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[ "Jonah", "In Judaism", "What is the significance of Jonah in judaism?", "The Book of Jonah is read every year, in its original Hebrew and in its entirety, on Yom Kippur - the Day of Atonement,", "Why is this important?", "as the Haftarah at the afternoon mincha prayer.", "How else is Jonah importnat?", "Teshuva - the ability to repent and be forgiven by God - is a prominent idea in Jewish thought. This concept is developed in the Book of Jonah:" ]	C_4784a95092ef420baa6a30b8770ea644_1	Is this relevant to other teachings?	4	Is Teshuva relevant to other teachings by Jonah?	Jonah	The Book of Jonah (Yonah yvnh) is one of the twelve minor prophets included in the Tanakh. According to one tradition, Jonah was the boy brought back to life by Elijah the prophet in 1 Kings 17. Another tradition holds that he was the son of the woman of Shunem brought back to life by Elisha in 2 Kings 4 and that he is called the "son of Amittai" (Truth) due to his mother's recognition of Elisha's identity as a prophet in 2 Kings 17:24. The Book of Jonah is read every year, in its original Hebrew and in its entirety, on Yom Kippur - the Day of Atonement, as the Haftarah at the afternoon mincha prayer. According to Rabbi Eliezer, the fish that swallowed Jonah was created in the primordial era and the inside of its mouth was like a synagogue; the fish's eyes were like windows and a pearl inside its mouth provided further illumination. According to the Midrash, while Jonah was inside the fish, it told him that its life was nearly over because soon the Leviathan would eat them both. Jonah promised the fish that he would save them. Following Jonah's directions, the fish swam up alongside the Leviathan and Jonah threatened to leash the Leviathan by its tongue and let the other fish eat it. The Leviathan heard Jonah's threats, saw that he was circumcized, and realized that he was protected by the Lord, so it fled in terror, leaving Jonah and the fish alive. Teshuva - the ability to repent and be forgiven by God - is a prominent idea in Jewish thought. This concept is developed in the Book of Jonah: Jonah, the son of truth (the name of his father "Amitai" in Hebrew means truth), refuses to ask the people of Nineveh to repent. He seeks the truth only, and not forgiveness. When forced to go, his call is heard loud and clear. The people of Nineveh repent ecstatically, "fasting, including the sheep," and the Jewish scripts are critical of this. The Book of Jonah also highlights the sometimes unstable relationship between two religious needs: comfort and truth. CANNOTANSWER	The Book of Jonah also highlights the sometimes unstable relationship between two religious needs: comfort and truth.	Jonah or Jonas, son of Amittai, is a prophet in the Hebrew Bible and the Quran, from Gath-hepher of the northern kingdom of Israel in about the 8th century BCE. Jonah is the central figure of the Book of Jonah, which details his reluctance in delivering God's judgement on the city of Nineveh, and then his subsequent, albeit begrudged, return to the divine mission after he is swallowed by a large sea creature. In Judaism, the story of Jonah represents the teaching of teshuva, which is the ability to repent and be forgiven by God. In the New Testament, Jesus calls himself "greater than Jonah" and promises the Pharisees "the sign of Jonah", which is his resurrection. Early Christian interpreters viewed Jonah as a type for Jesus. Jonah is regarded as a prophet in Islam and the biblical narrative of Jonah is repeated, with a few notable differences, in the Quran. Mainstream Bible scholars generally regard the Book of Jonah as fictional, and often at least partially satirical, but the character of Jonah son of Amittai may have been based on the historical prophet of the same name who prophesied during the reign of Amaziah of Judah, as mentioned in 2 Kings. Although the creature which swallowed Jonah is often depicted in art and culture as a whale, the Hebrew text actually uses the phrase dag gadol, which means "big fish". In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the species of the fish that swallowed Jonah was the subject of speculation for naturalists, who interpreted the story as an account of a historical incident. Some modern scholars of folklore say there are similarities between Jonah and other legendary figures, specifically Gilgamesh and the Greek hero Jason. Book of Jonah Jonah is the central character in the Book of Jonah, in which God commands him to go to the city of Nineveh to prophesy against it "for their great wickedness is come up before me," but Jonah instead attempts to flee from "the presence of the Lord" by going to Jaffa (sometimes transliterated as Joppa or Joppe), and sets sail for Tarshish. A huge storm arises and the sailors, realizing that it is no ordinary storm, cast lots and discover that Jonah is to blame. Jonah admits this and states that if he is thrown overboard, the storm will cease. The sailors refuse to do this and continue rowing, but all their efforts fail and they eventually throw Jonah overboard. As a result, the storm calms and the sailors then offer sacrifices to God. After being cast from the ship, Jonah is swallowed by a large fish, within the belly of which he remains for three days and three nights. While in the great fish, Jonah prays to God in his affliction and commits to giving thanks and to paying what he has vowed. God then commands the fish to vomit Jonah out. God again commands Jonah to travel to Nineveh and prophesy to its inhabitants. This time he goes and enters the city, crying, "In forty days Nineveh shall be overthrown." After Jonah has walked across Nineveh, the people of Nineveh begin to believe his word and proclaim a fast. The king of Nineveh puts on sackcloth and sits in ashes, making a proclamation which decrees fasting, the wearing of sackcloth, prayer, and repentance. God sees their repentant hearts and spares the city at that time. The entire city is humbled and broken with the people (and even the animals) in sackcloth and ashes. Displeased by this, Jonah refers to his earlier flight to Tarshish while asserting that, since God is merciful, it was inevitable that God would turn from the threatened calamities. He then leaves the city and makes himself a shelter, waiting to see whether or not the city will be destroyed. God causes a plant (in Hebrew a kikayon) to grow over Jonah's shelter to give him some shade from the sun. Later, God causes a worm to bite the plant's root and it withers. Jonah, now being exposed to the full force of the sun, becomes faint and pleads for God to kill him. Religious views In Judaism The Book of Jonah (Yonah יונה) is one of the twelve minor prophets included in the Tanakh. According to one tradition, Jonah was the boy brought back to life by Elijah the prophet in 1 Kings. Another tradition holds that he was the son of the woman of Shunem brought back to life by Elisha in 2 Kings and that he is called the "son of Amittai" (Truth) due to his mother's recognition of Elisha's identity as a prophet in 2 Kings. The Book of Jonah is read every year, in its original Hebrew and in its entirety, on Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement – as the Haftarah at the afternoon mincha prayer. According to Rabbi Eliezer, the fish that swallowed Jonah was created in the primordial era and the inside of its mouth was like a synagogue; the fish's eyes were like windows and a pearl inside its mouth provided further illumination. According to the Midrash, while Jonah was inside the fish, it told him that its life was nearly over because soon the Leviathan would eat them both. Jonah promised the fish that he would save them. Following Jonah's directions, the fish swam up alongside the Leviathan and Jonah threatened to leash the Leviathan by its tongue and let the other fish eat it. The Leviathan heard Jonah's threats, saw that he was circumcised, and realized that he was protected by the Lord, so it fled in terror, leaving Jonah and the fish alive. The medieval Jewish scholar and rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra (1092–1167) argued against any literal interpretation of the Book of Jonah, stating that the "experiences of all the prophets except Moses were visions, not actualities." The later scholar Isaac Abarbanel (1437–1509), however, argued that Jonah could have easily survived in the belly of the fish for three days, because "after all, fetuses live nine months without access to fresh air." Teshuva – the ability to repent and be forgiven by God – is a prominent idea in Jewish thought. This concept is developed in the Book of Jonah: Jonah, the son of truth (the name of his father "Amitai" in Hebrew means truth), refuses to ask the people of Nineveh to repent. He seeks the truth only, and not forgiveness. When forced to go, his call is heard loud and clear. The people of Nineveh repent ecstatically, "fasting, including the sheep," and the Jewish scripts are critical of this. The Book of Jonah also highlights the sometimes unstable relationship between two religious needs: comfort and truth. In Christianity In the Book of Tobit Jonah is mentioned twice in the fourteenth chapter of the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit, the conclusion of which finds Tobit's son, Tobias, rejoicing at the news of Nineveh's destruction by Nebuchadnezzar and Ahasuerus in apparent fulfillment of Jonah's prophecy against the Assyrian capital. In the New Testament In the New Testament, Jonah is mentioned in Matthew and in Luke. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus makes a reference to Jonah when he is asked for a sign by some of the scribes and the Pharisees. Jesus says that the sign will be the sign of Jonah: Jonah's restoration after three days inside the great fish prefigures His own resurrection. Post-Biblical views Jonah is regarded as a saint by a number of Christian denominations. His feast day in the Roman Catholic Church is on 21 September, according to the Martyrologium Romanum. On the Eastern Orthodox liturgical calendar, Jonah's feast day is on 22 September (for those churches which follow the traditional Julian calendar; 22 September currently falls in October on the modern Gregorian calendar). In the Armenian Apostolic Church, moveable feasts are held in commemoration of Jonah as a single prophet and as one of the Twelve Minor Prophets. Jonah's mission to the Ninevites is commemorated by the Fast of Nineveh in Syriac and Oriental Orthodox Churches. Jonah is commemorated as a prophet in the Calendar of Saints of the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church on 22 September. Christian theologians have traditionally interpreted Jonah as a type for Jesus Christ. Jonah being in swallowed by the giant fish was regarded as a foreshadowing of Jesus's crucifixion and Jonah emerging from the fish after three days was seen as a parallel for Jesus emerging from the tomb after three days. Saint Jerome equates Jonah with Jesus's more nationalistic side, and justifies Jonah's actions by arguing that "Jonah acts thus as a patriot, not so much that he hates the Ninevites, as that he does not want to destroy his own people." Other Christian interpreters, including Saint Augustine and Martin Luther, have taken a directly opposite approach, regarding Jonah as the epitome of envy and jealousness, which they regarded as inherent characteristics of the Jewish people. Luther likewise concludes that the kikayon represents Judaism, and that the worm which devours it represents Christ. Luther also questioned the idea that the Book of Jonah was ever intended as literal history, commenting that he found it hard to believe that anyone would have interpreted it as such if it had never been included in the Bible. Luther's antisemitic interpretation of Jonah remained the prevailing interpretation among German Protestants throughout early modern history. J. D. Michaelis comments that "the meaning of the fable hits you right between the eyes", and concludes that the Book of Jonah is a polemic against "the Israelite people's hate and envy towards all the other nations of the earth." Albert Eichhorn was a strong supporter of Michaelis's interpretation. John Calvin and John Hooper regarded the Book of Jonah as a warning to all those who might attempt to flee from the wrath of God. While Luther had been careful to maintain that the Book of Jonah was not written by Jonah, Calvin declared that the Book of Jonah was Jonah's personal confession of guilt. Calvin sees Jonah's time inside the fish's belly as equivalent to the fires of Hell, intended to correct Jonah and set him on the path of righteousness. Also unlike Luther, Calvin finds fault with all the characters in the story, describing the sailors on the boat as "hard and iron-hearted, like Cyclops'", the penitence of the Ninevites as "untrained", and the king of Nineveh as a "novice". Hooper, on the other hand, sees Jonah as the archetypal dissident and the ship he is cast out from as a symbol of the state. Hooper deplores such dissidents, decrying: "Can you live quietly with so many Jonasses? Nay then, throw them into the sea!" In the eighteenth century, German professors were forbidden from teaching that the Book of Jonah was anything other than a literal, historical account. In Islam Quran Jonah () is the title of the tenth chapter of the Quran. Yūnus is traditionally viewed as highly important in Islam as a prophet who was faithful to God and delivered His messages. Jonah is the only one of Judaism's Twelve Minor Prophets to be named in the Quran. In Quran 21:87 and 68:48, Jonah is called Dhul-Nūn (; meaning "The One of the Fish"). In 4:163 and 6:86, he is referred to as "an apostle of Allah". Surah 37:139–148 retells the full story of Jonah: The Quran never mentions Jonah's father, but Muslim tradition teaches that Jonah was from the tribe of Benjamin and that his father was Amittai. Hadiths Jonah is also mentioned in a few incidents during the lifetime of Muhammad. Quraysh sent their servant, Addas, to serve him grapes for sustenance. Muhammad asked Addas where he was from and the servant replied Nineveh. "The town of Jonah the just, son of Amittai!" Muhammad exclaimed. Addas was shocked because he knew that the pagan Arabs had no knowledge of the prophet Jonah. He then asked how Muhammad knew of this man. "We are brothers," Muhammad replied. "Jonah was a Prophet of God and I, too, am a Prophet of God." Addas immediately accepted Islam and kissed the hands and feet of Muhammad. One of the sayings of Muhammad, in the collection of Imam Bukhari, says that Muhammad said "One should not say that I am better than Jonah". A similar statement occurs in a hadith written by Yunus bin Yazid, the second caliph of the Umayyad Dynasty. Umayya ibn Abi al-Salt, an older contemporary of Muhammad, taught that, had Jonah not prayed to Allah, he would have remained trapped inside the fish until Judgement Day, but, because of his prayer, Jonah "stayed only a few days within the belly of the fish". The ninth-century Persian historian Al-Tabari records that, while Jonah was inside the fish, "none of his bones or members were injured". Al-Tabari also writes that Allah made the body of the fish transparent, allowing Jonah to see the "wonders of the deep" and that Jonah heard all the fish singing praises to Allah. Kisai Marvazi, a tenth-century poet, records that Jonah's father was seventy years old when Jonah was born and that he died soon afterwards, leaving Jonah's mother with nothing but a wooden spoon, which turned out to be a cornucopia. Claimed tombs Nineveh's current location is marked by excavations of five gates, parts of walls on four sides, and two large mounds: the hill of Kuyunjik and hill of Nabi Yunus. A mosque atop Nabi Yunus was dedicated to the prophet Jonah and contained a shrine, which was revered by both Muslims and Christians as the site of Jonah's tomb. The tomb was a popular pilgrimage site and a symbol of unity to Jews, Christians, and Muslims across the Middle East. On July 24, 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) destroyed the mosque containing the tomb as part of a campaign to destroy religious sanctuaries it deemed to be idolatrous. After Mosul was taken back from ISIL in January 2017, an ancient Assyrian palace built by Esarhaddon dating to around the first half of the 7th century BCE was discovered beneath the ruined mosque. ISIL had plundered the palace of items to sell on the black market, but some of the artifacts that were more difficult to transport still remained in place. Other reputed locations of Jonah's tomb include the Arab village of Mashhad, located on the ancient site of Gath-hepher in Israel; the Palestinian West Bank town of Halhul, north of Hebron; and a sanctuary near the city of Sarafand (Sarepta) in Lebanon. Another tradition places the tomb at a hill now called Giv'at Yonah, "Jonah's Hill", at the northern edge of the Israeli town of Ashdod, at a site covered by a modern lighthouse. A tomb of Jonah can be found in Diyarbakir, Turkey, located behind the mihrab at Fatih Pasha Mosque. Evliya Celebi states in his Seyahatname that he visited the tombs of prophet Jonah and prophet George in the city. Scholarly interpretations The story of a man surviving after being swallowed by a whale or giant fish is classified in the catalogue of folktale types as ATU 1889G. Historicity Many Biblical scholars hold that the contents of the Book of Jonah are ahistorical. Although the prophet Jonah allegedly lived in the eighth century BCE, the Book of Jonah was written centuries later during the time of the Achaemenid Empire. The Hebrew used in the Book of Jonah shows strong influences from Aramaic and the cultural practices described in it match those of the Achaemenid Persians. Some scholars regard the Book of Jonah as an intentional work of parody or satire. If this is the case, then it was probably admitted into the canon of the Hebrew Bible by sages who misunderstood its satirical nature and mistakenly interpreted it as a serious prophetic work. While the Book of Jonah itself is considered fiction, Jonah himself may have been a historical prophet; he is briefly mentioned in the Second Book of Kings: Parodic elements The views expressed by Jonah in the Book of Jonah are a parody of views held by members of Jewish society at the time when it was written. The primary target of the satire may have been a faction whom Morton Smith calls "Separationists", who believed that God would destroy those who disobeyed him, that sinful cities would be obliterated, and that God's mercy did not extend to those outside the Abrahamic covenant. McKenzie and Graham remark that "Jonah is in some ways the most 'orthodox' of Israelite theologians – to make a theological point." Jonah's statements throughout the book are characterized by their militancy, but his name ironically means "dove", a bird which the ancient Israelites associated with peace. Jonah's rejection of God's commands is a parody of the obedience of the prophets described in other Old Testament writings. The king of Nineveh's instant repentance parodies the rulers throughout the other writings of the Old Testament who disregard prophetic warnings, such as Ahab and Zedekiah. The readiness to worship God displayed by the sailors on the ship and the people of Nineveh contrasts ironically with Jonah's own reluctance, as does Jonah's greater love for kikayon providing him shade than for all the people in Nineveh. The Book of Jonah also employs elements of literary absurdism; it exaggerates the size of the city of Nineveh to an implausible degree and incorrectly refers to the administrator of the city as a "king". According to scholars, no human being could realistically survive for three days inside a fish, and the description of the livestock in Nineveh fasting alongside their owners is "silly". The motif of a protagonist being swallowed by a giant fish or whale became a stock trope of later satirical writings. Similar incidents are recounted in Lucian of Samosata's A True Story, which was written in the second century CE, and in the novel Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, published by Rudolf Erich Raspe in 1785. The fish Translation Though art and culture often depicts Jonah's fish as a whale, the Hebrew text, as throughout scripture, refers to no marine species in particular, simply saying "great fish" or "big fish" (modern taxonomists classify whales as mammals and not as fish, but cultures in antiquity made no such distinction). While some biblical scholars suggest the size and habits of the great white shark correspond better to the representations of Jonah's experiences, normally an adult human is too large to be swallowed whole. The development of whaling from the 18th century onwards made it clear that most, if not all, species of whale could not swallow a human, leading to much controversy about the veracity of the biblical story of Jonah. In Jonah 2:1 (1:17 in English translations), the Hebrew text reads dag gadol (דג גדול) or, in the Hebrew Masoretic Text, dāḡ gā·ḏō·wl (דָּ֣ג גָּד֔וֹל), which means "great fish". The Septuagint translates this phrase into Greek as kētei megalōi (κήτει μεγάλῳ), meaning "huge fish". In Greek mythology, the same word meaning "fish" (kêtos) is used to describe the sea monster slain by the hero Perseus that nearly devoured the Princess Andromeda. Jerome later translated this phrase as piscis grandis in his Latin Vulgate. He translated kétos, however, as ventre ceti in Matthew 12:40: this second case occurs only in this verse of the New Testament. At some point cetus became synonymous with "whale" (the study of whales is now called cetology). In his 1534 translation, William Tyndale translated the phrase in Jonah 2:1 as "greate fyshe" and the word kétos (Greek) or cetus (Latin) in Matthew 12:40 as "whale". Tyndale's translation was later incorporated into the Authorized Version of 1611. Since then, the "great fish" in Jonah 2 has been most often interpreted as a whale. In English some translations use the word "whale" for Matthew 12:40, while others use "sea creature" or "big fish". Scientific speculation In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, naturalists, interpreting the Jonah story as a historical account, became obsessed with trying to identify the exact species of the fish that swallowed Jonah. In the mid-nineteenth century, Edward Bouverie Pusey, professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, claimed that the Book of Jonah must have been authored by Jonah himself and argued that the fish story must be historically true, or else it would not have been included in the Bible. Pusey attempted to scientifically catalogue the fish, hoping to "shame those who speak of the miracle of Jonah's preservation in the fish as a thing less credible than any of God's other miraculous doings". The debate over the fish in the Book of Jonah played a major role during Clarence Darrow's cross-examination of William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Trial in 1925. Darrow asked Bryan "When you read that ... the whale swallowed Jonah ... how do you literally interpret that?" Bryan replied that he believed in "a God who can make a whale and can make a man and make both of them do what He pleases." Bryan ultimately admitted that it was necessary to interpret the Bible, and is generally regarded as having come off looking like a "buffoon". The largest of all whales – blue whales – are baleen whales which eat plankton; and "it is commonly said that this species would be choked if it attempted to swallow a herring." As for the whale shark, Dr. E. W. Gudger, an Honorary Associate in Ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History, notes that, while the whale shark does have a large mouth, its throat is only four inches wide, with a sharp elbow or bend behind the opening, meaning that not even a human arm would be able to pass through it. He concludes that "the whale shark is not the fish that swallowed Jonah." Sperm whales, however, appear to be a different matter: They regularly eat giant squid, so presumably one could swallow a human (although perhaps not in one piece). Similar to a cow, sperm whales have four-chambered stomachs. The first chamber has no gastric juices but has muscular walls to crush its food. On the other hand, it is not possible to breathe inside the sperm whale's stomach because there is no air (but probably methane instead). Cultural influence In Turkish, "Jonah fish" (in Turkish yunus baligi) is the term used for dolphins. A long-established expression among sailors uses the term, "a Jonah", to mean a sailor or a passenger whose presence on board brings bad luck and endangers the ship. Later, this meaning was extended to mean, "a person who carries a jinx, one who will bring bad luck to any enterprise." Despite its brevity, the Book of Jonah has been adapted numerous times in literature and in popular culture. In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Father Mapple delivers a sermon on the Book of Jonah. Mapple asks why Jonah does not show remorse for disobeying God while he is inside of the fish. He comes to the conclusion that Jonah admirably understands that "his dreadful punishment is just." Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) features the title character and his father Geppetto being swallowed by "the Terrible Dogfish," an allusion to the story of Jonah. Walt Disney's 1940 film adaptation of the novel retains this allusion. The story of Jonah was adapted into Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki's animated film Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie (2002). In the film, Jonah is swallowed by a gargantuan whale. The film was Big Idea Entertainment's first full-length theatrical release and it earned approximately $6.5 million on its first weekend. Suggested connections to legends Epic of Gilgamesh Joseph Campbell suggests that the story of Jonah parallels a scene from the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh obtains a plant from the bottom of the sea. In the Book of Jonah, a worm (in Hebrew tola'ath, "maggot") bites the shade-giving plant's root causing it to wither; whereas in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh ties stones to his feet and plucks his plant from the floor of the sea. Once he returns to the shore, the rejuvenating plant is eaten by a serpent. Jason from Greek mythology Campbell also noted several similarities between the story of Jonah and that of Jason in Greek mythology. The Greek rendering of the name Jonah is Jonas, which differs from Jason only in the order of sounds—both os are omegas suggesting that Jason may have been confused with Jonah. Gildas Hamel, drawing on the Book of Jonah and Greco-Roman sources—including Greek vases and the accounts of Apollonius of Rhodes, Gaius Valerius Flaccus and Orphic Argonautica—identifies a number of shared motifs, including the names of the heroes, the presence of a dove, the idea of "fleeing" like the wind and causing a storm, the attitude of the sailors, the presence of a sea-monster or dragon threatening the hero or swallowing him, and the form and the word used for the "gourd" (kikayon). Hamel takes the view that it was the Hebrew author who reacted to and adapted this mythological material to communicate his own, quite different message. See also Aquanaut, a person who stays underwater for a long time Biblical and Quranic narratives Jonah on the Sistine Chapel ceiling Legends and the Quran Prophets of Islam Qisas Al-Anbiya Notes References Bibliography External links Jonah leaving whale The Book of Jonah (Hebrew and English) The Book of Jonah (NIV) Prophet Jonah Orthodox icon and synaxarion Animated Retelling of the Jonah Story The Prophet Jonah at the Christian Iconography website Jonah Christian saints from the Old Testament Fish and humans People whose existence is disputed Satire Year of birth unknown Year of death unknown	true	[ "Among the Anishinaabe people, the Teachings of the Seven Grandfathers, also known simply as either the Seven Teachings or Seven Grandfathers, is a set of teachings that demonstrate what it means to live a “Good Life.” They detail human conduct towards others, the Earth, and all of Nature. Originating from a traditional Potawatomi and Ojibwe story, these teachings are not attributed to any specific creator. The story, and the teachings have been passed on orally by elders for centuries. An Ojibwe Anishinaabe man, Edward Benton-Banai, describes an in-depth understanding of what each means, in his novel \"The Mishomis Book\".\n\nBackground \n\nThe Seven Grandfathers were powerful spirits who held the responsibility of watching over the people. They noticed how difficult life on Earth was for the people and sent their helper down amongst the people to find a person whom they could teach to live in harmony with the Earth. The helper found a newborn child, however the Seven Grandfathers believed him to be too young at that time. Shkabwes, the helper, was instructed to take the boy to see the four quarters of the universe in order to give him more time to grow. When he returned, the boy was seven years old. The Grandfathers then began to teach the young boy, and they each presented him with a gift. These gifts were Wisdom, Love, Respect, Bravery, Honesty, Humility, and Truth. The boy, now a full-grown man, returned to the people and taught them of the gifts of the Seven Grandfathers. With the gifts and the understanding the people now had, they began to adjust to the daily challenges. The people had learned to live in harmony with the Earth.\n\nIn Edward Benton-Banai's story \"The Mishomis Book\" it is stated that the aadizookaan (traditional story) or the teachings of the seven grandfathers were given to the Anishinaabeg early in their history. The teachings of the seven grandfathers spans centuries, and in those centuries the story has been adapted in various ways. Leanne Simpson a Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer, musician and academic, wrote the book “A Short Story of the Blockade.” Within that book, Simpson references the Seven Grandfathers, but when discussing the seven gifts rather than referencing Honesty, she speaks about kindness. Additionally, in another book from Simpson, “As We Have Always Done,” she references these teachings as the “Seven Grandmothers.\" The idea behind the story of the Seven Grandfathers and their teachings remains the same, yet the story itself has been adapted throughout its history.\n\nBenton-Banai manages to incorporate many traditional teachings into his story about the Seven Grandfather Teachings. He succeeds in showing how an Anishinaabe Traditional Teacher can borrow from traditional teachings and recombine and change them to make them relevant to contemporary issues faced by Anishinaabe people.\n\nTeachings \nThe Teachings of the Seven Grandfathers are among the most commonly shared teachings in Native culture. They hold great significance to the Anishinaabe people and are considered to be the founding principles of their way of life.\nNibwaakaawin—Wisdom (Beaver): To cherish knowledge is to know Wisdom. Wisdom is given by the Creator to be used for the good of the people. In the Anishinaabe language, this word expresses not only \"wisdom,\" but also means \"prudence,\" or \"intelligence.\" In some communities, Gikendaasowin is used; in addition to \"wisdom,\" this word can also mean \"intelligence\" or \"knowledge.\"\n Zaagi'idiwin—Love (Eagle): To know peace is to know Love. Love must be unconditional. When people are weak they need love the most. In the Anishinaabe language, this word with the reciprocal theme /idi/ indicates that this form of love is mutual. In some communities, Gizhaawenidiwin is used, which in most context means \"jealousy\" but in this context is translated as either \"love\" or \"zeal\". Again, the reciprocal theme /idi/ indicates that this form of love is mutual.\n Minaadendamowin—Respect (Buffalo): To honor all creation is to have Respect. All of creation should be treated with respect. You must give respect if you wish to be respected. Some communities instead use Ozhibwaadenindiwin or Manazoonidiwin.\n Aakode'ewin—Bravery (Bear): Bravery is to face the foe with integrity. In the Anishinaabe language, this word literally means \"state of having a fearless heart.\" To do what is right even when the consequences are unpleasant. Some communities instead use either Zoongadikiwin (\"state of having a strong casing\") or Zoongide'ewin (\"state of having a strong heart\").\n Gwayakwaadiziwin—Honesty (Raven): Honesty in facing a situation is to be brave. Always be honest in word and action. Be honest first with yourself, and you will more easily be able to be honest with others. In the Anishinaabe language, this word can also mean \"righteousness.\"\n Dabaadendiziwin—Humility (Wolf): Humility is to know yourself as a sacred part of Creation. In the Anishinaabe language, this word can also mean \"compassion.\" You are equal to others, but you are not better. Some communities instead express this with Bekaadiziwin, which in addition to \"humility\" can also be translated as \"calmness,\" \"meekness,\" \"gentility\" or \"patience.\"\n Debwewin—Truth (Turtle): Truth is to know all of these things. Speak the truth. Do not deceive yourself or others.\n\nThe Teachings in a Contemporary Society \n\nThe Seven Grandfather teachings have been around for centuries, passed on from elders through storytelling. These teachings have helped shape the way of life for Anishinaabe people for years and continue to do so. The stories can be adapted to fit specific community values. The teachings have been incorporated by organizations, schools, different programs, artists, individualists, and tribes.\n\nIn contemporary society, these teachings have been used as a way to heal from and prevent both domestic and sexual violence. When taught in relation to these topics, humility teachings one to find balance, bravery allows individuals to continue living their lives in the face of their fears, honesty teaches people to be honest and to accept oneself, wisdom allows one to know and respect their boundaries, truth asks that one be true to themselves, respect ensures one not be hurtful to themselves or others, and finally love teaches to know and love thyself.\n\nSee also \n\n Seven Laws of Noah—Seven universal teachings in Judaism\n Virtue\n Okichitaw\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \nTraditional Teaching Narratives in the Eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan by Mary Magoulick\nSeven Teachings from Grand Council of Treaty 3\nCultural Teachings from Nishnawbe Aski Nation\nRe-telling the \"Seven Grandfather\" by Don Able \nRekindling the Spirit: The Rebirth of American Indian Spirituality — The Seven Grandfathers from Minnesota Public Radio\nAudio files from Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, Anishinaabemowin Program\nThe Seven Teachings of the Anishinaabe by Cindy O'Hora\n\nFurther reading\n\nBenton-Banai, Edward. The Mishomis Book: The Voice of the Ojibway. Hayward, WI: Indian Country Communications, 1988.\n\nNative American religion\nOjibwe culture\nAnishinaabe culture\nVirtue\n7 (number)", "In Chinese philosophy, the three teachings (; ) are Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, considered as a harmonious aggregate. Literary references to the \"three teachings\" by prominent Chinese scholars date back to the 6th century. The term may also refer to a non-religious philosophy built on that aggregation.\n\nThree teachings harmonious as one \nThe phrase also appears as the three teachings harmonious as one (). In common understanding, three teachings harmonious as one simply reflects the long history, mutual influence, and (at times) complementary teachings of the three belief systems.\n\nIt can also refer to the \"Sanyi teaching\", a syncretic sect founded during the Ming dynasty by Lin Zhao'en, wherein Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist beliefs are combined according to their usefulness in self-cultivation. However, the phrase is not necessarily a reference to this sect.\n\nWhile Confucianism was the ideology of the law, institutions and the ruling class while Taoism was the worldview of the radical intellectuals and compatible with the spiritual beliefs of peasants and artisans. The two, although opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum, jointly created the Chinese \"image of the world\".\n\nConfucianism \nConfucianism is a complex school of thought, sometimes also referred to as a religion, revolving around the principles of the Chinese philosopher Confucius. It was developed in the Spring and Autumn Period during the Zhou Dynasty. The main concepts of this philosophy include ren (humaneness), yi (righteousness), li (propriety/etiquette), zhong (loyalty), and xiao (filial piety), along with strict adherence to social roles. This is illustrated through the five main relationships Confucius interpreted to be the core of society: ruler-subject, father-son, husband-wife, elder brother-younger brother, and friend-friend. In these bonds, the latter must pay respect to and serve the former, while the former is bound to care for the latter.\n\nThe following quotation is from the Analects, a compilation of Confucius' sayings and teachings, written after his death by his disciples.\n\nThis quotation exemplifies Confucius' idea of the junzi () or gentleman. Originally this expression referred to \"the son of a ruler\", but Confucius redefined this concept to mean behaviour (in terms of ethics and values such as loyalty and righteousness) instead of mere social status.\n\nDaoism \nDaoism (or Taoism) is a philosophy centered on living in harmony with the Dao (Tao) (), which is believed to be the source, pattern and substance of all matter. Its origin can be traced back to the late 4th century B.C.E. and the main thinkers representative of this teaching are Laozi and Zhuang Zhou. Key components of Daoism are Dao (the Way) and immortality, along with a stress on balance found throughout nature. There is less emphasis on extremes and instead focuses on the interdependence between things. For example, yin and yang () do not exemplify the opposition of good against evil, but instead represents the interpenetration of mutually-dependent opposites present in everything; \"within the Yang there exists the Yin and vice versa\".\n\nThe basis of Daoist philosophy is the idea of \"wu wei\", often translated as \"non-action\". In practice, it refers to an in-between state of \"being, but not acting\". This concept also overlaps with an idea in Confucianism as Confucius similarly believed that a perfect sage could rule without taking action. Daoism assumes any extreme action can initiate a counter-action of equal extremity, and so excessive government can become tyrannical and unjust, even when initiated with good intentions.\n\nThe following is a quote from the Daodejing, one of the main texts in Daoist teachings:\n\nBuddhism \nBuddhism is a religion that is based on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama. The main principles of this belief system are karma, rebirth, and impermanence. Buddhists believe that life is full of suffering, but that suffering can be overcome by attaining enlightenment. Nirvana (a state of perfect happiness) can be obtained by breaking away from (material) attachments and purifying the mind. However, different doctrines vary on the practices and paths followed in order to do so.\n\nMeditation serves as a significant part of practicing Buddhism. This calming and working of the mind helps Buddhists strive to become more peaceful and positive while developing wisdom through solving everyday problems. The negative mental states that are sought to be overcome are called \"delusions\", while the positive mental states are called \"virtuous minds\".\n\nAnother concept prominent in the Buddhist belief system is the Eight-Fold Path. The Noble Eightfold Path is the fourth of the Four Noble Truths, which is said to be the first of all Buddha's teachings. It stresses areas in life that can be explored and practice, such as right speech and right intention.\n\nControversy \nThough the term \"three teachings\" is often focused on how well Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism have been able to coexist in harmony throughout Chinese history, evidence has shown that each practice has dominated, or risen to favour, during certain periods of time. Emperors would choose to follow one specific system and the others were discriminated against, or tolerated at most. An example of this would be the Song Dynasty, in which both Buddhism and Taoism became less popular. Neo-Confucianism (which had re-emerged during the previous Tang Dynasty) was followed as the dominant philosophy.\nA minority also claims that the phrase \"three teachings\" proposes that these mutually exclusive and fundamentally incomparable teachings are equal. This is a contested point of view as others stress that it is not so. Confucianism focuses on societal rules and moral values, whereas Taoism advocates simplicity and living happily while in tune with nature. On the other hand, Buddhism reiterates the ideas of suffering, impermanence of material items, and reincarnation while stressing the idea of reaching salvation beyond.\n\nSee also\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \nVideo on the Three Teachings\n\n \nConcepts in Chinese philosophy\nBuddhism and other religions\nConfucianism\nTaoism\nSyncretism\nKorean traditions\nChinese traditions\nJapanese traditions\nVietnamese traditions" ]
[ "Jonah", "In Judaism", "What is the significance of Jonah in judaism?", "The Book of Jonah is read every year, in its original Hebrew and in its entirety, on Yom Kippur - the Day of Atonement,", "Why is this important?", "as the Haftarah at the afternoon mincha prayer.", "How else is Jonah importnat?", "Teshuva - the ability to repent and be forgiven by God - is a prominent idea in Jewish thought. This concept is developed in the Book of Jonah:", "Is this relevant to other teachings?", "The Book of Jonah also highlights the sometimes unstable relationship between two religious needs: comfort and truth." ]	C_4784a95092ef420baa6a30b8770ea644_1	What is significant about this?	5	What is significant about the two religious needs in The Book of Jonah?	Jonah	The Book of Jonah (Yonah yvnh) is one of the twelve minor prophets included in the Tanakh. According to one tradition, Jonah was the boy brought back to life by Elijah the prophet in 1 Kings 17. Another tradition holds that he was the son of the woman of Shunem brought back to life by Elisha in 2 Kings 4 and that he is called the "son of Amittai" (Truth) due to his mother's recognition of Elisha's identity as a prophet in 2 Kings 17:24. The Book of Jonah is read every year, in its original Hebrew and in its entirety, on Yom Kippur - the Day of Atonement, as the Haftarah at the afternoon mincha prayer. According to Rabbi Eliezer, the fish that swallowed Jonah was created in the primordial era and the inside of its mouth was like a synagogue; the fish's eyes were like windows and a pearl inside its mouth provided further illumination. According to the Midrash, while Jonah was inside the fish, it told him that its life was nearly over because soon the Leviathan would eat them both. Jonah promised the fish that he would save them. Following Jonah's directions, the fish swam up alongside the Leviathan and Jonah threatened to leash the Leviathan by its tongue and let the other fish eat it. The Leviathan heard Jonah's threats, saw that he was circumcized, and realized that he was protected by the Lord, so it fled in terror, leaving Jonah and the fish alive. Teshuva - the ability to repent and be forgiven by God - is a prominent idea in Jewish thought. This concept is developed in the Book of Jonah: Jonah, the son of truth (the name of his father "Amitai" in Hebrew means truth), refuses to ask the people of Nineveh to repent. He seeks the truth only, and not forgiveness. When forced to go, his call is heard loud and clear. The people of Nineveh repent ecstatically, "fasting, including the sheep," and the Jewish scripts are critical of this. The Book of Jonah also highlights the sometimes unstable relationship between two religious needs: comfort and truth. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER	Jonah or Jonas, son of Amittai, is a prophet in the Hebrew Bible and the Quran, from Gath-hepher of the northern kingdom of Israel in about the 8th century BCE. Jonah is the central figure of the Book of Jonah, which details his reluctance in delivering God's judgement on the city of Nineveh, and then his subsequent, albeit begrudged, return to the divine mission after he is swallowed by a large sea creature. In Judaism, the story of Jonah represents the teaching of teshuva, which is the ability to repent and be forgiven by God. In the New Testament, Jesus calls himself "greater than Jonah" and promises the Pharisees "the sign of Jonah", which is his resurrection. Early Christian interpreters viewed Jonah as a type for Jesus. Jonah is regarded as a prophet in Islam and the biblical narrative of Jonah is repeated, with a few notable differences, in the Quran. Mainstream Bible scholars generally regard the Book of Jonah as fictional, and often at least partially satirical, but the character of Jonah son of Amittai may have been based on the historical prophet of the same name who prophesied during the reign of Amaziah of Judah, as mentioned in 2 Kings. Although the creature which swallowed Jonah is often depicted in art and culture as a whale, the Hebrew text actually uses the phrase dag gadol, which means "big fish". In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the species of the fish that swallowed Jonah was the subject of speculation for naturalists, who interpreted the story as an account of a historical incident. Some modern scholars of folklore say there are similarities between Jonah and other legendary figures, specifically Gilgamesh and the Greek hero Jason. Book of Jonah Jonah is the central character in the Book of Jonah, in which God commands him to go to the city of Nineveh to prophesy against it "for their great wickedness is come up before me," but Jonah instead attempts to flee from "the presence of the Lord" by going to Jaffa (sometimes transliterated as Joppa or Joppe), and sets sail for Tarshish. A huge storm arises and the sailors, realizing that it is no ordinary storm, cast lots and discover that Jonah is to blame. Jonah admits this and states that if he is thrown overboard, the storm will cease. The sailors refuse to do this and continue rowing, but all their efforts fail and they eventually throw Jonah overboard. As a result, the storm calms and the sailors then offer sacrifices to God. After being cast from the ship, Jonah is swallowed by a large fish, within the belly of which he remains for three days and three nights. While in the great fish, Jonah prays to God in his affliction and commits to giving thanks and to paying what he has vowed. God then commands the fish to vomit Jonah out. God again commands Jonah to travel to Nineveh and prophesy to its inhabitants. This time he goes and enters the city, crying, "In forty days Nineveh shall be overthrown." After Jonah has walked across Nineveh, the people of Nineveh begin to believe his word and proclaim a fast. The king of Nineveh puts on sackcloth and sits in ashes, making a proclamation which decrees fasting, the wearing of sackcloth, prayer, and repentance. God sees their repentant hearts and spares the city at that time. The entire city is humbled and broken with the people (and even the animals) in sackcloth and ashes. Displeased by this, Jonah refers to his earlier flight to Tarshish while asserting that, since God is merciful, it was inevitable that God would turn from the threatened calamities. He then leaves the city and makes himself a shelter, waiting to see whether or not the city will be destroyed. God causes a plant (in Hebrew a kikayon) to grow over Jonah's shelter to give him some shade from the sun. Later, God causes a worm to bite the plant's root and it withers. Jonah, now being exposed to the full force of the sun, becomes faint and pleads for God to kill him. Religious views In Judaism The Book of Jonah (Yonah יונה) is one of the twelve minor prophets included in the Tanakh. According to one tradition, Jonah was the boy brought back to life by Elijah the prophet in 1 Kings. Another tradition holds that he was the son of the woman of Shunem brought back to life by Elisha in 2 Kings and that he is called the "son of Amittai" (Truth) due to his mother's recognition of Elisha's identity as a prophet in 2 Kings. The Book of Jonah is read every year, in its original Hebrew and in its entirety, on Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement – as the Haftarah at the afternoon mincha prayer. According to Rabbi Eliezer, the fish that swallowed Jonah was created in the primordial era and the inside of its mouth was like a synagogue; the fish's eyes were like windows and a pearl inside its mouth provided further illumination. According to the Midrash, while Jonah was inside the fish, it told him that its life was nearly over because soon the Leviathan would eat them both. Jonah promised the fish that he would save them. Following Jonah's directions, the fish swam up alongside the Leviathan and Jonah threatened to leash the Leviathan by its tongue and let the other fish eat it. The Leviathan heard Jonah's threats, saw that he was circumcised, and realized that he was protected by the Lord, so it fled in terror, leaving Jonah and the fish alive. The medieval Jewish scholar and rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra (1092–1167) argued against any literal interpretation of the Book of Jonah, stating that the "experiences of all the prophets except Moses were visions, not actualities." The later scholar Isaac Abarbanel (1437–1509), however, argued that Jonah could have easily survived in the belly of the fish for three days, because "after all, fetuses live nine months without access to fresh air." Teshuva – the ability to repent and be forgiven by God – is a prominent idea in Jewish thought. This concept is developed in the Book of Jonah: Jonah, the son of truth (the name of his father "Amitai" in Hebrew means truth), refuses to ask the people of Nineveh to repent. He seeks the truth only, and not forgiveness. When forced to go, his call is heard loud and clear. The people of Nineveh repent ecstatically, "fasting, including the sheep," and the Jewish scripts are critical of this. The Book of Jonah also highlights the sometimes unstable relationship between two religious needs: comfort and truth. In Christianity In the Book of Tobit Jonah is mentioned twice in the fourteenth chapter of the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit, the conclusion of which finds Tobit's son, Tobias, rejoicing at the news of Nineveh's destruction by Nebuchadnezzar and Ahasuerus in apparent fulfillment of Jonah's prophecy against the Assyrian capital. In the New Testament In the New Testament, Jonah is mentioned in Matthew and in Luke. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus makes a reference to Jonah when he is asked for a sign by some of the scribes and the Pharisees. Jesus says that the sign will be the sign of Jonah: Jonah's restoration after three days inside the great fish prefigures His own resurrection. Post-Biblical views Jonah is regarded as a saint by a number of Christian denominations. His feast day in the Roman Catholic Church is on 21 September, according to the Martyrologium Romanum. On the Eastern Orthodox liturgical calendar, Jonah's feast day is on 22 September (for those churches which follow the traditional Julian calendar; 22 September currently falls in October on the modern Gregorian calendar). In the Armenian Apostolic Church, moveable feasts are held in commemoration of Jonah as a single prophet and as one of the Twelve Minor Prophets. Jonah's mission to the Ninevites is commemorated by the Fast of Nineveh in Syriac and Oriental Orthodox Churches. Jonah is commemorated as a prophet in the Calendar of Saints of the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church on 22 September. Christian theologians have traditionally interpreted Jonah as a type for Jesus Christ. Jonah being in swallowed by the giant fish was regarded as a foreshadowing of Jesus's crucifixion and Jonah emerging from the fish after three days was seen as a parallel for Jesus emerging from the tomb after three days. Saint Jerome equates Jonah with Jesus's more nationalistic side, and justifies Jonah's actions by arguing that "Jonah acts thus as a patriot, not so much that he hates the Ninevites, as that he does not want to destroy his own people." Other Christian interpreters, including Saint Augustine and Martin Luther, have taken a directly opposite approach, regarding Jonah as the epitome of envy and jealousness, which they regarded as inherent characteristics of the Jewish people. Luther likewise concludes that the kikayon represents Judaism, and that the worm which devours it represents Christ. Luther also questioned the idea that the Book of Jonah was ever intended as literal history, commenting that he found it hard to believe that anyone would have interpreted it as such if it had never been included in the Bible. Luther's antisemitic interpretation of Jonah remained the prevailing interpretation among German Protestants throughout early modern history. J. D. Michaelis comments that "the meaning of the fable hits you right between the eyes", and concludes that the Book of Jonah is a polemic against "the Israelite people's hate and envy towards all the other nations of the earth." Albert Eichhorn was a strong supporter of Michaelis's interpretation. John Calvin and John Hooper regarded the Book of Jonah as a warning to all those who might attempt to flee from the wrath of God. While Luther had been careful to maintain that the Book of Jonah was not written by Jonah, Calvin declared that the Book of Jonah was Jonah's personal confession of guilt. Calvin sees Jonah's time inside the fish's belly as equivalent to the fires of Hell, intended to correct Jonah and set him on the path of righteousness. Also unlike Luther, Calvin finds fault with all the characters in the story, describing the sailors on the boat as "hard and iron-hearted, like Cyclops'", the penitence of the Ninevites as "untrained", and the king of Nineveh as a "novice". Hooper, on the other hand, sees Jonah as the archetypal dissident and the ship he is cast out from as a symbol of the state. Hooper deplores such dissidents, decrying: "Can you live quietly with so many Jonasses? Nay then, throw them into the sea!" In the eighteenth century, German professors were forbidden from teaching that the Book of Jonah was anything other than a literal, historical account. In Islam Quran Jonah () is the title of the tenth chapter of the Quran. Yūnus is traditionally viewed as highly important in Islam as a prophet who was faithful to God and delivered His messages. Jonah is the only one of Judaism's Twelve Minor Prophets to be named in the Quran. In Quran 21:87 and 68:48, Jonah is called Dhul-Nūn (; meaning "The One of the Fish"). In 4:163 and 6:86, he is referred to as "an apostle of Allah". Surah 37:139–148 retells the full story of Jonah: The Quran never mentions Jonah's father, but Muslim tradition teaches that Jonah was from the tribe of Benjamin and that his father was Amittai. Hadiths Jonah is also mentioned in a few incidents during the lifetime of Muhammad. Quraysh sent their servant, Addas, to serve him grapes for sustenance. Muhammad asked Addas where he was from and the servant replied Nineveh. "The town of Jonah the just, son of Amittai!" Muhammad exclaimed. Addas was shocked because he knew that the pagan Arabs had no knowledge of the prophet Jonah. He then asked how Muhammad knew of this man. "We are brothers," Muhammad replied. "Jonah was a Prophet of God and I, too, am a Prophet of God." Addas immediately accepted Islam and kissed the hands and feet of Muhammad. One of the sayings of Muhammad, in the collection of Imam Bukhari, says that Muhammad said "One should not say that I am better than Jonah". A similar statement occurs in a hadith written by Yunus bin Yazid, the second caliph of the Umayyad Dynasty. Umayya ibn Abi al-Salt, an older contemporary of Muhammad, taught that, had Jonah not prayed to Allah, he would have remained trapped inside the fish until Judgement Day, but, because of his prayer, Jonah "stayed only a few days within the belly of the fish". The ninth-century Persian historian Al-Tabari records that, while Jonah was inside the fish, "none of his bones or members were injured". Al-Tabari also writes that Allah made the body of the fish transparent, allowing Jonah to see the "wonders of the deep" and that Jonah heard all the fish singing praises to Allah. Kisai Marvazi, a tenth-century poet, records that Jonah's father was seventy years old when Jonah was born and that he died soon afterwards, leaving Jonah's mother with nothing but a wooden spoon, which turned out to be a cornucopia. Claimed tombs Nineveh's current location is marked by excavations of five gates, parts of walls on four sides, and two large mounds: the hill of Kuyunjik and hill of Nabi Yunus. A mosque atop Nabi Yunus was dedicated to the prophet Jonah and contained a shrine, which was revered by both Muslims and Christians as the site of Jonah's tomb. The tomb was a popular pilgrimage site and a symbol of unity to Jews, Christians, and Muslims across the Middle East. On July 24, 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) destroyed the mosque containing the tomb as part of a campaign to destroy religious sanctuaries it deemed to be idolatrous. After Mosul was taken back from ISIL in January 2017, an ancient Assyrian palace built by Esarhaddon dating to around the first half of the 7th century BCE was discovered beneath the ruined mosque. ISIL had plundered the palace of items to sell on the black market, but some of the artifacts that were more difficult to transport still remained in place. Other reputed locations of Jonah's tomb include the Arab village of Mashhad, located on the ancient site of Gath-hepher in Israel; the Palestinian West Bank town of Halhul, north of Hebron; and a sanctuary near the city of Sarafand (Sarepta) in Lebanon. Another tradition places the tomb at a hill now called Giv'at Yonah, "Jonah's Hill", at the northern edge of the Israeli town of Ashdod, at a site covered by a modern lighthouse. A tomb of Jonah can be found in Diyarbakir, Turkey, located behind the mihrab at Fatih Pasha Mosque. Evliya Celebi states in his Seyahatname that he visited the tombs of prophet Jonah and prophet George in the city. Scholarly interpretations The story of a man surviving after being swallowed by a whale or giant fish is classified in the catalogue of folktale types as ATU 1889G. Historicity Many Biblical scholars hold that the contents of the Book of Jonah are ahistorical. Although the prophet Jonah allegedly lived in the eighth century BCE, the Book of Jonah was written centuries later during the time of the Achaemenid Empire. The Hebrew used in the Book of Jonah shows strong influences from Aramaic and the cultural practices described in it match those of the Achaemenid Persians. Some scholars regard the Book of Jonah as an intentional work of parody or satire. If this is the case, then it was probably admitted into the canon of the Hebrew Bible by sages who misunderstood its satirical nature and mistakenly interpreted it as a serious prophetic work. While the Book of Jonah itself is considered fiction, Jonah himself may have been a historical prophet; he is briefly mentioned in the Second Book of Kings: Parodic elements The views expressed by Jonah in the Book of Jonah are a parody of views held by members of Jewish society at the time when it was written. The primary target of the satire may have been a faction whom Morton Smith calls "Separationists", who believed that God would destroy those who disobeyed him, that sinful cities would be obliterated, and that God's mercy did not extend to those outside the Abrahamic covenant. McKenzie and Graham remark that "Jonah is in some ways the most 'orthodox' of Israelite theologians – to make a theological point." Jonah's statements throughout the book are characterized by their militancy, but his name ironically means "dove", a bird which the ancient Israelites associated with peace. Jonah's rejection of God's commands is a parody of the obedience of the prophets described in other Old Testament writings. The king of Nineveh's instant repentance parodies the rulers throughout the other writings of the Old Testament who disregard prophetic warnings, such as Ahab and Zedekiah. The readiness to worship God displayed by the sailors on the ship and the people of Nineveh contrasts ironically with Jonah's own reluctance, as does Jonah's greater love for kikayon providing him shade than for all the people in Nineveh. The Book of Jonah also employs elements of literary absurdism; it exaggerates the size of the city of Nineveh to an implausible degree and incorrectly refers to the administrator of the city as a "king". According to scholars, no human being could realistically survive for three days inside a fish, and the description of the livestock in Nineveh fasting alongside their owners is "silly". The motif of a protagonist being swallowed by a giant fish or whale became a stock trope of later satirical writings. Similar incidents are recounted in Lucian of Samosata's A True Story, which was written in the second century CE, and in the novel Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, published by Rudolf Erich Raspe in 1785. The fish Translation Though art and culture often depicts Jonah's fish as a whale, the Hebrew text, as throughout scripture, refers to no marine species in particular, simply saying "great fish" or "big fish" (modern taxonomists classify whales as mammals and not as fish, but cultures in antiquity made no such distinction). While some biblical scholars suggest the size and habits of the great white shark correspond better to the representations of Jonah's experiences, normally an adult human is too large to be swallowed whole. The development of whaling from the 18th century onwards made it clear that most, if not all, species of whale could not swallow a human, leading to much controversy about the veracity of the biblical story of Jonah. In Jonah 2:1 (1:17 in English translations), the Hebrew text reads dag gadol (דג גדול) or, in the Hebrew Masoretic Text, dāḡ gā·ḏō·wl (דָּ֣ג גָּד֔וֹל), which means "great fish". The Septuagint translates this phrase into Greek as kētei megalōi (κήτει μεγάλῳ), meaning "huge fish". In Greek mythology, the same word meaning "fish" (kêtos) is used to describe the sea monster slain by the hero Perseus that nearly devoured the Princess Andromeda. Jerome later translated this phrase as piscis grandis in his Latin Vulgate. He translated kétos, however, as ventre ceti in Matthew 12:40: this second case occurs only in this verse of the New Testament. At some point cetus became synonymous with "whale" (the study of whales is now called cetology). In his 1534 translation, William Tyndale translated the phrase in Jonah 2:1 as "greate fyshe" and the word kétos (Greek) or cetus (Latin) in Matthew 12:40 as "whale". Tyndale's translation was later incorporated into the Authorized Version of 1611. Since then, the "great fish" in Jonah 2 has been most often interpreted as a whale. In English some translations use the word "whale" for Matthew 12:40, while others use "sea creature" or "big fish". Scientific speculation In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, naturalists, interpreting the Jonah story as a historical account, became obsessed with trying to identify the exact species of the fish that swallowed Jonah. In the mid-nineteenth century, Edward Bouverie Pusey, professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, claimed that the Book of Jonah must have been authored by Jonah himself and argued that the fish story must be historically true, or else it would not have been included in the Bible. Pusey attempted to scientifically catalogue the fish, hoping to "shame those who speak of the miracle of Jonah's preservation in the fish as a thing less credible than any of God's other miraculous doings". The debate over the fish in the Book of Jonah played a major role during Clarence Darrow's cross-examination of William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Trial in 1925. Darrow asked Bryan "When you read that ... the whale swallowed Jonah ... how do you literally interpret that?" Bryan replied that he believed in "a God who can make a whale and can make a man and make both of them do what He pleases." Bryan ultimately admitted that it was necessary to interpret the Bible, and is generally regarded as having come off looking like a "buffoon". The largest of all whales – blue whales – are baleen whales which eat plankton; and "it is commonly said that this species would be choked if it attempted to swallow a herring." As for the whale shark, Dr. E. W. Gudger, an Honorary Associate in Ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History, notes that, while the whale shark does have a large mouth, its throat is only four inches wide, with a sharp elbow or bend behind the opening, meaning that not even a human arm would be able to pass through it. He concludes that "the whale shark is not the fish that swallowed Jonah." Sperm whales, however, appear to be a different matter: They regularly eat giant squid, so presumably one could swallow a human (although perhaps not in one piece). Similar to a cow, sperm whales have four-chambered stomachs. The first chamber has no gastric juices but has muscular walls to crush its food. On the other hand, it is not possible to breathe inside the sperm whale's stomach because there is no air (but probably methane instead). Cultural influence In Turkish, "Jonah fish" (in Turkish yunus baligi) is the term used for dolphins. A long-established expression among sailors uses the term, "a Jonah", to mean a sailor or a passenger whose presence on board brings bad luck and endangers the ship. Later, this meaning was extended to mean, "a person who carries a jinx, one who will bring bad luck to any enterprise." Despite its brevity, the Book of Jonah has been adapted numerous times in literature and in popular culture. In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Father Mapple delivers a sermon on the Book of Jonah. Mapple asks why Jonah does not show remorse for disobeying God while he is inside of the fish. He comes to the conclusion that Jonah admirably understands that "his dreadful punishment is just." Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) features the title character and his father Geppetto being swallowed by "the Terrible Dogfish," an allusion to the story of Jonah. Walt Disney's 1940 film adaptation of the novel retains this allusion. The story of Jonah was adapted into Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki's animated film Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie (2002). In the film, Jonah is swallowed by a gargantuan whale. The film was Big Idea Entertainment's first full-length theatrical release and it earned approximately $6.5 million on its first weekend. Suggested connections to legends Epic of Gilgamesh Joseph Campbell suggests that the story of Jonah parallels a scene from the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh obtains a plant from the bottom of the sea. In the Book of Jonah, a worm (in Hebrew tola'ath, "maggot") bites the shade-giving plant's root causing it to wither; whereas in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh ties stones to his feet and plucks his plant from the floor of the sea. Once he returns to the shore, the rejuvenating plant is eaten by a serpent. Jason from Greek mythology Campbell also noted several similarities between the story of Jonah and that of Jason in Greek mythology. The Greek rendering of the name Jonah is Jonas, which differs from Jason only in the order of sounds—both os are omegas suggesting that Jason may have been confused with Jonah. Gildas Hamel, drawing on the Book of Jonah and Greco-Roman sources—including Greek vases and the accounts of Apollonius of Rhodes, Gaius Valerius Flaccus and Orphic Argonautica—identifies a number of shared motifs, including the names of the heroes, the presence of a dove, the idea of "fleeing" like the wind and causing a storm, the attitude of the sailors, the presence of a sea-monster or dragon threatening the hero or swallowing him, and the form and the word used for the "gourd" (kikayon). Hamel takes the view that it was the Hebrew author who reacted to and adapted this mythological material to communicate his own, quite different message. See also Aquanaut, a person who stays underwater for a long time Biblical and Quranic narratives Jonah on the Sistine Chapel ceiling Legends and the Quran Prophets of Islam Qisas Al-Anbiya Notes References Bibliography External links Jonah leaving whale The Book of Jonah (Hebrew and English) The Book of Jonah (NIV) Prophet Jonah Orthodox icon and synaxarion Animated Retelling of the Jonah Story The Prophet Jonah at the Christian Iconography website Jonah Christian saints from the Old Testament Fish and humans People whose existence is disputed Satire Year of birth unknown Year of death unknown	false	[ "The Saugeen Kame Terraces is a 431-hectare provincially significant Earth Science Area of Natural and Scientific Interest in Ontario, Canada. It is in Grey County (in what was once Egremont Township), bounding the eastern and southern shores of Wilder Lake, a kettle lake, and is part of the larger Singhampton Kame Moraine formation. It is a kame formation that is the result of glacial retreat sediment deposition about 14,000 years ago.\n\nReferences\n\nGeography of Grey County\nAreas of Natural and Scientific Interest\nKames", "The term significant other has different uses in psychology and in colloquial language. Colloquially \"significant other\" (or SO) is used as a gender-neutral term for a person's partner in an intimate relationship without disclosing or presuming anything about marital status, relationship status, gender identity, or sexual orientation. Synonyms with similar properties include: sweetheart, other half, better half, spouse, domestic partner, lover, soulmate, or life partner.\n\nIn the United States, the term is sometimes used in invitations, such as to weddings and office parties. This use of the term has become common in the UK in correspondence from hospitals, e.g., \"you may be accompanied for your appointment by a significant other.\"\n\nScientific use\nIts usage in psychology and sociology is very different from its colloquial use. In psychology, a significant other is any person who has great importance to an individual's life or well-being. In sociology, it describes any person or persons with a strong influence on an individual's self-concept. Although the influence of significant others on individuals was long theorized, the first actual measurements of the influence of significant others on individuals were made by Archie O. Haller, Edward L. Fink, and Joseph Woelfel at the University of Wisconsin.\n\nHaller, Fink, and Woelfel are associates of the Wisconsin model of status attainment. They surveyed 100 Wisconsin adolescents, measured their educational and occupational aspirations, and identified the set of other individuals who communicated with the students and served as examples for them. They then contacted the significant others directly and measured their expectations for the adolescent's educational and occupational attainments, and calculated the impact of these expectations on the aspirations of the students. Results of the research showed that the expectations of significant others were the single most potent influences on the students' own aspirations. This usage is synonymous with the term \"relevant other\" and can also be found in plural form, \"significant others\".\n\nIn social psychology, a significant other is an \"insulating person\", uncle/aunt, grandparent, guardian or teacher – the person who guides and takes care of a child during primary socialization. The significant other protects, rewards, and punishes the child as a way of aiding the child's development. This usually takes about six or seven years, after which the significant other is no longer needed, and the child moves on to a general \"other\" which is not a real person, but an abstract notion of what society deems good or bad.\n\nFirst use\nThe first known use of the terms \"significant other person\" and \"significant other people\" is by the U.S. psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan in the article 'Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry' in the journal: 'Psychiatry: Journal of the biology and pathology of interpersonal relations', published in 1940. The phrase was popularised in the United States by Armistead Maupin's 1987 book Significant Others, and in the UK by the 1989 TV series Only Fools and Horses, in which Derek Trotter uses the phrase a number of times when referring to his long-term partner Raquel Turner.\n\nSee also\n POSSLQ\n Spouse\n\nReferences\n\nMarriage, unions and partnerships\nSocial philosophy\nGender-neutral language" ]
[ "Bonnie Raitt", "1970-1976" ]	C_684cefc6b9f7453ea706836155fb83f5_1	Did Bonnie Raitt release any albums in that period ?	1	Did Bonnie Raitt release any albums during the 1970 - 1976 period ?	Bonnie Raitt	In the fall of 1970, She played with her brother David on stand up Bass with Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Philly Folk Festival as well as Opening for John Hammond at the Gaslight Cafe in New York, she was seen by a reporter from Newsweek, who began to spread the word about her performance. Scouts from major record companies were soon attending her shows to watch her play. She eventually accepted an offer from Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971. The album was warmly received by the music press, with many writers praising her skills as an interpreter and as a bottleneck guitarist; at the time, few women in popular music had strong reputations as guitarists. While admired by those who saw her perform, and respected by her peers, Raitt gained little public acclaim for her work. Her critical stature continued to grow but record sales remained modest. Her second album, Give It Up, was released in 1972 to universal "acclaim"; though many critics still regard it as her best work, it did not change her commercial fortunes. 1973's Takin' My Time was also met with critical acclaim, but these notices were not matched by the sales. Raitt was beginning to receive greater press coverage, including a 1975 cover story for Rolling Stone, but with 1974's Streetlights, reviews for her work were becoming increasingly mixed. By now, Raitt was already experimenting with different producers and different styles, and she began to adopt a more mainstream sound that continued through 1975's Home Plate. In 1976, Raitt made an appearance on Warren Zevon's eponymous album with his friend Jackson Browne and Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. CANNOTANSWER	released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971.	Bonnie Lynn Raitt (; born November 8, 1949) is an American blues singer, guitarist, songwriter, and activist. During the 1970s, Raitt released a series of roots-influenced albums that incorporated elements of blues, rock, folk, and country. She was also a frequent session player and collaborator with other artists, including Warren Zevon, Little Feat, Jackson Browne, The Pointer Sisters, John Prine and Leon Russell. In 1989, after several years of critical acclaim but little commercial success, she had a major hit with the album Nick of Time. The following two albums, Luck of the Draw (1991) and Longing in Their Hearts (1994), were multimillion sellers, generating several hit singles, including "Something to Talk About", "Love Sneakin' Up On You", and the ballad "I Can't Make You Love Me" (with Bruce Hornsby on piano). Raitt has received ten competitive Grammy Awards as well as a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. She is listed as number 50 in Rolling Stones list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" and number 89 on the magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". Australian country music artist Graeme Connors has said, "Bonnie Raitt does something with a lyric no one else can do; she bends it and twists it right into your heart." Early life Bonnie Lynn Raitt was born on November 8, 1949, in Burbank, California. Her mother, Marge Goddard (née Haydock), was a pianist, while her father, John Raitt, was an actor in musical productions such as Oklahoma! and The Pajama Game. Raitt is of Scottish ancestry; her ancestors constructed Rait Castle near Nairn. As a child, Raitt would often play with her two brothers, Steve and David, and was a self-described tomboy. John Raitt's job as a theater actor meant Bonnie did not interact with him as much as she would have liked. Raitt grew to resent her mother, as she became the main authority figure of the household whenever John was away. Raitt's musically inclined parents had a strong influence on her life. From a young age, she and her brothers were encouraged to pursue music. At first, Raitt played the piano, but was intimidated by her mother's abilities. She instead began playing a Stella guitar, which she received as a Christmas gift in 1957 at the age of eight. Raitt did not take lessons, and instead took influence from the American folk music revival of the 1950s. She was also influenced by the beatnik movement, stating: "It represented my whole belief ... I'd grow my hair real long so I looked like a beatnik." From ages eight through fifteen, Raitt and her brothers attended a summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains called Camp Regis. It was there where Raitt learned of her musical talents, when camp counselors would ask her to play in front of the campers. Learning how to play songs from folk albums then became a hobby for Raitt. As a teenager, Raitt was self-conscious about her weight and her freckles, and saw music as an escape from reality. "That was my saving grace. I just sat in my room and played my guitar" said Raitt. After graduating from Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1967, Raitt entered Radcliffe College of Harvard University, majoring in Social Relations and African studies. She said her "plan was to travel to Tanzania, where President Julius Nyerere was creating a government based on democracy and socialism". She was the lead singer in a campus music group called the "Revolutionary Music Collective" founded by songwriter Bob Telson which played for striking Harvard students during the Student strike of 1970. Raitt became friends with blues promoter Dick Waterman. During her second year of college, Raitt left school for a semester and moved to Philadelphia with Waterman and other local musicians. Raitt said it was an "opportunity that changed everything." Career 1970–1976 In the summer of 1970, she played with her brother David on stand-up bass with Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Philly Folk Festival as well as opening for John Hammond at the Gaslight Cafe in New York, she was seen by a reporter from Newsweek, who began to spread the word about her performance. Scouts from major record companies were soon attending her shows to watch her play. She eventually accepted an offer from Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971. The album was warmly received by the music press, with many writers praising her skills as an interpreter and as a bottleneck guitarist; at the time, few women in popular music had strong reputations as guitarists. While admired by those who saw her perform, and respected by her peers, Raitt gained little public acclaim for her work. Her critical stature continued to grow but record sales remained modest. Her second album, Give It Up, was released in 1972 to positive reviews. One journalist described the album as "an excellent set" and "established the artist as an inventive and sympathetic interpreter". However, it did not change her commercial fortunes. 1973's Takin' My Time was also met with critical acclaim, but these notices were not matched by the sales. Raitt began to receive greater press coverage, including a 1975 cover story for Rolling Stone, but with 1974's Streetlights, reviews for her work were becoming increasingly mixed. By this point, Raitt was already experimenting with different producers and different styles, and she began to adopt a more mainstream sound that continued through 1975's Home Plate. In 1976, Raitt made an appearance on Warren Zevon's eponymous album. 1977–1988 1977's Sweet Forgiveness album gave Raitt her first commercial breakthrough, when it yielded a hit single in her remake of "Runaway." Recast as a heavy rhythm and blues recording based on a rhythmic groove inspired by Al Green, Raitt's version of "Runaway" was disparaged by many critics. However, the song's commercial success prompted a bidding war for Raitt between Warner Bros. and Columbia Records. "There was this big Columbia–Warner war going on at the time", recalled Raitt in a 1990 interview. "James Taylor had just left Warner Bros. and made a big album for Columbia... And then, Warner signed Paul Simon away from Columbia, and they didn't want me to have a hit record for Columbia – no matter what! So, I renegotiated my contract, and they basically matched Columbia's offer. Frankly the deal was a really big deal." Warner Brothers held higher expectations for Raitt's next album, The Glow, in 1979, but it was released to poor reviews as well as modest sales. Raitt had one commercial success in 1979 when she helped organize the five Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The shows spawned the three-record gold album No Nukes, as well as a Warner Brothers feature film of the same name. The shows featured co-founders Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, John Hall, and Raitt as well as Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Doobie Brothers, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Gil Scott-Heron, and others. In 1980, she appeared as herself in the Paramount film Urban Cowboy where she sang "Don't It Make You Wanna Dance." For her next record, 1982's Green Light, Raitt made a conscious attempt to revisit the sound of her earlier records. However, to her surprise, many of her peers and the media compared her new sound to the burgeoning new wave movement. The album received her strongest reviews in years, but her sales did not improve and this had a severe impact on her relationship with Warner Brothers. Tongue and Groove and release from Warner Brothers In 1983, Raitt was finishing work on her follow-up album, Tongue and Groove. The day after mastering was completed on Tongue & Groove, the record company dropped Raitt from its roster, not being happy with her commercial performance up to that point. The album was shelved and not released, and Raitt was left without a record contract. At this time Raitt was also struggling with alcohol and drug abuse problems. Despite her personal and professional problems, Raitt continued to tour and participate in political activism. In 1985, she sang and appeared in the video of "Sun City", the anti-apartheid song written and produced by guitarist Steven Van Zandt. Along with her participation in Farm Aid and Amnesty International concerts, Raitt traveled to Moscow, Russia in 1987 to participate in the first joint Soviet/American Peace Concert, later shown on the Showtime cable network. Also in 1987, Raitt organized a benefit in Los Angeles for Countdown '87 to Stop Contra Aid. The benefit featured herself, along with Don Henley, Herbie Hancock, and others. Two years after being dropped from Warner Brothers Records, the label notified Raitt of their plans to release the Tongue and Groove album. "I said it wasn't really fair," recalled Raitt. "I think at this point they felt kind of bad. I mean, I was out there touring on my savings to keep my name up, and my ability to draw was less and less. So they agreed to let me go in and recut half of it, and that's when it came out as Nine Lives." A critical and commercial disappointment, Nine Lives, released in 1986, was Raitt's last new recording for Warner Brothers. In late 1987, Raitt joined singers k.d. lang and Jennifer Warnes as female background vocalists for Roy Orbison's television special, Roy Orbison and Friends, A Black and White Night. Following this highly acclaimed broadcast, Raitt began working on new material. By then, she was clean and sober, having resolved her problems with substance abuse. She later credited Stevie Ray Vaughan for his help in a Minnesota State Fair concert the night after Vaughan's 1990 death. During this time, Raitt considered signing with the Prince-owned Paisley Park Records, but they could not come to an agreement and negotiations fell through. Instead, she began recording a bluesy mix of pop and rock songs under the production guidance of Don Was at Capitol Records. Raitt had met Was through Hal Wilner, who was putting together Stay Awake, a tribute album to Disney music for A&M. Was and Wilner both wanted Raitt to sing lead on an adult-contemporary arrangement created by Was for "Baby Mine", the lullaby from Dumbo. Raitt was very pleased with the sessions, and she asked Was to produce her next album. 1989–1999: Commercial breakthrough After working with Was on the Stay Awake album, Raitt's management, Gold Mountain, approached numerous labels about a new record deal and found interest from Capitol Records. Raitt was signed to Capitol by A&R executive Tim Devine. With her first Capitol Records release, and after nearly twenty years in the business, Raitt achieved commercial success with Nick of Time, her tenth overall album of her career. Released in the spring of 1989, Nick of Time went to number one on the U.S. album chart following Raitt's Grammy sweep in early 1990. This album has also been voted number 230 in the Rolling Stone list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Raitt later stated that her 10th try was "my first sober album." At the same time, Raitt received a fourth Grammy Award for her duet "I'm in the Mood" with John Lee Hooker on his album The Healer. Nick of Time was also the first of many of her recordings to feature her longtime rhythm section of Ricky Fataar and James "Hutch" Hutchinson (although previously Fataar had played on her Green Light album and Hutchinson had worked on Nine Lives), both of whom continue to record and tour with her. Since its release in 1989, Nick of Time has currently sold over five million copies in the US alone. Raitt followed up this success with three more Grammy Awards for her next album, 1991's Luck of the Draw, which sold seven million copies in the United States. Three years later, in 1994, she added two more Grammys with her album Longing in Their Hearts, her second number one album, that sold two million copies in the US. Raitt's collaboration with Don Was amicably came to an end with 1995's live release Road Tested. Released to solid reviews, it was certified gold in the US. "Rock Steady" was a hit written by Bryan Adams and Gretchen Peters in 1995. The song was written as a duet with Bryan Adams and Bonnie Raitt for her Road Tested tour, which also became one of her albums. The original demo version of the song appears on Adams' 1996 single "Let's Make a Night to Remember". For her next studio album, Raitt hired Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake as her producers. "I loved working with Don Was but I wanted to give myself and my fans a stretch and do something different," Raitt stated. Her work with Froom and Blake was released on Fundamental in 1998. 2000–2007 In March 2000, Raitt was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Silver Lining was released in 2002. In the US, it reached number 13 on the Billboard chart and was later certified Gold. It contains the singles "I Can't Help You Now", "Time of Our Lives", and the title track. All three singles charted within the top 40 of the US Adult Contemporary chart. On March 19, 2002, Bonnie Raitt received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to the recording industry, located at 1750 N. Vine Street. In 2003 Capitol Records released the compilation album The Best of Bonnie Raitt. It contains songs from her prior Capitol albums from 1989 to 2002 including Nick of Time, Luck of the Draw, Longing in Their Hearts, Road Tested, Fundamental, and Silver Lining. Raitt was featured on the album True Love by Toots and the Maytals, which won the Grammy Award in 2004 for Best Reggae Album. Souls Alike was released in September 2005. In the US, it reached the top 20 on the Billboard chart. It contains the singles "I Will Not Be Broken" and "I Don't Want Anything to Change", which both charted in the top 40 of the US Adult Contemporary chart. In 2006, she released the live DVD/CD Bonnie Raitt and Friends, which was filmed as part of the critically acclaimed VH1 Classic Decades Rock Live! concert series, featuring special guests Keb' Mo', Alison Krauss, Ben Harper, Jon Cleary, and Norah Jones. The DVD was released by Capitol Records on August 15. Bonnie Raitt and Friends, which was recorded live in Atlantic City, NJ on September 30, 2005, features never-before-seen performance and interview footage, including four duets not included in the VH1 Classic broadcast of the concert. The accompanying CD features 11 tracks, including the radio single "Two Lights in the Nighttime" (featuring Ben Harper). In 2007, Raitt contributed to Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino. With Jon Cleary, she sang a medley of "I'm in Love Again" and "All by Myself" by Fats Domino. Raitt is interviewed on screen and appears in performance footage in the 2005 documentary film Make It Funky!, which presents a history of New Orleans music and its influence on rhythm and blues, rock and roll, funk and jazz. In the film, Raitt performs "What is Success" with Allen Toussaint and band, a song he wrote and that Raitt included on her 1974 album Streetlights. 2008–present Raitt appeared on the June 7, 2008 broadcast of Garrison Keillor's radio program A Prairie Home Companion. She performed two blues songs with Keb' Mo': "No Getting Over You" and "There Ain't Nothin' in Ramblin'". Raitt also sang "Dimming of the Day" with Richard Thompson. This show, along with another one with Raitt and her band in October 2006, is archived on the Prairie Home Companion website. Raitt appeared in the 2011 documentary Reggae Got Soul: The Story of Toots and the Maytals, which was featured on the BBC and described as "The untold story of one of the most influential artists ever to come out of Jamaica". In February 2012, Raitt performed a duet with Alicia Keys at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards in 2012 honoring Etta James. In April 2012, Raitt released her first studio album since 2005, entitled Slipstream. It charted at Number 6 on the US Billboard 200 chart marking her first top ten album since 1994's Longing in Their Hearts. The album was described as "one of the best of her 40-year career" by American Songwriter magazine. In September 2012, Raitt was featured in a campaign called "30 Songs / 30 Days" to support Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, a multi-platform media project inspired by a project outlined in a book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. In 2013, she appeared on Foy Vance's album Joy of Nothing. On May 30, 2015, Leon Russell, Bonnie Raitt and Ivan Neville gave a performance at The Canyon Club in Agoura Hills, California to raise cash for Marty Grebb who was battling cancer. Grebb had played on some of their albums. In February 2016, Raitt released her seventeenth studio album Dig In Deep. The album charted at number 11 on the US Billboard 200 chart and received favorable reviews. The album features the single "Gypsy in Me" as well as a cover of the INXS song "Need You Tonight". Raitt cancelled the first leg of her 2018 spring-summer touring schedule due to a recently discovered medical issue requiring surgical intervention. She reported that a "full recovery" is expected and that she planned to resume touring with already-scheduled dates in June 2018. Drug and alcohol use and recovery Raitt used alcohol and drugs, but began psychotherapy and joined Alcoholics Anonymous in the late 1980s. "I thought I had to live that partying lifestyle in order to be authentic," she said, "but in fact if you keep it up too long, all you're going to be is sloppy or dead." She became clean in 1987. She has credited Stevie Ray Vaughan for breaking her substance abuse, saying that what gave her the courage to admit her alcohol problem and stop drinking was seeing that Stevie Ray Vaughan was an even better musician when sober. She has also said that she stopped because she realized that the "late night life" was not working for her. In 1989, she said, "I really feel like some angels have been carrying me around. I just have more focus and more discipline, and consequently more self-respect." Personal life Raitt has taken sabbaticals, including after the deaths of her parents, brother, and best friend. She has said "When I went through a lot of loss, I took a hiatus." Raitt and actor Michael O'Keefe were married on April 27, 1991. They announced their divorce on November 9, 1999, with a causal factor appearing to be that their careers caused considerable time apart. Singer and guitarist David Crosby has said that Raitt is his favorite singer of all time. Political activism Raitt's political involvement goes back to the early 1970s. Her 1972 album Give It Up had a dedication "to the people of North Vietnam ..." printed on the back. Raitt's web site urges fans to learn more about preserving the environment. She was a founding member of Musicians United for Safe Energy in 1979 and a catalyst for the larger anti-nuclear movement, becoming involved with groups like the Abalone Alliance and Alliance for Survival. In 1994 at the urging of Dick Waterman, Raitt funded the replacement of a headstone for one of her mentors, blues guitarist Fred McDowell through the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund. Raitt later financed memorial headstones in Mississippi for musicians Memphis Minnie, Sam Chatmon, and Tommy Johnson again with the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund. In 2002, Raitt signed on as an official supporter of Little Kids Rock, a nonprofit organization that provides free musical instruments and free lessons to children in public schools throughout the U.S. She has visited children in the program and sits on the organization's board of directors as an honorary member. At the Stockholm Jazz Festival in July 2004, Raitt dedicated a performance of "Your Good Thing (Is About to End)", from her 1979 album The Glow, to sitting (and later re-elected) U.S. President George W. Bush. She was quoted as saying "We're gonna sing this for George Bush because he's out of here, people!". In 2008, Raitt donated a song to the Aid Still Required's CD to assist with relief efforts in Southeast Asia from the 2004 tsunami. Raitt worked with Reverb, a non-profit environmental organization, for her 2005 fall/winter and 2006 spring/summer/fall tours. Raitt is part of the No Nukes group, which opposes the expansion of nuclear power. In 2007, No Nukes recorded a music video of a new version of the Buffalo Springfield song "For What It's Worth". During the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Raitt, along with Jackson Browne and bassist James "Hutch" Hutchinson, performed at campaign appearances for candidate John Edwards. During the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, Raitt endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Discography Bonnie Raitt (1971) Give It Up (1972) Takin' My Time (1973) Streetlights (1974) Home Plate (1975) Sweet Forgiveness (1977) The Glow (1979) Green Light (1982) Nine Lives (1986) Nick of Time (1989) Luck of the Draw (1991) Longing in Their Hearts (1994) Fundamental (1998) Silver Lining (2002) Souls Alike (2005) Slipstream (2012) Dig In Deep (2016) Just Like That... (2022) Guitar Raitt's principal touring guitar is a customized Fender Stratocaster that she nicknamed Brownie. This became the basis for a signature model in 1996. Raitt was the first female musician to receive a signature Fender line. Awards Grammy Awards \|- \| 1980 \|"You're Gonna Get What's Coming" \|rowspan="3"\|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \| 1983 \|"Green Light" \| \|- \| 1987 \|"No Way to Treat a Lady" \| \|- \|rowspan="4"\| 1990 \|rowspan="2"\|Nick of Time \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"Nick of Time" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"I'm in the Mood" (with John Lee Hooker) \|Best Traditional Blues Recording \| \|- \|rowspan="6"\| 1992 \|Luck of the Draw \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|rowspan="2"\|"Something to Talk About" \|Record of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \| "Luck of the Draw" \| Best Rock Vocal Solo Performance \| \|- \|"Good Man, Good Woman" \|Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocal \| \|- \|Bonnie Raitt \|MusiCares Person of the Year \| \|- \|rowspan="5"\| 1995 \|rowspan="2"\|Longing in Their Hearts \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|Best Pop Vocal Album \| \|- \|rowspan="2"\|"Love Sneakin' Up On You" \|Record of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"Longing in Their Hearts" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|1996 \|"You Got It" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|rowspan="3"\|1997 \|Road Tested \|Best Rock Album \| \|- \|"Burning Down the House" \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"SRV Shuffle" \|Best Rock Instrumental Performance \| \|- \| 1999 \|"Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" (with Jackson Browne) \|Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals \| \|- \| 2003 \|"Gnawin' on It" \|rowspan="2"\|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \| 2004 \| "Time of Our Lives" \| \|- \| 2006 \|"I Will Not Be Broken" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|2013 \|Slipstream \|Best Americana Album \| \|- \|2022 \|Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award \|Herself \| \|} : Not a Grammy Award, but awarded by The Recording Academy Americana Music Honors and Awards \|- \|2012 \|Herself \|Lifetime Achievement Award for Performance \| \|- \|2016 \|Herself \|Artist of the Year \| \|} Rock and Roll Hall of Fame \|- \|2000 \|Herself \|Hall of Fame induction \| \|} Other awards In 1991, Raitt was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee College of Music. In 1997 Raitt was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal. In 2017, Raitt was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Guitar Museum. In 2018, Raitt received the People's Voice Award from the Folk Alliance International Awards in recognition of her activism. References Citations General references External links Fansite: Bonnie's Pride and Joy [ Allmusic Guide Profile] 1949 births Living people American alternative country singers American women country singers American country singer-songwriters American anti–nuclear power activists American blues guitarists American blues pianists American women pianists American blues singer-songwriters American women rock singers American women singer-songwriters American folk rock musicians American feminists American folk singers American humanitarians Women humanitarians Record producers from California American rock songwriters American women activists Blues rock musicians Electric blues musicians Feminist musicians Fingerstyle guitarists Grammy Award winners Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Slide guitarists Proponents of Christian feminism Radcliffe College alumni Capitol Records artists Warner Music Group artists Warner Records artists American people of Scottish descent Activists from California Country musicians from California Guitarists from California Musicians from Burbank, California Singer-songwriters from California 21st-century American pianists 20th-century American women singers 21st-century American women singers 20th-century American pianists American women record producers 20th-century American women guitarists 20th-century American guitarists 21st-century American women guitarists 21st-century American guitarists Proper Records artists 20th-century American singers 21st-century American singers	true	[ "The Best of Bonnie Raitt is a 2003 compilation album by Bonnie Raitt, released by Capitol Records.\n\nReception\nThom Jurek of AllMusic wrote in his review, \"Here is the astonishing range, from deep blue-eyed bluesy soul, sheeny reggae-tinged pop, and adult rock & roll that moves and inspires anyone with an open mind.\"\n\nTrack listing\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nBonnie Raitt Official Site\nCapitol Records Official Site\n\n2003 greatest hits albums\nBonnie Raitt compilation albums\nCapitol Records compilation albums", "Bonnie Raitt is the self-titled debut album by Bonnie Raitt, released in 1971.\n\nBackground\nThe album was recorded at an empty summer camp on Enchanted Island, about 30 miles west of Minneapolis on Lake Minnetonka in August 1971. This location was chosen because of Raitt's close friendship with John Koerner and Dave Ray, two musicians from Minneapolis who were playing on the East Coast folk circuit. Koerner and Ray encouraged Raitt to check out Minneapolis for the location of her first recording. \"We recorded live on four tracks because we wanted a more spontaneous and natural feeling in the music\", Raitt wrote in the album's liner notes, \"a feeling often sacrificed when the musicians know they can overdub their part on a separate track until it's perfect.\"\n\nReception\nThough album sales were modest, Bonnie Raitt was warmly received by rock critics. \"[A]n unusual collection of songs performed by an unusual assortment of musicians\", wrote Rolling Stone. \"Raitt is a folkie by history but not by aesthetic\", wrote Robert Christgau in his Consumer Guide column. \"She includes songs from Steve Stills, the Marvelettes, and a classic feminist blues singer named Sippie Wallace because she knows the world doesn't end with acoustic song-poems and Fred McDowell. An adult repertoire that rocks with a steady roll, and she's all of twenty-one years old.\"\n\nTrack listing\n\n\"Bluebird\" (Stephen Stills) – 3:29\n\"Mighty Tight Woman\" (Sippie Wallace) – 4:20\n\"Thank You\" (Raitt) – 2:50\n\"Finest Lovin' Man\" (Raitt) – 4:42\n\"Any Day Woman\" (Paul Siebel) – 2:23\n\"Big Road\" (Tommy Johnson) – 3:31\n\"Walking Blues\" (Robert Johnson) – 2:40\n\"Danger Heartbreak Dead Ahead\" (Ivy Hunter, Clarence Paul, William \"Mickey\" Stevenson) – 2:53\n\"Since I Fell for You\" (Buddy Johnson) – 3:06\n\"I Ain't Blue\" (John Koerner, Willie Murphy) – 3:36\n\"Women Be Wise\" (Sippie Wallace) – 4:09\n\nPersonnel\n Bonnie Raitt – lead vocals, backing vocals (1, 8), acoustic guitar, slide guitar, acoustic piano (3), electric slide guitar (8)\n Willie Murphy – acoustic piano (1, 4, 6, 8, 9), guitar (3), backing vocals (5, 10), percussion (10), \n John Beach – acoustic piano (2, 11), arrangements (2)\n Peter Bell – electric guitar (1), backing vocals (1, 8, 10), acoustic guitar (6), percussion (7, 10)\n Russell Hagen – electric guitar (4, 8, 9)\n Freebo – fretless bass (1-5, 8-11), tuba (6)\n Stephen Bradley – drums (1-6, 8, 9, 11)\n Eugene Hoffman – cowbell (1), tenor saxophone (4, 8, 9)\n Steve Raitt – percussion (10), backing vocals (10)\n Junior Wells – harmonica (2, 4, 6, 7)\n A.C. Reed – tenor saxophone (1, 4, 8, 9)\n Maurice Jacox – baritone saxophone (3, 4, 8, 9, 10), flute (3)\n Voyle Harris – trumpet (3, 4, 8, 9)\n Douglas \"Toad\" Spurgeon – trombone (6)\n Reeve Little – backing vocals (1)\n Paul Pena – bass vocals (1)\n Chris Rhodes – backing vocals (8)\n\nProduction\n Producer – Willie Murphy \n Engineers – Dave Ray and Sylvia Ray\n Recorded at Sweet Jane, Ltd. (Cushing, MN).\n Remixing – Kendall Pacios \n Series Producer – Gregg Geller \n Project Coordinator – Jo Motta\n Remastering – Patrick Krauss\n Liner Notes – Bonnie Raitt\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Bonnie Raitt at MySpace (streamed copy where licensed)\n\nBonnie Raitt albums\n1971 debut albums\nWarner Records albums\nAlbums produced by Willie Murphy (musician)\nAlbums arranged by Bonnie Raitt" ]
[ "Bonnie Raitt", "1970-1976", "Did Bonnie Raitt release any albums in that period ?", "released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971." ]	C_684cefc6b9f7453ea706836155fb83f5_1	How was the album received by the critics ?	2	How was Bonnie Raitt's debut album received by the critics ?	Bonnie Raitt	In the fall of 1970, She played with her brother David on stand up Bass with Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Philly Folk Festival as well as Opening for John Hammond at the Gaslight Cafe in New York, she was seen by a reporter from Newsweek, who began to spread the word about her performance. Scouts from major record companies were soon attending her shows to watch her play. She eventually accepted an offer from Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971. The album was warmly received by the music press, with many writers praising her skills as an interpreter and as a bottleneck guitarist; at the time, few women in popular music had strong reputations as guitarists. While admired by those who saw her perform, and respected by her peers, Raitt gained little public acclaim for her work. Her critical stature continued to grow but record sales remained modest. Her second album, Give It Up, was released in 1972 to universal "acclaim"; though many critics still regard it as her best work, it did not change her commercial fortunes. 1973's Takin' My Time was also met with critical acclaim, but these notices were not matched by the sales. Raitt was beginning to receive greater press coverage, including a 1975 cover story for Rolling Stone, but with 1974's Streetlights, reviews for her work were becoming increasingly mixed. By now, Raitt was already experimenting with different producers and different styles, and she began to adopt a more mainstream sound that continued through 1975's Home Plate. In 1976, Raitt made an appearance on Warren Zevon's eponymous album with his friend Jackson Browne and Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. CANNOTANSWER	The album was warmly received by the music press,	Bonnie Lynn Raitt (; born November 8, 1949) is an American blues singer, guitarist, songwriter, and activist. During the 1970s, Raitt released a series of roots-influenced albums that incorporated elements of blues, rock, folk, and country. She was also a frequent session player and collaborator with other artists, including Warren Zevon, Little Feat, Jackson Browne, The Pointer Sisters, John Prine and Leon Russell. In 1989, after several years of critical acclaim but little commercial success, she had a major hit with the album Nick of Time. The following two albums, Luck of the Draw (1991) and Longing in Their Hearts (1994), were multimillion sellers, generating several hit singles, including "Something to Talk About", "Love Sneakin' Up On You", and the ballad "I Can't Make You Love Me" (with Bruce Hornsby on piano). Raitt has received ten competitive Grammy Awards as well as a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. She is listed as number 50 in Rolling Stones list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" and number 89 on the magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". Australian country music artist Graeme Connors has said, "Bonnie Raitt does something with a lyric no one else can do; she bends it and twists it right into your heart." Early life Bonnie Lynn Raitt was born on November 8, 1949, in Burbank, California. Her mother, Marge Goddard (née Haydock), was a pianist, while her father, John Raitt, was an actor in musical productions such as Oklahoma! and The Pajama Game. Raitt is of Scottish ancestry; her ancestors constructed Rait Castle near Nairn. As a child, Raitt would often play with her two brothers, Steve and David, and was a self-described tomboy. John Raitt's job as a theater actor meant Bonnie did not interact with him as much as she would have liked. Raitt grew to resent her mother, as she became the main authority figure of the household whenever John was away. Raitt's musically inclined parents had a strong influence on her life. From a young age, she and her brothers were encouraged to pursue music. At first, Raitt played the piano, but was intimidated by her mother's abilities. She instead began playing a Stella guitar, which she received as a Christmas gift in 1957 at the age of eight. Raitt did not take lessons, and instead took influence from the American folk music revival of the 1950s. She was also influenced by the beatnik movement, stating: "It represented my whole belief ... I'd grow my hair real long so I looked like a beatnik." From ages eight through fifteen, Raitt and her brothers attended a summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains called Camp Regis. It was there where Raitt learned of her musical talents, when camp counselors would ask her to play in front of the campers. Learning how to play songs from folk albums then became a hobby for Raitt. As a teenager, Raitt was self-conscious about her weight and her freckles, and saw music as an escape from reality. "That was my saving grace. I just sat in my room and played my guitar" said Raitt. After graduating from Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1967, Raitt entered Radcliffe College of Harvard University, majoring in Social Relations and African studies. She said her "plan was to travel to Tanzania, where President Julius Nyerere was creating a government based on democracy and socialism". She was the lead singer in a campus music group called the "Revolutionary Music Collective" founded by songwriter Bob Telson which played for striking Harvard students during the Student strike of 1970. Raitt became friends with blues promoter Dick Waterman. During her second year of college, Raitt left school for a semester and moved to Philadelphia with Waterman and other local musicians. Raitt said it was an "opportunity that changed everything." Career 1970–1976 In the summer of 1970, she played with her brother David on stand-up bass with Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Philly Folk Festival as well as opening for John Hammond at the Gaslight Cafe in New York, she was seen by a reporter from Newsweek, who began to spread the word about her performance. Scouts from major record companies were soon attending her shows to watch her play. She eventually accepted an offer from Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971. The album was warmly received by the music press, with many writers praising her skills as an interpreter and as a bottleneck guitarist; at the time, few women in popular music had strong reputations as guitarists. While admired by those who saw her perform, and respected by her peers, Raitt gained little public acclaim for her work. Her critical stature continued to grow but record sales remained modest. Her second album, Give It Up, was released in 1972 to positive reviews. One journalist described the album as "an excellent set" and "established the artist as an inventive and sympathetic interpreter". However, it did not change her commercial fortunes. 1973's Takin' My Time was also met with critical acclaim, but these notices were not matched by the sales. Raitt began to receive greater press coverage, including a 1975 cover story for Rolling Stone, but with 1974's Streetlights, reviews for her work were becoming increasingly mixed. By this point, Raitt was already experimenting with different producers and different styles, and she began to adopt a more mainstream sound that continued through 1975's Home Plate. In 1976, Raitt made an appearance on Warren Zevon's eponymous album. 1977–1988 1977's Sweet Forgiveness album gave Raitt her first commercial breakthrough, when it yielded a hit single in her remake of "Runaway." Recast as a heavy rhythm and blues recording based on a rhythmic groove inspired by Al Green, Raitt's version of "Runaway" was disparaged by many critics. However, the song's commercial success prompted a bidding war for Raitt between Warner Bros. and Columbia Records. "There was this big Columbia–Warner war going on at the time", recalled Raitt in a 1990 interview. "James Taylor had just left Warner Bros. and made a big album for Columbia... And then, Warner signed Paul Simon away from Columbia, and they didn't want me to have a hit record for Columbia – no matter what! So, I renegotiated my contract, and they basically matched Columbia's offer. Frankly the deal was a really big deal." Warner Brothers held higher expectations for Raitt's next album, The Glow, in 1979, but it was released to poor reviews as well as modest sales. Raitt had one commercial success in 1979 when she helped organize the five Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The shows spawned the three-record gold album No Nukes, as well as a Warner Brothers feature film of the same name. The shows featured co-founders Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, John Hall, and Raitt as well as Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Doobie Brothers, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Gil Scott-Heron, and others. In 1980, she appeared as herself in the Paramount film Urban Cowboy where she sang "Don't It Make You Wanna Dance." For her next record, 1982's Green Light, Raitt made a conscious attempt to revisit the sound of her earlier records. However, to her surprise, many of her peers and the media compared her new sound to the burgeoning new wave movement. The album received her strongest reviews in years, but her sales did not improve and this had a severe impact on her relationship with Warner Brothers. Tongue and Groove and release from Warner Brothers In 1983, Raitt was finishing work on her follow-up album, Tongue and Groove. The day after mastering was completed on Tongue & Groove, the record company dropped Raitt from its roster, not being happy with her commercial performance up to that point. The album was shelved and not released, and Raitt was left without a record contract. At this time Raitt was also struggling with alcohol and drug abuse problems. Despite her personal and professional problems, Raitt continued to tour and participate in political activism. In 1985, she sang and appeared in the video of "Sun City", the anti-apartheid song written and produced by guitarist Steven Van Zandt. Along with her participation in Farm Aid and Amnesty International concerts, Raitt traveled to Moscow, Russia in 1987 to participate in the first joint Soviet/American Peace Concert, later shown on the Showtime cable network. Also in 1987, Raitt organized a benefit in Los Angeles for Countdown '87 to Stop Contra Aid. The benefit featured herself, along with Don Henley, Herbie Hancock, and others. Two years after being dropped from Warner Brothers Records, the label notified Raitt of their plans to release the Tongue and Groove album. "I said it wasn't really fair," recalled Raitt. "I think at this point they felt kind of bad. I mean, I was out there touring on my savings to keep my name up, and my ability to draw was less and less. So they agreed to let me go in and recut half of it, and that's when it came out as Nine Lives." A critical and commercial disappointment, Nine Lives, released in 1986, was Raitt's last new recording for Warner Brothers. In late 1987, Raitt joined singers k.d. lang and Jennifer Warnes as female background vocalists for Roy Orbison's television special, Roy Orbison and Friends, A Black and White Night. Following this highly acclaimed broadcast, Raitt began working on new material. By then, she was clean and sober, having resolved her problems with substance abuse. She later credited Stevie Ray Vaughan for his help in a Minnesota State Fair concert the night after Vaughan's 1990 death. During this time, Raitt considered signing with the Prince-owned Paisley Park Records, but they could not come to an agreement and negotiations fell through. Instead, she began recording a bluesy mix of pop and rock songs under the production guidance of Don Was at Capitol Records. Raitt had met Was through Hal Wilner, who was putting together Stay Awake, a tribute album to Disney music for A&M. Was and Wilner both wanted Raitt to sing lead on an adult-contemporary arrangement created by Was for "Baby Mine", the lullaby from Dumbo. Raitt was very pleased with the sessions, and she asked Was to produce her next album. 1989–1999: Commercial breakthrough After working with Was on the Stay Awake album, Raitt's management, Gold Mountain, approached numerous labels about a new record deal and found interest from Capitol Records. Raitt was signed to Capitol by A&R executive Tim Devine. With her first Capitol Records release, and after nearly twenty years in the business, Raitt achieved commercial success with Nick of Time, her tenth overall album of her career. Released in the spring of 1989, Nick of Time went to number one on the U.S. album chart following Raitt's Grammy sweep in early 1990. This album has also been voted number 230 in the Rolling Stone list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Raitt later stated that her 10th try was "my first sober album." At the same time, Raitt received a fourth Grammy Award for her duet "I'm in the Mood" with John Lee Hooker on his album The Healer. Nick of Time was also the first of many of her recordings to feature her longtime rhythm section of Ricky Fataar and James "Hutch" Hutchinson (although previously Fataar had played on her Green Light album and Hutchinson had worked on Nine Lives), both of whom continue to record and tour with her. Since its release in 1989, Nick of Time has currently sold over five million copies in the US alone. Raitt followed up this success with three more Grammy Awards for her next album, 1991's Luck of the Draw, which sold seven million copies in the United States. Three years later, in 1994, she added two more Grammys with her album Longing in Their Hearts, her second number one album, that sold two million copies in the US. Raitt's collaboration with Don Was amicably came to an end with 1995's live release Road Tested. Released to solid reviews, it was certified gold in the US. "Rock Steady" was a hit written by Bryan Adams and Gretchen Peters in 1995. The song was written as a duet with Bryan Adams and Bonnie Raitt for her Road Tested tour, which also became one of her albums. The original demo version of the song appears on Adams' 1996 single "Let's Make a Night to Remember". For her next studio album, Raitt hired Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake as her producers. "I loved working with Don Was but I wanted to give myself and my fans a stretch and do something different," Raitt stated. Her work with Froom and Blake was released on Fundamental in 1998. 2000–2007 In March 2000, Raitt was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Silver Lining was released in 2002. In the US, it reached number 13 on the Billboard chart and was later certified Gold. It contains the singles "I Can't Help You Now", "Time of Our Lives", and the title track. All three singles charted within the top 40 of the US Adult Contemporary chart. On March 19, 2002, Bonnie Raitt received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to the recording industry, located at 1750 N. Vine Street. In 2003 Capitol Records released the compilation album The Best of Bonnie Raitt. It contains songs from her prior Capitol albums from 1989 to 2002 including Nick of Time, Luck of the Draw, Longing in Their Hearts, Road Tested, Fundamental, and Silver Lining. Raitt was featured on the album True Love by Toots and the Maytals, which won the Grammy Award in 2004 for Best Reggae Album. Souls Alike was released in September 2005. In the US, it reached the top 20 on the Billboard chart. It contains the singles "I Will Not Be Broken" and "I Don't Want Anything to Change", which both charted in the top 40 of the US Adult Contemporary chart. In 2006, she released the live DVD/CD Bonnie Raitt and Friends, which was filmed as part of the critically acclaimed VH1 Classic Decades Rock Live! concert series, featuring special guests Keb' Mo', Alison Krauss, Ben Harper, Jon Cleary, and Norah Jones. The DVD was released by Capitol Records on August 15. Bonnie Raitt and Friends, which was recorded live in Atlantic City, NJ on September 30, 2005, features never-before-seen performance and interview footage, including four duets not included in the VH1 Classic broadcast of the concert. The accompanying CD features 11 tracks, including the radio single "Two Lights in the Nighttime" (featuring Ben Harper). In 2007, Raitt contributed to Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino. With Jon Cleary, she sang a medley of "I'm in Love Again" and "All by Myself" by Fats Domino. Raitt is interviewed on screen and appears in performance footage in the 2005 documentary film Make It Funky!, which presents a history of New Orleans music and its influence on rhythm and blues, rock and roll, funk and jazz. In the film, Raitt performs "What is Success" with Allen Toussaint and band, a song he wrote and that Raitt included on her 1974 album Streetlights. 2008–present Raitt appeared on the June 7, 2008 broadcast of Garrison Keillor's radio program A Prairie Home Companion. She performed two blues songs with Keb' Mo': "No Getting Over You" and "There Ain't Nothin' in Ramblin'". Raitt also sang "Dimming of the Day" with Richard Thompson. This show, along with another one with Raitt and her band in October 2006, is archived on the Prairie Home Companion website. Raitt appeared in the 2011 documentary Reggae Got Soul: The Story of Toots and the Maytals, which was featured on the BBC and described as "The untold story of one of the most influential artists ever to come out of Jamaica". In February 2012, Raitt performed a duet with Alicia Keys at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards in 2012 honoring Etta James. In April 2012, Raitt released her first studio album since 2005, entitled Slipstream. It charted at Number 6 on the US Billboard 200 chart marking her first top ten album since 1994's Longing in Their Hearts. The album was described as "one of the best of her 40-year career" by American Songwriter magazine. In September 2012, Raitt was featured in a campaign called "30 Songs / 30 Days" to support Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, a multi-platform media project inspired by a project outlined in a book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. In 2013, she appeared on Foy Vance's album Joy of Nothing. On May 30, 2015, Leon Russell, Bonnie Raitt and Ivan Neville gave a performance at The Canyon Club in Agoura Hills, California to raise cash for Marty Grebb who was battling cancer. Grebb had played on some of their albums. In February 2016, Raitt released her seventeenth studio album Dig In Deep. The album charted at number 11 on the US Billboard 200 chart and received favorable reviews. The album features the single "Gypsy in Me" as well as a cover of the INXS song "Need You Tonight". Raitt cancelled the first leg of her 2018 spring-summer touring schedule due to a recently discovered medical issue requiring surgical intervention. She reported that a "full recovery" is expected and that she planned to resume touring with already-scheduled dates in June 2018. Drug and alcohol use and recovery Raitt used alcohol and drugs, but began psychotherapy and joined Alcoholics Anonymous in the late 1980s. "I thought I had to live that partying lifestyle in order to be authentic," she said, "but in fact if you keep it up too long, all you're going to be is sloppy or dead." She became clean in 1987. She has credited Stevie Ray Vaughan for breaking her substance abuse, saying that what gave her the courage to admit her alcohol problem and stop drinking was seeing that Stevie Ray Vaughan was an even better musician when sober. She has also said that she stopped because she realized that the "late night life" was not working for her. In 1989, she said, "I really feel like some angels have been carrying me around. I just have more focus and more discipline, and consequently more self-respect." Personal life Raitt has taken sabbaticals, including after the deaths of her parents, brother, and best friend. She has said "When I went through a lot of loss, I took a hiatus." Raitt and actor Michael O'Keefe were married on April 27, 1991. They announced their divorce on November 9, 1999, with a causal factor appearing to be that their careers caused considerable time apart. Singer and guitarist David Crosby has said that Raitt is his favorite singer of all time. Political activism Raitt's political involvement goes back to the early 1970s. Her 1972 album Give It Up had a dedication "to the people of North Vietnam ..." printed on the back. Raitt's web site urges fans to learn more about preserving the environment. She was a founding member of Musicians United for Safe Energy in 1979 and a catalyst for the larger anti-nuclear movement, becoming involved with groups like the Abalone Alliance and Alliance for Survival. In 1994 at the urging of Dick Waterman, Raitt funded the replacement of a headstone for one of her mentors, blues guitarist Fred McDowell through the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund. Raitt later financed memorial headstones in Mississippi for musicians Memphis Minnie, Sam Chatmon, and Tommy Johnson again with the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund. In 2002, Raitt signed on as an official supporter of Little Kids Rock, a nonprofit organization that provides free musical instruments and free lessons to children in public schools throughout the U.S. She has visited children in the program and sits on the organization's board of directors as an honorary member. At the Stockholm Jazz Festival in July 2004, Raitt dedicated a performance of "Your Good Thing (Is About to End)", from her 1979 album The Glow, to sitting (and later re-elected) U.S. President George W. Bush. She was quoted as saying "We're gonna sing this for George Bush because he's out of here, people!". In 2008, Raitt donated a song to the Aid Still Required's CD to assist with relief efforts in Southeast Asia from the 2004 tsunami. Raitt worked with Reverb, a non-profit environmental organization, for her 2005 fall/winter and 2006 spring/summer/fall tours. Raitt is part of the No Nukes group, which opposes the expansion of nuclear power. In 2007, No Nukes recorded a music video of a new version of the Buffalo Springfield song "For What It's Worth". During the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Raitt, along with Jackson Browne and bassist James "Hutch" Hutchinson, performed at campaign appearances for candidate John Edwards. During the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, Raitt endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Discography Bonnie Raitt (1971) Give It Up (1972) Takin' My Time (1973) Streetlights (1974) Home Plate (1975) Sweet Forgiveness (1977) The Glow (1979) Green Light (1982) Nine Lives (1986) Nick of Time (1989) Luck of the Draw (1991) Longing in Their Hearts (1994) Fundamental (1998) Silver Lining (2002) Souls Alike (2005) Slipstream (2012) Dig In Deep (2016) Just Like That... (2022) Guitar Raitt's principal touring guitar is a customized Fender Stratocaster that she nicknamed Brownie. This became the basis for a signature model in 1996. Raitt was the first female musician to receive a signature Fender line. Awards Grammy Awards \|- \| 1980 \|"You're Gonna Get What's Coming" \|rowspan="3"\|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \| 1983 \|"Green Light" \| \|- \| 1987 \|"No Way to Treat a Lady" \| \|- \|rowspan="4"\| 1990 \|rowspan="2"\|Nick of Time \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"Nick of Time" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"I'm in the Mood" (with John Lee Hooker) \|Best Traditional Blues Recording \| \|- \|rowspan="6"\| 1992 \|Luck of the Draw \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|rowspan="2"\|"Something to Talk About" \|Record of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \| "Luck of the Draw" \| Best Rock Vocal Solo Performance \| \|- \|"Good Man, Good Woman" \|Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocal \| \|- \|Bonnie Raitt \|MusiCares Person of the Year \| \|- \|rowspan="5"\| 1995 \|rowspan="2"\|Longing in Their Hearts \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|Best Pop Vocal Album \| \|- \|rowspan="2"\|"Love Sneakin' Up On You" \|Record of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"Longing in Their Hearts" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|1996 \|"You Got It" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|rowspan="3"\|1997 \|Road Tested \|Best Rock Album \| \|- \|"Burning Down the House" \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"SRV Shuffle" \|Best Rock Instrumental Performance \| \|- \| 1999 \|"Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" (with Jackson Browne) \|Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals \| \|- \| 2003 \|"Gnawin' on It" \|rowspan="2"\|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \| 2004 \| "Time of Our Lives" \| \|- \| 2006 \|"I Will Not Be Broken" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|2013 \|Slipstream \|Best Americana Album \| \|- \|2022 \|Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award \|Herself \| \|} : Not a Grammy Award, but awarded by The Recording Academy Americana Music Honors and Awards \|- \|2012 \|Herself \|Lifetime Achievement Award for Performance \| \|- \|2016 \|Herself \|Artist of the Year \| \|} Rock and Roll Hall of Fame \|- \|2000 \|Herself \|Hall of Fame induction \| \|} Other awards In 1991, Raitt was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee College of Music. In 1997 Raitt was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal. In 2017, Raitt was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Guitar Museum. In 2018, Raitt received the People's Voice Award from the Folk Alliance International Awards in recognition of her activism. References Citations General references External links Fansite: Bonnie's Pride and Joy [ Allmusic Guide Profile] 1949 births Living people American alternative country singers American women country singers American country singer-songwriters American anti–nuclear power activists American blues guitarists American blues pianists American women pianists American blues singer-songwriters American women rock singers American women singer-songwriters American folk rock musicians American feminists American folk singers American humanitarians Women humanitarians Record producers from California American rock songwriters American women activists Blues rock musicians Electric blues musicians Feminist musicians Fingerstyle guitarists Grammy Award winners Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Slide guitarists Proponents of Christian feminism Radcliffe College alumni Capitol Records artists Warner Music Group artists Warner Records artists American people of Scottish descent Activists from California Country musicians from California Guitarists from California Musicians from Burbank, California Singer-songwriters from California 21st-century American pianists 20th-century American women singers 21st-century American women singers 20th-century American pianists American women record producers 20th-century American women guitarists 20th-century American guitarists 21st-century American women guitarists 21st-century American guitarists Proper Records artists 20th-century American singers 21st-century American singers	true	[ "Care is the fourth studio album by American musician How to Dress Well, released on September 23, 2016 by the Domino Recording Company.\n\nRelease\nThe album was preceded by the singles \"Lost Youth/Lost You\", \"What's Up\", and \"Can't You Tell\".\n\nCritical reception\n\nCare received generally favorable reviews from contemporary music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 75, based on 16 reviews, which indicates \"generally favorable reviews\".\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2016 albums\nHow to Dress Well albums\nDomino Recording Company albums", "How I Knew Her is the first solo studio album by American musician Nataly Dawn of the duo Pomplamoose, released on February 12, 2013 under Nonesuch Records. The album was funded by a Kickstarter campaign which raised over $100,000 and was produced by Pomplamoose half Jack Conte.\n\nReception\nHow I Knew Her was met with \"generally favorable reviews\" from critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, this release received an average score of 68, based on 12 reviews.\n\nTrack listing\n\nReferences\n\n2013 albums\nKickstarter-funded albums" ]
