bo Diddley), failed to chart and the group was soon dropped from the label. Gaye began composing music during this period.

Moonglows co-founder Harvey Fuqua later hired The Marquees as employees. Under Fuqua's direction, the group changed its name to Harvey and the New Moonglows, and relocated to Chicago. The group recorded several sides for Chess in 1959, including the song "Mama Loocie", which was Gaye's first lead vocal recording. The group found work as session singers for established acts such as Chuck Berry, singing on the hits "Back in the U.S.A." and "Almost Grown."

In 1960, the group disbanded. Gaye relocated to Detroit with Fuqua where he signed with Tri-Phi Records as a session musician, playing drums on several Tri-Phi releases. Gaye performed at Motown president Berry Gordy's house during the holiday season in 1960. Impressed by the singer, Gordy sought Fuqua on his contract with Gaye. Fuqua agreed to sell part of his interest in his contract with Gaye. Shortly afterwards, Gaye signed with Motown subsidiary Tamla.

When Gaye signed with Tamla, he pursued a career as a performer of jazz music and standards, having no desire to become an R&B performer. Before the release of his first single, Gaye was teased about his surname, with some jokingly asking, "Is Marvin Gay?" Gaye changed his surname by adding an e, in the same way as did Sam Cooke. Author David Ritz wrote that Gaye did this to silence rumors of his sexuality, and to put more distance between Gaye and his father.

Gaye released his first single, "Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide", in May 1961, with the album The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye, following a month later. Gaye's initial recordings failed commercially and he spent most of 1961 performing session work as a drummer for artists such as The Miracles, The Marvelettes and blues artist Jimmy Reed for $5 (US$40 in 2016 dollars) a week. While Gaye took some advice on performing with his eyes open (having been accused of appearing as though he were sleeping), he refused to attend grooming school courses at the John Roberts Powers School for Social Grace in Detroit because of his unwillingness to comply with its orders, something he later regretted.

Initial success

In 1962, Gaye found success as co-writer of the Marvelettes hit, "Beechwood 4-5789". His first solo hit, "Stubborn Kind of Fellow", was later released that September, reaching No. 8 on the R&B chart and No. 46 on the Billboard Hot 100. Gaye reached the top 40 with the dance song, "Hitch Hike", peaking at No. 30 on the Hot 100. "Pride and Joy" became Gaye's first top ten single after its release in 1963.

The three singles and songs from the 1962 sessions were included on Gaye's second album, That Stubborn Kinda Fellow. Starting in October of the year, Gaye performed as part of the Motortown Revue, a series of concert tours headlined at the north and south eastern coasts of the United States as part of the chitlin' circuit. A filmed performance of Gaye at the Apollo Theater took place in June 1963. Later that October, Tamla issued the live album, Marvin Gaye Recorded Live on Stage. "Can I Get a Witness" became one of Gaye's early international hits.

In 1964, Gaye recorded a successful duet album with singer Mary Wells titled Together, which reached No. 42 on the pop album chart. The album's two-sided single, including "Once Upon a Time" and 'What's the Matter With You Baby", each reach the top 20. Gaye's next solo hit, "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)", which Holland-Dozier-Holland wrote for him, reached No. 6 on the Hot 100 and reached the top 50 in the UK. Gaye started getting television exposure around this time, on shows such as American Bandstand. Also in 1964, he appeared in the concert film, The T.A.M.I. Show. Gaye had two number-one R&B singles in 1965 with the Miracles–composed "I'll Be Doggone" and "Ain't That Peculiar". Both songs became million-sellers. After this, Gaye returned to jazz-derived ballads for a tribute album to the recently-deceased Nat "King" Cole.

After scoring a hit duet, "It Takes Two" with Kim Weston, Gaye began working with Tammi Terrell on a series of duets, mostly composed by Ashford & Simpson, including "Ain't No Mountain High Enough", "Your Precious Love", "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing" and "You're All I Need to Get By".

In October 1967, Terrell collapsed in Gaye's arms during a performance in Farmville, Virginia. Terrell was subsequently rushed to Farmville's Southside Community Hospital, where doctors discovered she had a malignant tumor in her brain. The diagnosis ended Terrell's career as a live performer, though she continued to record music under careful supervision. Despite the presence of hit singles such as "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing" and "You're All I Need to Get By", Terrell's illness caused problems with recording, and led to multiple operations to remove the tumor. Gaye was reportedly devastated by Terrell's sickness and became disillusioned with the record business.

On October 6, 1968, Gaye sang the national anthem during Game 4 of the 1968 World Series, held at Tiger Stadium, in Detroit, Michigan, and played between the Detroit Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals.

In late 1968, Gaye's recording of I Heard It Through the Grapevine became Gaye's first to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It also reached the top of the charts in other countries, selling over four million copies. However, Gaye felt the success was something he "didn't deserve" and that he "felt like a puppet – Berry's puppet, Anna's puppet...." Gaye followed it up with "Too Busy Thinking About My Baby" and "That's the Way Love Is", which reached the top ten on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969. That year, his album M.P.G. became his first No. 1 R&B album. Gaye produced and co-wrote two hits for The Originals during this period, including "Baby I'm For Real" and "The Bells".

Tammi Terrell died from brain cancer on March 16, 1970; Gaye attended her funeral and after a period of depression, Gaye sought out a position on a professional football team, the Detroit Lions, where he later befriended Mel Farr and Lem Barney. It was eventually decided that Gaye would not be allowed to try out owing to fears of possible injuries that could have affected his music career.

What's Going On and subsequent success

On June 1, 1970, Gaye returned to Hitsville U.S.A., where he recorded his new composition "What's Going On", inspired by an idea from Renaldo "Obie" Benson of the Four Tops after he witnessed an act of police brutality at an anti-war rally in Berkeley. Upon hearing the song, Berry Gordy refused its release due to his feelings of the song being "too political" for radio. Gaye responded by going on strike from recording until the label released the song. Released in 1971, it reached No. 1 on the R&B charts within a month, staying there for five weeks. It also reached the top spot on Cashbox's pop chart for a week and reached No. 2 on the Hot 100 and the Record World chart, selling over two million copies.

After giving an ultimatum to record a full album to win creative control from Motown, Gaye spent ten days recording the What's Going On album that March. Motown issued the album that May after Gaye remixed portions of the album in Hollywood. The album became Gaye's first million-selling album launching two more top ten singles, "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)" and "Inner City Blues". One of Motown's first autonomous works, its theme and segue flow brought the concept album format to rhythm and blues. An AllMusic writer later cited it as "...the most important and passionate record to come out of soul music, delivered by one of its finest voices." For the album, Gaye received two Grammy Award nominations and several NAACP Image Awards. The album also topped Rolling Stone's year-end list as its album of the year. Billboard magazine named Gaye Trendsetter of the Year following the album's success.

In 1971, Gaye signed a new deal with Motown worth $1 million (US$5,913,722 in 2016 dollars), making it the most lucrative deal by a black recording artist at the time. Gaye first responded to the new contract with the soundtrack and subsequent score, Trouble Man, released in late 1972.

In 1973, Gaye released the Let's Get It On album. Its title track became Gaye's second No. 1 single on the Hot 100. The album subsequently stayed on the charts for two years and sold over three million copies. The album was later hailed as "a record unparalleled in its sheer sensuality and carnal energy." Other singles from the album included "Come Get to This", which recalled Gaye's early Motown soul sound of the previous decade, while the suggestive "You Sure Love to Ball" reached modest success but received tepid promotion due to the song's sexually explicit content.

Marvin's final duet project, Diana & Marvin, with Diana Ross, garnered international success despite contrasting artistic styles. Much of the material was crafted especially for the duo by Ashford and Simpson. Responding to demand from fans and Motown, Gaye started his first tour in four years at the Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum on January 4, 1974. The performance received critical acclaim and resulted in the release of the live album, Marvin Gaye Live! and its single, a live version of Distant Lover, an album track from Let's Get It On.

The tour helped to increase Gaye's reputation as a live performer. For a time, he was earning $10,000 a night (US$48,563 in 2016 dollars) for performances. Gaye toured throughout 1974 and 1975. A renewed contract with Motown allowed Gaye to build his own custom-made recording studio.

In October 1975, Gaye gave a performance at a UNESCO benefit concert at New York's Radio City Music Hall to support UNESCO's African literacy drive, resulting in him being commended at the United Nations by then-Ambassador to Ghana Shirley Temple Black and Kurt Waldheim. Gaye's next studio album, I Want You, followed in 1976 with the title track becoming a No. 1 R&B hit. That summer, Gaye embarked on his first European tour in a decade, starting off in England. In early 1977, Gaye released the live album, Live at the London Palladium, which sold over two million copies thanks to the success of its studio song, "Got to Give It Up", which became a No. 1 hit.