[ "Bonnie Raitt", "1970-1976", "Did Bonnie Raitt release any albums in that period ?", "released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971.", "How was the album received by the critics ?", "The album was warmly received by the music press," ]	C_684cefc6b9f7453ea706836155fb83f5_1	Which record label released the album ?	3	Which record label released Bonnie Raitt's debut album ?	Bonnie Raitt	In the fall of 1970, She played with her brother David on stand up Bass with Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Philly Folk Festival as well as Opening for John Hammond at the Gaslight Cafe in New York, she was seen by a reporter from Newsweek, who began to spread the word about her performance. Scouts from major record companies were soon attending her shows to watch her play. She eventually accepted an offer from Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971. The album was warmly received by the music press, with many writers praising her skills as an interpreter and as a bottleneck guitarist; at the time, few women in popular music had strong reputations as guitarists. While admired by those who saw her perform, and respected by her peers, Raitt gained little public acclaim for her work. Her critical stature continued to grow but record sales remained modest. Her second album, Give It Up, was released in 1972 to universal "acclaim"; though many critics still regard it as her best work, it did not change her commercial fortunes. 1973's Takin' My Time was also met with critical acclaim, but these notices were not matched by the sales. Raitt was beginning to receive greater press coverage, including a 1975 cover story for Rolling Stone, but with 1974's Streetlights, reviews for her work were becoming increasingly mixed. By now, Raitt was already experimenting with different producers and different styles, and she began to adopt a more mainstream sound that continued through 1975's Home Plate. In 1976, Raitt made an appearance on Warren Zevon's eponymous album with his friend Jackson Browne and Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. CANNOTANSWER	Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album,	Bonnie Lynn Raitt (; born November 8, 1949) is an American blues singer, guitarist, songwriter, and activist. During the 1970s, Raitt released a series of roots-influenced albums that incorporated elements of blues, rock, folk, and country. She was also a frequent session player and collaborator with other artists, including Warren Zevon, Little Feat, Jackson Browne, The Pointer Sisters, John Prine and Leon Russell. In 1989, after several years of critical acclaim but little commercial success, she had a major hit with the album Nick of Time. The following two albums, Luck of the Draw (1991) and Longing in Their Hearts (1994), were multimillion sellers, generating several hit singles, including "Something to Talk About", "Love Sneakin' Up On You", and the ballad "I Can't Make You Love Me" (with Bruce Hornsby on piano). Raitt has received ten competitive Grammy Awards as well as a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. She is listed as number 50 in Rolling Stones list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" and number 89 on the magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". Australian country music artist Graeme Connors has said, "Bonnie Raitt does something with a lyric no one else can do; she bends it and twists it right into your heart." Early life Bonnie Lynn Raitt was born on November 8, 1949, in Burbank, California. Her mother, Marge Goddard (née Haydock), was a pianist, while her father, John Raitt, was an actor in musical productions such as Oklahoma! and The Pajama Game. Raitt is of Scottish ancestry; her ancestors constructed Rait Castle near Nairn. As a child, Raitt would often play with her two brothers, Steve and David, and was a self-described tomboy. John Raitt's job as a theater actor meant Bonnie did not interact with him as much as she would have liked. Raitt grew to resent her mother, as she became the main authority figure of the household whenever John was away. Raitt's musically inclined parents had a strong influence on her life. From a young age, she and her brothers were encouraged to pursue music. At first, Raitt played the piano, but was intimidated by her mother's abilities. She instead began playing a Stella guitar, which she received as a Christmas gift in 1957 at the age of eight. Raitt did not take lessons, and instead took influence from the American folk music revival of the 1950s. She was also influenced by the beatnik movement, stating: "It represented my whole belief ... I'd grow my hair real long so I looked like a beatnik." From ages eight through fifteen, Raitt and her brothers attended a summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains called Camp Regis. It was there where Raitt learned of her musical talents, when camp counselors would ask her to play in front of the campers. Learning how to play songs from folk albums then became a hobby for Raitt. As a teenager, Raitt was self-conscious about her weight and her freckles, and saw music as an escape from reality. "That was my saving grace. I just sat in my room and played my guitar" said Raitt. After graduating from Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1967, Raitt entered Radcliffe College of Harvard University, majoring in Social Relations and African studies. She said her "plan was to travel to Tanzania, where President Julius Nyerere was creating a government based on democracy and socialism". She was the lead singer in a campus music group called the "Revolutionary Music Collective" founded by songwriter Bob Telson which played for striking Harvard students during the Student strike of 1970. Raitt became friends with blues promoter Dick Waterman. During her second year of college, Raitt left school for a semester and moved to Philadelphia with Waterman and other local musicians. Raitt said it was an "opportunity that changed everything." Career 1970–1976 In the summer of 1970, she played with her brother David on stand-up bass with Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Philly Folk Festival as well as opening for John Hammond at the Gaslight Cafe in New York, she was seen by a reporter from Newsweek, who began to spread the word about her performance. Scouts from major record companies were soon attending her shows to watch her play. She eventually accepted an offer from Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971. The album was warmly received by the music press, with many writers praising her skills as an interpreter and as a bottleneck guitarist; at the time, few women in popular music had strong reputations as guitarists. While admired by those who saw her perform, and respected by her peers, Raitt gained little public acclaim for her work. Her critical stature continued to grow but record sales remained modest. Her second album, Give It Up, was released in 1972 to positive reviews. One journalist described the album as "an excellent set" and "established the artist as an inventive and sympathetic interpreter". However, it did not change her commercial fortunes. 1973's Takin' My Time was also met with critical acclaim, but these notices were not matched by the sales. Raitt began to receive greater press coverage, including a 1975 cover story for Rolling Stone, but with 1974's Streetlights, reviews for her work were becoming increasingly mixed. By this point, Raitt was already experimenting with different producers and different styles, and she began to adopt a more mainstream sound that continued through 1975's Home Plate. In 1976, Raitt made an appearance on Warren Zevon's eponymous album. 1977–1988 1977's Sweet Forgiveness album gave Raitt her first commercial breakthrough, when it yielded a hit single in her remake of "Runaway." Recast as a heavy rhythm and blues recording based on a rhythmic groove inspired by Al Green, Raitt's version of "Runaway" was disparaged by many critics. However, the song's commercial success prompted a bidding war for Raitt between Warner Bros. and Columbia Records. "There was this big Columbia–Warner war going on at the time", recalled Raitt in a 1990 interview. "James Taylor had just left Warner Bros. and made a big album for Columbia... And then, Warner signed Paul Simon away from Columbia, and they didn't want me to have a hit record for Columbia – no matter what! So, I renegotiated my contract, and they basically matched Columbia's offer. Frankly the deal was a really big deal." Warner Brothers held higher expectations for Raitt's next album, The Glow, in 1979, but it was released to poor reviews as well as modest sales. Raitt had one commercial success in 1979 when she helped organize the five Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The shows spawned the three-record gold album No Nukes, as well as a Warner Brothers feature film of the same name. The shows featured co-founders Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, John Hall, and Raitt as well as Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Doobie Brothers, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Gil Scott-Heron, and others. In 1980, she appeared as herself in the Paramount film Urban Cowboy where she sang "Don't It Make You Wanna Dance." For her next record, 1982's Green Light, Raitt made a conscious attempt to revisit the sound of her earlier records. However, to her surprise, many of her peers and the media compared her new sound to the burgeoning new wave movement. The album received her strongest reviews in years, but her sales did not improve and this had a severe impact on her relationship with Warner Brothers. Tongue and Groove and release from Warner Brothers In 1983, Raitt was finishing work on her follow-up album, Tongue and Groove. The day after mastering was completed on Tongue & Groove, the record company dropped Raitt from its roster, not being happy with her commercial performance up to that point. The album was shelved and not released, and Raitt was left without a record contract. At this time Raitt was also struggling with alcohol and drug abuse problems. Despite her personal and professional problems, Raitt continued to tour and participate in political activism. In 1985, she sang and appeared in the video of "Sun City", the anti-apartheid song written and produced by guitarist Steven Van Zandt. Along with her participation in Farm Aid and Amnesty International concerts, Raitt traveled to Moscow, Russia in 1987 to participate in the first joint Soviet/American Peace Concert, later shown on the Showtime cable network. Also in 1987, Raitt organized a benefit in Los Angeles for Countdown '87 to Stop Contra Aid. The benefit featured herself, along with Don Henley, Herbie Hancock, and others. Two years after being dropped from Warner Brothers Records, the label notified Raitt of their plans to release the Tongue and Groove album. "I said it wasn't really fair," recalled Raitt. "I think at this point they felt kind of bad. I mean, I was out there touring on my savings to keep my name up, and my ability to draw was less and less. So they agreed to let me go in and recut half of it, and that's when it came out as Nine Lives." A critical and commercial disappointment, Nine Lives, released in 1986, was Raitt's last new recording for Warner Brothers. In late 1987, Raitt joined singers k.d. lang and Jennifer Warnes as female background vocalists for Roy Orbison's television special, Roy Orbison and Friends, A Black and White Night. Following this highly acclaimed broadcast, Raitt began working on new material. By then, she was clean and sober, having resolved her problems with substance abuse. She later credited Stevie Ray Vaughan for his help in a Minnesota State Fair concert the night after Vaughan's 1990 death. During this time, Raitt considered signing with the Prince-owned Paisley Park Records, but they could not come to an agreement and negotiations fell through. Instead, she began recording a bluesy mix of pop and rock songs under the production guidance of Don Was at Capitol Records. Raitt had met Was through Hal Wilner, who was putting together Stay Awake, a tribute album to Disney music for A&M. Was and Wilner both wanted Raitt to sing lead on an adult-contemporary arrangement created by Was for "Baby Mine", the lullaby from Dumbo. Raitt was very pleased with the sessions, and she asked Was to produce her next album. 1989–1999: Commercial breakthrough After working with Was on the Stay Awake album, Raitt's management, Gold Mountain, approached numerous labels about a new record deal and found interest from Capitol Records. Raitt was signed to Capitol by A&R executive Tim Devine. With her first Capitol Records release, and after nearly twenty years in the business, Raitt achieved commercial success with Nick of Time, her tenth overall album of her career. Released in the spring of 1989, Nick of Time went to number one on the U.S. album chart following Raitt's Grammy sweep in early 1990. This album has also been voted number 230 in the Rolling Stone list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Raitt later stated that her 10th try was "my first sober album." At the same time, Raitt received a fourth Grammy Award for her duet "I'm in the Mood" with John Lee Hooker on his album The Healer. Nick of Time was also the first of many of her recordings to feature her longtime rhythm section of Ricky Fataar and James "Hutch" Hutchinson (although previously Fataar had played on her Green Light album and Hutchinson had worked on Nine Lives), both of whom continue to record and tour with her. Since its release in 1989, Nick of Time has currently sold over five million copies in the US alone. Raitt followed up this success with three more Grammy Awards for her next album, 1991's Luck of the Draw, which sold seven million copies in the United States. Three years later, in 1994, she added two more Grammys with her album Longing in Their Hearts, her second number one album, that sold two million copies in the US. Raitt's collaboration with Don Was amicably came to an end with 1995's live release Road Tested. Released to solid reviews, it was certified gold in the US. "Rock Steady" was a hit written by Bryan Adams and Gretchen Peters in 1995. The song was written as a duet with Bryan Adams and Bonnie Raitt for her Road Tested tour, which also became one of her albums. The original demo version of the song appears on Adams' 1996 single "Let's Make a Night to Remember". For her next studio album, Raitt hired Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake as her producers. "I loved working with Don Was but I wanted to give myself and my fans a stretch and do something different," Raitt stated. Her work with Froom and Blake was released on Fundamental in 1998. 2000–2007 In March 2000, Raitt was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Silver Lining was released in 2002. In the US, it reached number 13 on the Billboard chart and was later certified Gold. It contains the singles "I Can't Help You Now", "Time of Our Lives", and the title track. All three singles charted within the top 40 of the US Adult Contemporary chart. On March 19, 2002, Bonnie Raitt received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to the recording industry, located at 1750 N. Vine Street. In 2003 Capitol Records released the compilation album The Best of Bonnie Raitt. It contains songs from her prior Capitol albums from 1989 to 2002 including Nick of Time, Luck of the Draw, Longing in Their Hearts, Road Tested, Fundamental, and Silver Lining. Raitt was featured on the album True Love by Toots and the Maytals, which won the Grammy Award in 2004 for Best Reggae Album. Souls Alike was released in September 2005. In the US, it reached the top 20 on the Billboard chart. It contains the singles "I Will Not Be Broken" and "I Don't Want Anything to Change", which both charted in the top 40 of the US Adult Contemporary chart. In 2006, she released the live DVD/CD Bonnie Raitt and Friends, which was filmed as part of the critically acclaimed VH1 Classic Decades Rock Live! concert series, featuring special guests Keb' Mo', Alison Krauss, Ben Harper, Jon Cleary, and Norah Jones. The DVD was released by Capitol Records on August 15. Bonnie Raitt and Friends, which was recorded live in Atlantic City, NJ on September 30, 2005, features never-before-seen performance and interview footage, including four duets not included in the VH1 Classic broadcast of the concert. The accompanying CD features 11 tracks, including the radio single "Two Lights in the Nighttime" (featuring Ben Harper). In 2007, Raitt contributed to Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino. With Jon Cleary, she sang a medley of "I'm in Love Again" and "All by Myself" by Fats Domino. Raitt is interviewed on screen and appears in performance footage in the 2005 documentary film Make It Funky!, which presents a history of New Orleans music and its influence on rhythm and blues, rock and roll, funk and jazz. In the film, Raitt performs "What is Success" with Allen Toussaint and band, a song he wrote and that Raitt included on her 1974 album Streetlights. 2008–present Raitt appeared on the June 7, 2008 broadcast of Garrison Keillor's radio program A Prairie Home Companion. She performed two blues songs with Keb' Mo': "No Getting Over You" and "There Ain't Nothin' in Ramblin'". Raitt also sang "Dimming of the Day" with Richard Thompson. This show, along with another one with Raitt and her band in October 2006, is archived on the Prairie Home Companion website. Raitt appeared in the 2011 documentary Reggae Got Soul: The Story of Toots and the Maytals, which was featured on the BBC and described as "The untold story of one of the most influential artists ever to come out of Jamaica". In February 2012, Raitt performed a duet with Alicia Keys at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards in 2012 honoring Etta James. In April 2012, Raitt released her first studio album since 2005, entitled Slipstream. It charted at Number 6 on the US Billboard 200 chart marking her first top ten album since 1994's Longing in Their Hearts. The album was described as "one of the best of her 40-year career" by American Songwriter magazine. In September 2012, Raitt was featured in a campaign called "30 Songs / 30 Days" to support Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, a multi-platform media project inspired by a project outlined in a book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. In 2013, she appeared on Foy Vance's album Joy of Nothing. On May 30, 2015, Leon Russell, Bonnie Raitt and Ivan Neville gave a performance at The Canyon Club in Agoura Hills, California to raise cash for Marty Grebb who was battling cancer. Grebb had played on some of their albums. In February 2016, Raitt released her seventeenth studio album Dig In Deep. The album charted at number 11 on the US Billboard 200 chart and received favorable reviews. The album features the single "Gypsy in Me" as well as a cover of the INXS song "Need You Tonight". Raitt cancelled the first leg of her 2018 spring-summer touring schedule due to a recently discovered medical issue requiring surgical intervention. She reported that a "full recovery" is expected and that she planned to resume touring with already-scheduled dates in June 2018. Drug and alcohol use and recovery Raitt used alcohol and drugs, but began psychotherapy and joined Alcoholics Anonymous in the late 1980s. "I thought I had to live that partying lifestyle in order to be authentic," she said, "but in fact if you keep it up too long, all you're going to be is sloppy or dead." She became clean in 1987. She has credited Stevie Ray Vaughan for breaking her substance abuse, saying that what gave her the courage to admit her alcohol problem and stop drinking was seeing that Stevie Ray Vaughan was an even better musician when sober. She has also said that she stopped because she realized that the "late night life" was not working for her. In 1989, she said, "I really feel like some angels have been carrying me around. I just have more focus and more discipline, and consequently more self-respect." Personal life Raitt has taken sabbaticals, including after the deaths of her parents, brother, and best friend. She has said "When I went through a lot of loss, I took a hiatus." Raitt and actor Michael O'Keefe were married on April 27, 1991. They announced their divorce on November 9, 1999, with a causal factor appearing to be that their careers caused considerable time apart. Singer and guitarist David Crosby has said that Raitt is his favorite singer of all time. Political activism Raitt's political involvement goes back to the early 1970s. Her 1972 album Give It Up had a dedication "to the people of North Vietnam ..." printed on the back. Raitt's web site urges fans to learn more about preserving the environment. She was a founding member of Musicians United for Safe Energy in 1979 and a catalyst for the larger anti-nuclear movement, becoming involved with groups like the Abalone Alliance and Alliance for Survival. In 1994 at the urging of Dick Waterman, Raitt funded the replacement of a headstone for one of her mentors, blues guitarist Fred McDowell through the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund. Raitt later financed memorial headstones in Mississippi for musicians Memphis Minnie, Sam Chatmon, and Tommy Johnson again with the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund. In 2002, Raitt signed on as an official supporter of Little Kids Rock, a nonprofit organization that provides free musical instruments and free lessons to children in public schools throughout the U.S. She has visited children in the program and sits on the organization's board of directors as an honorary member. At the Stockholm Jazz Festival in July 2004, Raitt dedicated a performance of "Your Good Thing (Is About to End)", from her 1979 album The Glow, to sitting (and later re-elected) U.S. President George W. Bush. She was quoted as saying "We're gonna sing this for George Bush because he's out of here, people!". In 2008, Raitt donated a song to the Aid Still Required's CD to assist with relief efforts in Southeast Asia from the 2004 tsunami. Raitt worked with Reverb, a non-profit environmental organization, for her 2005 fall/winter and 2006 spring/summer/fall tours. Raitt is part of the No Nukes group, which opposes the expansion of nuclear power. In 2007, No Nukes recorded a music video of a new version of the Buffalo Springfield song "For What It's Worth". During the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Raitt, along with Jackson Browne and bassist James "Hutch" Hutchinson, performed at campaign appearances for candidate John Edwards. During the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, Raitt endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Discography Bonnie Raitt (1971) Give It Up (1972) Takin' My Time (1973) Streetlights (1974) Home Plate (1975) Sweet Forgiveness (1977) The Glow (1979) Green Light (1982) Nine Lives (1986) Nick of Time (1989) Luck of the Draw (1991) Longing in Their Hearts (1994) Fundamental (1998) Silver Lining (2002) Souls Alike (2005) Slipstream (2012) Dig In Deep (2016) Just Like That... (2022) Guitar Raitt's principal touring guitar is a customized Fender Stratocaster that she nicknamed Brownie. This became the basis for a signature model in 1996. Raitt was the first female musician to receive a signature Fender line. Awards Grammy Awards \|- \| 1980 \|"You're Gonna Get What's Coming" \|rowspan="3"\|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \| 1983 \|"Green Light" \| \|- \| 1987 \|"No Way to Treat a Lady" \| \|- \|rowspan="4"\| 1990 \|rowspan="2"\|Nick of Time \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"Nick of Time" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"I'm in the Mood" (with John Lee Hooker) \|Best Traditional Blues Recording \| \|- \|rowspan="6"\| 1992 \|Luck of the Draw \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|rowspan="2"\|"Something to Talk About" \|Record of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \| "Luck of the Draw" \| Best Rock Vocal Solo Performance \| \|- \|"Good Man, Good Woman" \|Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocal \| \|- \|Bonnie Raitt \|MusiCares Person of the Year \| \|- \|rowspan="5"\| 1995 \|rowspan="2"\|Longing in Their Hearts \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|Best Pop Vocal Album \| \|- \|rowspan="2"\|"Love Sneakin' Up On You" \|Record of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"Longing in Their Hearts" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|1996 \|"You Got It" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|rowspan="3"\|1997 \|Road Tested \|Best Rock Album \| \|- \|"Burning Down the House" \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"SRV Shuffle" \|Best Rock Instrumental Performance \| \|- \| 1999 \|"Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" (with Jackson Browne) \|Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals \| \|- \| 2003 \|"Gnawin' on It" \|rowspan="2"\|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \| 2004 \| "Time of Our Lives" \| \|- \| 2006 \|"I Will Not Be Broken" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|2013 \|Slipstream \|Best Americana Album \| \|- \|2022 \|Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award \|Herself \| \|} : Not a Grammy Award, but awarded by The Recording Academy Americana Music Honors and Awards \|- \|2012 \|Herself \|Lifetime Achievement Award for Performance \| \|- \|2016 \|Herself \|Artist of the Year \| \|} Rock and Roll Hall of Fame \|- \|2000 \|Herself \|Hall of Fame induction \| \|} Other awards In 1991, Raitt was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee College of Music. In 1997 Raitt was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal. In 2017, Raitt was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Guitar Museum. In 2018, Raitt received the People's Voice Award from the Folk Alliance International Awards in recognition of her activism. References Citations General references External links Fansite: Bonnie's Pride and Joy [ Allmusic Guide Profile] 1949 births Living people American alternative country singers American women country singers American country singer-songwriters American anti–nuclear power activists American blues guitarists American blues pianists American women pianists American blues singer-songwriters American women rock singers American women singer-songwriters American folk rock musicians American feminists American folk singers American humanitarians Women humanitarians Record producers from California American rock songwriters American women activists Blues rock musicians Electric blues musicians Feminist musicians Fingerstyle guitarists Grammy Award winners Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Slide guitarists Proponents of Christian feminism Radcliffe College alumni Capitol Records artists Warner Music Group artists Warner Records artists American people of Scottish descent Activists from California Country musicians from California Guitarists from California Musicians from Burbank, California Singer-songwriters from California 21st-century American pianists 20th-century American women singers 21st-century American women singers 20th-century American pianists American women record producers 20th-century American women guitarists 20th-century American guitarists 21st-century American women guitarists 21st-century American guitarists Proper Records artists 20th-century American singers 21st-century American singers	true	[ "À La Bien Mix Party (; meaning \"quietly\") is a compilation series by DJ Hamida mixing various acts but mainly from North Africa and other African acts in various genres of music, promoting what he calls \"Meknessi Style\".\n\nThe 2014 edition of the series, so far the most successful of the series, reached number 10 on SNEP, the official French Albums Chart, also charting in Belgium's Ultratop chart, with \"Déconnectés\" becoming the official debut release from the album. Five tracks from the album À la bien mix party have made it to the French SNEP Top 200 Singles Chart. DJ Hamida also engaged in a tour in support of the album release.\n\nÀ la bien mix party 2011\nFull title: DJ Hamida presente À la bien mix party 2011\nTracks: 43\nDate released: June 2011\nRecord label: DJ Hamida\n\nÀ la bien mix party 2012\nTracks: 37\nDate released: 24 June 2012\nRecord label: Dj Hamida\n\nÀ la bien mix party 2013\nFull title: DJ Hamida presente À la bien mix party 2013\nTracks: 32\nDate released: 12 July 2013\nRecord label: Meknessityle\n\nÀ la bien mix party 2014\nTracks: 30\nDate released: 2 June 2014\nRecord label: SIX-O-NINE / MUSICAST\nCharts\n\nCharting singles from the album\n\nMix party 2015\n\nAlso known as DJ Hamida Mix party 2015\nTracks: 34\nDate released: 25 May 2014\nRecord label: Definite Pop \nCharts\n\nCharting singles from the album\n\nMix party 2016\nAlso known as DJ Hamida Mix party 2016\nTracks: 34\nDate released: 25 May 2014\nRecord label: Definite Pop \nCharts\n\nÀ la bien Mix Party 2017\nTracks: 22\nDate released: 19 May 2017\nRecord label: Meknessi Style Records / Musicast\nCharts\n\nÀ la bien Mix Party 2018\nTracks: 21\nDate released: 22 June 2018\nRecord label: Meknessi Style Records\nCharts\n\nÀ la bien Mix Party 2019\nTracks: 20\nDate released: 5 July 2019\nRecord label: Meknessi Style Records\nCharts\n\nÀ la bien Mix Party 2020\nTracks: 24\nDate released: 31 July 2020\nRecord label: Believe / Meknessi Style Records\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nDJ Hamida Facebook\nDJ Hamida YouTube\n\nCompilation album series", "Swimming With Sharks Records is an independent record label founded in Dallas, Texas by drummer Noah \"Shark\" Robertson in 2011.\n\nRoster\n Eye of the Enemy (Australia)\n Ritual of Odds (Greece)\n Hellbent (US)\n\nHistory\n\nNoah Robertson started Swimming With Sharks Records in 2011, while drumming for The Browning (Century Media Records/Earache Records).\n\n2011\n\nThe first official release from the label was the Swimming With Sharks Metal Compilation Volume 1, on July 20, 2011.\n\nJuly 28, 2011 the label released the 'Oklahoma' EP from the band Commotio Cordis, out of Oklahoma City.\n\nJuly 31, 2011, in conjunction with the Total Deathcore company, the label released 4 tracks off the 'Fragments' album from the band, Swimming With Sharks from Coffs Harbour, Australia. The album sampler was available only during Shark Week.\n\nOctober 1, 2011 the label released the 'Validations' EP from the band Chapel Hill from Oklahoma.\n\nOctober 31, 2011 the label released the 'Invasion' EP, from the band The Brothers Highhorse out of Dallas, Texas, recorded by D. Braxton Henry (Devourment, Drowning Pool, A Dozen Furies).\n\nOctober 31, 2011 the label also released 'Armed To The Teeth With Jellybeans' from the band Blindfolded and Led To The Woods from New Zealand. The band is known for being featured in a viral video entitled \"Technical Death Metal Band On Kids TV Show\" in which the band is featured on The Erin Simpson Show. The video has been featured on Loudwire, Reddit, Ebaum's World, and more.\n\n2012\n\nJanuary 1, 2012 the label released the 'At War With The Dead' album from the band Awaiting The Apocalypse from California.\n\nJanuary 5, 2012 the label announced the signing of Jahmbi from California. On February 22, 2012 the label released their 'Demetalizer' album.\n\nJanuary 31, 2012 the label released the 'Lame Life' EP from the Nintendocore band, The Sharks Megabyte.\n\nFebruary 2, 2012 the label announced the signing of the band, Mouth of the Serpent from California.\n\nFebruary 24, 2012 the label released the 'Manifest' album from Mouth of the Serpent featuring the artwork of artist, Tony Koehl (The Black Dahlia Murder, Job For A Cowboy, Waking the Cadaver).\n\nFebruary 12, 2012 the label announced the signing of the band, Aechoes from Las Vegas, Nevada. On March 12, 2012 the label released their album 'The Human Condition', recorded by Daniel Braunstein and Diego Farias from the band, Volumes. The song \"VDSBTSD\" features a guest guitar solo from, Chris Storey from All Shall Perish. The song \"Goodbye\" features guitar work from Travis Montgomery from Threat Signal. The song \"Tears of Norris\" features a piano composition by Diego Farias from Volumes\n\nFebruary 12, 2012 the label released the 'Swimming With Sharks Metal Compilation Volume 2', featuring a track from the band Feed Her To The Sharks from Australia among many others.\n\nFebruary 24, 2012 the label released a 2-song EP from the band, Thy Devourer from New Orleans, entitled 'Thy Devourer'.\n\nFebruary 25, 2012 the label released the 'Treachery' EP from Bow Prometheus from Dallas, Texas, recorded by Jonny McBee from The Browning. The song \"False Creation\" features guest vocals from Jonny McBee.\n\nFebruary 28, 2012 the label released the single \"Born in Blood\" from the band, Thy Devourer.\n\nMarch 26, 2012 the label announced the signing of The Vile Impurity from Springfield, Illinois.\n\nApril 7, 2012 the label announced the signing of Above This from Norfolk, Virginia, and released the single \"Joker Smoker\" from the '7L7' album.\n\nApril 8, 2012, Easter Sunday, the label released the 'Anathema' album from The Vile Impurity, recorded at Audio Aggregate Studios in Des Moines, Iowa with Engineer/Producer Dustin Miller, who has recorded albums for well-known Record Labels such as Metal Blade Records, Eulogy Records, Prosthetic Records, Trust-kill Records, Mediaskare Records and Sumerian Records.\n\nApril 29, 2012 the label announced the signing of the band Laconic from Phoenix, Arizona. The same day the label released their 'For The Life Of One' album, produced by Ben Schigel (Chimaira, Drowning Pool, Breaking Benjamin)\n\nMay 12, 2012 the label announced the signing of the band Take This City from Houston, Texas. The same day the label released the official music video for the band's single, \"We're Only Human\" directed by Albert Gonzales, video producer and touring bassist for A Bullet For Pretty Boy.\n\nJune 5, 2012 the label announced the signing of For Fear Itself from Baltimore, Maryland. The same day the label released their single \"Deecohder\".\n\nJune 6, 2012 the label released the 'Original Demo' of The Browning.\n\nJune 9, 2012 the label released the 'Swimming With Sharks Metal Compilation Volume 3'.\n\nDecember 13, 2012 the label released the 'Apotheosis' album from Dei Aemeth from Dallas, Texas, featuring Noah \"Shark\" Robertson on drums.\n\n2013\n\nFebruary 27, 2013 the label announced the signing of Forced Abortion. The same day the label released their 'Violent Monkey Orgy' album.\n\nMay 13, 2013 the label announced the signing of The Terrigen Mist from Atlanta, Georgia, and released their album, 'Leveyan'.\n\nAugust 22, 2013 the label released 'The Yellowbricks' by The Yellowbricks from Kansas City featuring Noah \"Shark\" Robertson on drums.\n\n2014\n\nJanuary 10, 2014 the label released the 'Swimming With Sharks Metal Compilation Volume 4'.\n\nApril 13, 2014 the band announced the signing of 'The Conjuration', a one-man project, and released the 'Surreal' album.\n\nApril 18, 2014 the label announced the signing of Hellbent from Alabama, and released their 'Southern Brutality' album.\n\nApril 27, 2014 the label released the 'Everfall' EP from the band Everfall from Estonia.\n\nMay 12, 2014 the label announced the signing of Eye of the Enemy from Australia. The label released 'The Vengeance Paradox' album and their 'Weight of Redemption' album. Eye of the Enemy recently toured Asia, as support for Fleshgod Apocalypse.\n\n2015\n\nJanuary 13, 2015 the label released 'Don't Mess With TexXxas' by XSPONGEXCOREx.\n\nAugust 15, 2015 the label released the 'Swimming With Sharks Metal Compilation Volume 5'.\n\nMarch 13, 2015 the label released 'There Will Be Violence' from Hellbent.\n\nAugust 17, 2015 the label released 'Illuminati Shit' by Forced Abortion.\n\nAugust 17, 2015 the label released the 'Swimming With Sharks Records Metal Compilation Volume 6'.\n\nSeptember 24, 2015 the label released 'The Fear We Create' by The Periwinkle Massacre.\n\n2017\n\nSwimming With Sharks Records signed Ritual of Odds from Patras, Greece. 'Ritual of 9' was released on Feb. 3rd, 2017.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nAmerican independent record labels\nHeavy metal record labels\nDeath metal record labels\nGrindcore record labels\nRecord labels established in 1990" ]
[ "Bonnie Raitt", "1970-1976", "Did Bonnie Raitt release any albums in that period ?", "released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971.", "How was the album received by the critics ?", "The album was warmly received by the music press,", "Which record label released the album ?", "Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album," ]	C_684cefc6b9f7453ea706836155fb83f5_1	Who did she play with at that time ?	4	Who did Bonnie Raitt play with during 1971?	Bonnie Raitt	In the fall of 1970, She played with her brother David on stand up Bass with Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Philly Folk Festival as well as Opening for John Hammond at the Gaslight Cafe in New York, she was seen by a reporter from Newsweek, who began to spread the word about her performance. Scouts from major record companies were soon attending her shows to watch her play. She eventually accepted an offer from Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971. The album was warmly received by the music press, with many writers praising her skills as an interpreter and as a bottleneck guitarist; at the time, few women in popular music had strong reputations as guitarists. While admired by those who saw her perform, and respected by her peers, Raitt gained little public acclaim for her work. Her critical stature continued to grow but record sales remained modest. Her second album, Give It Up, was released in 1972 to universal "acclaim"; though many critics still regard it as her best work, it did not change her commercial fortunes. 1973's Takin' My Time was also met with critical acclaim, but these notices were not matched by the sales. Raitt was beginning to receive greater press coverage, including a 1975 cover story for Rolling Stone, but with 1974's Streetlights, reviews for her work were becoming increasingly mixed. By now, Raitt was already experimenting with different producers and different styles, and she began to adopt a more mainstream sound that continued through 1975's Home Plate. In 1976, Raitt made an appearance on Warren Zevon's eponymous album with his friend Jackson Browne and Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. CANNOTANSWER	She played with her brother David on stand up Bass with Mississippi Fred McDowell	Bonnie Lynn Raitt (; born November 8, 1949) is an American blues singer, guitarist, songwriter, and activist. During the 1970s, Raitt released a series of roots-influenced albums that incorporated elements of blues, rock, folk, and country. She was also a frequent session player and collaborator with other artists, including Warren Zevon, Little Feat, Jackson Browne, The Pointer Sisters, John Prine and Leon Russell. In 1989, after several years of critical acclaim but little commercial success, she had a major hit with the album Nick of Time. The following two albums, Luck of the Draw (1991) and Longing in Their Hearts (1994), were multimillion sellers, generating several hit singles, including "Something to Talk About", "Love Sneakin' Up On You", and the ballad "I Can't Make You Love Me" (with Bruce Hornsby on piano). Raitt has received ten competitive Grammy Awards as well as a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. She is listed as number 50 in Rolling Stones list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" and number 89 on the magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". Australian country music artist Graeme Connors has said, "Bonnie Raitt does something with a lyric no one else can do; she bends it and twists it right into your heart." Early life Bonnie Lynn Raitt was born on November 8, 1949, in Burbank, California. Her mother, Marge Goddard (née Haydock), was a pianist, while her father, John Raitt, was an actor in musical productions such as Oklahoma! and The Pajama Game. Raitt is of Scottish ancestry; her ancestors constructed Rait Castle near Nairn. As a child, Raitt would often play with her two brothers, Steve and David, and was a self-described tomboy. John Raitt's job as a theater actor meant Bonnie did not interact with him as much as she would have liked. Raitt grew to resent her mother, as she became the main authority figure of the household whenever John was away. Raitt's musically inclined parents had a strong influence on her life. From a young age, she and her brothers were encouraged to pursue music. At first, Raitt played the piano, but was intimidated by her mother's abilities. She instead began playing a Stella guitar, which she received as a Christmas gift in 1957 at the age of eight. Raitt did not take lessons, and instead took influence from the American folk music revival of the 1950s. She was also influenced by the beatnik movement, stating: "It represented my whole belief ... I'd grow my hair real long so I looked like a beatnik." From ages eight through fifteen, Raitt and her brothers attended a summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains called Camp Regis. It was there where Raitt learned of her musical talents, when camp counselors would ask her to play in front of the campers. Learning how to play songs from folk albums then became a hobby for Raitt. As a teenager, Raitt was self-conscious about her weight and her freckles, and saw music as an escape from reality. "That was my saving grace. I just sat in my room and played my guitar" said Raitt. After graduating from Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1967, Raitt entered Radcliffe College of Harvard University, majoring in Social Relations and African studies. She said her "plan was to travel to Tanzania, where President Julius Nyerere was creating a government based on democracy and socialism". She was the lead singer in a campus music group called the "Revolutionary Music Collective" founded by songwriter Bob Telson which played for striking Harvard students during the Student strike of 1970. Raitt became friends with blues promoter Dick Waterman. During her second year of college, Raitt left school for a semester and moved to Philadelphia with Waterman and other local musicians. Raitt said it was an "opportunity that changed everything." Career 1970–1976 In the summer of 1970, she played with her brother David on stand-up bass with Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Philly Folk Festival as well as opening for John Hammond at the Gaslight Cafe in New York, she was seen by a reporter from Newsweek, who began to spread the word about her performance. Scouts from major record companies were soon attending her shows to watch her play. She eventually accepted an offer from Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971. The album was warmly received by the music press, with many writers praising her skills as an interpreter and as a bottleneck guitarist; at the time, few women in popular music had strong reputations as guitarists. While admired by those who saw her perform, and respected by her peers, Raitt gained little public acclaim for her work. Her critical stature continued to grow but record sales remained modest. Her second album, Give It Up, was released in 1972 to positive reviews. One journalist described the album as "an excellent set" and "established the artist as an inventive and sympathetic interpreter". However, it did not change her commercial fortunes. 1973's Takin' My Time was also met with critical acclaim, but these notices were not matched by the sales. Raitt began to receive greater press coverage, including a 1975 cover story for Rolling Stone, but with 1974's Streetlights, reviews for her work were becoming increasingly mixed. By this point, Raitt was already experimenting with different producers and different styles, and she began to adopt a more mainstream sound that continued through 1975's Home Plate. In 1976, Raitt made an appearance on Warren Zevon's eponymous album. 1977–1988 1977's Sweet Forgiveness album gave Raitt her first commercial breakthrough, when it yielded a hit single in her remake of "Runaway." Recast as a heavy rhythm and blues recording based on a rhythmic groove inspired by Al Green, Raitt's version of "Runaway" was disparaged by many critics. However, the song's commercial success prompted a bidding war for Raitt between Warner Bros. and Columbia Records. "There was this big Columbia–Warner war going on at the time", recalled Raitt in a 1990 interview. "James Taylor had just left Warner Bros. and made a big album for Columbia... And then, Warner signed Paul Simon away from Columbia, and they didn't want me to have a hit record for Columbia – no matter what! So, I renegotiated my contract, and they basically matched Columbia's offer. Frankly the deal was a really big deal." Warner Brothers held higher expectations for Raitt's next album, The Glow, in 1979, but it was released to poor reviews as well as modest sales. Raitt had one commercial success in 1979 when she helped organize the five Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The shows spawned the three-record gold album No Nukes, as well as a Warner Brothers feature film of the same name. The shows featured co-founders Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, John Hall, and Raitt as well as Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Doobie Brothers, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Gil Scott-Heron, and others. In 1980, she appeared as herself in the Paramount film Urban Cowboy where she sang "Don't It Make You Wanna Dance." For her next record, 1982's Green Light, Raitt made a conscious attempt to revisit the sound of her earlier records. However, to her surprise, many of her peers and the media compared her new sound to the burgeoning new wave movement. The album received her strongest reviews in years, but her sales did not improve and this had a severe impact on her relationship with Warner Brothers. Tongue and Groove and release from Warner Brothers In 1983, Raitt was finishing work on her follow-up album, Tongue and Groove. The day after mastering was completed on Tongue & Groove, the record company dropped Raitt from its roster, not being happy with her commercial performance up to that point. The album was shelved and not released, and Raitt was left without a record contract. At this time Raitt was also struggling with alcohol and drug abuse problems. Despite her personal and professional problems, Raitt continued to tour and participate in political activism. In 1985, she sang and appeared in the video of "Sun City", the anti-apartheid song written and produced by guitarist Steven Van Zandt. Along with her participation in Farm Aid and Amnesty International concerts, Raitt traveled to Moscow, Russia in 1987 to participate in the first joint Soviet/American Peace Concert, later shown on the Showtime cable network. Also in 1987, Raitt organized a benefit in Los Angeles for Countdown '87 to Stop Contra Aid. The benefit featured herself, along with Don Henley, Herbie Hancock, and others. Two years after being dropped from Warner Brothers Records, the label notified Raitt of their plans to release the Tongue and Groove album. "I said it wasn't really fair," recalled Raitt. "I think at this point they felt kind of bad. I mean, I was out there touring on my savings to keep my name up, and my ability to draw was less and less. So they agreed to let me go in and recut half of it, and that's when it came out as Nine Lives." A critical and commercial disappointment, Nine Lives, released in 1986, was Raitt's last new recording for Warner Brothers. In late 1987, Raitt joined singers k.d. lang and Jennifer Warnes as female background vocalists for Roy Orbison's television special, Roy Orbison and Friends, A Black and White Night. Following this highly acclaimed broadcast, Raitt began working on new material. By then, she was clean and sober, having resolved her problems with substance abuse. She later credited Stevie Ray Vaughan for his help in a Minnesota State Fair concert the night after Vaughan's 1990 death. During this time, Raitt considered signing with the Prince-owned Paisley Park Records, but they could not come to an agreement and negotiations fell through. Instead, she began recording a bluesy mix of pop and rock songs under the production guidance of Don Was at Capitol Records. Raitt had met Was through Hal Wilner, who was putting together Stay Awake, a tribute album to Disney music for A&M. Was and Wilner both wanted Raitt to sing lead on an adult-contemporary arrangement created by Was for "Baby Mine", the lullaby from Dumbo. Raitt was very pleased with the sessions, and she asked Was to produce her next album. 1989–1999: Commercial breakthrough After working with Was on the Stay Awake album, Raitt's management, Gold Mountain, approached numerous labels about a new record deal and found interest from Capitol Records. Raitt was signed to Capitol by A&R executive Tim Devine. With her first Capitol Records release, and after nearly twenty years in the business, Raitt achieved commercial success with Nick of Time, her tenth overall album of her career. Released in the spring of 1989, Nick of Time went to number one on the U.S. album chart following Raitt's Grammy sweep in early 1990. This album has also been voted number 230 in the Rolling Stone list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Raitt later stated that her 10th try was "my first sober album." At the same time, Raitt received a fourth Grammy Award for her duet "I'm in the Mood" with John Lee Hooker on his album The Healer. Nick of Time was also the first of many of her recordings to feature her longtime rhythm section of Ricky Fataar and James "Hutch" Hutchinson (although previously Fataar had played on her Green Light album and Hutchinson had worked on Nine Lives), both of whom continue to record and tour with her. Since its release in 1989, Nick of Time has currently sold over five million copies in the US alone. Raitt followed up this success with three more Grammy Awards for her next album, 1991's Luck of the Draw, which sold seven million copies in the United States. Three years later, in 1994, she added two more Grammys with her album Longing in Their Hearts, her second number one album, that sold two million copies in the US. Raitt's collaboration with Don Was amicably came to an end with 1995's live release Road Tested. Released to solid reviews, it was certified gold in the US. "Rock Steady" was a hit written by Bryan Adams and Gretchen Peters in 1995. The song was written as a duet with Bryan Adams and Bonnie Raitt for her Road Tested tour, which also became one of her albums. The original demo version of the song appears on Adams' 1996 single "Let's Make a Night to Remember". For her next studio album, Raitt hired Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake as her producers. "I loved working with Don Was but I wanted to give myself and my fans a stretch and do something different," Raitt stated. Her work with Froom and Blake was released on Fundamental in 1998. 2000–2007 In March 2000, Raitt was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Silver Lining was released in 2002. In the US, it reached number 13 on the Billboard chart and was later certified Gold. It contains the singles "I Can't Help You Now", "Time of Our Lives", and the title track. All three singles charted within the top 40 of the US Adult Contemporary chart. On March 19, 2002, Bonnie Raitt received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to the recording industry, located at 1750 N. Vine Street. In 2003 Capitol Records released the compilation album The Best of Bonnie Raitt. It contains songs from her prior Capitol albums from 1989 to 2002 including Nick of Time, Luck of the Draw, Longing in Their Hearts, Road Tested, Fundamental, and Silver Lining. Raitt was featured on the album True Love by Toots and the Maytals, which won the Grammy Award in 2004 for Best Reggae Album. Souls Alike was released in September 2005. In the US, it reached the top 20 on the Billboard chart. It contains the singles "I Will Not Be Broken" and "I Don't Want Anything to Change", which both charted in the top 40 of the US Adult Contemporary chart. In 2006, she released the live DVD/CD Bonnie Raitt and Friends, which was filmed as part of the critically acclaimed VH1 Classic Decades Rock Live! concert series, featuring special guests Keb' Mo', Alison Krauss, Ben Harper, Jon Cleary, and Norah Jones. The DVD was released by Capitol Records on August 15. Bonnie Raitt and Friends, which was recorded live in Atlantic City, NJ on September 30, 2005, features never-before-seen performance and interview footage, including four duets not included in the VH1 Classic broadcast of the concert. The accompanying CD features 11 tracks, including the radio single "Two Lights in the Nighttime" (featuring Ben Harper). In 2007, Raitt contributed to Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino. With Jon Cleary, she sang a medley of "I'm in Love Again" and "All by Myself" by Fats Domino. Raitt is interviewed on screen and appears in performance footage in the 2005 documentary film Make It Funky!, which presents a history of New Orleans music and its influence on rhythm and blues, rock and roll, funk and jazz. In the film, Raitt performs "What is Success" with Allen Toussaint and band, a song he wrote and that Raitt included on her 1974 album Streetlights. 2008–present Raitt appeared on the June 7, 2008 broadcast of Garrison Keillor's radio program A Prairie Home Companion. She performed two blues songs with Keb' Mo': "No Getting Over You" and "There Ain't Nothin' in Ramblin'". Raitt also sang "Dimming of the Day" with Richard Thompson. This show, along with another one with Raitt and her band in October 2006, is archived on the Prairie Home Companion website. Raitt appeared in the 2011 documentary Reggae Got Soul: The Story of Toots and the Maytals, which was featured on the BBC and described as "The untold story of one of the most influential artists ever to come out of Jamaica". In February 2012, Raitt performed a duet with Alicia Keys at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards in 2012 honoring Etta James. In April 2012, Raitt released her first studio album since 2005, entitled Slipstream. It charted at Number 6 on the US Billboard 200 chart marking her first top ten album since 1994's Longing in Their Hearts. The album was described as "one of the best of her 40-year career" by American Songwriter magazine. In September 2012, Raitt was featured in a campaign called "30 Songs / 30 Days" to support Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, a multi-platform media project inspired by a project outlined in a book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. In 2013, she appeared on Foy Vance's album Joy of Nothing. On May 30, 2015, Leon Russell, Bonnie Raitt and Ivan Neville gave a performance at The Canyon Club in Agoura Hills, California to raise cash for Marty Grebb who was battling cancer. Grebb had played on some of their albums. In February 2016, Raitt released her seventeenth studio album Dig In Deep. The album charted at number 11 on the US Billboard 200 chart and received favorable reviews. The album features the single "Gypsy in Me" as well as a cover of the INXS song "Need You Tonight". Raitt cancelled the first leg of her 2018 spring-summer touring schedule due to a recently discovered medical issue requiring surgical intervention. She reported that a "full recovery" is expected and that she planned to resume touring with already-scheduled dates in June 2018. Drug and alcohol use and recovery Raitt used alcohol and drugs, but began psychotherapy and joined Alcoholics Anonymous in the late 1980s. "I thought I had to live that partying lifestyle in order to be authentic," she said, "but in fact if you keep it up too long, all you're going to be is sloppy or dead." She became clean in 1987. She has credited Stevie Ray Vaughan for breaking her substance abuse, saying that what gave her the courage to admit her alcohol problem and stop drinking was seeing that Stevie Ray Vaughan was an even better musician when sober. She has also said that she stopped because she realized that the "late night life" was not working for her. In 1989, she said, "I really feel like some angels have been carrying me around. I just have more focus and more discipline, and consequently more self-respect." Personal life Raitt has taken sabbaticals, including after the deaths of her parents, brother, and best friend. She has said "When I went through a lot of loss, I took a hiatus." Raitt and actor Michael O'Keefe were married on April 27, 1991. They announced their divorce on November 9, 1999, with a causal factor appearing to be that their careers caused considerable time apart. Singer and guitarist David Crosby has said that Raitt is his favorite singer of all time. Political activism Raitt's political involvement goes back to the early 1970s. Her 1972 album Give It Up had a dedication "to the people of North Vietnam ..." printed on the back. Raitt's web site urges fans to learn more about preserving the environment. She was a founding member of Musicians United for Safe Energy in 1979 and a catalyst for the larger anti-nuclear movement, becoming involved with groups like the Abalone Alliance and Alliance for Survival. In 1994 at the urging of Dick Waterman, Raitt funded the replacement of a headstone for one of her mentors, blues guitarist Fred McDowell through the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund. Raitt later financed memorial headstones in Mississippi for musicians Memphis Minnie, Sam Chatmon, and Tommy Johnson again with the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund. In 2002, Raitt signed on as an official supporter of Little Kids Rock, a nonprofit organization that provides free musical instruments and free lessons to children in public schools throughout the U.S. She has visited children in the program and sits on the organization's board of directors as an honorary member. At the Stockholm Jazz Festival in July 2004, Raitt dedicated a performance of "Your Good Thing (Is About to End)", from her 1979 album The Glow, to sitting (and later re-elected) U.S. President George W. Bush. She was quoted as saying "We're gonna sing this for George Bush because he's out of here, people!". In 2008, Raitt donated a song to the Aid Still Required's CD to assist with relief efforts in Southeast Asia from the 2004 tsunami. Raitt worked with Reverb, a non-profit environmental organization, for her 2005 fall/winter and 2006 spring/summer/fall tours. Raitt is part of the No Nukes group, which opposes the expansion of nuclear power. In 2007, No Nukes recorded a music video of a new version of the Buffalo Springfield song "For What It's Worth". During the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Raitt, along with Jackson Browne and bassist James "Hutch" Hutchinson, performed at campaign appearances for candidate John Edwards. During the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, Raitt endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Discography Bonnie Raitt (1971) Give It Up (1972) Takin' My Time (1973) Streetlights (1974) Home Plate (1975) Sweet Forgiveness (1977) The Glow (1979) Green Light (1982) Nine Lives (1986) Nick of Time (1989) Luck of the Draw (1991) Longing in Their Hearts (1994) Fundamental (1998) Silver Lining (2002) Souls Alike (2005) Slipstream (2012) Dig In Deep (2016) Just Like That... (2022) Guitar Raitt's principal touring guitar is a customized Fender Stratocaster that she nicknamed Brownie. This became the basis for a signature model in 1996. Raitt was the first female musician to receive a signature Fender line. Awards Grammy Awards \|- \| 1980 \|"You're Gonna Get What's Coming" \|rowspan="3"\|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \| 1983 \|"Green Light" \| \|- \| 1987 \|"No Way to Treat a Lady" \| \|- \|rowspan="4"\| 1990 \|rowspan="2"\|Nick of Time \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"Nick of Time" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"I'm in the Mood" (with John Lee Hooker) \|Best Traditional Blues Recording \| \|- \|rowspan="6"\| 1992 \|Luck of the Draw \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|rowspan="2"\|"Something to Talk About" \|Record of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \| "Luck of the Draw" \| Best Rock Vocal Solo Performance \| \|- \|"Good Man, Good Woman" \|Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocal \| \|- \|Bonnie Raitt \|MusiCares Person of the Year \| \|- \|rowspan="5"\| 1995 \|rowspan="2"\|Longing in Their Hearts \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|Best Pop Vocal Album \| \|- \|rowspan="2"\|"Love Sneakin' Up On You" \|Record of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"Longing in Their Hearts" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|1996 \|"You Got It" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|rowspan="3"\|1997 \|Road Tested \|Best Rock Album \| \|- \|"Burning Down the House" \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"SRV Shuffle" \|Best Rock Instrumental Performance \| \|- \| 1999 \|"Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" (with Jackson Browne) \|Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals \| \|- \| 2003 \|"Gnawin' on It" \|rowspan="2"\|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \| 2004 \| "Time of Our Lives" \| \|- \| 2006 \|"I Will Not Be Broken" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|2013 \|Slipstream \|Best Americana Album \| \|- \|2022 \|Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award \|Herself \| \|} : Not a Grammy Award, but awarded by The Recording Academy Americana Music Honors and Awards \|- \|2012 \|Herself \|Lifetime Achievement Award for Performance \| \|- \|2016 \|Herself \|Artist of the Year \| \|} Rock and Roll Hall of Fame \|- \|2000 \|Herself \|Hall of Fame induction \| \|} Other awards In 1991, Raitt was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee College of Music. In 1997 Raitt was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal. In 2017, Raitt was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Guitar Museum. In 2018, Raitt received the People's Voice Award from the Folk Alliance International Awards in recognition of her activism. References Citations General references External links Fansite: Bonnie's Pride and Joy [ Allmusic Guide Profile] 1949 births Living people American alternative country singers American women country singers American country singer-songwriters American anti–nuclear power activists American blues guitarists American blues pianists American women pianists American blues singer-songwriters American women rock singers American women singer-songwriters American folk rock musicians American feminists American folk singers American humanitarians Women humanitarians Record producers from California American rock songwriters American women activists Blues rock musicians Electric blues musicians Feminist musicians Fingerstyle guitarists Grammy Award winners Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Slide guitarists Proponents of Christian feminism Radcliffe College alumni Capitol Records artists Warner Music Group artists Warner Records artists American people of Scottish descent Activists from California Country musicians from California Guitarists from California Musicians from Burbank, California Singer-songwriters from California 21st-century American pianists 20th-century American women singers 21st-century American women singers 20th-century American pianists American women record producers 20th-century American women guitarists 20th-century American guitarists 21st-century American women guitarists 21st-century American guitarists Proper Records artists 20th-century American singers 21st-century American singers	false	[ "Ester Vilhelmina Textorius (22 August 1883 – 13 February 1972) was a Swedish actress and opera singer, known for her comedic theater roles.\n\nEarly life and marriage\nEster Vilhelmina Pettersson was born in Västerås, Sweden, on 22 August 1883. In 1904 she married the actor Oskar Textorius \n(1864-1938).\n\nCareer\nTextorius started her acting career by answering an advertisement by theater leader Emil Hillberg, and made her stage debut in 1901 at Halmstad theater in Halmstad as Paula in the play Fri vilja. After studies with Hillberg and actress Josefina Gullberg, she worked for a few years at different theaters in the countryside. It was during these years that she had the opportunity to work with the famous Dramaten actor J. Gustaf Fredrikson (1832-1921). Her favorite part during these years was as Käthe in the play Gamla Heidelberg. At about this same time she also met her future husband.\n\nStockholm debut\nIn 1907, Textorius made her Stockholm debut in a farce at Djurgårdsteatern and also recorded three records for Lycrophon with recorded operetten. In 1909 and 1910 she worked with Anton Salmson at the newly opened Operett-teatern at Östermalm in Stockholm. And from 1911–18 she worked at Vasateatern. During these years she did a lot of operetten; even though successful, she never considered herself a good enough singer for such roles and later preferred speaking roles. She also played in a revue.\n\nIn 1911, the couple made their joint film debut in Anna Hofman-Uddgren's short film Stockholmsfrestelser. Textorius, however, never become an established actress and participated only in a handful of films, mostly comedic roles in the 1940s. By 1912 she had done some recordings for the label Odeon.\n\nBetween 1919 and 1925, the Textorius duo worked in Gothenburg, Ester mostly at Folkteatern, but they returned to Stockholm where her husband obtained a job as a director at Oscarsteatern and Vasateatern. Ester worked with the administration at the same time.\n\nIn 1939, Textorius became a widow and had her final stage performance in Pauline Brunius's play Kvinnorna at Dramaten.\n\nDeath and legacy\nTextorius died on 13 February 1972 in Stockholm, at the age of 88.\n\nFilmography\n\nReferences\n\n1883 births\n1972 deaths\nSwedish actresses\nPeople from Västerås\n20th-century Swedish women opera singers", "Mabel B. Holle [\"Holly\"] (March 21, 1920 – December 11, 2011) was an American infielder and outfielder who played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League during the season. Listed at , 125 lb, she batted and threw right-handed.\n\nMabel Holle was one of the sixty original players to join the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League for its inaugural season. Basically a line-drive hitter, she had a strong throwing arm and was a sure fielder at third base, center field and right field.\n\nBorn in Jacksonville, Illinois, Holle was one of four children into the family of Frederick and Kathryn Holle. She came from a baseball family, as her father was a semi-professional pitcher. She always liked to play sports with her brother and three sisters, spending most of her time outdoors. In those days girls and women could not play on their school and college teams, so she played baseball with the boys on town teams until Shirley Jameson, one of the first players who signed with the league, put her name in for the final tryout at Wrigley Field.\n\nHolle made the final cuts and was assigned to the South Bend Blue Sox, playing for them for more of the year before being relocated to the Kenosha Comets for a short period of time. At the beginning of the 1944 season, the league did not renew her contract and made her try out again with the rookies, but this time she did not make the cut. Nevertheless, she did not give up playing and signed a contract with the rival National Girls Baseball League of Chicago to play for the next two seasons.\n\nA graduated from MacMurray College in 1942, Holle started teaching physical education as a coach and athletic administrator in the Waukegan area schools for most of her 47-year professional career, retiring in 1990.\n\nSince 1988 she is part of Women in Baseball, a permanent display based at the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, which was unveiled to honor the entire All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. In 1993 she was inducted in the MacMurray Sports Hall of Fame, where was created an annual award in her honor that goes to the female athlete who exemplifies leadership in the classroom and the playing field.\n\nMabel Holle was a longtime resident of Lake Forest, Illinois, where she died after a long illness at the age of 91.\n\nCareer statistics\nBatting\n\nFielding\n\nSources\n\nAll-American Girls Professional Baseball League players\nKenosha Comets players\nSouth Bend Blue Sox players\nBaseball players from Illinois\nMacMurray College alumni\nSportspeople from Jacksonville, Illinois\nSportspeople from Lake Forest, Illinois\n1920 births\n2011 deaths\n21st-century American women" ]
[ "Bonnie Raitt", "1970-1976", "Did Bonnie Raitt release any albums in that period ?", "released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971.", "How was the album received by the critics ?", "The album was warmly received by the music press,", "Which record label released the album ?", "Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album,", "Who did she play with at that time ?", "She played with her brother David on stand up Bass with Mississippi Fred McDowell" ]	C_684cefc6b9f7453ea706836155fb83f5_1	Where did they play together ?	5	Where did Bonnie, David and Fred play together?	Bonnie Raitt	In the fall of 1970, She played with her brother David on stand up Bass with Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Philly Folk Festival as well as Opening for John Hammond at the Gaslight Cafe in New York, she was seen by a reporter from Newsweek, who began to spread the word about her performance. Scouts from major record companies were soon attending her shows to watch her play. She eventually accepted an offer from Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971. The album was warmly received by the music press, with many writers praising her skills as an interpreter and as a bottleneck guitarist; at the time, few women in popular music had strong reputations as guitarists. While admired by those who saw her perform, and respected by her peers, Raitt gained little public acclaim for her work. Her critical stature continued to grow but record sales remained modest. Her second album, Give It Up, was released in 1972 to universal "acclaim"; though many critics still regard it as her best work, it did not change her commercial fortunes. 1973's Takin' My Time was also met with critical acclaim, but these notices were not matched by the sales. Raitt was beginning to receive greater press coverage, including a 1975 cover story for Rolling Stone, but with 1974's Streetlights, reviews for her work were becoming increasingly mixed. By now, Raitt was already experimenting with different producers and different styles, and she began to adopt a more mainstream sound that continued through 1975's Home Plate. In 1976, Raitt made an appearance on Warren Zevon's eponymous album with his friend Jackson Browne and Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. CANNOTANSWER	at the Philly Folk Festival as well as Opening for John Hammond at the Gaslight Cafe in New York,	Bonnie Lynn Raitt (; born November 8, 1949) is an American blues singer, guitarist, songwriter, and activist. During the 1970s, Raitt released a series of roots-influenced albums that incorporated elements of blues, rock, folk, and country. She was also a frequent session player and collaborator with other artists, including Warren Zevon, Little Feat, Jackson Browne, The Pointer Sisters, John Prine and Leon Russell. In 1989, after several years of critical acclaim but little commercial success, she had a major hit with the album Nick of Time. The following two albums, Luck of the Draw (1991) and Longing in Their Hearts (1994), were multimillion sellers, generating several hit singles, including "Something to Talk About", "Love Sneakin' Up On You", and the ballad "I Can't Make You Love Me" (with Bruce Hornsby on piano). Raitt has received ten competitive Grammy Awards as well as a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. She is listed as number 50 in Rolling Stones list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" and number 89 on the magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". Australian country music artist Graeme Connors has said, "Bonnie Raitt does something with a lyric no one else can do; she bends it and twists it right into your heart." Early life Bonnie Lynn Raitt was born on November 8, 1949, in Burbank, California. Her mother, Marge Goddard (née Haydock), was a pianist, while her father, John Raitt, was an actor in musical productions such as Oklahoma! and The Pajama Game. Raitt is of Scottish ancestry; her ancestors constructed Rait Castle near Nairn. As a child, Raitt would often play with her two brothers, Steve and David, and was a self-described tomboy. John Raitt's job as a theater actor meant Bonnie did not interact with him as much as she would have liked. Raitt grew to resent her mother, as she became the main authority figure of the household whenever John was away. Raitt's musically inclined parents had a strong influence on her life. From a young age, she and her brothers were encouraged to pursue music. At first, Raitt played the piano, but was intimidated by her mother's abilities. She instead began playing a Stella guitar, which she received as a Christmas gift in 1957 at the age of eight. Raitt did not take lessons, and instead took influence from the American folk music revival of the 1950s. She was also influenced by the beatnik movement, stating: "It represented my whole belief ... I'd grow my hair real long so I looked like a beatnik." From ages eight through fifteen, Raitt and her brothers attended a summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains called Camp Regis. It was there where Raitt learned of her musical talents, when camp counselors would ask her to play in front of the campers. Learning how to play songs from folk albums then became a hobby for Raitt. As a teenager, Raitt was self-conscious about her weight and her freckles, and saw music as an escape from reality. "That was my saving grace. I just sat in my room and played my guitar" said Raitt. After graduating from Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1967, Raitt entered Radcliffe College of Harvard University, majoring in Social Relations and African studies. She said her "plan was to travel to Tanzania, where President Julius Nyerere was creating a government based on democracy and socialism". She was the lead singer in a campus music group called the "Revolutionary Music Collective" founded by songwriter Bob Telson which played for striking Harvard students during the Student strike of 1970. Raitt became friends with blues promoter Dick Waterman. During her second year of college, Raitt left school for a semester and moved to Philadelphia with Waterman and other local musicians. Raitt said it was an "opportunity that changed everything." Career 1970–1976 In the summer of 1970, she played with her brother David on stand-up bass with Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Philly Folk Festival as well as opening for John Hammond at the Gaslight Cafe in New York, she was seen by a reporter from Newsweek, who began to spread the word about her performance. Scouts from major record companies were soon attending her shows to watch her play. She eventually accepted an offer from Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971. The album was warmly received by the music press, with many writers praising her skills as an interpreter and as a bottleneck guitarist; at the time, few women in popular music had strong reputations as guitarists. While admired by those who saw her perform, and respected by her peers, Raitt gained little public acclaim for her work. Her critical stature continued to grow but record sales remained modest. Her second album, Give It Up, was released in 1972 to positive reviews. One journalist described the album as "an excellent set" and "established the artist as an inventive and sympathetic interpreter". However, it did not change her commercial fortunes. 1973's Takin' My Time was also met with critical acclaim, but these notices were not matched by the sales. Raitt began to receive greater press coverage, including a 1975 cover story for Rolling Stone, but with 1974's Streetlights, reviews for her work were becoming increasingly mixed. By this point, Raitt was already experimenting with different producers and different styles, and she began to adopt a more mainstream sound that continued through 1975's Home Plate. In 1976, Raitt made an appearance on Warren Zevon's eponymous album. 1977–1988 1977's Sweet Forgiveness album gave Raitt her first commercial breakthrough, when it yielded a hit single in her remake of "Runaway." Recast as a heavy rhythm and blues recording based on a rhythmic groove inspired by Al Green, Raitt's version of "Runaway" was disparaged by many critics. However, the song's commercial success prompted a bidding war for Raitt between Warner Bros. and Columbia Records. "There was this big Columbia–Warner war going on at the time", recalled Raitt in a 1990 interview. "James Taylor had just left Warner Bros. and made a big album for Columbia... And then, Warner signed Paul Simon away from Columbia, and they didn't want me to have a hit record for Columbia – no matter what! So, I renegotiated my contract, and they basically matched Columbia's offer. Frankly the deal was a really big deal." Warner Brothers held higher expectations for Raitt's next album, The Glow, in 1979, but it was released to poor reviews as well as modest sales. Raitt had one commercial success in 1979 when she helped organize the five Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The shows spawned the three-record gold album No Nukes, as well as a Warner Brothers feature film of the same name. The shows featured co-founders Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, John Hall, and Raitt as well as Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Doobie Brothers, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Gil Scott-Heron, and others. In 1980, she appeared as herself in the Paramount film Urban Cowboy where she sang "Don't It Make You Wanna Dance." For her next record, 1982's Green Light, Raitt made a conscious attempt to revisit the sound of her earlier records. However, to her surprise, many of her peers and the media compared her new sound to the burgeoning new wave movement. The album received her strongest reviews in years, but her sales did not improve and this had a severe impact on her relationship with Warner Brothers. Tongue and Groove and release from Warner Brothers In 1983, Raitt was finishing work on her follow-up album, Tongue and Groove. The day after mastering was completed on Tongue & Groove, the record company dropped Raitt from its roster, not being happy with her commercial performance up to that point. The album was shelved and not released, and Raitt was left without a record contract. At this time Raitt was also struggling with alcohol and drug abuse problems. Despite her personal and professional problems, Raitt continued to tour and participate in political activism. In 1985, she sang and appeared in the video of "Sun City", the anti-apartheid song written and produced by guitarist Steven Van Zandt. Along with her participation in Farm Aid and Amnesty International concerts, Raitt traveled to Moscow, Russia in 1987 to participate in the first joint Soviet/American Peace Concert, later shown on the Showtime cable network. Also in 1987, Raitt organized a benefit in Los Angeles for Countdown '87 to Stop Contra Aid. The benefit featured herself, along with Don Henley, Herbie Hancock, and others. Two years after being dropped from Warner Brothers Records, the label notified Raitt of their plans to release the Tongue and Groove album. "I said it wasn't really fair," recalled Raitt. "I think at this point they felt kind of bad. I mean, I was out there touring on my savings to keep my name up, and my ability to draw was less and less. So they agreed to let me go in and recut half of it, and that's when it came out as Nine Lives." A critical and commercial disappointment, Nine Lives, released in 1986, was Raitt's last new recording for Warner Brothers. In late 1987, Raitt joined singers k.d. lang and Jennifer Warnes as female background vocalists for Roy Orbison's television special, Roy Orbison and Friends, A Black and White Night. Following this highly acclaimed broadcast, Raitt began working on new material. By then, she was clean and sober, having resolved her problems with substance abuse. She later credited Stevie Ray Vaughan for his help in a Minnesota State Fair concert the night after Vaughan's 1990 death. During this time, Raitt considered signing with the Prince-owned Paisley Park Records, but they could not come to an agreement and negotiations fell through. Instead, she began recording a bluesy mix of pop and rock songs under the production guidance of Don Was at Capitol Records. Raitt had met Was through Hal Wilner, who was putting together Stay Awake, a tribute album to Disney music for A&M. Was and Wilner both wanted Raitt to sing lead on an adult-contemporary arrangement created by Was for "Baby Mine", the lullaby from Dumbo. Raitt was very pleased with the sessions, and she asked Was to produce her next album. 1989–1999: Commercial breakthrough After working with Was on the Stay Awake album, Raitt's management, Gold Mountain, approached numerous labels about a new record deal and found interest from Capitol Records. Raitt was signed to Capitol by A&R executive Tim Devine. With her first Capitol Records release, and after nearly twenty years in the business, Raitt achieved commercial success with Nick of Time, her tenth overall album of her career. Released in the spring of 1989, Nick of Time went to number one on the U.S. album chart following Raitt's Grammy sweep in early 1990. This album has also been voted number 230 in the Rolling Stone list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Raitt later stated that her 10th try was "my first sober album." At the same time, Raitt received a fourth Grammy Award for her duet "I'm in the Mood" with John Lee Hooker on his album The Healer. Nick of Time was also the first of many of her recordings to feature her longtime rhythm section of Ricky Fataar and James "Hutch" Hutchinson (although previously Fataar had played on her Green Light album and Hutchinson had worked on Nine Lives), both of whom continue to record and tour with her. Since its release in 1989, Nick of Time has currently sold over five million copies in the US alone. Raitt followed up this success with three more Grammy Awards for her next album, 1991's Luck of the Draw, which sold seven million copies in the United States. Three years later, in 1994, she added two more Grammys with her album Longing in Their Hearts, her second number one album, that sold two million copies in the US. Raitt's collaboration with Don Was amicably came to an end with 1995's live release Road Tested. Released to solid reviews, it was certified gold in the US. "Rock Steady" was a hit written by Bryan Adams and Gretchen Peters in 1995. The song was written as a duet with Bryan Adams and Bonnie Raitt for her Road Tested tour, which also became one of her albums. The original demo version of the song appears on Adams' 1996 single "Let's Make a Night to Remember". For her next studio album, Raitt hired Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake as her producers. "I loved working with Don Was but I wanted to give myself and my fans a stretch and do something different," Raitt stated. Her work with Froom and Blake was released on Fundamental in 1998. 2000–2007 In March 2000, Raitt was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Silver Lining was released in 2002. In the US, it reached number 13 on the Billboard chart and was later certified Gold. It contains the singles "I Can't Help You Now", "Time of Our Lives", and the title track. All three singles charted within the top 40 of the US Adult Contemporary chart. On March 19, 2002, Bonnie Raitt received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to the recording industry, located at 1750 N. Vine Street. In 2003 Capitol Records released the compilation album The Best of Bonnie Raitt. It contains songs from her prior Capitol albums from 1989 to 2002 including Nick of Time, Luck of the Draw, Longing in Their Hearts, Road Tested, Fundamental, and Silver Lining. Raitt was featured on the album True Love by Toots and the Maytals, which won the Grammy Award in 2004 for Best Reggae Album. Souls Alike was released in September 2005. In the US, it reached the top 20 on the Billboard chart. It contains the singles "I Will Not Be Broken" and "I Don't Want Anything to Change", which both charted in the top 40 of the US Adult Contemporary chart. In 2006, she released the live DVD/CD Bonnie Raitt and Friends, which was filmed as part of the critically acclaimed VH1 Classic Decades Rock Live! concert series, featuring special guests Keb' Mo', Alison Krauss, Ben Harper, Jon Cleary, and Norah Jones. The DVD was released by Capitol Records on August 15. Bonnie Raitt and Friends, which was recorded live in Atlantic City, NJ on September 30, 2005, features never-before-seen performance and interview footage, including four duets not included in the VH1 Classic broadcast of the concert. The accompanying CD features 11 tracks, including the radio single "Two Lights in the Nighttime" (featuring Ben Harper). In 2007, Raitt contributed to Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino. With Jon Cleary, she sang a medley of "I'm in Love Again" and "All by Myself" by Fats Domino. Raitt is interviewed on screen and appears in performance footage in the 2005 documentary film Make It Funky!, which presents a history of New Orleans music and its influence on rhythm and blues, rock and roll, funk and jazz. In the film, Raitt performs "What is Success" with Allen Toussaint and band, a song he wrote and that Raitt included on her 1974 album Streetlights. 2008–present Raitt appeared on the June 7, 2008 broadcast of Garrison Keillor's radio program A Prairie Home Companion. She performed two blues songs with Keb' Mo': "No Getting Over You" and "There Ain't Nothin' in Ramblin'". Raitt also sang "Dimming of the Day" with Richard Thompson. This show, along with another one with Raitt and her band in October 2006, is archived on the Prairie Home Companion website. Raitt appeared in the 2011 documentary Reggae Got Soul: The Story of Toots and the Maytals, which was featured on the BBC and described as "The untold story of one of the most influential artists ever to come out of Jamaica". In February 2012, Raitt performed a duet with Alicia Keys at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards in 2012 honoring Etta James. In April 2012, Raitt released her first studio album since 2005, entitled Slipstream. It charted at Number 6 on the US Billboard 200 chart marking her first top ten album since 1994's Longing in Their Hearts. The album was described as "one of the best of her 40-year career" by American Songwriter magazine. In September 2012, Raitt was featured in a campaign called "30 Songs / 30 Days" to support Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, a multi-platform media project inspired by a project outlined in a book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. In 2013, she appeared on Foy Vance's album Joy of Nothing. On May 30, 2015, Leon Russell, Bonnie Raitt and Ivan Neville gave a performance at The Canyon Club in Agoura Hills, California to raise cash for Marty Grebb who was battling cancer. Grebb had played on some of their albums. In February 2016, Raitt released her seventeenth studio album Dig In Deep. The album charted at number 11 on the US Billboard 200 chart and received favorable reviews. The album features the single "Gypsy in Me" as well as a cover of the INXS song "Need You Tonight". Raitt cancelled the first leg of her 2018 spring-summer touring schedule due to a recently discovered medical issue requiring surgical intervention. She reported that a "full recovery" is expected and that she planned to resume touring with already-scheduled dates in June 2018. Drug and alcohol use and recovery Raitt used alcohol and drugs, but began psychotherapy and joined Alcoholics Anonymous in the late 1980s. "I thought I had to live that partying lifestyle in order to be authentic," she said, "but in fact if you keep it up too long, all you're going to be is sloppy or dead." She became clean in 1987. She has credited Stevie Ray Vaughan for breaking her substance abuse, saying that what gave her the courage to admit her alcohol problem and stop drinking was seeing that Stevie Ray Vaughan was an even better musician when sober. She has also said that she stopped because she realized that the "late night life" was not working for her. In 1989, she said, "I really feel like some angels have been carrying me around. I just have more focus and more discipline, and consequently more self-respect." Personal life Raitt has taken sabbaticals, including after the deaths of her parents, brother, and best friend. She has said "When I went through a lot of loss, I took a hiatus." Raitt and actor Michael O'Keefe were married on April 27, 1991. They announced their divorce on November 9, 1999, with a causal factor appearing to be that their careers caused considerable time apart. Singer and guitarist David Crosby has said that Raitt is his favorite singer of all time. Political activism Raitt's political involvement goes back to the early 1970s. Her 1972 album Give It Up had a dedication "to the people of North Vietnam ..." printed on the back. Raitt's web site urges fans to learn more about preserving the environment. She was a founding member of Musicians United for Safe Energy in 1979 and a catalyst for the larger anti-nuclear movement, becoming involved with groups like the Abalone Alliance and Alliance for Survival. In 1994 at the urging of Dick Waterman, Raitt funded the replacement of a headstone for one of her mentors, blues guitarist Fred McDowell through the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund. Raitt later financed memorial headstones in Mississippi for musicians Memphis Minnie, Sam Chatmon, and Tommy Johnson again with the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund. In 2002, Raitt signed on as an official supporter of Little Kids Rock, a nonprofit organization that provides free musical instruments and free lessons to children in public schools throughout the U.S. She has visited children in the program and sits on the organization's board of directors as an honorary member. At the Stockholm Jazz Festival in July 2004, Raitt dedicated a performance of "Your Good Thing (Is About to End)", from her 1979 album The Glow, to sitting (and later re-elected) U.S. President George W. Bush. She was quoted as saying "We're gonna sing this for George Bush because he's out of here, people!". In 2008, Raitt donated a song to the Aid Still Required's CD to assist with relief efforts in Southeast Asia from the 2004 tsunami. Raitt worked with Reverb, a non-profit environmental organization, for her 2005 fall/winter and 2006 spring/summer/fall tours. Raitt is part of the No Nukes group, which opposes the expansion of nuclear power. In 2007, No Nukes recorded a music video of a new version of the Buffalo Springfield song "For What It's Worth". During the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Raitt, along with Jackson Browne and bassist James "Hutch" Hutchinson, performed at campaign appearances for candidate John Edwards. During the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, Raitt endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Discography Bonnie Raitt (1971) Give It Up (1972) Takin' My Time (1973) Streetlights (1974) Home Plate (1975) Sweet Forgiveness (1977) The Glow (1979) Green Light (1982) Nine Lives (1986) Nick of Time (1989) Luck of the Draw (1991) Longing in Their Hearts (1994) Fundamental (1998) Silver Lining (2002) Souls Alike (2005) Slipstream (2012) Dig In Deep (2016) Just Like That... (2022) Guitar Raitt's principal touring guitar is a customized Fender Stratocaster that she nicknamed Brownie. This became the basis for a signature model in 1996. Raitt was the first female musician to receive a signature Fender line. Awards Grammy Awards \|- \| 1980 \|"You're Gonna Get What's Coming" \|rowspan="3"\|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \| 1983 \|"Green Light" \| \|- \| 1987 \|"No Way to Treat a Lady" \| \|- \|rowspan="4"\| 1990 \|rowspan="2"\|Nick of Time \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"Nick of Time" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"I'm in the Mood" (with John Lee Hooker) \|Best Traditional Blues Recording \| \|- \|rowspan="6"\| 1992 \|Luck of the Draw \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|rowspan="2"\|"Something to Talk About" \|Record of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \| "Luck of the Draw" \| Best Rock Vocal Solo Performance \| \|- \|"Good Man, Good Woman" \|Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocal \| \|- \|Bonnie Raitt \|MusiCares Person of the Year \| \|- \|rowspan="5"\| 1995 \|rowspan="2"\|Longing in Their Hearts \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|Best Pop Vocal Album \| \|- \|rowspan="2"\|"Love Sneakin' Up On You" \|Record of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"Longing in Their Hearts" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|1996 \|"You Got It" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|rowspan="3"\|1997 \|Road Tested \|Best Rock Album \| \|- \|"Burning Down the House" \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"SRV Shuffle" \|Best Rock Instrumental Performance \| \|- \| 1999 \|"Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" (with Jackson Browne) \|Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals \| \|- \| 2003 \|"Gnawin' on It" \|rowspan="2"\|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \| 2004 \| "Time of Our Lives" \| \|- \| 2006 \|"I Will Not Be Broken" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|2013 \|Slipstream \|Best Americana Album \| \|- \|2022 \|Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award \|Herself \| \|} : Not a Grammy Award, but awarded by The Recording Academy Americana Music Honors and Awards \|- \|2012 \|Herself \|Lifetime Achievement Award for Performance \| \|- \|2016 \|Herself \|Artist of the Year \| \|} Rock and Roll Hall of Fame \|- \|2000 \|Herself \|Hall of Fame induction \| \|} Other awards In 1991, Raitt was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee College of Music. In 1997 Raitt was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal. In 2017, Raitt was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Guitar Museum. In 2018, Raitt received the People's Voice Award from the Folk Alliance International Awards in recognition of her activism. References Citations General references External links Fansite: Bonnie's Pride and Joy [ Allmusic Guide Profile] 1949 births Living people American alternative country singers American women country singers American country singer-songwriters American anti–nuclear power activists American blues guitarists American blues pianists American women pianists American blues singer-songwriters American women rock singers American women singer-songwriters American folk rock musicians American feminists American folk singers American humanitarians Women humanitarians Record producers from California American rock songwriters American women activists Blues rock musicians Electric blues musicians Feminist musicians Fingerstyle guitarists Grammy Award winners Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Slide guitarists Proponents of Christian feminism Radcliffe College alumni Capitol Records artists Warner Music Group artists Warner Records artists American people of Scottish descent Activists from California Country musicians from California Guitarists from California Musicians from Burbank, California Singer-songwriters from California 21st-century American pianists 20th-century American women singers 21st-century American women singers 20th-century American pianists American women record producers 20th-century American women guitarists 20th-century American guitarists 21st-century American women guitarists 21st-century American guitarists Proper Records artists 20th-century American singers 21st-century American singers	true	[ "Facundo Bagnis and Federico Delbonis were the defending champions, but they did not play together. Facundo Bagnis played alongside Diego Sebastián Schwartzman, while Federico Delbonis did not participate.\n\nFacundo Bagnis and Diego Sebastián Schwartzman lost in the semifinals to Pablo Cuevas and Pere Riba.\n\nPablo Cuevas and Pere Riba won the title, defeating František Čermák and Michail Elgin in the final, 6–4, 6–3.\n\nSeeds\n\nDraw\n\nDraw\n\nReferences\n Main Draw\n\nSeguros Bolivar Open Barranquilla - Doubles\n2014 Doubles", "\"Patapan\" (or \"Pat-a-pan\") is a French Christmas carol in Burgundian dialect, later adapted into English. It was written by Bernard de La Monnoye (1641–1728) and first published in Noël bourguignons in 1720. Its original title is \"Guillô, Pran Ton Tamborin\" (\"Willie, Bring Your Little Drum\" or \"Willie, Take Your Little Drum\").\n\nThe carol revolves around the birth of Jesus Christ, and is told from the perspective of shepherds playing simple instruments—flutes and drums—the onomatopoeic sound of which gives the song its name; \"patapan\" is meant to mimic the sound of the drum, and an accompanying lyric, \"tu-re-lu-re-lu,\" the flute. This is similar conceptually to the carol \"The Little Drummer Boy\", with its chorus of \"pa-rum-pa-pum-pum.\"\n\nBurgundian lyrics\n\nFrench lyrics\n\nEnglish lyrics \nWillie, bring your little drum, Robin take your flute and come! \nWhen we hear the music bright we will sing Noel this night,\nWhen we hear the fife and drum, Christmas should be frolicsome.\n\nThus the men of olden days for the King of Kings to praise, \nWhen they heard the fife and drum, ture-lure-lu, pata-pata-pan,\nWhen they hear the fife and drum, sure, our children won't be dumb.\n\nGod and man are now become more at one than fife and drum. \nWhen you hear the fife and drum, ture-lure-lu, pata-pata-pan, \nWhen you hear the fife and drum, dance and make the village hum.\n\nEnglish rhyming version (Patta-Patta-Pan, Turra-Lurra-Lay, Wisconsin, U.S.) \nBilly, bring your new red drum,\nRobby [Robin], get your fife and come\nFife and drum together play,\nPatta-patta-pan, turra-lurra-lay,\nFife and drum together play,\nOn this joyous Holiday\n\nWhen the men of olden days\nTo the King of Kings gave praise,\nOn the fife and drum did play,\nPatta-patta-pan, turra-lurra-lay,\nOn the fife and drum did play,\nSo their hearts were glad and gay\n\nThere is music in the air\nYou can hear it everywhere,\nFife and drum together play,\nPatta-patta-pan, turra-lurra-lay,\nFife and drum together play,\nOn this joyous Holiday\n\nGod and man today become\nMore in tune than fife and drum,\nFife and drum together play,\nPatta-patta-pan, turra-lurra-lay,\nFife and drum together play,\nOn this joyous Holiday\n\nSee also\n List of Christmas carols\n Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ral (also known as \"Toora Loora\")\n Celtic Thunder (\"Toora Loora Lay\")\n\nReferences\n\nChristmas carols" ]
[ "Bonnie Raitt", "1970-1976", "Did Bonnie Raitt release any albums in that period ?", "released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971.", "How was the album received by the critics ?", "The album was warmly received by the music press,", "Which record label released the album ?", "Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album,", "Who did she play with at that time ?", "She played with her brother David on stand up Bass with Mississippi Fred McDowell", "Where did they play together ?", "at the Philly Folk Festival as well as Opening for John Hammond at the Gaslight Cafe in New York," ]	C_684cefc6b9f7453ea706836155fb83f5_1	What else is interesting about the article ?	6	Besides Raitt's debut album and the Philly Folk Festival, what else is interesting about Bonnie Raitt, 1970-1976	Bonnie Raitt	In the fall of 1970, She played with her brother David on stand up Bass with Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Philly Folk Festival as well as Opening for John Hammond at the Gaslight Cafe in New York, she was seen by a reporter from Newsweek, who began to spread the word about her performance. Scouts from major record companies were soon attending her shows to watch her play. She eventually accepted an offer from Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971. The album was warmly received by the music press, with many writers praising her skills as an interpreter and as a bottleneck guitarist; at the time, few women in popular music had strong reputations as guitarists. While admired by those who saw her perform, and respected by her peers, Raitt gained little public acclaim for her work. Her critical stature continued to grow but record sales remained modest. Her second album, Give It Up, was released in 1972 to universal "acclaim"; though many critics still regard it as her best work, it did not change her commercial fortunes. 1973's Takin' My Time was also met with critical acclaim, but these notices were not matched by the sales. Raitt was beginning to receive greater press coverage, including a 1975 cover story for Rolling Stone, but with 1974's Streetlights, reviews for her work were becoming increasingly mixed. By now, Raitt was already experimenting with different producers and different styles, and she began to adopt a more mainstream sound that continued through 1975's Home Plate. In 1976, Raitt made an appearance on Warren Zevon's eponymous album with his friend Jackson Browne and Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. CANNOTANSWER	While admired by those who saw her perform, and respected by her peers, Raitt gained little public acclaim for her work.	Bonnie Lynn Raitt (; born November 8, 1949) is an American blues singer, guitarist, songwriter, and activist. During the 1970s, Raitt released a series of roots-influenced albums that incorporated elements of blues, rock, folk, and country. She was also a frequent session player and collaborator with other artists, including Warren Zevon, Little Feat, Jackson Browne, The Pointer Sisters, John Prine and Leon Russell. In 1989, after several years of critical acclaim but little commercial success, she had a major hit with the album Nick of Time. The following two albums, Luck of the Draw (1991) and Longing in Their Hearts (1994), were multimillion sellers, generating several hit singles, including "Something to Talk About", "Love Sneakin' Up On You", and the ballad "I Can't Make You Love Me" (with Bruce Hornsby on piano). Raitt has received ten competitive Grammy Awards as well as a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. She is listed as number 50 in Rolling Stones list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" and number 89 on the magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". Australian country music artist Graeme Connors has said, "Bonnie Raitt does something with a lyric no one else can do; she bends it and twists it right into your heart." Early life Bonnie Lynn Raitt was born on November 8, 1949, in Burbank, California. Her mother, Marge Goddard (née Haydock), was a pianist, while her father, John Raitt, was an actor in musical productions such as Oklahoma! and The Pajama Game. Raitt is of Scottish ancestry; her ancestors constructed Rait Castle near Nairn. As a child, Raitt would often play with her two brothers, Steve and David, and was a self-described tomboy. John Raitt's job as a theater actor meant Bonnie did not interact with him as much as she would have liked. Raitt grew to resent her mother, as she became the main authority figure of the household whenever John was away. Raitt's musically inclined parents had a strong influence on her life. From a young age, she and her brothers were encouraged to pursue music. At first, Raitt played the piano, but was intimidated by her mother's abilities. She instead began playing a Stella guitar, which she received as a Christmas gift in 1957 at the age of eight. Raitt did not take lessons, and instead took influence from the American folk music revival of the 1950s. She was also influenced by the beatnik movement, stating: "It represented my whole belief ... I'd grow my hair real long so I looked like a beatnik." From ages eight through fifteen, Raitt and her brothers attended a summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains called Camp Regis. It was there where Raitt learned of her musical talents, when camp counselors would ask her to play in front of the campers. Learning how to play songs from folk albums then became a hobby for Raitt. As a teenager, Raitt was self-conscious about her weight and her freckles, and saw music as an escape from reality. "That was my saving grace. I just sat in my room and played my guitar" said Raitt. After graduating from Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1967, Raitt entered Radcliffe College of Harvard University, majoring in Social Relations and African studies. She said her "plan was to travel to Tanzania, where President Julius Nyerere was creating a government based on democracy and socialism". She was the lead singer in a campus music group called the "Revolutionary Music Collective" founded by songwriter Bob Telson which played for striking Harvard students during the Student strike of 1970. Raitt became friends with blues promoter Dick Waterman. During her second year of college, Raitt left school for a semester and moved to Philadelphia with Waterman and other local musicians. Raitt said it was an "opportunity that changed everything." Career 1970–1976 In the summer of 1970, she played with her brother David on stand-up bass with Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Philly Folk Festival as well as opening for John Hammond at the Gaslight Cafe in New York, she was seen by a reporter from Newsweek, who began to spread the word about her performance. Scouts from major record companies were soon attending her shows to watch her play. She eventually accepted an offer from Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971. The album was warmly received by the music press, with many writers praising her skills as an interpreter and as a bottleneck guitarist; at the time, few women in popular music had strong reputations as guitarists. While admired by those who saw her perform, and respected by her peers, Raitt gained little public acclaim for her work. Her critical stature continued to grow but record sales remained modest. Her second album, Give It Up, was released in 1972 to positive reviews. One journalist described the album as "an excellent set" and "established the artist as an inventive and sympathetic interpreter". However, it did not change her commercial fortunes. 1973's Takin' My Time was also met with critical acclaim, but these notices were not matched by the sales. Raitt began to receive greater press coverage, including a 1975 cover story for Rolling Stone, but with 1974's Streetlights, reviews for her work were becoming increasingly mixed. By this point, Raitt was already experimenting with different producers and different styles, and she began to adopt a more mainstream sound that continued through 1975's Home Plate. In 1976, Raitt made an appearance on Warren Zevon's eponymous album. 1977–1988 1977's Sweet Forgiveness album gave Raitt her first commercial breakthrough, when it yielded a hit single in her remake of "Runaway." Recast as a heavy rhythm and blues recording based on a rhythmic groove inspired by Al Green, Raitt's version of "Runaway" was disparaged by many critics. However, the song's commercial success prompted a bidding war for Raitt between Warner Bros. and Columbia Records. "There was this big Columbia–Warner war going on at the time", recalled Raitt in a 1990 interview. "James Taylor had just left Warner Bros. and made a big album for Columbia... And then, Warner signed Paul Simon away from Columbia, and they didn't want me to have a hit record for Columbia – no matter what! So, I renegotiated my contract, and they basically matched Columbia's offer. Frankly the deal was a really big deal." Warner Brothers held higher expectations for Raitt's next album, The Glow, in 1979, but it was released to poor reviews as well as modest sales. Raitt had one commercial success in 1979 when she helped organize the five Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The shows spawned the three-record gold album No Nukes, as well as a Warner Brothers feature film of the same name. The shows featured co-founders Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, John Hall, and Raitt as well as Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Doobie Brothers, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Gil Scott-Heron, and others. In 1980, she appeared as herself in the Paramount film Urban Cowboy where she sang "Don't It Make You Wanna Dance." For her next record, 1982's Green Light, Raitt made a conscious attempt to revisit the sound of her earlier records. However, to her surprise, many of her peers and the media compared her new sound to the burgeoning new wave movement. The album received her strongest reviews in years, but her sales did not improve and this had a severe impact on her relationship with Warner Brothers. Tongue and Groove and release from Warner Brothers In 1983, Raitt was finishing work on her follow-up album, Tongue and Groove. The day after mastering was completed on Tongue & Groove, the record company dropped Raitt from its roster, not being happy with her commercial performance up to that point. The album was shelved and not released, and Raitt was left without a record contract. At this time Raitt was also struggling with alcohol and drug abuse problems. Despite her personal and professional problems, Raitt continued to tour and participate in political activism. In 1985, she sang and appeared in the video of "Sun City", the anti-apartheid song written and produced by guitarist Steven Van Zandt. Along with her participation in Farm Aid and Amnesty International concerts, Raitt traveled to Moscow, Russia in 1987 to participate in the first joint Soviet/American Peace Concert, later shown on the Showtime cable network. Also in 1987, Raitt organized a benefit in Los Angeles for Countdown '87 to Stop Contra Aid. The benefit featured herself, along with Don Henley, Herbie Hancock, and others. Two years after being dropped from Warner Brothers Records, the label notified Raitt of their plans to release the Tongue and Groove album. "I said it wasn't really fair," recalled Raitt. "I think at this point they felt kind of bad. I mean, I was out there touring on my savings to keep my name up, and my ability to draw was less and less. So they agreed to let me go in and recut half of it, and that's when it came out as Nine Lives." A critical and commercial disappointment, Nine Lives, released in 1986, was Raitt's last new recording for Warner Brothers. In late 1987, Raitt joined singers k.d. lang and Jennifer Warnes as female background vocalists for Roy Orbison's television special, Roy Orbison and Friends, A Black and White Night. Following this highly acclaimed broadcast, Raitt began working on new material. By then, she was clean and sober, having resolved her problems with substance abuse. She later credited Stevie Ray Vaughan for his help in a Minnesota State Fair concert the night after Vaughan's 1990 death. During this time, Raitt considered signing with the Prince-owned Paisley Park Records, but they could not come to an agreement and negotiations fell through. Instead, she began recording a bluesy mix of pop and rock songs under the production guidance of Don Was at Capitol Records. Raitt had met Was through Hal Wilner, who was putting together Stay Awake, a tribute album to Disney music for A&M. Was and Wilner both wanted Raitt to sing lead on an adult-contemporary arrangement created by Was for "Baby Mine", the lullaby from Dumbo. Raitt was very pleased with the sessions, and she asked Was to produce her next album. 1989–1999: Commercial breakthrough After working with Was on the Stay Awake album, Raitt's management, Gold Mountain, approached numerous labels about a new record deal and found interest from Capitol Records. Raitt was signed to Capitol by A&R executive Tim Devine. With her first Capitol Records release, and after nearly twenty years in the business, Raitt achieved commercial success with Nick of Time, her tenth overall album of her career. Released in the spring of 1989, Nick of Time went to number one on the U.S. album chart following Raitt's Grammy sweep in early 1990. This album has also been voted number 230 in the Rolling Stone list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Raitt later stated that her 10th try was "my first sober album." At the same time, Raitt received a fourth Grammy Award for her duet "I'm in the Mood" with John Lee Hooker on his album The Healer. Nick of Time was also the first of many of her recordings to feature her longtime rhythm section of Ricky Fataar and James "Hutch" Hutchinson (although previously Fataar had played on her Green Light album and Hutchinson had worked on Nine Lives), both of whom continue to record and tour with her. Since its release in 1989, Nick of Time has currently sold over five million copies in the US alone. Raitt followed up this success with three more Grammy Awards for her next album, 1991's Luck of the Draw, which sold seven million copies in the United States. Three years later, in 1994, she added two more Grammys with her album Longing in Their Hearts, her second number one album, that sold two million copies in the US. Raitt's collaboration with Don Was amicably came to an end with 1995's live release Road Tested. Released to solid reviews, it was certified gold in the US. "Rock Steady" was a hit written by Bryan Adams and Gretchen Peters in 1995. The song was written as a duet with Bryan Adams and Bonnie Raitt for her Road Tested tour, which also became one of her albums. The original demo version of the song appears on Adams' 1996 single "Let's Make a Night to Remember". For her next studio album, Raitt hired Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake as her producers. "I loved working with Don Was but I wanted to give myself and my fans a stretch and do something different," Raitt stated. Her work with Froom and Blake was released on Fundamental in 1998. 2000–2007 In March 2000, Raitt was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Silver Lining was released in 2002. In the US, it reached number 13 on the Billboard chart and was later certified Gold. It contains the singles "I Can't Help You Now", "Time of Our Lives", and the title track. All three singles charted within the top 40 of the US Adult Contemporary chart. On March 19, 2002, Bonnie Raitt received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to the recording industry, located at 1750 N. Vine Street. In 2003 Capitol Records released the compilation album The Best of Bonnie Raitt. It contains songs from her prior Capitol albums from 1989 to 2002 including Nick of Time, Luck of the Draw, Longing in Their Hearts, Road Tested, Fundamental, and Silver Lining. Raitt was featured on the album True Love by Toots and the Maytals, which won the Grammy Award in 2004 for Best Reggae Album. Souls Alike was released in September 2005. In the US, it reached the top 20 on the Billboard chart. It contains the singles "I Will Not Be Broken" and "I Don't Want Anything to Change", which both charted in the top 40 of the US Adult Contemporary chart. In 2006, she released the live DVD/CD Bonnie Raitt and Friends, which was filmed as part of the critically acclaimed VH1 Classic Decades Rock Live! concert series, featuring special guests Keb' Mo', Alison Krauss, Ben Harper, Jon Cleary, and Norah Jones. The DVD was released by Capitol Records on August 15. Bonnie Raitt and Friends, which was recorded live in Atlantic City, NJ on September 30, 2005, features never-before-seen performance and interview footage, including four duets not included in the VH1 Classic broadcast of the concert. The accompanying CD features 11 tracks, including the radio single "Two Lights in the Nighttime" (featuring Ben Harper). In 2007, Raitt contributed to Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino. With Jon Cleary, she sang a medley of "I'm in Love Again" and "All by Myself" by Fats Domino. Raitt is interviewed on screen and appears in performance footage in the 2005 documentary film Make It Funky!, which presents a history of New Orleans music and its influence on rhythm and blues, rock and roll, funk and jazz. In the film, Raitt performs "What is Success" with Allen Toussaint and band, a song he wrote and that Raitt included on her 1974 album Streetlights. 2008–present Raitt appeared on the June 7, 2008 broadcast of Garrison Keillor's radio program A Prairie Home Companion. She performed two blues songs with Keb' Mo': "No Getting Over You" and "There Ain't Nothin' in Ramblin'". Raitt also sang "Dimming of the Day" with Richard Thompson. This show, along with another one with Raitt and her band in October 2006, is archived on the Prairie Home Companion website. Raitt appeared in the 2011 documentary Reggae Got Soul: The Story of Toots and the Maytals, which was featured on the BBC and described as "The untold story of one of the most influential artists ever to come out of Jamaica". In February 2012, Raitt performed a duet with Alicia Keys at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards in 2012 honoring Etta James. In April 2012, Raitt released her first studio album since 2005, entitled Slipstream. It charted at Number 6 on the US Billboard 200 chart marking her first top ten album since 1994's Longing in Their Hearts. The album was described as "one of the best of her 40-year career" by American Songwriter magazine. In September 2012, Raitt was featured in a campaign called "30 Songs / 30 Days" to support Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, a multi-platform media project inspired by a project outlined in a book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. In 2013, she appeared on Foy Vance's album Joy of Nothing. On May 30, 2015, Leon Russell, Bonnie Raitt and Ivan Neville gave a performance at The Canyon Club in Agoura Hills, California to raise cash for Marty Grebb who was battling cancer. Grebb had played on some of their albums. In February 2016, Raitt released her seventeenth studio album Dig In Deep. The album charted at number 11 on the US Billboard 200 chart and received favorable reviews. The album features the single "Gypsy in Me" as well as a cover of the INXS song "Need You Tonight". Raitt cancelled the first leg of her 2018 spring-summer touring schedule due to a recently discovered medical issue requiring surgical intervention. She reported that a "full recovery" is expected and that she planned to resume touring with already-scheduled dates in June 2018. Drug and alcohol use and recovery Raitt used alcohol and drugs, but began psychotherapy and joined Alcoholics Anonymous in the late 1980s. "I thought I had to live that partying lifestyle in order to be authentic," she said, "but in fact if you keep it up too long, all you're going to be is sloppy or dead." She became clean in 1987. She has credited Stevie Ray Vaughan for breaking her substance abuse, saying that what gave her the courage to admit her alcohol problem and stop drinking was seeing that Stevie Ray Vaughan was an even better musician when sober. She has also said that she stopped because she realized that the "late night life" was not working for her. In 1989, she said, "I really feel like some angels have been carrying me around. I just have more focus and more discipline, and consequently more self-respect." Personal life Raitt has taken sabbaticals, including after the deaths of her parents, brother, and best friend. She has said "When I went through a lot of loss, I took a hiatus." Raitt and actor Michael O'Keefe were married on April 27, 1991. They announced their divorce on November 9, 1999, with a causal factor appearing to be that their careers caused considerable time apart. Singer and guitarist David Crosby has said that Raitt is his favorite singer of all time. Political activism Raitt's political involvement goes back to the early 1970s. Her 1972 album Give It Up had a dedication "to the people of North Vietnam ..." printed on the back. Raitt's web site urges fans to learn more about preserving the environment. She was a founding member of Musicians United for Safe Energy in 1979 and a catalyst for the larger anti-nuclear movement, becoming involved with groups like the Abalone Alliance and Alliance for Survival. In 1994 at the urging of Dick Waterman, Raitt funded the replacement of a headstone for one of her mentors, blues guitarist Fred McDowell through the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund. Raitt later financed memorial headstones in Mississippi for musicians Memphis Minnie, Sam Chatmon, and Tommy Johnson again with the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund. In 2002, Raitt signed on as an official supporter of Little Kids Rock, a nonprofit organization that provides free musical instruments and free lessons to children in public schools throughout the U.S. She has visited children in the program and sits on the organization's board of directors as an honorary member. At the Stockholm Jazz Festival in July 2004, Raitt dedicated a performance of "Your Good Thing (Is About to End)", from her 1979 album The Glow, to sitting (and later re-elected) U.S. President George W. Bush. She was quoted as saying "We're gonna sing this for George Bush because he's out of here, people!". In 2008, Raitt donated a song to the Aid Still Required's CD to assist with relief efforts in Southeast Asia from the 2004 tsunami. Raitt worked with Reverb, a non-profit environmental organization, for her 2005 fall/winter and 2006 spring/summer/fall tours. Raitt is part of the No Nukes group, which opposes the expansion of nuclear power. In 2007, No Nukes recorded a music video of a new version of the Buffalo Springfield song "For What It's Worth". During the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Raitt, along with Jackson Browne and bassist James "Hutch" Hutchinson, performed at campaign appearances for candidate John Edwards. During the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, Raitt endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Discography Bonnie Raitt (1971) Give It Up (1972) Takin' My Time (1973) Streetlights (1974) Home Plate (1975) Sweet Forgiveness (1977) The Glow (1979) Green Light (1982) Nine Lives (1986) Nick of Time (1989) Luck of the Draw (1991) Longing in Their Hearts (1994) Fundamental (1998) Silver Lining (2002) Souls Alike (2005) Slipstream (2012) Dig In Deep (2016) Just Like That... (2022) Guitar Raitt's principal touring guitar is a customized Fender Stratocaster that she nicknamed Brownie. This became the basis for a signature model in 1996. Raitt was the first female musician to receive a signature Fender line. Awards Grammy Awards \|- \| 1980 \|"You're Gonna Get What's Coming" \|rowspan="3"\|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \| 1983 \|"Green Light" \| \|- \| 1987 \|"No Way to Treat a Lady" \| \|- \|rowspan="4"\| 1990 \|rowspan="2"\|Nick of Time \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"Nick of Time" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"I'm in the Mood" (with John Lee Hooker) \|Best Traditional Blues Recording \| \|- \|rowspan="6"\| 1992 \|Luck of the Draw \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|rowspan="2"\|"Something to Talk About" \|Record of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \| "Luck of the Draw" \| Best Rock Vocal Solo Performance \| \|- \|"Good Man, Good Woman" \|Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocal \| \|- \|Bonnie Raitt \|MusiCares Person of the Year \| \|- \|rowspan="5"\| 1995 \|rowspan="2"\|Longing in Their Hearts \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|Best Pop Vocal Album \| \|- \|rowspan="2"\|"Love Sneakin' Up On You" \|Record of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"Longing in Their Hearts" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|1996 \|"You Got It" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|rowspan="3"\|1997 \|Road Tested \|Best Rock Album \| \|- \|"Burning Down the House" \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"SRV Shuffle" \|Best Rock Instrumental Performance \| \|- \| 1999 \|"Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" (with Jackson Browne) \|Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals \| \|- \| 2003 \|"Gnawin' on It" \|rowspan="2"\|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \| 2004 \| "Time of Our Lives" \| \|- \| 2006 \|"I Will Not Be Broken" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|2013 \|Slipstream \|Best Americana Album \| \|- \|2022 \|Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award \|Herself \| \|} : Not a Grammy Award, but awarded by The Recording Academy Americana Music Honors and Awards \|- \|2012 \|Herself \|Lifetime Achievement Award for Performance \| \|- \|2016 \|Herself \|Artist of the Year \| \|} Rock and Roll Hall of Fame \|- \|2000 \|Herself \|Hall of Fame induction \| \|} Other awards In 1991, Raitt was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee College of Music. In 1997 Raitt was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal. In 2017, Raitt was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Guitar Museum. In 2018, Raitt received the People's Voice Award from the Folk Alliance International Awards in recognition of her activism. References Citations General references External links Fansite: Bonnie's Pride and Joy [ Allmusic Guide Profile] 1949 births Living people American alternative country singers American women country singers American country singer-songwriters American anti–nuclear power activists American blues guitarists American blues pianists American women pianists American blues singer-songwriters American women rock singers American women singer-songwriters American folk rock musicians American feminists American folk singers American humanitarians Women humanitarians Record producers from California American rock songwriters American women activists Blues rock musicians Electric blues musicians Feminist musicians Fingerstyle guitarists Grammy Award winners Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Slide guitarists Proponents of Christian feminism Radcliffe College alumni Capitol Records artists Warner Music Group artists Warner Records artists American people of Scottish descent Activists from California Country musicians from California Guitarists from California Musicians from Burbank, California Singer-songwriters from California 21st-century American pianists 20th-century American women singers 21st-century American women singers 20th-century American pianists American women record producers 20th-century American women guitarists 20th-century American guitarists 21st-century American women guitarists 21st-century American guitarists Proper Records artists 20th-century American singers 21st-century American singers	true	[ "\"What Else Is There?\" is the third single from the Norwegian duo Röyksopp's second album The Understanding. It features the vocals of Karin Dreijer from the Swedish electronica duo The Knife. The album was released in the UK with the help of Astralwerks.\n\nThe single was used in an O2 television advertisement in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia during 2008. It was also used in the 2006 film Cashback and the 2007 film, Meet Bill. Trentemøller's remix of \"What Else is There?\" was featured in an episode of the HBO show Entourage.\n\nThe song was covered by extreme metal band Enslaved as a bonus track for their album E.\n\nThe song was listed as the 375th best song of the 2000s by Pitchfork Media.\n\nOfficial versions\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Album Version) – 5:17\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Radio Edit) – 3:38\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Jacques Lu Cont Radio Mix) – 3:46\n\"What Else Is There?\" (The Emperor Machine Vocal Version) – 8:03\n\"What Else Is There?\" (The Emperor Machine Dub Version) – 7:51\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Thin White Duke Mix) – 8:25\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Thin White Duke Edit) – 4:50\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Thin White Duke Remix) (Radio Edit) – 3:06\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Trentemøller Remix) – 7:42\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Vitalic Remix) – 5:14\n\nResponse\nThe single was officially released on 5 December 2005 in the UK. The single had a limited release on 21 November 2005 to promote the upcoming album. On the UK Singles Chart, it peaked at number 32, while on the UK Dance Chart, it reached number one.\n\nMusic video\nThe music video was directed by Martin de Thurah. It features Norwegian model Marianne Schröder who is shown lip-syncing Dreijer's voice. Schröder is depicted as a floating woman traveling across stormy landscapes and within empty houses. Dreijer makes a cameo appearance as a woman wearing an Elizabethan ruff while dining alone at a festive table.\n\nMovie spots\n\nThe song is also featured in the movie Meet Bill as characters played by Jessica Alba and Aaron Eckhart smoke marijuana while listening to it. It is also part of the end credits music of the film Cashback.\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2005 singles\nRöyksopp songs\nAstralwerks singles\nSongs written by Svein Berge\nSongs written by Torbjørn Brundtland\n2004 songs\nSongs written by Roger Greenaway\nSongs written by Olof Dreijer\nSongs written by Karin Dreijer", "Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region" ]