Last Motown recordings and European exile

In December 1978, Gaye released Here, My Dear, inspired by the fallout of his first marriage to Anna Gordy. Recorded as an intent for Gaye to remit a portion of its royalties to her to receive alimony payments, it performed poorly on the charts. During that period, Gaye developed a serious dependence and addiction to cocaine and was dealing with several financial issues with the IRS. These issues led him to move to Maui, Hawaii, where he struggled to record a disco album. In 1980, Gaye went on a European tour. By the time the tour stopped, the singer relocated to London when he feared imprisonment for failure to pay back taxes, which had now reached upwards of $4.5 million (US$13,080,170 in 2016 dollars).

Gaye then reworked Love Man from its original disco concept to another personal album invoking religion and the possible end time from a chapter in the Book of Revelation. Titling the album In Our Lifetime?, Gaye worked on the album for much of 1980 in London studios such as Air and Odyssey Studios.

In the fall of that year, someone stole a master tape of a rough draft of the album from one of Gaye's traveling musicians, Frank Blair, taking the master tape to Motown's Hollywood headquarters. Motown remixed the album and released it on January 15, 1981. When Gaye learned of its release, he accused Motown of editing and remixing the album without his consent, allowing the release of an unfinished production (Far Cry), altering the album art of his request and removing the album title's question mark, muting its irony. He also accused the label of rush-releasing the album, comparing his unfinished album to an unfinished Picasso painting. Gaye then vowed not to record any more music for Motown.

On February 14, 1981, under the advice of music promoter Freddy Cousaert, Gaye relocated to Cousaert's apartment in Ostend, Belgium. While there, Gaye shied away from heavy drug use and began exercising and attending a local Ostend church, regaining personal confidence. Following several months of recovery, Gaye sought a comeback onstage, starting the short-lived Heavy Love Affair tour in England and Ostend in June–July 1981. Gaye's personal attorney Curtis Shaw would later describe Gaye's Ostend period as "the best thing that ever happened to Marvin". When word got around that Gaye was planning a musical comeback and an exit from Motown, CBS Urban president Larkin Arnold eventually was able to convince Gaye to sign with CBS. On March 23, 1982, Motown and CBS Records negotiated Gaye's release from Motown. The details of the contract were not revealed due to a possible negative effect on the singer's settlement to creditors from the IRS.

Midnight Love

Assigned to CBS' Columbia subsidiary, Gaye worked on his first post-Motown album titled Midnight Love. The first single, "Sexual Healing" which was written and recorded in Ostend in his apartment, was released on September 30, 1982, and became Gaye's biggest career hit, spending a record ten weeks at No. 1 on the Hot Black Singles chart, becoming the biggest R&B hit of the 1980s according to Billboard stats. The success later translated to the Billboard Hot 100 chart in January 1983 where it peaked at No. 3, while the record reached international success, reaching the top spot in New Zealand and Canada and reaching the top ten on the United Kingdom's OCC singles chart, later selling over two million copies in the U.S. alone, becoming Gaye's most successful single to date. The video for the song was shot at Ostend's Casino-Kursaal.

Sexual Healing won Gaye his first two Grammy Awards including Best Male R&B Vocal Performance, in February 1983, and also won Gaye an American Music Award in the R&B-soul category. People magazine called it "America's hottest musical turn-on since Olivia Newton-John demanded we get Physical." Midnight Love was released to stores a day after the single's release, and was equally successful, peaking at the top ten of the Billboard 200 and becoming Gaye's eighth No. 1 album on the Top Black Albums chart, eventually selling over six million copies worldwide, three million alone in the U.S.

NME – December 1982

On February 13, 1983, Gaye sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the NBA All-Star Game at The Forum in Inglewood, California—accompanied by Gordon Banks, who played the studio tape from the stands. The following month, Gaye performed at the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever special. This and a May appearance on Soul Train (his third appearance on the show) became Gaye's final television performances. Gaye embarked on his final concert tour, titled the Sexual Healing Tour, on April 18, 1983, in San Diego. The tour ended on August 14, 1983 at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa, California but was plagued by cocaine-triggered paranoia and illness. Following the concert's end, he retreated to his parents' house in Los Angeles. In early 1984, Midnight Love was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Male R&B Vocal Performance category, his 12th and final nomination.

Death

At around 12:38 p.m. (PST) on April 1, 1984, while Gaye was in his bedroom, his father Marvin Gay Sr. shot Gaye in the heart and then in his left shoulder, the latter shot taken at point-blank range. Minutes earlier, the two men had been involved in a physical altercation when Gaye intervened in a fight between his parents. The first shot proved to be fatal. Gaye was pronounced dead at 1:01 p.m. (PST) after his body arrived at California Hospital Medical Center.

After Gaye's funeral, his body was cremated at Forest Lawn Memorial Park at the Hollywood Hills; his ashes were later scattered into the Pacific Ocean. Initially charged with first-degree murder, Gay Sr.'s charges dropped to voluntary manslaughter following a diagnosis of a brain tumor and Gaye's autopsy revealing the singer had drugs in his system. Marvin Gay Sr. was later sentenced to a suspended six-year sentence and probation. He died at a nursing home in 1998.

Personal life

Marvin was the father of three children, Marvin III, Nona, and Frankie, and the grandfather of three boys, Marvin IV, Nolan, and Dylan. At the time of his death, he was survived by his three children, parents, and five siblings.

Musicianship

Influences

As a child, Gaye's main influence was his minister father, something he later acknowledged to biographer David Ritz, and also in interviews, often mentioning that his father's sermons greatly impressed him. His first major musical influences were doo-wop groups such as The Moonglows and The Capris. Gaye's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame page lists the Capris' song, God Only Knows as "critical to his musical awakening." Of the Capris' song, Gaye said, "It fell from the heavens and hit me between the eyes. So much soul, so much hurt. I related to the story, to the way that no one except the Lord really can read the heart of lonely kids in love." Gaye's main musical influences were Rudy West of The Five Keys, Clyde McPhatter, Ray Charles and Little Willie John. Gaye considered Frank Sinatra a major influence in what he wanted to be. He also was influenced by the vocal styles of Billy Eckstine and Nat King Cole.

Later on as his Motown career developed, Gaye would seek inspiration in fellow label mates such as David Ruffin of The Temptations and Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops as their grittier voices led to Gaye and his producer seeking a similar sound in recordings such as "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" and "That's the Way Love Is". Later in his life, Gaye reflected on the influence of Ruffin and Stubbs stating, "I had heard something in their voices something my own voice lacked". He further explained, "the Tempts and Tops' music made me remember that when a lot of women listen to music, they want to feel the power of a real man."

Vocal style

Gaye had a three-octave vocal range. From his earlier recordings as member of the Marquees and Harvey and the New Moonglows, and in his first several recordings with Motown, Gaye recorded mainly in the baritone and tenor ranges. He changed his tone to a rasp for his gospel-inspired early hits such as "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" and "Hitch Hike". As writer Eddie Holland explained, "He was the only singer I have ever heard known to take a song of that nature, that was so far removed from his natural voice where he liked singing, and do whatever it took to sell that song."

In songs such as "Pride and Joy", Gaye used three different vocal ranges—singing in his baritone range at the beginning, bringing a lighter tenor in the verses before reaching a gospel mode in the chorus. Holland further stated of Gaye's voice that it was "...one of the sweetest and prettiest voices you ever wanted to hear." And while he noted that ballads and jazz was "his basic soul", he stated Gaye "...had the ability to take a roughhouse, rock and roll, blues, R&B, any kind of song and make it his own", later saying that Gaye was the most versatile vocalist he had ever worked with.

Gaye changed his vocal style in the late 1960s, when he was advised to use a sharper, raspy voice—especially in Norman Whitfield's recordings. Gaye initially disliked the new style, considering it out of his range, but said he was "into being produce-able." After listening to David Ruffin and Levi Stubbs, Gaye said he started to develop what he called his "tough man voice"—saying, "I developed a growl." In the liner notes of his DVD set, Marvin Gaye: The Real Thing in Performance 1964–1981, Rob Bowman said that by the early 1970s, Gaye had developed "three distinct voices: his smooth, sweet tenor; a growling rasp; and an unreal falsetto." Bowman further wrote that the recording of the What's Going On single was "...the first single to utilize all three as Marvin developed a radical approach to constructing his recordings by layering a series of contrapuntal background vocal lines on different tracks, each one conceived and sung in isolation by Marvin himself." Bowman cites Gaye's multi-tracking of his tenor voice and other vocal styles "summon[ed] up what might be termed the ancient art of weaving".