[ "Bonnie Raitt", "1970-1976", "Did Bonnie Raitt release any albums in that period ?", "released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971.", "How was the album received by the critics ?", "The album was warmly received by the music press,", "Which record label released the album ?", "Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album,", "Who did she play with at that time ?", "She played with her brother David on stand up Bass with Mississippi Fred McDowell", "Where did they play together ?", "at the Philly Folk Festival as well as Opening for John Hammond at the Gaslight Cafe in New York,", "What else is interesting about the article ?", "While admired by those who saw her perform, and respected by her peers, Raitt gained little public acclaim for her work." ]	C_684cefc6b9f7453ea706836155fb83f5_1	Did she get critical acclaim from the press ?	7	Did Bonnie Raitt get critical acclaim from the press for her musical releases?	Bonnie Raitt	In the fall of 1970, She played with her brother David on stand up Bass with Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Philly Folk Festival as well as Opening for John Hammond at the Gaslight Cafe in New York, she was seen by a reporter from Newsweek, who began to spread the word about her performance. Scouts from major record companies were soon attending her shows to watch her play. She eventually accepted an offer from Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971. The album was warmly received by the music press, with many writers praising her skills as an interpreter and as a bottleneck guitarist; at the time, few women in popular music had strong reputations as guitarists. While admired by those who saw her perform, and respected by her peers, Raitt gained little public acclaim for her work. Her critical stature continued to grow but record sales remained modest. Her second album, Give It Up, was released in 1972 to universal "acclaim"; though many critics still regard it as her best work, it did not change her commercial fortunes. 1973's Takin' My Time was also met with critical acclaim, but these notices were not matched by the sales. Raitt was beginning to receive greater press coverage, including a 1975 cover story for Rolling Stone, but with 1974's Streetlights, reviews for her work were becoming increasingly mixed. By now, Raitt was already experimenting with different producers and different styles, and she began to adopt a more mainstream sound that continued through 1975's Home Plate. In 1976, Raitt made an appearance on Warren Zevon's eponymous album with his friend Jackson Browne and Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. CANNOTANSWER	Give It Up, was released in 1972 to universal "acclaim"; though many critics still regard it as her best work,	Bonnie Lynn Raitt (; born November 8, 1949) is an American blues singer, guitarist, songwriter, and activist. During the 1970s, Raitt released a series of roots-influenced albums that incorporated elements of blues, rock, folk, and country. She was also a frequent session player and collaborator with other artists, including Warren Zevon, Little Feat, Jackson Browne, The Pointer Sisters, John Prine and Leon Russell. In 1989, after several years of critical acclaim but little commercial success, she had a major hit with the album Nick of Time. The following two albums, Luck of the Draw (1991) and Longing in Their Hearts (1994), were multimillion sellers, generating several hit singles, including "Something to Talk About", "Love Sneakin' Up On You", and the ballad "I Can't Make You Love Me" (with Bruce Hornsby on piano). Raitt has received ten competitive Grammy Awards as well as a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. She is listed as number 50 in Rolling Stones list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" and number 89 on the magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". Australian country music artist Graeme Connors has said, "Bonnie Raitt does something with a lyric no one else can do; she bends it and twists it right into your heart." Early life Bonnie Lynn Raitt was born on November 8, 1949, in Burbank, California. Her mother, Marge Goddard (née Haydock), was a pianist, while her father, John Raitt, was an actor in musical productions such as Oklahoma! and The Pajama Game. Raitt is of Scottish ancestry; her ancestors constructed Rait Castle near Nairn. As a child, Raitt would often play with her two brothers, Steve and David, and was a self-described tomboy. John Raitt's job as a theater actor meant Bonnie did not interact with him as much as she would have liked. Raitt grew to resent her mother, as she became the main authority figure of the household whenever John was away. Raitt's musically inclined parents had a strong influence on her life. From a young age, she and her brothers were encouraged to pursue music. At first, Raitt played the piano, but was intimidated by her mother's abilities. She instead began playing a Stella guitar, which she received as a Christmas gift in 1957 at the age of eight. Raitt did not take lessons, and instead took influence from the American folk music revival of the 1950s. She was also influenced by the beatnik movement, stating: "It represented my whole belief ... I'd grow my hair real long so I looked like a beatnik." From ages eight through fifteen, Raitt and her brothers attended a summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains called Camp Regis. It was there where Raitt learned of her musical talents, when camp counselors would ask her to play in front of the campers. Learning how to play songs from folk albums then became a hobby for Raitt. As a teenager, Raitt was self-conscious about her weight and her freckles, and saw music as an escape from reality. "That was my saving grace. I just sat in my room and played my guitar" said Raitt. After graduating from Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1967, Raitt entered Radcliffe College of Harvard University, majoring in Social Relations and African studies. She said her "plan was to travel to Tanzania, where President Julius Nyerere was creating a government based on democracy and socialism". She was the lead singer in a campus music group called the "Revolutionary Music Collective" founded by songwriter Bob Telson which played for striking Harvard students during the Student strike of 1970. Raitt became friends with blues promoter Dick Waterman. During her second year of college, Raitt left school for a semester and moved to Philadelphia with Waterman and other local musicians. Raitt said it was an "opportunity that changed everything." Career 1970–1976 In the summer of 1970, she played with her brother David on stand-up bass with Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Philly Folk Festival as well as opening for John Hammond at the Gaslight Cafe in New York, she was seen by a reporter from Newsweek, who began to spread the word about her performance. Scouts from major record companies were soon attending her shows to watch her play. She eventually accepted an offer from Warner Bros., who soon released her debut album, Bonnie Raitt, in 1971. The album was warmly received by the music press, with many writers praising her skills as an interpreter and as a bottleneck guitarist; at the time, few women in popular music had strong reputations as guitarists. While admired by those who saw her perform, and respected by her peers, Raitt gained little public acclaim for her work. Her critical stature continued to grow but record sales remained modest. Her second album, Give It Up, was released in 1972 to positive reviews. One journalist described the album as "an excellent set" and "established the artist as an inventive and sympathetic interpreter". However, it did not change her commercial fortunes. 1973's Takin' My Time was also met with critical acclaim, but these notices were not matched by the sales. Raitt began to receive greater press coverage, including a 1975 cover story for Rolling Stone, but with 1974's Streetlights, reviews for her work were becoming increasingly mixed. By this point, Raitt was already experimenting with different producers and different styles, and she began to adopt a more mainstream sound that continued through 1975's Home Plate. In 1976, Raitt made an appearance on Warren Zevon's eponymous album. 1977–1988 1977's Sweet Forgiveness album gave Raitt her first commercial breakthrough, when it yielded a hit single in her remake of "Runaway." Recast as a heavy rhythm and blues recording based on a rhythmic groove inspired by Al Green, Raitt's version of "Runaway" was disparaged by many critics. However, the song's commercial success prompted a bidding war for Raitt between Warner Bros. and Columbia Records. "There was this big Columbia–Warner war going on at the time", recalled Raitt in a 1990 interview. "James Taylor had just left Warner Bros. and made a big album for Columbia... And then, Warner signed Paul Simon away from Columbia, and they didn't want me to have a hit record for Columbia – no matter what! So, I renegotiated my contract, and they basically matched Columbia's offer. Frankly the deal was a really big deal." Warner Brothers held higher expectations for Raitt's next album, The Glow, in 1979, but it was released to poor reviews as well as modest sales. Raitt had one commercial success in 1979 when she helped organize the five Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The shows spawned the three-record gold album No Nukes, as well as a Warner Brothers feature film of the same name. The shows featured co-founders Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, John Hall, and Raitt as well as Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Doobie Brothers, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Gil Scott-Heron, and others. In 1980, she appeared as herself in the Paramount film Urban Cowboy where she sang "Don't It Make You Wanna Dance." For her next record, 1982's Green Light, Raitt made a conscious attempt to revisit the sound of her earlier records. However, to her surprise, many of her peers and the media compared her new sound to the burgeoning new wave movement. The album received her strongest reviews in years, but her sales did not improve and this had a severe impact on her relationship with Warner Brothers. Tongue and Groove and release from Warner Brothers In 1983, Raitt was finishing work on her follow-up album, Tongue and Groove. The day after mastering was completed on Tongue & Groove, the record company dropped Raitt from its roster, not being happy with her commercial performance up to that point. The album was shelved and not released, and Raitt was left without a record contract. At this time Raitt was also struggling with alcohol and drug abuse problems. Despite her personal and professional problems, Raitt continued to tour and participate in political activism. In 1985, she sang and appeared in the video of "Sun City", the anti-apartheid song written and produced by guitarist Steven Van Zandt. Along with her participation in Farm Aid and Amnesty International concerts, Raitt traveled to Moscow, Russia in 1987 to participate in the first joint Soviet/American Peace Concert, later shown on the Showtime cable network. Also in 1987, Raitt organized a benefit in Los Angeles for Countdown '87 to Stop Contra Aid. The benefit featured herself, along with Don Henley, Herbie Hancock, and others. Two years after being dropped from Warner Brothers Records, the label notified Raitt of their plans to release the Tongue and Groove album. "I said it wasn't really fair," recalled Raitt. "I think at this point they felt kind of bad. I mean, I was out there touring on my savings to keep my name up, and my ability to draw was less and less. So they agreed to let me go in and recut half of it, and that's when it came out as Nine Lives." A critical and commercial disappointment, Nine Lives, released in 1986, was Raitt's last new recording for Warner Brothers. In late 1987, Raitt joined singers k.d. lang and Jennifer Warnes as female background vocalists for Roy Orbison's television special, Roy Orbison and Friends, A Black and White Night. Following this highly acclaimed broadcast, Raitt began working on new material. By then, she was clean and sober, having resolved her problems with substance abuse. She later credited Stevie Ray Vaughan for his help in a Minnesota State Fair concert the night after Vaughan's 1990 death. During this time, Raitt considered signing with the Prince-owned Paisley Park Records, but they could not come to an agreement and negotiations fell through. Instead, she began recording a bluesy mix of pop and rock songs under the production guidance of Don Was at Capitol Records. Raitt had met Was through Hal Wilner, who was putting together Stay Awake, a tribute album to Disney music for A&M. Was and Wilner both wanted Raitt to sing lead on an adult-contemporary arrangement created by Was for "Baby Mine", the lullaby from Dumbo. Raitt was very pleased with the sessions, and she asked Was to produce her next album. 1989–1999: Commercial breakthrough After working with Was on the Stay Awake album, Raitt's management, Gold Mountain, approached numerous labels about a new record deal and found interest from Capitol Records. Raitt was signed to Capitol by A&R executive Tim Devine. With her first Capitol Records release, and after nearly twenty years in the business, Raitt achieved commercial success with Nick of Time, her tenth overall album of her career. Released in the spring of 1989, Nick of Time went to number one on the U.S. album chart following Raitt's Grammy sweep in early 1990. This album has also been voted number 230 in the Rolling Stone list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Raitt later stated that her 10th try was "my first sober album." At the same time, Raitt received a fourth Grammy Award for her duet "I'm in the Mood" with John Lee Hooker on his album The Healer. Nick of Time was also the first of many of her recordings to feature her longtime rhythm section of Ricky Fataar and James "Hutch" Hutchinson (although previously Fataar had played on her Green Light album and Hutchinson had worked on Nine Lives), both of whom continue to record and tour with her. Since its release in 1989, Nick of Time has currently sold over five million copies in the US alone. Raitt followed up this success with three more Grammy Awards for her next album, 1991's Luck of the Draw, which sold seven million copies in the United States. Three years later, in 1994, she added two more Grammys with her album Longing in Their Hearts, her second number one album, that sold two million copies in the US. Raitt's collaboration with Don Was amicably came to an end with 1995's live release Road Tested. Released to solid reviews, it was certified gold in the US. "Rock Steady" was a hit written by Bryan Adams and Gretchen Peters in 1995. The song was written as a duet with Bryan Adams and Bonnie Raitt for her Road Tested tour, which also became one of her albums. The original demo version of the song appears on Adams' 1996 single "Let's Make a Night to Remember". For her next studio album, Raitt hired Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake as her producers. "I loved working with Don Was but I wanted to give myself and my fans a stretch and do something different," Raitt stated. Her work with Froom and Blake was released on Fundamental in 1998. 2000–2007 In March 2000, Raitt was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Silver Lining was released in 2002. In the US, it reached number 13 on the Billboard chart and was later certified Gold. It contains the singles "I Can't Help You Now", "Time of Our Lives", and the title track. All three singles charted within the top 40 of the US Adult Contemporary chart. On March 19, 2002, Bonnie Raitt received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to the recording industry, located at 1750 N. Vine Street. In 2003 Capitol Records released the compilation album The Best of Bonnie Raitt. It contains songs from her prior Capitol albums from 1989 to 2002 including Nick of Time, Luck of the Draw, Longing in Their Hearts, Road Tested, Fundamental, and Silver Lining. Raitt was featured on the album True Love by Toots and the Maytals, which won the Grammy Award in 2004 for Best Reggae Album. Souls Alike was released in September 2005. In the US, it reached the top 20 on the Billboard chart. It contains the singles "I Will Not Be Broken" and "I Don't Want Anything to Change", which both charted in the top 40 of the US Adult Contemporary chart. In 2006, she released the live DVD/CD Bonnie Raitt and Friends, which was filmed as part of the critically acclaimed VH1 Classic Decades Rock Live! concert series, featuring special guests Keb' Mo', Alison Krauss, Ben Harper, Jon Cleary, and Norah Jones. The DVD was released by Capitol Records on August 15. Bonnie Raitt and Friends, which was recorded live in Atlantic City, NJ on September 30, 2005, features never-before-seen performance and interview footage, including four duets not included in the VH1 Classic broadcast of the concert. The accompanying CD features 11 tracks, including the radio single "Two Lights in the Nighttime" (featuring Ben Harper). In 2007, Raitt contributed to Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino. With Jon Cleary, she sang a medley of "I'm in Love Again" and "All by Myself" by Fats Domino. Raitt is interviewed on screen and appears in performance footage in the 2005 documentary film Make It Funky!, which presents a history of New Orleans music and its influence on rhythm and blues, rock and roll, funk and jazz. In the film, Raitt performs "What is Success" with Allen Toussaint and band, a song he wrote and that Raitt included on her 1974 album Streetlights. 2008–present Raitt appeared on the June 7, 2008 broadcast of Garrison Keillor's radio program A Prairie Home Companion. She performed two blues songs with Keb' Mo': "No Getting Over You" and "There Ain't Nothin' in Ramblin'". Raitt also sang "Dimming of the Day" with Richard Thompson. This show, along with another one with Raitt and her band in October 2006, is archived on the Prairie Home Companion website. Raitt appeared in the 2011 documentary Reggae Got Soul: The Story of Toots and the Maytals, which was featured on the BBC and described as "The untold story of one of the most influential artists ever to come out of Jamaica". In February 2012, Raitt performed a duet with Alicia Keys at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards in 2012 honoring Etta James. In April 2012, Raitt released her first studio album since 2005, entitled Slipstream. It charted at Number 6 on the US Billboard 200 chart marking her first top ten album since 1994's Longing in Their Hearts. The album was described as "one of the best of her 40-year career" by American Songwriter magazine. In September 2012, Raitt was featured in a campaign called "30 Songs / 30 Days" to support Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, a multi-platform media project inspired by a project outlined in a book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. In 2013, she appeared on Foy Vance's album Joy of Nothing. On May 30, 2015, Leon Russell, Bonnie Raitt and Ivan Neville gave a performance at The Canyon Club in Agoura Hills, California to raise cash for Marty Grebb who was battling cancer. Grebb had played on some of their albums. In February 2016, Raitt released her seventeenth studio album Dig In Deep. The album charted at number 11 on the US Billboard 200 chart and received favorable reviews. The album features the single "Gypsy in Me" as well as a cover of the INXS song "Need You Tonight". Raitt cancelled the first leg of her 2018 spring-summer touring schedule due to a recently discovered medical issue requiring surgical intervention. She reported that a "full recovery" is expected and that she planned to resume touring with already-scheduled dates in June 2018. Drug and alcohol use and recovery Raitt used alcohol and drugs, but began psychotherapy and joined Alcoholics Anonymous in the late 1980s. "I thought I had to live that partying lifestyle in order to be authentic," she said, "but in fact if you keep it up too long, all you're going to be is sloppy or dead." She became clean in 1987. She has credited Stevie Ray Vaughan for breaking her substance abuse, saying that what gave her the courage to admit her alcohol problem and stop drinking was seeing that Stevie Ray Vaughan was an even better musician when sober. She has also said that she stopped because she realized that the "late night life" was not working for her. In 1989, she said, "I really feel like some angels have been carrying me around. I just have more focus and more discipline, and consequently more self-respect." Personal life Raitt has taken sabbaticals, including after the deaths of her parents, brother, and best friend. She has said "When I went through a lot of loss, I took a hiatus." Raitt and actor Michael O'Keefe were married on April 27, 1991. They announced their divorce on November 9, 1999, with a causal factor appearing to be that their careers caused considerable time apart. Singer and guitarist David Crosby has said that Raitt is his favorite singer of all time. Political activism Raitt's political involvement goes back to the early 1970s. Her 1972 album Give It Up had a dedication "to the people of North Vietnam ..." printed on the back. Raitt's web site urges fans to learn more about preserving the environment. She was a founding member of Musicians United for Safe Energy in 1979 and a catalyst for the larger anti-nuclear movement, becoming involved with groups like the Abalone Alliance and Alliance for Survival. In 1994 at the urging of Dick Waterman, Raitt funded the replacement of a headstone for one of her mentors, blues guitarist Fred McDowell through the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund. Raitt later financed memorial headstones in Mississippi for musicians Memphis Minnie, Sam Chatmon, and Tommy Johnson again with the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund. In 2002, Raitt signed on as an official supporter of Little Kids Rock, a nonprofit organization that provides free musical instruments and free lessons to children in public schools throughout the U.S. She has visited children in the program and sits on the organization's board of directors as an honorary member. At the Stockholm Jazz Festival in July 2004, Raitt dedicated a performance of "Your Good Thing (Is About to End)", from her 1979 album The Glow, to sitting (and later re-elected) U.S. President George W. Bush. She was quoted as saying "We're gonna sing this for George Bush because he's out of here, people!". In 2008, Raitt donated a song to the Aid Still Required's CD to assist with relief efforts in Southeast Asia from the 2004 tsunami. Raitt worked with Reverb, a non-profit environmental organization, for her 2005 fall/winter and 2006 spring/summer/fall tours. Raitt is part of the No Nukes group, which opposes the expansion of nuclear power. In 2007, No Nukes recorded a music video of a new version of the Buffalo Springfield song "For What It's Worth". During the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Raitt, along with Jackson Browne and bassist James "Hutch" Hutchinson, performed at campaign appearances for candidate John Edwards. During the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, Raitt endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Discography Bonnie Raitt (1971) Give It Up (1972) Takin' My Time (1973) Streetlights (1974) Home Plate (1975) Sweet Forgiveness (1977) The Glow (1979) Green Light (1982) Nine Lives (1986) Nick of Time (1989) Luck of the Draw (1991) Longing in Their Hearts (1994) Fundamental (1998) Silver Lining (2002) Souls Alike (2005) Slipstream (2012) Dig In Deep (2016) Just Like That... (2022) Guitar Raitt's principal touring guitar is a customized Fender Stratocaster that she nicknamed Brownie. This became the basis for a signature model in 1996. Raitt was the first female musician to receive a signature Fender line. Awards Grammy Awards \|- \| 1980 \|"You're Gonna Get What's Coming" \|rowspan="3"\|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \| 1983 \|"Green Light" \| \|- \| 1987 \|"No Way to Treat a Lady" \| \|- \|rowspan="4"\| 1990 \|rowspan="2"\|Nick of Time \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"Nick of Time" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"I'm in the Mood" (with John Lee Hooker) \|Best Traditional Blues Recording \| \|- \|rowspan="6"\| 1992 \|Luck of the Draw \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|rowspan="2"\|"Something to Talk About" \|Record of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \| "Luck of the Draw" \| Best Rock Vocal Solo Performance \| \|- \|"Good Man, Good Woman" \|Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocal \| \|- \|Bonnie Raitt \|MusiCares Person of the Year \| \|- \|rowspan="5"\| 1995 \|rowspan="2"\|Longing in Their Hearts \|Album of the Year \| \|- \|Best Pop Vocal Album \| \|- \|rowspan="2"\|"Love Sneakin' Up On You" \|Record of the Year \| \|- \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"Longing in Their Hearts" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|1996 \|"You Got It" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|rowspan="3"\|1997 \|Road Tested \|Best Rock Album \| \|- \|"Burning Down the House" \|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \|"SRV Shuffle" \|Best Rock Instrumental Performance \| \|- \| 1999 \|"Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" (with Jackson Browne) \|Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals \| \|- \| 2003 \|"Gnawin' on It" \|rowspan="2"\|Best Female Rock Vocal Performance \| \|- \| 2004 \| "Time of Our Lives" \| \|- \| 2006 \|"I Will Not Be Broken" \|Best Female Pop Vocal Performance \| \|- \|2013 \|Slipstream \|Best Americana Album \| \|- \|2022 \|Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award \|Herself \| \|} : Not a Grammy Award, but awarded by The Recording Academy Americana Music Honors and Awards \|- \|2012 \|Herself \|Lifetime Achievement Award for Performance \| \|- \|2016 \|Herself \|Artist of the Year \| \|} Rock and Roll Hall of Fame \|- \|2000 \|Herself \|Hall of Fame induction \| \|} Other awards In 1991, Raitt was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee College of Music. In 1997 Raitt was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal. In 2017, Raitt was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Guitar Museum. In 2018, Raitt received the People's Voice Award from the Folk Alliance International Awards in recognition of her activism. References Citations General references External links Fansite: Bonnie's Pride and Joy [ Allmusic Guide Profile] 1949 births Living people American alternative country singers American women country singers American country singer-songwriters American anti–nuclear power activists American blues guitarists American blues pianists American women pianists American blues singer-songwriters American women rock singers American women singer-songwriters American folk rock musicians American feminists American folk singers American humanitarians Women humanitarians Record producers from California American rock songwriters American women activists Blues rock musicians Electric blues musicians Feminist musicians Fingerstyle guitarists Grammy Award winners Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Slide guitarists Proponents of Christian feminism Radcliffe College alumni Capitol Records artists Warner Music Group artists Warner Records artists American people of Scottish descent Activists from California Country musicians from California Guitarists from California Musicians from Burbank, California Singer-songwriters from California 21st-century American pianists 20th-century American women singers 21st-century American women singers 20th-century American pianists American women record producers 20th-century American women guitarists 20th-century American guitarists 21st-century American women guitarists 21st-century American guitarists Proper Records artists 20th-century American singers 21st-century American singers	false	[ "Chitrashi Rawat (born 29 November 1989) is an Indian model, national level athlete and actress known for her role of Komal Chautala in Chak De! India in 2007. Chitrashi is a real life hockey player. She started playing hockey at the age of 17. She played as a left striker.\n\nCareer\nRawat had been playing field hockey since childhood.\n\nShe was picked for the role of a hockey player in the movie Chak De! India by the producers after an audition in Jabalpur. The film turned out to be a blockbuster worldwide, and Rawat shot to fame. In 2008, she starred in her second venture, Fashion. The film was a success at the box office, and received critical acclaim. She had a main role in the 2009 action film Luck opposite superstars Sanjay Dutt, Imran Khan, Shruti Hassan, Mithun Chakraborty, and Ravi Kissen. Luck also received critical acclaim, but did average business at the box office.\n\nHer latest films include Yeh Dooriyan and the 2012 hit Tere Naal Love Ho Gaya.\n\nRawat is a former student of the Guru Nanak Academy. The daughter of T. S. Rawat, a resident of Raipur, Uttarakhand, Rawat regularly represents the Uttarakhand hockey team in the national championships. Currently, she is studying at St Andrew FYBMM pursuing her bachelor's degree in mass media. She has campaigned for Minute Maid pulpy orange, along with co-stars Vidya Malvade and Sagarika Ghatge.\n\nShe hails from Dehradun. She is also hosting Star Gold's Sabse Favourite Kaun. She was also a contestant in a Comedy Circus 2 of Optimystix. She acted in Madhur Bhandarkar's Fashion as Shomu and recently as \"Shortkut\" in the 2009 action thriller movie Luck. She subsequently participated in Iss Jungle Se Mujhe Bachao, the Indian remake of I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!\n\nIn 2020, Rawat acted in Rubaru, a short film directed by Tisca Chopra.\n\nFilmography\n\nMovies\n\nTelevision\n\nAwards\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n \n \n \n\n1989 births\nLiving people\nIndian film actresses\nIndian female field hockey players\nSportspeople from Dehradun\nField hockey players from Uttarakhand\nActresses from Dehradun\nSportswomen from Uttarakhand\n21st-century Indian actresses\nActresses in Hindi cinema\nIndian television actresses\nActresses in Hindi television", "Matthew Tonner is an American musician and music producer. \nTonner is known as a member of Florida-based indie folk band The 502s, producing and performing multiple instruments on their debut album Because We Had To and follow up album Could It Get Better Than This. He is a former member of the electronic pop duo Destima and of Laney Jones and the Spirits. \nHe is also known for his solo music under the mononym Tonner.\n\nBiography\nTonner was born and raised in Shorewood, Wisconsin. He received a degree in music from Rollins College, where he also met songwriting collaborator Laney Jones. Tonner co-produced and performed on Laney Jones’ 2016 self-titled album, which received critical acclaim from Rolling Stone, Paste Magazine, Elmore Magazine and The Lefort Report, the latter of which declared the album \"easily one of the Best Albums of 2016\".\n\nIn 2017, Tonner was recruited by The 502s to produce their full-length album “Because We Had To” and joined their live band shortly afterward. The album received critical acclaim from PopMatters and Cowboys and Indians. Also in 2017, Tonner produced the self-titled full length album for Orlando based folk band Beemo; the lead single from Beemo's album \"Did For You\" (which featured piano and arrangements from Tonner), later appeared in the 2021 film Red Rocket.\n\nTonner has continued as an active member of The 502s and produced their follow up album Could It Get Better Than This \n\nIn 2020, Tonner began releasing music under his own name, culminating in the Whispers in the Dark EP. His debut single “Criminal” was co-produced with Jordan Shih of the band SALES\n\nDiscography\n\nwith Laney Jones\n\nwith The 502s\n\nas Tonner\n\nReferences \n\n1988 births\n21st-century American singers\n21st-century American writers\nLiving people\nAmerican male singer-songwriters\nSinger-songwriters from Florida\nWriters from Florida" ]
[ "Phonograph", "United States" ]	C_633eac39ad7d4090970629a6d31a4191_0	What year was the Phonograph brought to the United States?	1	What year was the Phonograph brought to the United States?	Phonograph	In American English, "phonograph", properly specific to machines made by Edison, was sometimes used in a generic sense as early as the 1890s to include cylinder-playing machines made by others. But it was then considered strictly incorrect to apply it to Emile Berliner's upstart Gramophone, a very different machine which played discs. "Talking machine" was the comprehensive generic term, but in the early 20th century the general public was increasingly applying the word "phonograph" indiscriminately to both cylinder and disc machines and to the records they played. By the time of the First World War, the mass advertising and popularity of the Victor Talking Machine Company's Victrolas (a line of disc-playing machines characterized by their concealed horns) was leading to widespread generic use of the word "victrola" for any machine that played discs, which were however still called "phonograph records" or simply "records", almost never "victrola records". After electrical disc-playing machines started appearing on the market during the second half of the 1920s, usually sharing the same cabinet with a radio receiver, the term "record player" was increasingly favored by users when referring to the device. Manufacturers, however, typically advertised such combinations as "radio-phonographs". Portable record players (no radio included), with a latched cover and an integrated power amplifier and loudspeaker, were fairly common as well, especially in schools and for use by children and teenagers. In the years following the Second World War, as "hi-fi" (high-fidelity, monophonic) and, later, "stereo" (stereophonic) component sound systems slowly evolved from an exotic specialty item into a common feature of American homes, the description of the record-spinning component as a "record changer" (which could automatically play through a stacked series of discs) or a "turntable" (which could hold only one disc at a time) entered common usage. By about 1980 the use of a "record changer", which might damage the stacked discs, was widely disparaged. So, the "turntable" emerged triumphant and retained its position to the end of the 20th century and beyond. Through all these changes, however, the discs have continued to be known as "phonograph records" or, much more commonly, simply as "records". The brand name Gramophone was not used in the USA after 1901, and the word fell out of use there, although it has survived in its nickname form, Grammy, as the name of the Grammy Awards. The Grammy trophy itself is a small rendering of a gramophone, resembling a Victor disc machine with a taper arm. Modern amplifier-component manufacturers continue to label the input jack which accepts the output from a modern magnetic pickup cartridge as the "phono" input, abbreviated from "phonograph". CANNOTANSWER	early as the 1890s	A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue recording and reproduction of sound. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a "record". To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it, very faintly reproducing the recorded sound. In early acoustic phonographs, the stylus vibrated a diaphragm which produced sound waves which were coupled to the open air through a flaring horn, or directly to the listener's ears through stethoscope-type earphones. The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison. Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory made several improvements in the 1880s and introduced the graphophone, including the use of wax-coated cardboard cylinders and a cutting stylus that moved from side to side in a zigzag groove around the record. In the 1890s, Emile Berliner initiated the transition from phonograph cylinders to flat discs with a spiral groove running from the periphery to near the center, coining the term gramophone for disc record players, which is predominantly used in many languages. Later improvements through the years included modifications to the turntable and its drive system, the stylus or needle, pickup system, and the sound and equalization systems. The disc phonograph record was the dominant commercial audio recording format throughout most of the 20th century. In the mid-1960s the use of 8-track cartridges and cassette tapes were introduced as alternatives. In the 1980s, phonograph use declined sharply due to the popularity of cassettes and the rise of the compact disc, as well as the later introduction of digital music distribution in the 2000s. However, records are still a favorite format for some audiophiles, DJs, collectors, and turntablists (particularly in hip hop and electronic dance music), and have undergone a revival since the 2000s. Terminology Usage of terminology is not uniform across the English-speaking world (see below). In more modern usage, the playback device is often called a "turntable", "record player", or "record changer", although each of these terms denote categorically distinct items. When used in conjunction with a mixer as part of a DJ setup, turntables are often colloquially called "decks". In later electric phonographs (more often known since the 1940s as record players or turntables), the motions of the stylus are converted into an analogous electrical signal by a transducer, then converted back into sound by a loudspeaker. The term phonograph ("sound writing") was derived from the Greek words (, 'sound' or 'voice') and (, 'writing'). The similar related terms gramophone (from the Greek 'letter' and 'voice') and graphophone have similar root meanings. The roots were already familiar from existing 19th-century words such as photograph ("light writing"), telegraph ("distant writing"), and telephone ("distant sound"). The new term may have been influenced by the existing words phonographic and phonography, which referred to a system of phonetic shorthand; in 1852 The New York Times carried an advertisement for "Professor Webster's phonographic class", and in 1859 the New York State Teachers Association tabled a motion to "employ a phonographic recorder" to record its meetings. Arguably, any device used to record sound or reproduce recorded sound could be called a type of "phonograph", but in common practice the word has come to mean historic technologies of sound recording, involving audio-frequency modulations of a physical trace or groove. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, "Phonograph", "Gramophone", "Graphophone", "Zonophone", "Graphonole" and the like were still brand names specific to various makers of sometimes very different (i.e. cylinder and disc) machines; so considerable use was made of the generic term "talking machine", especially in print. "Talking machine" had earlier been used to refer to complicated devices which produced a crude imitation of speech, by simulating the workings of the vocal cords, tongue, and lips – a potential source of confusion both then and now. United Kingdom In British English, "gramophone" may refer to any sound-reproducing machine using disc records, which were introduced and popularized in the UK by the Gramophone Company. Originally, "gramophone" was a proprietary trademark of that company and any use of the name by competing makers of disc records was vigorously prosecuted in the courts, but in 1910 an English court decision decreed that it had become a generic term; it has been so used in the UK and most Commonwealth countries since. The term "phonograph" was usually restricted to machines that used cylinder records. "Gramophone" generally referred to a wind-up machine. After the introduction of the softer vinyl records, -rpm LPs (long-playing records) and 45-rpm "single" or two-song records, and EPs (extended-play recordings), the common name became "record player" or "turntable". Often the home record player was part of a system that included a radio (radiogram) and, later, might also play audiotape cassettes. From about 1960, such a system began to be described as a "hi-fi" (high-fidelity, monophonic) or a "stereo" (most systems being stereophonic by the mid-1960s). United States In American English, "phonograph", properly specific to machines made by Edison, was sometimes used in a generic sense as early as the 1890s to include cylinder-playing machines made by others. But it was then considered strictly incorrect to apply it to Emile Berliner's upstart Gramophone, a very different machine which played discs (although Edison's original Phonograph patent included the use of discs). "Talking machine" was the comprehensive generic term, but from about 1902 on, the general public was increasingly applying the word "phonograph" indiscriminately to both cylinder and disc machines and to the records they played. By the time of the First World War, the mass advertising and popularity of the Victrola (a line of disc-playing machines characterized by their concealed horns) sold by the Victor Talking Machine Company was leading to widespread generic use of the word "victrola" for any machine that played discs, which were generally called "phonograph records" or simply "records", but almost never "Victrola records". After electrical disc-playing machines appeared on the market in the late 1920s, often combined with a radio receiver, the term "record player" was increasingly favored by the public. Manufacturers, however, typically advertised such combinations as "radio-phonographs". Portable record players (no radio included), with a latched cover and an integrated power amplifier and loudspeaker, were becoming popular as well, especially in schools and for use by children and teenagers. In the years following the Second World War, as "hi-fi" (high-fidelity, monophonic) and, later, "stereo" (stereophonic) component sound systems slowly evolved from an exotic specialty item into a common feature of American homes, the description of the record-spinning component as a "record changer" (which could automatically play through a stacked series of discs) or a "turntable" (which could hold only one disc at a time) entered common usage. By the 1980s, the use of a "record changer" was widely disparaged. So, the "turntable" emerged triumphant and retained its position to the present. Through all these changes, however, the discs have continued to be known as "phonograph records" or, much more commonly, simply as "records". Gramophone, as a brand name, was not used in the United States after 1902, and the word quickly fell out of use there, although it has survived in its nickname form, Grammy, as the name of the Grammy Awards. The Grammy trophy itself is a small rendering of a gramophone, resembling a Victor disc machine with a taper arm. Modern amplifier-component manufacturers continue to label the input jack for a magnetic pickup cartridge as the "phono" input. Australia In Australian English, "record player" was the term; "turntable" was a more technical term; "gramophone" was restricted to the old mechanical (i.e., wind-up) players; and "phonograph" was used as in British English. The "phonograph" was first demonstrated in Australia on 14 June, 1878 to a meeting of the Royal Society of Victoria by the Society's Honorary Secretary, Alex Sutherland who published "The Sounds of the Consonants, as Indicated by the Phonograph" in the Society's journal in November that year. On 8 August, 1878 the phonograph was publicly demonstrated at the Society's annual conversazione, along with a range of other new inventions, including the microphone. Early history Predecessors to the phonograph Several inventors devised machines to record sound prior to Thomas Edison's phonograph, Edison being the first to invent a device that could both record and reproduce sound. The phonograph's predecessors include Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph, and Charles Cros's paleophone. Recordings made with the phonautograph were intended to be visual representations of the sound, but were never sonically reproduced until 2008. Cros's paleophone was intended to both record and reproduce sound but had not been developed beyond a basic concept at the time of Edison's successful demonstration of the phonograph in 1877. Phonautograph Direct tracings of the vibrations of sound-producing objects such as tuning forks had been made by English physicist Thomas Young in 1807, but the first known device for recording airborne speech, music and other sounds is the phonautograph, patented in 1857 by French typesetter and inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. In this device, sound waves travelling through the air vibrated a parchment diaphragm which was linked to a bristle, and the bristle traced a line through a thin coating of soot on a sheet of paper wrapped around a rotating cylinder. The sound vibrations were recorded as undulations or other irregularities in the traced line. Scott's phonautograph was intended purely for the visual study and analysis of the tracings. Reproduction of the recorded sound was not possible with the original phonautograph. In 2008, phonautograph recordings made by Scott were played back as sound by American audio historians, who used optical scanning and computer processing to convert the traced waveforms into digital audio files. These recordings, made circa 1860, include fragments of two French songs and a recitation in Italian. Paleophone Charles Cros, a French poet and amateur scientist, is the first person known to have made the conceptual leap from recording sound as a traced line to the theoretical possibility of reproducing the sound from the tracing and then to devising a definite method for accomplishing the reproduction. On April 30, 1877, he deposited a sealed envelope containing a summary of his ideas with the French Academy of Sciences, a standard procedure used by scientists and inventors to establish priority of conception of unpublished ideas in the event of any later dispute. Cros proposed the use of photoengraving, a process already in use to make metal printing plates from line drawings, to convert an insubstantial phonautograph tracing in soot into a groove or ridge on a metal disc or cylinder. This metal surface would then be given the same motion and speed as the original recording surface. A stylus linked to a diaphragm would be made to ride in the groove or on the ridge so that the stylus would be moved back and forth in accordance with the recorded vibrations. It would transmit these vibrations to the connected diaphragm, and the diaphragm would transmit them to the air. An account of his invention was published on October 10, 1877, by which date Cros had devised a more direct procedure: the recording stylus could scribe its tracing through a thin coating of acid-resistant material on a metal surface and the surface could then be etched in an acid bath, producing the desired groove without the complication of an intermediate photographic procedure. The author of this article called the device a , but Cros himself favored the word , sometimes rendered in French as ('voice of the past'). Cros was a poet of meager means, not in a position to pay a machinist to build a working model, and largely content to bequeath his ideas to the public domain free of charge and let others reduce them to practice, but after the earliest reports of Edison's presumably independent invention crossed the Atlantic he had his sealed letter of April 30 opened and read at the December 3, 1877 meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, claiming due scientific credit for priority of conception. Throughout the first decade (1890–1900) of commercial production of the earliest crude disc records, the direct acid-etch method first invented by Cros was used to create the metal master discs, but Cros was not around to claim any credit or to witness the humble beginnings of the eventually rich phonographic library he had foreseen. He had died in 1888 at the age of 45. The early phonographs Thomas Edison conceived the principle of recording and reproducing sound between May and July 1877 as a byproduct of his efforts to "play back" recorded telegraph messages and to automate speech sounds for transmission by telephone. His first experiments were with waxed paper. He announced his invention of the first phonograph, a device for recording and replaying sound, on November 21, 1877 (early reports appear in Scientific American and several newspapers in the beginning of November, and an even earlier announcement of Edison working on a 'talking-machine' can be found in the Chicago Daily Tribune on May 9), and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 (it was patented on February 19, 1878 as US Patent 200,521). "In December, 1877, a young man came into the office of the Scientific American, and placed before the editors a small, simple machine about which very few preliminary remarks were offered. The visitor without any ceremony whatever turned the crank, and to the astonishment of all present the machine said: 'Good morning. How do you do? How do you like the phonograph?' The machine thus spoke for itself, and made known the fact that it was the phonograph..." Edison presented his own account of inventing the phonograph: "I was experimenting," he said, "on an automatic method of recording telegraph messages on a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk talking-machine of to-day. The platen had a spiral groove on its surface, like the disk. Over this was placed a circular disk of paper; an electromagnet with the embossing point connected to an arm traveled over the disk; and any signals given through the magnets were embossed on the disk of paper. If this disc was removed from the machine and put on a similar machine provided with a contact point, the embossed record would cause the signals to be repeated into another wire. The ordinary speed of telegraphic signals is thirty-five to forty words a minute; but with this machine several hundred words were possible. "From my experiments on the telephone I knew of how to work a pawl connected to the diaphragm; and this engaging a ratchet-wheel served to give continuous rotation to a pulley. This pulley was connected by a cord to a little paper toy representing a man sawing wood. Hence, if one shouted: 'Mary had a little lamb,' etc., the paper man would start sawing wood. I reached the conclusion that if I could record the movements of the diaphragm properly, I could cause such records to reproduce the original movements imparted to the diaphragm by the voice, and thus succeed in recording and reproducing the human voice. "Instead of using a disk I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface. Over this was to be placed tinfoil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm. A sketch was made, and the piece-work price, $18, was marked on the sketch. I was in the habit of marking the price I would pay on each sketch. If the workman lost, I would pay his regular wages; if he made more than the wages, he kept it. The workman who got the sketch was John Kruesi. I didn't have much faith that it would work, expecting that I might possibly hear a word or so that would give hope of a future for the idea. Kruesi, when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted 'Mary had a little lamb', etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no doubt of." The music critic Herman Klein attended an early demonstration (1881–2) of a similar machine. On the early phonograph's reproductive capabilities he writes "It sounded to my ear like someone singing about half a mile away, or talking at the other end of a big hall; but the effect was rather pleasant, save for a peculiar nasal quality wholly due to the mechanism, though there was little of the scratching which later was a prominent feature of the flat disc. Recording for that primitive machine was a comparatively simple matter. I had to keep my mouth about six inches away from the horn and remember not to make my voice too loud if I wanted anything approximating to a clear reproduction; that was all. When it was played over to me and I heard my own voice for the first time, one or two friends who were present said that it sounded rather like mine; others declared that they would never have recognised it. I daresay both opinions were correct." The Argus newspaper from Melbourne, Australia, reported on an 1878 demonstration at the Royal Society of Victoria, writing "There was a large attendance of ladies and gentlemen, who appeared greatly interested in the various scientific instruments exhibited. Among these the most interesting, perhaps, was the trial made by Mr. Sutherland with the phonograph, which was most amusing. Several trials were made, and were all more or less successful. "Rule Britannia" was distinctly repeated, but great laughter was caused by the repetition of the convivial song of "He's a jolly good fellow," which sounded as if it was being sung by an old man of 80 with a very cracked voice." Early machines Edison's early phonographs recorded onto a thin sheet of metal, normally tinfoil, which was temporarily wrapped around a helically grooved cylinder mounted on a correspondingly threaded rod supported by plain and threaded bearings. While the cylinder was rotated and slowly progressed along its axis, the airborne sound vibrated a diaphragm connected to a stylus that indented the foil into the cylinder's groove, thereby recording the vibrations as "hill-and-dale" variations of the depth of the indentation. Playback was accomplished by exactly repeating the recording procedure, the only difference being that the recorded foil now served to vibrate the stylus, which transmitted its vibrations to the diaphragm and onward into the air as audible sound. Although Edison's very first experimental tinfoil phonograph used separate and somewhat different recording and playback assemblies, in subsequent machines, a single diaphragm and stylus served both purposes. One peculiar consequence was that it was possible to overdub additional sound onto a recording being played back. The recording was heavily worn by each playing, and it was nearly impossible to accurately remount a recorded foil after it had been removed from the cylinder. In this form, the only practical use that could be found for the phonograph was as a startling novelty for private amusement at home or public exhibitions for profit. Edison's early patents show that he was aware that sound could be recorded as a spiral on a disc, but Edison concentrated his efforts on cylinders, since the groove on the outside of a rotating cylinder provides a constant velocity to the stylus in the groove, which Edison considered more "scientifically correct". Edison's patent specified that the audio recording be embossed, and it was not until 1886 that vertically modulated incised recording using wax-coated cylinders was patented by Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter. They named their version the Graphophone. Introduction of the disc record The use of a flat recording surface instead of a cylindrical one was an obvious alternative which thought-experimenter Charles Cros initially favored and which practical experimenter Thomas Edison and others actually tested in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The oldest surviving example is a copper electrotype of a recording cut into a wax disc in 1881. Cylindrical Dictaphone records continued in use until the mid-20th century. The commercialization of sound recording technology had been initially aimed at use in business correspondence, i.e. transcription into writing, in which the cylindrical form offered certain advantages. With paper documents being the end product, the cylinders were considered ephemeral; need to archive large numbers of bulky, fragile sound recordings seemed unlikely, and the ease of producing multiple copies was not a consideration. In 1887, Emile Berliner patented a variant of the phonograph which he named the Gramophone. Berliner's approach was essentially the same one proposed, but never implemented, by Charles Cros in 1877. The diaphragm was linked to the recording stylus in a way that caused it to vibrate laterally (side to side) as it traced a spiral onto a zinc disc very thinly coated with a compound of beeswax. The zinc disc was then immersed in a bath of chromic acid; this etched a groove into the disc where the stylus had removed the coating, after which the recording could be played. With some later improvements, the flat discs of Berliner could be produced in large quantities at much lower cost than the cylinders of Edison's system. In May 1889, in San Francisco, the first "phonograph parlor" opened. It featured a row of coin-operated machines, each supplied with a different wax cylinder record. The customer selected a machine according to the title that it advertised, inserted a nickel, then heard the recording through stethoscope-like listening tubes. By the mid-1890s, most American cities had at least one phonograph parlor. The coin-operated mechanism was invented by Louis T. Glass and William S. Arnold. The cabinet contained an Edison Class M or Class E phonograph. The Class M was powered by a wet-cell glass battery that would spill dangerous acid if it tipped over or broke. The Class E sold for a lower price and ran on 120 V DC. The phenomenon of phonograph parlors peaked in Paris around 1900: in Pathé's luxurious salon, patrons sat in plush upholstered chairs and chose from among many hundreds of available cylinders by using speaking tubes to communicate with attendants on the floor below. By 1890, record manufacturers had begun using a rudimentary duplication process to mass-produce their product. While the live performers recorded the master phonograph, up to ten tubes led to blank cylinders in other phonographs. Until this development, each record had to be custom-made. Before long, a more advanced pantograph-based process made it possible to simultaneously produce 90–150 copies of each record. However, as demand for certain records grew, popular artists still needed to re-record and re-re-record their songs. Reportedly, the medium's first major African-American star George Washington Johnson was obliged to perform his "The Laughing Song" (or the separate "The Whistling Coon") literally thousands of times in a studio during his recording career. Sometimes he would sing "The Laughing Song" more than fifty times in a day, at twenty cents per rendition. (The average price of a single cylinder in the mid-1890s was about fifty cents.) Oldest surviving recordings Lambert's lead cylinder recording for an experimental talking clock is often identified as the oldest surviving playable sound recording, although the evidence advanced for its early date is controversial. Wax phonograph cylinder recordings of Handel's choral music made on June 29, 1888, at The Crystal Palace in London were thought to be the oldest-known surviving musical recordings, until the recent playback by a group of American historians of a phonautograph recording of Au clair de la lune made on April 9, 1860. The 1860 phonautogram had not until then been played, as it was only a transcription of sound waves into graphic form on paper for visual study. Recently developed optical scanning and image processing techniques have given new life to early recordings by making it possible to play unusually delicate or physically unplayable media without physical contact. A recording made on a sheet of tinfoil at an 1878 demonstration of Edison's phonograph in St. Louis, Missouri has been played back by optical scanning and digital analysis. A few other early tinfoil recordings are known to survive, including a slightly earlier one which is believed to preserve the voice of U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, but as of May 2014 they have not yet been scanned. These antique tinfoil recordings, which have typically been stored folded, are too fragile to be played back with a stylus without seriously damaging them. Edison's 1877 tinfoil recording of Mary Had a Little Lamb, not preserved, has been called the first instance of recorded verse. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the phonograph, Edison recounted reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb to test his first machine. The 1927 event was filmed by an early sound-on-film newsreel camera, and an audio clip from that film's soundtrack is sometimes mistakenly presented as the original 1877 recording. Wax cylinder recordings made by 19th century media legends such as P. T. Barnum and Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth are amongst the earliest verified recordings by the famous that have survived to the present. Improvements at the Volta Laboratory Alexander Graham Bell and his two associates took Edison's tinfoil phonograph and modified it considerably to make it reproduce sound from wax instead of tinfoil. They began their work at Bell's Volta Laboratory in Washington, D. C., in 1879, and continued until they were granted basic patents in 1886 for recording in wax. Although Edison had invented the phonograph in 1877 the fame bestowed on him for this invention was not due to its efficiency. Recording with his tinfoil phonograph was too difficult to be practical, as the tinfoil tore easily, and even when the stylus was properly adjusted, its reproduction of sound was distorted, and good for only a few playbacks; nevertheless Edison had discovered the idea of sound recording. However immediately after his discovery he did not improve it, allegedly because of an agreement to spend the next five years developing the New York City electric light and power system. Volta's early challenge Meanwhile, Bell, a scientist and experimenter at heart, was looking for new worlds to conquer after his invention of the telephone. According to Sumner Tainter, it was through Gardiner Green Hubbard that Bell took up the phonograph challenge. Bell had married Hubbard's daughter Mabel in 1879 while Hubbard was president of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Co., and his organization, which had purchased the Edison patent, was financially troubled because people did not want to buy a machine which seldom worked well and proved difficult for the average person to operate. In 1879 Hubbard got Bell interested in improving the phonograph, and it was agreed that a laboratory should be set up in Washington. Experiments were also to be conducted on the transmission of sound by light, which resulted in the selenium-celled Photophone. Volta Graphophone By 1881, the Volta associates had succeeded in improving an Edison tinfoil machine to some extent. Wax was put in the grooves of the heavy iron cylinder, and no tinfoil was used. Rather than apply for a patent at that time, however, they deposited the machine in a sealed box at the Smithsonian, and specified that it was not to be opened without the consent of two of the three men. The sound vibrations had been indented in the wax which had been applied to the Edison phonograph. The following was the text of one of their recordings: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. I am a Graphophone and my mother was a phonograph." Most of the disc machines designed at the Volta Lab had their disc mounted on vertical turntables. The explanation is that in the early experiments, the turntable, with disc, was mounted on the shop lathe, along with the recording and reproducing heads. Later, when the complete models were built, most of them featured vertical turntables. One interesting exception was a horizontal seven inch turntable. The machine, although made in 1886, was a duplicate of one made earlier but taken to Europe by Chichester Bell. Tainter was granted on July 10, 1888. The playing arm is rigid, except for a pivoted vertical motion of 90 degrees to allow removal of the record or a return to starting position. While recording or playing, the record not only rotated, but moved laterally under the stylus, which thus described a spiral, recording 150 grooves to the inch. The preserved Bell and Tainter records are of both the lateral cut and the Edison-style hill-and-dale (up-and-down) styles. Edison for many years used the "hill-and-dale" method on both his cylinders and Diamond Disc records, and Emile Berliner is credited with the invention of the lateral cut, acid-etched Gramophone record in 1887. The Volta associates, however, had been experimenting with both formats and directions of groove modulation as early as 1881. The basic distinction between the Edison's first phonograph patent and the Bell and Tainter patent of 1886 was the method of recording. Edison's method was to indent the sound waves on a piece of tin foil, while Bell and Tainter's invention called for cutting, or "engraving", the sound waves into a wax record with a sharp recording stylus. Graphophone commercialization In 1885, when the Volta Associates were sure that they had a number of practical inventions, they filed patent applications and began to seek out investors. The Volta Graphophone Company of Alexandria, Virginia, was created on January 6, 1886 and incorporated on February 3, 1886. It was formed to control the patents and to handle the commercial development of their sound recording and reproduction inventions, one of which became the first Dictaphone. After the Volta Associates gave several demonstrations in the City of Washington, businessmen from Philadelphia created the American Graphophone Company on March 28, 1887, in order to produce and sell the machines for the budding phonograph marketplace. The Volta Graphophone Company then merged with American Graphophone, which itself later evolved into Columbia Records. Shortly after American Graphophone's creation, Jesse H. Lippincott used nearly $1 million of an inheritance to gain control of it, as well as the rights to the Graphophone and the Bell and Tainter patents. Not long later Lippincott purchased the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company. He then created the North American Phonograph Company to consolidate the national sales rights of both the Graphophone and the Edison Speaking Phonograph. In the early 1890s Lippincott fell victim to the unit's mechanical problems and also to resistance from stenographers. A coin-operated version of the Graphophone, , was developed by Tainter in 1893 to compete with nickel-in-the-slot entertainment phonograph demonstrated in 1889 by Louis T. Glass, manager of the Pacific Phonograph Company. The work of the Volta Associates laid the foundation for the successful use of dictating machines in business, because their wax recording process was practical and their machines were durable. But it would take several more years and the renewed efforts of Edison and the further improvements of Emile Berliner and many others, before the recording industry became a major factor in home entertainment. Disc vs. cylinder as a recording medium Discs are not inherently better than cylinders at providing audio fidelity. Rather, the advantages of the format are seen in the manufacturing process: discs can be stamped; cylinders could not be until 1901–1902 when the gold moulding process was introduced by Edison. Recordings made on a cylinder remain at a constant linear velocity for the entirety of the recording, while those made on a disc have a higher linear velocity at the outer portion of the disc compared to the inner portion. Edison's patented recording method recorded with vertical modulations in a groove. Berliner utilized a laterally modulated groove. Though Edison's recording technology was better than Berliner's, there were commercial advantages to a disc system since the disc could be easily mass-produced by molding and stamping and it required less storage space for a collection of recordings. Berliner successfully argued that his technology was different enough from Edison's that he did not need to pay royalties on it, which reduced his business expenses. Through experimentation, in 1892 Berliner began commercial production of his disc records, and "gramophones". His "gramophone record" was the first disc record to be offered to the public. They were five inches (12.7 cm) in diameter and recorded on one side only. Seven-inch (17.5 cm) records followed in 1895. Also in 1895 Berliner replaced the hard rubber used to make the discs with a shellac compound. Berliner's early records had very poor sound quality, however. Work by Eldridge R. Johnson eventually improved the sound fidelity to a point where it was as good as the cylinder. By late 1901, ten-inch (25 cm) records were marketed by Johnson and Berliner's Victor Talking Machine Company, and Berliner had sold his interests. In 1904, discs were first pressed with music on both sides and capable of around seven minutes total playing time, as opposed to the cylinder's typical duration on two minutes at that time. As a result of this and the fragility of wax cylinders in transit and storage, cylinders sales declined. Edison felt the increasing commercial pressure for disc records, and by 1912, though reluctant at first, his production of disc records was in full swing. This was the Edison Disc Record. Nevertheless, he continued to manufacture cylinders until 1929 and was last to withdraw from that market. From the mid-1890s until World War I, both phonograph cylinder and disc recordings and machines to play them on were widely mass-marketed and sold. The disc system superseded the cylinder in Europe by 1906 when both Columbia and Pathe withdrew from that market. By 1913, Edison was the only company still producing cylinders in the USA although in Great Britain small manufacturers pressed on until 1922. Dominance of the disc record Berliner's lateral disc record was the ancestor of the 78 rpm, 45 rpm, 33⅓ rpm, and all other analogue disc records popular for use in sound recording. See gramophone record. The 1920s brought improved radio technology. Radio sales increased, bringing many phonograph dealers to near financial ruin. With efforts at improved audio fidelity, the big record companies succeeded in keeping business booming through the end of the decade, but the record sales plummeted during the Great Depression, with many companies merging or going out of business. Record sales picked up appreciably by the late 30s and early 40s, with greater improvements in fidelity and more money to be spent. By this time home phonographs had become much more common, though it wasn't until the 1940s that console radio/phono set-ups with automatic record changers became more common. In the 1930s, vinyl (originally known as vinylite) was introduced as a record material for radio transcription discs, and for radio commercials. At that time, virtually no discs for home use were made from this material. Vinyl was used for the popular 78-rpm V-discs issued to US soldiers during World War II. This significantly reduced breakage during transport. The first commercial vinylite record was the set of five 12" discs "Prince Igor" (Asch Records album S-800, dubbed from Soviet masters in 1945). Victor began selling some home-use vinyl 78s in late 1945; but most 78s were made of a shellac compound until the 78-rpm format was completely phased out. (Shellac records were heavier and more brittle.) 33s and 45s were, however, made exclusively of vinyl, with the exception of some 45s manufactured out of polystyrene. Booms in record sales returned after the Second World War, as industry standards changed from 78s to vinyl, long-playing records (commonly called record albums), which could contain an entire symphony, and 45s which usually contained one hit song popularized on the radio – thus the term "single" record – plus another song on the back or "flip" side. An "extended play" version of the 45 was also available, designated 45 EP, which provided capacity for longer musical selections, or for two regular-length songs per side. Shortcomings include surface noise caused by dirt or abrasions (scratches) and failure caused by deep surface scratches causing skipping of the stylus forward and missing a section, or groove lock, causing a section to repeat, usually punctuated by a popping noise. This was so common that the phrase: "you sound like a broken record,” was coined, referring to someone who is being annoyingly repetitious. First all-transistor phonograph In 1955, Philco developed and produced the world's first all-transistor phonograph models TPA-1 and TPA-2, which were announced in the June 28, 1955 edition of the Wall Street Journal. Philco started to sell these all-transistor phonographs in the fall of 1955, for the price of $59.95. The October 1955 issue of Radio & Television News magazine (page 41), had a full page detailed article on Philco's new consumer product. The all-transistor portable phonograph TPA-1 and TPA-2 models played only 45rpm records and used four 1.5 volt "D" batteries for their power supply. The "TPA" stands for "Transistor Phonograph Amplifier". Their circuitry used three Philco germanium PNP alloy-fused junction audio frequency transistors. After the 1956 season had ended, Philco decided to discontinue both models, for transistors were too expensive compared to vacuum tubes, but by 1961 a $49.95 ($ in ) portable, battery-powered radio-phonograph with seven transistors was available. By the 1960s, cheaper portable record players and record changers which played stacks of records in wooden console cabinets were popular, usually with heavy and crude tonearms in the portables. The consoles were often equipped with better quality pick-up cartridges. Even pharmacies stocked 45 rpm records at their front counters. Rock music played on 45s became the soundtrack to the 1960s as people bought the same songs that were played free of charge on the radio. Some record players were even tried in automobiles, but were quickly displaced by 8-track and cassette tapes. The fidelity of sound reproduction made great advances during the 1970s, as turntables became very precise instruments with belt or direct drive, jewel-balanced tonearms, some with electronically controlled linear tracking and magnetic cartridges. Some cartridges had frequency response above 30 kHz for use with CD-4 quadraphonic 4 channel sound. A high fidelity component system which cost well under $1,000 could do a very good job of reproducing very accurate frequency response across the human audible spectrum from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz with a $200 turntable which would typically have less than 0.05% wow and flutter and very low rumble (low frequency noise). A well-maintained record would have very little surface noise. A novelty variation on the standard format was the use of multiple concentric spirals with different recordings. Thus when the record was played multiple times, different recordings would play, seemingly at random. These were often utilized in talking toys and games. Records themselves became an art form because of the large surface onto which graphics and books could be printed, and records could be molded into unusual shapes, colors, or with images (picture discs). The turntable remained a common element of home audio systems well after the introduction of other media, such as audio tape and even the early years of the compact disc as a lower-priced music format. However, even though the cost of producing CDs fell below that of records, CDs remained a higher-priced music format than either cassettes or records. Thus, records were not uncommon in home audio systems into the early 1990s. By the turn of the 21st century, the turntable had become a niche product, as the price of CD players, which reproduce music free of pops and scratches, fell far lower than high-fidelity tape players or turntables. Nevertheless, there is some increase in interest; many big-box media stores carry turntables, as do professional DJ equipment stores. Most low-end and mid-range amplifiers omit the phono input; but on the other hand, low-end turntables with built-in phono pre-amplifiers are widely available. Some combination systems include a basic turntable, a CD player, a cassette deck. and a radio, in a retro-styled cabinet. Records also continue to be manufactured and sold today, albeit in smaller quantities than in the disc phonograph's heyday. Turntable technology Turntable construction Inexpensive record players typically used a flanged steel stamping for the turntable structure. A rubber disc would be secured to the top of the stamping to provide traction for the record, as well as a small amount of vibration isolation. The spindle bearing usually consisted of a bronze bushing. The flange on the stamping provided a convenient place to drive the turntable by means of an idler wheel (see below). While light and cheap to manufacture, these mechanisms had low inertia, making motor speed instabilities more pronounced. Costlier turntables made from heavy aluminium castings have greater balanced mass and inertia, helping minimize vibration at the stylus, and maintaining constant speed without wow or flutter, even if the motor exhibits cogging effects. Like stamped steel turntables, they were topped with rubber. Because of the increased mass, they usually employed ball bearings or roller bearings in the spindle to reduce friction and noise. Most are belt or direct drive, but some use an idler wheel. A specific case was the Swiss "Lenco" drive, which possessed a very heavy turntable coupled via an idler wheel to a long, tapered motor drive shaft. This enabled stepless rotation or speed control on the drive. Because of this feature the Lenco became popular in the late 1950s with dancing schools, because the dancing instructor could lead the dancing exercises at different speeds. By the early 1980s, some companies started producing very inexpensive turntables that displaced the products of companies like BSR. Commonly found in "all-in-one" stereos from assorted far-east manufacturers, they used a thin plastic table set in a plastic plinth, no mats, belt drive, weak motors, and often, lightweight plastic tonearms with no counterweight. Most used sapphire pickups housed in ceramic cartridges, and they lacked several features of earlier units, such as auto-start and record-stacking. While not as common now that turntables are absent from the cheap "all-in-one" units, this type of turntable has made a strong resurgence in nostalgia-marketed record players. Turntable drive systems From the earliest phonograph designs, many of which were powered by spring-wound mechanisms, a speed governor was essential. Most of these employed some type of flywheel-friction disc to control the speed of the rotating cylinder or turntable; as the speed increased, centrifugal force caused a brake—often a felt pad—to rub against a smooth metal surface, slowing rotation. Electrically powered turntables, whose rotational speed was governed by other means, eventually made their mechanical counterparts obsolete. The mechanical governor was, however, still employed in some toy phonographs (such as those found in talking dolls) until they were replaced by digital sound generators in the late 20th century. Many modern players have platters with a continuous series of strobe markings machined or printed around their edge. Viewing these markings in artificial light at mains frequency produces a stroboscopic effect, which can be used to verify proper rotational speed. Additionally, the edge of the turntable can contain magnetic markings to provide feedback pulses to an electronic speed-control system. Idler-wheel drive system Earlier designs used a rubberized idler-wheel drive system. However, wear and decomposition of the wheel, as well as the direct mechanical coupling to a vibrating motor, introduced low-frequency noise ("rumble") and speed variations ("wow and flutter") into the sound. These systems generally used a synchronous motor which ran at a speed synchronized to the frequency of the AC power supply. Portable record players typically used an inexpensive shaded-pole motor. At the end of the motor shaft there was a stepped driving capstan; to obtain different speeds, the rubber idler wheel was moved to contact different steps of this capstan. The idler was pinched against the bottom or inside edge of the platter to drive it. Until the 1970s, the idler-wheel drive was the most common on turntables, except for higher-end audiophile models. However, even some higher-end turntables, such as the Lenco, Garrard, EMT, and Dual turntables, used idler-wheel drive. Belt drive system Belt drives brought improved motor and platter isolation compared to idler-wheel designs. Motor noise, generally heard as low-frequency rumble, is greatly reduced. The design of the belt drive turntable allows for a less expensive motor than the direct-drive turntable to be used. The elastomeric belt absorbs motor vibrations and noise which could otherwise be picked up by the stylus. It also absorbs small, fast speed variations, caused by "cogging", which in other designs are heard as "flutter." The "Acoustical professional" turntable (earlier marketed under Dutch "Jobo prof") of the 1960s however possessed an expensive German drive motor, the "Pabst Aussenläufer" ("Pabst outrunner"). As this motor name implied, the rotor was on the outside of the motor and acted as a flywheel ahead of the belt-driven turntable itself. In combination with a steel to nylon turntable bearing (with molybdenum disulfide inside for lifelong lubrication) very low wow, flutter and rumble figures were achieved. Direct drive system Direct-drive turntables drive the platter directly without utilizing intermediate wheels, belts, or gears as part of a drive train. This requires good engineering, with advanced electronics for acceleration and speed control. Matsushita's Technics division introduced the first commercially successful direct drive platter, model SP10, in 1969, which was joined by the Technics SL-1200 turntable, in 1972. Its updated model, SL-1200MK2, released in 1978, had a stronger motor, a convenient pitch control slider for beatmatching and a stylus illuminator, which made it the long-standing favourite among disc jockeys (see "Turntablism"). By the beginnings of the 80s, lowering of costs in microcontroller electronics made direct drive turntables more affordable. Pricing Audiophile grade turntables start at a few hundred dollars and range upwards of $100,000, depending on the complexity and quality of design and manufacture. The common view is that there are diminishing returns with an increase in price – a turntable costing $1,000 would not sound significantly better than a turntable costing $500; nevertheless, there exists a large choice of expensive turntables. Arm systems The tone arm (or tonearm) holds the pickup cartridge over the groove, the stylus tracking the groove with the desired force to give the optimal compromise between good tracking and minimizing wear of the stylus and record groove. At its simplest, a tone arm is a pivoted lever, free to move in two axes (vertical and horizontal) with a counterbalance to maintain tracking pressure. However, the requirements of high-fidelity reproduction place more demands upon the arm design. In a perfect world: The tone arm must track the groove without distorting the stylus assembly, so an ideal arm would have no mass, and frictionless bearings, requiring zero force to move it. The arm should not oscillate following a displacement, so it should either be both light and very stiff, or suitably damped. The arm must not resonate with vibrations induced by the stylus or from the turntable motor or plinth, so it must be heavy enough to be immune to those vibrations, or it must be damped to absorb them. The arm should keep the cartridge stylus tangent to the groove it's in as it moves across the record, with minimal variation in angle. These demands are contradictory and impossible to realize (massless arms and zero-friction bearings do not exist in the real world), so tone arm designs require engineering compromises. Solutions vary, but all modern tonearms are at least relatively lightweight and stiff constructions, with precision, very low friction pivot bearings in both the vertical and horizontal axes. Most arms are made from some kind of alloy (the cheapest being aluminium), but some manufacturers use balsa wood, while others use carbon fiber or graphite. The latter materials favor a straight arm design; alloys' properties lend themselves to S-type arms. The tone arm got its name before the age of electronics. It originally served to conduct actual sound waves from a purely mechanical "pickup" called a sound box or reproducer to a so-described "amplifying" horn. The earliest electronic record players, introduced at the end of 1925, had massive electromagnetic pickups that contained a horseshoe magnet, used disposable steel needles, and weighed several ounces. Their full weight rested on the record, providing ample tracking force to overcome their low compliance but causing rapid record wear. The tone arms were rudimentary and remained so even after lighter crystal pickups appeared about ten years later. When fine-grooved vinyl records were introduced in the late 1940s, still smaller and lighter crystal (later, ceramic) cartridges with semi-permanent jewel styluses became standard. In the mid-1950s these were joined by a new generation of magnetic cartridges that bore little resemblance to their crude ancestors. Far smaller tracking forces became possible and the balanced arm came into use. Prices varied widely. The well-known and extremely popular high-end S-type SME arm of the 1970–1980 era not only had a complicated design, it was also very costly. On the other hand, even some cheaper arms could be of professional quality: the "All Balance" arm, made by the now-defunct Dutch company Acoustical, was only €30 [equivalent]. It was used during that period by all official radio stations in the Dutch Broadcast studio facilities of the NOS, as well as by the pirate radio station Veronica. Playing records from a boat in international waters, the arm had to withstand sudden ship movements. Anecdotes indicate this low-cost arm was the only one capable of keeping the needle firmly in the groove during heavy storms at sea. Quality arms employ an adjustable counterweight to offset the mass of the arm and various cartridges and headshells. On this counterweight, a calibrated dial enables easy adjustment of stylus force. After perfectly balancing the arm, the dial itself is "zeroed"; the stylus force can then be dialed in by screwing the counterweight towards the fulcrum. (Sometimes a separate spring or smaller weight provides fine tuning.) Stylus forces of 10 to 20 mN (1 to 2 grams-force) are typical for modern consumer turntables, while forces of up to 50 mN (5 grams) are common for the tougher environmental demands of party deejaying or turntablism. Of special adjustment consideration, Stanton cartridges of the 681EE(E) series [and others like them] feature a small record brush ahead of the cartridge. The upforce of this brush, and its added drag require compensation of both tracking force (add 1 gram) and anti-skating adjustment values (see next paragraph for description). Even on a perfectly flat LP, tonearms are prone to two types of tracking errors that affect the sound. As the tonearm tracks the groove, the stylus exerts a frictional force tangent to the arc of the groove, and since this force does not intersect the tone arm pivot, a clockwise rotational force (moment) occurs and a reaction skating force is exerted on the stylus by the record groove wall away from center of the disc. Modern arms provide an anti-skate mechanism, using springs, hanging weights, or magnets to produce an offsetting counter-clockwise force at the pivot, making the net lateral force on the groove walls near zero. The second error occurs as the arm sweeps in an arc across the disc, causing the angle between the cartridge head and groove to change slightly. A change in angle, albeit small, will have a detrimental effect (especially with stereo recordings) by creating different forces on the two groove walls, as well as a slight timing shift between left/right channels. Making the arm longer to reduce this angle is a partial solution, but less than ideal. A longer arm weighs more, and only an infinitely long [pivoted] arm would reduce the error to zero. Some designs (Burne-Jones, and Garrard "Zero" series) use dual arms in a parallelogram arrangement, pivoting the cartridge head to maintain a constant angle as it moves across the record. Unfortunately this "solution" creates more problems than it solves, compromising rigidity and creating sources of unwanted noise. The pivoted arm produces yet another problem which is unlikely to be significant to the audiophile, though. As the master was originally cut in a linear motion from the edge towards the center, but the stylus on the pivoted arm always draws an arc, this causes a timing drift that is most significant when digitizing music and beat mapping the data for synchronization with other songs in a DAW or DJ software unless the software allows building a non-linear beat map. As the contact point of the stylus on the record wanders farther from the linear path between the starting point and center hole, the tempo and pitch tend to decrease towards the middle of the record, until the arc reaches its apex. After that the tempo and pitch increase towards the end as the contact point comes closer to the linear path again. Because the surface speed of the record is lower at the end, the relative speed error from the same absolute distance error is higher at the end, and the increase in tempo is more notable towards the end than the decrease towards the middle. This can be somewhat reduced by a curved arm pivoted so that the end point of the arc stays farther from the linear path than the starting point, or by a long straight arm that pivots perpendicularly to the linear path in the middle of the record. However the tempo droop at the middle can only be completely avoided by a linear tracking arm. Linear tracking If the arm is not pivoted, but instead carries the stylus along a radius of the disc, there is no skating force and little to no cartridge angle error. Such arms are known as linear tracking or tangential arms. These are driven along a track by various means, from strings and pulleys, to worm gears or electromagnets. The cartridge's position is usually regulated by an electronic servomechanism or mechanical interface, moving the stylus properly over the groove as the record plays, or for song selection. There are long-armed and short-armed linear arm designs. On a perfectly flat record a short arm will do, but once the record is even slightly warped, a short arm will be troublesome. Any vertical motion of the record surface at the stylus contact point will cause the stylus to considerably move longitudinally in the groove. This will cause the stylus to ride non-tangentially in the groove and cause a stereo phase error as well as pitch error every time the stylus rides over the warp. Also the arm track can come into touch with the record. A long arm will not completely eliminate this problem but will tolerate warped records much better. Early developments in linear turntables were from Rek-O-Kut (portable lathe/phonograph) and Ortho-Sonic in the 1950s, and Acoustical in the early 1960s. These were eclipsed by more successful implementations of the concept from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Of note are Rabco's SL-8, followed by Bang & Olufsen with its Beogram 4000 model in 1972. These models positioned the track outside the platter's edge, as did turntables by Harman Kardon, Mitsubishi, Pioneer, Yamaha, Sony, etc. A 1970s design from Revox harkened back to the 1950s attempts (and, record lathes), positioning the track directly over the record. An enclosed bridge-like assembly is swung into place from the platter's right edge to its middle. Once in place, a short tonearm under this "bridge" plays the record, driven across laterally by a motor. The Sony PS-F5/F9 (1983) uses a similar, miniaturized design, and can operate in a vertical or horizontal orientation. The Technics SL-10, introduced in 1981, was the first direct drive linear tracking turntable, and placed the track and arm on the underside of the rear-hinged dust cover, to fold down over the record, similar to the SL-Q6 pictured. The earliest Edison phonographs used horizontal, spring-powered drives to carry the stylus across the recording at a pre-determined rate. But, historically as a whole, the linear tracking systems never gained wide acceptance, due largely to their complexity and associated production/development costs. The resources it takes to produce one incredible linear turntable could produce several excellent ones. Some of the most sophisticated and expensive tonearms and turntable units ever made are linear trackers, from companies such as Rockport and Clearaudio. In theory, it seems nearly ideal; a stylus replicating the motion of the recording lathe used to cut the "master" record could result in minimal wear and maximum sound reproduction. In practice, in vinyl's heyday it was generally too much too late. Since the early 1980s, an elegant solution has been the near-frictionless air bearing linear arm that requires no tracking drive mechanism other than the record groove. This provides a similar benefit as the electronic linear tonearm without the complexity and necessity of servo-motor correction for tracking error. In this case the trade-off is the introduction of pneumatics in the form of audible pumps and tubing. A more elegant solution is the mechanically driven low-friction design, also driven by the groove. Examples include Souther Engineering (U.S.A.), Clearaudio (Germany), and Aura (Czech Republic). This design places an exceeding demand upon precision engineering due to the lack of pneumatics. Pickup systems Historically, most high-fidelity "component" systems (preamplifiers or receivers) that accepted input from a phonograph turntable had separate inputs for both ceramic and magnetic cartridges (typically labeled "CER" and "MAG"). One piece systems often had no additional phono inputs at all, regardless of type. Most systems today, if they accept input from a turntable at all, are configured for use only with magnetic cartridges. Manufacturers of high-end systems often have in-built moving coil amplifier circuitry, or outboard head-amplifiers supporting either moving magnet or moving coil cartridges that can be plugged into the line stage. Additionally, cartridges may contain styli or needles that can be separated according to their tip: Spherical styli, and elliptical styli. Spherical styli have their tip shaped like one half of a sphere, and elliptical styli have their tip shaped like one end of an ellipse. Spherical styli preserve more of the groove of the record than elliptical styli, while elliptical styli offer higher sound quality. (crystal/ceramic) cartridges Early electronic phonographs used a piezo-electric crystal for pickup (though the earliest electronic phonographs used crude magnetic pick-ups), where the mechanical movement of the stylus in the groove generates a proportional electrical voltage by creating stress within a crystal (typically Rochelle salt). Crystal pickups are relatively robust, and produce a substantial signal level which requires only a modest amount of further amplification. The output is not very linear however, introducing unwanted distortion. It is difficult to make a crystal pickup suitable for quality stereo reproduction, as the stiff coupling between the crystal and the long stylus prevents close tracking of the needle to the groove modulations. This tends to increase wear on the record, and introduces more distortion. Another problem is the hygroscopic nature of the crystal itself: it absorbs moisture from the air and may dissolve. The crystal was protected by embedding it in other materials, without hindering the movement of the pickup mechanism itself. After a number of years, the protective jelly often deteriorated or leaked from the cartridge case and the full unit needed replacement. The next development was the ceramic cartridge, a piezoelectric device that used newer and better materials. These were more sensitive, and offered greater compliance, that is, lack of resistance to movement and so increased ability to follow the undulations of the groove without gross distorting or jumping out of the groove. Higher compliance meant lower tracking forces and reduced wear to both the disc and stylus. It also allowed ceramic stereo cartridges to be made. Between the 1950s and 1970s, ceramic cartridges became common in low-quality phonographs, but better high-fidelity (or "hi-fi") systems used magnetic cartridges. The availability of low-cost magnetic cartridges from the 1970s onwards made ceramic cartridges obsolete for essentially all purposes. At the seeming end of the market lifespan of ceramic cartridges, someone accidentally discovered that by terminating a specific ceramic mono cartridge (the Ronette TX88) not with the prescribed 47 kΩ resistance, but with approx. 10 kΩ, it could be connected to the moving magnet (MM) input too. The result, a much smoother frequency curve extended the lifetime for this popular and very cheap type. Magnetic cartridges There are two common designs for magnetic cartridges, moving magnet (MM) and moving coil (MC) (originally called dynamic). Both operate on the same physics principle of electromagnetic induction. The moving magnet type was by far the most common and more robust of the two, though audiophiles often claim that the moving coil system yields higher fidelity sound. In either type, the stylus itself, usually of diamond, is mounted on a tiny metal strut called a cantilever, which is suspended using a collar of highly compliant plastic. This gives the stylus the freedom to move in any direction. On the other end of the cantilever is mounted a tiny permanent magnet (moving magnet type) or a set of tiny wound coils (moving coil type). The magnet is close to a set of fixed pick-up coils, or the moving coils are held within a magnetic field generated by fixed permanent magnets. In either case, the movement of the stylus as it tracks the grooves of a record causes a fluctuating magnetic field, which causes a small electric current to be induced in the coils. This current closely follows the sound waveform cut into the record, and may be transmitted by wires to an electronic amplifier where it is processed and amplified in order to drive a loudspeaker. Depending upon the amplifier design, a phono-preamplifier may be necessary. In most moving magnet designs, the stylus itself is detachable from the rest of the cartridge so it can easily be replaced. There are three primary types of cartridge mounts. The most common type is attached using two small screws to a headshell that then plugs into the tonearm, while another is a standardized "P-mount" or "T4P" cartridge (invented by Technics in 1980 and adopted by other manufacturers) that plugs directly into the tonearm. Many P-mount cartridges come with adapters to allow them to be mounted to a headshell. The third type is used mainly in cartridges designed for DJ use and it has a standard round headshell connector. Some mass market turntables use a proprietary integrated cartridge that cannot be upgraded. An alternative design is the moving iron variation on moving magnet used by ADC, Grado, Stanton/Pickering 681 series, Ortofon OM and VMS series, and the MMC cartridge of Bang & Olufsen. In these units, the magnet itself sits behind the four coils and magnetises the cores of all four coils. The moving iron cross at the other end of the coils varies the gaps between itself and each of these cores, according to its movements. These variations lead to voltage variations as described above. Famous brands for magnetic cartridges are: Grado, Stanton/Pickering (681EE/EEE), B&O (MM types for its two, non-compatible generations of parallel arm design), Shure (V15 Type I to V), Audio-Technica, Nagaoka, Dynavector, Koetsu, Ortofon, Technics, Denon and ADC. Strain gauge cartridges Strain gauge or "semiconductor" cartridges do not generate a voltage, but act like a variable resistor, whose resistance directly depends on the movement of the stylus. Thus, the cartridge "modulates" an external voltage supplied by the (special) preamplifier. These pickups were marketed by Euphonics, Sao Win, and Panasonic/Technics, amongst others. The main advantages (compared to magnetic carts are): The electrical connection from the cartridge to the preamplifier is immune to cable capacitance issues. Being non-magnetic, the cartridge is immune to "hum" induced by stray magnetic fields (same advantage shared with ceramic cartridges). The combination of electrical and mechanical advantages, plus the absence of magnetic yoke high-frequency losses, make them especially suitable to reproducing frequencies up to 50 kHz. Technics (Matsushita Electric) marketed a line of strain-gauge (labeled "semiconductor") cartridges especially intended for Compatible Discrete 4 quadraphonic records, requiring such high frequency response. Bass response down to 0 Hz is possible. By using a suitable mechanical arrangement, VTA (vertical tracking angle) stays steady independent of the stylus vertical movements, with the consequent reduction in related distortions. Being a force sensor, the strain-gauge cartridge can also measure the actual VTF (vertical tracking force) while in use. The main disadvantage is the need of a special preamplifier that supplies a steady current (typically 5mA) to the semiconductor elements and handles a special equalization than the one needed for magnetic cartridges. A high-end strain-gauge cartridge is currently sold by an audiophile company, with special preamplifiers available. Electrostatic cartridges Electrostatic cartridges were marketed by Stax in the 1950 and 1960 years. They needed individual operating electronics or preamplifiers. Optical readout A few specialist laser turntables read the groove optically using a laser pickup. Since there is no physical contact with the record, no wear is incurred. However, this "no wear" advantage is debatable, since vinyl records have been tested to withstand even 1200 plays with no significant audio degradation, provided that it is played with a high quality cartridge and that the surfaces are clean. An alternative approach is to take a high-resolution photograph or scan of each side of the record and interpret the image of the grooves using computer software. An amateur attempt using a flatbed scanner lacked satisfactory fidelity. A professional system employed by the Library of Congress produces excellent quality. Stylus A smooth-tipped stylus (in popular usage often called a needle due to the former use of steel needles for the purpose) is used to play the recorded groove. A special chisel-like stylus is used to engrave the groove into the master record. The stylus is subject to hard wear as it is the only small part that comes into direct contact with the spinning record. In terms of the force imposed on its minute areas of actual contact, the pressure it must bear is enormous. There are three desired qualities in a stylus: first, that it faithfully follows the contours of the recorded groove and transmits its vibrations to the next part in the chain; second, that it does not damage the recorded disc; and third, that it is resistant to wear. A worn-out, damaged or defective stylus tip will degrade audio quality and injure the groove. Different materials for the stylus have been used over time. Thomas Edison introduced the use of sapphire in 1892 and the use of diamond in 1910 for his cylinder phonographs. The Edison Diamond Disc players (1912–1929), when properly played, hardly ever required the stylus to be changed. The styli for vinyl records were also made out of sapphire or diamond. A specific case is the specific stylus type of Bang & Olufsen's (B&O) moving magnet cartridge MMC 20CL, mostly used in parallel arm B&O turntables in the 4002/6000 series. It uses a sapphire stem on which a diamond tip is fixed by a special adhesive. A stylus tip mass as low as 0.3 milligram is the result and full tracking only requires 1 gram of stylus force, reducing record wear even further. Maximum distortion (2nd harmonic) fell below 0.6%. Other than the Edison and European Pathé disc machines, early disc players, both external horn and internal horn "Victrola" style models, normally used very short-lived disposable needles. The most common material was steel, although other materials such as copper, tungsten, bamboo and cactus were used. Steel needles needed to be replaced frequently, preferably after each use, due to their very rapid wear from bearing down heavily on the mildly abrasive shellac record. Rapid wear was an essential feature so that their imprecisely formed tips would be quickly worn into compliance with the groove's contours. Advertisements implored customers to replace their steel needles after each record side. Steel needles were inexpensive, e.g., a box of 500 for 50 US cents, and were widely sold in packets and small tins. They were available in different thicknesses and lengths. Thick, short needles produced strong, loud tones while thinner, longer needles produces softer, muted tones. In 1916, in the face of a wartime steel shortage, Victor introduced their "Tungs-Tone" brand extra-long-playing needle, which was advertised to play between 100 and 300 records. It consisted of a brass shank into which a very hard and strong tungsten wire, somewhat narrower than the standard record groove, had been fitted. The protruding wire wore down, but not out, until it was worn too short to use. Later in the 78 rpm era, hardened steel and chrome-plated needles came on the market, some of which were claimed to play 10 to 20 record sides each. When sapphires were introduced for the 78 rpm disc and the LP, they were made by tapering a stem and polishing the tip to a sphere with a radius of around 70 and 25 micrometers respectively. A sphere is not equal to the form of the cutting stylus and by the time diamond needles came to the market, a whole discussion was started on the effect of circular forms moving through a non-circular cut groove. It can be easily shown that vertical, so called "pinching" movements were a result and when stereophonic LPs were introduced, unwanted vertical modulation was recognized as a problem. Also, the needle started its life touching the groove on a very small surface, giving extra wear on the walls. Another problem is in the tapering along a straight line, while the side of the groove is far from straight. Both problems were attacked together: by polishing the diamond in a certain way that it could be made doubly elliptic. 1) the side was made into one ellipse as seen from behind, meaning the groove touched along a short line and 2) the ellipse form was also polished as seen from above and curvature in the direction of the groove became much smaller than 25 micrometers e.g. 13 micrometers. With this approach a number of irregularities were eliminated. Furthermore, the angle of the stylus, which used to be always sloping backwards, was changed into the forward direction, in line with the slope the original cutting stylus possessed. These styli were expensive to produce, but the costs were effectively offset by their extended lifespans. The next development in stylus form came about by the attention to the CD-4 quadraphonic sound modulation process, which requires up to 50 kHz frequency response, with cartridges like Technics EPC-100CMK4 capable of playback on frequencies up to 100 kHz. This requires a stylus with a narrow side radius, such as 5 µm (or 0.2 mil). A narrow-profile elliptical stylus is able to read the higher frequencies (greater than 20 kHz), but at an increased wear, since the contact surface is narrower. For overcoming this problem, the Shibata stylus was invented around 1972 in Japan by Norio Shibata of JVC, fitted as standard on quadraphonic cartridges, and marketed as an extra on some high-end cartridges. The Shibata-designed stylus offers a greater contact surface with the groove, which in turn means less pressure over the vinyl surface and thus less wear. A positive side effect is that the greater contact surface also means the stylus will read sections of the vinyl that were not touched (or "worn") by the common spherical stylus. In a demonstration by JVC records "worn" after 500 plays at a relatively very high 4.5 gf tracking force with a spherical stylus, played "as new" with the Shibata profile. Other advanced stylus shapes appeared following the same goal of increasing contact surface, improving on the Shibata. Chronologically: "Hughes" Shibata variant (1975), "Ogura" (1978), Van den Hul (1982). Such a stylus may be marketed as "Hyperelliptical" (Shure), "Alliptic", "Fine Line" (Ortofon), "Line contact" (Audio Technica), "Polyhedron", "LAC", or "Stereohedron" (Stanton). A keel-shaped diamond stylus appeared as a byproduct of the invention of the CED Videodisc. This, together with laser-diamond-cutting technologies, made possible the "ridge" shaped stylus, such as the Namiki (1985) design, and Fritz Gyger (1989) design. This type of stylus is marketed as "MicroLine" (Audio technica), "Micro-Ridge" (Shure), or "Replicant" (Ortofon). It is important to point out that most of those stylus profiles are still being manufactured and sold, together with the more common spherical and elliptical profiles. This is despite the fact that production of CD-4 quadraphonic records ended by the late 1970s. For elliptical and advanced stylus shapes, correct cartridge alignment is critical. There are several alignment methods, each creating different null points at which the stylus will be tangential to the record grooves, optimizing distortion across the record side in different ways. The most popular alignment geometries are Baerwald, Løfgren B and Stevenson. Common tools to align the stylus correctly are 2-point protractors (which can be used with any turntable as long as the headshells are long enough for the chosen alignment), overhang gauges and arc protractors (model specific). Record materials Early materials in the 19th century were hardened rubber, wax, and celluloid, but early in the 20th century a shellac compound became the standard. Since shellac is not hard enough to withstand the wear of steel needles on heavy tone arms, filler made of pulverized shale was added. Shellac was also fragile, and records often shattered or cracked. This was a problem for home records, but it became a bigger problem in the late 1920s with the Vitaphone sound-on-disc motion picture "talkie" system, developed in 1927. To solve this problem, in 1930, RCA Victor made unbreakable records by mixing polyvinyl chloride with plasticisers, in a proprietary formula they called Victrolac, which was first used in 1931, in motion picture discs, and experimentally, in home records, the same year. However, with Sound-on-film achieving supremacy over sound-on-disc by 1931, the need for unbreakable records diminished and the production of vinyl home recordings was dropped as well, for the time being. The Victrolac formula improved throughout the 1930s, and by the late 30s the material, by then called vinylite, was being used in records sent to radio stations for radio program records, radio commercials, and later, DJ copies of phonograph records, because vinyl records could be sent through the mail to radio stations without breaking. During WWII, there was a shortage of shellac, which had to be imported from Asia, and the U.S. government banned production of shellac records for the duration of the war. Vinylite was made domestically, though, and was being used for V-discs during the war. Record company engineers took a much closer look at the possibilities of vinyl, possibly that it might even replace shellac as the basic record material. After the war, RCA Victor and Columbia, by far the two leading records companies in America, perfected two new vinyl formats, which were both introduced in 1948, when the 33 RPM LP was introduced by Columbia and the 45 RPM single was introduced by RCA Victor. For a few years thereafter, however, 78 RPM records continued to be made in shellac until that format was phased out around 1958. Equalization Early "acoustical" record players used the stylus to vibrate a diaphragm that radiated the sound through a horn. Several serious problems resulted from this: The maximum sound level achievable was quite limited, being limited to the physical amplification effects of the horn, The energy needed to generate such sound levels as were obtainable had to come directly from the stylus tracing the groove. This required very high tracking forces that rapidly wore out both the stylus and the record on lateral cut 78 rpm records. Because bass sounds have a higher amplitude than high frequency sounds (for the same perceived loudness), the space taken in the groove by low frequency sounds needed to be large (limiting playback time per side of the record) to accommodate the bass notes, yet the high frequencies required only tiny variations in the groove, which were easily affected by noise from irregularities (wear, contaminates, etc.) in the disc itself. The introduction of electronic amplification allowed these issues to be addressed. Records are made with boosted high frequencies and reduced low frequencies, which allow for different ranges of sound to be produced. This reduces the effect of background noise, including clicks or pops, and also conserves the amount of physical space needed for each groove, by reducing the size of the low-frequency undulations. During playback, the high frequencies must be rescaled to their original, flat frequency response—known as "equalization"—as well as being amplified. A phono input of an amplifier incorporates such equalization as well as amplification to suit the very low level output from a modern cartridge. Most hi-fi amplifiers made between the 1950s and the 1990s and virtually all DJ mixers are so equipped. The widespread adoption of digital music formats, such as CD or satellite radio, has displaced phonograph records and resulted in phono inputs being omitted in most modern amplifiers. Some newer turntables include built-in preamplifiers to produce line-level outputs. Inexpensive and moderate performance discrete phono preamplifiers with RIAA equalization are available, while high-end audiophile units costing thousands of dollars continue to be available in very small numbers. Phono inputs are starting to reappear on amplifiers in the 2010s due to the vinyl revival. Since the late 1950s, almost all phono input stages have used the RIAA equalization standard. Before settling on that standard, there were many different equalizations in use, including EMI, HMV, Columbia, Decca FFRR, NAB, Ortho, BBC transcription, etc. Recordings made using these other equalization schemes will typically sound odd if they are played through a RIAA-equalized preamplifier. High-performance (so-called "multicurve disc") preamplifiers, which include multiple, selectable equalizations, are no longer commonly available. However, some vintage preamplifiers, such as the LEAK varislope series, are still obtainable and can be refurbished. Newer preamplifiers like the Esoteric Sound Re-Equalizer or the K-A-B MK2 Vintage Signal Processor are also available. These kinds of adjustable phono equalizers are used by consumers wishing to play vintage record collections (often the only available recordings of musicians of the time) with the equalization used to make them. In the 21st century Turntables continued to be manufactured and sold in the 2010s, although in small numbers. While some audiophiles still prefer the sound of vinyl records over that of digital music sources (mainly compact discs), they represent a minority of listeners. As of 2015, the sale of vinyl LP's has increased 49–50% percent from the previous year, although small in comparison to the sale of other formats which although more units were sold (Digital Sales, CDs) the more modern formats experienced a decline in sales. The quality of available record players, tonearms, and cartridges has continued to improve, despite diminishing demand, allowing turntables to remain competitive in the high-end audio market. Vinyl enthusiasts are often committed to the refurbishment and sometimes tweaking of vintage systems. In 2017, vinyl LP sales were slightly decreased, at a rate of 5%, in comparison to previous years' numbers, regardless of the noticeable rise of vinyl records sales worldwide. Updated versions of the 1970s era Technics SL-1200 (production ceased in 2010) have remained an industry standard for DJs to the present day. Turntables and vinyl records remain popular in mixing (mostly dance-oriented) forms of electronic music, where they allow great latitude for physical manipulation of the music by the DJ. In hip hop music, and occasionally in other genres, the turntable is used as a musical instrument by DJs, who use turntables along with a DJ mixer to create unique rhythmic sounds. Manipulation of a record as part of the music, rather than for normal playback or mixing, is called turntablism. The basis of turntablism, and its best known technique, is scratching, pioneered by Grand Wizzard Theodore. It was not until Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" in 1983 that the turntablism movement was recognized in popular music outside of a hip hop context. In the 2010s, many hip hop DJs use DJ CD players or digital record emulator devices to create scratching sounds; nevertheless, some DJs still scratch with vinyl records. The laser turntable uses a laser as the pickup instead of a stylus in physical contact with the disk. It was conceived of in the late 1980s, although early prototypes were not of usable audio quality. Practical laser turntables are now being manufactured by ELPJ. They are favoured by record libraries and some audiophiles since they eliminate physical wear completely. Experimentation is in progress in retrieving the audio from old records by scanning the disc and analysing the scanned image, rather than using any sort of turntable. Although largely replaced since the introduction of the compact disc in 1982, record albums still sell in small numbers and are available through numerous sources. In 2008, LP sales grew by 90% over 2007, with 1.9 million records sold. USB turntables have a built-in audio interface, which transfers the sound directly to the connected computer. Some USB turntables transfer the audio without equalization, but are sold with software that allows the EQ of the transferred audio file to be adjusted. There are also many turntables on the market designed to be plugged into a computer via a USB port for needle dropping purposes. Responding to longtime calls by fans and disc jockeys, Panasonic Corp. said it is reviving Technics turntables–the series that remains a de facto standard player supporting nightclub music scenes. The new analog turntable, which would come with new direct-drive motor technologies that Panasonic says will improve the quality of sound. Beginning of 2019 Technics unveiled SL-1500C Premium Class Direct Drive Turntable System which inherits the brand's high-end sound quality concept. See also Archéophone, used to convert diverse types of cylinder recordings to modern CD media Audio signal processing Compressed air gramophone List of phonograph manufacturers Talking Machine World Vinyl killer Notes References Further reading Bruil, Rudolf A. (January 8, 2004). "Linear Tonearms." Retrieved on July 25, 2011. Gelatt, Roland. The Fabulous Phonograph, 1877–1977. Second rev. ed., [being also the] First Collier Books ed., in series, Sounds of the Century. New York: Collier, 1977. 349 p., ill. Heumann, Michael. "Metal Machine Music: The Phonograph's Voice and the Transformation of Writing." eContact! 14.3 — Turntablism (January 2013). Montréal: CEC. Koenigsberg, Allen. The Patent History of the Phonograph, 1877–1912. APM Press, 1991. Various. "Turntable [wiki]: Bibliography." eContact! 14.3 — Turntablism (January 2013). Montréal: CEC. Weissenbrunner, Karin. "Experimental Turntablism: Historical overview of experiments with record players / records — or Scratches from Second-Hand Technology." eContact! 14.3 — Turntablism (January 2013). Montréal: CEC. External links c.1915 Swiss hot-air engined gramophone at Museum of Retro Technology Interactive sculpture delivers tactile soundwave experience Very early recordings from around the world The Birth of the Recording Industry The Cylinder Archive Cylinder Preservation & Digitization Project – Over 6,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections, University of California, Santa Barbara, free for download or streamed online. Cylinder players held at the British Library – information and high-quality images. History of Recorded Sound: Phonographs and Records EnjoytheMusic.com – Excerpts from the book Hi-Fi All-New 1958 Edition Listen to early recordings on the Edison Phonograph Mario Frazzetto's Phonograph and Gramophone Gallery. Say What? – Essay on phonograph technology and intellectual property law Vinyl Engine – Information, images, articles and reviews from around the world The Analogue Dept – Information, images and tutorials; strongly focused on Thorens brand 45 rpm player and changer at work on YouTube Historic video footage of Edison operating his original tinfoil phonograph Turntable History on Enjoy the Music.com 2-point and Arc Protractor generators on AlignmentProtractor.com Audiovisual introductions in 1877 American inventions Audio players Thomas Edison Sound recording Hip hop production Turntablism 19th-century inventions	true	[ "The Chicago Talking Machine Company (sometimes The Talking Machine Company of Chicago, or simply The Talking Machine Company) was a manufacturer and dealer of phonographs, phonograph accessories, and phonograph records from 1893 until 1906, and a major wholesaler of Victor Talking Machine Company products between 1906 and at least 1928.\n\nThe company was founded in 1893 by Leon Douglass and Henry Babson, with financing from Charles Dickinson. It first sold phonographs and supplies manufactured by the Edison Phonograph Works, but soon began manufacturing their own cylinder records and marketing a spring motor designed by Edward H. Amet. After the collapse of the North American Phonograph Company in 1894, the company became a major independent distributor of phonograph records made by the Columbia Phonograph Company, the United States Phonograph Company, and Edison's National Phonograph Company, in addition to those of their own manufacture. Silas Leachman, a Chicago-based recording pioneer who specialized in coon songs, was their most popular artist. By the first issue of the trade magazine Phonoscope in November 1896, the company was in a prominent enough position in the industry to buy the first full-page advertisement of the issue.\n\nIn 1898, Leon Douglass, who had previously invented a coin-operation mechanism and phonograph record duplication process, invented the \"Polyphone\", which added a second horn and reproducer to the phonograph or graphophone to increase its loudness (and, supposedly, its fidelity). He formed The Polyphone Company at the same address as The Talking Machine Company (having dropped the \"Chicago\" prefix) to market the device and would focus on this aspect of the business until joining Eldridge Johnson in 1900 to begin working on what would become the Victor Talking Machine Company.\n\nFrom 1903 until 1905, Henry Babson would manage the operation with his brothers Fred and Gus, and develop a mail-order operation and a national distribution network. In 1906, the company was purchased by Arthur D. Geissler, son of the general manager of the Victor Talking Machine Company and reconfigured to wholesale Victor products, while the Babson Brothers formed a new company to sell and distribute Edison products.\n\nSee also \nUnited States Phonograph Company\nWalcutt and Leeds\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Leon F. Douglass: Inventor and Victor's First Vice-President \n\nAmerican record labels\nCylinder record producers\nPhonograph manufacturers\nAudio equipment manufacturers of the United States", "The United States Phonograph Company was a manufacturer of cylinder phonograph records and supplies in the 1890s. It was formed in the Spring of 1893 by Victor Emerson, manager of the New Jersey Phonograph Company. Simon S. Ott and George E. Tewkesbury, heads of the Kansas Phonograph Company and inventors of an automatic phonograph joined later. It was based in Newark, New Jersey. After the collapse of the North American Phonograph Company in August 1894, the United States Phonograph Company became one of the industry's largest suppliers of records, competing mostly with the Columbia Phonograph Company who had joined with the American Graphophone Company to manufacture graphophones (at this point nearly identical to phonographs), blank wax cylinders, and original and duplicate records. The USPC manufactured duplicates as well, which allowed their recording program to reach the scale of competing with Columbia's. Their central location and proximity to New York allowed them to record the most popular artists of the 1890s, including George J. Gaskin, Dan W. Quinn, Len Spencer, Russell Hunting and Issler's Orchestra. Emerson left the company to lead Columbia's recording department around the summer of 1896. In 1897 the USPC worked with Edison's National Phonograph Company to retrofit phonographs with spring motors invented by Frank Capps. The convenience and cost savings of spring-motor phonographs like these helped shift the phonograph from a public entertainment (in parlors or exhibitions) to a consumer good. In October 1899 the company was prohibited by court order from manufacturing duplicate records, and they began supplying original records for the National Phonograph Company[7][6][6][5][5]. The later U.S. Phonograph Company of Cleveland Ohio is unrelated.\n\nReferences \n\nAmerican companies established in 1893\nPhonograph manufacturers\nManufacturing companies based in Newark, New Jersey\nAudio equipment manufacturers of the United States" ]