Social commentary and concept albums

Prior to recording the What's Going On album, Gaye recorded a cover of the song, "Abraham, Martin & John", which became a UK hit in 1970. Only a handful of artists of various genres had recorded albums that focused on social commentary, including Curtis Mayfield. Despite some politically conscious material recorded by The Temptations in the late 1960s, Motown artists were often told to not delve into political and social commentary, fearing alienation from pop audiences. Early in his career, Gaye was affected by social events such as the 1965 Watts riots and once asked himself, "with the world exploding around me, how am I supposed to keep singing love songs?" When the singer called Gordy in the Bahamas about wanting to do protest music, Gordy cautioned him, "Marvin, don't be ridiculous. That's taking things too far."

Gaye was inspired by the Black Panther Party and supported the efforts they put forth like giving free meals to poor families door to door, however, he did not support the violent tactics the Panthers used to fight oppression, as Gaye's messages in many of his political songs were nonviolent. The lyrics and music of What's Going On discuss and illustrate issues during the 1960s/1970s such as police brutality, drug abuse, environmental issues, anti-war, and black power issues. Gaye was inspired to make this album because of events such as the Vietnam War, the 1967 race riots in Detroit, and the Kent State shootings.

Once Gaye presented Gordy with the What's Going On album, Gordy feared Gaye was risking the ruination of his image as a sex symbol. Following the album's success, Gaye tried a follow-up album that he would label You're the Man. The title track only produced modest success, however, and Gaye and Motown shelved the album. Later on, several of Gaye's unreleased songs of social commentary, including "The World Is Rated X", would be issued on posthumous compilation albums. What's Going On would later be described by an AllMusic writer as an album that "not only redefined soul music as a creative force but also expanded its impact as an agent for social change".

The album also provided another first in both Motown and R&B music: Gaye and his engineers had composed the album in a song cycle, segueing previous songs into other songs giving the album a more cohesive feel as opposed to R&B albums that traditionally included filler tracks to complete the album. This style of music would influence recordings by artists such as Stevie Wonder and Barry White making the concept album format a part of 1970s R&B music. Concept albums are usually based on either one theme or a series of themes in connection to the original thesis of the album's concept. Let's Get It On repeated the suite-form arrangement of What's Going On, as would Gaye's later albums such as I Want You, Here, My Dear and In Our Lifetime.

Although Marvin Gaye was not actually doing social justice work outside of his music, he became a public figure for social change and inspired/educated many people through his work.

Legacy

Marvin Gaye has been called, "The number-one purveyor of soul music." In his book, Mercy Mercy Me: The Art, Loves and Demons of Marvin Gaye, Michael Eric Dyson described Gaye as someone "...who transcended the boundaries of rhythm and blues as no other performer had done before." Following his death, The New York Times described Gaye as someone who "blended the soul music of the urban scene with the beat of the old-time gospel singer and became an influential force in pop music". Further in the article, Gaye was also credited with combining "the soulful directness of gospel music, the sweetness of soft-soul and pop, and the vocal musicianship of a jazz singer." His recordings for Motown in the 1960s and 1970s shaped that label's signature sound. His work with Motown gave him the titles Prince of Soul and Prince of Motown. Critics stated that Gaye's music "...signified the development of black music from raw rhythm and blues, through sophisticated soul to the political awareness of the 1970s and increased concentration on personal and sexual politics thereafter." As a Motown artist, Gaye was among the first to break from the reins of its production system, paving the way for Stevie Wonder. Gaye's late 1970s and early 1980s recordings influenced contemporary forms of R&B predating the subgenres quiet storm and neo-soul.

Artists from many genres have covered Gaye's music, including James Taylor, Brian McKnight, Kate Bush, Cyndi Lauper, Chico DeBarge, Michael McDonald, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Aaliyah, Christina Aguilera, A Perfect Circle, The Strokes and Gil Scott-Heron. Other artists such as D'Angelo, Common, Nas and Maxwell interpolated parts of Gaye's clothing from the singer's mid-1970s period. Gaye's clothing style was later was appropriated by Eddie Murphy in his role as James "Thunder" Early in Dreamgirls. Gaye's military-styled clothing attire in his final tour influenced Michael Jackson. According to David Ritz, "Since 1983, Marvin's name has been mentioned—in reverential tones—on no less than seven top-ten hit records." Later performers such as Kanye West and Mary J. Blige sampled Gaye's work for their recordings.