[ "Phonograph", "United States", "What year was the Phonograph brought to the United States?", "early as the 1890s" ]	C_633eac39ad7d4090970629a6d31a4191_0	how did people like it?	2	How did people like phonographs?	Phonograph	In American English, "phonograph", properly specific to machines made by Edison, was sometimes used in a generic sense as early as the 1890s to include cylinder-playing machines made by others. But it was then considered strictly incorrect to apply it to Emile Berliner's upstart Gramophone, a very different machine which played discs. "Talking machine" was the comprehensive generic term, but in the early 20th century the general public was increasingly applying the word "phonograph" indiscriminately to both cylinder and disc machines and to the records they played. By the time of the First World War, the mass advertising and popularity of the Victor Talking Machine Company's Victrolas (a line of disc-playing machines characterized by their concealed horns) was leading to widespread generic use of the word "victrola" for any machine that played discs, which were however still called "phonograph records" or simply "records", almost never "victrola records". After electrical disc-playing machines started appearing on the market during the second half of the 1920s, usually sharing the same cabinet with a radio receiver, the term "record player" was increasingly favored by users when referring to the device. Manufacturers, however, typically advertised such combinations as "radio-phonographs". Portable record players (no radio included), with a latched cover and an integrated power amplifier and loudspeaker, were fairly common as well, especially in schools and for use by children and teenagers. In the years following the Second World War, as "hi-fi" (high-fidelity, monophonic) and, later, "stereo" (stereophonic) component sound systems slowly evolved from an exotic specialty item into a common feature of American homes, the description of the record-spinning component as a "record changer" (which could automatically play through a stacked series of discs) or a "turntable" (which could hold only one disc at a time) entered common usage. By about 1980 the use of a "record changer", which might damage the stacked discs, was widely disparaged. So, the "turntable" emerged triumphant and retained its position to the end of the 20th century and beyond. Through all these changes, however, the discs have continued to be known as "phonograph records" or, much more commonly, simply as "records". The brand name Gramophone was not used in the USA after 1901, and the word fell out of use there, although it has survived in its nickname form, Grammy, as the name of the Grammy Awards. The Grammy trophy itself is a small rendering of a gramophone, resembling a Victor disc machine with a taper arm. Modern amplifier-component manufacturers continue to label the input jack which accepts the output from a modern magnetic pickup cartridge as the "phono" input, abbreviated from "phonograph". CANNOTANSWER	the term "record player" was increasingly favored by users when referring to the device.	A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue recording and reproduction of sound. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a "record". To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it, very faintly reproducing the recorded sound. In early acoustic phonographs, the stylus vibrated a diaphragm which produced sound waves which were coupled to the open air through a flaring horn, or directly to the listener's ears through stethoscope-type earphones. The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison. Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory made several improvements in the 1880s and introduced the graphophone, including the use of wax-coated cardboard cylinders and a cutting stylus that moved from side to side in a zigzag groove around the record. In the 1890s, Emile Berliner initiated the transition from phonograph cylinders to flat discs with a spiral groove running from the periphery to near the center, coining the term gramophone for disc record players, which is predominantly used in many languages. Later improvements through the years included modifications to the turntable and its drive system, the stylus or needle, pickup system, and the sound and equalization systems. The disc phonograph record was the dominant commercial audio recording format throughout most of the 20th century. In the mid-1960s the use of 8-track cartridges and cassette tapes were introduced as alternatives. In the 1980s, phonograph use declined sharply due to the popularity of cassettes and the rise of the compact disc, as well as the later introduction of digital music distribution in the 2000s. However, records are still a favorite format for some audiophiles, DJs, collectors, and turntablists (particularly in hip hop and electronic dance music), and have undergone a revival since the 2000s. Terminology Usage of terminology is not uniform across the English-speaking world (see below). In more modern usage, the playback device is often called a "turntable", "record player", or "record changer", although each of these terms denote categorically distinct items. When used in conjunction with a mixer as part of a DJ setup, turntables are often colloquially called "decks". In later electric phonographs (more often known since the 1940s as record players or turntables), the motions of the stylus are converted into an analogous electrical signal by a transducer, then converted back into sound by a loudspeaker. The term phonograph ("sound writing") was derived from the Greek words (, 'sound' or 'voice') and (, 'writing'). The similar related terms gramophone (from the Greek 'letter' and 'voice') and graphophone have similar root meanings. The roots were already familiar from existing 19th-century words such as photograph ("light writing"), telegraph ("distant writing"), and telephone ("distant sound"). The new term may have been influenced by the existing words phonographic and phonography, which referred to a system of phonetic shorthand; in 1852 The New York Times carried an advertisement for "Professor Webster's phonographic class", and in 1859 the New York State Teachers Association tabled a motion to "employ a phonographic recorder" to record its meetings. Arguably, any device used to record sound or reproduce recorded sound could be called a type of "phonograph", but in common practice the word has come to mean historic technologies of sound recording, involving audio-frequency modulations of a physical trace or groove. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, "Phonograph", "Gramophone", "Graphophone", "Zonophone", "Graphonole" and the like were still brand names specific to various makers of sometimes very different (i.e. cylinder and disc) machines; so considerable use was made of the generic term "talking machine", especially in print. "Talking machine" had earlier been used to refer to complicated devices which produced a crude imitation of speech, by simulating the workings of the vocal cords, tongue, and lips – a potential source of confusion both then and now. United Kingdom In British English, "gramophone" may refer to any sound-reproducing machine using disc records, which were introduced and popularized in the UK by the Gramophone Company. Originally, "gramophone" was a proprietary trademark of that company and any use of the name by competing makers of disc records was vigorously prosecuted in the courts, but in 1910 an English court decision decreed that it had become a generic term; it has been so used in the UK and most Commonwealth countries since. The term "phonograph" was usually restricted to machines that used cylinder records. "Gramophone" generally referred to a wind-up machine. After the introduction of the softer vinyl records, -rpm LPs (long-playing records) and 45-rpm "single" or two-song records, and EPs (extended-play recordings), the common name became "record player" or "turntable". Often the home record player was part of a system that included a radio (radiogram) and, later, might also play audiotape cassettes. From about 1960, such a system began to be described as a "hi-fi" (high-fidelity, monophonic) or a "stereo" (most systems being stereophonic by the mid-1960s). United States In American English, "phonograph", properly specific to machines made by Edison, was sometimes used in a generic sense as early as the 1890s to include cylinder-playing machines made by others. But it was then considered strictly incorrect to apply it to Emile Berliner's upstart Gramophone, a very different machine which played discs (although Edison's original Phonograph patent included the use of discs). "Talking machine" was the comprehensive generic term, but from about 1902 on, the general public was increasingly applying the word "phonograph" indiscriminately to both cylinder and disc machines and to the records they played. By the time of the First World War, the mass advertising and popularity of the Victrola (a line of disc-playing machines characterized by their concealed horns) sold by the Victor Talking Machine Company was leading to widespread generic use of the word "victrola" for any machine that played discs, which were generally called "phonograph records" or simply "records", but almost never "Victrola records". After electrical disc-playing machines appeared on the market in the late 1920s, often combined with a radio receiver, the term "record player" was increasingly favored by the public. Manufacturers, however, typically advertised such combinations as "radio-phonographs". Portable record players (no radio included), with a latched cover and an integrated power amplifier and loudspeaker, were becoming popular as well, especially in schools and for use by children and teenagers. In the years following the Second World War, as "hi-fi" (high-fidelity, monophonic) and, later, "stereo" (stereophonic) component sound systems slowly evolved from an exotic specialty item into a common feature of American homes, the description of the record-spinning component as a "record changer" (which could automatically play through a stacked series of discs) or a "turntable" (which could hold only one disc at a time) entered common usage. By the 1980s, the use of a "record changer" was widely disparaged. So, the "turntable" emerged triumphant and retained its position to the present. Through all these changes, however, the discs have continued to be known as "phonograph records" or, much more commonly, simply as "records". Gramophone, as a brand name, was not used in the United States after 1902, and the word quickly fell out of use there, although it has survived in its nickname form, Grammy, as the name of the Grammy Awards. The Grammy trophy itself is a small rendering of a gramophone, resembling a Victor disc machine with a taper arm. Modern amplifier-component manufacturers continue to label the input jack for a magnetic pickup cartridge as the "phono" input. Australia In Australian English, "record player" was the term; "turntable" was a more technical term; "gramophone" was restricted to the old mechanical (i.e., wind-up) players; and "phonograph" was used as in British English. The "phonograph" was first demonstrated in Australia on 14 June, 1878 to a meeting of the Royal Society of Victoria by the Society's Honorary Secretary, Alex Sutherland who published "The Sounds of the Consonants, as Indicated by the Phonograph" in the Society's journal in November that year. On 8 August, 1878 the phonograph was publicly demonstrated at the Society's annual conversazione, along with a range of other new inventions, including the microphone. Early history Predecessors to the phonograph Several inventors devised machines to record sound prior to Thomas Edison's phonograph, Edison being the first to invent a device that could both record and reproduce sound. The phonograph's predecessors include Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph, and Charles Cros's paleophone. Recordings made with the phonautograph were intended to be visual representations of the sound, but were never sonically reproduced until 2008. Cros's paleophone was intended to both record and reproduce sound but had not been developed beyond a basic concept at the time of Edison's successful demonstration of the phonograph in 1877. Phonautograph Direct tracings of the vibrations of sound-producing objects such as tuning forks had been made by English physicist Thomas Young in 1807, but the first known device for recording airborne speech, music and other sounds is the phonautograph, patented in 1857 by French typesetter and inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. In this device, sound waves travelling through the air vibrated a parchment diaphragm which was linked to a bristle, and the bristle traced a line through a thin coating of soot on a sheet of paper wrapped around a rotating cylinder. The sound vibrations were recorded as undulations or other irregularities in the traced line. Scott's phonautograph was intended purely for the visual study and analysis of the tracings. Reproduction of the recorded sound was not possible with the original phonautograph. In 2008, phonautograph recordings made by Scott were played back as sound by American audio historians, who used optical scanning and computer processing to convert the traced waveforms into digital audio files. These recordings, made circa 1860, include fragments of two French songs and a recitation in Italian. Paleophone Charles Cros, a French poet and amateur scientist, is the first person known to have made the conceptual leap from recording sound as a traced line to the theoretical possibility of reproducing the sound from the tracing and then to devising a definite method for accomplishing the reproduction. On April 30, 1877, he deposited a sealed envelope containing a summary of his ideas with the French Academy of Sciences, a standard procedure used by scientists and inventors to establish priority of conception of unpublished ideas in the event of any later dispute. Cros proposed the use of photoengraving, a process already in use to make metal printing plates from line drawings, to convert an insubstantial phonautograph tracing in soot into a groove or ridge on a metal disc or cylinder. This metal surface would then be given the same motion and speed as the original recording surface. A stylus linked to a diaphragm would be made to ride in the groove or on the ridge so that the stylus would be moved back and forth in accordance with the recorded vibrations. It would transmit these vibrations to the connected diaphragm, and the diaphragm would transmit them to the air. An account of his invention was published on October 10, 1877, by which date Cros had devised a more direct procedure: the recording stylus could scribe its tracing through a thin coating of acid-resistant material on a metal surface and the surface could then be etched in an acid bath, producing the desired groove without the complication of an intermediate photographic procedure. The author of this article called the device a , but Cros himself favored the word , sometimes rendered in French as ('voice of the past'). Cros was a poet of meager means, not in a position to pay a machinist to build a working model, and largely content to bequeath his ideas to the public domain free of charge and let others reduce them to practice, but after the earliest reports of Edison's presumably independent invention crossed the Atlantic he had his sealed letter of April 30 opened and read at the December 3, 1877 meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, claiming due scientific credit for priority of conception. Throughout the first decade (1890–1900) of commercial production of the earliest crude disc records, the direct acid-etch method first invented by Cros was used to create the metal master discs, but Cros was not around to claim any credit or to witness the humble beginnings of the eventually rich phonographic library he had foreseen. He had died in 1888 at the age of 45. The early phonographs Thomas Edison conceived the principle of recording and reproducing sound between May and July 1877 as a byproduct of his efforts to "play back" recorded telegraph messages and to automate speech sounds for transmission by telephone. His first experiments were with waxed paper. He announced his invention of the first phonograph, a device for recording and replaying sound, on November 21, 1877 (early reports appear in Scientific American and several newspapers in the beginning of November, and an even earlier announcement of Edison working on a 'talking-machine' can be found in the Chicago Daily Tribune on May 9), and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 (it was patented on February 19, 1878 as US Patent 200,521). "In December, 1877, a young man came into the office of the Scientific American, and placed before the editors a small, simple machine about which very few preliminary remarks were offered. The visitor without any ceremony whatever turned the crank, and to the astonishment of all present the machine said: 'Good morning. How do you do? How do you like the phonograph?' The machine thus spoke for itself, and made known the fact that it was the phonograph..." Edison presented his own account of inventing the phonograph: "I was experimenting," he said, "on an automatic method of recording telegraph messages on a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk talking-machine of to-day. The platen had a spiral groove on its surface, like the disk. Over this was placed a circular disk of paper; an electromagnet with the embossing point connected to an arm traveled over the disk; and any signals given through the magnets were embossed on the disk of paper. If this disc was removed from the machine and put on a similar machine provided with a contact point, the embossed record would cause the signals to be repeated into another wire. The ordinary speed of telegraphic signals is thirty-five to forty words a minute; but with this machine several hundred words were possible. "From my experiments on the telephone I knew of how to work a pawl connected to the diaphragm; and this engaging a ratchet-wheel served to give continuous rotation to a pulley. This pulley was connected by a cord to a little paper toy representing a man sawing wood. Hence, if one shouted: 'Mary had a little lamb,' etc., the paper man would start sawing wood. I reached the conclusion that if I could record the movements of the diaphragm properly, I could cause such records to reproduce the original movements imparted to the diaphragm by the voice, and thus succeed in recording and reproducing the human voice. "Instead of using a disk I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface. Over this was to be placed tinfoil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm. A sketch was made, and the piece-work price, $18, was marked on the sketch. I was in the habit of marking the price I would pay on each sketch. If the workman lost, I would pay his regular wages; if he made more than the wages, he kept it. The workman who got the sketch was John Kruesi. I didn't have much faith that it would work, expecting that I might possibly hear a word or so that would give hope of a future for the idea. Kruesi, when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted 'Mary had a little lamb', etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no doubt of." The music critic Herman Klein attended an early demonstration (1881–2) of a similar machine. On the early phonograph's reproductive capabilities he writes "It sounded to my ear like someone singing about half a mile away, or talking at the other end of a big hall; but the effect was rather pleasant, save for a peculiar nasal quality wholly due to the mechanism, though there was little of the scratching which later was a prominent feature of the flat disc. Recording for that primitive machine was a comparatively simple matter. I had to keep my mouth about six inches away from the horn and remember not to make my voice too loud if I wanted anything approximating to a clear reproduction; that was all. When it was played over to me and I heard my own voice for the first time, one or two friends who were present said that it sounded rather like mine; others declared that they would never have recognised it. I daresay both opinions were correct." The Argus newspaper from Melbourne, Australia, reported on an 1878 demonstration at the Royal Society of Victoria, writing "There was a large attendance of ladies and gentlemen, who appeared greatly interested in the various scientific instruments exhibited. Among these the most interesting, perhaps, was the trial made by Mr. Sutherland with the phonograph, which was most amusing. Several trials were made, and were all more or less successful. "Rule Britannia" was distinctly repeated, but great laughter was caused by the repetition of the convivial song of "He's a jolly good fellow," which sounded as if it was being sung by an old man of 80 with a very cracked voice." Early machines Edison's early phonographs recorded onto a thin sheet of metal, normally tinfoil, which was temporarily wrapped around a helically grooved cylinder mounted on a correspondingly threaded rod supported by plain and threaded bearings. While the cylinder was rotated and slowly progressed along its axis, the airborne sound vibrated a diaphragm connected to a stylus that indented the foil into the cylinder's groove, thereby recording the vibrations as "hill-and-dale" variations of the depth of the indentation. Playback was accomplished by exactly repeating the recording procedure, the only difference being that the recorded foil now served to vibrate the stylus, which transmitted its vibrations to the diaphragm and onward into the air as audible sound. Although Edison's very first experimental tinfoil phonograph used separate and somewhat different recording and playback assemblies, in subsequent machines, a single diaphragm and stylus served both purposes. One peculiar consequence was that it was possible to overdub additional sound onto a recording being played back. The recording was heavily worn by each playing, and it was nearly impossible to accurately remount a recorded foil after it had been removed from the cylinder. In this form, the only practical use that could be found for the phonograph was as a startling novelty for private amusement at home or public exhibitions for profit. Edison's early patents show that he was aware that sound could be recorded as a spiral on a disc, but Edison concentrated his efforts on cylinders, since the groove on the outside of a rotating cylinder provides a constant velocity to the stylus in the groove, which Edison considered more "scientifically correct". Edison's patent specified that the audio recording be embossed, and it was not until 1886 that vertically modulated incised recording using wax-coated cylinders was patented by Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter. They named their version the Graphophone. Introduction of the disc record The use of a flat recording surface instead of a cylindrical one was an obvious alternative which thought-experimenter Charles Cros initially favored and which practical experimenter Thomas Edison and others actually tested in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The oldest surviving example is a copper electrotype of a recording cut into a wax disc in 1881. Cylindrical Dictaphone records continued in use until the mid-20th century. The commercialization of sound recording technology had been initially aimed at use in business correspondence, i.e. transcription into writing, in which the cylindrical form offered certain advantages. With paper documents being the end product, the cylinders were considered ephemeral; need to archive large numbers of bulky, fragile sound recordings seemed unlikely, and the ease of producing multiple copies was not a consideration. In 1887, Emile Berliner patented a variant of the phonograph which he named the Gramophone. Berliner's approach was essentially the same one proposed, but never implemented, by Charles Cros in 1877. The diaphragm was linked to the recording stylus in a way that caused it to vibrate laterally (side to side) as it traced a spiral onto a zinc disc very thinly coated with a compound of beeswax. The zinc disc was then immersed in a bath of chromic acid; this etched a groove into the disc where the stylus had removed the coating, after which the recording could be played. With some later improvements, the flat discs of Berliner could be produced in large quantities at much lower cost than the cylinders of Edison's system. In May 1889, in San Francisco, the first "phonograph parlor" opened. It featured a row of coin-operated machines, each supplied with a different wax cylinder record. The customer selected a machine according to the title that it advertised, inserted a nickel, then heard the recording through stethoscope-like listening tubes. By the mid-1890s, most American cities had at least one phonograph parlor. The coin-operated mechanism was invented by Louis T. Glass and William S. Arnold. The cabinet contained an Edison Class M or Class E phonograph. The Class M was powered by a wet-cell glass battery that would spill dangerous acid if it tipped over or broke. The Class E sold for a lower price and ran on 120 V DC. The phenomenon of phonograph parlors peaked in Paris around 1900: in Pathé's luxurious salon, patrons sat in plush upholstered chairs and chose from among many hundreds of available cylinders by using speaking tubes to communicate with attendants on the floor below. By 1890, record manufacturers had begun using a rudimentary duplication process to mass-produce their product. While the live performers recorded the master phonograph, up to ten tubes led to blank cylinders in other phonographs. Until this development, each record had to be custom-made. Before long, a more advanced pantograph-based process made it possible to simultaneously produce 90–150 copies of each record. However, as demand for certain records grew, popular artists still needed to re-record and re-re-record their songs. Reportedly, the medium's first major African-American star George Washington Johnson was obliged to perform his "The Laughing Song" (or the separate "The Whistling Coon") literally thousands of times in a studio during his recording career. Sometimes he would sing "The Laughing Song" more than fifty times in a day, at twenty cents per rendition. (The average price of a single cylinder in the mid-1890s was about fifty cents.) Oldest surviving recordings Lambert's lead cylinder recording for an experimental talking clock is often identified as the oldest surviving playable sound recording, although the evidence advanced for its early date is controversial. Wax phonograph cylinder recordings of Handel's choral music made on June 29, 1888, at The Crystal Palace in London were thought to be the oldest-known surviving musical recordings, until the recent playback by a group of American historians of a phonautograph recording of Au clair de la lune made on April 9, 1860. The 1860 phonautogram had not until then been played, as it was only a transcription of sound waves into graphic form on paper for visual study. Recently developed optical scanning and image processing techniques have given new life to early recordings by making it possible to play unusually delicate or physically unplayable media without physical contact. A recording made on a sheet of tinfoil at an 1878 demonstration of Edison's phonograph in St. Louis, Missouri has been played back by optical scanning and digital analysis. A few other early tinfoil recordings are known to survive, including a slightly earlier one which is believed to preserve the voice of U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, but as of May 2014 they have not yet been scanned. These antique tinfoil recordings, which have typically been stored folded, are too fragile to be played back with a stylus without seriously damaging them. Edison's 1877 tinfoil recording of Mary Had a Little Lamb, not preserved, has been called the first instance of recorded verse. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the phonograph, Edison recounted reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb to test his first machine. The 1927 event was filmed by an early sound-on-film newsreel camera, and an audio clip from that film's soundtrack is sometimes mistakenly presented as the original 1877 recording. Wax cylinder recordings made by 19th century media legends such as P. T. Barnum and Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth are amongst the earliest verified recordings by the famous that have survived to the present. Improvements at the Volta Laboratory Alexander Graham Bell and his two associates took Edison's tinfoil phonograph and modified it considerably to make it reproduce sound from wax instead of tinfoil. They began their work at Bell's Volta Laboratory in Washington, D. C., in 1879, and continued until they were granted basic patents in 1886 for recording in wax. Although Edison had invented the phonograph in 1877 the fame bestowed on him for this invention was not due to its efficiency. Recording with his tinfoil phonograph was too difficult to be practical, as the tinfoil tore easily, and even when the stylus was properly adjusted, its reproduction of sound was distorted, and good for only a few playbacks; nevertheless Edison had discovered the idea of sound recording. However immediately after his discovery he did not improve it, allegedly because of an agreement to spend the next five years developing the New York City electric light and power system. Volta's early challenge Meanwhile, Bell, a scientist and experimenter at heart, was looking for new worlds to conquer after his invention of the telephone. According to Sumner Tainter, it was through Gardiner Green Hubbard that Bell took up the phonograph challenge. Bell had married Hubbard's daughter Mabel in 1879 while Hubbard was president of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Co., and his organization, which had purchased the Edison patent, was financially troubled because people did not want to buy a machine which seldom worked well and proved difficult for the average person to operate. In 1879 Hubbard got Bell interested in improving the phonograph, and it was agreed that a laboratory should be set up in Washington. Experiments were also to be conducted on the transmission of sound by light, which resulted in the selenium-celled Photophone. Volta Graphophone By 1881, the Volta associates had succeeded in improving an Edison tinfoil machine to some extent. Wax was put in the grooves of the heavy iron cylinder, and no tinfoil was used. Rather than apply for a patent at that time, however, they deposited the machine in a sealed box at the Smithsonian, and specified that it was not to be opened without the consent of two of the three men. The sound vibrations had been indented in the wax which had been applied to the Edison phonograph. The following was the text of one of their recordings: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. I am a Graphophone and my mother was a phonograph." Most of the disc machines designed at the Volta Lab had their disc mounted on vertical turntables. The explanation is that in the early experiments, the turntable, with disc, was mounted on the shop lathe, along with the recording and reproducing heads. Later, when the complete models were built, most of them featured vertical turntables. One interesting exception was a horizontal seven inch turntable. The machine, although made in 1886, was a duplicate of one made earlier but taken to Europe by Chichester Bell. Tainter was granted on July 10, 1888. The playing arm is rigid, except for a pivoted vertical motion of 90 degrees to allow removal of the record or a return to starting position. While recording or playing, the record not only rotated, but moved laterally under the stylus, which thus described a spiral, recording 150 grooves to the inch. The preserved Bell and Tainter records are of both the lateral cut and the Edison-style hill-and-dale (up-and-down) styles. Edison for many years used the "hill-and-dale" method on both his cylinders and Diamond Disc records, and Emile Berliner is credited with the invention of the lateral cut, acid-etched Gramophone record in 1887. The Volta associates, however, had been experimenting with both formats and directions of groove modulation as early as 1881. The basic distinction between the Edison's first phonograph patent and the Bell and Tainter patent of 1886 was the method of recording. Edison's method was to indent the sound waves on a piece of tin foil, while Bell and Tainter's invention called for cutting, or "engraving", the sound waves into a wax record with a sharp recording stylus. Graphophone commercialization In 1885, when the Volta Associates were sure that they had a number of practical inventions, they filed patent applications and began to seek out investors. The Volta Graphophone Company of Alexandria, Virginia, was created on January 6, 1886 and incorporated on February 3, 1886. It was formed to control the patents and to handle the commercial development of their sound recording and reproduction inventions, one of which became the first Dictaphone. After the Volta Associates gave several demonstrations in the City of Washington, businessmen from Philadelphia created the American Graphophone Company on March 28, 1887, in order to produce and sell the machines for the budding phonograph marketplace. The Volta Graphophone Company then merged with American Graphophone, which itself later evolved into Columbia Records. Shortly after American Graphophone's creation, Jesse H. Lippincott used nearly $1 million of an inheritance to gain control of it, as well as the rights to the Graphophone and the Bell and Tainter patents. Not long later Lippincott purchased the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company. He then created the North American Phonograph Company to consolidate the national sales rights of both the Graphophone and the Edison Speaking Phonograph. In the early 1890s Lippincott fell victim to the unit's mechanical problems and also to resistance from stenographers. A coin-operated version of the Graphophone, , was developed by Tainter in 1893 to compete with nickel-in-the-slot entertainment phonograph demonstrated in 1889 by Louis T. Glass, manager of the Pacific Phonograph Company. The work of the Volta Associates laid the foundation for the successful use of dictating machines in business, because their wax recording process was practical and their machines were durable. But it would take several more years and the renewed efforts of Edison and the further improvements of Emile Berliner and many others, before the recording industry became a major factor in home entertainment. Disc vs. cylinder as a recording medium Discs are not inherently better than cylinders at providing audio fidelity. Rather, the advantages of the format are seen in the manufacturing process: discs can be stamped; cylinders could not be until 1901–1902 when the gold moulding process was introduced by Edison. Recordings made on a cylinder remain at a constant linear velocity for the entirety of the recording, while those made on a disc have a higher linear velocity at the outer portion of the disc compared to the inner portion. Edison's patented recording method recorded with vertical modulations in a groove. Berliner utilized a laterally modulated groove. Though Edison's recording technology was better than Berliner's, there were commercial advantages to a disc system since the disc could be easily mass-produced by molding and stamping and it required less storage space for a collection of recordings. Berliner successfully argued that his technology was different enough from Edison's that he did not need to pay royalties on it, which reduced his business expenses. Through experimentation, in 1892 Berliner began commercial production of his disc records, and "gramophones". His "gramophone record" was the first disc record to be offered to the public. They were five inches (12.7 cm) in diameter and recorded on one side only. Seven-inch (17.5 cm) records followed in 1895. Also in 1895 Berliner replaced the hard rubber used to make the discs with a shellac compound. Berliner's early records had very poor sound quality, however. Work by Eldridge R. Johnson eventually improved the sound fidelity to a point where it was as good as the cylinder. By late 1901, ten-inch (25 cm) records were marketed by Johnson and Berliner's Victor Talking Machine Company, and Berliner had sold his interests. In 1904, discs were first pressed with music on both sides and capable of around seven minutes total playing time, as opposed to the cylinder's typical duration on two minutes at that time. As a result of this and the fragility of wax cylinders in transit and storage, cylinders sales declined. Edison felt the increasing commercial pressure for disc records, and by 1912, though reluctant at first, his production of disc records was in full swing. This was the Edison Disc Record. Nevertheless, he continued to manufacture cylinders until 1929 and was last to withdraw from that market. From the mid-1890s until World War I, both phonograph cylinder and disc recordings and machines to play them on were widely mass-marketed and sold. The disc system superseded the cylinder in Europe by 1906 when both Columbia and Pathe withdrew from that market. By 1913, Edison was the only company still producing cylinders in the USA although in Great Britain small manufacturers pressed on until 1922. Dominance of the disc record Berliner's lateral disc record was the ancestor of the 78 rpm, 45 rpm, 33⅓ rpm, and all other analogue disc records popular for use in sound recording. See gramophone record. The 1920s brought improved radio technology. Radio sales increased, bringing many phonograph dealers to near financial ruin. With efforts at improved audio fidelity, the big record companies succeeded in keeping business booming through the end of the decade, but the record sales plummeted during the Great Depression, with many companies merging or going out of business. Record sales picked up appreciably by the late 30s and early 40s, with greater improvements in fidelity and more money to be spent. By this time home phonographs had become much more common, though it wasn't until the 1940s that console radio/phono set-ups with automatic record changers became more common. In the 1930s, vinyl (originally known as vinylite) was introduced as a record material for radio transcription discs, and for radio commercials. At that time, virtually no discs for home use were made from this material. Vinyl was used for the popular 78-rpm V-discs issued to US soldiers during World War II. This significantly reduced breakage during transport. The first commercial vinylite record was the set of five 12" discs "Prince Igor" (Asch Records album S-800, dubbed from Soviet masters in 1945). Victor began selling some home-use vinyl 78s in late 1945; but most 78s were made of a shellac compound until the 78-rpm format was completely phased out. (Shellac records were heavier and more brittle.) 33s and 45s were, however, made exclusively of vinyl, with the exception of some 45s manufactured out of polystyrene. Booms in record sales returned after the Second World War, as industry standards changed from 78s to vinyl, long-playing records (commonly called record albums), which could contain an entire symphony, and 45s which usually contained one hit song popularized on the radio – thus the term "single" record – plus another song on the back or "flip" side. An "extended play" version of the 45 was also available, designated 45 EP, which provided capacity for longer musical selections, or for two regular-length songs per side. Shortcomings include surface noise caused by dirt or abrasions (scratches) and failure caused by deep surface scratches causing skipping of the stylus forward and missing a section, or groove lock, causing a section to repeat, usually punctuated by a popping noise. This was so common that the phrase: "you sound like a broken record,” was coined, referring to someone who is being annoyingly repetitious. First all-transistor phonograph In 1955, Philco developed and produced the world's first all-transistor phonograph models TPA-1 and TPA-2, which were announced in the June 28, 1955 edition of the Wall Street Journal. Philco started to sell these all-transistor phonographs in the fall of 1955, for the price of $59.95. The October 1955 issue of Radio & Television News magazine (page 41), had a full page detailed article on Philco's new consumer product. The all-transistor portable phonograph TPA-1 and TPA-2 models played only 45rpm records and used four 1.5 volt "D" batteries for their power supply. The "TPA" stands for "Transistor Phonograph Amplifier". Their circuitry used three Philco germanium PNP alloy-fused junction audio frequency transistors. After the 1956 season had ended, Philco decided to discontinue both models, for transistors were too expensive compared to vacuum tubes, but by 1961 a $49.95 ($ in ) portable, battery-powered radio-phonograph with seven transistors was available. By the 1960s, cheaper portable record players and record changers which played stacks of records in wooden console cabinets were popular, usually with heavy and crude tonearms in the portables. The consoles were often equipped with better quality pick-up cartridges. Even pharmacies stocked 45 rpm records at their front counters. Rock music played on 45s became the soundtrack to the 1960s as people bought the same songs that were played free of charge on the radio. Some record players were even tried in automobiles, but were quickly displaced by 8-track and cassette tapes. The fidelity of sound reproduction made great advances during the 1970s, as turntables became very precise instruments with belt or direct drive, jewel-balanced tonearms, some with electronically controlled linear tracking and magnetic cartridges. Some cartridges had frequency response above 30 kHz for use with CD-4 quadraphonic 4 channel sound. A high fidelity component system which cost well under $1,000 could do a very good job of reproducing very accurate frequency response across the human audible spectrum from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz with a $200 turntable which would typically have less than 0.05% wow and flutter and very low rumble (low frequency noise). A well-maintained record would have very little surface noise. A novelty variation on the standard format was the use of multiple concentric spirals with different recordings. Thus when the record was played multiple times, different recordings would play, seemingly at random. These were often utilized in talking toys and games. Records themselves became an art form because of the large surface onto which graphics and books could be printed, and records could be molded into unusual shapes, colors, or with images (picture discs). The turntable remained a common element of home audio systems well after the introduction of other media, such as audio tape and even the early years of the compact disc as a lower-priced music format. However, even though the cost of producing CDs fell below that of records, CDs remained a higher-priced music format than either cassettes or records. Thus, records were not uncommon in home audio systems into the early 1990s. By the turn of the 21st century, the turntable had become a niche product, as the price of CD players, which reproduce music free of pops and scratches, fell far lower than high-fidelity tape players or turntables. Nevertheless, there is some increase in interest; many big-box media stores carry turntables, as do professional DJ equipment stores. Most low-end and mid-range amplifiers omit the phono input; but on the other hand, low-end turntables with built-in phono pre-amplifiers are widely available. Some combination systems include a basic turntable, a CD player, a cassette deck. and a radio, in a retro-styled cabinet. Records also continue to be manufactured and sold today, albeit in smaller quantities than in the disc phonograph's heyday. Turntable technology Turntable construction Inexpensive record players typically used a flanged steel stamping for the turntable structure. A rubber disc would be secured to the top of the stamping to provide traction for the record, as well as a small amount of vibration isolation. The spindle bearing usually consisted of a bronze bushing. The flange on the stamping provided a convenient place to drive the turntable by means of an idler wheel (see below). While light and cheap to manufacture, these mechanisms had low inertia, making motor speed instabilities more pronounced. Costlier turntables made from heavy aluminium castings have greater balanced mass and inertia, helping minimize vibration at the stylus, and maintaining constant speed without wow or flutter, even if the motor exhibits cogging effects. Like stamped steel turntables, they were topped with rubber. Because of the increased mass, they usually employed ball bearings or roller bearings in the spindle to reduce friction and noise. Most are belt or direct drive, but some use an idler wheel. A specific case was the Swiss "Lenco" drive, which possessed a very heavy turntable coupled via an idler wheel to a long, tapered motor drive shaft. This enabled stepless rotation or speed control on the drive. Because of this feature the Lenco became popular in the late 1950s with dancing schools, because the dancing instructor could lead the dancing exercises at different speeds. By the early 1980s, some companies started producing very inexpensive turntables that displaced the products of companies like BSR. Commonly found in "all-in-one" stereos from assorted far-east manufacturers, they used a thin plastic table set in a plastic plinth, no mats, belt drive, weak motors, and often, lightweight plastic tonearms with no counterweight. Most used sapphire pickups housed in ceramic cartridges, and they lacked several features of earlier units, such as auto-start and record-stacking. While not as common now that turntables are absent from the cheap "all-in-one" units, this type of turntable has made a strong resurgence in nostalgia-marketed record players. Turntable drive systems From the earliest phonograph designs, many of which were powered by spring-wound mechanisms, a speed governor was essential. Most of these employed some type of flywheel-friction disc to control the speed of the rotating cylinder or turntable; as the speed increased, centrifugal force caused a brake—often a felt pad—to rub against a smooth metal surface, slowing rotation. Electrically powered turntables, whose rotational speed was governed by other means, eventually made their mechanical counterparts obsolete. The mechanical governor was, however, still employed in some toy phonographs (such as those found in talking dolls) until they were replaced by digital sound generators in the late 20th century. Many modern players have platters with a continuous series of strobe markings machined or printed around their edge. Viewing these markings in artificial light at mains frequency produces a stroboscopic effect, which can be used to verify proper rotational speed. Additionally, the edge of the turntable can contain magnetic markings to provide feedback pulses to an electronic speed-control system. Idler-wheel drive system Earlier designs used a rubberized idler-wheel drive system. However, wear and decomposition of the wheel, as well as the direct mechanical coupling to a vibrating motor, introduced low-frequency noise ("rumble") and speed variations ("wow and flutter") into the sound. These systems generally used a synchronous motor which ran at a speed synchronized to the frequency of the AC power supply. Portable record players typically used an inexpensive shaded-pole motor. At the end of the motor shaft there was a stepped driving capstan; to obtain different speeds, the rubber idler wheel was moved to contact different steps of this capstan. The idler was pinched against the bottom or inside edge of the platter to drive it. Until the 1970s, the idler-wheel drive was the most common on turntables, except for higher-end audiophile models. However, even some higher-end turntables, such as the Lenco, Garrard, EMT, and Dual turntables, used idler-wheel drive. Belt drive system Belt drives brought improved motor and platter isolation compared to idler-wheel designs. Motor noise, generally heard as low-frequency rumble, is greatly reduced. The design of the belt drive turntable allows for a less expensive motor than the direct-drive turntable to be used. The elastomeric belt absorbs motor vibrations and noise which could otherwise be picked up by the stylus. It also absorbs small, fast speed variations, caused by "cogging", which in other designs are heard as "flutter." The "Acoustical professional" turntable (earlier marketed under Dutch "Jobo prof") of the 1960s however possessed an expensive German drive motor, the "Pabst Aussenläufer" ("Pabst outrunner"). As this motor name implied, the rotor was on the outside of the motor and acted as a flywheel ahead of the belt-driven turntable itself. In combination with a steel to nylon turntable bearing (with molybdenum disulfide inside for lifelong lubrication) very low wow, flutter and rumble figures were achieved. Direct drive system Direct-drive turntables drive the platter directly without utilizing intermediate wheels, belts, or gears as part of a drive train. This requires good engineering, with advanced electronics for acceleration and speed control. Matsushita's Technics division introduced the first commercially successful direct drive platter, model SP10, in 1969, which was joined by the Technics SL-1200 turntable, in 1972. Its updated model, SL-1200MK2, released in 1978, had a stronger motor, a convenient pitch control slider for beatmatching and a stylus illuminator, which made it the long-standing favourite among disc jockeys (see "Turntablism"). By the beginnings of the 80s, lowering of costs in microcontroller electronics made direct drive turntables more affordable. Pricing Audiophile grade turntables start at a few hundred dollars and range upwards of $100,000, depending on the complexity and quality of design and manufacture. The common view is that there are diminishing returns with an increase in price – a turntable costing $1,000 would not sound significantly better than a turntable costing $500; nevertheless, there exists a large choice of expensive turntables. Arm systems The tone arm (or tonearm) holds the pickup cartridge over the groove, the stylus tracking the groove with the desired force to give the optimal compromise between good tracking and minimizing wear of the stylus and record groove. At its simplest, a tone arm is a pivoted lever, free to move in two axes (vertical and horizontal) with a counterbalance to maintain tracking pressure. However, the requirements of high-fidelity reproduction place more demands upon the arm design. In a perfect world: The tone arm must track the groove without distorting the stylus assembly, so an ideal arm would have no mass, and frictionless bearings, requiring zero force to move it. The arm should not oscillate following a displacement, so it should either be both light and very stiff, or suitably damped. The arm must not resonate with vibrations induced by the stylus or from the turntable motor or plinth, so it must be heavy enough to be immune to those vibrations, or it must be damped to absorb them. The arm should keep the cartridge stylus tangent to the groove it's in as it moves across the record, with minimal variation in angle. These demands are contradictory and impossible to realize (massless arms and zero-friction bearings do not exist in the real world), so tone arm designs require engineering compromises. Solutions vary, but all modern tonearms are at least relatively lightweight and stiff constructions, with precision, very low friction pivot bearings in both the vertical and horizontal axes. Most arms are made from some kind of alloy (the cheapest being aluminium), but some manufacturers use balsa wood, while others use carbon fiber or graphite. The latter materials favor a straight arm design; alloys' properties lend themselves to S-type arms. The tone arm got its name before the age of electronics. It originally served to conduct actual sound waves from a purely mechanical "pickup" called a sound box or reproducer to a so-described "amplifying" horn. The earliest electronic record players, introduced at the end of 1925, had massive electromagnetic pickups that contained a horseshoe magnet, used disposable steel needles, and weighed several ounces. Their full weight rested on the record, providing ample tracking force to overcome their low compliance but causing rapid record wear. The tone arms were rudimentary and remained so even after lighter crystal pickups appeared about ten years later. When fine-grooved vinyl records were introduced in the late 1940s, still smaller and lighter crystal (later, ceramic) cartridges with semi-permanent jewel styluses became standard. In the mid-1950s these were joined by a new generation of magnetic cartridges that bore little resemblance to their crude ancestors. Far smaller tracking forces became possible and the balanced arm came into use. Prices varied widely. The well-known and extremely popular high-end S-type SME arm of the 1970–1980 era not only had a complicated design, it was also very costly. On the other hand, even some cheaper arms could be of professional quality: the "All Balance" arm, made by the now-defunct Dutch company Acoustical, was only €30 [equivalent]. It was used during that period by all official radio stations in the Dutch Broadcast studio facilities of the NOS, as well as by the pirate radio station Veronica. Playing records from a boat in international waters, the arm had to withstand sudden ship movements. Anecdotes indicate this low-cost arm was the only one capable of keeping the needle firmly in the groove during heavy storms at sea. Quality arms employ an adjustable counterweight to offset the mass of the arm and various cartridges and headshells. On this counterweight, a calibrated dial enables easy adjustment of stylus force. After perfectly balancing the arm, the dial itself is "zeroed"; the stylus force can then be dialed in by screwing the counterweight towards the fulcrum. (Sometimes a separate spring or smaller weight provides fine tuning.) Stylus forces of 10 to 20 mN (1 to 2 grams-force) are typical for modern consumer turntables, while forces of up to 50 mN (5 grams) are common for the tougher environmental demands of party deejaying or turntablism. Of special adjustment consideration, Stanton cartridges of the 681EE(E) series [and others like them] feature a small record brush ahead of the cartridge. The upforce of this brush, and its added drag require compensation of both tracking force (add 1 gram) and anti-skating adjustment values (see next paragraph for description). Even on a perfectly flat LP, tonearms are prone to two types of tracking errors that affect the sound. As the tonearm tracks the groove, the stylus exerts a frictional force tangent to the arc of the groove, and since this force does not intersect the tone arm pivot, a clockwise rotational force (moment) occurs and a reaction skating force is exerted on the stylus by the record groove wall away from center of the disc. Modern arms provide an anti-skate mechanism, using springs, hanging weights, or magnets to produce an offsetting counter-clockwise force at the pivot, making the net lateral force on the groove walls near zero. The second error occurs as the arm sweeps in an arc across the disc, causing the angle between the cartridge head and groove to change slightly. A change in angle, albeit small, will have a detrimental effect (especially with stereo recordings) by creating different forces on the two groove walls, as well as a slight timing shift between left/right channels. Making the arm longer to reduce this angle is a partial solution, but less than ideal. A longer arm weighs more, and only an infinitely long [pivoted] arm would reduce the error to zero. Some designs (Burne-Jones, and Garrard "Zero" series) use dual arms in a parallelogram arrangement, pivoting the cartridge head to maintain a constant angle as it moves across the record. Unfortunately this "solution" creates more problems than it solves, compromising rigidity and creating sources of unwanted noise. The pivoted arm produces yet another problem which is unlikely to be significant to the audiophile, though. As the master was originally cut in a linear motion from the edge towards the center, but the stylus on the pivoted arm always draws an arc, this causes a timing drift that is most significant when digitizing music and beat mapping the data for synchronization with other songs in a DAW or DJ software unless the software allows building a non-linear beat map. As the contact point of the stylus on the record wanders farther from the linear path between the starting point and center hole, the tempo and pitch tend to decrease towards the middle of the record, until the arc reaches its apex. After that the tempo and pitch increase towards the end as the contact point comes closer to the linear path again. Because the surface speed of the record is lower at the end, the relative speed error from the same absolute distance error is higher at the end, and the increase in tempo is more notable towards the end than the decrease towards the middle. This can be somewhat reduced by a curved arm pivoted so that the end point of the arc stays farther from the linear path than the starting point, or by a long straight arm that pivots perpendicularly to the linear path in the middle of the record. However the tempo droop at the middle can only be completely avoided by a linear tracking arm. Linear tracking If the arm is not pivoted, but instead carries the stylus along a radius of the disc, there is no skating force and little to no cartridge angle error. Such arms are known as linear tracking or tangential arms. These are driven along a track by various means, from strings and pulleys, to worm gears or electromagnets. The cartridge's position is usually regulated by an electronic servomechanism or mechanical interface, moving the stylus properly over the groove as the record plays, or for song selection. There are long-armed and short-armed linear arm designs. On a perfectly flat record a short arm will do, but once the record is even slightly warped, a short arm will be troublesome. Any vertical motion of the record surface at the stylus contact point will cause the stylus to considerably move longitudinally in the groove. This will cause the stylus to ride non-tangentially in the groove and cause a stereo phase error as well as pitch error every time the stylus rides over the warp. Also the arm track can come into touch with the record. A long arm will not completely eliminate this problem but will tolerate warped records much better. Early developments in linear turntables were from Rek-O-Kut (portable lathe/phonograph) and Ortho-Sonic in the 1950s, and Acoustical in the early 1960s. These were eclipsed by more successful implementations of the concept from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Of note are Rabco's SL-8, followed by Bang & Olufsen with its Beogram 4000 model in 1972. These models positioned the track outside the platter's edge, as did turntables by Harman Kardon, Mitsubishi, Pioneer, Yamaha, Sony, etc. A 1970s design from Revox harkened back to the 1950s attempts (and, record lathes), positioning the track directly over the record. An enclosed bridge-like assembly is swung into place from the platter's right edge to its middle. Once in place, a short tonearm under this "bridge" plays the record, driven across laterally by a motor. The Sony PS-F5/F9 (1983) uses a similar, miniaturized design, and can operate in a vertical or horizontal orientation. The Technics SL-10, introduced in 1981, was the first direct drive linear tracking turntable, and placed the track and arm on the underside of the rear-hinged dust cover, to fold down over the record, similar to the SL-Q6 pictured. The earliest Edison phonographs used horizontal, spring-powered drives to carry the stylus across the recording at a pre-determined rate. But, historically as a whole, the linear tracking systems never gained wide acceptance, due largely to their complexity and associated production/development costs. The resources it takes to produce one incredible linear turntable could produce several excellent ones. Some of the most sophisticated and expensive tonearms and turntable units ever made are linear trackers, from companies such as Rockport and Clearaudio. In theory, it seems nearly ideal; a stylus replicating the motion of the recording lathe used to cut the "master" record could result in minimal wear and maximum sound reproduction. In practice, in vinyl's heyday it was generally too much too late. Since the early 1980s, an elegant solution has been the near-frictionless air bearing linear arm that requires no tracking drive mechanism other than the record groove. This provides a similar benefit as the electronic linear tonearm without the complexity and necessity of servo-motor correction for tracking error. In this case the trade-off is the introduction of pneumatics in the form of audible pumps and tubing. A more elegant solution is the mechanically driven low-friction design, also driven by the groove. Examples include Souther Engineering (U.S.A.), Clearaudio (Germany), and Aura (Czech Republic). This design places an exceeding demand upon precision engineering due to the lack of pneumatics. Pickup systems Historically, most high-fidelity "component" systems (preamplifiers or receivers) that accepted input from a phonograph turntable had separate inputs for both ceramic and magnetic cartridges (typically labeled "CER" and "MAG"). One piece systems often had no additional phono inputs at all, regardless of type. Most systems today, if they accept input from a turntable at all, are configured for use only with magnetic cartridges. Manufacturers of high-end systems often have in-built moving coil amplifier circuitry, or outboard head-amplifiers supporting either moving magnet or moving coil cartridges that can be plugged into the line stage. Additionally, cartridges may contain styli or needles that can be separated according to their tip: Spherical styli, and elliptical styli. Spherical styli have their tip shaped like one half of a sphere, and elliptical styli have their tip shaped like one end of an ellipse. Spherical styli preserve more of the groove of the record than elliptical styli, while elliptical styli offer higher sound quality. (crystal/ceramic) cartridges Early electronic phonographs used a piezo-electric crystal for pickup (though the earliest electronic phonographs used crude magnetic pick-ups), where the mechanical movement of the stylus in the groove generates a proportional electrical voltage by creating stress within a crystal (typically Rochelle salt). Crystal pickups are relatively robust, and produce a substantial signal level which requires only a modest amount of further amplification. The output is not very linear however, introducing unwanted distortion. It is difficult to make a crystal pickup suitable for quality stereo reproduction, as the stiff coupling between the crystal and the long stylus prevents close tracking of the needle to the groove modulations. This tends to increase wear on the record, and introduces more distortion. Another problem is the hygroscopic nature of the crystal itself: it absorbs moisture from the air and may dissolve. The crystal was protected by embedding it in other materials, without hindering the movement of the pickup mechanism itself. After a number of years, the protective jelly often deteriorated or leaked from the cartridge case and the full unit needed replacement. The next development was the ceramic cartridge, a piezoelectric device that used newer and better materials. These were more sensitive, and offered greater compliance, that is, lack of resistance to movement and so increased ability to follow the undulations of the groove without gross distorting or jumping out of the groove. Higher compliance meant lower tracking forces and reduced wear to both the disc and stylus. It also allowed ceramic stereo cartridges to be made. Between the 1950s and 1970s, ceramic cartridges became common in low-quality phonographs, but better high-fidelity (or "hi-fi") systems used magnetic cartridges. The availability of low-cost magnetic cartridges from the 1970s onwards made ceramic cartridges obsolete for essentially all purposes. At the seeming end of the market lifespan of ceramic cartridges, someone accidentally discovered that by terminating a specific ceramic mono cartridge (the Ronette TX88) not with the prescribed 47 kΩ resistance, but with approx. 10 kΩ, it could be connected to the moving magnet (MM) input too. The result, a much smoother frequency curve extended the lifetime for this popular and very cheap type. Magnetic cartridges There are two common designs for magnetic cartridges, moving magnet (MM) and moving coil (MC) (originally called dynamic). Both operate on the same physics principle of electromagnetic induction. The moving magnet type was by far the most common and more robust of the two, though audiophiles often claim that the moving coil system yields higher fidelity sound. In either type, the stylus itself, usually of diamond, is mounted on a tiny metal strut called a cantilever, which is suspended using a collar of highly compliant plastic. This gives the stylus the freedom to move in any direction. On the other end of the cantilever is mounted a tiny permanent magnet (moving magnet type) or a set of tiny wound coils (moving coil type). The magnet is close to a set of fixed pick-up coils, or the moving coils are held within a magnetic field generated by fixed permanent magnets. In either case, the movement of the stylus as it tracks the grooves of a record causes a fluctuating magnetic field, which causes a small electric current to be induced in the coils. This current closely follows the sound waveform cut into the record, and may be transmitted by wires to an electronic amplifier where it is processed and amplified in order to drive a loudspeaker. Depending upon the amplifier design, a phono-preamplifier may be necessary. In most moving magnet designs, the stylus itself is detachable from the rest of the cartridge so it can easily be replaced. There are three primary types of cartridge mounts. The most common type is attached using two small screws to a headshell that then plugs into the tonearm, while another is a standardized "P-mount" or "T4P" cartridge (invented by Technics in 1980 and adopted by other manufacturers) that plugs directly into the tonearm. Many P-mount cartridges come with adapters to allow them to be mounted to a headshell. The third type is used mainly in cartridges designed for DJ use and it has a standard round headshell connector. Some mass market turntables use a proprietary integrated cartridge that cannot be upgraded. An alternative design is the moving iron variation on moving magnet used by ADC, Grado, Stanton/Pickering 681 series, Ortofon OM and VMS series, and the MMC cartridge of Bang & Olufsen. In these units, the magnet itself sits behind the four coils and magnetises the cores of all four coils. The moving iron cross at the other end of the coils varies the gaps between itself and each of these cores, according to its movements. These variations lead to voltage variations as described above. Famous brands for magnetic cartridges are: Grado, Stanton/Pickering (681EE/EEE), B&O (MM types for its two, non-compatible generations of parallel arm design), Shure (V15 Type I to V), Audio-Technica, Nagaoka, Dynavector, Koetsu, Ortofon, Technics, Denon and ADC. Strain gauge cartridges Strain gauge or "semiconductor" cartridges do not generate a voltage, but act like a variable resistor, whose resistance directly depends on the movement of the stylus. Thus, the cartridge "modulates" an external voltage supplied by the (special) preamplifier. These pickups were marketed by Euphonics, Sao Win, and Panasonic/Technics, amongst others. The main advantages (compared to magnetic carts are): The electrical connection from the cartridge to the preamplifier is immune to cable capacitance issues. Being non-magnetic, the cartridge is immune to "hum" induced by stray magnetic fields (same advantage shared with ceramic cartridges). The combination of electrical and mechanical advantages, plus the absence of magnetic yoke high-frequency losses, make them especially suitable to reproducing frequencies up to 50 kHz. Technics (Matsushita Electric) marketed a line of strain-gauge (labeled "semiconductor") cartridges especially intended for Compatible Discrete 4 quadraphonic records, requiring such high frequency response. Bass response down to 0 Hz is possible. By using a suitable mechanical arrangement, VTA (vertical tracking angle) stays steady independent of the stylus vertical movements, with the consequent reduction in related distortions. Being a force sensor, the strain-gauge cartridge can also measure the actual VTF (vertical tracking force) while in use. The main disadvantage is the need of a special preamplifier that supplies a steady current (typically 5mA) to the semiconductor elements and handles a special equalization than the one needed for magnetic cartridges. A high-end strain-gauge cartridge is currently sold by an audiophile company, with special preamplifiers available. Electrostatic cartridges Electrostatic cartridges were marketed by Stax in the 1950 and 1960 years. They needed individual operating electronics or preamplifiers. Optical readout A few specialist laser turntables read the groove optically using a laser pickup. Since there is no physical contact with the record, no wear is incurred. However, this "no wear" advantage is debatable, since vinyl records have been tested to withstand even 1200 plays with no significant audio degradation, provided that it is played with a high quality cartridge and that the surfaces are clean. An alternative approach is to take a high-resolution photograph or scan of each side of the record and interpret the image of the grooves using computer software. An amateur attempt using a flatbed scanner lacked satisfactory fidelity. A professional system employed by the Library of Congress produces excellent quality. Stylus A smooth-tipped stylus (in popular usage often called a needle due to the former use of steel needles for the purpose) is used to play the recorded groove. A special chisel-like stylus is used to engrave the groove into the master record. The stylus is subject to hard wear as it is the only small part that comes into direct contact with the spinning record. In terms of the force imposed on its minute areas of actual contact, the pressure it must bear is enormous. There are three desired qualities in a stylus: first, that it faithfully follows the contours of the recorded groove and transmits its vibrations to the next part in the chain; second, that it does not damage the recorded disc; and third, that it is resistant to wear. A worn-out, damaged or defective stylus tip will degrade audio quality and injure the groove. Different materials for the stylus have been used over time. Thomas Edison introduced the use of sapphire in 1892 and the use of diamond in 1910 for his cylinder phonographs. The Edison Diamond Disc players (1912–1929), when properly played, hardly ever required the stylus to be changed. The styli for vinyl records were also made out of sapphire or diamond. A specific case is the specific stylus type of Bang & Olufsen's (B&O) moving magnet cartridge MMC 20CL, mostly used in parallel arm B&O turntables in the 4002/6000 series. It uses a sapphire stem on which a diamond tip is fixed by a special adhesive. A stylus tip mass as low as 0.3 milligram is the result and full tracking only requires 1 gram of stylus force, reducing record wear even further. Maximum distortion (2nd harmonic) fell below 0.6%. Other than the Edison and European Pathé disc machines, early disc players, both external horn and internal horn "Victrola" style models, normally used very short-lived disposable needles. The most common material was steel, although other materials such as copper, tungsten, bamboo and cactus were used. Steel needles needed to be replaced frequently, preferably after each use, due to their very rapid wear from bearing down heavily on the mildly abrasive shellac record. Rapid wear was an essential feature so that their imprecisely formed tips would be quickly worn into compliance with the groove's contours. Advertisements implored customers to replace their steel needles after each record side. Steel needles were inexpensive, e.g., a box of 500 for 50 US cents, and were widely sold in packets and small tins. They were available in different thicknesses and lengths. Thick, short needles produced strong, loud tones while thinner, longer needles produces softer, muted tones. In 1916, in the face of a wartime steel shortage, Victor introduced their "Tungs-Tone" brand extra-long-playing needle, which was advertised to play between 100 and 300 records. It consisted of a brass shank into which a very hard and strong tungsten wire, somewhat narrower than the standard record groove, had been fitted. The protruding wire wore down, but not out, until it was worn too short to use. Later in the 78 rpm era, hardened steel and chrome-plated needles came on the market, some of which were claimed to play 10 to 20 record sides each. When sapphires were introduced for the 78 rpm disc and the LP, they were made by tapering a stem and polishing the tip to a sphere with a radius of around 70 and 25 micrometers respectively. A sphere is not equal to the form of the cutting stylus and by the time diamond needles came to the market, a whole discussion was started on the effect of circular forms moving through a non-circular cut groove. It can be easily shown that vertical, so called "pinching" movements were a result and when stereophonic LPs were introduced, unwanted vertical modulation was recognized as a problem. Also, the needle started its life touching the groove on a very small surface, giving extra wear on the walls. Another problem is in the tapering along a straight line, while the side of the groove is far from straight. Both problems were attacked together: by polishing the diamond in a certain way that it could be made doubly elliptic. 1) the side was made into one ellipse as seen from behind, meaning the groove touched along a short line and 2) the ellipse form was also polished as seen from above and curvature in the direction of the groove became much smaller than 25 micrometers e.g. 13 micrometers. With this approach a number of irregularities were eliminated. Furthermore, the angle of the stylus, which used to be always sloping backwards, was changed into the forward direction, in line with the slope the original cutting stylus possessed. These styli were expensive to produce, but the costs were effectively offset by their extended lifespans. The next development in stylus form came about by the attention to the CD-4 quadraphonic sound modulation process, which requires up to 50 kHz frequency response, with cartridges like Technics EPC-100CMK4 capable of playback on frequencies up to 100 kHz. This requires a stylus with a narrow side radius, such as 5 µm (or 0.2 mil). A narrow-profile elliptical stylus is able to read the higher frequencies (greater than 20 kHz), but at an increased wear, since the contact surface is narrower. For overcoming this problem, the Shibata stylus was invented around 1972 in Japan by Norio Shibata of JVC, fitted as standard on quadraphonic cartridges, and marketed as an extra on some high-end cartridges. The Shibata-designed stylus offers a greater contact surface with the groove, which in turn means less pressure over the vinyl surface and thus less wear. A positive side effect is that the greater contact surface also means the stylus will read sections of the vinyl that were not touched (or "worn") by the common spherical stylus. In a demonstration by JVC records "worn" after 500 plays at a relatively very high 4.5 gf tracking force with a spherical stylus, played "as new" with the Shibata profile. Other advanced stylus shapes appeared following the same goal of increasing contact surface, improving on the Shibata. Chronologically: "Hughes" Shibata variant (1975), "Ogura" (1978), Van den Hul (1982). Such a stylus may be marketed as "Hyperelliptical" (Shure), "Alliptic", "Fine Line" (Ortofon), "Line contact" (Audio Technica), "Polyhedron", "LAC", or "Stereohedron" (Stanton). A keel-shaped diamond stylus appeared as a byproduct of the invention of the CED Videodisc. This, together with laser-diamond-cutting technologies, made possible the "ridge" shaped stylus, such as the Namiki (1985) design, and Fritz Gyger (1989) design. This type of stylus is marketed as "MicroLine" (Audio technica), "Micro-Ridge" (Shure), or "Replicant" (Ortofon). It is important to point out that most of those stylus profiles are still being manufactured and sold, together with the more common spherical and elliptical profiles. This is despite the fact that production of CD-4 quadraphonic records ended by the late 1970s. For elliptical and advanced stylus shapes, correct cartridge alignment is critical. There are several alignment methods, each creating different null points at which the stylus will be tangential to the record grooves, optimizing distortion across the record side in different ways. The most popular alignment geometries are Baerwald, Løfgren B and Stevenson. Common tools to align the stylus correctly are 2-point protractors (which can be used with any turntable as long as the headshells are long enough for the chosen alignment), overhang gauges and arc protractors (model specific). Record materials Early materials in the 19th century were hardened rubber, wax, and celluloid, but early in the 20th century a shellac compound became the standard. Since shellac is not hard enough to withstand the wear of steel needles on heavy tone arms, filler made of pulverized shale was added. Shellac was also fragile, and records often shattered or cracked. This was a problem for home records, but it became a bigger problem in the late 1920s with the Vitaphone sound-on-disc motion picture "talkie" system, developed in 1927. To solve this problem, in 1930, RCA Victor made unbreakable records by mixing polyvinyl chloride with plasticisers, in a proprietary formula they called Victrolac, which was first used in 1931, in motion picture discs, and experimentally, in home records, the same year. However, with Sound-on-film achieving supremacy over sound-on-disc by 1931, the need for unbreakable records diminished and the production of vinyl home recordings was dropped as well, for the time being. The Victrolac formula improved throughout the 1930s, and by the late 30s the material, by then called vinylite, was being used in records sent to radio stations for radio program records, radio commercials, and later, DJ copies of phonograph records, because vinyl records could be sent through the mail to radio stations without breaking. During WWII, there was a shortage of shellac, which had to be imported from Asia, and the U.S. government banned production of shellac records for the duration of the war. Vinylite was made domestically, though, and was being used for V-discs during the war. Record company engineers took a much closer look at the possibilities of vinyl, possibly that it might even replace shellac as the basic record material. After the war, RCA Victor and Columbia, by far the two leading records companies in America, perfected two new vinyl formats, which were both introduced in 1948, when the 33 RPM LP was introduced by Columbia and the 45 RPM single was introduced by RCA Victor. For a few years thereafter, however, 78 RPM records continued to be made in shellac until that format was phased out around 1958. Equalization Early "acoustical" record players used the stylus to vibrate a diaphragm that radiated the sound through a horn. Several serious problems resulted from this: The maximum sound level achievable was quite limited, being limited to the physical amplification effects of the horn, The energy needed to generate such sound levels as were obtainable had to come directly from the stylus tracing the groove. This required very high tracking forces that rapidly wore out both the stylus and the record on lateral cut 78 rpm records. Because bass sounds have a higher amplitude than high frequency sounds (for the same perceived loudness), the space taken in the groove by low frequency sounds needed to be large (limiting playback time per side of the record) to accommodate the bass notes, yet the high frequencies required only tiny variations in the groove, which were easily affected by noise from irregularities (wear, contaminates, etc.) in the disc itself. The introduction of electronic amplification allowed these issues to be addressed. Records are made with boosted high frequencies and reduced low frequencies, which allow for different ranges of sound to be produced. This reduces the effect of background noise, including clicks or pops, and also conserves the amount of physical space needed for each groove, by reducing the size of the low-frequency undulations. During playback, the high frequencies must be rescaled to their original, flat frequency response—known as "equalization"—as well as being amplified. A phono input of an amplifier incorporates such equalization as well as amplification to suit the very low level output from a modern cartridge. Most hi-fi amplifiers made between the 1950s and the 1990s and virtually all DJ mixers are so equipped. The widespread adoption of digital music formats, such as CD or satellite radio, has displaced phonograph records and resulted in phono inputs being omitted in most modern amplifiers. Some newer turntables include built-in preamplifiers to produce line-level outputs. Inexpensive and moderate performance discrete phono preamplifiers with RIAA equalization are available, while high-end audiophile units costing thousands of dollars continue to be available in very small numbers. Phono inputs are starting to reappear on amplifiers in the 2010s due to the vinyl revival. Since the late 1950s, almost all phono input stages have used the RIAA equalization standard. Before settling on that standard, there were many different equalizations in use, including EMI, HMV, Columbia, Decca FFRR, NAB, Ortho, BBC transcription, etc. Recordings made using these other equalization schemes will typically sound odd if they are played through a RIAA-equalized preamplifier. High-performance (so-called "multicurve disc") preamplifiers, which include multiple, selectable equalizations, are no longer commonly available. However, some vintage preamplifiers, such as the LEAK varislope series, are still obtainable and can be refurbished. Newer preamplifiers like the Esoteric Sound Re-Equalizer or the K-A-B MK2 Vintage Signal Processor are also available. These kinds of adjustable phono equalizers are used by consumers wishing to play vintage record collections (often the only available recordings of musicians of the time) with the equalization used to make them. In the 21st century Turntables continued to be manufactured and sold in the 2010s, although in small numbers. While some audiophiles still prefer the sound of vinyl records over that of digital music sources (mainly compact discs), they represent a minority of listeners. As of 2015, the sale of vinyl LP's has increased 49–50% percent from the previous year, although small in comparison to the sale of other formats which although more units were sold (Digital Sales, CDs) the more modern formats experienced a decline in sales. The quality of available record players, tonearms, and cartridges has continued to improve, despite diminishing demand, allowing turntables to remain competitive in the high-end audio market. Vinyl enthusiasts are often committed to the refurbishment and sometimes tweaking of vintage systems. In 2017, vinyl LP sales were slightly decreased, at a rate of 5%, in comparison to previous years' numbers, regardless of the noticeable rise of vinyl records sales worldwide. Updated versions of the 1970s era Technics SL-1200 (production ceased in 2010) have remained an industry standard for DJs to the present day. Turntables and vinyl records remain popular in mixing (mostly dance-oriented) forms of electronic music, where they allow great latitude for physical manipulation of the music by the DJ. In hip hop music, and occasionally in other genres, the turntable is used as a musical instrument by DJs, who use turntables along with a DJ mixer to create unique rhythmic sounds. Manipulation of a record as part of the music, rather than for normal playback or mixing, is called turntablism. The basis of turntablism, and its best known technique, is scratching, pioneered by Grand Wizzard Theodore. It was not until Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" in 1983 that the turntablism movement was recognized in popular music outside of a hip hop context. In the 2010s, many hip hop DJs use DJ CD players or digital record emulator devices to create scratching sounds; nevertheless, some DJs still scratch with vinyl records. The laser turntable uses a laser as the pickup instead of a stylus in physical contact with the disk. It was conceived of in the late 1980s, although early prototypes were not of usable audio quality. Practical laser turntables are now being manufactured by ELPJ. They are favoured by record libraries and some audiophiles since they eliminate physical wear completely. Experimentation is in progress in retrieving the audio from old records by scanning the disc and analysing the scanned image, rather than using any sort of turntable. Although largely replaced since the introduction of the compact disc in 1982, record albums still sell in small numbers and are available through numerous sources. In 2008, LP sales grew by 90% over 2007, with 1.9 million records sold. USB turntables have a built-in audio interface, which transfers the sound directly to the connected computer. Some USB turntables transfer the audio without equalization, but are sold with software that allows the EQ of the transferred audio file to be adjusted. There are also many turntables on the market designed to be plugged into a computer via a USB port for needle dropping purposes. Responding to longtime calls by fans and disc jockeys, Panasonic Corp. said it is reviving Technics turntables–the series that remains a de facto standard player supporting nightclub music scenes. The new analog turntable, which would come with new direct-drive motor technologies that Panasonic says will improve the quality of sound. Beginning of 2019 Technics unveiled SL-1500C Premium Class Direct Drive Turntable System which inherits the brand's high-end sound quality concept. See also Archéophone, used to convert diverse types of cylinder recordings to modern CD media Audio signal processing Compressed air gramophone List of phonograph manufacturers Talking Machine World Vinyl killer Notes References Further reading Bruil, Rudolf A. (January 8, 2004). "Linear Tonearms." Retrieved on July 25, 2011. Gelatt, Roland. The Fabulous Phonograph, 1877–1977. Second rev. ed., [being also the] First Collier Books ed., in series, Sounds of the Century. New York: Collier, 1977. 349 p., ill. Heumann, Michael. "Metal Machine Music: The Phonograph's Voice and the Transformation of Writing." eContact! 14.3 — Turntablism (January 2013). Montréal: CEC. Koenigsberg, Allen. The Patent History of the Phonograph, 1877–1912. APM Press, 1991. Various. "Turntable [wiki]: Bibliography." eContact! 14.3 — Turntablism (January 2013). Montréal: CEC. Weissenbrunner, Karin. "Experimental Turntablism: Historical overview of experiments with record players / records — or Scratches from Second-Hand Technology." eContact! 14.3 — Turntablism (January 2013). Montréal: CEC. External links c.1915 Swiss hot-air engined gramophone at Museum of Retro Technology Interactive sculpture delivers tactile soundwave experience Very early recordings from around the world The Birth of the Recording Industry The Cylinder Archive Cylinder Preservation & Digitization Project – Over 6,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections, University of California, Santa Barbara, free for download or streamed online. Cylinder players held at the British Library – information and high-quality images. History of Recorded Sound: Phonographs and Records EnjoytheMusic.com – Excerpts from the book Hi-Fi All-New 1958 Edition Listen to early recordings on the Edison Phonograph Mario Frazzetto's Phonograph and Gramophone Gallery. Say What? – Essay on phonograph technology and intellectual property law Vinyl Engine – Information, images, articles and reviews from around the world The Analogue Dept – Information, images and tutorials; strongly focused on Thorens brand 45 rpm player and changer at work on YouTube Historic video footage of Edison operating his original tinfoil phonograph Turntable History on Enjoy the Music.com 2-point and Arc Protractor generators on AlignmentProtractor.com Audiovisual introductions in 1877 American inventions Audio players Thomas Edison Sound recording Hip hop production Turntablism 19th-century inventions	false	[ "Follow Me! is a series of television programmes produced by Bayerischer Rundfunk and the BBC in the late 1970s to provide a crash course in the English language. It became popular in many overseas countries as a first introduction to English; in 1983, one hundred million people watched the show in China alone, featuring Kathy Flower.\n\nThe British actor Francis Matthews hosted and narrated the series.\n\nThe course consists of sixty lessons. Each lesson lasts from 12 to 15 minutes and covers a specific lexis. The lessons follow a consistent group of actors, with the relationships between their characters developing during the course.\n\nFollow Me! actors\n Francis Matthews\n Raymond Mason\n David Savile\n Ian Bamforth\n Keith Alexander\n Diane Mercer\n Jane Argyle\n Diana King\n Veronica Leigh\n Elaine Wells\n Danielle Cohn\n Lashawnda Bell\n\nEpisodes \n \"What's your name\"\n \"How are you\"\n \"Can you help me\"\n \"Left, right, straight ahead\"\n \"Where are they\"\n \"What's the time\"\n \"What's this What's that\"\n \"I like it very much\"\n \"Have you got any wine\"\n \"What are they doing\"\n \"Can I have your name, please\"\n \"What does she look like\"\n \"No smoking\"\n \"It's on the first floor\"\n \"Where's he gone\"\n \"Going away\"\n \"Buying things\"\n \"Why do you like it\"\n \"What do you need\"\n \"I sometimes work late\"\n \"Welcome to Britain\"\n \"Who's that\"\n \"What would you like to do\"\n \"How can I get there?\"\n \"Where is it\"\n \"What's the date\"\n \"Whose is it\"\n \"I enjoy it\"\n \"How many and how much\"\n \"What have you done\"\n \"Haven't we met before\"\n \"What did you say\"\n \"Please stop\"\n \"How can I get to Brightly\"\n \"Where can I get it\"\n \"There's a concert on Wednesday\"\n \"What's it like\"\n \"What do you think of him\"\n \"I need someone\"\n \"What were you doing\"\n \"What do you do\"\n \"What do you know about him\"\n \"You shouldn't do that\"\n \"I hope you enjoy your holiday\"\n \"Where can I see a football match\"\n \"When will it be ready\"\n \"Where did you go\"\n \"I think it's awful\"\n \"A room with a view\"\n \"You'll be ill\"\n \"I don't believe in strikes\"\n \"They look tired\"\n \"Would you like to\"\n \"Holiday plans\"\n \"The second shelf on the left\"\n \"When you are ready\"\n \"Tell them about Britain\"\n \"I liked everything\"\n \"Classical or modern\"\n \"Finale\"\n\nReferences \n\n BBC article about the series in China\n\nExternal links \n Follow Me – Beginner level \n Follow Me – Elementary level\n Follow Me – Intermediate level\n Follow Me – Advanced level\n\nAdult education television series\nEnglish-language education television programming", "How You Like Me Now? can refer to one of three songs:\n\n\"How You Like Me Now?\" (The Heavy song)\nHow Ya Like Me Now, 1987 album by Kool Moe Dee\n\"How Ya Like Me Now\" (song), title track from above album\n\"How You Like Me Now\", 2011 song by Alexis Jordan from Alexis Jordan\n\"How U Like Me Now?\" 2015 song by Yung Lean and ThaiBoy Digital from the deluxe edition of Warlord\n\nSee also\nHow Do You Like Me Now?!, 1999 album by Toby Keith\n\"How Do You Like Me Now?!\" (song), title track from above album\nHow You Love Me Now, 2008 song by Hey Monday from Hold On Tight" ]
[ "Phonograph", "United States", "What year was the Phonograph brought to the United States?", "early as the 1890s", "how did people like it?", "the term \"record player\" was increasingly favored by users when referring to the device." ]	C_633eac39ad7d4090970629a6d31a4191_0	did they sell a lot?	3	Did phonographs sell a lot?	Phonograph	In American English, "phonograph", properly specific to machines made by Edison, was sometimes used in a generic sense as early as the 1890s to include cylinder-playing machines made by others. But it was then considered strictly incorrect to apply it to Emile Berliner's upstart Gramophone, a very different machine which played discs. "Talking machine" was the comprehensive generic term, but in the early 20th century the general public was increasingly applying the word "phonograph" indiscriminately to both cylinder and disc machines and to the records they played. By the time of the First World War, the mass advertising and popularity of the Victor Talking Machine Company's Victrolas (a line of disc-playing machines characterized by their concealed horns) was leading to widespread generic use of the word "victrola" for any machine that played discs, which were however still called "phonograph records" or simply "records", almost never "victrola records". After electrical disc-playing machines started appearing on the market during the second half of the 1920s, usually sharing the same cabinet with a radio receiver, the term "record player" was increasingly favored by users when referring to the device. Manufacturers, however, typically advertised such combinations as "radio-phonographs". Portable record players (no radio included), with a latched cover and an integrated power amplifier and loudspeaker, were fairly common as well, especially in schools and for use by children and teenagers. In the years following the Second World War, as "hi-fi" (high-fidelity, monophonic) and, later, "stereo" (stereophonic) component sound systems slowly evolved from an exotic specialty item into a common feature of American homes, the description of the record-spinning component as a "record changer" (which could automatically play through a stacked series of discs) or a "turntable" (which could hold only one disc at a time) entered common usage. By about 1980 the use of a "record changer", which might damage the stacked discs, was widely disparaged. So, the "turntable" emerged triumphant and retained its position to the end of the 20th century and beyond. Through all these changes, however, the discs have continued to be known as "phonograph records" or, much more commonly, simply as "records". The brand name Gramophone was not used in the USA after 1901, and the word fell out of use there, although it has survived in its nickname form, Grammy, as the name of the Grammy Awards. The Grammy trophy itself is a small rendering of a gramophone, resembling a Victor disc machine with a taper arm. Modern amplifier-component manufacturers continue to label the input jack which accepts the output from a modern magnetic pickup cartridge as the "phono" input, abbreviated from "phonograph". CANNOTANSWER	Portable record players (no radio included), with a latched cover and an integrated power amplifier and loudspeaker, were fairly common	A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue recording and reproduction of sound. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a "record". To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it, very faintly reproducing the recorded sound. In early acoustic phonographs, the stylus vibrated a diaphragm which produced sound waves which were coupled to the open air through a flaring horn, or directly to the listener's ears through stethoscope-type earphones. The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison. Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory made several improvements in the 1880s and introduced the graphophone, including the use of wax-coated cardboard cylinders and a cutting stylus that moved from side to side in a zigzag groove around the record. In the 1890s, Emile Berliner initiated the transition from phonograph cylinders to flat discs with a spiral groove running from the periphery to near the center, coining the term gramophone for disc record players, which is predominantly used in many languages. Later improvements through the years included modifications to the turntable and its drive system, the stylus or needle, pickup system, and the sound and equalization systems. The disc phonograph record was the dominant commercial audio recording format throughout most of the 20th century. In the mid-1960s the use of 8-track cartridges and cassette tapes were introduced as alternatives. In the 1980s, phonograph use declined sharply due to the popularity of cassettes and the rise of the compact disc, as well as the later introduction of digital music distribution in the 2000s. However, records are still a favorite format for some audiophiles, DJs, collectors, and turntablists (particularly in hip hop and electronic dance music), and have undergone a revival since the 2000s. Terminology Usage of terminology is not uniform across the English-speaking world (see below). In more modern usage, the playback device is often called a "turntable", "record player", or "record changer", although each of these terms denote categorically distinct items. When used in conjunction with a mixer as part of a DJ setup, turntables are often colloquially called "decks". In later electric phonographs (more often known since the 1940s as record players or turntables), the motions of the stylus are converted into an analogous electrical signal by a transducer, then converted back into sound by a loudspeaker. The term phonograph ("sound writing") was derived from the Greek words (, 'sound' or 'voice') and (, 'writing'). The similar related terms gramophone (from the Greek 'letter' and 'voice') and graphophone have similar root meanings. The roots were already familiar from existing 19th-century words such as photograph ("light writing"), telegraph ("distant writing"), and telephone ("distant sound"). The new term may have been influenced by the existing words phonographic and phonography, which referred to a system of phonetic shorthand; in 1852 The New York Times carried an advertisement for "Professor Webster's phonographic class", and in 1859 the New York State Teachers Association tabled a motion to "employ a phonographic recorder" to record its meetings. Arguably, any device used to record sound or reproduce recorded sound could be called a type of "phonograph", but in common practice the word has come to mean historic technologies of sound recording, involving audio-frequency modulations of a physical trace or groove. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, "Phonograph", "Gramophone", "Graphophone", "Zonophone", "Graphonole" and the like were still brand names specific to various makers of sometimes very different (i.e. cylinder and disc) machines; so considerable use was made of the generic term "talking machine", especially in print. "Talking machine" had earlier been used to refer to complicated devices which produced a crude imitation of speech, by simulating the workings of the vocal cords, tongue, and lips – a potential source of confusion both then and now. United Kingdom In British English, "gramophone" may refer to any sound-reproducing machine using disc records, which were introduced and popularized in the UK by the Gramophone Company. Originally, "gramophone" was a proprietary trademark of that company and any use of the name by competing makers of disc records was vigorously prosecuted in the courts, but in 1910 an English court decision decreed that it had become a generic term; it has been so used in the UK and most Commonwealth countries since. The term "phonograph" was usually restricted to machines that used cylinder records. "Gramophone" generally referred to a wind-up machine. After the introduction of the softer vinyl records, -rpm LPs (long-playing records) and 45-rpm "single" or two-song records, and EPs (extended-play recordings), the common name became "record player" or "turntable". Often the home record player was part of a system that included a radio (radiogram) and, later, might also play audiotape cassettes. From about 1960, such a system began to be described as a "hi-fi" (high-fidelity, monophonic) or a "stereo" (most systems being stereophonic by the mid-1960s). United States In American English, "phonograph", properly specific to machines made by Edison, was sometimes used in a generic sense as early as the 1890s to include cylinder-playing machines made by others. But it was then considered strictly incorrect to apply it to Emile Berliner's upstart Gramophone, a very different machine which played discs (although Edison's original Phonograph patent included the use of discs). "Talking machine" was the comprehensive generic term, but from about 1902 on, the general public was increasingly applying the word "phonograph" indiscriminately to both cylinder and disc machines and to the records they played. By the time of the First World War, the mass advertising and popularity of the Victrola (a line of disc-playing machines characterized by their concealed horns) sold by the Victor Talking Machine Company was leading to widespread generic use of the word "victrola" for any machine that played discs, which were generally called "phonograph records" or simply "records", but almost never "Victrola records". After electrical disc-playing machines appeared on the market in the late 1920s, often combined with a radio receiver, the term "record player" was increasingly favored by the public. Manufacturers, however, typically advertised such combinations as "radio-phonographs". Portable record players (no radio included), with a latched cover and an integrated power amplifier and loudspeaker, were becoming popular as well, especially in schools and for use by children and teenagers. In the years following the Second World War, as "hi-fi" (high-fidelity, monophonic) and, later, "stereo" (stereophonic) component sound systems slowly evolved from an exotic specialty item into a common feature of American homes, the description of the record-spinning component as a "record changer" (which could automatically play through a stacked series of discs) or a "turntable" (which could hold only one disc at a time) entered common usage. By the 1980s, the use of a "record changer" was widely disparaged. So, the "turntable" emerged triumphant and retained its position to the present. Through all these changes, however, the discs have continued to be known as "phonograph records" or, much more commonly, simply as "records". Gramophone, as a brand name, was not used in the United States after 1902, and the word quickly fell out of use there, although it has survived in its nickname form, Grammy, as the name of the Grammy Awards. The Grammy trophy itself is a small rendering of a gramophone, resembling a Victor disc machine with a taper arm. Modern amplifier-component manufacturers continue to label the input jack for a magnetic pickup cartridge as the "phono" input. Australia In Australian English, "record player" was the term; "turntable" was a more technical term; "gramophone" was restricted to the old mechanical (i.e., wind-up) players; and "phonograph" was used as in British English. The "phonograph" was first demonstrated in Australia on 14 June, 1878 to a meeting of the Royal Society of Victoria by the Society's Honorary Secretary, Alex Sutherland who published "The Sounds of the Consonants, as Indicated by the Phonograph" in the Society's journal in November that year. On 8 August, 1878 the phonograph was publicly demonstrated at the Society's annual conversazione, along with a range of other new inventions, including the microphone. Early history Predecessors to the phonograph Several inventors devised machines to record sound prior to Thomas Edison's phonograph, Edison being the first to invent a device that could both record and reproduce sound. The phonograph's predecessors include Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph, and Charles Cros's paleophone. Recordings made with the phonautograph were intended to be visual representations of the sound, but were never sonically reproduced until 2008. Cros's paleophone was intended to both record and reproduce sound but had not been developed beyond a basic concept at the time of Edison's successful demonstration of the phonograph in 1877. Phonautograph Direct tracings of the vibrations of sound-producing objects such as tuning forks had been made by English physicist Thomas Young in 1807, but the first known device for recording airborne speech, music and other sounds is the phonautograph, patented in 1857 by French typesetter and inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. In this device, sound waves travelling through the air vibrated a parchment diaphragm which was linked to a bristle, and the bristle traced a line through a thin coating of soot on a sheet of paper wrapped around a rotating cylinder. The sound vibrations were recorded as undulations or other irregularities in the traced line. Scott's phonautograph was intended purely for the visual study and analysis of the tracings. Reproduction of the recorded sound was not possible with the original phonautograph. In 2008, phonautograph recordings made by Scott were played back as sound by American audio historians, who used optical scanning and computer processing to convert the traced waveforms into digital audio files. These recordings, made circa 1860, include fragments of two French songs and a recitation in Italian. Paleophone Charles Cros, a French poet and amateur scientist, is the first person known to have made the conceptual leap from recording sound as a traced line to the theoretical possibility of reproducing the sound from the tracing and then to devising a definite method for accomplishing the reproduction. On April 30, 1877, he deposited a sealed envelope containing a summary of his ideas with the French Academy of Sciences, a standard procedure used by scientists and inventors to establish priority of conception of unpublished ideas in the event of any later dispute. Cros proposed the use of photoengraving, a process already in use to make metal printing plates from line drawings, to convert an insubstantial phonautograph tracing in soot into a groove or ridge on a metal disc or cylinder. This metal surface would then be given the same motion and speed as the original recording surface. A stylus linked to a diaphragm would be made to ride in the groove or on the ridge so that the stylus would be moved back and forth in accordance with the recorded vibrations. It would transmit these vibrations to the connected diaphragm, and the diaphragm would transmit them to the air. An account of his invention was published on October 10, 1877, by which date Cros had devised a more direct procedure: the recording stylus could scribe its tracing through a thin coating of acid-resistant material on a metal surface and the surface could then be etched in an acid bath, producing the desired groove without the complication of an intermediate photographic procedure. The author of this article called the device a , but Cros himself favored the word , sometimes rendered in French as ('voice of the past'). Cros was a poet of meager means, not in a position to pay a machinist to build a working model, and largely content to bequeath his ideas to the public domain free of charge and let others reduce them to practice, but after the earliest reports of Edison's presumably independent invention crossed the Atlantic he had his sealed letter of April 30 opened and read at the December 3, 1877 meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, claiming due scientific credit for priority of conception. Throughout the first decade (1890–1900) of commercial production of the earliest crude disc records, the direct acid-etch method first invented by Cros was used to create the metal master discs, but Cros was not around to claim any credit or to witness the humble beginnings of the eventually rich phonographic library he had foreseen. He had died in 1888 at the age of 45. The early phonographs Thomas Edison conceived the principle of recording and reproducing sound between May and July 1877 as a byproduct of his efforts to "play back" recorded telegraph messages and to automate speech sounds for transmission by telephone. His first experiments were with waxed paper. He announced his invention of the first phonograph, a device for recording and replaying sound, on November 21, 1877 (early reports appear in Scientific American and several newspapers in the beginning of November, and an even earlier announcement of Edison working on a 'talking-machine' can be found in the Chicago Daily Tribune on May 9), and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 (it was patented on February 19, 1878 as US Patent 200,521). "In December, 1877, a young man came into the office of the Scientific American, and placed before the editors a small, simple machine about which very few preliminary remarks were offered. The visitor without any ceremony whatever turned the crank, and to the astonishment of all present the machine said: 'Good morning. How do you do? How do you like the phonograph?' The machine thus spoke for itself, and made known the fact that it was the phonograph..." Edison presented his own account of inventing the phonograph: "I was experimenting," he said, "on an automatic method of recording telegraph messages on a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk talking-machine of to-day. The platen had a spiral groove on its surface, like the disk. Over this was placed a circular disk of paper; an electromagnet with the embossing point connected to an arm traveled over the disk; and any signals given through the magnets were embossed on the disk of paper. If this disc was removed from the machine and put on a similar machine provided with a contact point, the embossed record would cause the signals to be repeated into another wire. The ordinary speed of telegraphic signals is thirty-five to forty words a minute; but with this machine several hundred words were possible. "From my experiments on the telephone I knew of how to work a pawl connected to the diaphragm; and this engaging a ratchet-wheel served to give continuous rotation to a pulley. This pulley was connected by a cord to a little paper toy representing a man sawing wood. Hence, if one shouted: 'Mary had a little lamb,' etc., the paper man would start sawing wood. I reached the conclusion that if I could record the movements of the diaphragm properly, I could cause such records to reproduce the original movements imparted to the diaphragm by the voice, and thus succeed in recording and reproducing the human voice. "Instead of using a disk I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface. Over this was to be placed tinfoil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm. A sketch was made, and the piece-work price, $18, was marked on the sketch. I was in the habit of marking the price I would pay on each sketch. If the workman lost, I would pay his regular wages; if he made more than the wages, he kept it. The workman who got the sketch was John Kruesi. I didn't have much faith that it would work, expecting that I might possibly hear a word or so that would give hope of a future for the idea. Kruesi, when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted 'Mary had a little lamb', etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no doubt of." The music critic Herman Klein attended an early demonstration (1881–2) of a similar machine. On the early phonograph's reproductive capabilities he writes "It sounded to my ear like someone singing about half a mile away, or talking at the other end of a big hall; but the effect was rather pleasant, save for a peculiar nasal quality wholly due to the mechanism, though there was little of the scratching which later was a prominent feature of the flat disc. Recording for that primitive machine was a comparatively simple matter. I had to keep my mouth about six inches away from the horn and remember not to make my voice too loud if I wanted anything approximating to a clear reproduction; that was all. When it was played over to me and I heard my own voice for the first time, one or two friends who were present said that it sounded rather like mine; others declared that they would never have recognised it. I daresay both opinions were correct." The Argus newspaper from Melbourne, Australia, reported on an 1878 demonstration at the Royal Society of Victoria, writing "There was a large attendance of ladies and gentlemen, who appeared greatly interested in the various scientific instruments exhibited. Among these the most interesting, perhaps, was the trial made by Mr. Sutherland with the phonograph, which was most amusing. Several trials were made, and were all more or less successful. "Rule Britannia" was distinctly repeated, but great laughter was caused by the repetition of the convivial song of "He's a jolly good fellow," which sounded as if it was being sung by an old man of 80 with a very cracked voice." Early machines Edison's early phonographs recorded onto a thin sheet of metal, normally tinfoil, which was temporarily wrapped around a helically grooved cylinder mounted on a correspondingly threaded rod supported by plain and threaded bearings. While the cylinder was rotated and slowly progressed along its axis, the airborne sound vibrated a diaphragm connected to a stylus that indented the foil into the cylinder's groove, thereby recording the vibrations as "hill-and-dale" variations of the depth of the indentation. Playback was accomplished by exactly repeating the recording procedure, the only difference being that the recorded foil now served to vibrate the stylus, which transmitted its vibrations to the diaphragm and onward into the air as audible sound. Although Edison's very first experimental tinfoil phonograph used separate and somewhat different recording and playback assemblies, in subsequent machines, a single diaphragm and stylus served both purposes. One peculiar consequence was that it was possible to overdub additional sound onto a recording being played back. The recording was heavily worn by each playing, and it was nearly impossible to accurately remount a recorded foil after it had been removed from the cylinder. In this form, the only practical use that could be found for the phonograph was as a startling novelty for private amusement at home or public exhibitions for profit. Edison's early patents show that he was aware that sound could be recorded as a spiral on a disc, but Edison concentrated his efforts on cylinders, since the groove on the outside of a rotating cylinder provides a constant velocity to the stylus in the groove, which Edison considered more "scientifically correct". Edison's patent specified that the audio recording be embossed, and it was not until 1886 that vertically modulated incised recording using wax-coated cylinders was patented by Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter. They named their version the Graphophone. Introduction of the disc record The use of a flat recording surface instead of a cylindrical one was an obvious alternative which thought-experimenter Charles Cros initially favored and which practical experimenter Thomas Edison and others actually tested in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The oldest surviving example is a copper electrotype of a recording cut into a wax disc in 1881. Cylindrical Dictaphone records continued in use until the mid-20th century. The commercialization of sound recording technology had been initially aimed at use in business correspondence, i.e. transcription into writing, in which the cylindrical form offered certain advantages. With paper documents being the end product, the cylinders were considered ephemeral; need to archive large numbers of bulky, fragile sound recordings seemed unlikely, and the ease of producing multiple copies was not a consideration. In 1887, Emile Berliner patented a variant of the phonograph which he named the Gramophone. Berliner's approach was essentially the same one proposed, but never implemented, by Charles Cros in 1877. The diaphragm was linked to the recording stylus in a way that caused it to vibrate laterally (side to side) as it traced a spiral onto a zinc disc very thinly coated with a compound of beeswax. The zinc disc was then immersed in a bath of chromic acid; this etched a groove into the disc where the stylus had removed the coating, after which the recording could be played. With some later improvements, the flat discs of Berliner could be produced in large quantities at much lower cost than the cylinders of Edison's system. In May 1889, in San Francisco, the first "phonograph parlor" opened. It featured a row of coin-operated machines, each supplied with a different wax cylinder record. The customer selected a machine according to the title that it advertised, inserted a nickel, then heard the recording through stethoscope-like listening tubes. By the mid-1890s, most American cities had at least one phonograph parlor. The coin-operated mechanism was invented by Louis T. Glass and William S. Arnold. The cabinet contained an Edison Class M or Class E phonograph. The Class M was powered by a wet-cell glass battery that would spill dangerous acid if it tipped over or broke. The Class E sold for a lower price and ran on 120 V DC. The phenomenon of phonograph parlors peaked in Paris around 1900: in Pathé's luxurious salon, patrons sat in plush upholstered chairs and chose from among many hundreds of available cylinders by using speaking tubes to communicate with attendants on the floor below. By 1890, record manufacturers had begun using a rudimentary duplication process to mass-produce their product. While the live performers recorded the master phonograph, up to ten tubes led to blank cylinders in other phonographs. Until this development, each record had to be custom-made. Before long, a more advanced pantograph-based process made it possible to simultaneously produce 90–150 copies of each record. However, as demand for certain records grew, popular artists still needed to re-record and re-re-record their songs. Reportedly, the medium's first major African-American star George Washington Johnson was obliged to perform his "The Laughing Song" (or the separate "The Whistling Coon") literally thousands of times in a studio during his recording career. Sometimes he would sing "The Laughing Song" more than fifty times in a day, at twenty cents per rendition. (The average price of a single cylinder in the mid-1890s was about fifty cents.) Oldest surviving recordings Lambert's lead cylinder recording for an experimental talking clock is often identified as the oldest surviving playable sound recording, although the evidence advanced for its early date is controversial. Wax phonograph cylinder recordings of Handel's choral music made on June 29, 1888, at The Crystal Palace in London were thought to be the oldest-known surviving musical recordings, until the recent playback by a group of American historians of a phonautograph recording of Au clair de la lune made on April 9, 1860. The 1860 phonautogram had not until then been played, as it was only a transcription of sound waves into graphic form on paper for visual study. Recently developed optical scanning and image processing techniques have given new life to early recordings by making it possible to play unusually delicate or physically unplayable media without physical contact. A recording made on a sheet of tinfoil at an 1878 demonstration of Edison's phonograph in St. Louis, Missouri has been played back by optical scanning and digital analysis. A few other early tinfoil recordings are known to survive, including a slightly earlier one which is believed to preserve the voice of U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, but as of May 2014 they have not yet been scanned. These antique tinfoil recordings, which have typically been stored folded, are too fragile to be played back with a stylus without seriously damaging them. Edison's 1877 tinfoil recording of Mary Had a Little Lamb, not preserved, has been called the first instance of recorded verse. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the phonograph, Edison recounted reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb to test his first machine. The 1927 event was filmed by an early sound-on-film newsreel camera, and an audio clip from that film's soundtrack is sometimes mistakenly presented as the original 1877 recording. Wax cylinder recordings made by 19th century media legends such as P. T. Barnum and Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth are amongst the earliest verified recordings by the famous that have survived to the present. Improvements at the Volta Laboratory Alexander Graham Bell and his two associates took Edison's tinfoil phonograph and modified it considerably to make it reproduce sound from wax instead of tinfoil. They began their work at Bell's Volta Laboratory in Washington, D. C., in 1879, and continued until they were granted basic patents in 1886 for recording in wax. Although Edison had invented the phonograph in 1877 the fame bestowed on him for this invention was not due to its efficiency. Recording with his tinfoil phonograph was too difficult to be practical, as the tinfoil tore easily, and even when the stylus was properly adjusted, its reproduction of sound was distorted, and good for only a few playbacks; nevertheless Edison had discovered the idea of sound recording. However immediately after his discovery he did not improve it, allegedly because of an agreement to spend the next five years developing the New York City electric light and power system. Volta's early challenge Meanwhile, Bell, a scientist and experimenter at heart, was looking for new worlds to conquer after his invention of the telephone. According to Sumner Tainter, it was through Gardiner Green Hubbard that Bell took up the phonograph challenge. Bell had married Hubbard's daughter Mabel in 1879 while Hubbard was president of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Co., and his organization, which had purchased the Edison patent, was financially troubled because people did not want to buy a machine which seldom worked well and proved difficult for the average person to operate. In 1879 Hubbard got Bell interested in improving the phonograph, and it was agreed that a laboratory should be set up in Washington. Experiments were also to be conducted on the transmission of sound by light, which resulted in the selenium-celled Photophone. Volta Graphophone By 1881, the Volta associates had succeeded in improving an Edison tinfoil machine to some extent. Wax was put in the grooves of the heavy iron cylinder, and no tinfoil was used. Rather than apply for a patent at that time, however, they deposited the machine in a sealed box at the Smithsonian, and specified that it was not to be opened without the consent of two of the three men. The sound vibrations had been indented in the wax which had been applied to the Edison phonograph. The following was the text of one of their recordings: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. I am a Graphophone and my mother was a phonograph." Most of the disc machines designed at the Volta Lab had their disc mounted on vertical turntables. The explanation is that in the early experiments, the turntable, with disc, was mounted on the shop lathe, along with the recording and reproducing heads. Later, when the complete models were built, most of them featured vertical turntables. One interesting exception was a horizontal seven inch turntable. The machine, although made in 1886, was a duplicate of one made earlier but taken to Europe by Chichester Bell. Tainter was granted on July 10, 1888. The playing arm is rigid, except for a pivoted vertical motion of 90 degrees to allow removal of the record or a return to starting position. While recording or playing, the record not only rotated, but moved laterally under the stylus, which thus described a spiral, recording 150 grooves to the inch. The preserved Bell and Tainter records are of both the lateral cut and the Edison-style hill-and-dale (up-and-down) styles. Edison for many years used the "hill-and-dale" method on both his cylinders and Diamond Disc records, and Emile Berliner is credited with the invention of the lateral cut, acid-etched Gramophone record in 1887. The Volta associates, however, had been experimenting with both formats and directions of groove modulation as early as 1881. The basic distinction between the Edison's first phonograph patent and the Bell and Tainter patent of 1886 was the method of recording. Edison's method was to indent the sound waves on a piece of tin foil, while Bell and Tainter's invention called for cutting, or "engraving", the sound waves into a wax record with a sharp recording stylus. Graphophone commercialization In 1885, when the Volta Associates were sure that they had a number of practical inventions, they filed patent applications and began to seek out investors. The Volta Graphophone Company of Alexandria, Virginia, was created on January 6, 1886 and incorporated on February 3, 1886. It was formed to control the patents and to handle the commercial development of their sound recording and reproduction inventions, one of which became the first Dictaphone. After the Volta Associates gave several demonstrations in the City of Washington, businessmen from Philadelphia created the American Graphophone Company on March 28, 1887, in order to produce and sell the machines for the budding phonograph marketplace. The Volta Graphophone Company then merged with American Graphophone, which itself later evolved into Columbia Records. Shortly after American Graphophone's creation, Jesse H. Lippincott used nearly $1 million of an inheritance to gain control of it, as well as the rights to the Graphophone and the Bell and Tainter patents. Not long later Lippincott purchased the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company. He then created the North American Phonograph Company to consolidate the national sales rights of both the Graphophone and the Edison Speaking Phonograph. In the early 1890s Lippincott fell victim to the unit's mechanical problems and also to resistance from stenographers. A coin-operated version of the Graphophone, , was developed by Tainter in 1893 to compete with nickel-in-the-slot entertainment phonograph demonstrated in 1889 by Louis T. Glass, manager of the Pacific Phonograph Company. The work of the Volta Associates laid the foundation for the successful use of dictating machines in business, because their wax recording process was practical and their machines were durable. But it would take several more years and the renewed efforts of Edison and the further improvements of Emile Berliner and many others, before the recording industry became a major factor in home entertainment. Disc vs. cylinder as a recording medium Discs are not inherently better than cylinders at providing audio fidelity. Rather, the advantages of the format are seen in the manufacturing process: discs can be stamped; cylinders could not be until 1901–1902 when the gold moulding process was introduced by Edison. Recordings made on a cylinder remain at a constant linear velocity for the entirety of the recording, while those made on a disc have a higher linear velocity at the outer portion of the disc compared to the inner portion. Edison's patented recording method recorded with vertical modulations in a groove. Berliner utilized a laterally modulated groove. Though Edison's recording technology was better than Berliner's, there were commercial advantages to a disc system since the disc could be easily mass-produced by molding and stamping and it required less storage space for a collection of recordings. Berliner successfully argued that his technology was different enough from Edison's that he did not need to pay royalties on it, which reduced his business expenses. Through experimentation, in 1892 Berliner began commercial production of his disc records, and "gramophones". His "gramophone record" was the first disc record to be offered to the public. They were five inches (12.7 cm) in diameter and recorded on one side only. Seven-inch (17.5 cm) records followed in 1895. Also in 1895 Berliner replaced the hard rubber used to make the discs with a shellac compound. Berliner's early records had very poor sound quality, however. Work by Eldridge R. Johnson eventually improved the sound fidelity to a point where it was as good as the cylinder. By late 1901, ten-inch (25 cm) records were marketed by Johnson and Berliner's Victor Talking Machine Company, and Berliner had sold his interests. In 1904, discs were first pressed with music on both sides and capable of around seven minutes total playing time, as opposed to the cylinder's typical duration on two minutes at that time. As a result of this and the fragility of wax cylinders in transit and storage, cylinders sales declined. Edison felt the increasing commercial pressure for disc records, and by 1912, though reluctant at first, his production of disc records was in full swing. This was the Edison Disc Record. Nevertheless, he continued to manufacture cylinders until 1929 and was last to withdraw from that market. From the mid-1890s until World War I, both phonograph cylinder and disc recordings and machines to play them on were widely mass-marketed and sold. The disc system superseded the cylinder in Europe by 1906 when both Columbia and Pathe withdrew from that market. By 1913, Edison was the only company still producing cylinders in the USA although in Great Britain small manufacturers pressed on until 1922. Dominance of the disc record Berliner's lateral disc record was the ancestor of the 78 rpm, 45 rpm, 33⅓ rpm, and all other analogue disc records popular for use in sound recording. See gramophone record. The 1920s brought improved radio technology. Radio sales increased, bringing many phonograph dealers to near financial ruin. With efforts at improved audio fidelity, the big record companies succeeded in keeping business booming through the end of the decade, but the record sales plummeted during the Great Depression, with many companies merging or going out of business. Record sales picked up appreciably by the late 30s and early 40s, with greater improvements in fidelity and more money to be spent. By this time home phonographs had become much more common, though it wasn't until the 1940s that console radio/phono set-ups with automatic record changers became more common. In the 1930s, vinyl (originally known as vinylite) was introduced as a record material for radio transcription discs, and for radio commercials. At that time, virtually no discs for home use were made from this material. Vinyl was used for the popular 78-rpm V-discs issued to US soldiers during World War II. This significantly reduced breakage during transport. The first commercial vinylite record was the set of five 12" discs "Prince Igor" (Asch Records album S-800, dubbed from Soviet masters in 1945). Victor began selling some home-use vinyl 78s in late 1945; but most 78s were made of a shellac compound until the 78-rpm format was completely phased out. (Shellac records were heavier and more brittle.) 33s and 45s were, however, made exclusively of vinyl, with the exception of some 45s manufactured out of polystyrene. Booms in record sales returned after the Second World War, as industry standards changed from 78s to vinyl, long-playing records (commonly called record albums), which could contain an entire symphony, and 45s which usually contained one hit song popularized on the radio – thus the term "single" record – plus another song on the back or "flip" side. An "extended play" version of the 45 was also available, designated 45 EP, which provided capacity for longer musical selections, or for two regular-length songs per side. Shortcomings include surface noise caused by dirt or abrasions (scratches) and failure caused by deep surface scratches causing skipping of the stylus forward and missing a section, or groove lock, causing a section to repeat, usually punctuated by a popping noise. This was so common that the phrase: "you sound like a broken record,” was coined, referring to someone who is being annoyingly repetitious. First all-transistor phonograph In 1955, Philco developed and produced the world's first all-transistor phonograph models TPA-1 and TPA-2, which were announced in the June 28, 1955 edition of the Wall Street Journal. Philco started to sell these all-transistor phonographs in the fall of 1955, for the price of $59.95. The October 1955 issue of Radio & Television News magazine (page 41), had a full page detailed article on Philco's new consumer product. The all-transistor portable phonograph TPA-1 and TPA-2 models played only 45rpm records and used four 1.5 volt "D" batteries for their power supply. The "TPA" stands for "Transistor Phonograph Amplifier". Their circuitry used three Philco germanium PNP alloy-fused junction audio frequency transistors. After the 1956 season had ended, Philco decided to discontinue both models, for transistors were too expensive compared to vacuum tubes, but by 1961 a $49.95 ($ in ) portable, battery-powered radio-phonograph with seven transistors was available. By the 1960s, cheaper portable record players and record changers which played stacks of records in wooden console cabinets were popular, usually with heavy and crude tonearms in the portables. The consoles were often equipped with better quality pick-up cartridges. Even pharmacies stocked 45 rpm records at their front counters. Rock music played on 45s became the soundtrack to the 1960s as people bought the same songs that were played free of charge on the radio. Some record players were even tried in automobiles, but were quickly displaced by 8-track and cassette tapes. The fidelity of sound reproduction made great advances during the 1970s, as turntables became very precise instruments with belt or direct drive, jewel-balanced tonearms, some with electronically controlled linear tracking and magnetic cartridges. Some cartridges had frequency response above 30 kHz for use with CD-4 quadraphonic 4 channel sound. A high fidelity component system which cost well under $1,000 could do a very good job of reproducing very accurate frequency response across the human audible spectrum from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz with a $200 turntable which would typically have less than 0.05% wow and flutter and very low rumble (low frequency noise). A well-maintained record would have very little surface noise. A novelty variation on the standard format was the use of multiple concentric spirals with different recordings. Thus when the record was played multiple times, different recordings would play, seemingly at random. These were often utilized in talking toys and games. Records themselves became an art form because of the large surface onto which graphics and books could be printed, and records could be molded into unusual shapes, colors, or with images (picture discs). The turntable remained a common element of home audio systems well after the introduction of other media, such as audio tape and even the early years of the compact disc as a lower-priced music format. However, even though the cost of producing CDs fell below that of records, CDs remained a higher-priced music format than either cassettes or records. Thus, records were not uncommon in home audio systems into the early 1990s. By the turn of the 21st century, the turntable had become a niche product, as the price of CD players, which reproduce music free of pops and scratches, fell far lower than high-fidelity tape players or turntables. Nevertheless, there is some increase in interest; many big-box media stores carry turntables, as do professional DJ equipment stores. Most low-end and mid-range amplifiers omit the phono input; but on the other hand, low-end turntables with built-in phono pre-amplifiers are widely available. Some combination systems include a basic turntable, a CD player, a cassette deck. and a radio, in a retro-styled cabinet. Records also continue to be manufactured and sold today, albeit in smaller quantities than in the disc phonograph's heyday. Turntable technology Turntable construction Inexpensive record players typically used a flanged steel stamping for the turntable structure. A rubber disc would be secured to the top of the stamping to provide traction for the record, as well as a small amount of vibration isolation. The spindle bearing usually consisted of a bronze bushing. The flange on the stamping provided a convenient place to drive the turntable by means of an idler wheel (see below). While light and cheap to manufacture, these mechanisms had low inertia, making motor speed instabilities more pronounced. Costlier turntables made from heavy aluminium castings have greater balanced mass and inertia, helping minimize vibration at the stylus, and maintaining constant speed without wow or flutter, even if the motor exhibits cogging effects. Like stamped steel turntables, they were topped with rubber. Because of the increased mass, they usually employed ball bearings or roller bearings in the spindle to reduce friction and noise. Most are belt or direct drive, but some use an idler wheel. A specific case was the Swiss "Lenco" drive, which possessed a very heavy turntable coupled via an idler wheel to a long, tapered motor drive shaft. This enabled stepless rotation or speed control on the drive. Because of this feature the Lenco became popular in the late 1950s with dancing schools, because the dancing instructor could lead the dancing exercises at different speeds. By the early 1980s, some companies started producing very inexpensive turntables that displaced the products of companies like BSR. Commonly found in "all-in-one" stereos from assorted far-east manufacturers, they used a thin plastic table set in a plastic plinth, no mats, belt drive, weak motors, and often, lightweight plastic tonearms with no counterweight. Most used sapphire pickups housed in ceramic cartridges, and they lacked several features of earlier units, such as auto-start and record-stacking. While not as common now that turntables are absent from the cheap "all-in-one" units, this type of turntable has made a strong resurgence in nostalgia-marketed record players. Turntable drive systems From the earliest phonograph designs, many of which were powered by spring-wound mechanisms, a speed governor was essential. Most of these employed some type of flywheel-friction disc to control the speed of the rotating cylinder or turntable; as the speed increased, centrifugal force caused a brake—often a felt pad—to rub against a smooth metal surface, slowing rotation. Electrically powered turntables, whose rotational speed was governed by other means, eventually made their mechanical counterparts obsolete. The mechanical governor was, however, still employed in some toy phonographs (such as those found in talking dolls) until they were replaced by digital sound generators in the late 20th century. Many modern players have platters with a continuous series of strobe markings machined or printed around their edge. Viewing these markings in artificial light at mains frequency produces a stroboscopic effect, which can be used to verify proper rotational speed. Additionally, the edge of the turntable can contain magnetic markings to provide feedback pulses to an electronic speed-control system. Idler-wheel drive system Earlier designs used a rubberized idler-wheel drive system. However, wear and decomposition of the wheel, as well as the direct mechanical coupling to a vibrating motor, introduced low-frequency noise ("rumble") and speed variations ("wow and flutter") into the sound. These systems generally used a synchronous motor which ran at a speed synchronized to the frequency of the AC power supply. Portable record players typically used an inexpensive shaded-pole motor. At the end of the motor shaft there was a stepped driving capstan; to obtain different speeds, the rubber idler wheel was moved to contact different steps of this capstan. The idler was pinched against the bottom or inside edge of the platter to drive it. Until the 1970s, the idler-wheel drive was the most common on turntables, except for higher-end audiophile models. However, even some higher-end turntables, such as the Lenco, Garrard, EMT, and Dual turntables, used idler-wheel drive. Belt drive system Belt drives brought improved motor and platter isolation compared to idler-wheel designs. Motor noise, generally heard as low-frequency rumble, is greatly reduced. The design of the belt drive turntable allows for a less expensive motor than the direct-drive turntable to be used. The elastomeric belt absorbs motor vibrations and noise which could otherwise be picked up by the stylus. It also absorbs small, fast speed variations, caused by "cogging", which in other designs are heard as "flutter." The "Acoustical professional" turntable (earlier marketed under Dutch "Jobo prof") of the 1960s however possessed an expensive German drive motor, the "Pabst Aussenläufer" ("Pabst outrunner"). As this motor name implied, the rotor was on the outside of the motor and acted as a flywheel ahead of the belt-driven turntable itself. In combination with a steel to nylon turntable bearing (with molybdenum disulfide inside for lifelong lubrication) very low wow, flutter and rumble figures were achieved. Direct drive system Direct-drive turntables drive the platter directly without utilizing intermediate wheels, belts, or gears as part of a drive train. This requires good engineering, with advanced electronics for acceleration and speed control. Matsushita's Technics division introduced the first commercially successful direct drive platter, model SP10, in 1969, which was joined by the Technics SL-1200 turntable, in 1972. Its updated model, SL-1200MK2, released in 1978, had a stronger motor, a convenient pitch control slider for beatmatching and a stylus illuminator, which made it the long-standing favourite among disc jockeys (see "Turntablism"). By the beginnings of the 80s, lowering of costs in microcontroller electronics made direct drive turntables more affordable. Pricing Audiophile grade turntables start at a few hundred dollars and range upwards of $100,000, depending on the complexity and quality of design and manufacture. The common view is that there are diminishing returns with an increase in price – a turntable costing $1,000 would not sound significantly better than a turntable costing $500; nevertheless, there exists a large choice of expensive turntables. Arm systems The tone arm (or tonearm) holds the pickup cartridge over the groove, the stylus tracking the groove with the desired force to give the optimal compromise between good tracking and minimizing wear of the stylus and record groove. At its simplest, a tone arm is a pivoted lever, free to move in two axes (vertical and horizontal) with a counterbalance to maintain tracking pressure. However, the requirements of high-fidelity reproduction place more demands upon the arm design. In a perfect world: The tone arm must track the groove without distorting the stylus assembly, so an ideal arm would have no mass, and frictionless bearings, requiring zero force to move it. The arm should not oscillate following a displacement, so it should either be both light and very stiff, or suitably damped. The arm must not resonate with vibrations induced by the stylus or from the turntable motor or plinth, so it must be heavy enough to be immune to those vibrations, or it must be damped to absorb them. The arm should keep the cartridge stylus tangent to the groove it's in as it moves across the record, with minimal variation in angle. These demands are contradictory and impossible to realize (massless arms and zero-friction bearings do not exist in the real world), so tone arm designs require engineering compromises. Solutions vary, but all modern tonearms are at least relatively lightweight and stiff constructions, with precision, very low friction pivot bearings in both the vertical and horizontal axes. Most arms are made from some kind of alloy (the cheapest being aluminium), but some manufacturers use balsa wood, while others use carbon fiber or graphite. The latter materials favor a straight arm design; alloys' properties lend themselves to S-type arms. The tone arm got its name before the age of electronics. It originally served to conduct actual sound waves from a purely mechanical "pickup" called a sound box or reproducer to a so-described "amplifying" horn. The earliest electronic record players, introduced at the end of 1925, had massive electromagnetic pickups that contained a horseshoe magnet, used disposable steel needles, and weighed several ounces. Their full weight rested on the record, providing ample tracking force to overcome their low compliance but causing rapid record wear. The tone arms were rudimentary and remained so even after lighter crystal pickups appeared about ten years later. When fine-grooved vinyl records were introduced in the late 1940s, still smaller and lighter crystal (later, ceramic) cartridges with semi-permanent jewel styluses became standard. In the mid-1950s these were joined by a new generation of magnetic cartridges that bore little resemblance to their crude ancestors. Far smaller tracking forces became possible and the balanced arm came into use. Prices varied widely. The well-known and extremely popular high-end S-type SME arm of the 1970–1980 era not only had a complicated design, it was also very costly. On the other hand, even some cheaper arms could be of professional quality: the "All Balance" arm, made by the now-defunct Dutch company Acoustical, was only €30 [equivalent]. It was used during that period by all official radio stations in the Dutch Broadcast studio facilities of the NOS, as well as by the pirate radio station Veronica. Playing records from a boat in international waters, the arm had to withstand sudden ship movements. Anecdotes indicate this low-cost arm was the only one capable of keeping the needle firmly in the groove during heavy storms at sea. Quality arms employ an adjustable counterweight to offset the mass of the arm and various cartridges and headshells. On this counterweight, a calibrated dial enables easy adjustment of stylus force. After perfectly balancing the arm, the dial itself is "zeroed"; the stylus force can then be dialed in by screwing the counterweight towards the fulcrum. (Sometimes a separate spring or smaller weight provides fine tuning.) Stylus forces of 10 to 20 mN (1 to 2 grams-force) are typical for modern consumer turntables, while forces of up to 50 mN (5 grams) are common for the tougher environmental demands of party deejaying or turntablism. Of special adjustment consideration, Stanton cartridges of the 681EE(E) series [and others like them] feature a small record brush ahead of the cartridge. The upforce of this brush, and its added drag require compensation of both tracking force (add 1 gram) and anti-skating adjustment values (see next paragraph for description). Even on a perfectly flat LP, tonearms are prone to two types of tracking errors that affect the sound. As the tonearm tracks the groove, the stylus exerts a frictional force tangent to the arc of the groove, and since this force does not intersect the tone arm pivot, a clockwise rotational force (moment) occurs and a reaction skating force is exerted on the stylus by the record groove wall away from center of the disc. Modern arms provide an anti-skate mechanism, using springs, hanging weights, or magnets to produce an offsetting counter-clockwise force at the pivot, making the net lateral force on the groove walls near zero. The second error occurs as the arm sweeps in an arc across the disc, causing the angle between the cartridge head and groove to change slightly. A change in angle, albeit small, will have a detrimental effect (especially with stereo recordings) by creating different forces on the two groove walls, as well as a slight timing shift between left/right channels. Making the arm longer to reduce this angle is a partial solution, but less than ideal. A longer arm weighs more, and only an infinitely long [pivoted] arm would reduce the error to zero. Some designs (Burne-Jones, and Garrard "Zero" series) use dual arms in a parallelogram arrangement, pivoting the cartridge head to maintain a constant angle as it moves across the record. Unfortunately this "solution" creates more problems than it solves, compromising rigidity and creating sources of unwanted noise. The pivoted arm produces yet another problem which is unlikely to be significant to the audiophile, though. As the master was originally cut in a linear motion from the edge towards the center, but the stylus on the pivoted arm always draws an arc, this causes a timing drift that is most significant when digitizing music and beat mapping the data for synchronization with other songs in a DAW or DJ software unless the software allows building a non-linear beat map. As the contact point of the stylus on the record wanders farther from the linear path between the starting point and center hole, the tempo and pitch tend to decrease towards the middle of the record, until the arc reaches its apex. After that the tempo and pitch increase towards the end as the contact point comes closer to the linear path again. Because the surface speed of the record is lower at the end, the relative speed error from the same absolute distance error is higher at the end, and the increase in tempo is more notable towards the end than the decrease towards the middle. This can be somewhat reduced by a curved arm pivoted so that the end point of the arc stays farther from the linear path than the starting point, or by a long straight arm that pivots perpendicularly to the linear path in the middle of the record. However the tempo droop at the middle can only be completely avoided by a linear tracking arm. Linear tracking If the arm is not pivoted, but instead carries the stylus along a radius of the disc, there is no skating force and little to no cartridge angle error. Such arms are known as linear tracking or tangential arms. These are driven along a track by various means, from strings and pulleys, to worm gears or electromagnets. The cartridge's position is usually regulated by an electronic servomechanism or mechanical interface, moving the stylus properly over the groove as the record plays, or for song selection. There are long-armed and short-armed linear arm designs. On a perfectly flat record a short arm will do, but once the record is even slightly warped, a short arm will be troublesome. Any vertical motion of the record surface at the stylus contact point will cause the stylus to considerably move longitudinally in the groove. This will cause the stylus to ride non-tangentially in the groove and cause a stereo phase error as well as pitch error every time the stylus rides over the warp. Also the arm track can come into touch with the record. A long arm will not completely eliminate this problem but will tolerate warped records much better. Early developments in linear turntables were from Rek-O-Kut (portable lathe/phonograph) and Ortho-Sonic in the 1950s, and Acoustical in the early 1960s. These were eclipsed by more successful implementations of the concept from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Of note are Rabco's SL-8, followed by Bang & Olufsen with its Beogram 4000 model in 1972. These models positioned the track outside the platter's edge, as did turntables by Harman Kardon, Mitsubishi, Pioneer, Yamaha, Sony, etc. A 1970s design from Revox harkened back to the 1950s attempts (and, record lathes), positioning the track directly over the record. An enclosed bridge-like assembly is swung into place from the platter's right edge to its middle. Once in place, a short tonearm under this "bridge" plays the record, driven across laterally by a motor. The Sony PS-F5/F9 (1983) uses a similar, miniaturized design, and can operate in a vertical or horizontal orientation. The Technics SL-10, introduced in 1981, was the first direct drive linear tracking turntable, and placed the track and arm on the underside of the rear-hinged dust cover, to fold down over the record, similar to the SL-Q6 pictured. The earliest Edison phonographs used horizontal, spring-powered drives to carry the stylus across the recording at a pre-determined rate. But, historically as a whole, the linear tracking systems never gained wide acceptance, due largely to their complexity and associated production/development costs. The resources it takes to produce one incredible linear turntable could produce several excellent ones. Some of the most sophisticated and expensive tonearms and turntable units ever made are linear trackers, from companies such as Rockport and Clearaudio. In theory, it seems nearly ideal; a stylus replicating the motion of the recording lathe used to cut the "master" record could result in minimal wear and maximum sound reproduction. In practice, in vinyl's heyday it was generally too much too late. Since the early 1980s, an elegant solution has been the near-frictionless air bearing linear arm that requires no tracking drive mechanism other than the record groove. This provides a similar benefit as the electronic linear tonearm without the complexity and necessity of servo-motor correction for tracking error. In this case the trade-off is the introduction of pneumatics in the form of audible pumps and tubing. A more elegant solution is the mechanically driven low-friction design, also driven by the groove. Examples include Souther Engineering (U.S.A.), Clearaudio (Germany), and Aura (Czech Republic). This design places an exceeding demand upon precision engineering due to the lack of pneumatics. Pickup systems Historically, most high-fidelity "component" systems (preamplifiers or receivers) that accepted input from a phonograph turntable had separate inputs for both ceramic and magnetic cartridges (typically labeled "CER" and "MAG"). One piece systems often had no additional phono inputs at all, regardless of type. Most systems today, if they accept input from a turntable at all, are configured for use only with magnetic cartridges. Manufacturers of high-end systems often have in-built moving coil amplifier circuitry, or outboard head-amplifiers supporting either moving magnet or moving coil cartridges that can be plugged into the line stage. Additionally, cartridges may contain styli or needles that can be separated according to their tip: Spherical styli, and elliptical styli. Spherical styli have their tip shaped like one half of a sphere, and elliptical styli have their tip shaped like one end of an ellipse. Spherical styli preserve more of the groove of the record than elliptical styli, while elliptical styli offer higher sound quality. (crystal/ceramic) cartridges Early electronic phonographs used a piezo-electric crystal for pickup (though the earliest electronic phonographs used crude magnetic pick-ups), where the mechanical movement of the stylus in the groove generates a proportional electrical voltage by creating stress within a crystal (typically Rochelle salt). Crystal pickups are relatively robust, and produce a substantial signal level which requires only a modest amount of further amplification. The output is not very linear however, introducing unwanted distortion. It is difficult to make a crystal pickup suitable for quality stereo reproduction, as the stiff coupling between the crystal and the long stylus prevents close tracking of the needle to the groove modulations. This tends to increase wear on the record, and introduces more distortion. Another problem is the hygroscopic nature of the crystal itself: it absorbs moisture from the air and may dissolve. The crystal was protected by embedding it in other materials, without hindering the movement of the pickup mechanism itself. After a number of years, the protective jelly often deteriorated or leaked from the cartridge case and the full unit needed replacement. The next development was the ceramic cartridge, a piezoelectric device that used newer and better materials. These were more sensitive, and offered greater compliance, that is, lack of resistance to movement and so increased ability to follow the undulations of the groove without gross distorting or jumping out of the groove. Higher compliance meant lower tracking forces and reduced wear to both the disc and stylus. It also allowed ceramic stereo cartridges to be made. Between the 1950s and 1970s, ceramic cartridges became common in low-quality phonographs, but better high-fidelity (or "hi-fi") systems used magnetic cartridges. The availability of low-cost magnetic cartridges from the 1970s onwards made ceramic cartridges obsolete for essentially all purposes. At the seeming end of the market lifespan of ceramic cartridges, someone accidentally discovered that by terminating a specific ceramic mono cartridge (the Ronette TX88) not with the prescribed 47 kΩ resistance, but with approx. 10 kΩ, it could be connected to the moving magnet (MM) input too. The result, a much smoother frequency curve extended the lifetime for this popular and very cheap type. Magnetic cartridges There are two common designs for magnetic cartridges, moving magnet (MM) and moving coil (MC) (originally called dynamic). Both operate on the same physics principle of electromagnetic induction. The moving magnet type was by far the most common and more robust of the two, though audiophiles often claim that the moving coil system yields higher fidelity sound. In either type, the stylus itself, usually of diamond, is mounted on a tiny metal strut called a cantilever, which is suspended using a collar of highly compliant plastic. This gives the stylus the freedom to move in any direction. On the other end of the cantilever is mounted a tiny permanent magnet (moving magnet type) or a set of tiny wound coils (moving coil type). The magnet is close to a set of fixed pick-up coils, or the moving coils are held within a magnetic field generated by fixed permanent magnets. In either case, the movement of the stylus as it tracks the grooves of a record causes a fluctuating magnetic field, which causes a small electric current to be induced in the coils. This current closely follows the sound waveform cut into the record, and may be transmitted by wires to an electronic amplifier where it is processed and amplified in order to drive a loudspeaker. Depending upon the amplifier design, a phono-preamplifier may be necessary. In most moving magnet designs, the stylus itself is detachable from the rest of the cartridge so it can easily be replaced. There are three primary types of cartridge mounts. The most common type is attached using two small screws to a headshell that then plugs into the tonearm, while another is a standardized "P-mount" or "T4P" cartridge (invented by Technics in 1980 and adopted by other manufacturers) that plugs directly into the tonearm. Many P-mount cartridges come with adapters to allow them to be mounted to a headshell. The third type is used mainly in cartridges designed for DJ use and it has a standard round headshell connector. Some mass market turntables use a proprietary integrated cartridge that cannot be upgraded. An alternative design is the moving iron variation on moving magnet used by ADC, Grado, Stanton/Pickering 681 series, Ortofon OM and VMS series, and the MMC cartridge of Bang & Olufsen. In these units, the magnet itself sits behind the four coils and magnetises the cores of all four coils. The moving iron cross at the other end of the coils varies the gaps between itself and each of these cores, according to its movements. These variations lead to voltage variations as described above. Famous brands for magnetic cartridges are: Grado, Stanton/Pickering (681EE/EEE), B&O (MM types for its two, non-compatible generations of parallel arm design), Shure (V15 Type I to V), Audio-Technica, Nagaoka, Dynavector, Koetsu, Ortofon, Technics, Denon and ADC. Strain gauge cartridges Strain gauge or "semiconductor" cartridges do not generate a voltage, but act like a variable resistor, whose resistance directly depends on the movement of the stylus. Thus, the cartridge "modulates" an external voltage supplied by the (special) preamplifier. These pickups were marketed by Euphonics, Sao Win, and Panasonic/Technics, amongst others. The main advantages (compared to magnetic carts are): The electrical connection from the cartridge to the preamplifier is immune to cable capacitance issues. Being non-magnetic, the cartridge is immune to "hum" induced by stray magnetic fields (same advantage shared with ceramic cartridges). The combination of electrical and mechanical advantages, plus the absence of magnetic yoke high-frequency losses, make them especially suitable to reproducing frequencies up to 50 kHz. Technics (Matsushita Electric) marketed a line of strain-gauge (labeled "semiconductor") cartridges especially intended for Compatible Discrete 4 quadraphonic records, requiring such high frequency response. Bass response down to 0 Hz is possible. By using a suitable mechanical arrangement, VTA (vertical tracking angle) stays steady independent of the stylus vertical movements, with the consequent reduction in related distortions. Being a force sensor, the strain-gauge cartridge can also measure the actual VTF (vertical tracking force) while in use. The main disadvantage is the need of a special preamplifier that supplies a steady current (typically 5mA) to the semiconductor elements and handles a special equalization than the one needed for magnetic cartridges. A high-end strain-gauge cartridge is currently sold by an audiophile company, with special preamplifiers available. Electrostatic cartridges Electrostatic cartridges were marketed by Stax in the 1950 and 1960 years. They needed individual operating electronics or preamplifiers. Optical readout A few specialist laser turntables read the groove optically using a laser pickup. Since there is no physical contact with the record, no wear is incurred. However, this "no wear" advantage is debatable, since vinyl records have been tested to withstand even 1200 plays with no significant audio degradation, provided that it is played with a high quality cartridge and that the surfaces are clean. An alternative approach is to take a high-resolution photograph or scan of each side of the record and interpret the image of the grooves using computer software. An amateur attempt using a flatbed scanner lacked satisfactory fidelity. A professional system employed by the Library of Congress produces excellent quality. Stylus A smooth-tipped stylus (in popular usage often called a needle due to the former use of steel needles for the purpose) is used to play the recorded groove. A special chisel-like stylus is used to engrave the groove into the master record. The stylus is subject to hard wear as it is the only small part that comes into direct contact with the spinning record. In terms of the force imposed on its minute areas of actual contact, the pressure it must bear is enormous. There are three desired qualities in a stylus: first, that it faithfully follows the contours of the recorded groove and transmits its vibrations to the next part in the chain; second, that it does not damage the recorded disc; and third, that it is resistant to wear. A worn-out, damaged or defective stylus tip will degrade audio quality and injure the groove. Different materials for the stylus have been used over time. Thomas Edison introduced the use of sapphire in 1892 and the use of diamond in 1910 for his cylinder phonographs. The Edison Diamond Disc players (1912–1929), when properly played, hardly ever required the stylus to be changed. The styli for vinyl records were also made out of sapphire or diamond. A specific case is the specific stylus type of Bang & Olufsen's (B&O) moving magnet cartridge MMC 20CL, mostly used in parallel arm B&O turntables in the 4002/6000 series. It uses a sapphire stem on which a diamond tip is fixed by a special adhesive. A stylus tip mass as low as 0.3 milligram is the result and full tracking only requires 1 gram of stylus force, reducing record wear even further. Maximum distortion (2nd harmonic) fell below 0.6%. Other than the Edison and European Pathé disc machines, early disc players, both external horn and internal horn "Victrola" style models, normally used very short-lived disposable needles. The most common material was steel, although other materials such as copper, tungsten, bamboo and cactus were used. Steel needles needed to be replaced frequently, preferably after each use, due to their very rapid wear from bearing down heavily on the mildly abrasive shellac record. Rapid wear was an essential feature so that their imprecisely formed tips would be quickly worn into compliance with the groove's contours. Advertisements implored customers to replace their steel needles after each record side. Steel needles were inexpensive, e.g., a box of 500 for 50 US cents, and were widely sold in packets and small tins. They were available in different thicknesses and lengths. Thick, short needles produced strong, loud tones while thinner, longer needles produces softer, muted tones. In 1916, in the face of a wartime steel shortage, Victor introduced their "Tungs-Tone" brand extra-long-playing needle, which was advertised to play between 100 and 300 records. It consisted of a brass shank into which a very hard and strong tungsten wire, somewhat narrower than the standard record groove, had been fitted. The protruding wire wore down, but not out, until it was worn too short to use. Later in the 78 rpm era, hardened steel and chrome-plated needles came on the market, some of which were claimed to play 10 to 20 record sides each. When sapphires were introduced for the 78 rpm disc and the LP, they were made by tapering a stem and polishing the tip to a sphere with a radius of around 70 and 25 micrometers respectively. A sphere is not equal to the form of the cutting stylus and by the time diamond needles came to the market, a whole discussion was started on the effect of circular forms moving through a non-circular cut groove. It can be easily shown that vertical, so called "pinching" movements were a result and when stereophonic LPs were introduced, unwanted vertical modulation was recognized as a problem. Also, the needle started its life touching the groove on a very small surface, giving extra wear on the walls. Another problem is in the tapering along a straight line, while the side of the groove is far from straight. Both problems were attacked together: by polishing the diamond in a certain way that it could be made doubly elliptic. 1) the side was made into one ellipse as seen from behind, meaning the groove touched along a short line and 2) the ellipse form was also polished as seen from above and curvature in the direction of the groove became much smaller than 25 micrometers e.g. 13 micrometers. With this approach a number of irregularities were eliminated. Furthermore, the angle of the stylus, which used to be always sloping backwards, was changed into the forward direction, in line with the slope the original cutting stylus possessed. These styli were expensive to produce, but the costs were effectively offset by their extended lifespans. The next development in stylus form came about by the attention to the CD-4 quadraphonic sound modulation process, which requires up to 50 kHz frequency response, with cartridges like Technics EPC-100CMK4 capable of playback on frequencies up to 100 kHz. This requires a stylus with a narrow side radius, such as 5 µm (or 0.2 mil). A narrow-profile elliptical stylus is able to read the higher frequencies (greater than 20 kHz), but at an increased wear, since the contact surface is narrower. For overcoming this problem, the Shibata stylus was invented around 1972 in Japan by Norio Shibata of JVC, fitted as standard on quadraphonic cartridges, and marketed as an extra on some high-end cartridges. The Shibata-designed stylus offers a greater contact surface with the groove, which in turn means less pressure over the vinyl surface and thus less wear. A positive side effect is that the greater contact surface also means the stylus will read sections of the vinyl that were not touched (or "worn") by the common spherical stylus. In a demonstration by JVC records "worn" after 500 plays at a relatively very high 4.5 gf tracking force with a spherical stylus, played "as new" with the Shibata profile. Other advanced stylus shapes appeared following the same goal of increasing contact surface, improving on the Shibata. Chronologically: "Hughes" Shibata variant (1975), "Ogura" (1978), Van den Hul (1982). Such a stylus may be marketed as "Hyperelliptical" (Shure), "Alliptic", "Fine Line" (Ortofon), "Line contact" (Audio Technica), "Polyhedron", "LAC", or "Stereohedron" (Stanton). A keel-shaped diamond stylus appeared as a byproduct of the invention of the CED Videodisc. This, together with laser-diamond-cutting technologies, made possible the "ridge" shaped stylus, such as the Namiki (1985) design, and Fritz Gyger (1989) design. This type of stylus is marketed as "MicroLine" (Audio technica), "Micro-Ridge" (Shure), or "Replicant" (Ortofon). It is important to point out that most of those stylus profiles are still being manufactured and sold, together with the more common spherical and elliptical profiles. This is despite the fact that production of CD-4 quadraphonic records ended by the late 1970s. For elliptical and advanced stylus shapes, correct cartridge alignment is critical. There are several alignment methods, each creating different null points at which the stylus will be tangential to the record grooves, optimizing distortion across the record side in different ways. The most popular alignment geometries are Baerwald, Løfgren B and Stevenson. Common tools to align the stylus correctly are 2-point protractors (which can be used with any turntable as long as the headshells are long enough for the chosen alignment), overhang gauges and arc protractors (model specific). Record materials Early materials in the 19th century were hardened rubber, wax, and celluloid, but early in the 20th century a shellac compound became the standard. Since shellac is not hard enough to withstand the wear of steel needles on heavy tone arms, filler made of pulverized shale was added. Shellac was also fragile, and records often shattered or cracked. This was a problem for home records, but it became a bigger problem in the late 1920s with the Vitaphone sound-on-disc motion picture "talkie" system, developed in 1927. To solve this problem, in 1930, RCA Victor made unbreakable records by mixing polyvinyl chloride with plasticisers, in a proprietary formula they called Victrolac, which was first used in 1931, in motion picture discs, and experimentally, in home records, the same year. However, with Sound-on-film achieving supremacy over sound-on-disc by 1931, the need for unbreakable records diminished and the production of vinyl home recordings was dropped as well, for the time being. The Victrolac formula improved throughout the 1930s, and by the late 30s the material, by then called vinylite, was being used in records sent to radio stations for radio program records, radio commercials, and later, DJ copies of phonograph records, because vinyl records could be sent through the mail to radio stations without breaking. During WWII, there was a shortage of shellac, which had to be imported from Asia, and the U.S. government banned production of shellac records for the duration of the war. Vinylite was made domestically, though, and was being used for V-discs during the war. Record company engineers took a much closer look at the possibilities of vinyl, possibly that it might even replace shellac as the basic record material. After the war, RCA Victor and Columbia, by far the two leading records companies in America, perfected two new vinyl formats, which were both introduced in 1948, when the 33 RPM LP was introduced by Columbia and the 45 RPM single was introduced by RCA Victor. For a few years thereafter, however, 78 RPM records continued to be made in shellac until that format was phased out around 1958. Equalization Early "acoustical" record players used the stylus to vibrate a diaphragm that radiated the sound through a horn. Several serious problems resulted from this: The maximum sound level achievable was quite limited, being limited to the physical amplification effects of the horn, The energy needed to generate such sound levels as were obtainable had to come directly from the stylus tracing the groove. This required very high tracking forces that rapidly wore out both the stylus and the record on lateral cut 78 rpm records. Because bass sounds have a higher amplitude than high frequency sounds (for the same perceived loudness), the space taken in the groove by low frequency sounds needed to be large (limiting playback time per side of the record) to accommodate the bass notes, yet the high frequencies required only tiny variations in the groove, which were easily affected by noise from irregularities (wear, contaminates, etc.) in the disc itself. The introduction of electronic amplification allowed these issues to be addressed. Records are made with boosted high frequencies and reduced low frequencies, which allow for different ranges of sound to be produced. This reduces the effect of background noise, including clicks or pops, and also conserves the amount of physical space needed for each groove, by reducing the size of the low-frequency undulations. During playback, the high frequencies must be rescaled to their original, flat frequency response—known as "equalization"—as well as being amplified. A phono input of an amplifier incorporates such equalization as well as amplification to suit the very low level output from a modern cartridge. Most hi-fi amplifiers made between the 1950s and the 1990s and virtually all DJ mixers are so equipped. The widespread adoption of digital music formats, such as CD or satellite radio, has displaced phonograph records and resulted in phono inputs being omitted in most modern amplifiers. Some newer turntables include built-in preamplifiers to produce line-level outputs. Inexpensive and moderate performance discrete phono preamplifiers with RIAA equalization are available, while high-end audiophile units costing thousands of dollars continue to be available in very small numbers. Phono inputs are starting to reappear on amplifiers in the 2010s due to the vinyl revival. Since the late 1950s, almost all phono input stages have used the RIAA equalization standard. Before settling on that standard, there were many different equalizations in use, including EMI, HMV, Columbia, Decca FFRR, NAB, Ortho, BBC transcription, etc. Recordings made using these other equalization schemes will typically sound odd if they are played through a RIAA-equalized preamplifier. High-performance (so-called "multicurve disc") preamplifiers, which include multiple, selectable equalizations, are no longer commonly available. However, some vintage preamplifiers, such as the LEAK varislope series, are still obtainable and can be refurbished. Newer preamplifiers like the Esoteric Sound Re-Equalizer or the K-A-B MK2 Vintage Signal Processor are also available. These kinds of adjustable phono equalizers are used by consumers wishing to play vintage record collections (often the only available recordings of musicians of the time) with the equalization used to make them. In the 21st century Turntables continued to be manufactured and sold in the 2010s, although in small numbers. While some audiophiles still prefer the sound of vinyl records over that of digital music sources (mainly compact discs), they represent a minority of listeners. As of 2015, the sale of vinyl LP's has increased 49–50% percent from the previous year, although small in comparison to the sale of other formats which although more units were sold (Digital Sales, CDs) the more modern formats experienced a decline in sales. The quality of available record players, tonearms, and cartridges has continued to improve, despite diminishing demand, allowing turntables to remain competitive in the high-end audio market. Vinyl enthusiasts are often committed to the refurbishment and sometimes tweaking of vintage systems. In 2017, vinyl LP sales were slightly decreased, at a rate of 5%, in comparison to previous years' numbers, regardless of the noticeable rise of vinyl records sales worldwide. Updated versions of the 1970s era Technics SL-1200 (production ceased in 2010) have remained an industry standard for DJs to the present day. Turntables and vinyl records remain popular in mixing (mostly dance-oriented) forms of electronic music, where they allow great latitude for physical manipulation of the music by the DJ. In hip hop music, and occasionally in other genres, the turntable is used as a musical instrument by DJs, who use turntables along with a DJ mixer to create unique rhythmic sounds. Manipulation of a record as part of the music, rather than for normal playback or mixing, is called turntablism. The basis of turntablism, and its best known technique, is scratching, pioneered by Grand Wizzard Theodore. It was not until Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" in 1983 that the turntablism movement was recognized in popular music outside of a hip hop context. In the 2010s, many hip hop DJs use DJ CD players or digital record emulator devices to create scratching sounds; nevertheless, some DJs still scratch with vinyl records. The laser turntable uses a laser as the pickup instead of a stylus in physical contact with the disk. It was conceived of in the late 1980s, although early prototypes were not of usable audio quality. Practical laser turntables are now being manufactured by ELPJ. They are favoured by record libraries and some audiophiles since they eliminate physical wear completely. Experimentation is in progress in retrieving the audio from old records by scanning the disc and analysing the scanned image, rather than using any sort of turntable. Although largely replaced since the introduction of the compact disc in 1982, record albums still sell in small numbers and are available through numerous sources. In 2008, LP sales grew by 90% over 2007, with 1.9 million records sold. USB turntables have a built-in audio interface, which transfers the sound directly to the connected computer. Some USB turntables transfer the audio without equalization, but are sold with software that allows the EQ of the transferred audio file to be adjusted. There are also many turntables on the market designed to be plugged into a computer via a USB port for needle dropping purposes. Responding to longtime calls by fans and disc jockeys, Panasonic Corp. said it is reviving Technics turntables–the series that remains a de facto standard player supporting nightclub music scenes. The new analog turntable, which would come with new direct-drive motor technologies that Panasonic says will improve the quality of sound. Beginning of 2019 Technics unveiled SL-1500C Premium Class Direct Drive Turntable System which inherits the brand's high-end sound quality concept. See also Archéophone, used to convert diverse types of cylinder recordings to modern CD media Audio signal processing Compressed air gramophone List of phonograph manufacturers Talking Machine World Vinyl killer Notes References Further reading Bruil, Rudolf A. (January 8, 2004). "Linear Tonearms." Retrieved on July 25, 2011. Gelatt, Roland. The Fabulous Phonograph, 1877–1977. Second rev. ed., [being also the] First Collier Books ed., in series, Sounds of the Century. New York: Collier, 1977. 349 p., ill. Heumann, Michael. "Metal Machine Music: The Phonograph's Voice and the Transformation of Writing." eContact! 14.3 — Turntablism (January 2013). Montréal: CEC. Koenigsberg, Allen. The Patent History of the Phonograph, 1877–1912. APM Press, 1991. Various. "Turntable [wiki]: Bibliography." eContact! 14.3 — Turntablism (January 2013). Montréal: CEC. Weissenbrunner, Karin. "Experimental Turntablism: Historical overview of experiments with record players / records — or Scratches from Second-Hand Technology." eContact! 14.3 — Turntablism (January 2013). Montréal: CEC. External links c.1915 Swiss hot-air engined gramophone at Museum of Retro Technology Interactive sculpture delivers tactile soundwave experience Very early recordings from around the world The Birth of the Recording Industry The Cylinder Archive Cylinder Preservation & Digitization Project – Over 6,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections, University of California, Santa Barbara, free for download or streamed online. Cylinder players held at the British Library – information and high-quality images. History of Recorded Sound: Phonographs and Records EnjoytheMusic.com – Excerpts from the book Hi-Fi All-New 1958 Edition Listen to early recordings on the Edison Phonograph Mario Frazzetto's Phonograph and Gramophone Gallery. Say What? – Essay on phonograph technology and intellectual property law Vinyl Engine – Information, images, articles and reviews from around the world The Analogue Dept – Information, images and tutorials; strongly focused on Thorens brand 45 rpm player and changer at work on YouTube Historic video footage of Edison operating his original tinfoil phonograph Turntable History on Enjoy the Music.com 2-point and Arc Protractor generators on AlignmentProtractor.com Audiovisual introductions in 1877 American inventions Audio players Thomas Edison Sound recording Hip hop production Turntablism 19th-century inventions	false	[ "Realty Services Holdings Ltd v Slater (2006) 6 NZCPR 657 is a cited case in New Zealand regarding where a mistake is known to one party (often referred to as a unilateral mistake) when a contract is formed, under section 6(1)(a)(i) of the Contractual Mistakes Act 1977.\n\nBackground\nRealty Services was a local real estate agent in Rotorua. They had just built a new office building, and they had 2 apartments in it to sell, Apartment A and Apartment B. Apartment B was quickly sold for $641,000, but they struggled to sell Apartment A for $630,000. Eventually, they agreed to sell the apartment to the Slaters for $300,000 in cash, plus the transfer of a property in Kawaha Point. Realty Services agents had valued the property at $300,000 to $330,000, with a registered valuation of $330,000. This implied a sale price of about $630,000. However, matters were complicated by the fact that the Kawaha property was in 2 titles, Lot 1 and Lot 2.\n\nFurther complicating matters was that in the sales agreement, Realty Services only included Lot 1 to be transferred. After the sale had gone through, Realty Services realised their mistake, and requested the Slaters transfer Lot 2 to them as well. The Slater's refused, saying their intention was only to transfer Lot 1, and they got a valuation of the property for $410,000 to support this claim.\n\nHeld\nThe judge ruled that there was a unilateral mistake here, as the Slaters were well aware of the mistake at the time, considering that they knew they wanted $630,000, and even with Slaters best valuation, valued the transaction at only $470,000. Furthermore, the judge pointed out that Mr Slater had extensive property knowledge and that he had not demurred when the real estate firm valued his property at $330,000. While the judge refused to rectify the contract, he effectively did this anyway, by granting relief by ordering the Slaters to transfer Lot 2 to Realty Services.\n\nReferences\n\nHigh Court of New Zealand cases\nNew Zealand contract case law\n2005 in New Zealand law\n2005 in case law", "Layering is a strategy in high-frequency trading where a trader makes and then cancels orders that they never intend to have executed in hopes of influencing the stock price. For instance, to buy stock at a lower price, the trader initially places orders to sell at or below the market ask price. This may cause the market's best ask price to fall as other market participants lower their asking prices because they perceive selling pressure as they see the sell orders being entered on the order book. The trader may place subsequent sell orders for the security at successively lower prices as the best ask price falls (to increase the appearance of selling interest). After the price has fallen sufficiently, the trader makes a real trade, buying the stock at the now lower best ask price, and cancels all the sell orders. It is considered a form of stock market manipulation.\n\nInstances\nIn 2011, British regulators fined Swift Trade £8 million for using the technique and the firm went out of business. The case drew a lot of attention as Swift Trade was a Canadian firm and it was one of the first cases of the FSA (Financial Services Authority) fining foreign firms.\n\nSee also\n Spoofing (finance)\n\nReferences\n\nFinancial markets\nElectronic trading systems" ]
[ "Phonograph", "United States", "What year was the Phonograph brought to the United States?", "early as the 1890s", "how did people like it?", "the term \"record player\" was increasingly favored by users when referring to the device.", "did they sell a lot?", "Portable record players (no radio included), with a latched cover and an integrated power amplifier and loudspeaker, were fairly common" ]	C_633eac39ad7d4090970629a6d31a4191_0	did any famous people use them?	4	Did any famous people use phonographs?	Phonograph	In American English, "phonograph", properly specific to machines made by Edison, was sometimes used in a generic sense as early as the 1890s to include cylinder-playing machines made by others. But it was then considered strictly incorrect to apply it to Emile Berliner's upstart Gramophone, a very different machine which played discs. "Talking machine" was the comprehensive generic term, but in the early 20th century the general public was increasingly applying the word "phonograph" indiscriminately to both cylinder and disc machines and to the records they played. By the time of the First World War, the mass advertising and popularity of the Victor Talking Machine Company's Victrolas (a line of disc-playing machines characterized by their concealed horns) was leading to widespread generic use of the word "victrola" for any machine that played discs, which were however still called "phonograph records" or simply "records", almost never "victrola records". After electrical disc-playing machines started appearing on the market during the second half of the 1920s, usually sharing the same cabinet with a radio receiver, the term "record player" was increasingly favored by users when referring to the device. Manufacturers, however, typically advertised such combinations as "radio-phonographs". Portable record players (no radio included), with a latched cover and an integrated power amplifier and loudspeaker, were fairly common as well, especially in schools and for use by children and teenagers. In the years following the Second World War, as "hi-fi" (high-fidelity, monophonic) and, later, "stereo" (stereophonic) component sound systems slowly evolved from an exotic specialty item into a common feature of American homes, the description of the record-spinning component as a "record changer" (which could automatically play through a stacked series of discs) or a "turntable" (which could hold only one disc at a time) entered common usage. By about 1980 the use of a "record changer", which might damage the stacked discs, was widely disparaged. So, the "turntable" emerged triumphant and retained its position to the end of the 20th century and beyond. Through all these changes, however, the discs have continued to be known as "phonograph records" or, much more commonly, simply as "records". The brand name Gramophone was not used in the USA after 1901, and the word fell out of use there, although it has survived in its nickname form, Grammy, as the name of the Grammy Awards. The Grammy trophy itself is a small rendering of a gramophone, resembling a Victor disc machine with a taper arm. Modern amplifier-component manufacturers continue to label the input jack which accepts the output from a modern magnetic pickup cartridge as the "phono" input, abbreviated from "phonograph". CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER	A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue recording and reproduction of sound. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a "record". To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it, very faintly reproducing the recorded sound. In early acoustic phonographs, the stylus vibrated a diaphragm which produced sound waves which were coupled to the open air through a flaring horn, or directly to the listener's ears through stethoscope-type earphones. The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison. Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory made several improvements in the 1880s and introduced the graphophone, including the use of wax-coated cardboard cylinders and a cutting stylus that moved from side to side in a zigzag groove around the record. In the 1890s, Emile Berliner initiated the transition from phonograph cylinders to flat discs with a spiral groove running from the periphery to near the center, coining the term gramophone for disc record players, which is predominantly used in many languages. Later improvements through the years included modifications to the turntable and its drive system, the stylus or needle, pickup system, and the sound and equalization systems. The disc phonograph record was the dominant commercial audio recording format throughout most of the 20th century. In the mid-1960s the use of 8-track cartridges and cassette tapes were introduced as alternatives. In the 1980s, phonograph use declined sharply due to the popularity of cassettes and the rise of the compact disc, as well as the later introduction of digital music distribution in the 2000s. However, records are still a favorite format for some audiophiles, DJs, collectors, and turntablists (particularly in hip hop and electronic dance music), and have undergone a revival since the 2000s. Terminology Usage of terminology is not uniform across the English-speaking world (see below). In more modern usage, the playback device is often called a "turntable", "record player", or "record changer", although each of these terms denote categorically distinct items. When used in conjunction with a mixer as part of a DJ setup, turntables are often colloquially called "decks". In later electric phonographs (more often known since the 1940s as record players or turntables), the motions of the stylus are converted into an analogous electrical signal by a transducer, then converted back into sound by a loudspeaker. The term phonograph ("sound writing") was derived from the Greek words (, 'sound' or 'voice') and (, 'writing'). The similar related terms gramophone (from the Greek 'letter' and 'voice') and graphophone have similar root meanings. The roots were already familiar from existing 19th-century words such as photograph ("light writing"), telegraph ("distant writing"), and telephone ("distant sound"). The new term may have been influenced by the existing words phonographic and phonography, which referred to a system of phonetic shorthand; in 1852 The New York Times carried an advertisement for "Professor Webster's phonographic class", and in 1859 the New York State Teachers Association tabled a motion to "employ a phonographic recorder" to record its meetings. Arguably, any device used to record sound or reproduce recorded sound could be called a type of "phonograph", but in common practice the word has come to mean historic technologies of sound recording, involving audio-frequency modulations of a physical trace or groove. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, "Phonograph", "Gramophone", "Graphophone", "Zonophone", "Graphonole" and the like were still brand names specific to various makers of sometimes very different (i.e. cylinder and disc) machines; so considerable use was made of the generic term "talking machine", especially in print. "Talking machine" had earlier been used to refer to complicated devices which produced a crude imitation of speech, by simulating the workings of the vocal cords, tongue, and lips – a potential source of confusion both then and now. United Kingdom In British English, "gramophone" may refer to any sound-reproducing machine using disc records, which were introduced and popularized in the UK by the Gramophone Company. Originally, "gramophone" was a proprietary trademark of that company and any use of the name by competing makers of disc records was vigorously prosecuted in the courts, but in 1910 an English court decision decreed that it had become a generic term; it has been so used in the UK and most Commonwealth countries since. The term "phonograph" was usually restricted to machines that used cylinder records. "Gramophone" generally referred to a wind-up machine. After the introduction of the softer vinyl records, -rpm LPs (long-playing records) and 45-rpm "single" or two-song records, and EPs (extended-play recordings), the common name became "record player" or "turntable". Often the home record player was part of a system that included a radio (radiogram) and, later, might also play audiotape cassettes. From about 1960, such a system began to be described as a "hi-fi" (high-fidelity, monophonic) or a "stereo" (most systems being stereophonic by the mid-1960s). United States In American English, "phonograph", properly specific to machines made by Edison, was sometimes used in a generic sense as early as the 1890s to include cylinder-playing machines made by others. But it was then considered strictly incorrect to apply it to Emile Berliner's upstart Gramophone, a very different machine which played discs (although Edison's original Phonograph patent included the use of discs). "Talking machine" was the comprehensive generic term, but from about 1902 on, the general public was increasingly applying the word "phonograph" indiscriminately to both cylinder and disc machines and to the records they played. By the time of the First World War, the mass advertising and popularity of the Victrola (a line of disc-playing machines characterized by their concealed horns) sold by the Victor Talking Machine Company was leading to widespread generic use of the word "victrola" for any machine that played discs, which were generally called "phonograph records" or simply "records", but almost never "Victrola records". After electrical disc-playing machines appeared on the market in the late 1920s, often combined with a radio receiver, the term "record player" was increasingly favored by the public. Manufacturers, however, typically advertised such combinations as "radio-phonographs". Portable record players (no radio included), with a latched cover and an integrated power amplifier and loudspeaker, were becoming popular as well, especially in schools and for use by children and teenagers. In the years following the Second World War, as "hi-fi" (high-fidelity, monophonic) and, later, "stereo" (stereophonic) component sound systems slowly evolved from an exotic specialty item into a common feature of American homes, the description of the record-spinning component as a "record changer" (which could automatically play through a stacked series of discs) or a "turntable" (which could hold only one disc at a time) entered common usage. By the 1980s, the use of a "record changer" was widely disparaged. So, the "turntable" emerged triumphant and retained its position to the present. Through all these changes, however, the discs have continued to be known as "phonograph records" or, much more commonly, simply as "records". Gramophone, as a brand name, was not used in the United States after 1902, and the word quickly fell out of use there, although it has survived in its nickname form, Grammy, as the name of the Grammy Awards. The Grammy trophy itself is a small rendering of a gramophone, resembling a Victor disc machine with a taper arm. Modern amplifier-component manufacturers continue to label the input jack for a magnetic pickup cartridge as the "phono" input. Australia In Australian English, "record player" was the term; "turntable" was a more technical term; "gramophone" was restricted to the old mechanical (i.e., wind-up) players; and "phonograph" was used as in British English. The "phonograph" was first demonstrated in Australia on 14 June, 1878 to a meeting of the Royal Society of Victoria by the Society's Honorary Secretary, Alex Sutherland who published "The Sounds of the Consonants, as Indicated by the Phonograph" in the Society's journal in November that year. On 8 August, 1878 the phonograph was publicly demonstrated at the Society's annual conversazione, along with a range of other new inventions, including the microphone. Early history Predecessors to the phonograph Several inventors devised machines to record sound prior to Thomas Edison's phonograph, Edison being the first to invent a device that could both record and reproduce sound. The phonograph's predecessors include Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph, and Charles Cros's paleophone. Recordings made with the phonautograph were intended to be visual representations of the sound, but were never sonically reproduced until 2008. Cros's paleophone was intended to both record and reproduce sound but had not been developed beyond a basic concept at the time of Edison's successful demonstration of the phonograph in 1877. Phonautograph Direct tracings of the vibrations of sound-producing objects such as tuning forks had been made by English physicist Thomas Young in 1807, but the first known device for recording airborne speech, music and other sounds is the phonautograph, patented in 1857 by French typesetter and inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. In this device, sound waves travelling through the air vibrated a parchment diaphragm which was linked to a bristle, and the bristle traced a line through a thin coating of soot on a sheet of paper wrapped around a rotating cylinder. The sound vibrations were recorded as undulations or other irregularities in the traced line. Scott's phonautograph was intended purely for the visual study and analysis of the tracings. Reproduction of the recorded sound was not possible with the original phonautograph. In 2008, phonautograph recordings made by Scott were played back as sound by American audio historians, who used optical scanning and computer processing to convert the traced waveforms into digital audio files. These recordings, made circa 1860, include fragments of two French songs and a recitation in Italian. Paleophone Charles Cros, a French poet and amateur scientist, is the first person known to have made the conceptual leap from recording sound as a traced line to the theoretical possibility of reproducing the sound from the tracing and then to devising a definite method for accomplishing the reproduction. On April 30, 1877, he deposited a sealed envelope containing a summary of his ideas with the French Academy of Sciences, a standard procedure used by scientists and inventors to establish priority of conception of unpublished ideas in the event of any later dispute. Cros proposed the use of photoengraving, a process already in use to make metal printing plates from line drawings, to convert an insubstantial phonautograph tracing in soot into a groove or ridge on a metal disc or cylinder. This metal surface would then be given the same motion and speed as the original recording surface. A stylus linked to a diaphragm would be made to ride in the groove or on the ridge so that the stylus would be moved back and forth in accordance with the recorded vibrations. It would transmit these vibrations to the connected diaphragm, and the diaphragm would transmit them to the air. An account of his invention was published on October 10, 1877, by which date Cros had devised a more direct procedure: the recording stylus could scribe its tracing through a thin coating of acid-resistant material on a metal surface and the surface could then be etched in an acid bath, producing the desired groove without the complication of an intermediate photographic procedure. The author of this article called the device a , but Cros himself favored the word , sometimes rendered in French as ('voice of the past'). Cros was a poet of meager means, not in a position to pay a machinist to build a working model, and largely content to bequeath his ideas to the public domain free of charge and let others reduce them to practice, but after the earliest reports of Edison's presumably independent invention crossed the Atlantic he had his sealed letter of April 30 opened and read at the December 3, 1877 meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, claiming due scientific credit for priority of conception. Throughout the first decade (1890–1900) of commercial production of the earliest crude disc records, the direct acid-etch method first invented by Cros was used to create the metal master discs, but Cros was not around to claim any credit or to witness the humble beginnings of the eventually rich phonographic library he had foreseen. He had died in 1888 at the age of 45. The early phonographs Thomas Edison conceived the principle of recording and reproducing sound between May and July 1877 as a byproduct of his efforts to "play back" recorded telegraph messages and to automate speech sounds for transmission by telephone. His first experiments were with waxed paper. He announced his invention of the first phonograph, a device for recording and replaying sound, on November 21, 1877 (early reports appear in Scientific American and several newspapers in the beginning of November, and an even earlier announcement of Edison working on a 'talking-machine' can be found in the Chicago Daily Tribune on May 9), and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 (it was patented on February 19, 1878 as US Patent 200,521). "In December, 1877, a young man came into the office of the Scientific American, and placed before the editors a small, simple machine about which very few preliminary remarks were offered. The visitor without any ceremony whatever turned the crank, and to the astonishment of all present the machine said: 'Good morning. How do you do? How do you like the phonograph?' The machine thus spoke for itself, and made known the fact that it was the phonograph..." Edison presented his own account of inventing the phonograph: "I was experimenting," he said, "on an automatic method of recording telegraph messages on a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk talking-machine of to-day. The platen had a spiral groove on its surface, like the disk. Over this was placed a circular disk of paper; an electromagnet with the embossing point connected to an arm traveled over the disk; and any signals given through the magnets were embossed on the disk of paper. If this disc was removed from the machine and put on a similar machine provided with a contact point, the embossed record would cause the signals to be repeated into another wire. The ordinary speed of telegraphic signals is thirty-five to forty words a minute; but with this machine several hundred words were possible. "From my experiments on the telephone I knew of how to work a pawl connected to the diaphragm; and this engaging a ratchet-wheel served to give continuous rotation to a pulley. This pulley was connected by a cord to a little paper toy representing a man sawing wood. Hence, if one shouted: 'Mary had a little lamb,' etc., the paper man would start sawing wood. I reached the conclusion that if I could record the movements of the diaphragm properly, I could cause such records to reproduce the original movements imparted to the diaphragm by the voice, and thus succeed in recording and reproducing the human voice. "Instead of using a disk I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface. Over this was to be placed tinfoil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm. A sketch was made, and the piece-work price, $18, was marked on the sketch. I was in the habit of marking the price I would pay on each sketch. If the workman lost, I would pay his regular wages; if he made more than the wages, he kept it. The workman who got the sketch was John Kruesi. I didn't have much faith that it would work, expecting that I might possibly hear a word or so that would give hope of a future for the idea. Kruesi, when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted 'Mary had a little lamb', etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no doubt of." The music critic Herman Klein attended an early demonstration (1881–2) of a similar machine. On the early phonograph's reproductive capabilities he writes "It sounded to my ear like someone singing about half a mile away, or talking at the other end of a big hall; but the effect was rather pleasant, save for a peculiar nasal quality wholly due to the mechanism, though there was little of the scratching which later was a prominent feature of the flat disc. Recording for that primitive machine was a comparatively simple matter. I had to keep my mouth about six inches away from the horn and remember not to make my voice too loud if I wanted anything approximating to a clear reproduction; that was all. When it was played over to me and I heard my own voice for the first time, one or two friends who were present said that it sounded rather like mine; others declared that they would never have recognised it. I daresay both opinions were correct." The Argus newspaper from Melbourne, Australia, reported on an 1878 demonstration at the Royal Society of Victoria, writing "There was a large attendance of ladies and gentlemen, who appeared greatly interested in the various scientific instruments exhibited. Among these the most interesting, perhaps, was the trial made by Mr. Sutherland with the phonograph, which was most amusing. Several trials were made, and were all more or less successful. "Rule Britannia" was distinctly repeated, but great laughter was caused by the repetition of the convivial song of "He's a jolly good fellow," which sounded as if it was being sung by an old man of 80 with a very cracked voice." Early machines Edison's early phonographs recorded onto a thin sheet of metal, normally tinfoil, which was temporarily wrapped around a helically grooved cylinder mounted on a correspondingly threaded rod supported by plain and threaded bearings. While the cylinder was rotated and slowly progressed along its axis, the airborne sound vibrated a diaphragm connected to a stylus that indented the foil into the cylinder's groove, thereby recording the vibrations as "hill-and-dale" variations of the depth of the indentation. Playback was accomplished by exactly repeating the recording procedure, the only difference being that the recorded foil now served to vibrate the stylus, which transmitted its vibrations to the diaphragm and onward into the air as audible sound. Although Edison's very first experimental tinfoil phonograph used separate and somewhat different recording and playback assemblies, in subsequent machines, a single diaphragm and stylus served both purposes. One peculiar consequence was that it was possible to overdub additional sound onto a recording being played back. The recording was heavily worn by each playing, and it was nearly impossible to accurately remount a recorded foil after it had been removed from the cylinder. In this form, the only practical use that could be found for the phonograph was as a startling novelty for private amusement at home or public exhibitions for profit. Edison's early patents show that he was aware that sound could be recorded as a spiral on a disc, but Edison concentrated his efforts on cylinders, since the groove on the outside of a rotating cylinder provides a constant velocity to the stylus in the groove, which Edison considered more "scientifically correct". Edison's patent specified that the audio recording be embossed, and it was not until 1886 that vertically modulated incised recording using wax-coated cylinders was patented by Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter. They named their version the Graphophone. Introduction of the disc record The use of a flat recording surface instead of a cylindrical one was an obvious alternative which thought-experimenter Charles Cros initially favored and which practical experimenter Thomas Edison and others actually tested in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The oldest surviving example is a copper electrotype of a recording cut into a wax disc in 1881. Cylindrical Dictaphone records continued in use until the mid-20th century. The commercialization of sound recording technology had been initially aimed at use in business correspondence, i.e. transcription into writing, in which the cylindrical form offered certain advantages. With paper documents being the end product, the cylinders were considered ephemeral; need to archive large numbers of bulky, fragile sound recordings seemed unlikely, and the ease of producing multiple copies was not a consideration. In 1887, Emile Berliner patented a variant of the phonograph which he named the Gramophone. Berliner's approach was essentially the same one proposed, but never implemented, by Charles Cros in 1877. The diaphragm was linked to the recording stylus in a way that caused it to vibrate laterally (side to side) as it traced a spiral onto a zinc disc very thinly coated with a compound of beeswax. The zinc disc was then immersed in a bath of chromic acid; this etched a groove into the disc where the stylus had removed the coating, after which the recording could be played. With some later improvements, the flat discs of Berliner could be produced in large quantities at much lower cost than the cylinders of Edison's system. In May 1889, in San Francisco, the first "phonograph parlor" opened. It featured a row of coin-operated machines, each supplied with a different wax cylinder record. The customer selected a machine according to the title that it advertised, inserted a nickel, then heard the recording through stethoscope-like listening tubes. By the mid-1890s, most American cities had at least one phonograph parlor. The coin-operated mechanism was invented by Louis T. Glass and William S. Arnold. The cabinet contained an Edison Class M or Class E phonograph. The Class M was powered by a wet-cell glass battery that would spill dangerous acid if it tipped over or broke. The Class E sold for a lower price and ran on 120 V DC. The phenomenon of phonograph parlors peaked in Paris around 1900: in Pathé's luxurious salon, patrons sat in plush upholstered chairs and chose from among many hundreds of available cylinders by using speaking tubes to communicate with attendants on the floor below. By 1890, record manufacturers had begun using a rudimentary duplication process to mass-produce their product. While the live performers recorded the master phonograph, up to ten tubes led to blank cylinders in other phonographs. Until this development, each record had to be custom-made. Before long, a more advanced pantograph-based process made it possible to simultaneously produce 90–150 copies of each record. However, as demand for certain records grew, popular artists still needed to re-record and re-re-record their songs. Reportedly, the medium's first major African-American star George Washington Johnson was obliged to perform his "The Laughing Song" (or the separate "The Whistling Coon") literally thousands of times in a studio during his recording career. Sometimes he would sing "The Laughing Song" more than fifty times in a day, at twenty cents per rendition. (The average price of a single cylinder in the mid-1890s was about fifty cents.) Oldest surviving recordings Lambert's lead cylinder recording for an experimental talking clock is often identified as the oldest surviving playable sound recording, although the evidence advanced for its early date is controversial. Wax phonograph cylinder recordings of Handel's choral music made on June 29, 1888, at The Crystal Palace in London were thought to be the oldest-known surviving musical recordings, until the recent playback by a group of American historians of a phonautograph recording of Au clair de la lune made on April 9, 1860. The 1860 phonautogram had not until then been played, as it was only a transcription of sound waves into graphic form on paper for visual study. Recently developed optical scanning and image processing techniques have given new life to early recordings by making it possible to play unusually delicate or physically unplayable media without physical contact. A recording made on a sheet of tinfoil at an 1878 demonstration of Edison's phonograph in St. Louis, Missouri has been played back by optical scanning and digital analysis. A few other early tinfoil recordings are known to survive, including a slightly earlier one which is believed to preserve the voice of U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, but as of May 2014 they have not yet been scanned. These antique tinfoil recordings, which have typically been stored folded, are too fragile to be played back with a stylus without seriously damaging them. Edison's 1877 tinfoil recording of Mary Had a Little Lamb, not preserved, has been called the first instance of recorded verse. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the phonograph, Edison recounted reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb to test his first machine. The 1927 event was filmed by an early sound-on-film newsreel camera, and an audio clip from that film's soundtrack is sometimes mistakenly presented as the original 1877 recording. Wax cylinder recordings made by 19th century media legends such as P. T. Barnum and Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth are amongst the earliest verified recordings by the famous that have survived to the present. Improvements at the Volta Laboratory Alexander Graham Bell and his two associates took Edison's tinfoil phonograph and modified it considerably to make it reproduce sound from wax instead of tinfoil. They began their work at Bell's Volta Laboratory in Washington, D. C., in 1879, and continued until they were granted basic patents in 1886 for recording in wax. Although Edison had invented the phonograph in 1877 the fame bestowed on him for this invention was not due to its efficiency. Recording with his tinfoil phonograph was too difficult to be practical, as the tinfoil tore easily, and even when the stylus was properly adjusted, its reproduction of sound was distorted, and good for only a few playbacks; nevertheless Edison had discovered the idea of sound recording. However immediately after his discovery he did not improve it, allegedly because of an agreement to spend the next five years developing the New York City electric light and power system. Volta's early challenge Meanwhile, Bell, a scientist and experimenter at heart, was looking for new worlds to conquer after his invention of the telephone. According to Sumner Tainter, it was through Gardiner Green Hubbard that Bell took up the phonograph challenge. Bell had married Hubbard's daughter Mabel in 1879 while Hubbard was president of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Co., and his organization, which had purchased the Edison patent, was financially troubled because people did not want to buy a machine which seldom worked well and proved difficult for the average person to operate. In 1879 Hubbard got Bell interested in improving the phonograph, and it was agreed that a laboratory should be set up in Washington. Experiments were also to be conducted on the transmission of sound by light, which resulted in the selenium-celled Photophone. Volta Graphophone By 1881, the Volta associates had succeeded in improving an Edison tinfoil machine to some extent. Wax was put in the grooves of the heavy iron cylinder, and no tinfoil was used. Rather than apply for a patent at that time, however, they deposited the machine in a sealed box at the Smithsonian, and specified that it was not to be opened without the consent of two of the three men. The sound vibrations had been indented in the wax which had been applied to the Edison phonograph. The following was the text of one of their recordings: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. I am a Graphophone and my mother was a phonograph." Most of the disc machines designed at the Volta Lab had their disc mounted on vertical turntables. The explanation is that in the early experiments, the turntable, with disc, was mounted on the shop lathe, along with the recording and reproducing heads. Later, when the complete models were built, most of them featured vertical turntables. One interesting exception was a horizontal seven inch turntable. The machine, although made in 1886, was a duplicate of one made earlier but taken to Europe by Chichester Bell. Tainter was granted on July 10, 1888. The playing arm is rigid, except for a pivoted vertical motion of 90 degrees to allow removal of the record or a return to starting position. While recording or playing, the record not only rotated, but moved laterally under the stylus, which thus described a spiral, recording 150 grooves to the inch. The preserved Bell and Tainter records are of both the lateral cut and the Edison-style hill-and-dale (up-and-down) styles. Edison for many years used the "hill-and-dale" method on both his cylinders and Diamond Disc records, and Emile Berliner is credited with the invention of the lateral cut, acid-etched Gramophone record in 1887. The Volta associates, however, had been experimenting with both formats and directions of groove modulation as early as 1881. The basic distinction between the Edison's first phonograph patent and the Bell and Tainter patent of 1886 was the method of recording. Edison's method was to indent the sound waves on a piece of tin foil, while Bell and Tainter's invention called for cutting, or "engraving", the sound waves into a wax record with a sharp recording stylus. Graphophone commercialization In 1885, when the Volta Associates were sure that they had a number of practical inventions, they filed patent applications and began to seek out investors. The Volta Graphophone Company of Alexandria, Virginia, was created on January 6, 1886 and incorporated on February 3, 1886. It was formed to control the patents and to handle the commercial development of their sound recording and reproduction inventions, one of which became the first Dictaphone. After the Volta Associates gave several demonstrations in the City of Washington, businessmen from Philadelphia created the American Graphophone Company on March 28, 1887, in order to produce and sell the machines for the budding phonograph marketplace. The Volta Graphophone Company then merged with American Graphophone, which itself later evolved into Columbia Records. Shortly after American Graphophone's creation, Jesse H. Lippincott used nearly $1 million of an inheritance to gain control of it, as well as the rights to the Graphophone and the Bell and Tainter patents. Not long later Lippincott purchased the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company. He then created the North American Phonograph Company to consolidate the national sales rights of both the Graphophone and the Edison Speaking Phonograph. In the early 1890s Lippincott fell victim to the unit's mechanical problems and also to resistance from stenographers. A coin-operated version of the Graphophone, , was developed by Tainter in 1893 to compete with nickel-in-the-slot entertainment phonograph demonstrated in 1889 by Louis T. Glass, manager of the Pacific Phonograph Company. The work of the Volta Associates laid the foundation for the successful use of dictating machines in business, because their wax recording process was practical and their machines were durable. But it would take several more years and the renewed efforts of Edison and the further improvements of Emile Berliner and many others, before the recording industry became a major factor in home entertainment. Disc vs. cylinder as a recording medium Discs are not inherently better than cylinders at providing audio fidelity. Rather, the advantages of the format are seen in the manufacturing process: discs can be stamped; cylinders could not be until 1901–1902 when the gold moulding process was introduced by Edison. Recordings made on a cylinder remain at a constant linear velocity for the entirety of the recording, while those made on a disc have a higher linear velocity at the outer portion of the disc compared to the inner portion. Edison's patented recording method recorded with vertical modulations in a groove. Berliner utilized a laterally modulated groove. Though Edison's recording technology was better than Berliner's, there were commercial advantages to a disc system since the disc could be easily mass-produced by molding and stamping and it required less storage space for a collection of recordings. Berliner successfully argued that his technology was different enough from Edison's that he did not need to pay royalties on it, which reduced his business expenses. Through experimentation, in 1892 Berliner began commercial production of his disc records, and "gramophones". His "gramophone record" was the first disc record to be offered to the public. They were five inches (12.7 cm) in diameter and recorded on one side only. Seven-inch (17.5 cm) records followed in 1895. Also in 1895 Berliner replaced the hard rubber used to make the discs with a shellac compound. Berliner's early records had very poor sound quality, however. Work by Eldridge R. Johnson eventually improved the sound fidelity to a point where it was as good as the cylinder. By late 1901, ten-inch (25 cm) records were marketed by Johnson and Berliner's Victor Talking Machine Company, and Berliner had sold his interests. In 1904, discs were first pressed with music on both sides and capable of around seven minutes total playing time, as opposed to the cylinder's typical duration on two minutes at that time. As a result of this and the fragility of wax cylinders in transit and storage, cylinders sales declined. Edison felt the increasing commercial pressure for disc records, and by 1912, though reluctant at first, his production of disc records was in full swing. This was the Edison Disc Record. Nevertheless, he continued to manufacture cylinders until 1929 and was last to withdraw from that market. From the mid-1890s until World War I, both phonograph cylinder and disc recordings and machines to play them on were widely mass-marketed and sold. The disc system superseded the cylinder in Europe by 1906 when both Columbia and Pathe withdrew from that market. By 1913, Edison was the only company still producing cylinders in the USA although in Great Britain small manufacturers pressed on until 1922. Dominance of the disc record Berliner's lateral disc record was the ancestor of the 78 rpm, 45 rpm, 33⅓ rpm, and all other analogue disc records popular for use in sound recording. See gramophone record. The 1920s brought improved radio technology. Radio sales increased, bringing many phonograph dealers to near financial ruin. With efforts at improved audio fidelity, the big record companies succeeded in keeping business booming through the end of the decade, but the record sales plummeted during the Great Depression, with many companies merging or going out of business. Record sales picked up appreciably by the late 30s and early 40s, with greater improvements in fidelity and more money to be spent. By this time home phonographs had become much more common, though it wasn't until the 1940s that console radio/phono set-ups with automatic record changers became more common. In the 1930s, vinyl (originally known as vinylite) was introduced as a record material for radio transcription discs, and for radio commercials. At that time, virtually no discs for home use were made from this material. Vinyl was used for the popular 78-rpm V-discs issued to US soldiers during World War II. This significantly reduced breakage during transport. The first commercial vinylite record was the set of five 12" discs "Prince Igor" (Asch Records album S-800, dubbed from Soviet masters in 1945). Victor began selling some home-use vinyl 78s in late 1945; but most 78s were made of a shellac compound until the 78-rpm format was completely phased out. (Shellac records were heavier and more brittle.) 