Awards and honors

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him in 1987, declaring that Gaye "...made a huge contribution to soul music in general and the Motown Sound in particular." The page stated that Gaye "...possessed a classic R&B voice that was edged with grit yet tempered with sweetness." The page further states that Gaye "...projected an air of soulful authority driven by fervid conviction and heartbroken vulnerability." A year after his death, then-mayor of D.C., Marion Barry declared April 2 as "Marvin Gaye Jr. Memorial Scholarship Fund Day" in the city. Since then, a non-profit organization has helped to organize annual Marvin Gaye Day Celebrations in the city of Washington.

A year later, Gaye's mother founded the Marvin P. Gaye Jr. Memorial Foundation in dedication to her son to help those suffering from drug abuse and alcoholism; however she died a day before the memorial was set to open in 1987. Gaye's sister Jeanne once served as the foundation's chairperson. In 1990, Gaye received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1996, Gaye posthumously received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame listed three Gaye recordings, "I Heard It Through the Grapevine", "What's Going On" and "Sexual Healing", among its list of the 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll. American music magazine Rolling Stone ranked Gaye No. 18 on their list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" and sixth on their list of "100 Greatest Singers of All Time". Q magazine ranked Gaye sixth on their list of the "100 Greatest Singers".

Three of Gaye's albums – What's Going On (1971), Let's Get It On (1973), and Here, My Dear (1978) – were ranked by Rolling Stone on their list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. What's Going On remains his largest-ranked album, reaching No. 6 on the Rolling Stone list and topped the NME list of the Top 100 Albums of All Time in 1985 and was later chosen in 2003 for inclusion by the Library of Congress to its National Recording Registry. In addition, four of his songs – "I Heard It Through the Grapevine", "What's Going On, "Let's Get It On" and "Sexual Healing" – made it on the Rolling Stone list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

In 2006, a park that Gaye frequented as a teenager called Watts Branch Park in Washington was renamed Marvin Gaye Park. Three years later, the 5200 block of Foote Street NE in Deanwood, Washington, D.C., was renamed Marvin Gaye Way. In August 2014, Gaye was inducted to the official Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame in its second class. In October 2015, the Songwriters Hall of Fame announced Gaye as a nominee for induction to the Hall's 2016 class after posthumous nominations were included. Gaye was named as a posthumous inductee to that hall on March 2, 2016. Gaye was subsequently inducted to the Songwriters Hall on June 9, 2016.

In popular culture

His 1983 NBA All-Star performance of the national anthem was used in a Nike commercial featuring the 2008 U.S. Olympic basketball team. Also, on CBS Sports' final NBA telecast to date (before the contract moved to NBC) at the conclusion of Game 5 of the 1990 Finals, they used Gaye's 1983 All-Star Game performance over the closing credits. When VH1 launched on January 1, 1985, Gaye's 1983 rendition of the national anthem was the very first video they aired. Most recently, it was used in the intro to Ken Burns' Tenth Inning documentary on the game of baseball.

"I Heard It Through the Grapevine" was played in a Levi's ad in 1985. The result of the commercial's success led to the original song finding renewed success in Europe after Tamla-Motown re-released it in the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands. In 1986, the song was covered by Buddy Miles as part of a California Raisins ad campaign. The song was later used for chewing gum commercials in Finland and to promote a brand of Lucky Strike cigarettes in Germany.

Gaye's music has also been used in numerous film soundtracks including Four Brothers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, both of which featured Gaye's music from his Trouble Man soundtrack. "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" was used in the opening credits of the film, The Big Chill. Gaye's music has also become a source for samples in hip-hop recordings.

In 2007, his song, "A Funky Space Reincarnation", was used in the Charlize Theron–starred ad for Dior J'Adore perfume. A documentary about Gaye—What's Going On: The Marvin Gaye Story—was a UK/PBS co-production, directed by Jeremy Marre and was first broadcast in 2006. Two years later, the special re-aired with a different production and newer interviews after it was re-broadcast as an American Masters special. Another documentary, focusing on his 1981 documentary, Transit Ostend, titled Remember Marvin, aired in 2006.