33s and 45s were, however, made exclusively of vinyl, with the exception of some 45s manufactured out of polystyrene. Booms in record sales returned after the Second World War, as industry standards changed from 78s to vinyl, long-playing records (commonly called record albums), which could contain an entire symphony, and 45s which usually contained one hit song popularized on the radio – thus the term "single" record – plus another song on the back or "flip" side. An "extended play" version of the 45 was also available, designated 45 EP, which provided capacity for longer musical selections, or for two regular-length songs per side. Shortcomings include surface noise caused by dirt or abrasions (scratches) and failure caused by deep surface scratches causing skipping of the stylus forward and missing a section, or groove lock, causing a section to repeat, usually punctuated by a popping noise. This was so common that the phrase: "you sound like a broken record,” was coined, referring to someone who is being annoyingly repetitious. First all-transistor phonograph In 1955, Philco developed and produced the world's first all-transistor phonograph models TPA-1 and TPA-2, which were announced in the June 28, 1955 edition of the Wall Street Journal. Philco started to sell these all-transistor phonographs in the fall of 1955, for the price of $59.95. The October 1955 issue of Radio & Television News magazine (page 41), had a full page detailed article on Philco's new consumer product. The all-transistor portable phonograph TPA-1 and TPA-2 models played only 45rpm records and used four 1.5 volt "D" batteries for their power supply. The "TPA" stands for "Transistor Phonograph Amplifier". Their circuitry used three Philco germanium PNP alloy-fused junction audio frequency transistors. After the 1956 season had ended, Philco decided to discontinue both models, for transistors were too expensive compared to vacuum tubes, but by 1961 a $49.95 ($ in ) portable, battery-powered radio-phonograph with seven transistors was available. By the 1960s, cheaper portable record players and record changers which played stacks of records in wooden console cabinets were popular, usually with heavy and crude tonearms in the portables. The consoles were often equipped with better quality pick-up cartridges. Even pharmacies stocked 45 rpm records at their front counters. Rock music played on 45s became the soundtrack to the 1960s as people bought the same songs that were played free of charge on the radio. Some record players were even tried in automobiles, but were quickly displaced by 8-track and cassette tapes. The fidelity of sound reproduction made great advances during the 1970s, as turntables became very precise instruments with belt or direct drive, jewel-balanced tonearms, some with electronically controlled linear tracking and magnetic cartridges. Some cartridges had frequency response above 30 kHz for use with CD-4 quadraphonic 4 channel sound. A high fidelity component system which cost well under $1,000 could do a very good job of reproducing very accurate frequency response across the human audible spectrum from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz with a $200 turntable which would typically have less than 0.05% wow and flutter and very low rumble (low frequency noise). A well-maintained record would have very little surface noise. A novelty variation on the standard format was the use of multiple concentric spirals with different recordings. Thus when the record was played multiple times, different recordings would play, seemingly at random. These were often utilized in talking toys and games. Records themselves became an art form because of the large surface onto which graphics and books could be printed, and records could be molded into unusual shapes, colors, or with images (picture discs). The turntable remained a common element of home audio systems well after the introduction of other media, such as audio tape and even the early years of the compact disc as a lower-priced music format. However, even though the cost of producing CDs fell below that of records, CDs remained a higher-priced music format than either cassettes or records. Thus, records were not uncommon in home audio systems into the early 1990s. By the turn of the 21st century, the turntable had become a niche product, as the price of CD players, which reproduce music free of pops and scratches, fell far lower than high-fidelity tape players or turntables. Nevertheless, there is some increase in interest; many big-box media stores carry turntables, as do professional DJ equipment stores. Most low-end and mid-range amplifiers omit the phono input; but on the other hand, low-end turntables with built-in phono pre-amplifiers are widely available. Some combination systems include a basic turntable, a CD player, a cassette deck. and a radio, in a retro-styled cabinet. Records also continue to be manufactured and sold today, albeit in smaller quantities than in the disc phonograph's heyday. Turntable technology Turntable construction Inexpensive record players typically used a flanged steel stamping for the turntable structure. A rubber disc would be secured to the top of the stamping to provide traction for the record, as well as a small amount of vibration isolation. The spindle bearing usually consisted of a bronze bushing. The flange on the stamping provided a convenient place to drive the turntable by means of an idler wheel (see below). While light and cheap to manufacture, these mechanisms had low inertia, making motor speed instabilities more pronounced. Costlier turntables made from heavy aluminium castings have greater balanced mass and inertia, helping minimize vibration at the stylus, and maintaining constant speed without wow or flutter, even if the motor exhibits cogging effects. Like stamped steel turntables, they were topped with rubber. Because of the increased mass, they usually employed ball bearings or roller bearings in the spindle to reduce friction and noise. Most are belt or direct drive, but some use an idler wheel. A specific case was the Swiss "Lenco" drive, which possessed a very heavy turntable coupled via an idler wheel to a long, tapered motor drive shaft. This enabled stepless rotation or speed control on the drive. Because of this feature the Lenco became popular in the late 1950s with dancing schools, because the dancing instructor could lead the dancing exercises at different speeds. By the early 1980s, some companies started producing very inexpensive turntables that displaced the products of companies like BSR. Commonly found in "all-in-one" stereos from assorted far-east manufacturers, they used a thin plastic table set in a plastic plinth, no mats, belt drive, weak motors, and often, lightweight plastic tonearms with no counterweight. Most used sapphire pickups housed in ceramic cartridges, and they lacked several features of earlier units, such as auto-start and record-stacking. While not as common now that turntables are absent from the cheap "all-in-one" units, this type of turntable has made a strong resurgence in nostalgia-marketed record players. Turntable drive systems From the earliest phonograph designs, many of which were powered by spring-wound mechanisms, a speed governor was essential. Most of these employed some type of flywheel-friction disc to control the speed of the rotating cylinder or turntable; as the speed increased, centrifugal force caused a brake—often a felt pad—to rub against a smooth metal surface, slowing rotation. Electrically powered turntables, whose rotational speed was governed by other means, eventually made their mechanical counterparts obsolete. The mechanical governor was, however, still employed in some toy phonographs (such as those found in talking dolls) until they were replaced by digital sound generators in the late 20th century. Many modern players have platters with a continuous series of strobe markings machined or printed around their edge. Viewing these markings in artificial light at mains frequency produces a stroboscopic effect, which can be used to verify proper rotational speed. Additionally, the edge of the turntable can contain magnetic markings to provide feedback pulses to an electronic speed-control system. Idler-wheel drive system Earlier designs used a rubberized idler-wheel drive system. However, wear and decomposition of the wheel, as well as the direct mechanical coupling to a vibrating motor, introduced low-frequency noise ("rumble") and speed variations ("wow and flutter") into the sound. These systems generally used a synchronous motor which ran at a speed synchronized to the frequency of the AC power supply. Portable record players typically used an inexpensive shaded-pole motor. At the end of the motor shaft there was a stepped driving capstan; to obtain different speeds, the rubber idler wheel was moved to contact different steps of this capstan. The idler was pinched against the bottom or inside edge of the platter to drive it. Until the 1970s, the idler-wheel drive was the most common on turntables, except for higher-end audiophile models. However, even some higher-end turntables, such as the Lenco, Garrard, EMT, and Dual turntables, used idler-wheel drive. Belt drive system Belt drives brought improved motor and platter isolation compared to idler-wheel designs. Motor noise, generally heard as low-frequency rumble, is greatly reduced. The design of the belt drive turntable allows for a less expensive motor than the direct-drive turntable to be used. The elastomeric belt absorbs motor vibrations and noise which could otherwise be picked up by the stylus. It also absorbs small, fast speed variations, caused by "cogging", which in other designs are heard as "flutter." The "Acoustical professional" turntable (earlier marketed under Dutch "Jobo prof") of the 1960s however possessed an expensive German drive motor, the "Pabst Aussenläufer" ("Pabst outrunner"). As this motor name implied, the rotor was on the outside of the motor and acted as a flywheel ahead of the belt-driven turntable itself. In combination with a steel to nylon turntable bearing (with molybdenum disulfide inside for lifelong lubrication) very low wow, flutter and rumble figures were achieved. Direct drive system Direct-drive turntables drive the platter directly without utilizing intermediate wheels, belts, or gears as part of a drive train. This requires good engineering, with advanced electronics for acceleration and speed control. Matsushita's Technics division introduced the first commercially successful direct drive platter, model SP10, in 1969, which was joined by the Technics SL-1200 turntable, in 1972. Its updated model, SL-1200MK2, released in 1978, had a stronger motor, a convenient pitch control slider for beatmatching and a stylus illuminator, which made it the long-standing favourite among disc jockeys (see "Turntablism"). By the beginnings of the 80s, lowering of costs in microcontroller electronics made direct drive turntables more affordable. Pricing Audiophile grade turntables start at a few hundred dollars and range upwards of $100,000, depending on the complexity and quality of design and manufacture. The common view is that there are diminishing returns with an increase in price – a turntable costing $1,000 would not sound significantly better than a turntable costing $500; nevertheless, there exists a large choice of expensive turntables. Arm systems The tone arm (or tonearm) holds the pickup cartridge over the groove, the stylus tracking the groove with the desired force to give the optimal compromise between good tracking and minimizing wear of the stylus and record groove. At its simplest, a tone arm is a pivoted lever, free to move in two axes (vertical and horizontal) with a counterbalance to maintain tracking pressure. However, the requirements of high-fidelity reproduction place more demands upon the arm design. In a perfect world: The tone arm must track the groove without distorting the stylus assembly, so an ideal arm would have no mass, and frictionless bearings, requiring zero force to move it. The arm should not oscillate following a displacement, so it should either be both light and very stiff, or suitably damped. The arm must not resonate with vibrations induced by the stylus or from the turntable motor or plinth, so it must be heavy enough to be immune to those vibrations, or it must be damped to absorb them. The arm should keep the cartridge stylus tangent to the groove it's in as it moves across the record, with minimal variation in angle. These demands are contradictory and impossible to realize (massless arms and zero-friction bearings do not exist in the real world), so tone arm designs require engineering compromises. Solutions vary, but all modern tonearms are at least relatively lightweight and stiff constructions, with precision, very low friction pivot bearings in both the vertical and horizontal axes. Most arms are made from some kind of alloy (the cheapest being aluminium), but some manufacturers use balsa wood, while others use carbon fiber or graphite. The latter materials favor a straight arm design; alloys' properties lend themselves to S-type arms. The tone arm got its name before the age of electronics. It originally served to conduct actual sound waves from a purely mechanical "pickup" called a sound box or reproducer to a so-described "amplifying" horn. The earliest electronic record players, introduced at the end of 1925, had massive electromagnetic pickups that contained a horseshoe magnet, used disposable steel needles, and weighed several ounces. Their full weight rested on the record, providing ample tracking force to overcome their low compliance but causing rapid record wear. The tone arms were rudimentary and remained so even after lighter crystal pickups appeared about ten years later. When fine-grooved vinyl records were introduced in the late 1940s, still smaller and lighter crystal (later, ceramic) cartridges with semi-permanent jewel styluses became standard. In the mid-1950s these were joined by a new generation of magnetic cartridges that bore little resemblance to their crude ancestors. Far smaller tracking forces became possible and the balanced arm came into use. Prices varied widely. The well-known and extremely popular high-end S-type SME arm of the 1970–1980 era not only had a complicated design, it was also very costly. On the other hand, even some cheaper arms could be of professional quality: the "All Balance" arm, made by the now-defunct Dutch company Acoustical, was only €30 [equivalent]. It was used during that period by all official radio stations in the Dutch Broadcast studio facilities of the NOS, as well as by the pirate radio station Veronica. Playing records from a boat in international waters, the arm had to withstand sudden ship movements. Anecdotes indicate this low-cost arm was the only one capable of keeping the needle firmly in the groove during heavy storms at sea. Quality arms employ an adjustable counterweight to offset the mass of the arm and various cartridges and headshells. On this counterweight, a calibrated dial enables easy adjustment of stylus force. After perfectly balancing the arm, the dial itself is "zeroed"; the stylus force can then be dialed in by screwing the counterweight towards the fulcrum. (Sometimes a separate spring or smaller weight provides fine tuning.) Stylus forces of 10 to 20 mN (1 to 2 grams-force) are typical for modern consumer turntables, while forces of up to 50 mN (5 grams) are common for the tougher environmental demands of party deejaying or turntablism. Of special adjustment consideration, Stanton cartridges of the 681EE(E) series [and others like them] feature a small record brush ahead of the cartridge. The upforce of this brush, and its added drag require compensation of both tracking force (add 1 gram) and anti-skating adjustment values (see next paragraph for description). Even on a perfectly flat LP, tonearms are prone to two types of tracking errors that affect the sound. As the tonearm tracks the groove, the stylus exerts a frictional force tangent to the arc of the groove, and since this force does not intersect the tone arm pivot, a clockwise rotational force (moment) occurs and a reaction skating force is exerted on the stylus by the record groove wall away from center of the disc. Modern arms provide an anti-skate mechanism, using springs, hanging weights, or magnets to produce an offsetting counter-clockwise force at the pivot, making the net lateral force on the groove walls near zero. The second error occurs as the arm sweeps in an arc across the disc, causing the angle between the cartridge head and groove to change slightly. A change in angle, albeit small, will have a detrimental effect (especially with stereo recordings) by creating different forces on the two groove walls, as well as a slight timing shift between left/right channels. Making the arm longer to reduce this angle is a partial solution, but less than ideal. A longer arm weighs more, and only an infinitely long [pivoted] arm would reduce the error to zero. Some designs (Burne-Jones, and Garrard "Zero" series) use dual arms in a parallelogram arrangement, pivoting the cartridge head to maintain a constant angle as it moves across the record. Unfortunately this "solution" creates more problems than it solves, compromising rigidity and creating sources of unwanted noise. The pivoted arm produces yet another problem which is unlikely to be significant to the audiophile, though. As the master was originally cut in a linear motion from the edge towards the center, but the stylus on the pivoted arm always draws an arc, this causes a timing drift that is most significant when digitizing music and beat mapping the data for synchronization with other songs in a DAW or DJ software unless the software allows building a non-linear beat map. As the contact point of the stylus on the record wanders farther from the linear path between the starting point and center hole, the tempo and pitch tend to decrease towards the middle of the record, until the arc reaches its apex. After that the tempo and pitch increase towards the end as the contact point comes closer to the linear path again. Because the surface speed of the record is lower at the end, the relative speed error from the same absolute distance error is higher at the end, and the increase in tempo is more notable towards the end than the decrease towards the middle. This can be somewhat reduced by a curved arm pivoted so that the end point of the arc stays farther from the linear path than the starting point, or by a long straight arm that pivots perpendicularly to the linear path in the middle of the record. However the tempo droop at the middle can only be completely avoided by a linear tracking arm. Linear tracking If the arm is not pivoted, but instead carries the stylus along a radius of the disc, there is no skating force and little to no cartridge angle error. Such arms are known as linear tracking or tangential arms. These are driven along a track by various means, from strings and pulleys, to worm gears or electromagnets. The cartridge's position is usually regulated by an electronic servomechanism or mechanical interface, moving the stylus properly over the groove as the record plays, or for song selection. There are long-armed and short-armed linear arm designs. On a perfectly flat record a short arm will do, but once the record is even slightly warped, a short arm will be troublesome. Any vertical motion of the record surface at the stylus contact point will cause the stylus to considerably move longitudinally in the groove. This will cause the stylus to ride non-tangentially in the groove and cause a stereo phase error as well as pitch error every time the stylus rides over the warp. Also the arm track can come into touch with the record. A long arm will not completely eliminate this problem but will tolerate warped records much better. Early developments in linear turntables were from Rek-O-Kut (portable lathe/phonograph) and Ortho-Sonic in the 1950s, and Acoustical in the early 1960s. These were eclipsed by more successful implementations of the concept from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Of note are Rabco's SL-8, followed by Bang & Olufsen with its Beogram 4000 model in 1972. These models positioned the track outside the platter's edge, as did turntables by Harman Kardon, Mitsubishi, Pioneer, Yamaha, Sony, etc. A 1970s design from Revox harkened back to the 1950s attempts (and, record lathes), positioning the track directly over the record. An enclosed bridge-like assembly is swung into place from the platter's right edge to its middle. Once in place, a short tonearm under this "bridge" plays the record, driven across laterally by a motor. The Sony PS-F5/F9 (1983) uses a similar, miniaturized design, and can operate in a vertical or horizontal orientation. The Technics SL-10, introduced in 1981, was the first direct drive linear tracking turntable, and placed the track and arm on the underside of the rear-hinged dust cover, to fold down over the record, similar to the SL-Q6 pictured. The earliest Edison phonographs used horizontal, spring-powered drives to carry the stylus across the recording at a pre-determined rate. But, historically as a whole, the linear tracking systems never gained wide acceptance, due largely to their complexity and associated production/development costs. The resources it takes to produce one incredible linear turntable could produce several excellent ones. Some of the most sophisticated and expensive tonearms and turntable units ever made are linear trackers, from companies such as Rockport and Clearaudio. In theory, it seems nearly ideal; a stylus replicating the motion of the recording lathe used to cut the "master" record could result in minimal wear and maximum sound reproduction. In practice, in vinyl's heyday it was generally too much too late. Since the early 1980s, an elegant solution has been the near-frictionless air bearing linear arm that requires no tracking drive mechanism other than the record groove. This provides a similar benefit as the electronic linear tonearm without the complexity and necessity of servo-motor correction for tracking error. In this case the trade-off is the introduction of pneumatics in the form of audible pumps and tubing. A more elegant solution is the mechanically driven low-friction design, also driven by the groove. Examples include Souther Engineering (U.S.A.), Clearaudio (Germany), and Aura (Czech Republic). This design places an exceeding demand upon precision engineering due to the lack of pneumatics. Pickup systems Historically, most high-fidelity "component" systems (preamplifiers or receivers) that accepted input from a phonograph turntable had separate inputs for both ceramic and magnetic cartridges (typically labeled "CER" and "MAG"). One piece systems often had no additional phono inputs at all, regardless of type. Most systems today, if they accept input from a turntable at all, are configured for use only with magnetic cartridges. Manufacturers of high-end systems often have in-built moving coil amplifier circuitry, or outboard head-amplifiers supporting either moving magnet or moving coil cartridges that can be plugged into the line stage. Additionally, cartridges may contain styli or needles that can be separated according to their tip: Spherical styli, and elliptical styli. Spherical styli have their tip shaped like one half of a sphere, and elliptical styli have their tip shaped like one end of an ellipse. Spherical styli preserve more of the groove of the record than elliptical styli, while elliptical styli offer higher sound quality. (crystal/ceramic) cartridges Early electronic phonographs used a piezo-electric crystal for pickup (though the earliest electronic phonographs used crude magnetic pick-ups), where the mechanical movement of the stylus in the groove generates a proportional electrical voltage by creating stress within a crystal (typically Rochelle salt). Crystal pickups are relatively robust, and produce a substantial signal level which requires only a modest amount of further amplification. The output is not very linear however, introducing unwanted distortion. It is difficult to make a crystal pickup suitable for quality stereo reproduction, as the stiff coupling between the crystal and the long stylus prevents close tracking of the needle to the groove modulations. This tends to increase wear on the record, and introduces more distortion. Another problem is the hygroscopic nature of the crystal itself: it absorbs moisture from the air and may dissolve. The crystal was protected by embedding it in other materials, without hindering the movement of the pickup mechanism itself. After a number of years, the protective jelly often deteriorated or leaked from the cartridge case and the full unit needed replacement. The next development was the ceramic cartridge, a piezoelectric device that used newer and better materials. These were more sensitive, and offered greater compliance, that is, lack of resistance to movement and so increased ability to follow the undulations of the groove without gross distorting or jumping out of the groove. Higher compliance meant lower tracking forces and reduced wear to both the disc and stylus. It also allowed ceramic stereo cartridges to be made. Between the 1950s and 1970s, ceramic cartridges became common in low-quality phonographs, but better high-fidelity (or "hi-fi") systems used magnetic cartridges. The availability of low-cost magnetic cartridges from the 1970s onwards made ceramic cartridges obsolete for essentially all purposes. At the seeming end of the market lifespan of ceramic cartridges, someone accidentally discovered that by terminating a specific ceramic mono cartridge (the Ronette TX88) not with the prescribed 47 kΩ resistance, but with approx. 10 kΩ, it could be connected to the moving magnet (MM) input too. The result, a much smoother frequency curve extended the lifetime for this popular and very cheap type. Magnetic cartridges There are two common designs for magnetic cartridges, moving magnet (MM) and moving coil (MC) (originally called dynamic). Both operate on the same physics principle of electromagnetic induction. The moving magnet type was by far the most common and more robust of the two, though audiophiles often claim that the moving coil system yields higher fidelity sound. In either type, the stylus itself, usually of diamond, is mounted on a tiny metal strut called a cantilever, which is suspended using a collar of highly compliant plastic. This gives the stylus the freedom to move in any direction. On the other end of the cantilever is mounted a tiny permanent magnet (moving magnet type) or a set of tiny wound coils (moving coil type). The magnet is close to a set of fixed pick-up coils, or the moving coils are held within a magnetic field generated by fixed permanent magnets. In either case, the movement of the stylus as it tracks the grooves of a record causes a fluctuating magnetic field, which causes a small electric current to be induced in the coils. This current closely follows the sound waveform cut into the record, and may be transmitted by wires to an electronic amplifier where it is processed and amplified in order to drive a loudspeaker. Depending upon the amplifier design, a phono-preamplifier may be necessary. In most moving magnet designs, the stylus itself is detachable from the rest of the cartridge so it can easily be replaced. There are three primary types of cartridge mounts. The most common type is attached using two small screws to a headshell that then plugs into the tonearm, while another is a standardized "P-mount" or "T4P" cartridge (invented by Technics in 1980 and adopted by other manufacturers) that plugs directly into the tonearm. Many P-mount cartridges come with adapters to allow them to be mounted to a headshell. The third type is used mainly in cartridges designed for DJ use and it has a standard round headshell connector. Some mass market turntables use a proprietary integrated cartridge that cannot be upgraded. An alternative design is the moving iron variation on moving magnet used by ADC, Grado, Stanton/Pickering 681 series, Ortofon OM and VMS series, and the MMC cartridge of Bang & Olufsen. In these units, the magnet itself sits behind the four coils and magnetises the cores of all four coils. The moving iron cross at the other end of the coils varies the gaps between itself and each of these cores, according to its movements. These variations lead to voltage variations as described above. Famous brands for magnetic cartridges are: Grado, Stanton/Pickering (681EE/EEE), B&O (MM types for its two, non-compatible generations of parallel arm design), Shure (V15 Type I to V), Audio-Technica, Nagaoka, Dynavector, Koetsu, Ortofon, Technics, Denon and ADC. Strain gauge cartridges Strain gauge or "semiconductor" cartridges do not generate a voltage, but act like a variable resistor, whose resistance directly depends on the movement of the stylus. Thus, the cartridge "modulates" an external voltage supplied by the (special) preamplifier. These pickups were marketed by Euphonics, Sao Win, and Panasonic/Technics, amongst others. The main advantages (compared to magnetic carts are): The electrical connection from the cartridge to the preamplifier is immune to cable capacitance issues. Being non-magnetic, the cartridge is immune to "hum" induced by stray magnetic fields (same advantage shared with ceramic cartridges). The combination of electrical and mechanical advantages, plus the absence of magnetic yoke high-frequency losses, make them especially suitable to reproducing frequencies up to 50 kHz. Technics (Matsushita Electric) marketed a line of strain-gauge (labeled "semiconductor") cartridges especially intended for Compatible Discrete 4 quadraphonic records, requiring such high frequency response. Bass response down to 0 Hz is possible. By using a suitable mechanical arrangement, VTA (vertical tracking angle) stays steady independent of the stylus vertical movements, with the consequent reduction in related distortions. Being a force sensor, the strain-gauge cartridge can also measure the actual VTF (vertical tracking force) while in use. The main disadvantage is the need of a special preamplifier that supplies a steady current (typically 5mA) to the semiconductor elements and handles a special equalization than the one needed for magnetic cartridges. A high-end strain-gauge cartridge is currently sold by an audiophile company, with special preamplifiers available. Electrostatic cartridges Electrostatic cartridges were marketed by Stax in the 1950 and 1960 years. They needed individual operating electronics or preamplifiers. Optical readout A few specialist laser turntables read the groove optically using a laser pickup. Since there is no physical contact with the record, no wear is incurred. However, this "no wear" advantage is debatable, since vinyl records have been tested to withstand even 1200 plays with no significant audio degradation, provided that it is played with a high quality cartridge and that the surfaces are clean. An alternative approach is to take a high-resolution photograph or scan of each side of the record and interpret the image of the grooves using computer software. An amateur attempt using a flatbed scanner lacked satisfactory fidelity. A professional system employed by the Library of Congress produces excellent quality. Stylus A smooth-tipped stylus (in popular usage often called a needle due to the former use of steel needles for the purpose) is used to play the recorded groove. A special chisel-like stylus is used to engrave the groove into the master record. The stylus is subject to hard wear as it is the only small part that comes into direct contact with the spinning record. In terms of the force imposed on its minute areas of actual contact, the pressure it must bear is enormous. There are three desired qualities in a stylus: first, that it faithfully follows the contours of the recorded groove and transmits its vibrations to the next part in the chain; second, that it does not damage the recorded disc; and third, that it is resistant to wear. A worn-out, damaged or defective stylus tip will degrade audio quality and injure the groove. Different materials for the stylus have been used over time. Thomas Edison introduced the use of sapphire in 1892 and the use of diamond in 1910 for his cylinder phonographs. The Edison Diamond Disc players (1912–1929), when properly played, hardly ever required the stylus to be changed. The styli for vinyl records were also made out of sapphire or diamond. A specific case is the specific stylus type of Bang & Olufsen's (B&O) moving magnet cartridge MMC 20CL, mostly used in parallel arm B&O turntables in the 4002/6000 series. It uses a sapphire stem on which a diamond tip is fixed by a special adhesive. A stylus tip mass as low as 0.3 milligram is the result and full tracking only requires 1 gram of stylus force, reducing record wear even further. Maximum distortion (2nd harmonic) fell below 0.6%. Other than the Edison and European Pathé disc machines, early disc players, both external horn and internal horn "Victrola" style models, normally used very short-lived disposable needles. The most common material was steel, although other materials such as copper, tungsten, bamboo and cactus were used. Steel needles needed to be replaced frequently, preferably after each use, due to their very rapid wear from bearing down heavily on the mildly abrasive shellac record. Rapid wear was an essential feature so that their imprecisely formed tips would be quickly worn into compliance with the groove's contours. Advertisements implored customers to replace their steel needles after each record side. Steel needles were inexpensive, e.g., a box of 500 for 50 US cents, and were widely sold in packets and small tins. They were available in different thicknesses and lengths. Thick, short needles produced strong, loud tones while thinner, longer needles produces softer, muted tones. In 1916, in the face of a wartime steel shortage, Victor introduced their "Tungs-Tone" brand extra-long-playing needle, which was advertised to play between 100 and 300 records. It consisted of a brass shank into which a very hard and strong tungsten wire, somewhat narrower than the standard record groove, had been fitted. The protruding wire wore down, but not out, until it was worn too short to use. Later in the 78 rpm era, hardened steel and chrome-plated needles came on the market, some of which were claimed to play 10 to 20 record sides each. When sapphires were introduced for the 78 rpm disc and the LP, they were made by tapering a stem and polishing the tip to a sphere with a radius of around 70 and 25 micrometers respectively. A sphere is not equal to the form of the cutting stylus and by the time diamond needles came to the market, a whole discussion was started on the effect of circular forms moving through a non-circular cut groove. It can be easily shown that vertical, so called "pinching" movements were a result and when stereophonic LPs were introduced, unwanted vertical modulation was recognized as a problem. Also, the needle started its life touching the groove on a very small surface, giving extra wear on the walls. Another problem is in the tapering along a straight line, while the side of the groove is far from straight. Both problems were attacked together: by polishing the diamond in a certain way that it could be made doubly elliptic. 1) the side was made into one ellipse as seen from behind, meaning the groove touched along a short line and 2) the ellipse form was also polished as seen from above and curvature in the direction of the groove became much smaller than 25 micrometers e.g. 13 micrometers. With this approach a number of irregularities were eliminated. Furthermore, the angle of the stylus, which used to be always sloping backwards, was changed into the forward direction, in line with the slope the original cutting stylus possessed. These styli were expensive to produce, but the costs were effectively offset by their extended lifespans. The next development in stylus form came about by the attention to the CD-4 quadraphonic sound modulation process, which requires up to 50 kHz frequency response, with cartridges like Technics EPC-100CMK4 capable of playback on frequencies up to 100 kHz. This requires a stylus with a narrow side radius, such as 5 µm (or 0.2 mil). A narrow-profile elliptical stylus is able to read the higher frequencies (greater than 20 kHz), but at an increased wear, since the contact surface is narrower. For overcoming this problem, the Shibata stylus was invented around 1972 in Japan by Norio Shibata of JVC, fitted as standard on quadraphonic cartridges, and marketed as an extra on some high-end cartridges. The Shibata-designed stylus offers a greater contact surface with the groove, which in turn means less pressure over the vinyl surface and thus less wear. A positive side effect is that the greater contact surface also means the stylus will read sections of the vinyl that were not touched (or "worn") by the common spherical stylus. In a demonstration by JVC records "worn" after 500 plays at a relatively very high 4.5 gf tracking force with a spherical stylus, played "as new" with the Shibata profile. Other advanced stylus shapes appeared following the same goal of increasing contact surface, improving on the Shibata. Chronologically: "Hughes" Shibata variant (1975), "Ogura" (1978), Van den Hul (1982). Such a stylus may be marketed as "Hyperelliptical" (Shure), "Alliptic", "Fine Line" (Ortofon), "Line contact" (Audio Technica), "Polyhedron", "LAC", or "Stereohedron" (Stanton). A keel-shaped diamond stylus appeared as a byproduct of the invention of the CED Videodisc. This, together with laser-diamond-cutting technologies, made possible the "ridge" shaped stylus, such as the Namiki (1985) design, and Fritz Gyger (1989) design. This type of stylus is marketed as "MicroLine" (Audio technica), "Micro-Ridge" (Shure), or "Replicant" (Ortofon). It is important to point out that most of those stylus profiles are still being manufactured and sold, together with the more common spherical and elliptical profiles. This is despite the fact that production of CD-4 quadraphonic records ended by the late 1970s. For elliptical and advanced stylus shapes, correct cartridge alignment is critical. There are several alignment methods, each creating different null points at which the stylus will be tangential to the record grooves, optimizing distortion across the record side in different ways. The most popular alignment geometries are Baerwald, Løfgren B and Stevenson. Common tools to align the stylus correctly are 2-point protractors (which can be used with any turntable as long as the headshells are long enough for the chosen alignment), overhang gauges and arc protractors (model specific). Record materials Early materials in the 19th century were hardened rubber, wax, and celluloid, but early in the 20th century a shellac compound became the standard. Since shellac is not hard enough to withstand the wear of steel needles on heavy tone arms, filler made of pulverized shale was added. Shellac was also fragile, and records often shattered or cracked. This was a problem for home records, but it became a bigger problem in the late 1920s with the Vitaphone sound-on-disc motion picture "talkie" system, developed in 1927. To solve this problem, in 1930, RCA Victor made unbreakable records by mixing polyvinyl chloride with plasticisers, in a proprietary formula they called Victrolac, which was first used in 1931, in motion picture discs, and experimentally, in home records, the same year. However, with Sound-on-film achieving supremacy over sound-on-disc by 1931, the need for unbreakable records diminished and the production of vinyl home recordings was dropped as well, for the time being. The Victrolac formula improved throughout the 1930s, and by the late 30s the material, by then called vinylite, was being used in records sent to radio stations for radio program records, radio commercials, and later, DJ copies of phonograph records, because vinyl records could be sent through the mail to radio stations without breaking. During WWII, there was a shortage of shellac, which had to be imported from Asia, and the U.S. government banned production of shellac records for the duration of the war. Vinylite was made domestically, though, and was being used for V-discs during the war. Record company engineers took a much closer look at the possibilities of vinyl, possibly that it might even replace shellac as the basic record material. After the war, RCA Victor and Columbia, by far the two leading records companies in America, perfected two new vinyl formats, which were both introduced in 1948, when the 33 RPM LP was introduced by Columbia and the 45 RPM single was introduced by RCA Victor. For a few years thereafter, however, 78 RPM records continued to be made in shellac until that format was phased out around 1958. Equalization Early "acoustical" record players used the stylus to vibrate a diaphragm that radiated the sound through a horn. Several serious problems resulted from this: The maximum sound level achievable was quite limited, being limited to the physical amplification effects of the horn, The energy needed to generate such sound levels as were obtainable had to come directly from the stylus tracing the groove. This required very high tracking forces that rapidly wore out both the stylus and the record on lateral cut 78 rpm records. Because bass sounds have a higher amplitude than high frequency sounds (for the same perceived loudness), the space taken in the groove by low frequency sounds needed to be large (limiting playback time per side of the record) to accommodate the bass notes, yet the high frequencies required only tiny variations in the groove, which were easily affected by noise from irregularities (wear, contaminates, etc.) in the disc itself. The introduction of electronic amplification allowed these issues to be addressed. Records are made with boosted high frequencies and reduced low frequencies, which allow for different ranges of sound to be produced. This reduces the effect of background noise, including clicks or pops, and also conserves the amount of physical space needed for each groove, by reducing the size of the low-frequency undulations. During playback, the high frequencies must be rescaled to their original, flat frequency response—known as "equalization"—as well as being amplified. A phono input of an amplifier incorporates such equalization as well as amplification to suit the very low level output from a modern cartridge. Most hi-fi amplifiers made between the 1950s and the 1990s and virtually all DJ mixers are so equipped. The widespread adoption of digital music formats, such as CD or satellite radio, has displaced phonograph records and resulted in phono inputs being omitted in most modern amplifiers. Some newer turntables include built-in preamplifiers to produce line-level outputs. Inexpensive and moderate performance discrete phono preamplifiers with RIAA equalization are available, while high-end audiophile units costing thousands of dollars continue to be available in very small numbers. Phono inputs are starting to reappear on amplifiers in the 2010s due to the vinyl revival. Since the late 1950s, almost all phono input stages have used the RIAA equalization standard. Before settling on that standard, there were many different equalizations in use, including EMI, HMV, Columbia, Decca FFRR, NAB, Ortho, BBC transcription, etc. Recordings made using these other equalization schemes will typically sound odd if they are played through a RIAA-equalized preamplifier. High-performance (so-called "multicurve disc") preamplifiers, which include multiple, selectable equalizations, are no longer commonly available. However, some vintage preamplifiers, such as the LEAK varislope series, are still obtainable and can be refurbished. Newer preamplifiers like the Esoteric Sound Re-Equalizer or the K-A-B MK2 Vintage Signal Processor are also available. These kinds of adjustable phono equalizers are used by consumers wishing to play vintage record collections (often the only available recordings of musicians of the time) with the equalization used to make them. In the 21st century Turntables continued to be manufactured and sold in the 2010s, although in small numbers. While some audiophiles still prefer the sound of vinyl records over that of digital music sources (mainly compact discs), they represent a minority of listeners. As of 2015, the sale of vinyl LP's has increased 49–50% percent from the previous year, although small in comparison to the sale of other formats which although more units were sold (Digital Sales, CDs) the more modern formats experienced a decline in sales. The quality of available record players, tonearms, and cartridges has continued to improve, despite diminishing demand, allowing turntables to remain competitive in the high-end audio market. Vinyl enthusiasts are often committed to the refurbishment and sometimes tweaking of vintage systems. In 2017, vinyl LP sales were slightly decreased, at a rate of 5%, in comparison to previous years' numbers, regardless of the noticeable rise of vinyl records sales worldwide. Updated versions of the 1970s era Technics SL-1200 (production ceased in 2010) have remained an industry standard for DJs to the present day. Turntables and vinyl records remain popular in mixing (mostly dance-oriented) forms of electronic music, where they allow great latitude for physical manipulation of the music by the DJ. In hip hop music, and occasionally in other genres, the turntable is used as a musical instrument by DJs, who use turntables along with a DJ mixer to create unique rhythmic sounds. Manipulation of a record as part of the music, rather than for normal playback or mixing, is called turntablism. The basis of turntablism, and its best known technique, is scratching, pioneered by Grand Wizzard Theodore. It was not until Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" in 1983 that the turntablism movement was recognized in popular music outside of a hip hop context. In the 2010s, many hip hop DJs use DJ CD players or digital record emulator devices to create scratching sounds; nevertheless, some DJs still scratch with vinyl records. The laser turntable uses a laser as the pickup instead of a stylus in physical contact with the disk. It was conceived of in the late 1980s, although early prototypes were not of usable audio quality. Practical laser turntables are now being manufactured by ELPJ. They are favoured by record libraries and some audiophiles since they eliminate physical wear completely. Experimentation is in progress in retrieving the audio from old records by scanning the disc and analysing the scanned image, rather than using any sort of turntable. Although largely replaced since the introduction of the compact disc in 1982, record albums still sell in small numbers and are available through numerous sources. In 2008, LP sales grew by 90% over 2007, with 1.9 million records sold. USB turntables have a built-in audio interface, which transfers the sound directly to the connected computer. Some USB turntables transfer the audio without equalization, but are sold with software that allows the EQ of the transferred audio file to be adjusted. There are also many turntables on the market designed to be plugged into a computer via a USB port for needle dropping purposes. Responding to longtime calls by fans and disc jockeys, Panasonic Corp. said it is reviving Technics turntables–the series that remains a de facto standard player supporting nightclub music scenes. The new analog turntable, which would come with new direct-drive motor technologies that Panasonic says will improve the quality of sound. Beginning of 2019 Technics unveiled SL-1500C Premium Class Direct Drive Turntable System which inherits the brand's high-end sound quality concept. See also Archéophone, used to convert diverse types of cylinder recordings to modern CD media Audio signal processing Compressed air gramophone List of phonograph manufacturers Talking Machine World Vinyl killer Notes References Further reading Bruil, Rudolf A. (January 8, 2004). "Linear Tonearms." Retrieved on July 25, 2011. Gelatt, Roland. The Fabulous Phonograph, 1877–1977. Second rev. ed., [being also the] First Collier Books ed., in series, Sounds of the Century. New York: Collier, 1977. 349 p., ill. Heumann, Michael. "Metal Machine Music: The Phonograph's Voice and the Transformation of Writing." eContact! 14.3 — Turntablism (January 2013). Montréal: CEC. Koenigsberg, Allen. The Patent History of the Phonograph, 1877–1912. APM Press, 1991. Various. "Turntable [wiki]: Bibliography." eContact! 14.3 — Turntablism (January 2013). Montréal: CEC. Weissenbrunner, Karin. "Experimental Turntablism: Historical overview of experiments with record players / records — or Scratches from Second-Hand Technology." eContact! 14.3 — Turntablism (January 2013). Montréal: CEC. External links c.1915 Swiss hot-air engined gramophone at Museum of Retro Technology Interactive sculpture delivers tactile soundwave experience Very early recordings from around the world The Birth of the Recording Industry The Cylinder Archive Cylinder Preservation & Digitization Project – Over 6,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections, University of California, Santa Barbara, free for download or streamed online. Cylinder players held at the British Library – information and high-quality images. History of Recorded Sound: Phonographs and Records EnjoytheMusic.com – Excerpts from the book Hi-Fi All-New 1958 Edition Listen to early recordings on the Edison Phonograph Mario Frazzetto's Phonograph and Gramophone Gallery. Say What? – Essay on phonograph technology and intellectual property law Vinyl Engine – Information, images, articles and reviews from around the world The Analogue Dept – Information, images and tutorials; strongly focused on Thorens brand 45 rpm player and changer at work on YouTube Historic video footage of Edison operating his original tinfoil phonograph Turntable History on Enjoy the Music.com 2-point and Arc Protractor generators on AlignmentProtractor.com Audiovisual introductions in 1877 American inventions Audio players Thomas Edison Sound recording Hip hop production Turntablism 19th-century inventions	false	[ "Steeplejack Charles Miller (1882–1910), nicknamed the Human Fly, was an American man famous for climbing buildings. He began climbing in 1900, and earned a living from his stunts. Miller did not use any climbing equipment. He died after falling sixty feet from the fourth floor of the Hamburger building in Los Angeles in full view of hundreds of spectators, who transported his unconscious body to the hospital, where he later succumbed to his injuries.\n\nSee also\n List of stunt performers nicknamed the \"Human Fly\"\nBuildering\n\nReferences\n\n1882 births\n1910 deaths\nUrban climbers\nUrban exploration", "Pekka Vesainen or (as a character in a historical novel by Santeri Ivalo) Juho Vesainen was a famous 16th century Finnish peasant leader and guerrilla chief during the \"long wrath\" or \"pitkä viha\".\n\nThe long restlessness of Russo-Swedish war was worst among settlements in Northern Ostrobothnia region, which was officially then beyond the Russian border of the Treaty of Nöteborg. The long and cruel guerrilla war without any outside help created eventually need of warlords to take care of the protection of the settlers. The most famous figure of this period is Pekka Vesainen.\n\nA raiding party of peasants from Ii, led by Vesainen, destroyed and burned Kandalaksha (Kantalahti) and a small Russian settlement in Kem in summer 1589. They took a considerable loot with them back to Ii. According to oral tradition and historical speculation from later centuries, Vesainen would have also led another raid later on same year, on which the peasants destroyed the Pechenga Monastery and killed all the monks. This raid did actually take place, but Vesainen is not known to have anything to do with it.\n\nYear of birth unknown\nYear of death unknown\n16th-century Finnish people\nFinnish guerrillas" ]
[ "John Pilger", "Responses by William Shawcross and others" ]	C_81f47291a0304f7d81c3ee5545e66d08_1	Did William Shawcross right any books?	1	Did William Shawcross write any books?	John Pilger	William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984) about Pilger's series of articles about Cambodia in the Daily Mirror during August 1979: "A rather interesting quality of the articles was their concentration on Nazism and the holocaust. Pilger called Pol Pot 'an Asian Hitler' -- and said he was even worse than Hitler . . . Again and again Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis. Their Marxist-Leninist ideology was not even mentioned in the Mirror, except to say they were inspired by the Red Guards. Their intellectual origins were described as 'anarchist' rather than Communist". Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards. Kiernan notes instances where other writers' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account, or not mentioned. Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and Francois Ponchaud. Nonetheless, the reaction to the stories in Britain was as if they were something quite new." Oliver Kamm asserted in 2006: "Pilger's documentaries are full of falsehoods. They operate by misdirection, simultaneously denouncing one form of injustice while ignoring or denying others". In Heroes, Pilger disputes Francois Ponchaud and Shawcross's account of Vietnamesse atrocities during the Vietnamese invasion and near famine as being "unsubstantiated". Ponchard had interviewed members of anti-communist groups living in the Thai refugee border camps. According to Pilger, "At the very least the effect of Shawcross's 'expose'" of Cambodian's treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese "was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: in truth. a difference of night and day". In his book, Shawcross himself doubted that anyone had died of starvation. CANNOTANSWER	that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and Francois Ponchaud.	John Richard Pilger (; born 9 October 1939) is an Australian journalist, writer, scholar, and documentary filmmaker. He has been mainly based in Britain since 1962. He is also currently Visiting Professor at Cornell University in New York. Pilger is a strong critic of American, Australian, and British foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by an imperialist and colonialist agenda. Pilger has also criticised his native country's treatment of Indigenous Australians. He first drew international attention for his reports on the Cambodian genocide. His career as a documentary film maker began with The Quiet Mutiny (1970), made during one of his visits to Vietnam, and has continued with over 50 documentaries since. Other works in this form include Year Zero (1979), about the aftermath of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1993). His many documentary films on indigenous Australians include The Secret Country (1985) and Utopia (2013). In the British print media, Pilger worked at the Daily Mirror from 1963 to 1986, and wrote a regular column for the New Statesman magazine from 1991 to 2014. Pilger won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award in 1967 and 1979. His documentaries have gained awards in Britain and worldwide, including multiple BAFTA honours. The practices of the mainstream media are a regular subject in Pilger's writing. Early life John Richard Pilger was born on 9 October 1939 in Bondi, New South Wales, the son of Claude and Elsie Pilger. His older brother, Graham (1932–2017), was a disabled rights activist who later advised the government of Gough Whitlam. Pilger is of German descent on his father's side, while his mother had English, German, and Irish ancestry; two of his maternal great-great-grandparents were Irish convicts transported to Australia. His mother taught French in school. Pilger and his brother attended Sydney Boys High School, where he began a student newspaper, The Messenger. He later joined a four-year journalist trainee scheme with the Australian Consolidated Press. Journalism and television career Journalism Beginning his career in 1958 as a copy boy with the Sydney Sun, Pilger later moved to the city's Daily Telegraph, where he was a reporter, sports writer, and sub-editor. He also freelanced and worked for the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, the daily paper's sister title. After moving to Europe, he was a freelance correspondent in Italy for a year. Settling in London in 1962, working as a sub-editor, Pilger joined British United Press and then Reuters on its Middle-East desk. In 1963 he was recruited by the English Daily Mirror, again as a sub-editor. Later, he advanced to become a reporter, a feature writer, and Chief Foreign Correspondent for the title. While living and working in the United States for the Daily Mirror, on 5 June 1968 he witnessed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles during his presidential campaign. He was a war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra. Nearly eighteen months after Robert Maxwell bought the Mirror (on 12 July 1984), Pilger was sacked by Richard Stott, the newspaper's editor, on 31 December 1985. Pilger was a founder of the News on Sunday tabloid in 1984, and was hired as Editor-in-Chief in 1986. During the period of hiring staff, Pilger was away for several months filming The Secret Country in Australia. Prior to this, he had given editor Keith Sutton a list of people who he thought might be recruited for the paper, but found on his return to Britain that none of them had been hired. Pilger resigned before the first issue and had come into conflict with those around him. He disagreed with the founders' decision to base the paper in Manchester and then clashed with the governing committees; the paper was intended to be a workers' co-operative. Sutton's appointment as editor was Pilger's suggestion, but he fell out with Sutton over his plan to produce a left wing Sun newspaper. The two men ended up producing their own dummies, but the founders and the various committees backed Sutton. Pilger, appointed with "overall editorial control", resigned at this point. The first issue appeared on 27 April 1987 and The News on Sunday soon closed. Pilger returned to the Mirror in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks, while Piers Morgan was editor. His most frequent outlet for many years was the New Statesman, where he had a fortnightly column from 1991 when Steve Platt was editor to 2014. In 2018, Pilger said his "written journalism is no longer welcome" in the mainstream and that "probably its last home" was in The Guardian. His last column for The Guardian was in April 2015. Television With the actor David Swift, and the film makers Paul Watson and Charles Denton, Pilger formed Tempest Films in 1969. "We wanted a frontman with a mind of his own, rather like another James Cameron, with whom Richard [Marquand] had worked", Swift once said. "Paul thought John was very charismatic, as well as marketing extremely original, refreshingly radical ideas." The company was unable to gain commissions from either the BBC or ITV, but did manage to package potential projects. Pilger's career on television began on World in Action (Granada Television) in 1969, directed by Denton, for whom he made two documentaries broadcast in 1970 and 1971, the earliest of more than fifty in his career. The Quiet Mutiny (1970) was filmed at Camp Snuffy, presenting a character study of the common US soldier during the Vietnam War. It revealed the shifting morale and open rebellion of American troops. Pilger later described the film as "something of a scoop" – it was the first documentary to show the problems with morale among the drafted ranks of the US military. In an interview with the New Statesman, Pilger said: When I flew to New York and showed it to Mike Wallace, the star reporter of CBS' 60 Minutes, he agreed. "Real shame we can't show it here". He made other documentaries about the United States involvement in Vietnam, including Vietnam: Still America's War (1974), Do You Remember Vietnam? (1978), and Vietnam: The Last Battle (1995). During his work with BBC's Midweek television series during 1972–73, Pilger completed five documentary reports, but only two were broadcast. Pilger was successful in gaining a regular television outlet at ATV. The Pilger half-hour documentary series was commissioned by Charles Denton, then a producer with ATV, for screening on the British ITV network. The series ran for five seasons from 1974 until 1977, at first running in the UK on Sunday afternoons after Weekend World. The theme song for the series was composed by Lynsey de Paul. Later it was scheduled in a weekday peak-time evening slot. The last series included "A Faraway Country" (September 1977) about dissidents in Czechoslovakia, then still part of the Communist Soviet bloc. Pilger and his team interviewed members of Charter 77 and other groups, clandestinely using domestic film equipment. In the documentary Pilger praises the dissidents' courage and commitment to freedom, and describes the communist totalitarianism as "fascism disguised as socialism". Pilger was later given an hour slot at 9 pm, before News at Ten, which gave him a high profile in Britain. After ATV lost its franchise in 1981, he continued to make documentaries for screening on ITV, initially for Central, and later via Carlton Television. Documentaries and career: 1978–2000 Cambodia In 1979, Pilger and two colleagues with whom he collaborated for many years, documentary film-maker David Munro and photographer Eric Piper, entered Cambodia in the wake of the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime. They made photographs and reports that were world exclusives. The first was published as a special issue of the Daily Mirror, which sold out. They also produced an ITV documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, which brought to people's living rooms the suffering of the Khmer people. During the filming of Cambodia Year One, the team were warned that Pilger was on a Khmer Rouge 'death list.' In one incident, they narrowly escaped an ambush. Following the showing of Year Zero, some $45 million was raised, unsolicited, in mostly small donations, including almost £4 million raised by schoolchildren in the UK. This funded the first substantial relief to Cambodia, including the shipment of life-saving drugs such as penicillin, and clothing to replace the black uniforms people had been forced to wear. According to Brian Walker, director of Oxfam, "a solidarity and compassion surged across our nation" from the broadcast of Year Zero. William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984) about Pilger's series of articles about Cambodia in the Daily Mirror during August 1979: A rather interesting quality of the articles was their concentration on Nazism and the holocaust. Pilger called Pol Pot 'an Asian Hitler' — and said he was even worse than Hitler . . . Again and again Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis. Their Marxist-Leninist ideology was not even mentioned in the Mirror, except to say they were inspired by the Red Guards. Their intellectual origins were described as 'anarchist' rather than Communist". Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards. Kiernan notes instances where other writers' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account, or not mentioned. Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and François Ponchaud. In Heroes, Pilger disputes François Ponchaud and Shawcross's account of Vietnamese atrocities during the Vietnamese invasion and near famine as being "unsubstantiated". Ponchaud had interviewed members of anti-communist groups living in the Thai refugee border camps. According to Pilger, "At the very least the effect of Shawcross's 'exposé'" of Cambodians' treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese "was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: in truth, a difference of night and day". In his book, Shawcross himself doubted that anyone had died of starvation. Pilger and Munro made four later films about Cambodia. Pilger's documentary Cambodia – The Betrayal (1990), prompted a libel case against him, which was settled at the High Court with an award against Pilger and Central Television. The Times of 6 July 1991 reported: Two men who claimed that a television documentary accused them of being SAS members who trained Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to lay mines, accepted "very substantial" libel damages in the High Court yesterday. Christopher Geidt and Anthony De Normann settled their action against the journalist John Pilger and Central Television on the third day of the hearing. Desmond Browne, QC, for Mr Pilger and Central Television, said his clients had not intended to allege the two men trained the Khmer Rouge to lay mines, but they accepted that was how the program had been understood. Pilger said the defence case collapsed because the government issued a gagging order, citing national security, which prevented three government ministers and two former heads of the SAS from appearing in court. The film received a British Academy of Film and Television Award nomination in 1991. Australia's Indigenous peoples Pilger has long criticised aspects of Australian government policy, particularly what he regards as its inherent racism resulting in the poor treatment of Indigenous Australians. In 1969, Pilger went with Australian activist Charlie Perkins on a tour to Jay Creek in Central Australia. He compared what he witnessed in Jay Creek to South African apartheid. He saw the appalling conditions that the Aboriginal people were living under, with children suffering from malnutrition and grieving mothers and grandmothers having had their lighter-skinned children and grandchildren removed by the police and welfare agencies. Equally, he learned of Aboriginal boys being sent to work on white run farms, and Aboriginal girls working as servants in middle-class homes as undeclared slave labour. Pilger has made several documentaries about Indigenous Australians, such as The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back (1985) and Welcome to Australia (1999). His book on the subject, A Secret Country, was first published in 1989. Pilger wrote in 2000 that the 1998 legislation that removed the common-law rights of Indigenous peoples: is just one of the disgraces that has given Australia the distinction of being the only developed country whose government has been condemned as racist by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Pilger returned to this subject with Utopia, released in 2013 (see below). East Timor Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy In East Timor Pilger clandestinely shot Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy about the brutal Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which began in 1975. Death of a Nation contributed to an international outcry which ultimately led to Indonesian withdrawal from East Timor and eventual independence in 2000. When Death of a Nation was screened in Britain it was the highest rating documentary in 15 years and 5,000 telephone calls per minute were made to the programme's action line. When Death of a Nation was screened in Australia in June 1994, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans declared that Pilger "had a track record of distorted sensationalism mixed with sanctimony." Documentaries and career since 2000 Palestine Is Still the Issue Pilger's documentary Palestine Is Still the Issue was released in 2002 and had Ilan Pappé as historical adviser. Pilger said the film describes how an "historic injustice has been done to the Palestinian people, and until Israel's illegal and brutal occupation ends, there will be no peace for anyone, Israelis included". He said the responses of his interviewees "put the lie to the standard Zionist cry that any criticism of Israel is anti-semitic, a claim that insults all those Jewish people who reject the likes of Ariel Sharon acting in their name". Its broadcast resulted in complaints by the Israeli embassy, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the Conservative Friends of Israel that it was inaccurate and biased. Michael Green, chairman of Carlton Communications, the company that made the film, also objected to it in an interview with the Jewish Chronicle. The UK television regulator, the Independent Television Commission (ITC), ordered an investigation. The ITC investigation rejected the complaints about the film, stating in its report: The ITC raised with Carlton all the significant areas of inaccuracy critics of the programme alleged and the broadcaster answered them by reference to a range of historical texts. The ITC is not a tribunal of fact and is particularly aware of the difficulties of verifying 'historical fact' but the comprehensiveness and authority of Carlton's sources were persuasive, not least because many appeared to be of Israeli origin. The ITC concluded that in Pilger's documentary "adequate opportunity was given to a pro-Israeli government perspective" and that the programme "was not in breach of the ITC Programme Code". Stealing a Nation Pilger's documentary Stealing a Nation (2004) recounts the experiences of the late 20th-century trials of the people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The documentary primarily focuses on the expulsion of the Chagossians by Britain and the USA between 1967 and 1973 to Mauritius, and the poor economic situation faced by the islanders as a result of the deportation. Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos Islands, was given to the United States government which began the construction of a major military base for the region. In the 21st century, the US used the base for planes which were bombing targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a 2000 ruling on the events, the International Court of Justice described the wholesale removal of the Chagossian peoples from the Chagos Islands by Britain as "a crime against humanity". Pilger strongly criticised Tony Blair for failing to respond in a substantive way to the 2000 High Court ruling that the expulsion of the Chagossian people to Mauritius was illegal. In March 2005, Stealing a Nation received the Royal Television Society Award. Latin America: The War on Democracy (2007) The documentary The War on Democracy (2007) was Pilger's first film to be released in the cinema. In "an unremitting assault on American foreign policy since 1945", according to Andrew Billen in The Times, the film explores the role of US interventions, overt and covert, in toppling a series of governments in the region, and placing "a succession of favourably disposed bullies in control of its Latino backyard". It discusses the US role in the overthrow in 1973 of the democratically elected Chilean leader Salvador Allende, who was replaced by the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who purportedly took part in secret campaigns against democratic governments in South America. It also contains what Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian described as "a dewy-eyed interview" with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, which has moments of "almost Hello!-magazine deference". Pilger explores the US Army School of the Americas in the US state of Georgia. Generations of South American military were trained there, with a curriculum including counter-insurgency techniques. Attendees reportedly included members of Pinochet's security services, along with men from Haiti, El Salvador, Argentina and Brazil who have been implicated in human rights abuses. The film also details the attempted overthrow of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez in 2002. The people of Caracas rose up to force his return to power. It looks at the wider rise of populist governments across South America, led by figures calling for loosening ties with the United States and attempting a more equitable redistribution of the continent's natural wealth. Of "Chávez's decision to bypass the National Assembly for 18 months, and rule by decree", Peter Bradshaw writes "Pilger passes over it very lightly". Pilger said the film is about the struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery. These people, he says,describe a world not as American presidents like to see it as useful or expendable, they describe the power of courage and humanity among people with next to nothing. They reclaim noble words like democracy, freedom, liberation, justice, and in doing so they are defending the most basic human rights of all of us in a war being waged against all of us. The War on Democracy won the Best Documentary category at the One World Media Awards in 2008. The War You Don't See (2010) The subject of The War You Don’t See is the role of the media in making war. It concentrates on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories. It begins with the Collateral Murder video leaked by Chelsea Manning and released by WikiLeaks. In an interview, Julian Assange describes WikiLeaks as an organisation that gives power to ‘conscientious objectors’ within ‘power systems’. The documentary contends that the CIA uses intelligence to manipulate public opinion and that the media collude by following the official line. During the documentary Pilger states that "propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home". John Lloyd in the Financial Times said The War You Don't See was a "one-sided" documentary which "had no thought of explaining, even hinting, that the wars fought by the US and the UK had a scrap of just cause, nor of examining the nature of what Pilger simply stated were "lies" – especially those that took the two countries to the invasion of Iraq". Support for Julian Assange Pilger supported Julian Assange by pledging bail in December 2010. Pilger said at the time: "There's no doubt that he is not going to abscond". Assange sought asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in 2012 and Pilger's bail money was lost when a judge ordered it to be forfeited. Pilger has been critical of the media's treatment of Assange saying: "The same brave newspapers and broadcasters that have supported Britain’s part in epic bloody crimes, from the genocide in Indonesia to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, now attack the “human rights record” of Ecuador, whose real crime is to stand up to the bullies in London and Washington". He criticised the failure of the Australian government to object when it "repeatedly received confirmation that the US was conducting an “unprecedented” pursuit of Assange" and noted that one of the reasons Ecuador gave for granting asylum to Assange was his abandonment by Australia. Pilger visited Assange in the embassy and has continued to support him. Utopia (2013) With Utopia, Pilger returned to the experiences of Indigenous Australians and what he termed "the denigrating of their humanity". A documentary feature film, it takes its title from Utopia, an Aboriginal homeland (also known as an outstation) in the Northern Territory. Pilger says that "in essence, very little" has changed since the first of his seven films about the Aboriginal people, A Secret Country: The First Australians (1985). In an interview with the UK based Australian Times he commented: "the catastrophe imposed on Indigenous Australians is the equivalent of apartheid, and the system has to change". Reviewing the film, Peter Bradshaw wrote: "The awful truth is that Indigenous communities are on mineral-rich lands that cause mouths to water in mining corporation boardrooms". "When the subject and subjects are allowed to speak for themselves – when Pilger doesn't stand and preach – the injustices glow like throbbing wounds", wrote Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times, but the documentary maker "goes on too long. 110 minutes is a hefty time in screen politics, especially when we know the makers' message from scene one". Geoffrey Macnab described it as an "angry, impassioned documentary" while for Mark Kermode it is a "searing indictment of the ongoing mistreatment" of the first Australians. The Coming War on China (2016) The Coming War on China was Pilger's 60th film for ITV. The film premiered in the UK on Thursday 1 December 2016, and was shown on ITV at 10.40 pm on Tuesday 6 December and on the Australian public broadcaster SBS on 16 April 2017. In the documentary, according to Pilger, "the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency. The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way. They are on the western borders of Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China. Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an 'existential threat' to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs". "The first third told, and told well, the unforgivable, unconscionable tale of what has overtaken the Marshall Islanders since 1946, when the US first nuked the test site on Bikini Atoll" beginning an extended series of tests, wrote Euan Ferguson in The Observer. "Over the next 12 years they would unleash a total of 42.2 megatons. The islanders, as forensically proved by Pilger, were effectively guinea pigs for [the] effects of radiation". Ferguson wrote that the rest of the film "was a sane, sober, necessary, deeply troubling bucketful of worries". Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian wrote that the film "lays bare the historical horrors of the US military in the Pacific, exposing the paranoia and pre-emptive aggression of its semi-secret bases," adding: "This is a gripping film, which though it comes close to excusing China ... does point out China's insecurities and political cruelties". Neil Young of The Hollywood Reporter called the film an "authoritative indictment of American nefariousness in the western Pacific". Kevin Maher wrote in The Times that he admired the early sequences on the Marshall Islands, but that he believed the film lacked nuance or subtlety. Maher wrote that, for Pilger, China is "a brilliant place with just some 'issues with human rights', but let's not go into that now". Diplomat columnist David Hutt said "Pilger consistently glosses over China's past crimes while dwelling on America's". Caitlin Johnstone of Scoop called the film "powerful" and praised it for showing "the USA's generations-long history of provocation and hostility toward [China's] government. It also addresses the silly projection so many westerners harbor that if the US wasn't bullying and slaughtering the world into compliance, China would take over doing the same." The Dirty War on the National Health Service (2019) Pilger's The Dirty War on the National Health Service was released in the UK on 29 November 2019 and examined the changes that the NHS has undergone since its founding in 1948. Pilger makes the case that governments beginning with that of Margaret Thatcher have waged a secret war against the NHS with a view to privatising it slowly and surreptitiously. Pilger predicted that moves toward privatisation would create more poverty and homelessness and that the resulting chaos would be used as an argument for further "reform". Peter Bradshaw described the documentary as a "fierce, necessary film". Views (1999–present) Bush, Blair, Howard and wars In 2003 and 2004, Pilger criticised United States President George W. Bush, saying that he had used the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq as part of a strategy to increase US control of the world's oil supplies. In 2004, Pilger criticised British Prime Minister Tony Blair as equally responsible for the invasion and the bungled occupation of Iraq. In 2004, as the Iraq insurgency increased, Pilger wrote that the anti-war movement should support "Iraq's anti-occupation resistance: We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the "Bush gang" will attack another country". Pilger described Australian Prime Minister John Howard as "the mouse that roars for America, whipping his country into war fever and paranoia about terrorism within". He thought Howard's willingness to "join the Bush/Blair assault on Iraq ... evok[ed] a melancholy history of obsequious service to great power: from the Boxer Rebellion to the Boer war, to the disaster at Gallipoli, and Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf". On 25 July 2005, Pilger ascribed blame for the 2005 London bombings that month to Blair. He wrote that Blair's decision to follow Bush helped to generate the rage that Pilger said precipitated the bombings. In his column a year later, Pilger described Blair as a war criminal for supporting Israel's actions during the 2006 Israel–Lebanon conflict. He said that Blair gave permission to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 to initiate what would ultimately become Operation Defensive Shield. In 2014, Pilger wrote that "The truth about the criminal bloodbath in Iraq cannot be "countered" indefinitely. Neither can the truth about our support for the medievalists in Saudi Arabia, the nuclear-armed predators in Israel, the new military fascists in Egypt and the jihadist "liberators" of Syria, whose propaganda is now BBC news". Barack Obama Pilger criticised Barack Obama during his presidential campaign of 2008, saying that he was "a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan" and his theme "was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully". After Obama was elected and took office in 2009, Pilger wrote, "In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government". Sunny Hundal wrote in The Guardian during November 2008 that the "Uncle Tom" slur used against Obama "highlights a patronising attitude towards ethnic minorities. Pilger expects all black and brown people to be revolutionary brothers and sisters, and if they veer away from that stereotype, it can only be because they are pawns of a wider conspiracy". Comments about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton In a February 2016 webchat on the website of The Guardian newspaper, Pilger said "Trump is speaking straight to ordinary Americans". Although his opinions about immigration were "gross", Pilger wrote that they are "no more gross in essence than, say, David Cameron's – he is not planning to invade anywhere, he doesn't hate the Russians or the Chinese, he is not beholden to Israel. People like this lack of cant, and when the so-called liberal media deride him, they like him even more". In March 2016, Pilger commented in a speech delivered at the University of Sydney during the 2016 United States presidential election, that Donald Trump was a less dangerous potential President of the United States than Hillary Clinton. In November 2016, Pilger said that "notorious terrorist jihadist group called ISIL or ISIS is created largely with money from [the government of Saudi and the government of Qatar] who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation". In August 2017, in an article published on his website, Pilger wrote that a "coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently made clear he does not want war with Russia. This glimpse of sanity, or simple pragmatism, is anathema to the 'national security' managers who guard a system based on war, surveillance, armaments, threats and extreme capitalism". According to Pilger, The Guardian has published "drivel" in covering the claims "that the Russians conspired with Trump". Such assertions, he writes, are "reminiscent of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as a 'Soviet agent'". Russia On the Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, Wiltshire on 4 March 2018, Pilger said in an interview on RT: "This is a carefully constructed drama as part of the propaganda campaign that has been building now for several years in order to justify the actions of NATO, Britain and the United States, towards Russia. That’s a fact". Such events as the Iraq War, "at the very least should make us sceptical of Theresa May’s theatrics in Parliament". He hinted that the UK government may have been involved in the attack, saying it had motive and that the nearby Porton Down laboratory has a "long and sinister record with nerve gas and chemical weapons". China According to Pilger, "American bases form a giant noose encircling China with missiles, bombers, warships - all the way from Australia through the Pacific to Asia and beyond. ... There are no Chinese naval ships and no Chinese bases off California". Brexit On voting to leave the European Union, Pilger wrote in 2016 "The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media.This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and demoralised by the sheer arrogance of the apologists for the "remain" campaign and the dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain. The last bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service, has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is fighting for its life." Criticism of the mainstream media Pilger has criticised many journalists of the mainstream media. During the administration of President Bill Clinton in the US, Pilger attacked the British-American Project as an example of "Atlanticist freemasonry". He asserted in November 1998 that "many members are journalists, the essential foot soldiers in any network devoted to power and propaganda". In 2002, he said that "many journalists now are no more than channellers and echoers of what Orwell called the official truth". In 2003, he criticised what he called the "liberal lobby" which "promote killing" from "behind a humanitarian mask". He said David Aaronovitch exemplified the "mask-wearers" and noted that Aaronovitch had written that the attack on Iraq will be "the easy bit". Aaronovitch responded to an article by Pilger about the mainstream media in 2003 as one of his "typical pieces about the corruption of most journalists (ie people like me [Aaronovitch]) versus the bravery of a few (ie people like him)". On another occasion, while speaking to journalism students at the University of Lincoln, Pilger said that mainstream journalism means corporate journalism. As such, he believes it represents vested corporate interests more than those of the public. In September 2014, Pilger wrote critically of The Guardian and other western media, regarding their reporting on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, writing "Without a single piece of evidence, the US and its NATO allies and their media machines blamed ethnic Russian 'separatists' in Ukraine and implied that Moscow was ultimately responsible". He asserted that "the newspaper has made no serious attempt to examine who shot the aeroplane down and why". In January 2020, Pilger tweeted scepticism of contemporary mainstream narratives about the downing of MH17, and the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 over Iran, saying "Lie upon lie. Hiroshima necessary to defeat Japan. Vietnam attacked US ships in Gulf of Tonkin. Saddam Hussein had WMD. Libya invaded to prevent massacre. Russia shot down MH17/put Trump in the White House. The US, not Russia, defeated Isis. Add Iran shot down Ukrainian airliner". BBC Pilger wrote in December 2002, of British broadcasting's requirement for "impartiality" as being "a euphemism for the consensual view of established authority". He wrote that "BBC television news faithfully echoed word for word" government "propaganda designed to soften up the public for Blair's attack on Iraq". In his documentary The War You Don't See (2010), Pilger returned to this theme and accused the BBC of failing to cover the viewpoint of the victims, civilians caught up in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has additionally pointed to the 48 documentaries on Ireland made for the BBC and ITV between 1959 and the late-1980s which were delayed or altered before transmission, or totally suppressed. Personal life Pilger was married to journalist Scarth Flett, granddaughter of the physician and geologist Sir John Smith Flett. Their son Sam was born in 1973 and is a sports writer. Pilger also has a daughter, Zoe Pilger, born 1984, with journalist Yvonne Roberts. Zoe is an author and art critic. Honours and awards The Press Awards, formerly the British Press Awards 1966: Descriptive Writer of the Year 1967: Journalist of the Year 1970: International Reporter of the Year 1974: News Reporter of the Year 1978: Campaigning Journalist of the Year 1979: Journalist of the Year Other awards 1991: Television Richard Dimbleby Award, BAFTA 1991: At 19th International Emmy Awards Emmy for documentary 'Cambodia, the Betrayal' 2009: Sydney Peace Prize 2011: Grierson Trust Award, UK 2017: Order of Timor-Leste Reception Martha Gellhorn, the American novelist, journalist and war correspondent, said that "[John Pilger] has taken on the great theme of justice and injustice... He documents and proclaims the official lies that we are told and that most people accept or don't bother to think about. [He] belongs to an old and unending worldwide company, the men and women of conscience. Some are as famous as Tom Paine and William Wilberforce, some as unknown as a tiny group calling itself Grandmothers Against The Bomb.... If they win, it is slowly; but they never entirely lose. To my mind, they are the blessed proof of the dignity of man. John has an assured place among them. I'd say he is a charter member for his generation". Noam Chomsky said of Pilger: "John Pilger's work has been a beacon of light in often dark times. The realities he has brought to light have been a revelation, over and over again, and his courage and insight a constant inspiration". According to Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate and member of the Stop the War Coalition, "John Pilger is fearless. He unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is... I salute him". John Simpson, the BBC's world affairs editor, has said, "A country that does not have a John Pilger in its journalism is a very feeble place indeed". The Anglo-American writer Christopher Hitchens said of Pilger: "I remember thinking that his work from Vietnam was very good at the time. I dare say if I went back and read it again I'd probably still admire quite a lot of it. But there is a word that gets overused and can be misused – namely, anti-American – and it has to be used about him. So that for me sort of spoils it... even when I'm inclined to agree". Shortly after Pilger won the Sydney Peace Prize in 2009, the Australian commentator Gerard Henderson accused Pilger of "engaging in hyperbole against western democracies". The Economist Lexington columnist criticised Pilger's account of the Arab uprising, writing that he "thinks the Arab revolts show that the West in general and the United States in particular are 'fascist'", adding, "what most of the Arab protesters say they want are the very freedoms that they know full well, even if Pilger doesn't, to be available in the West". In Breaking the Silence: The Films of John Pilger, Anthony Hayward wrote, "For half a century, he has been an ever stronger voice for those without a voice and a thorn in the side of authority, the Establishment. His work, particularly his documentary films, has also made him rare in being a journalist who is universally known, a champion of those for whom he fights and the scourge of politicians and others whose actions he exposes". The New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait responded to Pilger's 13 May 2014 column in The Guardian about Ukraine. Chait wrote that Pilger was "defending Vladimir Putin on the grounds that he stands opposed to the United States, which is the font of all evil" and that his "attempt to cast land-grabbing, ultranationalist dictator Vladimir Putin as an enemy of fascism is comical". US Government funded Radio Free Europe claimed that Pilger's column contained a bogus quote regarding the Odessa massacre of May 2014. Legacy The John Pilger Archive is housed at the British Library. The papers can be accessed through the British Library catalogue. Bibliography Books The Last Day (1975) Aftermath: The Struggles of Cambodia and Vietnam (1981) The Outsiders (with Michael Coren, 1984) Heroes (1986), (2001) A Secret Country (1989) Distant Voices (1992 and 1994) Hidden Agendas (1998) Reporting the World: John Pilger's Great Eyewitness Photographers (2001) The New Rulers of the World (2002; 4th ed. 2016) Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs (ed.) Cape (2004) Freedom Next Time (2006) Plays The Last Day (1983) Documentaries World in Action "The Quiet Mutiny" (1970) Conversations With a Working Man (1971) Palestine Is Still The Issue (Part 1) (1974) Vietnam: Still America's War (1974) Guilty Until Proven Innocent (John Pilger) (1974) Thalidomide: The Ninety-Eight We Forgot (1974) The Most Powerful Politician in America (1974) One British Family (1974) Pilger "An Unfashionable Tragedy" (1975) "Nobody's Children" (1975) "Zap-The Weapon is Food" (1976) "Pyramid Lake is Dying" (1976) "Street of Joy" (1976) "A Faraway Country" (1977) Mr Nixon's Secret Legacy (1975) Smashing Kids] (1975) To Know Us Is To Love Us (1975) A Nod & A Wink (1975) Pilger in Australia (1976) Dismantling A Dream (1977) An Unjustifiable Risk (1977) The Selling of the Sea (1978) Do You Remember Vietnam (1978) Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979) The Mexicans (1980) Cambodia: Year One (1980) Heroes (1980) Island of Dreams (John Pilger)(1981) In Search of Truth in Wartime (1983) Nicaragua. A Nations Right to Survive (1983) The Outsiders (series, 1983) The Truth Game (1983) Burp! Pepsi V Coke in the Ice Cold War (1984) The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back (1985) Japan Behind the Mask (1987) The Last Dream (1988) "Heroes unsung" "Secrets" "Other People's Wars" Cambodia: Year Ten (1989) Cambodia, the Betrayal (1990) War By Other Means (1992) Cambodia: Return to Year Zero (1993) Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1994) Flying the Flag, Arming the World (1994) Vietnam: The Last Battle (1995) Inside Burma: Land of Fear (1996) Breaking the Mirror – The Murdoch Effect (1997) Apartheid Did Not Die (1998) Welcome to Australia (1999) Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq (2000) The New Rulers of the World (2001) Palestine Is Still the Issue (2002) Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror (2003) Stealing a Nation (2004) The War on Democracy (2007) The War You Don't See (2010) Utopia (2013) The Coming War on China (2016) The Dirty War on the NHS (2019) References External links Freedom Next Time: Filmmaker & Journalist John Pilger on Propaganda, the Press, Censorship and Resisting the American Empire, Democracy Now!, 7 August 2007 John Pilger at Random House Australia 1939 births Living people Anti-Americanism Australian documentary filmmakers Australian expatriates in the United Kingdom Australian freelance journalists Australian investigative journalists Australian people of English descent Australian people of German descent Australian people of Irish descent Australian war correspondents People educated at Sydney Boys High School People from Sydney War correspondents of the Nigerian Civil War War correspondents of the Vietnam War 20th-century Australian journalists 21st-century Australian journalists Daily Mirror people	false	[ "Shawcross is an English surname. Notable people with this surname include the following:\n\n Arthur Shawcross (1945–2008), American serial killer\n Christopher Nyholm Shawcross (1905–1973), English lawyer and politician; brother of Hartley Shawcross\n Conrad Shawcross (born 1977), English artist; son of William Shawcross\n David Shawcross (born 1941), former English footballer\n Hartley Shawcross, Baron Shawcross (1902–2003), English lawyer and politician\n Henry Douglas Shawcross (?–1913), English newspaper journalist and writer\n Neil Shawcross (born 1940), English artist\n Ryan Shawcross (born 1987), English footballer\n Val Shawcross, English Labour Party politician\n William Shawcross (born 1946), English writer, journalist and commentator, and charity administrator; son of Hartley Shawcross\n\nEnglish-language surnames", "William Hartley Hume Shawcross, (born 28 May 1946, in Sussex, England) is a British writer and commentator, and a former Chairman of the Charity Commission for England and Wales.\n\nCareer\nShawcross was educated at St Aubyns Preparatory School, Rottingdean, Eton College and University College, Oxford. He attended Saint Martin's School of Art to study sculpture after leaving Oxford, and worked as a journalist for The Sunday Times. In 1973, as a Congressional Fellow of the American Political Science Association, Shawcross worked in Washington, D.C. on the staffs of Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Representative Les Aspin.\n\nShawcross writes and lectures on issues of international policy, geopolitics, Southeast Asia and refugees, as well as the British royal family. He has written for a number of publications, including Time, Newsweek, International Herald Tribune, The Spectator, The Washington Post and Rolling Stone, in addition to writing numerous books.\n\nHis books include studies of recent international topics: the Prague Spring, the Vietnam War, the Iranian Revolution, the Iraq War, foreign assistance, humanitarian intervention, and the United Nations. Two of them, Sideshow and The Quality of Mercy, were included on The New York Times Book Reviews annual lists of the roughly 15 top books of the year for 1979 and 1984, respectively.\n\nSince 2002, he has also written several books about the British royal family, including the official biography of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, published in 2009. He writes glowingly about the royal family, for example in an April 2020 piece about Queen Elizabeth II captioned \"Thank God for the Queen\": \"One happy result of the horrible virus is that it has prompted the Queen to give us not one but two statements of her faith in this country and in God. Together they demonstrate vividly the exquisite, strong but light touch of our almost timeless monarch.\"\n\nShawcross was Chairman of ARTICLE 19, the international centre on censorship, from 1986 to 1996. He was a Member of the Council of the Disasters Emergency Committee from 1997 to 2002, and a board member of the International Crisis Group from 1995 to 2005.\n\nShawcross was a member of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees's Informal Advisory Group from 1995 to 2000. From 1997 to 2003, he was a member of the BBC World Service Advisory Council. In 2008, he became a Patron of the Wiener Library, and in 2011 he joined the board of the Anglo-Israel Association and was appointed to the board of the Henry Jackson Society.\n\nShawcross took up the Chairmanship of the Charity Commission for England and Wales on 1 October 2012, and was chairman until February 2018. His appointment to a second three-year term in 2015 was called \"controversial\" at the time, with some Labour Party members raising concerns about how it was handled. A January 2018 assessment of his tenure concluded that he \"won praise from government but heavy criticism from within the charity sector.\"\n\nIn March 2019, he was named by the UK Foreign Secretary as Special Representative on UK victims of Qadhafi-sponsored IRA terrorism. In March 2020, he delivered his report to the Foreign Secretary but, controversially, it was not made public.\n\nIn January 2021, the British government appointed Shawcross to head the review of Prevent, its anti-radicalisation programme. Amnesty International and 16 other human rights and “community” organisations announced they would boycott the review in protest at the appointment of William Shawcross as its chairman as they feared a “whitewash” because of his perceived anti-Muslim political positions.\n\nHe was appointed a Commissioner for Public Appointments in September 2021\n\nPolitical views\nShawcross's politics have been described as having moved to the right over the course of his life. His 1979 book on Cambodia, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, resulted in Shawcross's being \"lauded by liberal intellectuals and America's East Coast elite.\" The U.S. left continues to praise Shawcross's earlier work; for example, in September 2019, Sideshow was cited at length in an opinion piece in The Intercept defending Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.\n\nAs an initial indicator of how his views were shifting, in his 1990 introduction to the revised edition of his 1970 biography of Alexander Dubček, Shawcross wrote, \"My own principal criticism [of his own 1970 book] is that I did not realize adequately that the experiment of humane Communism, or Socialism with a Human Face, was impossible, perhaps even a contradiction in terms. . . . The last twenty years have shown nothing so much as the catastrophic nature of Communism everywhere. Wherever Communism has triumphed—I think particularly of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—its consequences have been utterly disastrous.\" In 1992, he wrote an \"admiring\" biography of Rupert Murdoch. In 1994, about his 1970s journalism from Vietnam, in light of subsequent abuses by the governments of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos, Shawcross wrote, \"I think I concentrated too easily on the corruption and incompetence of the South Vietnamese and their American allies, was too ignorant of the inhuman Hanoi regime, and far too willing to believe that a victory by the Communists would provide a better future.\" Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, he supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His 2003 selection by Buckingham Palace to write the authorised biography of the Queen Mother was described as drawing \"Shawcross into the bosom of the monarchy in a way rarely enjoyed by any layman\", and the resulting book led to him being described as a \"royalist writer.\" In November 2018 he appeared to walk back his 1979 criticism of Henry Kissinger in Sideshow; in an argument that Kissinger should be allowed to speak at New York University, Shawcross noted \"regret\" for the \"tone\" of his prior criticism of Kissinger, which he minimised as \"a policy disagreement over Cambodia\", as opposed to \"a moral crusade\", and he concluded that Kissinger \"is an extraordinary man who deserves respect.\"\n\nShawcross justified torture such as waterboarding at Guantánamo Bay.\n\nIn 2006, Shawcross warned of “a vast fifth column” of Muslims in Europe who “wish to destroy us”; we should not shy away from labelling the problem “Islamic fascism”.\n\nIn 2010, Shawcross described “Britain’s humiliation” by “mass immigration” and multiculturalism.\n\nIn November 2019 he took a position in support of Britain's exit from the European Union, on the basis of the E.U.'s problematic nature and approach, summarizing his position as \"There are risks in proceeding with Brexit. But there are far greater risks in abandoning it.\"\n\nThe change over time in Shawcross's politics has been compared to the political shifts of his father Sir Hartley Shawcross, Paul Johnson, and Christopher Hitchens. While noting speculation about other reasons for the shift, American journalist James Traub speculated that \"it's more instructive to consider the possibility that Shawcross has remained true to his principles, but that a morally driven foreign policy looks very different after 9/11 than it did before.\"\n\nSelected Books\n\nDubcek (1970, revised 1990)\nShawcross's first published book was a biography of Alexander Dubček, the leader of Czechoslovakia during the 1968 Prague Spring whose \"socialism with a human face\" briefly brought freedom into the Soviet Bloc. According to the introduction to the 1990 edition, the book's genesis was in Shawcross's travels to Czechoslovakia as a 22-year-old recent college graduate in 1968–69, when he witnessed the Prague Spring and its aftermath. In April 1969, as his first assignment, The Times sent Shawcross to Prague to report on Dubcek's deposition from power, which led him to decide \"I would like to write a book about Dubcek\", and to spend several months in Czechoslovakia researching it. The book concluded (grandiosely) that Dubcek \"was quite convinced that he had discovered in 1968 that for which philosophers and philanthropists have for centuries searched—the just society. He may have been right.\"\n\nThe New York Times Book Review, in December 1971, named Dubcek among the year's \"noteworthy titles\", describing it in a June 1971 capsule review as: \"Written less than a year after Alexander Dubcek's resignation, this biography of the Czech leader by a London journalist is an authoritative, first‐rate job.\"\n\nShawcross revised and reissued Dubcek in 1990 upon its subject's return to prominence and power during the Velvet Revolution, following two decades of rustication.\n\nCrime and Compromise: Janos Kadar and the Politics of Hungary Since Revolution (1974)\nShawcross next wrote \"a political study of Hungarian politician Janos Kadar\" who, like Dubcek, \"tried to negotiate with Communist dogmas to create more humane regimes.\" \nIn it, Shawcross argued that, following Kadar's 1956 betrayal of Hungarian President Imre Nagy, \"Kadar worked to reunite Hungary and succeeded in making it one of the most advanced countries in the Warsaw Pact in both economic and democratic terms.\"\n\nIn his mostly-favorable review in The Washington Post, Robert Dean, a CIA analyst, wrote that \"Shawcross has succeeded admirably in conveying a sense of the atmosphere which has come to prevail in the wake of the reform, and how a cautious reformist ethos and economic success have in turn shaped cultural life, social policies, and the attitudes of youth.\" Dean thought that the book portrayed Kadar less well than it did Hungary: \"One senses that Shawcross would have liked to have produced a biography of Kadar but was stymied by the incompleteness of information.\"\n\nSideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (1979)\nSideshow is, at least in the United States, Shawcross's best known and most controversial book. To write it, Shawcross interviewed over 300 people and reviewed thousands of U.S Government documents, some classified Top Secret, obtained using the Freedom of Information Act. Sideshow exposed the secret bombing of Cambodia conducted by U.S. President Richard Nixon and his advisor Henry Kissinger, and argued that Nixon's and Kissinger's policy \"led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the subsequent massacre of a third of Cambodia's population,\" According to one summary, Sideshow \"denounces the systematic destruction of Cambodia by the Nixon Administration as a consequence of the Vietnam War and for the sake of a mere strategic design. The study stresses how the decision to attack a neutral country was a patent violation of the American Constitution. As in his previous two books, Shawcross combines an interest in international policies with a private focus on the personal relationship between Nixon and Kissinger. The study argues that the President and his Secretary of State reproduced in their international relations the same pattern of falsehood that characterized their own personal association.\" The book's penultimate, conclusory sentence—\"Cambodia was not a mistake; it was a crime\"—is frequently quoted; whenever Shawcross's lifetime of writing is reduced to one sentence, that's it.\n\nSideshow received high praise and awards. The Pulitzer Prize jury recommended a special citation for it in the 1980 awards based on its \"extraordinary qualities\", although it was ineligible for the prize because its author was not American; the Pulitzer board declined that recommendation, however. The New York Times Book Review selected Sideshow among its top 17 \"Editor's Choice\" books of 1979, describing it as an \"indictment\" of Kissinger and Nixon. It won the George Polk Award in Journalism's Book Award for 1979. Columnist Anthony Lewis wrote in The New York Times, \"I think it is the most interesting and the most important book on American foreign policy in many years. On more than foreign policy, really: on the American constitutional system. For it is a textbook — a gripping, factual textbook — on what can happen when the system is violated.\" John Leonard of The New York Times wrote that in addition to being \"meticulous[ly]\" documented, \"it has the sweep and the shadow of a spy novel as it portrays the surreal world of power, severed from morality, paranoid, feeding on itself.\"\n\nKissinger, who declined Shawcross's interview requests when the book was being written, vociferously denounced Sideshow, as did American conservatives. In an angry letter to The Economist, Kissinger described the book as \"obscene\" and \"absurd.\" Observing that both Sideshow and Kissinger's memoir, White House Years, were included among The New York Times Book Reviews best books of 1979, Herbert Mitgang asked each author about the other's volume. Kissinger called Sideshow \"a shoddy, outrageous work that is filled with inaccuracies,\" adding, \"And you can quote me.\" Following the publication of Sideshow, Peter Rodman, an aide to Kissinger, concluded that Shawcross's work was \"a fraud\" and \"a compendium of errors, sleight of hand, and egregious selectivity\", according to R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., who published Rodman's criticism in his conservative magazine, The American Spectator. Shawcross, in turn, described Rodman's critique as \"a rotten piece of work\" and wrote a response (\"demonstrating the fallacies, if not the fraud, of almost all of Mr. Rodman's points\"), which The American Spectator published, with Rodman's further reply.\n Shawcross included the entire exchange in later editions of Sideshow. Tyrrell proclaimed Sideshow the \"worst book of the year\" in the Washington Post, as did his magazine. Shawcross later became friends with Tyrrell and Rodman. In 2007, Shawcross and Rodman co-wrote a New York Times op-ed, referring to their past differences over Cambodia but jointly arguing against U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. When Rodman died in 2008, Shawcross was \"much saddened\", as he later wrote, and sent Tyrrell a note expressing his grief. And in 2011, The American Spectator ceremonially revoked its 1979 \"worst book of the year\" award, on grounds that subsequently \"Shawcross has become increasingly sound\" in his views, at a London lunch among Shawcross and Tyrrell.\n\nThe Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984)\nThe Quality of Mercy again addresses Cambodia, but as a critical assessment of the aid and relief efforts of governments, UN bodies, and international relief agencies following the suffering inflicted on that country by its Khmer Rouge government and by its neighbour, Vietnam. Shawcross's book portrays, in the words of Colin Campbell's New York Times review, \"a humanitarian outpouring that was shot through with misrepresentations, incompetence, callousness and shirking of principle.\" The book finds positives and negatives of each player, but overall, the United States, in particular the U.S. Embassy in Thailand and its Ambassador, Morton Abramowitz, \"comes out looking pretty good. Vietnam appears to have been the main obstacle to the Cambodians' relief.\"\n\nThe Quality of Mercy has received less attention than some of Shawcross's other books, but is highly regarded by some critics, while also receiving negative criticism from others. The historian and Cambodia expert Ben Kiernan, who was \"Shawcross's interpreter for several weeks\" when he was researching the book, wrote a long critical essay. The Australian journalist John Pilger—who is criticised in The Quality of Mercy, and the two men have a continuing history of public disagreements—reportedly attacked Shawcross in a New Statesman review as a \"born-again cold warrior.\" But Ed Vulliamy, in The Guardian, called it \"Shawcross's bravest, most complicated and astute work\", commenting that \"the little-known Quality of Mercy examined and challenged deficiencies in the international aid programme to Cambodia, which lavished assistance on the remnants of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, perpetuating the violence.\" The editors of The New York Times Book Review included it among their fifteen \"Editor's Choice\" books, as the best books of 1984. Colin Campbell, in The New York Times, concluded, \"This is a startling book and most of it is very persuasive.\" He stated that on most counts, \"Mr. Shawcross's subtlety and lack of sanctimony are remarkable.\" He also considers it \"noteworthy that a journalist who in the past attacked American policy so fiercely has, in this book, portrayed at least the United States Embassy in Bangkok as one of the best informed and most decently efficient actors in the refugee drama.\" Human rights activist Aryeh Neier, reviewing The Quality of Mercy in The New York Times Book Review, similarly stated that \"a reader cannot help but be impressed by his apparent fairness\" and called it \"a splendid book that will have a profound impact.\" He concluded that The Quality of Mercy \"may well be the best account we have of the politics of international charity.\"\n\nThe Quality of Mercy was republished in 1985 with an additional final chapter, \"Report from Ethiopia—May 1985\", describing the then-ongoing relief effort in response to the Ethiopian famine in light of the Cambodian experience. Shawcross drew a number of lamentable parallels, for example that \"in Ethiopia as well as Cambodia, humanitarian aid was being used by a Communist regime to underwrite war.\" The essay concluded, \"In neither Cambodia nor Ethiopia did the ordinary people for whom the aid was delivered benefit from it to the extent which had been intended and which they deserved. Instead aid was being used to prolong rather than to end the disaster.\"\n\nThe Shah's Last Ride (1988)\nThis book's US subtitle was \"The Fate of an Ally;\" its 1989 UK subtitle was \"The Story of the Exile, Misadventures and Death of the Emperor.\" The Shah's Last Ride is, in the words of its prologue, \"the story of a journey, the Shah's forlorn journey into exile and death, and of various elements of his rule—his relations with the British and Americans, his secret police, SAVAK, the CIA, oil, the arms trade. The tale of the fall and exile of the Shah is one which illustrates the nature of relationship between states and leaders. It is a story of loyalty and convenience.\" It retraces the odyssey of the last Shah of Iran after being driven into exile by the Iranian Revolution, first to Egypt, and then in succession to Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico, the United States, Panama, and finally back to Egypt, where he died. Shawcross traces his own interest in Iran to the 1960s: \"Ardeshir Zahedi, the Shah's Ambassador to London, became a firm friend of my family then, and has remained so since.\" As a further family connection, Shawcross's father \"was once President of the Iran Society in Britain.\"\n\nMany reviewers praised The Shah's Last Ride for the high quality of its narrative and storytelling, with praise such as \"a compelling, evenhanded, artful book, more like a novel than a history;\" Much of what criticism the book received arose from its narrow focus. One Middle East expert, Daniel Pipes, wrote that Shawcross \"has done his best to eke out the details of this sad, small tale. But this reader concludes that he has pretty much wasted his time, and Shawcross himself seems to know it.\" Another, Zalmay Khalilzad (later Republican-appointed U.S. Ambassador to, successively, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations), criticised the book for not highlighting the Carter administration's failures in its dealings with the Shah. A third Middle East expert, Fouad Ajami, criticised Shawcross for telling the Shah's story as a sympathetic (or at least pathetic) tale of \"the woes of an ailing, old man, dying of cancer\" rather than one of an oppressive dictator and his long, brutal reign. Ajami further criticised Shawcross's choice of sources from the Shah's circle, and his credulous attitude toward them. In a critique that may have foreshadowed Shawcross's later writing about another royal family, Ajami posited that Shawcross's sources, including the Shah's twin sister, Princess Ashraf, were able to work their royal charms to disarm his reportorial skepticism.\n\nMurdoch (1992)\nIn a change from international affairs, Shawcross next wrote a biography of Rupert Murdoch. Its 1992 UK title was Rupert Murdoch: Ringmaster of the Information Circus; it was published in the US in 1993 as Murdoch: The Making of a Media Empire. New York Times reviewer Herbert Mitgang commented there was a \"red flag\" present: Shawcross had let Murdoch read a draft before publication, violating \"an unwritten rule for the most esteemed American biographers.\" The pundit Andrew Sullivan, in The New York Times Book Review, described Murdoch as \"what a Murdoch paper would surely call a suck-up.\"\n\nDespite the issues raised, Mitgang's review was generally positive, while Sullivan wrote that Shawcross, albeit \"unwittingly\", \"achieved something very valuable\", in \"expos[ing] the banality of a highly sophisticated and successful businessman\", and \"plac[ing] the real issue behind the story of Mr. Murdoch's career—the nature of a democratic culture—away from the petty demonization of an entrepreneur and on the larger forces that have determined his fate.\" The Economist made a similar point in a more straightforward way: \"Although this is a fine, superbly-researched and vivid book on the Murdoch enigma, the enigma remains.\"\n\nThe 1992 publication of Murdoch raised a brief flurry in the literary world. The New Yorker, then edited by Tina Brown, published a short Talk of the Town piece by Francis Wheen, wondering how \"could Willie Shawcross, who made his name in the seventies with Sideshow, an indignant expose of Henry Kissinger's destruction of Cambodia, become Murdoch's hagiographer?\" David Cornwall, better known by his nom de plume John le Carré, wrote a responsive letter in defense of Shawcross, calling Wheen's essay \"one of the ugliest pieces of partisan journalism that I have witnessed in a long life of writing.\" Brown said she would only publish Cornwall's letter if he cut it to one paragraph, he released it to the press instead, and the contretemps drew much media attention.\n\nDeliver Us From Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords, and a World of Endless Conflict (2000)\nDeliver Us From Evil overviews the work of the United Nations during the 1990s to ameliorate situations in many of the world's trouble spots of that decade, largely as seen through the eyes of Kofi Annan, whom Shawcross accompanied on his travels.\n\nReviews were mixed to negative. Some meted out limited praise: \"highly readable, if at times repetitive and scattershot,\" \"admirably fair in his judgments,\" and \"thoughtful but inconclusive\" as well as \"a useful reality check for all those well-meaning people who clamor for the United Nations to do something.\"\n\nAt the most negative end of the spectrum, a capsule review in The New Yorker concluded: \"Shawcross's reporting here is often secondhand; his prose is dreary; and his thinking (which frequently takes refuge in anti-Americanism) is lazy. The result is an insult to the gravity of the issues he purports to address, and—worse—to the anguish of the world's politically endangered peoples.\" Shawcross's optimistic attitude \"as a booster for the UN\" was criticised as unwarranted by reviewers from left and right, with all arguing the UN has a long record of failures. His identifying Cambodia as a UN success story drew particular quibbles, while several found fault with the book's analytical conclusions (or, more precisely, its lack thereof).\n\nRobert Kagan, reviewing it for Commentary, labelled Deliver Us From Evil \"little more than an exercise in liberal handwringing.\"\n\nThe more balanced reviewers, witness New Zealand diplomat Terence O'Brien who was on the ground at UN Headquarters for large parts of Shawcross' tale during the ascendancy of Bill Clinton, paint it as excellent first-hand history and feel that it \"is unlikely soon to be bettered\", terming his book sharp and comprehensive. \"Shawcross enjoys a reputation as a chronicler of the blemishes in modern international behaviour... The response of the so-called international community to the continuing rash of internal conflict is subjected to clinical appraisal\" might have triggered some reviewers' esprit de corps so readers are well-advised to read and judge for themselves.\n\nAllies (2003)\nLike other Shawcross books, Allies was published under two different subtitles, in a 2003 hardback as \"The U.S., Britain, and Europe in the Aftermath of the Iraq War\", and in a 2005 paperback as \"Why the West Had to Remove Saddam.\" The book has been described as a polemic, rather than a work of journalism, with some commentators observing that, unlike other books by Shawcross, it has no footnotes. One critic wrote of Shawcross as \"a vocal supporter of President George W. Bush's War on Terror and praises Tony Blair's interventionist policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, writing off criticism of the two leaders as hysterical.\"\n\nRegarding Shawcross's position in Allies compared to his prior positions, especially in Sideshow, the reviewer in The New York Times asked \"What's going on here?\" while the conservative U.S. journals The National Review and The American Spectator were surprised and laudatory. The National Review wrote, \"Shawcross has written an outstanding justification of the Anglo-American effort to drive Saddam Hussein from power. It is an exemplary piece of moral clarity and fine writing.\"\n\nJustice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11, and the Trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (2011)\nJustice and the Enemy considered the George W. Bush administration's post-9/11 military commissions in light of the Nuremberg trials. In it, according to the law professor and former U.S. Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith, Shawcross \"provides a deeply sympathetic account of how\" the Bush administration resolved \"difficult choices and trade-offs in deciding how to bring justice to the perpetrators of 9/11.\"\n\nThe Economists review of Justice and the Enemy found the book lacked \"original research on al-Qaeda\", its Nuremberg comparisons unhelpful, and its author \"keener to score points against all those who roundly condemn President George Bush's strategy\" than to draw useful conclusions. The Independent described it as a \"shameless justification of the policies of the Bush administration\" in which \"justice is a surreal concept totally subordinate to the \"security\" of the US\".\n\nPrivate life and honours\nShawcross's father was the politician, lawyer, Chief British Prosecutor at Nuremberg and life peer Hartley Shawcross. His mother was Joan Winifred Mather, who died in a riding accident on the Sussex Downs in 1974.\n\nIn 1970, he married the writer and art critic Marina Warner, and their son, Conrad, is an artist. The marriage ended in divorce in 1980.\n\nShawcross married Michal Levin in 1981. Their daughter, Eleanor, was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers to George Osborne from 2008. She had previously worked on Boris Johnson's mayoral campaign. Eleanor is married to Simon Wolfson, Baron Wolfson, who is the son of David Wolfson, Baron Wolfson of Sunningdale, Conservative life peers and the current and former Next chairman.\n\nShawcross married his third wife, Olga Polizzi, in 1993. His stepdaughter is the hotelier and television presenter Alex Polizzi.\n\nHe has lifelong ties to Cornwall where he is a keen campaigner in the preservation and protection of local Conservation Areas. His campaign succeeded in obtaining Grade II listing for St Mawes's historic and endangered sea wall.\n\nHe was appointed Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (CVO) in the 2011 New Year Honours.\n\nPublications\nDubcek: Dubcek and Czechoslovakia 1918–1968 (1970, revised ed. 1990)\nWatergate: The Full Inside Story (co-author, 1973)\nCrime and Compromise: Janos Kadar and the Politics of Hungary since Revolution (1974)\nSideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (1979), New York Times Editor's Choice Book of the Year, awarded a George Polk Award\nThe Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984), New York Times Editor's Choice Book of the Year, awarded the Freedom From Hunger Media Award\nThe Shah's Last Ride (1988)\nKowtow!: A Plea on Behalf of Hong Kong (1989)\nMurdoch: The Making of a Media Empire (also published as Rupert Murdoch: Ringmaster of the Information Circus) (1992)\nCambodia's New Deal (1994)\nDeliver us from Evil: Warlords, Peacekeepers and a World of Endless Conflict (2000)\nQueen and Country: The Fifty-Year Reign of Elizabeth II (2002)\nAllies (2003)\nQueen Elizabeth The Queen Mother: The Official Biography (2009)\nJustice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11, and the Trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (2011)\nCounting One's Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (2012) (editor) \nThe Servant Queen and the King She Serves (2016)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nWilliam Shawcross on GOV.UK\nWilliam Shawcross on The Guardian\n\n1946 births\nLiving people\nBritish people of English descent\nPeople educated at St. Aubyns School\nPeople educated at Eton College\nAlumni of University College, Oxford\nCommanders of the Royal Victorian Order\nEnglish biographers\nBritish biographers\n20th-century biographers\n21st-century biographers\nBritish male journalists\nCampaign Against Psychiatric Abuse\nWilliam Shawcross\nMale biographers\nForte family\nSons of life peers" ]