Earnings

In 2008, Gaye's estate earned $3.5 million (US$3,893,277 in 2016 dollars). As a result, Gaye took 13th place in "Top-Earning Dead Celebrities" in Forbes magazine.

On March 11, 2015, Gaye's family was awarded $7.3 million in damages following a decision by an eight-member jury in Los Angeles that Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams had breached copyright by incorporating part of Gaye's song "Got to Give It Up" into their hit "Blurred Lines".

Attempted biopics

There have been several attempts to adapt Gaye's life story into a feature film. In February 2006, it was reported that Jesse L. Martin was to portray Gaye in a biopic titled Sexual Healing, named after Gaye's 1982 song of the same name. The film was to have been directed by Lauren Goodman and produced by James Gandolfini and Alexandra Ryan. The film was to depict the final three years of Gaye's life. Years later, other producers such as Jean-Luc Van Damme, Frederick Bestall and Jimmy De Brabant, came aboard and Goodman was replaced by Julien Temple. Lenny Kravitz was almost slated to playing Gaye. The script was to be written by Matthew Broughton. The film was to have been distributed by Focus Features and released on April 1, 2014, the thirtieth anniversary of Gaye's death. This never came to fruition and it was announced that Focus Features no longer has involvement with the Gaye biopic as of June 2013.

In June 2008, it was announced that F. Gary Gray was going to direct a biopic titled Marvin. The script was to be written by C. Gaby Mitchell and the film was to be produced by David Foster and Duncan McGillivray and co-produced by Ryan Heppe. According to Gray, the film would cover Gaye's entire life, from his emergence at Motown through his defiance of Berry Gordy to record What's Going On and on up to his death.

Cameron Crowe had also been working on a biopic titled My Name Is Marvin. The film was to have been a Sony presentation with Scott Rudin as producer. Both Will Smith and Terrence Howard were considered for the role of Gaye. Crowe later confirmed in August 2011 that he abandoned the project: "We were working on the Marvin Gaye movie which is called My Name is Marvin, but the time just wasn't right for that movie."

Members of Gaye's family, such as his ex-wife Janis and his son Marvin III, have expressed opposition to a biopic.

On December 9, 2015, Roger Friedman spoke of a biopic to be directed by F. Gary Gray was approved by Berry Gordy and Suzanne de Passe as well as Gaye's family, following the success of Gray's Straight Outta Compton biopic based on the hip-hop act, N.W.A.

In July 2016, it was announced that a feature film documentary on Gaye will be released next year delving into the life of the musician and the making of his 1971 album, What's Going On. The film would be developed by Noah Media Group and Greenlight and is quoted to be "the defining portrait of this visionary artist and his impeccable album" by the film's producers Gabriel Clarke and Torquil Jones. The film will include "unseen footage" of the singer. Gaye's family approved of the documentary. In November 2016, it was announced that actor Jamie Foxx was billed to produce a limited biopic series on the singer's life. The series was approved by Gaye's family, including son Marvin III, who will serve as executive producer, and Berry Gordy, Jr..

Tributes

Acting

Gaye acted in two movies, both having to do with Vietnam veterans. One was in 1969 in the George McCowan-directed film, The Ballad of Andy Crocker which starred Lee Majors. The film was about a war veteran returning to find that his expectations have not been met and he feels betrayed. Gaye had a prominent role in the film as David Owens. The other was in 1971. He had a role in the Lee Frost-directed biker-exploitation film, Chrome and Hot Leather, a film about a group of Vietnam veterans taking on a bike gang. The film starred William Smith and Gaye played the part of Jim, one of the veterans. Gaye did have acting aspirations and had signed with the William Morris Agency but that only lasted a year as Gaye wasn't satisfied with the support he was getting from the agency.

Discography

Studio albums

Filmography

1965: T.A.M.I. Show (documentary)

1969: The Ballad of Andy Crocker (television movie)

1971: Chrome and Hot Leather (television movie)

1973: Save the Children (documentary)

Videography

Marvin Gaye: Live in Montreux 1980 (2003)

The Real Thing: In Performance (1964–1981) (2006)

Wikipedia

#Marvin Gaye #04-01 #04-02

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