[ "John Pilger", "Responses by William Shawcross and others", "Did William Shawcross right any books?", "that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and Francois Ponchaud." ]	C_81f47291a0304f7d81c3ee5545e66d08_1	What other authors had reviews or responses ?	2	What other authors besides William Shawcross had reviews or responses?	John Pilger	William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984) about Pilger's series of articles about Cambodia in the Daily Mirror during August 1979: "A rather interesting quality of the articles was their concentration on Nazism and the holocaust. Pilger called Pol Pot 'an Asian Hitler' -- and said he was even worse than Hitler . . . Again and again Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis. Their Marxist-Leninist ideology was not even mentioned in the Mirror, except to say they were inspired by the Red Guards. Their intellectual origins were described as 'anarchist' rather than Communist". Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards. Kiernan notes instances where other writers' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account, or not mentioned. Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and Francois Ponchaud. Nonetheless, the reaction to the stories in Britain was as if they were something quite new." Oliver Kamm asserted in 2006: "Pilger's documentaries are full of falsehoods. They operate by misdirection, simultaneously denouncing one form of injustice while ignoring or denying others". In Heroes, Pilger disputes Francois Ponchaud and Shawcross's account of Vietnamesse atrocities during the Vietnamese invasion and near famine as being "unsubstantiated". Ponchard had interviewed members of anti-communist groups living in the Thai refugee border camps. According to Pilger, "At the very least the effect of Shawcross's 'expose'" of Cambodian's treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese "was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: in truth. a difference of night and day". In his book, Shawcross himself doubted that anyone had died of starvation. CANNOTANSWER	Ben Kiernan,	John Richard Pilger (; born 9 October 1939) is an Australian journalist, writer, scholar, and documentary filmmaker. He has been mainly based in Britain since 1962. He is also currently Visiting Professor at Cornell University in New York. Pilger is a strong critic of American, Australian, and British foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by an imperialist and colonialist agenda. Pilger has also criticised his native country's treatment of Indigenous Australians. He first drew international attention for his reports on the Cambodian genocide. His career as a documentary film maker began with The Quiet Mutiny (1970), made during one of his visits to Vietnam, and has continued with over 50 documentaries since. Other works in this form include Year Zero (1979), about the aftermath of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1993). His many documentary films on indigenous Australians include The Secret Country (1985) and Utopia (2013). In the British print media, Pilger worked at the Daily Mirror from 1963 to 1986, and wrote a regular column for the New Statesman magazine from 1991 to 2014. Pilger won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award in 1967 and 1979. His documentaries have gained awards in Britain and worldwide, including multiple BAFTA honours. The practices of the mainstream media are a regular subject in Pilger's writing. Early life John Richard Pilger was born on 9 October 1939 in Bondi, New South Wales, the son of Claude and Elsie Pilger. His older brother, Graham (1932–2017), was a disabled rights activist who later advised the government of Gough Whitlam. Pilger is of German descent on his father's side, while his mother had English, German, and Irish ancestry; two of his maternal great-great-grandparents were Irish convicts transported to Australia. His mother taught French in school. Pilger and his brother attended Sydney Boys High School, where he began a student newspaper, The Messenger. He later joined a four-year journalist trainee scheme with the Australian Consolidated Press. Journalism and television career Journalism Beginning his career in 1958 as a copy boy with the Sydney Sun, Pilger later moved to the city's Daily Telegraph, where he was a reporter, sports writer, and sub-editor. He also freelanced and worked for the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, the daily paper's sister title. After moving to Europe, he was a freelance correspondent in Italy for a year. Settling in London in 1962, working as a sub-editor, Pilger joined British United Press and then Reuters on its Middle-East desk. In 1963 he was recruited by the English Daily Mirror, again as a sub-editor. Later, he advanced to become a reporter, a feature writer, and Chief Foreign Correspondent for the title. While living and working in the United States for the Daily Mirror, on 5 June 1968 he witnessed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles during his presidential campaign. He was a war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra. Nearly eighteen months after Robert Maxwell bought the Mirror (on 12 July 1984), Pilger was sacked by Richard Stott, the newspaper's editor, on 31 December 1985. Pilger was a founder of the News on Sunday tabloid in 1984, and was hired as Editor-in-Chief in 1986. During the period of hiring staff, Pilger was away for several months filming The Secret Country in Australia. Prior to this, he had given editor Keith Sutton a list of people who he thought might be recruited for the paper, but found on his return to Britain that none of them had been hired. Pilger resigned before the first issue and had come into conflict with those around him. He disagreed with the founders' decision to base the paper in Manchester and then clashed with the governing committees; the paper was intended to be a workers' co-operative. Sutton's appointment as editor was Pilger's suggestion, but he fell out with Sutton over his plan to produce a left wing Sun newspaper. The two men ended up producing their own dummies, but the founders and the various committees backed Sutton. Pilger, appointed with "overall editorial control", resigned at this point. The first issue appeared on 27 April 1987 and The News on Sunday soon closed. Pilger returned to the Mirror in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks, while Piers Morgan was editor. His most frequent outlet for many years was the New Statesman, where he had a fortnightly column from 1991 when Steve Platt was editor to 2014. In 2018, Pilger said his "written journalism is no longer welcome" in the mainstream and that "probably its last home" was in The Guardian. His last column for The Guardian was in April 2015. Television With the actor David Swift, and the film makers Paul Watson and Charles Denton, Pilger formed Tempest Films in 1969. "We wanted a frontman with a mind of his own, rather like another James Cameron, with whom Richard [Marquand] had worked", Swift once said. "Paul thought John was very charismatic, as well as marketing extremely original, refreshingly radical ideas." The company was unable to gain commissions from either the BBC or ITV, but did manage to package potential projects. Pilger's career on television began on World in Action (Granada Television) in 1969, directed by Denton, for whom he made two documentaries broadcast in 1970 and 1971, the earliest of more than fifty in his career. The Quiet Mutiny (1970) was filmed at Camp Snuffy, presenting a character study of the common US soldier during the Vietnam War. It revealed the shifting morale and open rebellion of American troops. Pilger later described the film as "something of a scoop" – it was the first documentary to show the problems with morale among the drafted ranks of the US military. In an interview with the New Statesman, Pilger said: When I flew to New York and showed it to Mike Wallace, the star reporter of CBS' 60 Minutes, he agreed. "Real shame we can't show it here". He made other documentaries about the United States involvement in Vietnam, including Vietnam: Still America's War (1974), Do You Remember Vietnam? (1978), and Vietnam: The Last Battle (1995). During his work with BBC's Midweek television series during 1972–73, Pilger completed five documentary reports, but only two were broadcast. Pilger was successful in gaining a regular television outlet at ATV. The Pilger half-hour documentary series was commissioned by Charles Denton, then a producer with ATV, for screening on the British ITV network. The series ran for five seasons from 1974 until 1977, at first running in the UK on Sunday afternoons after Weekend World. The theme song for the series was composed by Lynsey de Paul. Later it was scheduled in a weekday peak-time evening slot. The last series included "A Faraway Country" (September 1977) about dissidents in Czechoslovakia, then still part of the Communist Soviet bloc. Pilger and his team interviewed members of Charter 77 and other groups, clandestinely using domestic film equipment. In the documentary Pilger praises the dissidents' courage and commitment to freedom, and describes the communist totalitarianism as "fascism disguised as socialism". Pilger was later given an hour slot at 9 pm, before News at Ten, which gave him a high profile in Britain. After ATV lost its franchise in 1981, he continued to make documentaries for screening on ITV, initially for Central, and later via Carlton Television. Documentaries and career: 1978–2000 Cambodia In 1979, Pilger and two colleagues with whom he collaborated for many years, documentary film-maker David Munro and photographer Eric Piper, entered Cambodia in the wake of the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime. They made photographs and reports that were world exclusives. The first was published as a special issue of the Daily Mirror, which sold out. They also produced an ITV documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, which brought to people's living rooms the suffering of the Khmer people. During the filming of Cambodia Year One, the team were warned that Pilger was on a Khmer Rouge 'death list.' In one incident, they narrowly escaped an ambush. Following the showing of Year Zero, some $45 million was raised, unsolicited, in mostly small donations, including almost £4 million raised by schoolchildren in the UK. This funded the first substantial relief to Cambodia, including the shipment of life-saving drugs such as penicillin, and clothing to replace the black uniforms people had been forced to wear. According to Brian Walker, director of Oxfam, "a solidarity and compassion surged across our nation" from the broadcast of Year Zero. William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984) about Pilger's series of articles about Cambodia in the Daily Mirror during August 1979: A rather interesting quality of the articles was their concentration on Nazism and the holocaust. Pilger called Pol Pot 'an Asian Hitler' — and said he was even worse than Hitler . . . Again and again Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis. Their Marxist-Leninist ideology was not even mentioned in the Mirror, except to say they were inspired by the Red Guards. Their intellectual origins were described as 'anarchist' rather than Communist". Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards. Kiernan notes instances where other writers' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account, or not mentioned. Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and François Ponchaud. In Heroes, Pilger disputes François Ponchaud and Shawcross's account of Vietnamese atrocities during the Vietnamese invasion and near famine as being "unsubstantiated". Ponchaud had interviewed members of anti-communist groups living in the Thai refugee border camps. According to Pilger, "At the very least the effect of Shawcross's 'exposé'" of Cambodians' treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese "was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: in truth, a difference of night and day". In his book, Shawcross himself doubted that anyone had died of starvation. Pilger and Munro made four later films about Cambodia. Pilger's documentary Cambodia – The Betrayal (1990), prompted a libel case against him, which was settled at the High Court with an award against Pilger and Central Television. The Times of 6 July 1991 reported: Two men who claimed that a television documentary accused them of being SAS members who trained Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to lay mines, accepted "very substantial" libel damages in the High Court yesterday. Christopher Geidt and Anthony De Normann settled their action against the journalist John Pilger and Central Television on the third day of the hearing. Desmond Browne, QC, for Mr Pilger and Central Television, said his clients had not intended to allege the two men trained the Khmer Rouge to lay mines, but they accepted that was how the program had been understood. Pilger said the defence case collapsed because the government issued a gagging order, citing national security, which prevented three government ministers and two former heads of the SAS from appearing in court. The film received a British Academy of Film and Television Award nomination in 1991. Australia's Indigenous peoples Pilger has long criticised aspects of Australian government policy, particularly what he regards as its inherent racism resulting in the poor treatment of Indigenous Australians. In 1969, Pilger went with Australian activist Charlie Perkins on a tour to Jay Creek in Central Australia. He compared what he witnessed in Jay Creek to South African apartheid. He saw the appalling conditions that the Aboriginal people were living under, with children suffering from malnutrition and grieving mothers and grandmothers having had their lighter-skinned children and grandchildren removed by the police and welfare agencies. Equally, he learned of Aboriginal boys being sent to work on white run farms, and Aboriginal girls working as servants in middle-class homes as undeclared slave labour. Pilger has made several documentaries about Indigenous Australians, such as The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back (1985) and Welcome to Australia (1999). His book on the subject, A Secret Country, was first published in 1989. Pilger wrote in 2000 that the 1998 legislation that removed the common-law rights of Indigenous peoples: is just one of the disgraces that has given Australia the distinction of being the only developed country whose government has been condemned as racist by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Pilger returned to this subject with Utopia, released in 2013 (see below). East Timor Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy In East Timor Pilger clandestinely shot Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy about the brutal Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which began in 1975. Death of a Nation contributed to an international outcry which ultimately led to Indonesian withdrawal from East Timor and eventual independence in 2000. When Death of a Nation was screened in Britain it was the highest rating documentary in 15 years and 5,000 telephone calls per minute were made to the programme's action line. When Death of a Nation was screened in Australia in June 1994, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans declared that Pilger "had a track record of distorted sensationalism mixed with sanctimony." Documentaries and career since 2000 Palestine Is Still the Issue Pilger's documentary Palestine Is Still the Issue was released in 2002 and had Ilan Pappé as historical adviser. Pilger said the film describes how an "historic injustice has been done to the Palestinian people, and until Israel's illegal and brutal occupation ends, there will be no peace for anyone, Israelis included". He said the responses of his interviewees "put the lie to the standard Zionist cry that any criticism of Israel is anti-semitic, a claim that insults all those Jewish people who reject the likes of Ariel Sharon acting in their name". Its broadcast resulted in complaints by the Israeli embassy, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the Conservative Friends of Israel that it was inaccurate and biased. Michael Green, chairman of Carlton Communications, the company that made the film, also objected to it in an interview with the Jewish Chronicle. The UK television regulator, the Independent Television Commission (ITC), ordered an investigation. The ITC investigation rejected the complaints about the film, stating in its report: The ITC raised with Carlton all the significant areas of inaccuracy critics of the programme alleged and the broadcaster answered them by reference to a range of historical texts. The ITC is not a tribunal of fact and is particularly aware of the difficulties of verifying 'historical fact' but the comprehensiveness and authority of Carlton's sources were persuasive, not least because many appeared to be of Israeli origin. The ITC concluded that in Pilger's documentary "adequate opportunity was given to a pro-Israeli government perspective" and that the programme "was not in breach of the ITC Programme Code". Stealing a Nation Pilger's documentary Stealing a Nation (2004) recounts the experiences of the late 20th-century trials of the people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The documentary primarily focuses on the expulsion of the Chagossians by Britain and the USA between 1967 and 1973 to Mauritius, and the poor economic situation faced by the islanders as a result of the deportation. Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos Islands, was given to the United States government which began the construction of a major military base for the region. In the 21st century, the US used the base for planes which were bombing targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a 2000 ruling on the events, the International Court of Justice described the wholesale removal of the Chagossian peoples from the Chagos Islands by Britain as "a crime against humanity". Pilger strongly criticised Tony Blair for failing to respond in a substantive way to the 2000 High Court ruling that the expulsion of the Chagossian people to Mauritius was illegal. In March 2005, Stealing a Nation received the Royal Television Society Award. Latin America: The War on Democracy (2007) The documentary The War on Democracy (2007) was Pilger's first film to be released in the cinema. In "an unremitting assault on American foreign policy since 1945", according to Andrew Billen in The Times, the film explores the role of US interventions, overt and covert, in toppling a series of governments in the region, and placing "a succession of favourably disposed bullies in control of its Latino backyard". It discusses the US role in the overthrow in 1973 of the democratically elected Chilean leader Salvador Allende, who was replaced by the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who purportedly took part in secret campaigns against democratic governments in South America. It also contains what Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian described as "a dewy-eyed interview" with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, which has moments of "almost Hello!-magazine deference". Pilger explores the US Army School of the Americas in the US state of Georgia. Generations of South American military were trained there, with a curriculum including counter-insurgency techniques. Attendees reportedly included members of Pinochet's security services, along with men from Haiti, El Salvador, Argentina and Brazil who have been implicated in human rights abuses. The film also details the attempted overthrow of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez in 2002. The people of Caracas rose up to force his return to power. It looks at the wider rise of populist governments across South America, led by figures calling for loosening ties with the United States and attempting a more equitable redistribution of the continent's natural wealth. Of "Chávez's decision to bypass the National Assembly for 18 months, and rule by decree", Peter Bradshaw writes "Pilger passes over it very lightly". Pilger said the film is about the struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery. These people, he says,describe a world not as American presidents like to see it as useful or expendable, they describe the power of courage and humanity among people with next to nothing. They reclaim noble words like democracy, freedom, liberation, justice, and in doing so they are defending the most basic human rights of all of us in a war being waged against all of us. The War on Democracy won the Best Documentary category at the One World Media Awards in 2008. The War You Don't See (2010) The subject of The War You Don’t See is the role of the media in making war. It concentrates on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories. It begins with the Collateral Murder video leaked by Chelsea Manning and released by WikiLeaks. In an interview, Julian Assange describes WikiLeaks as an organisation that gives power to ‘conscientious objectors’ within ‘power systems’. The documentary contends that the CIA uses intelligence to manipulate public opinion and that the media collude by following the official line. During the documentary Pilger states that "propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home". John Lloyd in the Financial Times said The War You Don't See was a "one-sided" documentary which "had no thought of explaining, even hinting, that the wars fought by the US and the UK had a scrap of just cause, nor of examining the nature of what Pilger simply stated were "lies" – especially those that took the two countries to the invasion of Iraq". Support for Julian Assange Pilger supported Julian Assange by pledging bail in December 2010. Pilger said at the time: "There's no doubt that he is not going to abscond". Assange sought asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in 2012 and Pilger's bail money was lost when a judge ordered it to be forfeited. Pilger has been critical of the media's treatment of Assange saying: "The same brave newspapers and broadcasters that have supported Britain’s part in epic bloody crimes, from the genocide in Indonesia to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, now attack the “human rights record” of Ecuador, whose real crime is to stand up to the bullies in London and Washington". He criticised the failure of the Australian government to object when it "repeatedly received confirmation that the US was conducting an “unprecedented” pursuit of Assange" and noted that one of the reasons Ecuador gave for granting asylum to Assange was his abandonment by Australia. Pilger visited Assange in the embassy and has continued to support him. Utopia (2013) With Utopia, Pilger returned to the experiences of Indigenous Australians and what he termed "the denigrating of their humanity". A documentary feature film, it takes its title from Utopia, an Aboriginal homeland (also known as an outstation) in the Northern Territory. Pilger says that "in essence, very little" has changed since the first of his seven films about the Aboriginal people, A Secret Country: The First Australians (1985). In an interview with the UK based Australian Times he commented: "the catastrophe imposed on Indigenous Australians is the equivalent of apartheid, and the system has to change". Reviewing the film, Peter Bradshaw wrote: "The awful truth is that Indigenous communities are on mineral-rich lands that cause mouths to water in mining corporation boardrooms". "When the subject and subjects are allowed to speak for themselves – when Pilger doesn't stand and preach – the injustices glow like throbbing wounds", wrote Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times, but the documentary maker "goes on too long. 110 minutes is a hefty time in screen politics, especially when we know the makers' message from scene one". Geoffrey Macnab described it as an "angry, impassioned documentary" while for Mark Kermode it is a "searing indictment of the ongoing mistreatment" of the first Australians. The Coming War on China (2016) The Coming War on China was Pilger's 60th film for ITV. The film premiered in the UK on Thursday 1 December 2016, and was shown on ITV at 10.40 pm on Tuesday 6 December and on the Australian public broadcaster SBS on 16 April 2017. In the documentary, according to Pilger, "the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency. The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way. They are on the western borders of Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China. Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an 'existential threat' to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs". "The first third told, and told well, the unforgivable, unconscionable tale of what has overtaken the Marshall Islanders since 1946, when the US first nuked the test site on Bikini Atoll" beginning an extended series of tests, wrote Euan Ferguson in The Observer. "Over the next 12 years they would unleash a total of 42.2 megatons. The islanders, as forensically proved by Pilger, were effectively guinea pigs for [the] effects of radiation". Ferguson wrote that the rest of the film "was a sane, sober, necessary, deeply troubling bucketful of worries". Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian wrote that the film "lays bare the historical horrors of the US military in the Pacific, exposing the paranoia and pre-emptive aggression of its semi-secret bases," adding: "This is a gripping film, which though it comes close to excusing China ... does point out China's insecurities and political cruelties". Neil Young of The Hollywood Reporter called the film an "authoritative indictment of American nefariousness in the western Pacific". Kevin Maher wrote in The Times that he admired the early sequences on the Marshall Islands, but that he believed the film lacked nuance or subtlety. Maher wrote that, for Pilger, China is "a brilliant place with just some 'issues with human rights', but let's not go into that now". Diplomat columnist David Hutt said "Pilger consistently glosses over China's past crimes while dwelling on America's". Caitlin Johnstone of Scoop called the film "powerful" and praised it for showing "the USA's generations-long history of provocation and hostility toward [China's] government. It also addresses the silly projection so many westerners harbor that if the US wasn't bullying and slaughtering the world into compliance, China would take over doing the same." The Dirty War on the National Health Service (2019) Pilger's The Dirty War on the National Health Service was released in the UK on 29 November 2019 and examined the changes that the NHS has undergone since its founding in 1948. Pilger makes the case that governments beginning with that of Margaret Thatcher have waged a secret war against the NHS with a view to privatising it slowly and surreptitiously. Pilger predicted that moves toward privatisation would create more poverty and homelessness and that the resulting chaos would be used as an argument for further "reform". Peter Bradshaw described the documentary as a "fierce, necessary film". Views (1999–present) Bush, Blair, Howard and wars In 2003 and 2004, Pilger criticised United States President George W. Bush, saying that he had used the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq as part of a strategy to increase US control of the world's oil supplies. In 2004, Pilger criticised British Prime Minister Tony Blair as equally responsible for the invasion and the bungled occupation of Iraq. In 2004, as the Iraq insurgency increased, Pilger wrote that the anti-war movement should support "Iraq's anti-occupation resistance: We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the "Bush gang" will attack another country". Pilger described Australian Prime Minister John Howard as "the mouse that roars for America, whipping his country into war fever and paranoia about terrorism within". He thought Howard's willingness to "join the Bush/Blair assault on Iraq ... evok[ed] a melancholy history of obsequious service to great power: from the Boxer Rebellion to the Boer war, to the disaster at Gallipoli, and Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf". On 25 July 2005, Pilger ascribed blame for the 2005 London bombings that month to Blair. He wrote that Blair's decision to follow Bush helped to generate the rage that Pilger said precipitated the bombings. In his column a year later, Pilger described Blair as a war criminal for supporting Israel's actions during the 2006 Israel–Lebanon conflict. He said that Blair gave permission to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 to initiate what would ultimately become Operation Defensive Shield. In 2014, Pilger wrote that "The truth about the criminal bloodbath in Iraq cannot be "countered" indefinitely. Neither can the truth about our support for the medievalists in Saudi Arabia, the nuclear-armed predators in Israel, the new military fascists in Egypt and the jihadist "liberators" of Syria, whose propaganda is now BBC news". Barack Obama Pilger criticised Barack Obama during his presidential campaign of 2008, saying that he was "a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan" and his theme "was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully". After Obama was elected and took office in 2009, Pilger wrote, "In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government". Sunny Hundal wrote in The Guardian during November 2008 that the "Uncle Tom" slur used against Obama "highlights a patronising attitude towards ethnic minorities. Pilger expects all black and brown people to be revolutionary brothers and sisters, and if they veer away from that stereotype, it can only be because they are pawns of a wider conspiracy". Comments about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton In a February 2016 webchat on the website of The Guardian newspaper, Pilger said "Trump is speaking straight to ordinary Americans". Although his opinions about immigration were "gross", Pilger wrote that they are "no more gross in essence than, say, David Cameron's – he is not planning to invade anywhere, he doesn't hate the Russians or the Chinese, he is not beholden to Israel. People like this lack of cant, and when the so-called liberal media deride him, they like him even more". In March 2016, Pilger commented in a speech delivered at the University of Sydney during the 2016 United States presidential election, that Donald Trump was a less dangerous potential President of the United States than Hillary Clinton. In November 2016, Pilger said that "notorious terrorist jihadist group called ISIL or ISIS is created largely with money from [the government of Saudi and the government of Qatar] who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation". In August 2017, in an article published on his website, Pilger wrote that a "coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently made clear he does not want war with Russia. This glimpse of sanity, or simple pragmatism, is anathema to the 'national security' managers who guard a system based on war, surveillance, armaments, threats and extreme capitalism". According to Pilger, The Guardian has published "drivel" in covering the claims "that the Russians conspired with Trump". Such assertions, he writes, are "reminiscent of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as a 'Soviet agent'". Russia On the Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, Wiltshire on 4 March 2018, Pilger said in an interview on RT: "This is a carefully constructed drama as part of the propaganda campaign that has been building now for several years in order to justify the actions of NATO, Britain and the United States, towards Russia. That’s a fact". Such events as the Iraq War, "at the very least should make us sceptical of Theresa May’s theatrics in Parliament". He hinted that the UK government may have been involved in the attack, saying it had motive and that the nearby Porton Down laboratory has a "long and sinister record with nerve gas and chemical weapons". China According to Pilger, "American bases form a giant noose encircling China with missiles, bombers, warships - all the way from Australia through the Pacific to Asia and beyond. ... There are no Chinese naval ships and no Chinese bases off California". Brexit On voting to leave the European Union, Pilger wrote in 2016 "The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media.This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and demoralised by the sheer arrogance of the apologists for the "remain" campaign and the dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain. The last bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service, has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is fighting for its life." Criticism of the mainstream media Pilger has criticised many journalists of the mainstream media. During the administration of President Bill Clinton in the US, Pilger attacked the British-American Project as an example of "Atlanticist freemasonry". He asserted in November 1998 that "many members are journalists, the essential foot soldiers in any network devoted to power and propaganda". In 2002, he said that "many journalists now are no more than channellers and echoers of what Orwell called the official truth". In 2003, he criticised what he called the "liberal lobby" which "promote killing" from "behind a humanitarian mask". He said David Aaronovitch exemplified the "mask-wearers" and noted that Aaronovitch had written that the attack on Iraq will be "the easy bit". Aaronovitch responded to an article by Pilger about the mainstream media in 2003 as one of his "typical pieces about the corruption of most journalists (ie people like me [Aaronovitch]) versus the bravery of a few (ie people like him)". On another occasion, while speaking to journalism students at the University of Lincoln, Pilger said that mainstream journalism means corporate journalism. As such, he believes it represents vested corporate interests more than those of the public. In September 2014, Pilger wrote critically of The Guardian and other western media, regarding their reporting on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, writing "Without a single piece of evidence, the US and its NATO allies and their media machines blamed ethnic Russian 'separatists' in Ukraine and implied that Moscow was ultimately responsible". He asserted that "the newspaper has made no serious attempt to examine who shot the aeroplane down and why". In January 2020, Pilger tweeted scepticism of contemporary mainstream narratives about the downing of MH17, and the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 over Iran, saying "Lie upon lie. Hiroshima necessary to defeat Japan. Vietnam attacked US ships in Gulf of Tonkin. Saddam Hussein had WMD. Libya invaded to prevent massacre. Russia shot down MH17/put Trump in the White House. The US, not Russia, defeated Isis. Add Iran shot down Ukrainian airliner". BBC Pilger wrote in December 2002, of British broadcasting's requirement for "impartiality" as being "a euphemism for the consensual view of established authority". He wrote that "BBC television news faithfully echoed word for word" government "propaganda designed to soften up the public for Blair's attack on Iraq". In his documentary The War You Don't See (2010), Pilger returned to this theme and accused the BBC of failing to cover the viewpoint of the victims, civilians caught up in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has additionally pointed to the 48 documentaries on Ireland made for the BBC and ITV between 1959 and the late-1980s which were delayed or altered before transmission, or totally suppressed. Personal life Pilger was married to journalist Scarth Flett, granddaughter of the physician and geologist Sir John Smith Flett. Their son Sam was born in 1973 and is a sports writer. Pilger also has a daughter, Zoe Pilger, born 1984, with journalist Yvonne Roberts. Zoe is an author and art critic. Honours and awards The Press Awards, formerly the British Press Awards 1966: Descriptive Writer of the Year 1967: Journalist of the Year 1970: International Reporter of the Year 1974: News Reporter of the Year 1978: Campaigning Journalist of the Year 1979: Journalist of the Year Other awards 1991: Television Richard Dimbleby Award, BAFTA 1991: At 19th International Emmy Awards Emmy for documentary 'Cambodia, the Betrayal' 2009: Sydney Peace Prize 2011: Grierson Trust Award, UK 2017: Order of Timor-Leste Reception Martha Gellhorn, the American novelist, journalist and war correspondent, said that "[John Pilger] has taken on the great theme of justice and injustice... He documents and proclaims the official lies that we are told and that most people accept or don't bother to think about. [He] belongs to an old and unending worldwide company, the men and women of conscience. Some are as famous as Tom Paine and William Wilberforce, some as unknown as a tiny group calling itself Grandmothers Against The Bomb.... If they win, it is slowly; but they never entirely lose. To my mind, they are the blessed proof of the dignity of man. John has an assured place among them. I'd say he is a charter member for his generation". Noam Chomsky said of Pilger: "John Pilger's work has been a beacon of light in often dark times. The realities he has brought to light have been a revelation, over and over again, and his courage and insight a constant inspiration". According to Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate and member of the Stop the War Coalition, "John Pilger is fearless. He unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is... I salute him". John Simpson, the BBC's world affairs editor, has said, "A country that does not have a John Pilger in its journalism is a very feeble place indeed". The Anglo-American writer Christopher Hitchens said of Pilger: "I remember thinking that his work from Vietnam was very good at the time. I dare say if I went back and read it again I'd probably still admire quite a lot of it. But there is a word that gets overused and can be misused – namely, anti-American – and it has to be used about him. So that for me sort of spoils it... even when I'm inclined to agree". Shortly after Pilger won the Sydney Peace Prize in 2009, the Australian commentator Gerard Henderson accused Pilger of "engaging in hyperbole against western democracies". The Economist Lexington columnist criticised Pilger's account of the Arab uprising, writing that he "thinks the Arab revolts show that the West in general and the United States in particular are 'fascist'", adding, "what most of the Arab protesters say they want are the very freedoms that they know full well, even if Pilger doesn't, to be available in the West". In Breaking the Silence: The Films of John Pilger, Anthony Hayward wrote, "For half a century, he has been an ever stronger voice for those without a voice and a thorn in the side of authority, the Establishment. His work, particularly his documentary films, has also made him rare in being a journalist who is universally known, a champion of those for whom he fights and the scourge of politicians and others whose actions he exposes". The New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait responded to Pilger's 13 May 2014 column in The Guardian about Ukraine. Chait wrote that Pilger was "defending Vladimir Putin on the grounds that he stands opposed to the United States, which is the font of all evil" and that his "attempt to cast land-grabbing, ultranationalist dictator Vladimir Putin as an enemy of fascism is comical". US Government funded Radio Free Europe claimed that Pilger's column contained a bogus quote regarding the Odessa massacre of May 2014. Legacy The John Pilger Archive is housed at the British Library. The papers can be accessed through the British Library catalogue. Bibliography Books The Last Day (1975) Aftermath: The Struggles of Cambodia and Vietnam (1981) The Outsiders (with Michael Coren, 1984) Heroes (1986), (2001) A Secret Country (1989) Distant Voices (1992 and 1994) Hidden Agendas (1998) Reporting the World: John Pilger's Great Eyewitness Photographers (2001) The New Rulers of the World (2002; 4th ed. 2016) Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs (ed.) Cape (2004) Freedom Next Time (2006) Plays The Last Day (1983) Documentaries World in Action "The Quiet Mutiny" (1970) Conversations With a Working Man (1971) Palestine Is Still The Issue (Part 1) (1974) Vietnam: Still America's War (1974) Guilty Until Proven Innocent (John Pilger) (1974) Thalidomide: The Ninety-Eight We Forgot (1974) The Most Powerful Politician in America (1974) One British Family (1974) Pilger "An Unfashionable Tragedy" (1975) "Nobody's Children" (1975) "Zap-The Weapon is Food" (1976) "Pyramid Lake is Dying" (1976) "Street of Joy" (1976) "A Faraway Country" (1977) Mr Nixon's Secret Legacy (1975) Smashing Kids] (1975) To Know Us Is To Love Us (1975) A Nod & A Wink (1975) Pilger in Australia (1976) Dismantling A Dream (1977) An Unjustifiable Risk (1977) The Selling of the Sea (1978) Do You Remember Vietnam (1978) Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979) The Mexicans (1980) Cambodia: Year One (1980) Heroes (1980) Island of Dreams (John Pilger)(1981) In Search of Truth in Wartime (1983) Nicaragua. A Nations Right to Survive (1983) The Outsiders (series, 1983) The Truth Game (1983) Burp! Pepsi V Coke in the Ice Cold War (1984) The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back (1985) Japan Behind the Mask (1987) The Last Dream (1988) "Heroes unsung" "Secrets" "Other People's Wars" Cambodia: Year Ten (1989) Cambodia, the Betrayal (1990) War By Other Means (1992) Cambodia: Return to Year Zero (1993) Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1994) Flying the Flag, Arming the World (1994) Vietnam: The Last Battle (1995) Inside Burma: Land of Fear (1996) Breaking the Mirror – The Murdoch Effect (1997) Apartheid Did Not Die (1998) Welcome to Australia (1999) Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq (2000) The New Rulers of the World (2001) Palestine Is Still the Issue (2002) Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror (2003) Stealing a Nation (2004) The War on Democracy (2007) The War You Don't See (2010) Utopia (2013) The Coming War on China (2016) The Dirty War on the NHS (2019) References External links Freedom Next Time: Filmmaker & Journalist John Pilger on Propaganda, the Press, Censorship and Resisting the American Empire, Democracy Now!, 7 August 2007 John Pilger at Random House Australia 1939 births Living people Anti-Americanism Australian documentary filmmakers Australian expatriates in the United Kingdom Australian freelance journalists Australian investigative journalists Australian people of English descent Australian people of German descent Australian people of Irish descent Australian war correspondents People educated at Sydney Boys High School People from Sydney War correspondents of the Nigerian Civil War War correspondents of the Vietnam War 20th-century Australian journalists 21st-century Australian journalists Daily Mirror people	true	[ "The International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews, better known as PROSPERO, is an open access online database of systematic review protocols on a wide range of topics. While it was initially restricted to medicine, , it also accepts protocols in criminology, social care, education and international development, as long as there is a health-related outcome. Researchers can choose to have their reviews prospectively registered with PROSPERO. The database is produced by the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at the University of York in England, and it is funded by the National Institute for Health Research. Registration of systematic reviews in the database has been supported by PLoS Medicine, BioMed Central, the EQUATOR Network, and BMJ editor-in-chief Fiona Godlee, among others.\n\nHistory\nAfter the PRISMA statement was published in 2010, the University of York responded to its recommendation for prospective systematic review registration by beginning development of an online database of systematic reviews. The resulting PROSPERO database was launched in February 2011 by Frederick Curzon, 7th Earl Howe, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health. It was simultaneously launched at a Vancouver, Canada meeting organized by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research that month. By October 2011, the database included 200 records of systematic reviews that were being conducted at the time. In October 2013, the Cochrane Collaboration began automatically including protocols of its systematic reviews in PROSPERO. By October 10, 2017, the number of registered reviews in the database had increased to 26,535.\n\nResponses\nIn 2017, concern was raised that some protocols in PROSPERO could be \"zombie reviews\" for which the protocol had been registered, but its record in the database had not been updated to indicate that it had been completed. Andrade et al. showed that only 7% of all reviews registered in PROSPERO from 2011 to 2015 had since been marked as \"completed\". These authors suggested that many of these reviews were either abandoned, meaning they had not been completed or published, or, if they had been completed, had not had their PROSPERO record updated to reflect this. Sideri et al. (2018) showed that orthodontics-related systematic reviews that were registered in PROSPERO were on average of higher methodological quality than those not so registered. Proportion of registration in systems other than PROSPERO in the systematic review protocol is 1% from 2011 to 2020.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n\nDatabases in England\nEnglish websites\nHealth in Yorkshire\nInternet properties established in 2011\nMedical databases in the United Kingdom\nOnline databases\nSystematic review\nUniversity of York\n2011 establishments in England", "Open peer review is the various possible modifications of the traditional scholarly peer review process. The three most common modifications to which the term is applied are: \n Open identities: Authors and reviewers are aware of each other's identity.\n Open reports: Review reports are published alongside the relevant article (rather than being kept confidential).\n Open participation: The wider community (and not just invited reviewers) are able to contribute to the review process.\n\nThese modifications are supposed to address various perceived shortcomings of the traditional scholarly peer review process, in particular its lack of transparency, lack of incentives, and wastefulness.\n\nDefinitions\n\nOpen identities\nOpen peer review may be defined as \n\"any scholarly review mechanism providing disclosure of author and referee identities to one another at any point during the peer review or publication process\".\nThen reviewer's identities may or may not be disclosed to the public. \nThis is in contrast to the traditional peer review process where reviewers remain anonymous to anyone but the journal's editors, while authors' names are disclosed from the beginning.\n\nOpen reports\nOpen peer review may be defined as making the reviewers' reports public, instead of disclosing them to the article's authors only. This may include publishing the rest of the peer review history, i.e. the authors' replies and editors' recommendations. Most often, this concerns only articles that are accepted for publication, and not those that are rejected.\n\nOpen participation\nOpen peer review may be defined as allowing self-selected reviewers to comment on an article, rather than (or in addition to) having reviewers who are selected by the editors. This assumes that the text of the article is openly accessible. The self-selected reviewers may or may not be screened for their basic credentials, and they may contribute either short comments or full reviews.\n\nAdoption\n\nAdoption by publishers \nThese publishers and journals operate various types of open peer review:\n Publishers:\n BioMed Central\n BMJ Group \n Copernicus Publications\n European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO)\n Nature Research\n Journals:\n eLife\n GigaScience\n PeerJ\n PLOS\n ReScience C\n Semantic Web journal by IOS Press\n WikiJournal\n SciPost\n\nPeer review at The BMJ, BioMed Central, EMBO, eLife, ReScience C, and the Semantic Web journal involves posting the entire pre-publication history of the article online, including not only signed reviews of the article, but also its previous versions and in some cases names of handling editors and author responses to the reviewers. Furthermore, eLife plans to publish the reviews not only for published articles, but also for rejected articles.\n\nThe European Geosciences Union operates public discussions where open peer review is conducted before suitable articles are accepted for publication in the journal.\n\nSci, an open access journal which covers all research fields, adapted a post publication public peer-review (P4R) in which it promised authors immediate visibility of their manuscripts on the journal's online platform after a brief and limited check of scientific soundness and proper reporting and against plagiarism and offensive material; the manuscript is rendered open for public review by the entire community.\n\nOpen peer review of preprints\nSome platforms, including some preprint servers, facilitate open peer review of \npreprints. \n In 2019, the preprint server BioRxiv started allowing posting reviews alongside preprints, in addition to allowing comments on preprints. The reviews can come from journals or from platforms such as Review Commons.\n In 2020, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the platform Outbreak Science Rapid PREreview was launched in order to perform rapid open peer review of preprints related to emerging outbreaks. The platform initially worked with preprints from medRxiv, bioRxiv and arXiv.\n\nAdvantages and disadvantages\n\nArgued \nOpen identities have been argued to incite reviewers to be \"more tactful and constructive\" than they would be if they could remain anonymous, while however allowing authors to accumulate enemies who try to keep their papers from being published or their grant applications from being successful.\n\nOpen peer review in all its forms has been argued to favour more honest reviewing, and to prevent reviewers from following their individual agendas.\n\nAn article by Lonni Besançon et al. has also argued that open peer review helps evaluate the legitimacy of manuscripts that contain editorial conflict of interests; the authors argue that the COVID-19 pandemic has spurred many publishers to open up their review process, increasing transparency in the process.\n\nObserved\nIn an experiment with 56 research articles accepted by the Medical Journal of Australia in 1996–1997, the articles were published online together with the peer reviewers' comments; readers could email their comments and the authors could amend their articles further before print publication. The investigators concluded that the process had modest benefits for authors, editors and readers.\n\nSome studies have found that open identities lead to an increase in the quality of reviews, while other studies find no significant effect.\n\nOpen peer review at BMJ journals has lent itself to randomized trials to study open identity and open report reviews. These studies did not find that open identities and open reports significantly affected the quality of review or the rate of acceptance of articles for publication, and there was only one reported instance of a conflict between authors and reviewers (\"adverse event\"). The only significant negative effect of open peer review was \"increasing the likelihood of reviewers declining to review\".\n\nIn some cases, open identities have helped detect reviewers' conflicts of interests.\n\nOpen participation has been criticised as being a form of popularity contest in which well known authors are more likely to get their manuscripts reviewed than others. However, even with this implementation of Open Peer Reviews, both authors and reviewers acknowledged that Open Reviews could lead to a higher quality of reviews, foster collaborations and reduce the \"cite-me\" effect.\n\nAccording to a 2020 Nature editorial, experience from Nature Communications negates the concerns that open reports would be less critical, or would require an excessive amount of work from reviewers.\n\nSee also\n Open peer commentary\n Open research\n Open science\n Open science data\n\nReferences \n\nPeer review\nOpen science\nMetascience" ]
[ "John Pilger", "Responses by William Shawcross and others", "Did William Shawcross right any books?", "that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and Francois Ponchaud.", "What other authors had reviews or responses ?", "Ben Kiernan," ]	C_81f47291a0304f7d81c3ee5545e66d08_1	What was Ben Kiernan's response?	3	What was Ben Kiernan's response to the work of John Updike?	John Pilger	William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984) about Pilger's series of articles about Cambodia in the Daily Mirror during August 1979: "A rather interesting quality of the articles was their concentration on Nazism and the holocaust. Pilger called Pol Pot 'an Asian Hitler' -- and said he was even worse than Hitler . . . Again and again Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis. Their Marxist-Leninist ideology was not even mentioned in the Mirror, except to say they were inspired by the Red Guards. Their intellectual origins were described as 'anarchist' rather than Communist". Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards. Kiernan notes instances where other writers' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account, or not mentioned. Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and Francois Ponchaud. Nonetheless, the reaction to the stories in Britain was as if they were something quite new." Oliver Kamm asserted in 2006: "Pilger's documentaries are full of falsehoods. They operate by misdirection, simultaneously denouncing one form of injustice while ignoring or denying others". In Heroes, Pilger disputes Francois Ponchaud and Shawcross's account of Vietnamesse atrocities during the Vietnamese invasion and near famine as being "unsubstantiated". Ponchard had interviewed members of anti-communist groups living in the Thai refugee border camps. According to Pilger, "At the very least the effect of Shawcross's 'expose'" of Cambodian's treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese "was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: in truth. a difference of night and day". In his book, Shawcross himself doubted that anyone had died of starvation. CANNOTANSWER	notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror,	John Richard Pilger (; born 9 October 1939) is an Australian journalist, writer, scholar, and documentary filmmaker. He has been mainly based in Britain since 1962. He is also currently Visiting Professor at Cornell University in New York. Pilger is a strong critic of American, Australian, and British foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by an imperialist and colonialist agenda. Pilger has also criticised his native country's treatment of Indigenous Australians. He first drew international attention for his reports on the Cambodian genocide. His career as a documentary film maker began with The Quiet Mutiny (1970), made during one of his visits to Vietnam, and has continued with over 50 documentaries since. Other works in this form include Year Zero (1979), about the aftermath of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1993). His many documentary films on indigenous Australians include The Secret Country (1985) and Utopia (2013). In the British print media, Pilger worked at the Daily Mirror from 1963 to 1986, and wrote a regular column for the New Statesman magazine from 1991 to 2014. Pilger won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award in 1967 and 1979. His documentaries have gained awards in Britain and worldwide, including multiple BAFTA honours. The practices of the mainstream media are a regular subject in Pilger's writing. Early life John Richard Pilger was born on 9 October 1939 in Bondi, New South Wales, the son of Claude and Elsie Pilger. His older brother, Graham (1932–2017), was a disabled rights activist who later advised the government of Gough Whitlam. Pilger is of German descent on his father's side, while his mother had English, German, and Irish ancestry; two of his maternal great-great-grandparents were Irish convicts transported to Australia. His mother taught French in school. Pilger and his brother attended Sydney Boys High School, where he began a student newspaper, The Messenger. He later joined a four-year journalist trainee scheme with the Australian Consolidated Press. Journalism and television career Journalism Beginning his career in 1958 as a copy boy with the Sydney Sun, Pilger later moved to the city's Daily Telegraph, where he was a reporter, sports writer, and sub-editor. He also freelanced and worked for the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, the daily paper's sister title. After moving to Europe, he was a freelance correspondent in Italy for a year. Settling in London in 1962, working as a sub-editor, Pilger joined British United Press and then Reuters on its Middle-East desk. In 1963 he was recruited by the English Daily Mirror, again as a sub-editor. Later, he advanced to become a reporter, a feature writer, and Chief Foreign Correspondent for the title. While living and working in the United States for the Daily Mirror, on 5 June 1968 he witnessed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles during his presidential campaign. He was a war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra. Nearly eighteen months after Robert Maxwell bought the Mirror (on 12 July 1984), Pilger was sacked by Richard Stott, the newspaper's editor, on 31 December 1985. Pilger was a founder of the News on Sunday tabloid in 1984, and was hired as Editor-in-Chief in 1986. During the period of hiring staff, Pilger was away for several months filming The Secret Country in Australia. Prior to this, he had given editor Keith Sutton a list of people who he thought might be recruited for the paper, but found on his return to Britain that none of them had been hired. Pilger resigned before the first issue and had come into conflict with those around him. He disagreed with the founders' decision to base the paper in Manchester and then clashed with the governing committees; the paper was intended to be a workers' co-operative. Sutton's appointment as editor was Pilger's suggestion, but he fell out with Sutton over his plan to produce a left wing Sun newspaper. The two men ended up producing their own dummies, but the founders and the various committees backed Sutton. Pilger, appointed with "overall editorial control", resigned at this point. The first issue appeared on 27 April 1987 and The News on Sunday soon closed. Pilger returned to the Mirror in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks, while Piers Morgan was editor. His most frequent outlet for many years was the New Statesman, where he had a fortnightly column from 1991 when Steve Platt was editor to 2014. In 2018, Pilger said his "written journalism is no longer welcome" in the mainstream and that "probably its last home" was in The Guardian. His last column for The Guardian was in April 2015. Television With the actor David Swift, and the film makers Paul Watson and Charles Denton, Pilger formed Tempest Films in 1969. "We wanted a frontman with a mind of his own, rather like another James Cameron, with whom Richard [Marquand] had worked", Swift once said. "Paul thought John was very charismatic, as well as marketing extremely original, refreshingly radical ideas." The company was unable to gain commissions from either the BBC or ITV, but did manage to package potential projects. Pilger's career on television began on World in Action (Granada Television) in 1969, directed by Denton, for whom he made two documentaries broadcast in 1970 and 1971, the earliest of more than fifty in his career. The Quiet Mutiny (1970) was filmed at Camp Snuffy, presenting a character study of the common US soldier during the Vietnam War. It revealed the shifting morale and open rebellion of American troops. Pilger later described the film as "something of a scoop" – it was the first documentary to show the problems with morale among the drafted ranks of the US military. In an interview with the New Statesman, Pilger said: When I flew to New York and showed it to Mike Wallace, the star reporter of CBS' 60 Minutes, he agreed. "Real shame we can't show it here". He made other documentaries about the United States involvement in Vietnam, including Vietnam: Still America's War (1974), Do You Remember Vietnam? (1978), and Vietnam: The Last Battle (1995). During his work with BBC's Midweek television series during 1972–73, Pilger completed five documentary reports, but only two were broadcast. Pilger was successful in gaining a regular television outlet at ATV. The Pilger half-hour documentary series was commissioned by Charles Denton, then a producer with ATV, for screening on the British ITV network. The series ran for five seasons from 1974 until 1977, at first running in the UK on Sunday afternoons after Weekend World. The theme song for the series was composed by Lynsey de Paul. Later it was scheduled in a weekday peak-time evening slot. The last series included "A Faraway Country" (September 1977) about dissidents in Czechoslovakia, then still part of the Communist Soviet bloc. Pilger and his team interviewed members of Charter 77 and other groups, clandestinely using domestic film equipment. In the documentary Pilger praises the dissidents' courage and commitment to freedom, and describes the communist totalitarianism as "fascism disguised as socialism". Pilger was later given an hour slot at 9 pm, before News at Ten, which gave him a high profile in Britain. After ATV lost its franchise in 1981, he continued to make documentaries for screening on ITV, initially for Central, and later via Carlton Television. Documentaries and career: 1978–2000 Cambodia In 1979, Pilger and two colleagues with whom he collaborated for many years, documentary film-maker David Munro and photographer Eric Piper, entered Cambodia in the wake of the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime. They made photographs and reports that were world exclusives. The first was published as a special issue of the Daily Mirror, which sold out. They also produced an ITV documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, which brought to people's living rooms the suffering of the Khmer people. During the filming of Cambodia Year One, the team were warned that Pilger was on a Khmer Rouge 'death list.' In one incident, they narrowly escaped an ambush. Following the showing of Year Zero, some $45 million was raised, unsolicited, in mostly small donations, including almost £4 million raised by schoolchildren in the UK. This funded the first substantial relief to Cambodia, including the shipment of life-saving drugs such as penicillin, and clothing to replace the black uniforms people had been forced to wear. According to Brian Walker, director of Oxfam, "a solidarity and compassion surged across our nation" from the broadcast of Year Zero. William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984) about Pilger's series of articles about Cambodia in the Daily Mirror during August 1979: A rather interesting quality of the articles was their concentration on Nazism and the holocaust. Pilger called Pol Pot 'an Asian Hitler' — and said he was even worse than Hitler . . . Again and again Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis. Their Marxist-Leninist ideology was not even mentioned in the Mirror, except to say they were inspired by the Red Guards. Their intellectual origins were described as 'anarchist' rather than Communist". Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards. Kiernan notes instances where other writers' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account, or not mentioned. Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and François Ponchaud. In Heroes, Pilger disputes François Ponchaud and Shawcross's account of Vietnamese atrocities during the Vietnamese invasion and near famine as being "unsubstantiated". Ponchaud had interviewed members of anti-communist groups living in the Thai refugee border camps. According to Pilger, "At the very least the effect of Shawcross's 'exposé'" of Cambodians' treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese "was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: in truth, a difference of night and day". In his book, Shawcross himself doubted that anyone had died of starvation. Pilger and Munro made four later films about Cambodia. Pilger's documentary Cambodia – The Betrayal (1990), prompted a libel case against him, which was settled at the High Court with an award against Pilger and Central Television. The Times of 6 July 1991 reported: Two men who claimed that a television documentary accused them of being SAS members who trained Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to lay mines, accepted "very substantial" libel damages in the High Court yesterday. Christopher Geidt and Anthony De Normann settled their action against the journalist John Pilger and Central Television on the third day of the hearing. Desmond Browne, QC, for Mr Pilger and Central Television, said his clients had not intended to allege the two men trained the Khmer Rouge to lay mines, but they accepted that was how the program had been understood. Pilger said the defence case collapsed because the government issued a gagging order, citing national security, which prevented three government ministers and two former heads of the SAS from appearing in court. The film received a British Academy of Film and Television Award nomination in 1991. Australia's Indigenous peoples Pilger has long criticised aspects of Australian government policy, particularly what he regards as its inherent racism resulting in the poor treatment of Indigenous Australians. In 1969, Pilger went with Australian activist Charlie Perkins on a tour to Jay Creek in Central Australia. He compared what he witnessed in Jay Creek to South African apartheid. He saw the appalling conditions that the Aboriginal people were living under, with children suffering from malnutrition and grieving mothers and grandmothers having had their lighter-skinned children and grandchildren removed by the police and welfare agencies. Equally, he learned of Aboriginal boys being sent to work on white run farms, and Aboriginal girls working as servants in middle-class homes as undeclared slave labour. Pilger has made several documentaries about Indigenous Australians, such as The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back (1985) and Welcome to Australia (1999). His book on the subject, A Secret Country, was first published in 1989. Pilger wrote in 2000 that the 1998 legislation that removed the common-law rights of Indigenous peoples: is just one of the disgraces that has given Australia the distinction of being the only developed country whose government has been condemned as racist by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Pilger returned to this subject with Utopia, released in 2013 (see below). East Timor Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy In East Timor Pilger clandestinely shot Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy about the brutal Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which began in 1975. Death of a Nation contributed to an international outcry which ultimately led to Indonesian withdrawal from East Timor and eventual independence in 2000. When Death of a Nation was screened in Britain it was the highest rating documentary in 15 years and 5,000 telephone calls per minute were made to the programme's action line. When Death of a Nation was screened in Australia in June 1994, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans declared that Pilger "had a track record of distorted sensationalism mixed with sanctimony." Documentaries and career since 2000 Palestine Is Still the Issue Pilger's documentary Palestine Is Still the Issue was released in 2002 and had Ilan Pappé as historical adviser. Pilger said the film describes how an "historic injustice has been done to the Palestinian people, and until Israel's illegal and brutal occupation ends, there will be no peace for anyone, Israelis included". He said the responses of his interviewees "put the lie to the standard Zionist cry that any criticism of Israel is anti-semitic, a claim that insults all those Jewish people who reject the likes of Ariel Sharon acting in their name". Its broadcast resulted in complaints by the Israeli embassy, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the Conservative Friends of Israel that it was inaccurate and biased. Michael Green, chairman of Carlton Communications, the company that made the film, also objected to it in an interview with the Jewish Chronicle. The UK television regulator, the Independent Television Commission (ITC), ordered an investigation. The ITC investigation rejected the complaints about the film, stating in its report: The ITC raised with Carlton all the significant areas of inaccuracy critics of the programme alleged and the broadcaster answered them by reference to a range of historical texts. The ITC is not a tribunal of fact and is particularly aware of the difficulties of verifying 'historical fact' but the comprehensiveness and authority of Carlton's sources were persuasive, not least because many appeared to be of Israeli origin. The ITC concluded that in Pilger's documentary "adequate opportunity was given to a pro-Israeli government perspective" and that the programme "was not in breach of the ITC Programme Code". Stealing a Nation Pilger's documentary Stealing a Nation (2004) recounts the experiences of the late 20th-century trials of the people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The documentary primarily focuses on the expulsion of the Chagossians by Britain and the USA between 1967 and 1973 to Mauritius, and the poor economic situation faced by the islanders as a result of the deportation. Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos Islands, was given to the United States government which began the construction of a major military base for the region. In the 21st century, the US used the base for planes which were bombing targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a 2000 ruling on the events, the International Court of Justice described the wholesale removal of the Chagossian peoples from the Chagos Islands by Britain as "a crime against humanity". Pilger strongly criticised Tony Blair for failing to respond in a substantive way to the 2000 High Court ruling that the expulsion of the Chagossian people to Mauritius was illegal. In March 2005, Stealing a Nation received the Royal Television Society Award. Latin America: The War on Democracy (2007) The documentary The War on Democracy (2007) was Pilger's first film to be released in the cinema. In "an unremitting assault on American foreign policy since 1945", according to Andrew Billen in The Times, the film explores the role of US interventions, overt and covert, in toppling a series of governments in the region, and placing "a succession of favourably disposed bullies in control of its Latino backyard". It discusses the US role in the overthrow in 1973 of the democratically elected Chilean leader Salvador Allende, who was replaced by the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who purportedly took part in secret campaigns against democratic governments in South America. It also contains what Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian described as "a dewy-eyed interview" with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, which has moments of "almost Hello!-magazine deference". Pilger explores the US Army School of the Americas in the US state of Georgia. Generations of South American military were trained there, with a curriculum including counter-insurgency techniques. Attendees reportedly included members of Pinochet's security services, along with men from Haiti, El Salvador, Argentina and Brazil who have been implicated in human rights abuses. The film also details the attempted overthrow of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez in 2002. The people of Caracas rose up to force his return to power. It looks at the wider rise of populist governments across South America, led by figures calling for loosening ties with the United States and attempting a more equitable redistribution of the continent's natural wealth. Of "Chávez's decision to bypass the National Assembly for 18 months, and rule by decree", Peter Bradshaw writes "Pilger passes over it very lightly". Pilger said the film is about the struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery. These people, he says,describe a world not as American presidents like to see it as useful or expendable, they describe the power of courage and humanity among people with next to nothing. They reclaim noble words like democracy, freedom, liberation, justice, and in doing so they are defending the most basic human rights of all of us in a war being waged against all of us. The War on Democracy won the Best Documentary category at the One World Media Awards in 2008. The War You Don't See (2010) The subject of The War You Don’t See is the role of the media in making war. It concentrates on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories. It begins with the Collateral Murder video leaked by Chelsea Manning and released by WikiLeaks. In an interview, Julian Assange describes WikiLeaks as an organisation that gives power to ‘conscientious objectors’ within ‘power systems’. The documentary contends that the CIA uses intelligence to manipulate public opinion and that the media collude by following the official line. During the documentary Pilger states that "propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home". John Lloyd in the Financial Times said The War You Don't See was a "one-sided" documentary which "had no thought of explaining, even hinting, that the wars fought by the US and the UK had a scrap of just cause, nor of examining the nature of what Pilger simply stated were "lies" – especially those that took the two countries to the invasion of Iraq". Support for Julian Assange Pilger supported Julian Assange by pledging bail in December 2010. Pilger said at the time: "There's no doubt that he is not going to abscond". Assange sought asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in 2012 and Pilger's bail money was lost when a judge ordered it to be forfeited. Pilger has been critical of the media's treatment of Assange saying: "The same brave newspapers and broadcasters that have supported Britain’s part in epic bloody crimes, from the genocide in Indonesia to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, now attack the “human rights record” of Ecuador, whose real crime is to stand up to the bullies in London and Washington". He criticised the failure of the Australian government to object when it "repeatedly received confirmation that the US was conducting an “unprecedented” pursuit of Assange" and noted that one of the reasons Ecuador gave for granting asylum to Assange was his abandonment by Australia. Pilger visited Assange in the embassy and has continued to support him. Utopia (2013) With Utopia, Pilger returned to the experiences of Indigenous Australians and what he termed "the denigrating of their humanity". A documentary feature film, it takes its title from Utopia, an Aboriginal homeland (also known as an outstation) in the Northern Territory. Pilger says that "in essence, very little" has changed since the first of his seven films about the Aboriginal people, A Secret Country: The First Australians (1985). In an interview with the UK based Australian Times he commented: "the catastrophe imposed on Indigenous Australians is the equivalent of apartheid, and the system has to change". Reviewing the film, Peter Bradshaw wrote: "The awful truth is that Indigenous communities are on mineral-rich lands that cause mouths to water in mining corporation boardrooms". "When the subject and subjects are allowed to speak for themselves – when Pilger doesn't stand and preach – the injustices glow like throbbing wounds", wrote Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times, but the documentary maker "goes on too long. 110 minutes is a hefty time in screen politics, especially when we know the makers' message from scene one". Geoffrey Macnab described it as an "angry, impassioned documentary" while for Mark Kermode it is a "searing indictment of the ongoing mistreatment" of the first Australians. The Coming War on China (2016) The Coming War on China was Pilger's 60th film for ITV. The film premiered in the UK on Thursday 1 December 2016, and was shown on ITV at 10.40 pm on Tuesday 6 December and on the Australian public broadcaster SBS on 16 April 2017. In the documentary, according to Pilger, "the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency. The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way. They are on the western borders of Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China. Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an 'existential threat' to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs". "The first third told, and told well, the unforgivable, unconscionable tale of what has overtaken the Marshall Islanders since 1946, when the US first nuked the test site on Bikini Atoll" beginning an extended series of tests, wrote Euan Ferguson in The Observer. "Over the next 12 years they would unleash a total of 42.2 megatons. The islanders, as forensically proved by Pilger, were effectively guinea pigs for [the] effects of radiation". Ferguson wrote that the rest of the film "was a sane, sober, necessary, deeply troubling bucketful of worries". Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian wrote that the film "lays bare the historical horrors of the US military in the Pacific, exposing the paranoia and pre-emptive aggression of its semi-secret bases," adding: "This is a gripping film, which though it comes close to excusing China ... does point out China's insecurities and political cruelties". Neil Young of The Hollywood Reporter called the film an "authoritative indictment of American nefariousness in the western Pacific". Kevin Maher wrote in The Times that he admired the early sequences on the Marshall Islands, but that he believed the film lacked nuance or subtlety. Maher wrote that, for Pilger, China is "a brilliant place with just some 'issues with human rights', but let's not go into that now". Diplomat columnist David Hutt said "Pilger consistently glosses over China's past crimes while dwelling on America's". Caitlin Johnstone of Scoop called the film "powerful" and praised it for showing "the USA's generations-long history of provocation and hostility toward [China's] government. It also addresses the silly projection so many westerners harbor that if the US wasn't bullying and slaughtering the world into compliance, China would take over doing the same." The Dirty War on the National Health Service (2019) Pilger's The Dirty War on the National Health Service was released in the UK on 29 November 2019 and examined the changes that the NHS has undergone since its founding in 1948. Pilger makes the case that governments beginning with that of Margaret Thatcher have waged a secret war against the NHS with a view to privatising it slowly and surreptitiously. Pilger predicted that moves toward privatisation would create more poverty and homelessness and that the resulting chaos would be used as an argument for further "reform". Peter Bradshaw described the documentary as a "fierce, necessary film". Views (1999–present) Bush, Blair, Howard and wars In 2003 and 2004, Pilger criticised United States President George W. Bush, saying that he had used the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq as part of a strategy to increase US control of the world's oil supplies. In 2004, Pilger criticised British Prime Minister Tony Blair as equally responsible for the invasion and the bungled occupation of Iraq. In 2004, as the Iraq insurgency increased, Pilger wrote that the anti-war movement should support "Iraq's anti-occupation resistance: We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the "Bush gang" will attack another country". Pilger described Australian Prime Minister John Howard as "the mouse that roars for America, whipping his country into war fever and paranoia about terrorism within". He thought Howard's willingness to "join the Bush/Blair assault on Iraq ... evok[ed] a melancholy history of obsequious service to great power: from the Boxer Rebellion to the Boer war, to the disaster at Gallipoli, and Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf". On 25 July 2005, Pilger ascribed blame for the 2005 London bombings that month to Blair. He wrote that Blair's decision to follow Bush helped to generate the rage that Pilger said precipitated the bombings. In his column a year later, Pilger described Blair as a war criminal for supporting Israel's actions during the 2006 Israel–Lebanon conflict. He said that Blair gave permission to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 to initiate what would ultimately become Operation Defensive Shield. In 2014, Pilger wrote that "The truth about the criminal bloodbath in Iraq cannot be "countered" indefinitely. Neither can the truth about our support for the medievalists in Saudi Arabia, the nuclear-armed predators in Israel, the new military fascists in Egypt and the jihadist "liberators" of Syria, whose propaganda is now BBC news". Barack Obama Pilger criticised Barack Obama during his presidential campaign of 2008, saying that he was "a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan" and his theme "was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully". After Obama was elected and took office in 2009, Pilger wrote, "In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government". Sunny Hundal wrote in The Guardian during November 2008 that the "Uncle Tom" slur used against Obama "highlights a patronising attitude towards ethnic minorities. Pilger expects all black and brown people to be revolutionary brothers and sisters, and if they veer away from that stereotype, it can only be because they are pawns of a wider conspiracy". Comments about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton In a February 2016 webchat on the website of The Guardian newspaper, Pilger said "Trump is speaking straight to ordinary Americans". Although his opinions about immigration were "gross", Pilger wrote that they are "no more gross in essence than, say, David Cameron's – he is not planning to invade anywhere, he doesn't hate the Russians or the Chinese, he is not beholden to Israel. People like this lack of cant, and when the so-called liberal media deride him, they like him even more". In March 2016, Pilger commented in a speech delivered at the University of Sydney during the 2016 United States presidential election, that Donald Trump was a less dangerous potential President of the United States than Hillary Clinton. In November 2016, Pilger said that "notorious terrorist jihadist group called ISIL or ISIS is created largely with money from [the government of Saudi and the government of Qatar] who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation". In August 2017, in an article published on his website, Pilger wrote that a "coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently made clear he does not want war with Russia. This glimpse of sanity, or simple pragmatism, is anathema to the 'national security' managers who guard a system based on war, surveillance, armaments, threats and extreme capitalism". According to Pilger, The Guardian has published "drivel" in covering the claims "that the Russians conspired with Trump". Such assertions, he writes, are "reminiscent of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as a 'Soviet agent'". Russia On the Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, Wiltshire on 4 March 2018, Pilger said in an interview on RT: "This is a carefully constructed drama as part of the propaganda campaign that has been building now for several years in order to justify the actions of NATO, Britain and the United States, towards Russia. That’s a fact". Such events as the Iraq War, "at the very least should make us sceptical of Theresa May’s theatrics in Parliament". He hinted that the UK government may have been involved in the attack, saying it had motive and that the nearby Porton Down laboratory has a "long and sinister record with nerve gas and chemical weapons". China According to Pilger, "American bases form a giant noose encircling China with missiles, bombers, warships - all the way from Australia through the Pacific to Asia and beyond. ... There are no Chinese naval ships and no Chinese bases off California". Brexit On voting to leave the European Union, Pilger wrote in 2016 "The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media.This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and demoralised by the sheer arrogance of the apologists for the "remain" campaign and the dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain. The last bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service, has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is fighting for its life." Criticism of the mainstream media Pilger has criticised many journalists of the mainstream media. During the administration of President Bill Clinton in the US, Pilger attacked the British-American Project as an example of "Atlanticist freemasonry". He asserted in November 1998 that "many members are journalists, the essential foot soldiers in any network devoted to power and propaganda". In 2002, he said that "many journalists now are no more than channellers and echoers of what Orwell called the official truth". In 2003, he criticised what he called the "liberal lobby" which "promote killing" from "behind a humanitarian mask". He said David Aaronovitch exemplified the "mask-wearers" and noted that Aaronovitch had written that the attack on Iraq will be "the easy bit". Aaronovitch responded to an article by Pilger about the mainstream media in 2003 as one of his "typical pieces about the corruption of most journalists (ie people like me [Aaronovitch]) versus the bravery of a few (ie people like him)". On another occasion, while speaking to journalism students at the University of Lincoln, Pilger said that mainstream journalism means corporate journalism. As such, he believes it represents vested corporate interests more than those of the public. In September 2014, Pilger wrote critically of The Guardian and other western media, regarding their reporting on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, writing "Without a single piece of evidence, the US and its NATO allies and their media machines blamed ethnic Russian 'separatists' in Ukraine and implied that Moscow was ultimately responsible". He asserted that "the newspaper has made no serious attempt to examine who shot the aeroplane down and why". In January 2020, Pilger tweeted scepticism of contemporary mainstream narratives about the downing of MH17, and the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 over Iran, saying "Lie upon lie. Hiroshima necessary to defeat Japan. Vietnam attacked US ships in Gulf of Tonkin. Saddam Hussein had WMD. Libya invaded to prevent massacre. Russia shot down MH17/put Trump in the White House. The US, not Russia, defeated Isis. Add Iran shot down Ukrainian airliner". BBC Pilger wrote in December 2002, of British broadcasting's requirement for "impartiality" as being "a euphemism for the consensual view of established authority". He wrote that "BBC television news faithfully echoed word for word" government "propaganda designed to soften up the public for Blair's attack on Iraq". In his documentary The War You Don't See (2010), Pilger returned to this theme and accused the BBC of failing to cover the viewpoint of the victims, civilians caught up in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has additionally pointed to the 48 documentaries on Ireland made for the BBC and ITV between 1959 and the late-1980s which were delayed or altered before transmission, or totally suppressed. Personal life Pilger was married to journalist Scarth Flett, granddaughter of the physician and geologist Sir John Smith Flett. Their son Sam was born in 1973 and is a sports writer. Pilger also has a daughter, Zoe Pilger, born 1984, with journalist Yvonne Roberts. Zoe is an author and art critic. Honours and awards The Press Awards, formerly the British Press Awards 1966: Descriptive Writer of the Year 1967: Journalist of the Year 1970: International Reporter of the Year 1974: News Reporter of the Year 1978: Campaigning Journalist of the Year 1979: Journalist of the Year Other awards 1991: Television Richard Dimbleby Award, BAFTA 1991: At 19th International Emmy Awards Emmy for documentary 'Cambodia, the Betrayal' 2009: Sydney Peace Prize 2011: Grierson Trust Award, UK 2017: Order of Timor-Leste Reception Martha Gellhorn, the American novelist, journalist and war correspondent, said that "[John Pilger] has taken on the great theme of justice and injustice... He documents and proclaims the official lies that we are told and that most people accept or don't bother to think about. [He] belongs to an old and unending worldwide company, the men and women of conscience. Some are as famous as Tom Paine and William Wilberforce, some as unknown as a tiny group calling itself Grandmothers Against The Bomb.... If they win, it is slowly; but they never entirely lose. To my mind, they are the blessed proof of the dignity of man. John has an assured place among them. I'd say he is a charter member for his generation". Noam Chomsky said of Pilger: "John Pilger's work has been a beacon of light in often dark times. The realities he has brought to light have been a revelation, over and over again, and his courage and insight a constant inspiration". According to Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate and member of the Stop the War Coalition, "John Pilger is fearless. He unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is... I salute him". John Simpson, the BBC's world affairs editor, has said, "A country that does not have a John Pilger in its journalism is a very feeble place indeed". The Anglo-American writer Christopher Hitchens said of Pilger: "I remember thinking that his work from Vietnam was very good at the time. I dare say if I went back and read it again I'd probably still admire quite a lot of it. But there is a word that gets overused and can be misused – namely, anti-American – and it has to be used about him. So that for me sort of spoils it... even when I'm inclined to agree". Shortly after Pilger won the Sydney Peace Prize in 2009, the Australian commentator Gerard Henderson accused Pilger of "engaging in hyperbole against western democracies". The Economist Lexington columnist criticised Pilger's account of the Arab uprising, writing that he "thinks the Arab revolts show that the West in general and the United States in particular are 'fascist'", adding, "what most of the Arab protesters say they want are the very freedoms that they know full well, even if Pilger doesn't, to be available in the West". In Breaking the Silence: The Films of John Pilger, Anthony Hayward wrote, "For half a century, he has been an ever stronger voice for those without a voice and a thorn in the side of authority, the Establishment. His work, particularly his documentary films, has also made him rare in being a journalist who is universally known, a champion of those for whom he fights and the scourge of politicians and others whose actions he exposes". The New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait responded to Pilger's 13 May 2014 column in The Guardian about Ukraine. Chait wrote that Pilger was "defending Vladimir Putin on the grounds that he stands opposed to the United States, which is the font of all evil" and that his "attempt to cast land-grabbing, ultranationalist dictator Vladimir Putin as an enemy of fascism is comical". US Government funded Radio Free Europe claimed that Pilger's column contained a bogus quote regarding the Odessa massacre of May 2014. Legacy The John Pilger Archive is housed at the British Library. The papers can be accessed through the British Library catalogue. Bibliography Books The Last Day (1975) Aftermath: The Struggles of Cambodia and Vietnam (1981) The Outsiders (with Michael Coren, 1984) Heroes (1986), (2001) A Secret Country (1989) Distant Voices (1992 and 1994) Hidden Agendas (1998) Reporting the World: John Pilger's Great Eyewitness Photographers (2001) The New Rulers of the World (2002; 4th ed. 2016) Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs (ed.) Cape (2004) Freedom Next Time (2006) Plays The Last Day (1983) Documentaries World in Action "The Quiet Mutiny" (1970) Conversations With a Working Man (1971) Palestine Is Still The Issue (Part 1) (1974) Vietnam: Still America's War (1974) Guilty Until Proven Innocent (John Pilger) (1974) Thalidomide: The Ninety-Eight We Forgot (1974) The Most Powerful Politician in America (1974) One British Family (1974) Pilger "An Unfashionable Tragedy" (1975) "Nobody's Children" (1975) "Zap-The Weapon is Food" (1976) "Pyramid Lake is Dying" (1976) "Street of Joy" (1976) "A Faraway Country" (1977) Mr Nixon's Secret Legacy (1975) Smashing Kids] (1975) To Know Us Is To Love Us (1975) A Nod & A Wink (1975) Pilger in Australia (1976) Dismantling A Dream (1977) An Unjustifiable Risk (1977) The Selling of the Sea (1978) Do You Remember Vietnam (1978) Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979) The Mexicans (1980) Cambodia: Year One (1980) Heroes (1980) Island of Dreams (John Pilger)(1981) In Search of Truth in Wartime (1983) Nicaragua. A Nations Right to Survive (1983) The Outsiders (series, 1983) The Truth Game (1983) Burp! Pepsi V Coke in the Ice Cold War (1984) The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back (1985) Japan Behind the Mask (1987) The Last Dream (1988) "Heroes unsung" "Secrets" "Other People's Wars" Cambodia: Year Ten (1989) Cambodia, the Betrayal (1990) War By Other Means (1992) Cambodia: Return to Year Zero (1993) Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1994) Flying the Flag, Arming the World (1994) Vietnam: The Last Battle (1995) Inside Burma: Land of Fear (1996) Breaking the Mirror – The Murdoch Effect (1997) Apartheid Did Not Die (1998) Welcome to Australia (1999) Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq (2000) The New Rulers of the World (2001) Palestine Is Still the Issue (2002) Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror (2003) Stealing a Nation (2004) The War on Democracy (2007) The War You Don't See (2010) Utopia (2013) The Coming War on China (2016) The Dirty War on the NHS (2019) References External links Freedom Next Time: Filmmaker & Journalist John Pilger on Propaganda, the Press, Censorship and Resisting the American Empire, Democracy Now!, 7 August 2007 John Pilger at Random House Australia 1939 births Living people Anti-Americanism Australian documentary filmmakers Australian expatriates in the United Kingdom Australian freelance journalists Australian investigative journalists Australian people of English descent Australian people of German descent Australian people of Irish descent Australian war correspondents People educated at Sydney Boys High School People from Sydney War correspondents of the Nigerian Civil War War correspondents of the Vietnam War 20th-century Australian journalists 21st-century Australian journalists Daily Mirror people	true	[ "Walter J. Kiernan (January 25, 1902 – January 8, 1978) was an American radio, television, and print journalist and author, as well as television game show host during the early days of the medium.\n\nCareer\nWalter Kiernan began his career as a journalist in New Haven in the early 1920s as a feature writer for the Elm City (Conn.) Clarion and the New Haven (Conn.) Union. He was a writer and editor of the New Haven Register from 1926 to 1928. He wrote for The Saturday Evening Post and started The Town Crier newspaper of West Haven, Connecticut in 1930.\n\nKiernan was an Associated Press (AP) correspondent from 1928–29 and joined the now long since defunct International News Service (INS) as manager of its Hartford bureau in 1937. The following year he was moved to New York, serving until 1943 as a roving reporter and special assignment writer for INS, during which he spent a remarkable New Year's Eve with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on a train ride from the United States to Canada during World War II.\n\nWhile a staff correspondent for the INS, Kiernan wrote the syndicated column Manhattan Side Streets which appeared in papers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Indiana and Texas. His column One Man's Opinion was also nationally syndicated by INS. In addition to his fascinating train ride with Winston Churchill, he had previously covered Douglas \"Wrong Way\" Corrigan's return to New York, as well as the visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth during their royal tour of Canada in 1939. He also wrote a \"Broadway\" column in the Dallas Times Herald.\n\nIn 1942, he co-authored with another noted columnist, Damon Runyon, The Life Story of Captain Eddie Rickenbacker As heard at The Paley Center for Media (formerly The Museum of Television and Radio), Kiernan's animated reporting and analysis of V-E Day in 1945 remains one of the era's most stirring historical recordings. Walter Kiernan eventually hosted his own news analysis program, Kiernan's Korner, which ran throughout 1948 for ABC Radio. On ABC Radio in 1948 he had a chat program called That Reminds Me, with former New Jersey Governor Harold Hoffman and \"Uncle Jim\" Harkins. He had an ABC radio chat show in 1951 called Family Circle. Among his guests was Winston Churchill's actress daughter Sarah.\n\nRadio and television\nKiernan hosted several daytime chat and commentary programs on both radio and television throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, including Kiernan's Corner (1948), Sparring Partners (1949), What's the Story (1951-1953), Who Said That? (1951-1954), I've Got a Secret (1952), Who's the Boss? (1954), and history show Stroke of Fate (1952–1953). After the relative success of Stroke of Fate, he began co-hosting NBC Radio's long-running news magazine, Monitor. Kiernan co-hosted Monitor from 1955 to 1960, when the program's format was dramatically changed.\n\nA familiar baritone voice on New York radio for many years, Kiernan's commentary program on WOR Radio's, One Man's Opinion, was heard daily, in addition to co-anchoring WOR-TV's local evening news. He was also a past president of the Catholic Actors Guild'' in New York. In more national issues he was an early outspoken critic of United States policy in Vietnam, raising objections as early as 1965, and later covering the Paris peace talks. \n\nWalter Kiernan was most remembered in political circles for his reporting of every national political convention from 1940 through 1972. Kiernan retired from journalism after covering the 1968 Republican Convention in Miami. Walter Kiernan died after a protracted struggle with cancer in 1978 at the age of 75.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n The Monitor Communicators\n Stroke of Fate\n\n1902 births\n1978 deaths\nAmerican game show hosts\nAmerican Roman Catholics", "Edward Victor Gordon Kiernan (4 September 1913 – 17 February 2009) was a British historian and a member of the Communist Party Historians Group. Kiernan's work was prominent in the field of Marxist historiography in Britain, analyzing historical events from a Marxist point of view. Belonging to a group of prominent British Marxist historians active in the 20th century, Kiernan was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain from 1934 until 1959, when he left in protest over the party's response to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He was also involved in promoting Urdu poetry among Western audiences.\n\nLife\nBorn in Ashton-on-Mersey, a southern district of Manchester, Kiernan was one of three children born to Ella née Young and John Edward Kiernan, who served as a translator of Spanish and Portuguese for the privately owned Manchester Ship Canal. His family came from a congregationalist, non-conformist religious tradition that he later suggested played a role in his socialist formation and that of many of the Communist Party Historians Group founded in 1946.\n\nA scholarship student at the Manchester Grammar School, Kiernan developed a passion for the classics, as he added ancient Greek and Latin to the modern European languages he had already learned at home. Propelled with three new scholarships, he went on to Trinity College, Cambridge where he achieved a double-starred First in History (B.A.,1934; M.A., 1937). Recruited by Guy Burgess during a time of radical ferment among Cambridge students, Kiernan joined the Communist Party in 1934. He found his radicalism subsequently reinforced by what he regarded as the treachery of Britain's elites. Perhaps the greatest influence on Kiernan was Maurice Dobb: a lecturer in economics at Cambridge, Dobb had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920 and was open with his students about his communist beliefs. Kiernan later wrote: \"We had no time then to assimilate Marxist theory more than very roughly; it was only beginning to take root in England, although it had one remarkable expounder at Cambridge in Maurice Dobb.\"\n\nIn 1938, as a junior fellow, Kiernan departed for Bombay in to continue his political activities and to teach at the Sikh National College and Aitchison College in Lahore, India (now Pakistan). Shortly after his arrival he married the theatre activist and childhood friend of Indira Nehru, Shanta Gandhi. Though they remained friends, they split up when Kiernan returned to Cambridge in 1946 to complete his Fellowship.\n\nSpurned by both Cambridge and Oxford, Kiernan was offered a lectureship in 1948 at the University of Edinburgh, thanks to the intervention of the distinguished historian Richard Pares. In 1970, Kiernan was given a Personal Chair in Modern History; a position he held until his retirement in 1977. Having joined the CPGB in 1934, he finally left in 1959, chiefly in disgust at the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, after which, he said: \"I waited in hopes the party might improve. It didn't.\"\n\nIn 1993 at the age of 80, Kiernan produced Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen a book he had been working on since 1947. A second volume, Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare, followed in 1996. His final book, Horace: Poetics and Politics appeared in 1999. Kiernan died peacefully in his sleep, aged 95, in Stow, Scotland.\n\nIntellectual legacy\n\nKiernan made immense contributions to the post-war flowering of British Marxist historiography that transformed the understanding of social history. Seeking escape paths from a congealing Stalinism, this intellectual movement grew from several figures among them - E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Kiernan and Eric Hobsbawm. Brash and confident in wielding the best of the British Left's cultural arsenal, they welcomed open-ended dialogue with non-Marxist traditions. Some of this dialogue was on display in the journal Past & Present, a journal of social history that became the most prestigious in the English-speaking world.\n\nKiernan wrote a major essay in 1952 for the first issue of the journal (\"Evangelicalism and the French Revolution\"), produced several landmark articles, and later served on its editorial board from 1973 to 1983. He also contributed to New Left Review throughout the journal's transitions.\nWhile Thompson, Hill and Hilton were rooted in English social history, Kiernan and Hobsbawm practised a historical craft with more global aspirations. Kiernan's distinctive contributions included the study of elites in history, the mythologies of imperialism, the folklore of capitalism and conservatism, and literature and social change.\n\nWork with Urdu poetry\n\nWhile steeped in Western literature and the classical heritage of Horace, Kiernan called for an appreciation of Urdu poetry, as he translated works from its literary golden age spanning from Ghalib (1796-1869) to Allama Iqbal (1877-1938) to Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911-1984). He elevated writers from the East who had been largely banished by guardians of the Western canon and then overlooked by stylish post-modern literary figures looking for more transgressive exemplars of literary craft.{{fact}]\n\nMarriages\nHe was married twice: to the Indian theatre director, dancer and playwright Shanta Gandhi (Bollywood actress Dina Pathak's sister), from 1938 to 1946; and to the Canadian scholar Heather Massey, from 1984 until his death.\n\nSelected works/articles\nThe Dragon and St. George: Anglo-Chinese relations 1880-1885 (1939)\nBritish diplomacy in China, 1880 to 1885 (1939)\nPoems from Iqbal, Translation (1955)\nThe revolution of 1854 in Spanish history (1966)\nThe lords of human kind. European attitudes towards the outside world in the Imperial Age (1969)\nMarxism and imperialism: studies (1974)\nAmerica, the new imperialism: from white settlement to world hegemony (1978)\nState & society in Europe, 1550-1650 (1980)\nEuropean empires from conquest to collapse, 1815-1960 (1982)\nThe duel in European history: honour and the reign of aristocracy (1988)\nHistory, classes and nation-states (edited and introduced by Harvey J. Kaye (1988)\nTobacco: A History (1991)\nShakespeare, poet and citizen (1993)\nImperialism and its contradictions (edited & introduced by Harvey J. Kaye; 1995)\nEight tragedies of Shakespeare: a Marxist study (1996)\nColonial empires and armies 1815-1960 (1982, 1998)\nHorace: poetics and politics (1999)\n\nSee also\n\nHistory & humanism: essays in honour of V.G. Kiernan (edited by Owen Dudley Edwards; 1977)\nAcross time and continents: a tribute to Victor G. Kiernan (edited by Prakash Karat; 2003). .\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Obituary by Eric Hobsbawm\n Profile in The Hindu\n Obituary in The Scotsman\n Review of America, the new imperialism\n Obituary by James Dunkerley, History Workshop Journal, 69, (Spring, 2010).\n Obituary in The Times, 14 May 2009\n\n1913 births\n2009 deaths\nAlumni of Trinity College, Cambridge\nAcademics of the University of Edinburgh\nBritish Marxists\nFellows of Trinity College, Cambridge\nBritish Marxist historians\nPeople educated at Manchester Grammar School\nPeople from Sale, Greater Manchester\nCommunist Party of Great Britain members\n20th-century British historians" ]
[ "John Pilger", "Responses by William Shawcross and others", "Did William Shawcross right any books?", "that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and Francois Ponchaud.", "What other authors had reviews or responses ?", "Ben Kiernan,", "What was Ben Kiernan's response?", "notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror," ]	C_81f47291a0304f7d81c3ee5545e66d08_1	What happened after that?	4	What happened after Ben Kiernan compared the work of John Updike?	John Pilger	William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984) about Pilger's series of articles about Cambodia in the Daily Mirror during August 1979: "A rather interesting quality of the articles was their concentration on Nazism and the holocaust. Pilger called Pol Pot 'an Asian Hitler' -- and said he was even worse than Hitler . . . Again and again Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis. Their Marxist-Leninist ideology was not even mentioned in the Mirror, except to say they were inspired by the Red Guards. Their intellectual origins were described as 'anarchist' rather than Communist". Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards. Kiernan notes instances where other writers' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account, or not mentioned. Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and Francois Ponchaud. Nonetheless, the reaction to the stories in Britain was as if they were something quite new." Oliver Kamm asserted in 2006: "Pilger's documentaries are full of falsehoods. They operate by misdirection, simultaneously denouncing one form of injustice while ignoring or denying others". In Heroes, Pilger disputes Francois Ponchaud and Shawcross's account of Vietnamesse atrocities during the Vietnamese invasion and near famine as being "unsubstantiated". Ponchard had interviewed members of anti-communist groups living in the Thai refugee border camps. According to Pilger, "At the very least the effect of Shawcross's 'expose'" of Cambodian's treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese "was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: in truth. a difference of night and day". In his book, Shawcross himself doubted that anyone had died of starvation. CANNOTANSWER	and said he was even worse than Hitler .	John Richard Pilger (; born 9 October 1939) is an Australian journalist, writer, scholar, and documentary filmmaker. He has been mainly based in Britain since 1962. He is also currently Visiting Professor at Cornell University in New York. Pilger is a strong critic of American, Australian, and British foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by an imperialist and colonialist agenda. Pilger has also criticised his native country's treatment of Indigenous Australians. He first drew international attention for his reports on the Cambodian genocide. His career as a documentary film maker began with The Quiet Mutiny (1970), made during one of his visits to Vietnam, and has continued with over 50 documentaries since. Other works in this form include Year Zero (1979), about the aftermath of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1993). His many documentary films on indigenous Australians include The Secret Country (1985) and Utopia (2013). In the British print media, Pilger worked at the Daily Mirror from 1963 to 1986, and wrote a regular column for the New Statesman magazine from 1991 to 2014. Pilger won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award in 1967 and 1979. His documentaries have gained awards in Britain and worldwide, including multiple BAFTA honours. The practices of the mainstream media are a regular subject in Pilger's writing. Early life John Richard Pilger was born on 9 October 1939 in Bondi, New South Wales, the son of Claude and Elsie Pilger. His older brother, Graham (1932–2017), was a disabled rights activist who later advised the government of Gough Whitlam. Pilger is of German descent on his father's side, while his mother had English, German, and Irish ancestry; two of his maternal great-great-grandparents were Irish convicts transported to Australia. His mother taught French in school. Pilger and his brother attended Sydney Boys High School, where he began a student newspaper, The Messenger. He later joined a four-year journalist trainee scheme with the Australian Consolidated Press. Journalism and television career Journalism Beginning his career in 1958 as a copy boy with the Sydney Sun, Pilger later moved to the city's Daily Telegraph, where he was a reporter, sports writer, and sub-editor. He also freelanced and worked for the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, the daily paper's sister title. After moving to Europe, he was a freelance correspondent in Italy for a year. Settling in London in 1962, working as a sub-editor, Pilger joined British United Press and then Reuters on its Middle-East desk. In 1963 he was recruited by the English Daily Mirror, again as a sub-editor. Later, he advanced to become a reporter, a feature writer, and Chief Foreign Correspondent for the title. While living and working in the United States for the Daily Mirror, on 5 June 1968 he witnessed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles during his presidential campaign. He was a war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra. Nearly eighteen months after Robert Maxwell bought the Mirror (on 12 July 1984), Pilger was sacked by Richard Stott, the newspaper's editor, on 31 December 1985. Pilger was a founder of the News on Sunday tabloid in 1984, and was hired as Editor-in-Chief in 1986. During the period of hiring staff, Pilger was away for several months filming The Secret Country in Australia. Prior to this, he had given editor Keith Sutton a list of people who he thought might be recruited for the paper, but found on his return to Britain that none of them had been hired. Pilger resigned before the first issue and had come into conflict with those around him. He disagreed with the founders' decision to base the paper in Manchester and then clashed with the governing committees; the paper was intended to be a workers' co-operative. Sutton's appointment as editor was Pilger's suggestion, but he fell out with Sutton over his plan to produce a left wing Sun newspaper. The two men ended up producing their own dummies, but the founders and the various committees backed Sutton. Pilger, appointed with "overall editorial control", resigned at this point. The first issue appeared on 27 April 1987 and The News on Sunday soon closed. Pilger returned to the Mirror in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks, while Piers Morgan was editor. His most frequent outlet for many years was the New Statesman, where he had a fortnightly column from 1991 when Steve Platt was editor to 2014. In 2018, Pilger said his "written journalism is no longer welcome" in the mainstream and that "probably its last home" was in The Guardian. His last column for The Guardian was in April 2015. Television With the actor David Swift, and the film makers Paul Watson and Charles Denton, Pilger formed Tempest Films in 1969. "We wanted a frontman with a mind of his own, rather like another James Cameron, with whom Richard [Marquand] had worked", Swift once said. "Paul thought John was very charismatic, as well as marketing extremely original, refreshingly radical ideas." The company was unable to gain commissions from either the BBC or ITV, but did manage to package potential projects. Pilger's career on television began on World in Action (Granada Television) in 1969, directed by Denton, for whom he made two documentaries broadcast in 1970 and 1971, the earliest of more than fifty in his career. The Quiet Mutiny (1970) was filmed at Camp Snuffy, presenting a character study of the common US soldier during the Vietnam War. It revealed the shifting morale and open rebellion of American troops. Pilger later described the film as "something of a scoop" – it was the first documentary to show the problems with morale among the drafted ranks of the US military. In an interview with the New Statesman, Pilger said: When I flew to New York and showed it to Mike Wallace, the star reporter of CBS' 60 Minutes, he agreed. "Real shame we can't show it here". He made other documentaries about the United States involvement in Vietnam, including Vietnam: Still America's War (1974), Do You Remember Vietnam? (1978), and Vietnam: The Last Battle (1995). During his work with BBC's Midweek television series during 1972–73, Pilger completed five documentary reports, but only two were broadcast. Pilger was successful in gaining a regular television outlet at ATV. The Pilger half-hour documentary series was commissioned by Charles Denton, then a producer with ATV, for screening on the British ITV network. The series ran for five seasons from 1974 until 1977, at first running in the UK on Sunday afternoons after Weekend World. The theme song for the series was composed by Lynsey de Paul. Later it was scheduled in a weekday peak-time evening slot. The last series included "A Faraway Country" (September 1977) about dissidents in Czechoslovakia, then still part of the Communist Soviet bloc. Pilger and his team interviewed members of Charter 77 and other groups, clandestinely using domestic film equipment. In the documentary Pilger praises the dissidents' courage and commitment to freedom, and describes the communist totalitarianism as "fascism disguised as socialism". Pilger was later given an hour slot at 9 pm, before News at Ten, which gave him a high profile in Britain. After ATV lost its franchise in 1981, he continued to make documentaries for screening on ITV, initially for Central, and later via Carlton Television. Documentaries and career: 1978–2000 Cambodia In 1979, Pilger and two colleagues with whom he collaborated for many years, documentary film-maker David Munro and photographer Eric Piper, entered Cambodia in the wake of the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime. They made photographs and reports that were world exclusives. The first was published as a special issue of the Daily Mirror, which sold out. They also produced an ITV documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, which brought to people's living rooms the suffering of the Khmer people. During the filming of Cambodia Year One, the team were warned that Pilger was on a Khmer Rouge 'death list.' In one incident, they narrowly escaped an ambush. Following the showing of Year Zero, some $45 million was raised, unsolicited, in mostly small donations, including almost £4 million raised by schoolchildren in the UK. This funded the first substantial relief to Cambodia, including the shipment of life-saving drugs such as penicillin, and clothing to replace the black uniforms people had been forced to wear. According to Brian Walker, director of Oxfam, "a solidarity and compassion surged across our nation" from the broadcast of Year Zero. William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984) about Pilger's series of articles about Cambodia in the Daily Mirror during August 1979: A rather interesting quality of the articles was their concentration on Nazism and the holocaust. Pilger called Pol Pot 'an Asian Hitler' — and said he was even worse than Hitler . . . Again and again Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis. Their Marxist-Leninist ideology was not even mentioned in the Mirror, except to say they were inspired by the Red Guards. Their intellectual origins were described as 'anarchist' rather than Communist". Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards. Kiernan notes instances where other writers' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account, or not mentioned. Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and François Ponchaud. In Heroes, Pilger disputes François Ponchaud and Shawcross's account of Vietnamese atrocities during the Vietnamese invasion and near famine as being "unsubstantiated". Ponchaud had interviewed members of anti-communist groups living in the Thai refugee border camps. According to Pilger, "At the very least the effect of Shawcross's 'exposé'" of Cambodians' treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese "was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: in truth, a difference of night and day". In his book, Shawcross himself doubted that anyone had died of starvation. Pilger and Munro made four later films about Cambodia. Pilger's documentary Cambodia – The Betrayal (1990), prompted a libel case against him, which was settled at the High Court with an award against Pilger and Central Television. The Times of 6 July 1991 reported: Two men who claimed that a television documentary accused them of being SAS members who trained Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to lay mines, accepted "very substantial" libel damages in the High Court yesterday. Christopher Geidt and Anthony De Normann settled their action against the journalist John Pilger and Central Television on the third day of the hearing. Desmond Browne, QC, for Mr Pilger and Central Television, said his clients had not intended to allege the two men trained the Khmer Rouge to lay mines, but they accepted that was how the program had been understood. Pilger said the defence case collapsed because the government issued a gagging order, citing national security, which prevented three government ministers and two former heads of the SAS from appearing in court. The film received a British Academy of Film and Television Award nomination in 1991. Australia's Indigenous peoples Pilger has long criticised aspects of Australian government policy, particularly what he regards as its inherent racism resulting in the poor treatment of Indigenous Australians. In 1969, Pilger went with Australian activist Charlie Perkins on a tour to Jay Creek in Central Australia. He compared what he witnessed in Jay Creek to South African apartheid. He saw the appalling conditions that the Aboriginal people were living under, with children suffering from malnutrition and grieving mothers and grandmothers having had their lighter-skinned children and grandchildren removed by the police and welfare agencies. Equally, he learned of Aboriginal boys being sent to work on white run farms, and Aboriginal girls working as servants in middle-class homes as undeclared slave labour. Pilger has made several documentaries about Indigenous Australians, such as The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back (1985) and Welcome to Australia (1999). His book on the subject, A Secret Country, was first published in 1989. Pilger wrote in 2000 that the 1998 legislation that removed the common-law rights of Indigenous peoples: is just one of the disgraces that has given Australia the distinction of being the only developed country whose government has been condemned as racist by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Pilger returned to this subject with Utopia, released in 2013 (see below). East Timor Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy In East Timor Pilger clandestinely shot Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy about the brutal Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which began in 1975. Death of a Nation contributed to an international outcry which ultimately led to Indonesian withdrawal from East Timor and eventual independence in 2000. When Death of a Nation was screened in Britain it was the highest rating documentary in 15 years and 5,000 telephone calls per minute were made to the programme's action line. When Death of a Nation was screened in Australia in June 1994, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans declared that Pilger "had a track record of distorted sensationalism mixed with sanctimony." Documentaries and career since 2000 Palestine Is Still the Issue Pilger's documentary Palestine Is Still the Issue was released in 2002 and had Ilan Pappé as historical adviser. Pilger said the film describes how an "historic injustice has been done to the Palestinian people, and until Israel's illegal and brutal occupation ends, there will be no peace for anyone, Israelis included". He said the responses of his interviewees "put the lie to the standard Zionist cry that any criticism of Israel is anti-semitic, a claim that insults all those Jewish people who reject the likes of Ariel Sharon acting in their name". Its broadcast resulted in complaints by the Israeli embassy, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the Conservative Friends of Israel that it was inaccurate and biased. Michael Green, chairman of Carlton Communications, the company that made the film, also objected to it in an interview with the Jewish Chronicle. The UK television regulator, the Independent Television Commission (ITC), ordered an investigation. The ITC investigation rejected the complaints about the film, stating in its report: The ITC raised with Carlton all the significant areas of inaccuracy critics of the programme alleged and the broadcaster answered them by reference to a range of historical texts. The ITC is not a tribunal of fact and is particularly aware of the difficulties of verifying 'historical fact' but the comprehensiveness and authority of Carlton's sources were persuasive, not least because many appeared to be of Israeli origin. The ITC concluded that in Pilger's documentary "adequate opportunity was given to a pro-Israeli government perspective" and that the programme "was not in breach of the ITC Programme Code". Stealing a Nation Pilger's documentary Stealing a Nation (2004) recounts the experiences of the late 20th-century trials of the people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The documentary primarily focuses on the expulsion of the Chagossians by Britain and the USA between 1967 and 1973 to Mauritius, and the poor economic situation faced by the islanders as a result of the deportation. Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos Islands, was given to the United States government which began the construction of a major military base for the region. In the 21st century, the US used the base for planes which were bombing targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a 2000 ruling on the events, the International Court of Justice described the wholesale removal of the Chagossian peoples from the Chagos Islands by Britain as "a crime against humanity". Pilger strongly criticised Tony Blair for failing to respond in a substantive way to the 2000 High Court ruling that the expulsion of the Chagossian people to Mauritius was illegal. In March 2005, Stealing a Nation received the Royal Television Society Award. Latin America: The War on Democracy (2007) The documentary The War on Democracy (2007) was Pilger's first film to be released in the cinema. In "an unremitting assault on American foreign policy since 1945", according to Andrew Billen in The Times, the film explores the role of US interventions, overt and covert, in toppling a series of governments in the region, and placing "a succession of favourably disposed bullies in control of its Latino backyard". It discusses the US role in the overthrow in 1973 of the democratically elected Chilean leader Salvador Allende, who was replaced by the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who purportedly took part in secret campaigns against democratic governments in South America. It also contains what Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian described as "a dewy-eyed interview" with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, which has moments of "almost Hello!-magazine deference". Pilger explores the US Army School of the Americas in the US state of Georgia. Generations of South American military were trained there, with a curriculum including counter-insurgency techniques. Attendees reportedly included members of Pinochet's security services, along with men from Haiti, El Salvador, Argentina and Brazil who have been implicated in human rights abuses. The film also details the attempted overthrow of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez in 2002. The people of Caracas rose up to force his return to power. It looks at the wider rise of populist governments across South America, led by figures calling for loosening ties with the United States and attempting a more equitable redistribution of the continent's natural wealth. Of "Chávez's decision to bypass the National Assembly for 18 months, and rule by decree", Peter Bradshaw writes "Pilger passes over it very lightly". Pilger said the film is about the struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery. These people, he says,describe a world not as American presidents like to see it as useful or expendable, they describe the power of courage and humanity among people with next to nothing. They reclaim noble words like democracy, freedom, liberation, justice, and in doing so they are defending the most basic human rights of all of us in a war being waged against all of us. The War on Democracy won the Best Documentary category at the One World Media Awards in 2008. The War You Don't See (2010) The subject of The War You Don’t See is the role of the media in making war. It concentrates on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories. It begins with the Collateral Murder video leaked by Chelsea Manning and released by WikiLeaks. In an interview, Julian Assange describes WikiLeaks as an organisation that gives power to ‘conscientious objectors’ within ‘power systems’. The documentary contends that the CIA uses intelligence to manipulate public opinion and that the media collude by following the official line. During the documentary Pilger states that "propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home". John Lloyd in the Financial Times said The War You Don't See was a "one-sided" documentary which "had no thought of explaining, even hinting, that the wars fought by the US and the UK had a scrap of just cause, nor of examining the nature of what Pilger simply stated were "lies" – especially those that took the two countries to the invasion of Iraq". Support for Julian Assange Pilger supported Julian Assange by pledging bail in December 2010. Pilger said at the time: "There's no doubt that he is not going to abscond". Assange sought asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in 2012 and Pilger's bail money was lost when a judge ordered it to be forfeited. Pilger has been critical of the media's treatment of Assange saying: "The same brave newspapers and broadcasters that have supported Britain’s part in epic bloody crimes, from the genocide in Indonesia to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, now attack the “human rights record” of Ecuador, whose real crime is to stand up to the bullies in London and Washington". He criticised the failure of the Australian government to object when it "repeatedly received confirmation that the US was conducting an “unprecedented” pursuit of Assange" and noted that one of the reasons Ecuador gave for granting asylum to Assange was his abandonment by Australia. Pilger visited Assange in the embassy and has continued to support him. Utopia (2013) With Utopia, Pilger returned to the experiences of Indigenous Australians and what he termed "the denigrating of their humanity". A documentary feature film, it takes its title from Utopia, an Aboriginal homeland (also known as an outstation) in the Northern Territory. Pilger says that "in essence, very little" has changed since the first of his seven films about the Aboriginal people, A Secret Country: The First Australians (1985). In an interview with the UK based Australian Times he commented: "the catastrophe imposed on Indigenous Australians is the equivalent of apartheid, and the system has to change". Reviewing the film, Peter Bradshaw wrote: "The awful truth is that Indigenous communities are on mineral-rich lands that cause mouths to water in mining corporation boardrooms". "When the subject and subjects are allowed to speak for themselves – when Pilger doesn't stand and preach – the injustices glow like throbbing wounds", wrote Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times, but the documentary maker "goes on too long. 110 minutes is a hefty time in screen politics, especially when we know the makers' message from scene one". Geoffrey Macnab described it as an "angry, impassioned documentary" while for Mark Kermode it is a "searing indictment of the ongoing mistreatment" of the first Australians. The Coming War on China (2016) The Coming War on China was Pilger's 60th film for ITV. The film premiered in the UK on Thursday 1 December 2016, and was shown on ITV at 10.40 pm on Tuesday 6 December and on the Australian public broadcaster SBS on 16 April 2017. In the documentary, according to Pilger, "the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency. The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way. They are on the western borders of Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China. Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an 'existential threat' to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs". "The first third told, and told well, the unforgivable, unconscionable tale of what has overtaken the Marshall Islanders since 1946, when the US first nuked the test site on Bikini Atoll" beginning an extended series of tests, wrote Euan Ferguson in The Observer. "Over the next 12 years they would unleash a total of 42.2 megatons. The islanders, as forensically proved by Pilger, were effectively guinea pigs for [the] effects of radiation". Ferguson wrote that the rest of the film "was a sane, sober, necessary, deeply troubling bucketful of worries". Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian wrote that the film "lays bare the historical horrors of the US military in the Pacific, exposing the paranoia and pre-emptive aggression of its semi-secret bases," adding: "This is a gripping film, which though it comes close to excusing China ... does point out China's insecurities and political cruelties". Neil Young of The Hollywood Reporter called the film an "authoritative indictment of American nefariousness in the western Pacific". Kevin Maher wrote in The Times that he admired the early sequences on the Marshall Islands, but that he believed the film lacked nuance or subtlety. Maher wrote that, for Pilger, China is "a brilliant place with just some 'issues with human rights', but let's not go into that now". Diplomat columnist David Hutt said "Pilger consistently glosses over China's past crimes while dwelling on America's". Caitlin Johnstone of Scoop called the film "powerful" and praised it for showing "the USA's generations-long history of provocation and hostility toward [China's] government. It also addresses the silly projection so many westerners harbor that if the US wasn't bullying and slaughtering the world into compliance, China would take over doing the same." The Dirty War on the National Health Service (2019) Pilger's The Dirty War on the National Health Service was released in the UK on 29 November 2019 and examined the changes that the NHS has undergone since its founding in 1948. Pilger makes the case that governments beginning with that of Margaret Thatcher have waged a secret war against the NHS with a view to privatising it slowly and surreptitiously. Pilger predicted that moves toward privatisation would create more poverty and homelessness and that the resulting chaos would be used as an argument for further "reform". Peter Bradshaw described the documentary as a "fierce, necessary film". Views (1999–present) Bush, Blair, Howard and wars In 2003 and 2004, Pilger criticised United States President George W. Bush, saying that he had used the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq as part of a strategy to increase US control of the world's oil supplies. In 2004, Pilger criticised British Prime Minister Tony Blair as equally responsible for the invasion and the bungled occupation of Iraq. In 2004, as the Iraq insurgency increased, Pilger wrote that the anti-war movement should support "Iraq's anti-occupation resistance: We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the "Bush gang" will attack another country". Pilger described Australian Prime Minister John Howard as "the mouse that roars for America, whipping his country into war fever and paranoia about terrorism within". He thought Howard's willingness to "join the Bush/Blair assault on Iraq ... evok[ed] a melancholy history of obsequious service to great power: from the Boxer Rebellion to the Boer war, to the disaster at Gallipoli, and Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf". On 25 July 2005, Pilger ascribed blame for the 2005 London bombings that month to Blair. He wrote that Blair's decision to follow Bush helped to generate the rage that Pilger said precipitated the bombings. In his column a year later, Pilger described Blair as a war criminal for supporting Israel's actions during the 2006 Israel–Lebanon conflict. He said that Blair gave permission to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 to initiate what would ultimately become Operation Defensive Shield. In 2014, Pilger wrote that "The truth about the criminal bloodbath in Iraq cannot be "countered" indefinitely. Neither can the truth about our support for the medievalists in Saudi Arabia, the nuclear-armed predators in Israel, the new military fascists in Egypt and the jihadist "liberators" of Syria, whose propaganda is now BBC news". Barack Obama Pilger criticised Barack Obama during his presidential campaign of 2008, saying that he was "a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan" and his theme "was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully". After Obama was elected and took office in 2009, Pilger wrote, "In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government". Sunny Hundal wrote in The Guardian during November 2008 that the "Uncle Tom" slur used against Obama "highlights a patronising attitude towards ethnic minorities. Pilger expects all black and brown people to be revolutionary brothers and sisters, and if they veer away from that stereotype, it can only be because they are pawns of a wider conspiracy". Comments about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton In a February 2016 webchat on the website of The Guardian newspaper, Pilger said "Trump is speaking straight to ordinary Americans". Although his opinions about immigration were "gross", Pilger wrote that they are "no more gross in essence than, say, David Cameron's – he is not planning to invade anywhere, he doesn't hate the Russians or the Chinese, he is not beholden to Israel. People like this lack of cant, and when the so-called liberal media deride him, they like him even more". In March 2016, Pilger commented in a speech delivered at the University of Sydney during the 2016 United States presidential election, that Donald Trump was a less dangerous potential President of the United States than Hillary Clinton. In November 2016, Pilger said that "notorious terrorist jihadist group called ISIL or ISIS is created largely with money from [the government of Saudi and the government of Qatar] who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation". In August 2017, in an article published on his website, Pilger wrote that a "coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently made clear he does not want war with Russia. This glimpse of sanity, or simple pragmatism, is anathema to the 'national security' managers who guard a system based on war, surveillance, armaments, threats and extreme capitalism". According to Pilger, The Guardian has published "drivel" in covering the claims "that the Russians conspired with Trump". Such assertions, he writes, are "reminiscent of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as a 'Soviet agent'". Russia On the Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, Wiltshire on 4 March 2018, Pilger said in an interview on RT: "This is a carefully constructed drama as part of the propaganda campaign that has been building now for several years in order to justify the actions of NATO, Britain and the United States, towards Russia. That’s a fact". Such events as the Iraq War, "at the very least should make us sceptical of Theresa May’s theatrics in Parliament". He hinted that the UK government may have been involved in the attack, saying it had motive and that the nearby Porton Down laboratory has a "long and sinister record with nerve gas and chemical weapons". China According to Pilger, "American bases form a giant noose encircling China with missiles, bombers, warships - all the way from Australia through the Pacific to Asia and beyond. ... There are no Chinese naval ships and no Chinese bases off California". Brexit On voting to leave the European Union, Pilger wrote in 2016 "The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media.This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and demoralised by the sheer arrogance of the apologists for the "remain" campaign and the dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain. The last bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service, has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is fighting for its life." Criticism of the mainstream media Pilger has criticised many journalists of the mainstream media. During the administration of President Bill Clinton in the US, Pilger attacked the British-American Project as an example of "Atlanticist freemasonry". He asserted in November 1998 that "many members are journalists, the essential foot soldiers in any network devoted to power and propaganda". In 2002, he said that "many journalists now are no more than channellers and echoers of what Orwell called the official truth". In 2003, he criticised what he called the "liberal lobby" which "promote killing" from "behind a humanitarian mask". He said David Aaronovitch exemplified the "mask-wearers" and noted that Aaronovitch had written that the attack on Iraq will be "the easy bit". Aaronovitch responded to an article by Pilger about the mainstream media in 2003 as one of his "typical pieces about the corruption of most journalists (ie people like me [Aaronovitch]) versus the bravery of a few (ie people like him)". On another occasion, while speaking to journalism students at the University of Lincoln, Pilger said that mainstream journalism means corporate journalism. As such, he believes it represents vested corporate interests more than those of the public. In September 2014, Pilger wrote critically of The Guardian and other western media, regarding their reporting on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, writing "Without a single piece of evidence, the US and its NATO allies and their media machines blamed ethnic Russian 'separatists' in Ukraine and implied that Moscow was ultimately responsible". He asserted that "the newspaper has made no serious attempt to examine who shot the aeroplane down and why". In January 2020, Pilger tweeted scepticism of contemporary mainstream narratives about the downing of MH17, and the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 over Iran, saying "Lie upon lie. Hiroshima necessary to defeat Japan. Vietnam attacked US ships in Gulf of Tonkin. Saddam Hussein had WMD. Libya invaded to prevent massacre. Russia shot down MH17/put Trump in the White House. The US, not Russia, defeated Isis. Add Iran shot down Ukrainian airliner". BBC Pilger wrote in December 2002, of British broadcasting's requirement for "impartiality" as being "a euphemism for the consensual view of established authority". He wrote that "BBC television news faithfully echoed word for word" government "propaganda designed to soften up the public for Blair's attack on Iraq". In his documentary The War You Don't See (2010), Pilger returned to this theme and accused the BBC of failing to cover the viewpoint of the victims, civilians caught up in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has additionally pointed to the 48 documentaries on Ireland made for the BBC and ITV between 1959 and the late-1980s which were delayed or altered before transmission, or totally suppressed. Personal life Pilger was married to journalist Scarth Flett, granddaughter of the physician and geologist Sir John Smith Flett. Their son Sam was born in 1973 and is a sports writer. Pilger also has a daughter, Zoe Pilger, born 1984, with journalist Yvonne Roberts. Zoe is an author and art critic. Honours and awards The Press Awards, formerly the British Press Awards 1966: Descriptive Writer of the Year 1967: Journalist of the Year 1970: International Reporter of the Year 1974: News Reporter of the Year 1978: Campaigning Journalist of the Year 1979: Journalist of the Year Other awards 1991: Television Richard Dimbleby Award, BAFTA 1991: At 19th International Emmy Awards Emmy for documentary 'Cambodia, the Betrayal' 2009: Sydney Peace Prize 2011: Grierson Trust Award, UK 2017: Order of Timor-Leste Reception Martha Gellhorn, the American novelist, journalist and war correspondent, said that "[John Pilger] has taken on the great theme of justice and injustice... He documents and proclaims the official lies that we are told and that most people accept or don't bother to think about. [He] belongs to an old and unending worldwide company, the men and women of conscience. Some are as famous as Tom Paine and William Wilberforce, some as unknown as a tiny group calling itself Grandmothers Against The Bomb.... If they win, it is slowly; but they never entirely lose. To my mind, they are the blessed proof of the dignity of man. John has an assured place among them. I'd say he is a charter member for his generation". Noam Chomsky said of Pilger: "John Pilger's work has been a beacon of light in often dark times. The realities he has brought to light have been a revelation, over and over again, and his courage and insight a constant inspiration". According to Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate and member of the Stop the War Coalition, "John Pilger is fearless. He unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is... I salute him". John Simpson, the BBC's world affairs editor, has said, "A country that does not have a John Pilger in its journalism is a very feeble place indeed". The Anglo-American writer Christopher Hitchens said of Pilger: "I remember thinking that his work from Vietnam was very good at the time. I dare say if I went back and read it again I'd probably still admire quite a lot of it. But there is a word that gets overused and can be misused – namely, anti-American – and it has to be used about him. So that for me sort of spoils it... even when I'm inclined to agree". Shortly after Pilger won the Sydney Peace Prize in 2009, the Australian commentator Gerard Henderson accused Pilger of "engaging in hyperbole against western democracies". The Economist Lexington columnist criticised Pilger's account of the Arab uprising, writing that he "thinks the Arab revolts show that the West in general and the United States in particular are 'fascist'", adding, "what most of the Arab protesters say they want are the very freedoms that they know full well, even if Pilger doesn't, to be available in the West". In Breaking the Silence: The Films of John Pilger, Anthony Hayward wrote, "For half a century, he has been an ever stronger voice for those without a voice and a thorn in the side of authority, the Establishment. His work, particularly his documentary films, has also made him rare in being a journalist who is universally known, a champion of those for whom he fights and the scourge of politicians and others whose actions he exposes". The New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait responded to Pilger's 13 May 2014 column in The Guardian about Ukraine. Chait wrote that Pilger was "defending Vladimir Putin on the grounds that he stands opposed to the United States, which is the font of all evil" and that his "attempt to cast land-grabbing, ultranationalist dictator Vladimir Putin as an enemy of fascism is comical". US Government funded Radio Free Europe claimed that Pilger's column contained a bogus quote regarding the Odessa massacre of May 2014. Legacy The John Pilger Archive is housed at the British Library. The papers can be accessed through the British Library catalogue. Bibliography Books The Last Day (1975) Aftermath: The Struggles of Cambodia and Vietnam (1981) The Outsiders (with Michael Coren, 1984) Heroes (1986), (2001) A Secret Country (1989) Distant Voices (1992 and 1994) Hidden Agendas (1998) Reporting the World: John Pilger's Great Eyewitness Photographers (2001) The New Rulers of the World (2002; 4th ed. 2016) Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs (ed.) Cape (2004) Freedom Next Time (2006) Plays The Last Day (1983) Documentaries World in Action "The Quiet Mutiny" (1970) Conversations With a Working Man (1971) Palestine Is Still The Issue (Part 1) (1974) Vietnam: Still America's War (1974) Guilty Until Proven Innocent (John Pilger) (1974) Thalidomide: The Ninety-Eight We Forgot (1974) The Most Powerful Politician in America (1974) One British Family (1974) Pilger "An Unfashionable Tragedy" (1975) "Nobody's Children" (1975) "Zap-The Weapon is Food" (1976) "Pyramid Lake is Dying" (1976) "Street of Joy" (1976) "A Faraway Country" (1977) Mr Nixon's Secret Legacy (1975) Smashing Kids] (1975) To Know Us Is To Love Us (1975) A Nod & A Wink (1975) Pilger in Australia (1976) Dismantling A Dream (1977) An Unjustifiable Risk (1977) The Selling of the Sea (1978) Do You Remember Vietnam (1978) Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979) The Mexicans (1980) Cambodia: Year One (1980) Heroes (1980) Island of Dreams (John Pilger)(1981) In Search of Truth in Wartime (1983) Nicaragua. A Nations Right to Survive (1983) The Outsiders (series, 1983) The Truth Game (1983) Burp! Pepsi V Coke in the Ice Cold War (1984) The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back (1985) Japan Behind the Mask (1987) The Last Dream (1988) "Heroes unsung" "Secrets" "Other People's Wars" Cambodia: Year Ten (1989) Cambodia, the Betrayal (1990) War By Other Means (1992) Cambodia: Return to Year Zero (1993) Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1994) Flying the Flag, Arming the World (1994) Vietnam: The Last Battle (1995) Inside Burma: Land of Fear (1996) Breaking the Mirror – The Murdoch Effect (1997) Apartheid Did Not Die (1998) Welcome to Australia (1999) Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq (2000) The New Rulers of the World (2001) Palestine Is Still the Issue (2002) Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror (2003) Stealing a Nation (2004) The War on Democracy (2007) The War You Don't See (2010) Utopia (2013) The Coming War on China (2016) The Dirty War on the NHS (2019) References External links Freedom Next Time: Filmmaker & Journalist John Pilger on Propaganda, the Press, Censorship and Resisting the American Empire, Democracy Now!, 7 August 2007 John Pilger at Random House Australia 1939 births Living people Anti-Americanism Australian documentary filmmakers Australian expatriates in the United Kingdom Australian freelance journalists Australian investigative journalists Australian people of English descent Australian people of German descent Australian people of Irish descent Australian war correspondents People educated at Sydney Boys High School People from Sydney War correspondents of the Nigerian Civil War War correspondents of the Vietnam War 20th-century Australian journalists 21st-century Australian journalists Daily Mirror people	true	[ "Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor, in Spanish Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio (Book of the Examples of Count Lucanor and of Patronio), also commonly known as El Conde Lucanor, Libro de Patronio, or Libro de los ejemplos (original Old Castilian: Libro de los enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor et de Patronio), is one of the earliest works of prose in Castilian Spanish. It was first written in 1335.\n\nThe book is divided into four parts. The first and most well-known part is a series of 51 short stories (some no more than a page or two) drawn from various sources, such as Aesop and other classical writers, and Arabic folktales.\n\nTales of Count Lucanor was first printed in 1575 when it was published at Seville under the auspices of Argote de Molina. It was again printed at Madrid in 1642, after which it lay forgotten for nearly two centuries.\n\nPurpose and structure\n\nA didactic, moralistic purpose, which would color so much of the Spanish literature to follow (see Novela picaresca), is the mark of this book. Count Lucanor engages in conversation with his advisor Patronio, putting to him a problem (\"Some man has made me a proposition...\" or \"I fear that such and such person intends to...\") and asking for advice. Patronio responds always with the greatest humility, claiming not to wish to offer advice to so illustrious a person as the Count, but offering to tell him a story of which the Count's problem reminds him. (Thus, the stories are \"examples\" [ejemplos] of wise action.) At the end he advises the Count to do as the protagonist of his story did.\n\nEach chapter ends in more or less the same way, with slight variations on: \"And this pleased the Count greatly and he did just so, and found it well. And Don Johán (Juan) saw that this example was very good, and had it written in this book, and composed the following verses.\" A rhymed couplet closes, giving the moral of the story.\n\nOrigin of stories and influence on later literature\nMany of the stories written in the book are the first examples written in a modern European language of various stories, which many other writers would use in the proceeding centuries. Many of the stories he included were themselves derived from other stories, coming from western and Arab sources.\n\nShakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew has the basic elements of Tale 35, \"What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\".\n\nTale 32, \"What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth\" tells the story that Hans Christian Andersen made popular as The Emperor's New Clothes.\n\nStory 7, \"What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana\", a version of Aesop's The Milkmaid and Her Pail, was claimed by Max Müller to originate in the Hindu cycle Panchatantra.\n\nTale 2, \"What happened to a good Man and his Son, leading a beast to market,\" is the familiar fable The miller, his son and the donkey.\n\nIn 2016, Baroque Decay released a game under the name \"The Count Lucanor\". As well as some protagonists' names, certain events from the books inspired past events in the game.\n\nThe stories\n\nThe book opens with a prologue which introduces the characters of the Count and Patronio. The titles in the following list are those given in Keller and Keating's 1977 translation into English. James York's 1868 translation into English gives a significantly different ordering of the stories and omits the fifty-first.\n\n What Happened to a King and His Favorite \n What Happened to a Good Man and His Son \n How King Richard of England Leapt into the Sea against the Moors\n What a Genoese Said to His Soul When He Was about to Die \n What Happened to a Fox and a Crow Who Had a Piece of Cheese in His Beak\n How the Swallow Warned the Other Birds When She Saw Flax Being Sown \n What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana \n What Happened to a Man Whose Liver Had to Be Washed \n What Happened to Two Horses Which Were Thrown to the Lion \n What Happened to a Man Who on Account of Poverty and Lack of Other Food Was Eating Bitter Lentils \n What Happened to a Dean of Santiago de Compostela and Don Yllán, the Grand Master of Toledo\n What Happened to the Fox and the Rooster \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Hunting Partridges \n The Miracle of Saint Dominick When He Preached against the Usurer \n What Happened to Lorenzo Suárez at the Siege of Seville \n The Reply that count Fernán González Gave to His Relative Núño Laynes \n What Happened to a Very Hungry Man Who Was Half-heartedly Invited to Dinner \n What Happened to Pero Meléndez de Valdés When He Broke His Leg \n What Happened to the Crows and the Owls \n What Happened to a King for Whom a Man Promised to Perform Alchemy \n What Happened to a Young King and a Philosopher to Whom his Father Commended Him \n What Happened to the Lion and the Bull \n How the Ants Provide for Themselves \n What Happened to the King Who Wanted to Test His Three Sons \n What Happened to the Count of Provence and How He Was Freed from Prison by the Advice of Saladin\n What Happened to the Tree of Lies \n What Happened to an Emperor and to Don Alvarfáñez Minaya and Their Wives \n What Happened in Granada to Don Lorenzo Suárez Gallinato When He Beheaded the Renegade Chaplain \n What Happened to a Fox Who Lay down in the Street to Play Dead \n What Happened to King Abenabet of Seville and Ramayquía His Wife \n How a Cardinal Judged between the Canons of Paris and the Friars Minor \n What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth \n What Happened to Don Juan Manuel's Saker Falcon and an Eagle and a Heron \n What Happened to a Blind Man Who Was Leading Another \n What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\n What Happened to a Merchant When He Found His Son and His Wife Sleeping Together \n What Happened to Count Fernán González with His Men after He Had Won the Battle of Hacinas \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Loaded down with Precious Stones and Drowned in the River \n What Happened to a Man and a Swallow and a Sparrow \n Why the Seneschal of Carcassonne Lost His Soul \n What Happened to a King of Córdova Named Al-Haquem \n What Happened to a Woman of Sham Piety \n What Happened to Good and Evil and the Wise Man and the Madman \n What Happened to Don Pero Núñez the Loyal, to Don Ruy González de Zavallos, and to Don Gutier Roiz de Blaguiello with Don Rodrigo the Generous \n What Happened to a Man Who Became the Devil's Friend and Vassal \n What Happened to a Philosopher who by Accident Went down a Street Where Prostitutes Lived \n What Befell a Moor and His Sister Who Pretended That She Was Timid \n What Happened to a Man Who Tested His Friends \n What Happened to the Man Whom They Cast out Naked on an Island When They Took away from Him the Kingdom He Ruled \n What Happened to Saladin and a Lady, the Wife of a Knight Who Was His Vassal \n What Happened to a Christian King Who Was Very Powerful and Haughty\n\nReferences\n\nNotes\n\nBibliography\n\n Sturm, Harlan\n\n Wacks, David\n\nExternal links\n\nThe Internet Archive provides free access to the 1868 translation by James York.\nJSTOR has the to the 1977 translation by Keller and Keating.\nSelections in English and Spanish (pedagogical edition) with introduction, notes, and bibliography in Open Iberia/América (open access teaching anthology)\n\n14th-century books\nSpanish literature\n1335 books", "What Happened to Jones may refer to:\n What Happened to Jones (1897 play), a play by George Broadhurst\n What Happened to Jones (1915 film), a lost silent film\n What Happened to Jones (1920 film), a lost silent film\n What Happened to Jones (1926 film), a silent film comedy" ]
[ "John Pilger", "Responses by William Shawcross and others", "Did William Shawcross right any books?", "that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and Francois Ponchaud.", "What other authors had reviews or responses ?", "Ben Kiernan,", "What was Ben Kiernan's response?", "notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror,", "What happened after that?", "and said he was even worse than Hitler ." ]	C_81f47291a0304f7d81c3ee5545e66d08_1	Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?	5	Are there any other interesting points within the article besides the negative review by Ben Kiernan?	John Pilger	William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984) about Pilger's series of articles about Cambodia in the Daily Mirror during August 1979: "A rather interesting quality of the articles was their concentration on Nazism and the holocaust. Pilger called Pol Pot 'an Asian Hitler' -- and said he was even worse than Hitler . . . Again and again Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis. Their Marxist-Leninist ideology was not even mentioned in the Mirror, except to say they were inspired by the Red Guards. Their intellectual origins were described as 'anarchist' rather than Communist". Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards. Kiernan notes instances where other writers' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account, or not mentioned. Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and Francois Ponchaud. Nonetheless, the reaction to the stories in Britain was as if they were something quite new." Oliver Kamm asserted in 2006: "Pilger's documentaries are full of falsehoods. They operate by misdirection, simultaneously denouncing one form of injustice while ignoring or denying others". In Heroes, Pilger disputes Francois Ponchaud and Shawcross's account of Vietnamesse atrocities during the Vietnamese invasion and near famine as being "unsubstantiated". Ponchard had interviewed members of anti-communist groups living in the Thai refugee border camps. According to Pilger, "At the very least the effect of Shawcross's 'expose'" of Cambodian's treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese "was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: in truth. a difference of night and day". In his book, Shawcross himself doubted that anyone had died of starvation. CANNOTANSWER	William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy:	John Richard Pilger (; born 9 October 1939) is an Australian journalist, writer, scholar, and documentary filmmaker. He has been mainly based in Britain since 1962. He is also currently Visiting Professor at Cornell University in New York. Pilger is a strong critic of American, Australian, and British foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by an imperialist and colonialist agenda. Pilger has also criticised his native country's treatment of Indigenous Australians. He first drew international attention for his reports on the Cambodian genocide. His career as a documentary film maker began with The Quiet Mutiny (1970), made during one of his visits to Vietnam, and has continued with over 50 documentaries since. Other works in this form include Year Zero (1979), about the aftermath of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1993). His many documentary films on indigenous Australians include The Secret Country (1985) and Utopia (2013). In the British print media, Pilger worked at the Daily Mirror from 1963 to 1986, and wrote a regular column for the New Statesman magazine from 1991 to 2014. Pilger won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award in 1967 and 1979. His documentaries have gained awards in Britain and worldwide, including multiple BAFTA honours. The practices of the mainstream media are a regular subject in Pilger's writing. Early life John Richard Pilger was born on 9 October 1939 in Bondi, New South Wales, the son of Claude and Elsie Pilger. His older brother, Graham (1932–2017), was a disabled rights activist who later advised the government of Gough Whitlam. Pilger is of German descent on his father's side, while his mother had English, German, and Irish ancestry; two of his maternal great-great-grandparents were Irish convicts transported to Australia. His mother taught French in school. Pilger and his brother attended Sydney Boys High School, where he began a student newspaper, The Messenger. He later joined a four-year journalist trainee scheme with the Australian Consolidated Press. Journalism and television career Journalism Beginning his career in 1958 as a copy boy with the Sydney Sun, Pilger later moved to the city's Daily Telegraph, where he was a reporter, sports writer, and sub-editor. He also freelanced and worked for the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, the daily paper's sister title. After moving to Europe, he was a freelance correspondent in Italy for a year. Settling in London in 1962, working as a sub-editor, Pilger joined British United Press and then Reuters on its Middle-East desk. In 1963 he was recruited by the English Daily Mirror, again as a sub-editor. Later, he advanced to become a reporter, a feature writer, and Chief Foreign Correspondent for the title. While living and working in the United States for the Daily Mirror, on 5 June 1968 he witnessed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles during his presidential campaign. He was a war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra. Nearly eighteen months after Robert Maxwell bought the Mirror (on 12 July 1984), Pilger was sacked by Richard Stott, the newspaper's editor, on 31 December 1985. Pilger was a founder of the News on Sunday tabloid in 1984, and was hired as Editor-in-Chief in 1986. During the period of hiring staff, Pilger was away for several months filming The Secret Country in Australia. Prior to this, he had given editor Keith Sutton a list of people who he thought might be recruited for the paper, but found on his return to Britain that none of them had been hired. Pilger resigned before the first issue and had come into conflict with those around him. He disagreed with the founders' decision to base the paper in Manchester and then clashed with the governing committees; the paper was intended to be a workers' co-operative. Sutton's appointment as editor was Pilger's suggestion, but he fell out with Sutton over his plan to produce a left wing Sun newspaper. The two men ended up producing their own dummies, but the founders and the various committees backed Sutton. Pilger, appointed with "overall editorial control", resigned at this point. The first issue appeared on 27 April 1987 and The News on Sunday soon closed. Pilger returned to the Mirror in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks, while Piers Morgan was editor. His most frequent outlet for many years was the New Statesman, where he had a fortnightly column from 1991 when Steve Platt was editor to 2014. In 2018, Pilger said his "written journalism is no longer welcome" in the mainstream and that "probably its last home" was in The Guardian. His last column for The Guardian was in April 2015. Television With the actor David Swift, and the film makers Paul Watson and Charles Denton, Pilger formed Tempest Films in 1969. "We wanted a frontman with a mind of his own, rather like another James Cameron, with whom Richard [Marquand] had worked", Swift once said. "Paul thought John was very charismatic, as well as marketing extremely original, refreshingly radical ideas." The company was unable to gain commissions from either the BBC or ITV, but did manage to package potential projects. Pilger's career on television began on World in Action (Granada Television) in 1969, directed by Denton, for whom he made two documentaries broadcast in 1970 and 1971, the earliest of more than fifty in his career. The Quiet Mutiny (1970) was filmed at Camp Snuffy, presenting a character study of the common US soldier during the Vietnam War. It revealed the shifting morale and open rebellion of American troops. Pilger later described the film as "something of a scoop" – it was the first documentary to show the problems with morale among the drafted ranks of the US military. In an interview with the New Statesman, Pilger said: When I flew to New York and showed it to Mike Wallace, the star reporter of CBS' 60 Minutes, he agreed. "Real shame we can't show it here". He made other documentaries about the United States involvement in Vietnam, including Vietnam: Still America's War (1974), Do You Remember Vietnam? (1978), and Vietnam: The Last Battle (1995). During his work with BBC's Midweek television series during 1972–73, Pilger completed five documentary reports, but only two were broadcast. Pilger was successful in gaining a regular television outlet at ATV. The Pilger half-hour documentary series was commissioned by Charles Denton, then a producer with ATV, for screening on the British ITV network. The series ran for five seasons from 1974 until 1977, at first running in the UK on Sunday afternoons after Weekend World. The theme song for the series was composed by Lynsey de Paul. Later it was scheduled in a weekday peak-time evening slot. The last series included "A Faraway Country" (September 1977) about dissidents in Czechoslovakia, then still part of the Communist Soviet bloc. Pilger and his team interviewed members of Charter 77 and other groups, clandestinely using domestic film equipment. In the documentary Pilger praises the dissidents' courage and commitment to freedom, and describes the communist totalitarianism as "fascism disguised as socialism". Pilger was later given an hour slot at 9 pm, before News at Ten, which gave him a high profile in Britain. After ATV lost its franchise in 1981, he continued to make documentaries for screening on ITV, initially for Central, and later via Carlton Television. Documentaries and career: 1978–2000 Cambodia In 1979, Pilger and two colleagues with whom he collaborated for many years, documentary film-maker David Munro and photographer Eric Piper, entered Cambodia in the wake of the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime. They made photographs and reports that were world exclusives. The first was published as a special issue of the Daily Mirror, which sold out. They also produced an ITV documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, which brought to people's living rooms the suffering of the Khmer people. During the filming of Cambodia Year One, the team were warned that Pilger was on a Khmer Rouge 'death list.' In one incident, they narrowly escaped an ambush. Following the showing of Year Zero, some $45 million was raised, unsolicited, in mostly small donations, including almost £4 million raised by schoolchildren in the UK. This funded the first substantial relief to Cambodia, including the shipment of life-saving drugs such as penicillin, and clothing to replace the black uniforms people had been forced to wear. According to Brian Walker, director of Oxfam, "a solidarity and compassion surged across our nation" from the broadcast of Year Zero. William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984) about Pilger's series of articles about Cambodia in the Daily Mirror during August 1979: A rather interesting quality of the articles was their concentration on Nazism and the holocaust. Pilger called Pol Pot 'an Asian Hitler' — and said he was even worse than Hitler . . . Again and again Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis. Their Marxist-Leninist ideology was not even mentioned in the Mirror, except to say they were inspired by the Red Guards. Their intellectual origins were described as 'anarchist' rather than Communist". Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards. Kiernan notes instances where other writers' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account, or not mentioned. Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and François Ponchaud. In Heroes, Pilger disputes François Ponchaud and Shawcross's account of Vietnamese atrocities during the Vietnamese invasion and near famine as being "unsubstantiated". Ponchaud had interviewed members of anti-communist groups living in the Thai refugee border camps. According to Pilger, "At the very least the effect of Shawcross's 'exposé'" of Cambodians' treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese "was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: in truth, a difference of night and day". In his book, Shawcross himself doubted that anyone had died of starvation. Pilger and Munro made four later films about Cambodia. Pilger's documentary Cambodia – The Betrayal (1990), prompted a libel case against him, which was settled at the High Court with an award against Pilger and Central Television. The Times of 6 July 1991 reported: Two men who claimed that a television documentary accused them of being SAS members who trained Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to lay mines, accepted "very substantial" libel damages in the High Court yesterday. Christopher Geidt and Anthony De Normann settled their action against the journalist John Pilger and Central Television on the third day of the hearing. Desmond Browne, QC, for Mr Pilger and Central Television, said his clients had not intended to allege the two men trained the Khmer Rouge to lay mines, but they accepted that was how the program had been understood. Pilger said the defence case collapsed because the government issued a gagging order, citing national security, which prevented three government ministers and two former heads of the SAS from appearing in court. The film received a British Academy of Film and Television Award nomination in 1991. Australia's Indigenous peoples Pilger has long criticised aspects of Australian government policy, particularly what he regards as its inherent racism resulting in the poor treatment of Indigenous Australians. In 1969, Pilger went with Australian activist Charlie Perkins on a tour to Jay Creek in Central Australia. He compared what he witnessed in Jay Creek to South African apartheid. He saw the appalling conditions that the Aboriginal people were living under, with children suffering from malnutrition and grieving mothers and grandmothers having had their lighter-skinned children and grandchildren removed by the police and welfare agencies. Equally, he learned of Aboriginal boys being sent to work on white run farms, and Aboriginal girls working as servants in middle-class homes as undeclared slave labour. Pilger has made several documentaries about Indigenous Australians, such as The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back (1985) and Welcome to Australia (1999). His book on the subject, A Secret Country, was first published in 1989. Pilger wrote in 2000 that the 1998 legislation that removed the common-law rights of Indigenous peoples: is just one of the disgraces that has given Australia the distinction of being the only developed country whose government has been condemned as racist by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Pilger returned to this subject with Utopia, released in 2013 (see below). East Timor Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy In East Timor Pilger clandestinely shot Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy about the brutal Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which began in 1975. Death of a Nation contributed to an international outcry which ultimately led to Indonesian withdrawal from East Timor and eventual independence in 2000. When Death of a Nation was screened in Britain it was the highest rating documentary in 15 years and 5,000 telephone calls per minute were made to the programme's action line. When Death of a Nation was screened in Australia in June 1994, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans declared that Pilger "had a track record of distorted sensationalism mixed with sanctimony." Documentaries and career since 2000 Palestine Is Still the Issue Pilger's documentary Palestine Is Still the Issue was released in 2002 and had Ilan Pappé as historical adviser. Pilger said the film describes how an "historic injustice has been done to the Palestinian people, and until Israel's illegal and brutal occupation ends, there will be no peace for anyone, Israelis included". He said the responses of his interviewees "put the lie to the standard Zionist cry that any criticism of Israel is anti-semitic, a claim that insults all those Jewish people who reject the likes of Ariel Sharon acting in their name". Its broadcast resulted in complaints by the Israeli embassy, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the Conservative Friends of Israel that it was inaccurate and biased. Michael Green, chairman of Carlton Communications, the company that made the film, also objected to it in an interview with the Jewish Chronicle. The UK television regulator, the Independent Television Commission (ITC), ordered an investigation. The ITC investigation rejected the complaints about the film, stating in its report: The ITC raised with Carlton all the significant areas of inaccuracy critics of the programme alleged and the broadcaster answered them by reference to a range of historical texts. The ITC is not a tribunal of fact and is particularly aware of the difficulties of verifying 'historical fact' but the comprehensiveness and authority of Carlton's sources were persuasive, not least because many appeared to be of Israeli origin. The ITC concluded that in Pilger's documentary "adequate opportunity was given to a pro-Israeli government perspective" and that the programme "was not in breach of the ITC Programme Code". Stealing a Nation Pilger's documentary Stealing a Nation (2004) recounts the experiences of the late 20th-century trials of the people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The documentary primarily focuses on the expulsion of the Chagossians by Britain and the USA between 1967 and 1973 to Mauritius, and the poor economic situation faced by the islanders as a result of the deportation. Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos Islands, was given to the United States government which began the construction of a major military base for the region. In the 21st century, the US used the base for planes which were bombing targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a 2000 ruling on the events, the International Court of Justice described the wholesale removal of the Chagossian peoples from the Chagos Islands by Britain as "a crime against humanity". Pilger strongly criticised Tony Blair for failing to respond in a substantive way to the 2000 High Court ruling that the expulsion of the Chagossian people to Mauritius was illegal. In March 2005, Stealing a Nation received the Royal Television Society Award. Latin America: The War on Democracy (2007) The documentary The War on Democracy (2007) was Pilger's first film to be released in the cinema. In "an unremitting assault on American foreign policy since 1945", according to Andrew Billen in The Times, the film explores the role of US interventions, overt and covert, in toppling a series of governments in the region, and placing "a succession of favourably disposed bullies in control of its Latino backyard". It discusses the US role in the overthrow in 1973 of the democratically elected Chilean leader Salvador Allende, who was replaced by the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who purportedly took part in secret campaigns against democratic governments in South America. It also contains what Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian described as "a dewy-eyed interview" with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, which has moments of "almost Hello!-magazine deference". Pilger explores the US Army School of the Americas in the US state of Georgia. Generations of South American military were trained there, with a curriculum including counter-insurgency techniques. Attendees reportedly included members of Pinochet's security services, along with men from Haiti, El Salvador, Argentina and Brazil who have been implicated in human rights abuses. The film also details the attempted overthrow of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez in 2002. The people of Caracas rose up to force his return to power. It looks at the wider rise of populist governments across South America, led by figures calling for loosening ties with the United States and attempting a more equitable redistribution of the continent's natural wealth. Of "Chávez's decision to bypass the National Assembly for 18 months, and rule by decree", Peter Bradshaw writes "Pilger passes over it very lightly". Pilger said the film is about the struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery. These people, he says,describe a world not as American presidents like to see it as useful or expendable, they describe the power of courage and humanity among people with next to nothing. They reclaim noble words like democracy, freedom, liberation, justice, and in doing so they are defending the most basic human rights of all of us in a war being waged against all of us. The War on Democracy won the Best Documentary category at the One World Media Awards in 2008. The War You Don't See (2010) The subject of The War You Don’t See is the role of the media in making war. It concentrates on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories. It begins with the Collateral Murder video leaked by Chelsea Manning and released by WikiLeaks. In an interview, Julian Assange describes WikiLeaks as an organisation that gives power to ‘conscientious objectors’ within ‘power systems’. The documentary contends that the CIA uses intelligence to manipulate public opinion and that the media collude by following the official line. During the documentary Pilger states that "propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home". John Lloyd in the Financial Times said The War You Don't See was a "one-sided" documentary which "had no thought of explaining, even hinting, that the wars fought by the US and the UK had a scrap of just cause, nor of examining the nature of what Pilger simply stated were "lies" – especially those that took the two countries to the invasion of Iraq". Support for Julian Assange Pilger supported Julian Assange by pledging bail in December 2010. Pilger said at the time: "There's no doubt that he is not going to abscond". Assange sought asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in 2012 and Pilger's bail money was lost when a judge ordered it to be forfeited. Pilger has been critical of the media's treatment of Assange saying: "The same brave newspapers and broadcasters that have supported Britain’s part in epic bloody crimes, from the genocide in Indonesia to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, now attack the “human rights record” of Ecuador, whose real crime is to stand up to the bullies in London and Washington". He criticised the failure of the Australian government to object when it "repeatedly received confirmation that the US was conducting an “unprecedented” pursuit of Assange" and noted that one of the reasons Ecuador gave for granting asylum to Assange was his abandonment by Australia. Pilger visited Assange in the embassy and has continued to support him. Utopia (2013) With Utopia, Pilger returned to the experiences of Indigenous Australians and what he termed "the denigrating of their humanity". A documentary feature film, it takes its title from Utopia, an Aboriginal homeland (also known as an outstation) in the Northern Territory. Pilger says that "in essence, very little" has changed since the first of his seven films about the Aboriginal people, A Secret Country: The First Australians (1985). In an interview with the UK based Australian Times he commented: "the catastrophe imposed on Indigenous Australians is the equivalent of apartheid, and the system has to change". Reviewing the film, Peter Bradshaw wrote: "The awful truth is that Indigenous communities are on mineral-rich lands that cause mouths to water in mining corporation boardrooms". "When the subject and subjects are allowed to speak for themselves – when Pilger doesn't stand and preach – the injustices glow like throbbing wounds", wrote Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times, but the documentary maker "goes on too long. 110 minutes is a hefty time in screen politics, especially when we know the makers' message from scene one". Geoffrey Macnab described it as an "angry, impassioned documentary" while for Mark Kermode it is a "searing indictment of the ongoing mistreatment" of the first Australians. The Coming War on China (2016) The Coming War on China was Pilger's 60th film for ITV. The film premiered in the UK on Thursday 1 December 2016, and was shown on ITV at 10.40 pm on Tuesday 6 December and on the Australian public broadcaster SBS on 16 April 2017. In the documentary, according to Pilger, "the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency. The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way. They are on the western borders of Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China. Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an 'existential threat' to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs". "The first third told, and told well, the unforgivable, unconscionable tale of what has overtaken the Marshall Islanders since 1946, when the US first nuked the test site on Bikini Atoll" beginning an extended series of tests, wrote Euan Ferguson in The Observer. "Over the next 12 years they would unleash a total of 42.2 megatons. The islanders, as forensically proved by Pilger, were effectively guinea pigs for [the] effects of radiation". Ferguson wrote that the rest of the film "was a sane, sober, necessary, deeply troubling bucketful of worries". Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian wrote that the film "lays bare the historical horrors of the US military in the Pacific, exposing the paranoia and pre-emptive aggression of its semi-secret bases," adding: "This is a gripping film, which though it comes close to excusing China ... does point out China's insecurities and political cruelties". Neil Young of The Hollywood Reporter called the film an "authoritative indictment of American nefariousness in the western Pacific". Kevin Maher wrote in The Times that he admired the early sequences on the Marshall Islands, but that he believed the film lacked nuance or subtlety. Maher wrote that, for Pilger, China is "a brilliant place with just some 'issues with human rights', but let's not go into that now". Diplomat columnist David Hutt said "Pilger consistently glosses over China's past crimes while dwelling on America's". Caitlin Johnstone of Scoop called the film "powerful" and praised it for showing "the USA's generations-long history of provocation and hostility toward [China's] government. It also addresses the silly projection so many westerners harbor that if the US wasn't bullying and slaughtering the world into compliance, China would take over doing the same." The Dirty War on the National Health Service (2019) Pilger's The Dirty War on the National Health Service was released in the UK on 29 November 2019 and examined the changes that the NHS has undergone since its founding in 1948. Pilger makes the case that governments beginning with that of Margaret Thatcher have waged a secret war against the NHS with a view to privatising it slowly and surreptitiously. Pilger predicted that moves toward privatisation would create more poverty and homelessness and that the resulting chaos would be used as an argument for further "reform". Peter Bradshaw described the documentary as a "fierce, necessary film". Views (1999–present) Bush, Blair, Howard and wars In 2003 and 2004, Pilger criticised United States President George W. Bush, saying that he had used the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq as part of a strategy to increase US control of the world's oil supplies. In 2004, Pilger criticised British Prime Minister Tony Blair as equally responsible for the invasion and the bungled occupation of Iraq. In 2004, as the Iraq insurgency increased, Pilger wrote that the anti-war movement should support "Iraq's anti-occupation resistance: We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the "Bush gang" will attack another country". Pilger described Australian Prime Minister John Howard as "the mouse that roars for America, whipping his country into war fever and paranoia about terrorism within". He thought Howard's willingness to "join the Bush/Blair assault on Iraq ... evok[ed] a melancholy history of obsequious service to great power: from the Boxer Rebellion to the Boer war, to the disaster at Gallipoli, and Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf". On 25 July 2005, Pilger ascribed blame for the 2005 London bombings that month to Blair. He wrote that Blair's decision to follow Bush helped to generate the rage that Pilger said precipitated the bombings. In his column a year later, Pilger described Blair as a war criminal for supporting Israel's actions during the 2006 Israel–Lebanon conflict. He said that Blair gave permission to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 to initiate what would ultimately become Operation Defensive Shield. In 2014, Pilger wrote that "The truth about the criminal bloodbath in Iraq cannot be "countered" indefinitely. Neither can the truth about our support for the medievalists in Saudi Arabia, the nuclear-armed predators in Israel, the new military fascists in Egypt and the jihadist "liberators" of Syria, whose propaganda is now BBC news". Barack Obama Pilger criticised Barack Obama during his presidential campaign of 2008, saying that he was "a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan" and his theme "was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully". After Obama was elected and took office in 2009, Pilger wrote, "In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government". Sunny Hundal wrote in The Guardian during November 2008 that the "Uncle Tom" slur used against Obama "highlights a patronising attitude towards ethnic minorities. Pilger expects all black and brown people to be revolutionary brothers and sisters, and if they veer away from that stereotype, it can only be because they are pawns of a wider conspiracy". Comments about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton In a February 2016 webchat on the website of The Guardian newspaper, Pilger said "Trump is speaking straight to ordinary Americans". Although his opinions about immigration were "gross", Pilger wrote that they are "no more gross in essence than, say, David Cameron's – he is not planning to invade anywhere, he doesn't hate the Russians or the Chinese, he is not beholden to Israel. People like this lack of cant, and when the so-called liberal media deride him, they like him even more". In March 2016, Pilger commented in a speech delivered at the University of Sydney during the 2016 United States presidential election, that Donald Trump was a less dangerous potential President of the United States than Hillary Clinton. In November 2016, Pilger said that "notorious terrorist jihadist group called ISIL or ISIS is created largely with money from [the government of Saudi and the government of Qatar] who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation". In August 2017, in an article published on his website, Pilger wrote that a "coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently made clear he does not want war with Russia. This glimpse of sanity, or simple pragmatism, is anathema to the 'national security' managers who guard a system based on war, surveillance, armaments, threats and extreme capitalism". According to Pilger, The Guardian has published "drivel" in covering the claims "that the Russians conspired with Trump". Such assertions, he writes, are "reminiscent of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as a 'Soviet agent'". Russia On the Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, Wiltshire on 4 March 2018, Pilger said in an interview on RT: "This is a carefully constructed drama as part of the propaganda campaign that has been building now for several years in order to justify the actions of NATO, Britain and the United States, towards Russia. That’s a fact". Such events as the Iraq War, "at the very least should make us sceptical of Theresa May’s theatrics in Parliament". He hinted that the UK government may have been involved in the attack, saying it had motive and that the nearby Porton Down laboratory has a "long and sinister record with nerve gas and chemical weapons". China According to Pilger, "American bases form a giant noose encircling China with missiles, bombers, warships - all the way from Australia through the Pacific to Asia and beyond. ... There are no Chinese naval ships and no Chinese bases off California". Brexit On voting to leave the European Union, Pilger wrote in 2016 "The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media.This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and demoralised by the sheer arrogance of the apologists for the "remain" campaign and the dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain. The last bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service, has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is fighting for its life." Criticism of the mainstream media Pilger has criticised many journalists of the mainstream media. During the administration of President Bill Clinton in the US, Pilger attacked the British-American Project as an example of "Atlanticist freemasonry". He asserted in November 1998 that "many members are journalists, the essential foot soldiers in any network devoted to power and propaganda". In 2002, he said that "many journalists now are no more than channellers and echoers of what Orwell called the official truth". In 2003, he criticised what he called the "liberal lobby" which "promote killing" from "behind a humanitarian mask". He said David Aaronovitch exemplified the "mask-wearers" and noted that Aaronovitch had written that the attack on Iraq will be "the easy bit". Aaronovitch responded to an article by Pilger about the mainstream media in 2003 as one of his "typical pieces about the corruption of most journalists (ie people like me [Aaronovitch]) versus the bravery of a few (ie people like him)". On another occasion, while speaking to journalism students at the University of Lincoln, Pilger said that mainstream journalism means corporate journalism. As such, he believes it represents vested corporate interests more than those of the public. In September 2014, Pilger wrote critically of The Guardian and other western media, regarding their reporting on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, writing "Without a single piece of evidence, the US and its NATO allies and their media machines blamed ethnic Russian 'separatists' in Ukraine and implied that Moscow was ultimately responsible". He asserted that "the newspaper has made no serious attempt to examine who shot the aeroplane down and why". In January 2020, Pilger tweeted scepticism of contemporary mainstream narratives about the downing of MH17, and the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 over Iran, saying "Lie upon lie. Hiroshima necessary to defeat Japan. Vietnam attacked US ships in Gulf of Tonkin. Saddam Hussein had WMD. Libya invaded to prevent massacre. Russia shot down MH17/put Trump in the White House. The US, not Russia, defeated Isis. Add Iran shot down Ukrainian airliner". BBC Pilger wrote in December 2002, of British broadcasting's requirement for "impartiality" as being "a euphemism for the consensual view of established authority". He wrote that "BBC television news faithfully echoed word for word" government "propaganda designed to soften up the public for Blair's attack on Iraq". In his documentary The War You Don't See (2010), Pilger returned to this theme and accused the BBC of failing to cover the viewpoint of the victims, civilians caught up in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has additionally pointed to the 48 documentaries on Ireland made for the BBC and ITV between 1959 and the late-1980s which were delayed or altered before transmission, or totally suppressed. Personal life Pilger was married to journalist Scarth Flett, granddaughter of the physician and geologist Sir John Smith Flett. Their son Sam was born in 1973 and is a sports writer. Pilger also has a daughter, Zoe Pilger, born 1984, with journalist Yvonne Roberts. Zoe is an author and art critic. Honours and awards The Press Awards, formerly the British Press Awards 1966: Descriptive Writer of the Year 1967: Journalist of the Year 1970: International Reporter of the Year 1974: News Reporter of the Year 1978: Campaigning Journalist of the Year 1979: Journalist of the Year Other awards 1991: Television Richard Dimbleby Award, BAFTA 1991: At 19th International Emmy Awards Emmy for documentary 'Cambodia, the Betrayal' 2009: Sydney Peace Prize 2011: Grierson Trust Award, UK 2017: Order of Timor-Leste Reception Martha Gellhorn, the American novelist, journalist and war correspondent, said that "[John Pilger] has taken on the great theme of justice and injustice... He documents and proclaims the official lies that we are told and that most people accept or don't bother to think about. [He] belongs to an old and unending worldwide company, the men and women of conscience. Some are as famous as Tom Paine and William Wilberforce, some as unknown as a tiny group calling itself Grandmothers Against The Bomb.... If they win, it is slowly; but they never entirely lose. To my mind, they are the blessed proof of the dignity of man. John has an assured place among them. I'd say he is a charter member for his generation". Noam Chomsky said of Pilger: "John Pilger's work has been a beacon of light in often dark times. The realities he has brought to light have been a revelation, over and over again, and his courage and insight a constant inspiration". According to Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate and member of the Stop the War Coalition, "John Pilger is fearless. He unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is... I salute him". John Simpson, the BBC's world affairs editor, has said, "A country that does not have a John Pilger in its journalism is a very feeble place indeed". The Anglo-American writer Christopher Hitchens said of Pilger: "I remember thinking that his work from Vietnam was very good at the time. I dare say if I went back and read it again I'd probably still admire quite a lot of it. But there is a word that gets overused and can be misused – namely, anti-American – and it has to be used about him. So that for me sort of spoils it... even when I'm inclined to agree". Shortly after Pilger won the Sydney Peace Prize in 2009, the Australian commentator Gerard Henderson accused Pilger of "engaging in hyperbole against western democracies". The Economist Lexington columnist criticised Pilger's account of the Arab uprising, writing that he "thinks the Arab revolts show that the West in general and the United States in particular are 'fascist'", adding, "what most of the Arab protesters say they want are the very freedoms that they know full well, even if Pilger doesn't, to be available in the West". In Breaking the Silence: The Films of John Pilger, Anthony Hayward wrote, "For half a century, he has been an ever stronger voice for those without a voice and a thorn in the side of authority, the Establishment. His work, particularly his documentary films, has also made him rare in being a journalist who is universally known, a champion of those for whom he fights and the scourge of politicians and others whose actions he exposes". The New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait responded to Pilger's 13 May 2014 column in The Guardian about Ukraine. Chait wrote that Pilger was "defending Vladimir Putin on the grounds that he stands opposed to the United States, which is the font of all evil" and that his "attempt to cast land-grabbing, ultranationalist dictator Vladimir Putin as an enemy of fascism is comical". US Government funded Radio Free Europe claimed that Pilger's column contained a bogus quote regarding the Odessa massacre of May 2014. Legacy The John Pilger Archive is housed at the British Library. The papers can be accessed through the British Library catalogue. Bibliography Books The Last Day (1975) Aftermath: The Struggles of Cambodia and Vietnam (1981) The Outsiders (with Michael Coren, 1984) Heroes (1986), (2001) A Secret Country (1989) Distant Voices (1992 and 1994) Hidden Agendas (1998) Reporting the World: John Pilger's Great Eyewitness Photographers (2001) The New Rulers of the World (2002; 4th ed. 2016) Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs (ed.) Cape (2004) Freedom Next Time (2006) Plays The Last Day (1983) Documentaries World in Action "The Quiet Mutiny" (1970) Conversations With a Working Man (1971) Palestine Is Still The Issue (Part 1) (1974) Vietnam: Still America's War (1974) Guilty Until Proven Innocent (John Pilger) (1974) Thalidomide: The Ninety-Eight We Forgot (1974) The Most Powerful Politician in America (1974) One British Family (1974) Pilger "An Unfashionable Tragedy" (1975) "Nobody's Children" (1975) "Zap-The Weapon is Food" (1976) "Pyramid Lake is Dying" (1976) "Street of Joy" (1976) "A Faraway Country" (1977) Mr Nixon's Secret Legacy (1975) Smashing Kids] (1975) To Know Us Is To Love Us (1975) A Nod & A Wink (1975) Pilger in Australia (1976) Dismantling A Dream (1977) An Unjustifiable Risk (1977) The Selling of the Sea (1978) Do You Remember Vietnam (1978) Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979) The Mexicans (1980) Cambodia: Year One (1980) Heroes (1980) Island of Dreams (John Pilger)(1981) In Search of Truth in Wartime (1983) Nicaragua. A Nations Right to Survive (1983) The Outsiders (series, 1983) The Truth Game (1983) Burp! Pepsi V Coke in the Ice Cold War (1984) The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back (1985) Japan Behind the Mask (1987) The Last Dream (1988) "Heroes unsung" "Secrets" "Other People's Wars" Cambodia: Year Ten (1989) Cambodia, the Betrayal (1990) War By Other Means (1992) Cambodia: Return to Year Zero (1993) Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1994) Flying the Flag, Arming the World (1994) Vietnam: The Last Battle (1995) Inside Burma: Land of Fear (1996) Breaking the Mirror – The Murdoch Effect (1997) Apartheid Did Not Die (1998) Welcome to Australia (1999) Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq (2000) The New Rulers of the World (2001) Palestine Is Still the Issue (2002) Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror (2003) Stealing a Nation (2004) The War on Democracy (2007) The War You Don't See (2010) Utopia (2013) The Coming War on China (2016) The Dirty War on the NHS (2019) References External links Freedom Next Time: Filmmaker & Journalist John Pilger on Propaganda, the Press, Censorship and Resisting the American Empire, Democracy Now!, 7 August 2007 John Pilger at Random House Australia 1939 births Living people Anti-Americanism Australian documentary filmmakers Australian expatriates in the United Kingdom Australian freelance journalists Australian investigative journalists Australian people of English descent Australian people of German descent Australian people of Irish descent Australian war correspondents People educated at Sydney Boys High School People from Sydney War correspondents of the Nigerian Civil War War correspondents of the Vietnam War 20th-century Australian journalists 21st-century Australian journalists Daily Mirror people	true	[ "Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region", "Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts" ]
[ "John Pilger", "Responses by William Shawcross and others", "Did William Shawcross right any books?", "that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and Francois Ponchaud.", "What other authors had reviews or responses ?", "Ben Kiernan,", "What was Ben Kiernan's response?", "notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror,", "What happened after that?", "and said he was even worse than Hitler .", "Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?", "William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy:" ]	C_81f47291a0304f7d81c3ee5545e66d08_1	What was a response to the book?	6	What was the response to the book by the general public or than Ben Kiernan?	John Pilger	William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984) about Pilger's series of articles about Cambodia in the Daily Mirror during August 1979: "A rather interesting quality of the articles was their concentration on Nazism and the holocaust. Pilger called Pol Pot 'an Asian Hitler' -- and said he was even worse than Hitler . . . Again and again Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis. Their Marxist-Leninist ideology was not even mentioned in the Mirror, except to say they were inspired by the Red Guards. Their intellectual origins were described as 'anarchist' rather than Communist". Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards. Kiernan notes instances where other writers' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account, or not mentioned. Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and Francois Ponchaud. Nonetheless, the reaction to the stories in Britain was as if they were something quite new." Oliver Kamm asserted in 2006: "Pilger's documentaries are full of falsehoods. They operate by misdirection, simultaneously denouncing one form of injustice while ignoring or denying others". In Heroes, Pilger disputes Francois Ponchaud and Shawcross's account of Vietnamesse atrocities during the Vietnamese invasion and near famine as being "unsubstantiated". Ponchard had interviewed members of anti-communist groups living in the Thai refugee border camps. According to Pilger, "At the very least the effect of Shawcross's 'expose'" of Cambodian's treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese "was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: in truth. a difference of night and day". In his book, Shawcross himself doubted that anyone had died of starvation. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER	John Richard Pilger (; born 9 October 1939) is an Australian journalist, writer, scholar, and documentary filmmaker. He has been mainly based in Britain since 1962. He is also currently Visiting Professor at Cornell University in New York. Pilger is a strong critic of American, Australian, and British foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by an imperialist and colonialist agenda. Pilger has also criticised his native country's treatment of Indigenous Australians. He first drew international attention for his reports on the Cambodian genocide. His career as a documentary film maker began with The Quiet Mutiny (1970), made during one of his visits to Vietnam, and has continued with over 50 documentaries since. Other works in this form include Year Zero (1979), about the aftermath of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1993). His many documentary films on indigenous Australians include The Secret Country (1985) and Utopia (2013). In the British print media, Pilger worked at the Daily Mirror from 1963 to 1986, and wrote a regular column for the New Statesman magazine from 1991 to 2014. Pilger won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award in 1967 and 1979. His documentaries have gained awards in Britain and worldwide, including multiple BAFTA honours. The practices of the mainstream media are a regular subject in Pilger's writing. Early life John Richard Pilger was born on 9 October 1939 in Bondi, New South Wales, the son of Claude and Elsie Pilger. His older brother, Graham (1932–2017), was a disabled rights activist who later advised the government of Gough Whitlam. Pilger is of German descent on his father's side, while his mother had English, German, and Irish ancestry; two of his maternal great-great-grandparents were Irish convicts transported to Australia. His mother taught French in school. Pilger and his brother attended Sydney Boys High School, where he began a student newspaper, The Messenger. He later joined a four-year journalist trainee scheme with the Australian Consolidated Press. Journalism and television career Journalism Beginning his career in 1958 as a copy boy with the Sydney Sun, Pilger later moved to the city's Daily Telegraph, where he was a reporter, sports writer, and sub-editor. He also freelanced and worked for the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, the daily paper's sister title. After moving to Europe, he was a freelance correspondent in Italy for a year. Settling in London in 1962, working as a sub-editor, Pilger joined British United Press and then Reuters on its Middle-East desk. In 1963 he was recruited by the English Daily Mirror, again as a sub-editor. Later, he advanced to become a reporter, a feature writer, and Chief Foreign Correspondent for the title. While living and working in the United States for the Daily Mirror, on 5 June 1968 he witnessed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles during his presidential campaign. He was a war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra. Nearly eighteen months after Robert Maxwell bought the Mirror (on 12 July 1984), Pilger was sacked by Richard Stott, the newspaper's editor, on 31 December 1985. Pilger was a founder of the News on Sunday tabloid in 1984, and was hired as Editor-in-Chief in 1986. During the period of hiring staff, Pilger was away for several months filming The Secret Country in Australia. Prior to this, he had given editor Keith Sutton a list of people who he thought might be recruited for the paper, but found on his return to Britain that none of them had been hired. Pilger resigned before the first issue and had come into conflict with those around him. He disagreed with the founders' decision to base the paper in Manchester and then clashed with the governing committees; the paper was intended to be a workers' co-operative. Sutton's appointment as editor was Pilger's suggestion, but he fell out with Sutton over his plan to produce a left wing Sun newspaper. The two men ended up producing their own dummies, but the founders and the various committees backed Sutton. Pilger, appointed with "overall editorial control", resigned at this point. The first issue appeared on 27 April 1987 and The News on Sunday soon closed. Pilger returned to the Mirror in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks, while Piers Morgan was editor. His most frequent outlet for many years was the New Statesman, where he had a fortnightly column from 1991 when Steve Platt was editor to 2014. In 2018, Pilger said his "written journalism is no longer welcome" in the mainstream and that "probably its last home" was in The Guardian. His last column for The Guardian was in April 2015. Television With the actor David Swift, and the film makers Paul Watson and Charles Denton, Pilger formed Tempest Films in 1969. "We wanted a frontman with a mind of his own, rather like another James Cameron, with whom Richard [Marquand] had worked", Swift once said. "Paul thought John was very charismatic, as well as marketing extremely original, refreshingly radical ideas." The company was unable to gain commissions from either the BBC or ITV, but did manage to package potential projects. Pilger's career on television began on World in Action (Granada Television) in 1969, directed by Denton, for whom he made two documentaries broadcast in 1970 and 1971, the earliest of more than fifty in his career. The Quiet Mutiny (1970) was filmed at Camp Snuffy, presenting a character study of the common US soldier during the Vietnam War. It revealed the shifting morale and open rebellion of American troops. Pilger later described the film as "something of a scoop" – it was the first documentary to show the problems with morale among the drafted ranks of the US military. In an interview with the New Statesman, Pilger said: When I flew to New York and showed it to Mike Wallace, the star reporter of CBS' 60 Minutes, he agreed. "Real shame we can't show it here". He made other documentaries about the United States involvement in Vietnam, including Vietnam: Still America's War (1974), Do You Remember Vietnam? (1978), and Vietnam: The Last Battle (1995). During his work with BBC's Midweek television series during 1972–73, Pilger completed five documentary reports, but only two were broadcast. Pilger was successful in gaining a regular television outlet at ATV. The Pilger half-hour documentary series was commissioned by Charles Denton, then a producer with ATV, for screening on the British ITV network. The series ran for five seasons from 1974 until 1977, at first running in the UK on Sunday afternoons after Weekend World. The theme song for the series was composed by Lynsey de Paul. Later it was scheduled in a weekday peak-time evening slot. The last series included "A Faraway Country" (September 1977) about dissidents in Czechoslovakia, then still part of the Communist Soviet bloc. Pilger and his team interviewed members of Charter 77 and other groups, clandestinely using domestic film equipment. In the documentary Pilger praises the dissidents' courage and commitment to freedom, and describes the communist totalitarianism as "fascism disguised as socialism". Pilger was later given an hour slot at 9 pm, before News at Ten, which gave him a high profile in Britain. After ATV lost its franchise in 1981, he continued to make documentaries for screening on ITV, initially for Central, and later via Carlton Television. Documentaries and career: 1978–2000 Cambodia In 1979, Pilger and two colleagues with whom he collaborated for many years, documentary film-maker David Munro and photographer Eric Piper, entered Cambodia in the wake of the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime. They made photographs and reports that were world exclusives. The first was published as a special issue of the Daily Mirror, which sold out. They also produced an ITV documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, which brought to people's living rooms the suffering of the Khmer people. During the filming of Cambodia Year One, the team were warned that Pilger was on a Khmer Rouge 'death list.' In one incident, they narrowly escaped an ambush. Following the showing of Year Zero, some $45 million was raised, unsolicited, in mostly small donations, including almost £4 million raised by schoolchildren in the UK. This funded the first substantial relief to Cambodia, including the shipment of life-saving drugs such as penicillin, and clothing to replace the black uniforms people had been forced to wear. According to Brian Walker, director of Oxfam, "a solidarity and compassion surged across our nation" from the broadcast of Year Zero. William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984) about Pilger's series of articles about Cambodia in the Daily Mirror during August 1979: A rather interesting quality of the articles was their concentration on Nazism and the holocaust. Pilger called Pol Pot 'an Asian Hitler' — and said he was even worse than Hitler . . . Again and again Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis. Their Marxist-Leninist ideology was not even mentioned in the Mirror, except to say they were inspired by the Red Guards. Their intellectual origins were described as 'anarchist' rather than Communist". Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards. Kiernan notes instances where other writers' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account, or not mentioned. Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and François Ponchaud. In Heroes, Pilger disputes François Ponchaud and Shawcross's account of Vietnamese atrocities during the Vietnamese invasion and near famine as being "unsubstantiated". Ponchaud had interviewed members of anti-communist groups living in the Thai refugee border camps. According to Pilger, "At the very least the effect of Shawcross's 'exposé'" of Cambodians' treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese "was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: in truth, a difference of night and day". In his book, Shawcross himself doubted that anyone had died of starvation. Pilger and Munro made four later films about Cambodia. Pilger's documentary Cambodia – The Betrayal (1990), prompted a libel case against him, which was settled at the High Court with an award against Pilger and Central Television. The Times of 6 July 1991 reported: Two men who claimed that a television documentary accused them of being SAS members who trained Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to lay mines, accepted "very substantial" libel damages in the High Court yesterday. Christopher Geidt and Anthony De Normann settled their action against the journalist John Pilger and Central Television on the third day of the hearing. Desmond Browne, QC, for Mr Pilger and Central Television, said his clients had not intended to allege the two men trained the Khmer Rouge to lay mines, but they accepted that was how the program had been understood. Pilger said the defence case collapsed because the government issued a gagging order, citing national security, which prevented three government ministers and two former heads of the SAS from appearing in court. The film received a British Academy of Film and Television Award nomination in 1991. Australia's Indigenous peoples Pilger has long criticised aspects of Australian government policy, particularly what he regards as its inherent racism resulting in the poor treatment of Indigenous Australians. In 1969, Pilger went with Australian activist Charlie Perkins on a tour to Jay Creek in Central Australia. He compared what he witnessed in Jay Creek to South African apartheid. He saw the appalling conditions that the Aboriginal people were living under, with children suffering from malnutrition and grieving mothers and grandmothers having had their lighter-skinned children and grandchildren removed by the police and welfare agencies. Equally, he learned of Aboriginal boys being sent to work on white run farms, and Aboriginal girls working as servants in middle-class homes as undeclared slave labour. Pilger has made several documentaries about Indigenous Australians, such as The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back (1985) and Welcome to Australia (1999). His book on the subject, A Secret Country, was first published in 1989. Pilger wrote in 2000 that the 1998 legislation that removed the common-law rights of Indigenous peoples: is just one of the disgraces that has given Australia the distinction of being the only developed country whose government has been condemned as racist by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Pilger returned to this subject with Utopia, released in 2013 (see below). East Timor Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy In East Timor Pilger clandestinely shot Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy about the brutal Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which began in 1975. Death of a Nation contributed to an international outcry which ultimately led to Indonesian withdrawal from East Timor and eventual independence in 2000. When Death of a Nation was screened in Britain it was the highest rating documentary in 15 years and 5,000 telephone calls per minute were made to the programme's action line. When Death of a Nation was screened in Australia in June 1994, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans declared that Pilger "had a track record of distorted sensationalism mixed with sanctimony." Documentaries and career since 2000 Palestine Is Still the Issue Pilger's documentary Palestine Is Still the Issue was released in 2002 and had Ilan Pappé as historical adviser. Pilger said the film describes how an "historic injustice has been done to the Palestinian people, and until Israel's illegal and brutal occupation ends, there will be no peace for anyone, Israelis included". He said the responses of his interviewees "put the lie to the standard Zionist cry that any criticism of Israel is anti-semitic, a claim that insults all those Jewish people who reject the likes of Ariel Sharon acting in their name". Its broadcast resulted in complaints by the Israeli embassy, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the Conservative Friends of Israel that it was inaccurate and biased. Michael Green, chairman of Carlton Communications, the company that made the film, also objected to it in an interview with the Jewish Chronicle. The UK television regulator, the Independent Television Commission (ITC), ordered an investigation. The ITC investigation rejected the complaints about the film, stating in its report: The ITC raised with Carlton all the significant areas of inaccuracy critics of the programme alleged and the broadcaster answered them by reference to a range of historical texts. The ITC is not a tribunal of fact and is particularly aware of the difficulties of verifying 'historical fact' but the comprehensiveness and authority of Carlton's sources were persuasive, not least because many appeared to be of Israeli origin. The ITC concluded that in Pilger's documentary "adequate opportunity was given to a pro-Israeli government perspective" and that the programme "was not in breach of the ITC Programme Code". Stealing a Nation Pilger's documentary Stealing a Nation (2004) recounts the experiences of the late 20th-century trials of the people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The documentary primarily focuses on the expulsion of the Chagossians by Britain and the USA between 1967 and 1973 to Mauritius, and the poor economic situation faced by the islanders as a result of the deportation. Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos Islands, was given to the United States government which began the construction of a major military base for the region. In the 21st century, the US used the base for planes which were bombing targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a 2000 ruling on the events, the International Court of Justice described the wholesale removal of the Chagossian peoples from the Chagos Islands by Britain as "a crime against humanity". Pilger strongly criticised Tony Blair for failing to respond in a substantive way to the 2000 High Court ruling that the expulsion of the Chagossian people to Mauritius was illegal. In March 2005, Stealing a Nation received the Royal Television Society Award. Latin America: The War on Democracy (2007) The documentary The War on Democracy (2007) was Pilger's first film to be released in the cinema. In "an unremitting assault on American foreign policy since 1945", according to Andrew Billen in The Times, the film explores the role of US interventions, overt and covert, in toppling a series of governments in the region, and placing "a succession of favourably disposed bullies in control of its Latino backyard". It discusses the US role in the overthrow in 1973 of the democratically elected Chilean leader Salvador Allende, who was replaced by the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who purportedly took part in secret campaigns against democratic governments in South America. It also contains what Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian described as "a dewy-eyed interview" with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, which has moments of "almost Hello!-magazine deference". Pilger explores the US Army School of the Americas in the US state of Georgia. Generations of South American military were trained there, with a curriculum including counter-insurgency techniques. Attendees reportedly included members of Pinochet's security services, along with men from Haiti, El Salvador, Argentina and Brazil who have been implicated in human rights abuses. The film also details the attempted overthrow of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez in 2002. The people of Caracas rose up to force his return to power. It looks at the wider rise of populist governments across South America, led by figures calling for loosening ties with the United States and attempting a more equitable redistribution of the continent's natural wealth. Of "Chávez's decision to bypass the National Assembly for 18 months, and rule by decree", Peter Bradshaw writes "Pilger passes over it very lightly". Pilger said the film is about the struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery. These people, he says,describe a world not as American presidents like to see it as useful or expendable, they describe the power of courage and humanity among people with next to nothing. They reclaim noble words like democracy, freedom, liberation, justice, and in doing so they are defending the most basic human rights of all of us in a war being waged against all of us. The War on Democracy won the Best Documentary category at the One World Media Awards in 2008. The War You Don't See (2010) The subject of The War You Don’t See is the role of the media in making war. It concentrates on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories. It begins with the Collateral Murder video leaked by Chelsea Manning and released by WikiLeaks. In an interview, Julian Assange describes WikiLeaks as an organisation that gives power to ‘conscientious objectors’ within ‘power systems’. The documentary contends that the CIA uses intelligence to manipulate public opinion and that the media collude by following the official line. During the documentary Pilger states that "propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home". John Lloyd in the Financial Times said The War You Don't See was a "one-sided" documentary which "had no thought of explaining, even hinting, that the wars fought by the US and the UK had a scrap of just cause, nor of examining the nature of what Pilger simply stated were "lies" – especially those that took the two countries to the invasion of Iraq". Support for Julian Assange Pilger supported Julian Assange by pledging bail in December 2010. Pilger said at the time: "There's no doubt that he is not going to abscond". Assange sought asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in 2012 and Pilger's bail money was lost when a judge ordered it to be forfeited. Pilger has been critical of the media's treatment of Assange saying: "The same brave newspapers and broadcasters that have supported Britain’s part in epic bloody crimes, from the genocide in Indonesia to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, now attack the “human rights record” of Ecuador, whose real crime is to stand up to the bullies in London and Washington". He criticised the failure of the Australian government to object when it "repeatedly received confirmation that the US was conducting an “unprecedented” pursuit of Assange" and noted that one of the reasons Ecuador gave for granting asylum to Assange was his abandonment by Australia. Pilger visited Assange in the embassy and has continued to support him. Utopia (2013) With Utopia, Pilger returned to the experiences of Indigenous Australians and what he termed "the denigrating of their humanity". A documentary feature film, it takes its title from Utopia, an Aboriginal homeland (also known as an outstation) in the Northern Territory. Pilger says that "in essence, very little" has changed since the first of his seven films about the Aboriginal people, A Secret Country: The First Australians (1985). In an interview with the UK based Australian Times he commented: "the catastrophe imposed on Indigenous Australians is the equivalent of apartheid, and the system has to change". Reviewing the film, Peter Bradshaw wrote: "The awful truth is that Indigenous communities are on mineral-rich lands that cause mouths to water in mining corporation boardrooms". "When the subject and subjects are allowed to speak for themselves – when Pilger doesn't stand and preach – the injustices glow like throbbing wounds", wrote Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times, but the documentary maker "goes on too long. 110 minutes is a hefty time in screen politics, especially when we know the makers' message from scene one". Geoffrey Macnab described it as an "angry, impassioned documentary" while for Mark Kermode it is a "searing indictment of the ongoing mistreatment" of the first Australians. The Coming War on China (2016) The Coming War on China was Pilger's 60th film for ITV. The film premiered in the UK on Thursday 1 December 2016, and was shown on ITV at 10.40 pm on Tuesday 6 December and on the Australian public broadcaster SBS on 16 April 2017. In the documentary, according to Pilger, "the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency. The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way. They are on the western borders of Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China. Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an 'existential threat' to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs". "The first third told, and told well, the unforgivable, unconscionable tale of what has overtaken the Marshall Islanders since 1946, when the US first nuked the test site on Bikini Atoll" beginning an extended series of tests, wrote Euan Ferguson in The Observer. "Over the next 12 years they would unleash a total of 42.2 megatons. The islanders, as forensically proved by Pilger, were effectively guinea pigs for [the] effects of radiation". Ferguson wrote that the rest of the film "was a sane, sober, necessary, deeply troubling bucketful of worries". Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian wrote that the film "lays bare the historical horrors of the US military in the Pacific, exposing the paranoia and pre-emptive aggression of its semi-secret bases," adding: "This is a gripping film, which though it comes close to excusing China ... does point out China's insecurities and political cruelties". Neil Young of The Hollywood Reporter called the film an "authoritative indictment of American nefariousness in the western Pacific". Kevin Maher wrote in The Times that he admired the early sequences on the Marshall Islands, but that he believed the film lacked nuance or subtlety. Maher wrote that, for Pilger, China is "a brilliant place with just some 'issues with human rights', but let's not go into that now". Diplomat columnist David Hutt said "Pilger consistently glosses over China's past crimes while dwelling on America's". Caitlin Johnstone of Scoop called the film "powerful" and praised it for showing "the USA's generations-long history of provocation and hostility toward [China's] government. It also addresses the silly projection so many westerners harbor that if the US wasn't bullying and slaughtering the world into compliance, China would take over doing the same." The Dirty War on the National Health Service (2019) Pilger's The Dirty War on the National Health Service was released in the UK on 29 November 2019 and examined the changes that the NHS has undergone since its founding in 1948. Pilger makes the case that governments beginning with that of Margaret Thatcher have waged a secret war against the NHS with a view to privatising it slowly and surreptitiously. Pilger predicted that moves toward privatisation would create more poverty and homelessness and that the resulting chaos would be used as an argument for further "reform". Peter Bradshaw described the documentary as a "fierce, necessary film". Views (1999–present) Bush, Blair, Howard and wars In 2003 and 2004, Pilger criticised United States President George W. Bush, saying that he had used the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq as part of a strategy to increase US control of the world's oil supplies. In 2004, Pilger criticised British Prime Minister Tony Blair as equally responsible for the invasion and the bungled occupation of Iraq. In 2004, as the Iraq insurgency increased, Pilger wrote that the anti-war movement should support "Iraq's anti-occupation resistance: We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the "Bush gang" will attack another country". Pilger described Australian Prime Minister John Howard as "the mouse that roars for America, whipping his country into war fever and paranoia about terrorism within". He thought Howard's willingness to "join the Bush/Blair assault on Iraq ... evok[ed] a melancholy history of obsequious service to great power: from the Boxer Rebellion to the Boer war, to the disaster at Gallipoli, and Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf". On 25 July 2005, Pilger ascribed blame for the 2005 London bombings that month to Blair. He wrote that Blair's decision to follow Bush helped to generate the rage that Pilger said precipitated the bombings. In his column a year later, Pilger described Blair as a war criminal for supporting Israel's actions during the 2006 Israel–Lebanon conflict. He said that Blair gave permission to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 to initiate what would ultimately become Operation Defensive Shield. In 2014, Pilger wrote that "The truth about the criminal bloodbath in Iraq cannot be "countered" indefinitely. Neither can the truth about our support for the medievalists in Saudi Arabia, the nuclear-armed predators in Israel, the new military fascists in Egypt and the jihadist "liberators" of Syria, whose propaganda is now BBC news". Barack Obama Pilger criticised Barack Obama during his presidential campaign of 2008, saying that he was "a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan" and his theme "was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully". After Obama was elected and took office in 2009, Pilger wrote, "In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government". Sunny Hundal wrote in The Guardian during November 2008 that the "Uncle Tom" slur used against Obama "highlights a patronising attitude towards ethnic minorities. Pilger expects all black and brown people to be revolutionary brothers and sisters, and if they veer away from that stereotype, it can only be because they are pawns of a wider conspiracy". Comments about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton In a February 2016 webchat on the website of The Guardian newspaper, Pilger said "Trump is speaking straight to ordinary Americans". Although his opinions about immigration were "gross", Pilger wrote that they are "no more gross in essence than, say, David Cameron's – he is not planning to invade anywhere, he doesn't hate the Russians or the Chinese, he is not beholden to Israel. People like this lack of cant, and when the so-called liberal media deride him, they like him even more". In March 2016, Pilger commented in a speech delivered at the University of Sydney during the 2016 United States presidential election, that Donald Trump was a less dangerous potential President of the United States than Hillary Clinton. In November 2016, Pilger said that "notorious terrorist jihadist group called ISIL or ISIS is created largely with money from [the government of Saudi and the government of Qatar] who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation". In August 2017, in an article published on his website, Pilger wrote that a "coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently made clear he does not want war with Russia. This glimpse of sanity, or simple pragmatism, is anathema to the 'national security' managers who guard a system based on war, surveillance, armaments, threats and extreme capitalism". According to Pilger, The Guardian has published "drivel" in covering the claims "that the Russians conspired with Trump". Such assertions, he writes, are "reminiscent of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as a 'Soviet agent'". Russia On the Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, Wiltshire on 4 March 2018, Pilger said in an interview on RT: "This is a carefully constructed drama as part of the propaganda campaign that has been building now for several years in order to justify the actions of NATO, Britain and the United States, towards Russia. That’s a fact". Such events as the Iraq War, "at the very least should make us sceptical of Theresa May’s theatrics in Parliament". He hinted that the UK government may have been involved in the attack, saying it had motive and that the nearby Porton Down laboratory has a "long and sinister record with nerve gas and chemical weapons". China According to Pilger, "American bases form a giant noose encircling China with missiles, bombers, warships - all the way from Australia through the Pacific to Asia and beyond. ... There are no Chinese naval ships and no Chinese bases off California". Brexit On voting to leave the European Union, Pilger wrote in 2016 "The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media.This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and demoralised by the sheer arrogance of the apologists for the "remain" campaign and the dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain. The last bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service, has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is fighting for its life." Criticism of the mainstream media Pilger has criticised many journalists of the mainstream media. During the administration of President Bill Clinton in the US, Pilger attacked the British-American Project as an example of "Atlanticist freemasonry". He asserted in November 1998 that "many members are journalists, the essential foot soldiers in any network devoted to power and propaganda". In 2002, he said that "many journalists now are no more than channellers and echoers of what Orwell called the official truth". In 2003, he criticised what he called the "liberal lobby" which "promote killing" from "behind a humanitarian mask". He said David Aaronovitch exemplified the "mask-wearers" and noted that Aaronovitch had written that the attack on Iraq will be "the easy bit". Aaronovitch responded to an article by Pilger about the mainstream media in 2003 as one of his "typical pieces about the corruption of most journalists (ie people like me [Aaronovitch]) versus the bravery of a few (ie people like him)". On another occasion, while speaking to journalism students at the University of Lincoln, Pilger said that mainstream journalism means corporate journalism. As such, he believes it represents vested corporate interests more than those of the public. In September 2014, Pilger wrote critically of The Guardian and other western media, regarding their reporting on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, writing "Without a single piece of evidence, the US and its NATO allies and their media machines blamed ethnic Russian 'separatists' in Ukraine and implied that Moscow was ultimately responsible". He asserted that "the newspaper has made no serious attempt to examine who shot the aeroplane down and why". In January 2020, Pilger tweeted scepticism of contemporary mainstream narratives about the downing of MH17, and the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 over Iran, saying "Lie upon lie. Hiroshima necessary to defeat Japan. Vietnam attacked US ships in Gulf of Tonkin. Saddam Hussein had WMD. Libya invaded to prevent massacre. Russia shot down MH17/put Trump in the White House. The US, not Russia, defeated Isis. Add Iran shot down Ukrainian airliner". BBC Pilger wrote in December 2002, of British broadcasting's requirement for "impartiality" as being "a euphemism for the consensual view of established authority". He wrote that "BBC television news faithfully echoed word for word" government "propaganda designed to soften up the public for Blair's attack on Iraq". In his documentary The War You Don't See (2010), Pilger returned to this theme and accused the BBC of failing to cover the viewpoint of the victims, civilians caught up in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has additionally pointed to the 48 documentaries on Ireland made for the BBC and ITV between 1959 and the late-1980s which were delayed or altered before transmission, or totally suppressed. Personal life Pilger was married to journalist Scarth Flett, granddaughter of the physician and geologist Sir John Smith Flett. Their son Sam was born in 1973 and is a sports writer. Pilger also has a daughter, Zoe Pilger, born 1984, with journalist Yvonne Roberts. Zoe is an author and art critic. Honours and awards The Press Awards, formerly the British Press Awards 1966: Descriptive Writer of the Year 1967: Journalist of the Year 1970: International Reporter of the Year 1974: News Reporter of the Year 1978: Campaigning Journalist of the Year 1979: Journalist of the Year Other awards 1991: Television Richard Dimbleby Award, BAFTA 1991: At 19th International Emmy Awards Emmy for documentary 'Cambodia, the Betrayal' 2009: Sydney Peace Prize 2011: Grierson Trust Award, UK 2017: Order of Timor-Leste Reception Martha Gellhorn, the American novelist, journalist and war correspondent, said that "[John Pilger] has taken on the great theme of justice and injustice... He documents and proclaims the official lies that we are told and that most people accept or don't bother to think about. [He] belongs to an old and unending worldwide company, the men and women of conscience. Some are as famous as Tom Paine and William Wilberforce, some as unknown as a tiny group calling itself Grandmothers Against The Bomb.... If they win, it is slowly; but they never entirely lose. To my mind, they are the blessed proof of the dignity of man. John has an assured place among them. I'd say he is a charter member for his generation". Noam Chomsky said of Pilger: "John Pilger's work has been a beacon of light in often dark times. The realities he has brought to light have been a revelation, over and over again, and his courage and insight a constant inspiration". According to Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate and member of the Stop the War Coalition, "John Pilger is fearless. He unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is... I salute him". John Simpson, the BBC's world affairs editor, has said, "A country that does not have a John Pilger in its journalism is a very feeble place indeed". The Anglo-American writer Christopher Hitchens said of Pilger: "I remember thinking that his work from Vietnam was very good at the time. I dare say if I went back and read it again I'd probably still admire quite a lot of it. But there is a word that gets overused and can be misused – namely, anti-American – and it has to be used about him. So that for me sort of spoils it... even when I'm inclined to agree". Shortly after Pilger won the Sydney Peace Prize in 2009, the Australian commentator Gerard Henderson accused Pilger of "engaging in hyperbole against western democracies". The Economist Lexington columnist criticised Pilger's account of the Arab uprising, writing that he "thinks the Arab revolts show that the West in general and the United States in particular are 'fascist'", adding, "what most of the Arab protesters say they want are the very freedoms that they know full well, even if Pilger doesn't, to be available in the West". In Breaking the Silence: The Films of John Pilger, Anthony Hayward wrote, "For half a century, he has been an ever stronger voice for those without a voice and a thorn in the side of authority, the Establishment. His work, particularly his documentary films, has also made him rare in being a journalist who is universally known, a champion of those for whom he fights and the scourge of politicians and others whose actions he exposes". The New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait responded to Pilger's 13 May 2014 column in The Guardian about Ukraine. Chait wrote that Pilger was "defending Vladimir Putin on the grounds that he stands opposed to the United States, which is the font of all evil" and that his "attempt to cast land-grabbing, ultranationalist dictator Vladimir Putin as an enemy of fascism is comical". US Government funded Radio Free Europe claimed that Pilger's column contained a bogus quote regarding the Odessa massacre of May 2014. Legacy The John Pilger Archive is housed at the British Library. The papers can be accessed through the British Library catalogue. Bibliography Books The Last Day (1975) Aftermath: The Struggles of Cambodia and Vietnam (1981) The Outsiders (with Michael Coren, 1984) Heroes (1986), (2001) A Secret Country (1989) Distant Voices (1992 and 1994) Hidden Agendas (1998) Reporting the World: John Pilger's Great Eyewitness Photographers (2001) The New Rulers of the World (2002; 4th ed. 2016) Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs (ed.) Cape (2004) Freedom Next Time (2006) Plays The Last Day (1983) Documentaries World in Action "The Quiet Mutiny" (1970) Conversations With a Working Man (1971) Palestine Is Still The Issue (Part 1) (1974) Vietnam: Still America's War (1974) Guilty Until Proven Innocent (John Pilger) (1974) Thalidomide: The Ninety-Eight We Forgot (1974) The Most Powerful Politician in America (1974) One British Family (1974) Pilger "An Unfashionable Tragedy" (1975) "Nobody's Children" (1975) "Zap-The Weapon is Food" (1976) "Pyramid Lake is Dying" (1976) "Street of Joy" (1976) "A Faraway Country" (1977) Mr Nixon's Secret Legacy (1975) Smashing Kids] (1975) To Know Us Is To Love Us (1975) A Nod & A Wink (1975) Pilger in Australia (1976) Dismantling A Dream (1977) An Unjustifiable Risk (1977) The Selling of the Sea (1978) Do You Remember Vietnam (1978) Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979) The Mexicans (1980) Cambodia: Year One (1980) Heroes (1980) Island of Dreams (John Pilger)(1981) In Search of Truth in Wartime (1983) Nicaragua. A Nations Right to Survive (1983) The Outsiders (series, 1983) The Truth Game (1983) Burp! Pepsi V Coke in the Ice Cold War (1984) The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back (1985) Japan Behind the Mask (1987) The Last Dream (1988) "Heroes unsung" "Secrets" "Other People's Wars" Cambodia: Year Ten (1989) Cambodia, the Betrayal (1990) War By Other Means (1992) Cambodia: Return to Year Zero (1993) Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1994) Flying the Flag, Arming the World (1994) Vietnam: The Last Battle (1995) Inside Burma: Land of Fear (1996) Breaking the Mirror – The Murdoch Effect (1997) Apartheid Did Not Die (1998) Welcome to Australia (1999) Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq (2000) The New Rulers of the World (2001) Palestine Is Still the Issue (2002) Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror (2003) Stealing a Nation (2004) The War on Democracy (2007) The War You Don't See (2010) Utopia (2013) The Coming War on China (2016) The Dirty War on the NHS (2019) References External links Freedom Next Time: Filmmaker & Journalist John Pilger on Propaganda, the Press, Censorship and Resisting the American Empire, Democracy Now!, 7 August 2007 John Pilger at Random House Australia 1939 births Living people Anti-Americanism Australian documentary filmmakers Australian expatriates in the United Kingdom Australian freelance journalists Australian investigative journalists Australian people of English descent Australian people of German descent Australian people of Irish descent Australian war correspondents People educated at Sydney Boys High School People from Sydney War correspondents of the Nigerian Civil War War correspondents of the Vietnam War 20th-century Australian journalists 21st-century Australian journalists Daily Mirror people	false	[ "WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy is a 2011 book by British journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding. It is an account of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and the leak by Chelsea Manning of classified material to the website in 2010. It was published by Guardian Books in February 2011.\n\nAlong with other sources, portions were adapted for the 2013 film The Fifth Estate.\n\nContent\nThe book describes Assange's childhood and details about his work creating and expanding WikiLeaks. It explains how his surname comes from his stepfather, a \"touring puppet theater owner\", and not his biological father, a choice that Assange made himself.\n\nPublication of the password\n\nWikileaks gave The Guardian a copy of the unredacted leaks which included the names of informants and other sensitive information that was not intended for publication. This very sensitive information was protected by a large passphrase to ensure its secrecy. \n\nHowever, Leigh's book then published this password which led directly to the unredacted data being publicly available. It has been claimed that this led directly to the deaths of some of those informants.\n\nIn response The Guardian said \"It's nonsense to suggest the Guardian's WikiLeaks book has compromised security in any way.\" According to The Guardian, WikiLeaks had indicated that the password was temporary and that WikiLeaks had seven months to take action to protect the files it had subsequently decided to post online. The Guardian has not described what actions WikiLeaks could have taken given that the encrypted files had been leaked.\n\nWikileaks did eventually publish the unredacted version. The Guardian article about this failed to mention that the publication was after the password became widely known and was published so that informants could see what had been leaked and take action to protect themselves if necessary.\n\nControversies as to content\nIn response to the book's publication, WikiLeaks posted on Twitter: \"The Guardian book serialization contains malicious libels. We will be taking action.\" The Hindu writer, Hasan Suroor, said Assange's concern is that the book is \"critical of [Assange's] robust style and his alleged tendency to be a 'control freak'\". One of the points of disagreement is that the book claimed he had initially refused to redact the names of Afghan informants to the US military from the Afghan War logs; the book reports him as saying they would \"deserve it\" if they were killed. When Douglas Murray relayed these comments in a debate on 9 April 2011, Assange interjected \"We are in the process of suing The Guardian in relation to that comment.\" The Guardian claimed the following day that they had \"not received any notification of such action from WikiLeaks or its lawyers\", two months after the publication of the book.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\nWikiLeaks\nWorks about whistleblowing\n2011 non-fiction books\nEnglish non-fiction books\nBiographies (books)\nGuardian Books books", "Princess Masako: Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne () is a controversial 2006 book by Australian investigative journalist Ben Hills. Billed as \"The Tragic True Story of Japan's Crown Princess\", the book drew criticism from the Imperial Household Agency and the government of Japan over its supposed inaccuracies, and Hills' claims to have received death threats. The English version was released in Japan in September 2007.\n\nA translation was to be published in Japan by the country's largest publisher, Kodansha. But Kodansha demanded that some of the contents which was pointed out by Imperial household to be revised due to \"substantial number of factual errors\". Hills refused and Kodansha, in response, decided not to publish the book. A small publishing company, Dai-san Shokan, later published the book in August 2007, along with a companion book by investigative journalist Mineo Noda titled The Truth about 'Princess Masako' – Mystery of the Contents Which Were Censored, which claims to reveal the ways the Japanese establishment tried to prevent Hills' book being published.\n\nThe book\n\nThe author states that the book was written after over a year of research in Japan, Australia, America and England, and interviews with friends, teachers and colleagues of the Crown Prince and Crown Princess. \n\nAmong the claims made in the book are that Masako was forced to abandon her studies at Oxford because her thesis topic was too controversial; that the Imperial Household Agency opposed the marriage from the start and has bullied the Princess, leading to a nervous breakdown; that Princess Aiko was conceived as a result of in vitro fertilisation treatments; and that Masako is suffering from clinical depression.\n\nReactions\n\nOn February 13, 2007, the Japanese Foreign Ministry held a press conference in Tokyo at which it denounced the book as \"insulting to the Japanese people and the Imperial family\", alleging \"disrespectful descriptions, distortions of facts, and judgemental assertions with audacious conjectures and coarse logic\". Press conferences at which the book was denounced were also held by Japan's ambassadors to America and Australia.\n\nJapan's leading media, including the Asahi, Mainichi, Yomiuri and Nihon Keizai newspapers all rejected advertisements for the book.\n\nKodansha\n\nPublisher Kodansha was slated to release a Japanese translation in 2006, which was to contain 149 changes. According to Hills, these included:\n\n Removal of all references to IVF treatment (story originally broken by The Times)\n Alteration of references from \"depression\" to \"adjustment disorder\" – the Imperial Household Agency's official terminology\n Deletion of all references to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine\n Deletion of references to yakuza\n Removal of statements about the allegedly strained relationship between the Emperor and Empress and the Crown Prince and Princess\n\nOn learning of what he termed the \"bowdlerization\" of his book, Hills demanded a disclaimer be placed in the preface. Ultimately, however, Kodansha decided not to publish the book.\n\nKazunobu Kakishima, a Kodansha editor, says that the book was cancelled because Hills refused to acknowledge making a \"substantial number of factual errors\". Hills says, \"We have repeatedly asked the bureaucrats for the list of 'more than 100 errors' that they claim to have found. There has been no response, other than to state that the Empress Michiko is not a 'stick-thin, grey-haired wraith'.\"\n\nSee also\nThe King Never Smiles\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Why I am Banned in Japan\n Australian author of Princess Masako biography receives death threats\n Imperial Household Denies Exerting Pressure Over Masako Book, 19 February 2007\n\nBooks about Japan\nJapanese culture\nJapanese monarchy\n2006 non-fiction books" ]
[ "Wishbone Ash", "Line-up instability (1981-1986)" ]	C_fe1460a2b98e490eb5c14e10722b3dc5_1	who did the lineup instability start with?	1	who did the lineup instability with Wishbone Ash start with?	Wishbone Ash	Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and UK. Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song, although during album sessions he had offered songs such as "Here Comes the Feeling" that would eventually sell millions when released on Asia's 1982 debut album. Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and rejoined Asia. Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder. Also joining the band was female backing vocalist, Claire Hamill, who had sung on both the Just Testing and Number the Brave albums. In 1982, after Hamill's departure, the band experimented with heavy metal on the Twin Barrels Burning album. It became the highest charting Wishbone Ash album in years (UK #22). Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983, to be replaced by bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze). The group continued with a heavy metal side on 1985's Raw to the Bone, which became the first Wishbone Ash album not to make the charts. Not long after, Wisefield left after serving as guitarist in the band for eleven years, going on to a varied career that would include work with Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Roger Chapman, Jeff Wayne and the Queen musical We Will Rock You. He was replaced by Jamie Crompton, who in turn was succeeded briefly by Phil Palmer. Early in 1986, Mervyn Spence quit as well, to be replaced by ex-Kinks bassist Andy Pyle. CANNOTANSWER	Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton,	Wishbone Ash are a British rock band who achieved success in the early and mid-1970s. Their popular albums included Wishbone Ash (1970), Pilgrimage (1971), Argus (1972), Wishbone Four (1973), There's the Rub (1974), and New England (1976). Wishbone Ash are noted for their extensive use of harmony twin lead guitars, which had been attracting electric blues bands since Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page had played together in the Yardbirds in 1966. Their contributions helped Andy Powell and Ted Turner to be voted "Two of the Ten Most Important Guitarists in Rock History" (Traffic magazine 1989), and to appear in the "Top 20 Guitarists of All Time" (Rolling Stone). Melody Maker (1972) described Powell and Turner as "the most interesting two guitar team since the days when Beck and Page graced The Yardbirds". Several notable bands have cited Wishbone Ash as an influence, including Iron Maiden, Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Thin Lizzy, Metallica, Dream Theater, Overkill and Opeth. Formed in Torquay, Devon, in 1969, out of the ashes of trio The Empty Vessels (originally known as The Torinoes, later briefly being renamed Tanglewood in 1969), which had been formed by Wishbone Ash's founding member Martin Turner (bass & vocals) in 1963 and complemented by Steve Upton (drums and percussion) in 1966. The original Wishbone Ash line-up was completed by guitarists/vocalists Andy Powell and Ted Turner. In 1974, Ted Turner left the band, and was replaced by Laurie Wisefield. The band continued on with strong critical and commercial success until 1980. There followed line-ups featuring former bass players from King Crimson (John Wetton), Uriah Heep (Trevor Bolder), and Trapeze (Mervyn Spence), Wisefield left in 1985. In 1987, however, the original line-up reunited for several albums – Nouveau Calls, Here to Hear and Strange Affair – until 1990, when Upton quit the band. After Martin Turner was replaced in 1991, the band recorded The Ash Live in Chicago, before Ted Turner left in 1993. This left Andy Powell as the sole remaining original founding member of Wishbone Ash to continue the band on into the future. History Formation and rise to fame (1969–1980) Wishbone Ash were formed in October 1969 by bass guitarist Martin Turner and drummer Steve Upton. When Tanglewood's original guitarist, Martin's brother Glenn Turner left the trio and returned to his native Devon, their manager, Miles Copeland III advertised for a guitar player and also for a keyboard player. After an extensive search for a guitarist, the band could not decide between the final two candidates, Andy Powell and Ted Turner (no relation to Martin). It was suggested that they try both guitar players "just to see what it sounds like". Differing from the twin lead sound of Southern rock pioneer The Allman Brothers Band, Wishbone Ash included strong elements of progressive rock, and also of folk and classical music. After the band members wrote several suggested band names on two sheets of paper, Martin Turner picked one word from each list – 'Wishbone' and 'Ash'. In early 1970, the band secured an opening spot for Deep Purple. Its guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore, later recommended Wishbone Ash to producer Derek Lawrence, as well as helping them secure a record deal with Decca/MCA Records. The band's debut album, Wishbone Ash, was released in December 1970. One year later, the group released Pilgrimage. The band peaked commercially in 1972 with Argus, their highest placed entry in the UK Albums Chart (#3). The album was voted by the readers of Sounds as the "best rock album of the year", also "Top British Album" (Melody Maker). The band were getting international acclaim for their live performances as they gained popularity around the world. The band had now begun to play major arenas as headliners. Wishbone Four (1973) was the band's first record without producer Derek Lawrence, as the band decided to produce the album themselves. In December 1973, the band released a double live album, Live Dates. There was an album released called Wishbone Ash Live in Memphis, which was a promo to FM radio stations but never sold in stores. Not long after, guitarist Ted Turner left the band. After replacing Turner with guitarist Laurie Wisefield (ex-Home), the band relocated to the US and recorded There's the Rub (1974). Locked In (1976), produced by Tom Dowd, saw the band moving towards US soft-rock territory and the group began touring with a keyboard player. 1976's New England returned to the traditional Wishbone Ash style. Front Page News (1977) was the band's last album of this period that was recorded in the US. In 1978, after years of experimental albums, the band decided to return to its roots with No Smoke Without Fire, the first to be produced by Derek Lawrence since Argus in 1972. The album contained mainly songs written by Laurie Wisefield and Martin Turner. The band spent six months making the next album, Just Testing which was released in February 1980. Pressured by MCA to make more commercial music, Andy Powell, Laurie Wisefield and Steve Upton expressed to bassist/vocalist Martin Turner that they planned to recruit a lead singer / frontman, thus restricting Martin Turner's duties to bass guitar only. Turner felt unable to support such plans and described the position he was being put in as "untenable". Following a band meeting at his house, Martin Turner parted company with the band. Ironically, the band never recruited the proposed frontman and Turner, in his 2012 autobiography, described the situation as "constructive dismissal". However this was not a view held by the rest of the remaining band members or the then management. Line-up changes (1981–1986) Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and U.K. Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song, although during album sessions he had offered songs such as "Here Comes the Feeling" that would eventually sell millions when released on Asia's 1982 debut album. Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and instead co-founded Asia. Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder. Also joining the band was female backing vocalist, Claire Hamill, who had sung on both the Just Testing and Number the Brave albums. In 1982, after Hamill's departure, the band experimented with heavy metal on the Twin Barrels Burning album. It became the highest charting Wishbone Ash album in years (UK #22). Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983, to be replaced by bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze). The group continued with a rock side on 1985's Raw to the Bone, which became the first Wishbone Ash album not to make the charts. Not long after, Wisefield left after serving as guitarist in the band for eleven years, going on to a varied career that would include work with Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Roger Chapman, Jeff Wayne and the Queen musical We Will Rock You. He was replaced by Jamie Crompton, who in turn was succeeded briefly by Phil Palmer. Early in 1986, Mervyn Spence quit as well, to be replaced by ex-Kinks bassist Andy Pyle. Reunions and departures (1987–1994) In 1987, I.R.S. Records founder and original Wishbone manager Miles Copeland III began a series of albums entitled No Speak, which featured all instrumental music. To launch the label successfully, Copeland needed a big name band that would bring publicity to the project. Copeland approached the four founding members of Wishbone Ash about having the original line-up record an all-instrumental album. For the first time in fourteen years, Andy Powell and Steve Upton joined forces with Martin Turner and Ted Turner to record the album Nouveau Calls, released in February 1988. The original line-up's tour of 1988 was a huge success, as the band played large venues for the first time since the late 1970s. In August 1989, the band released a reunion album with vocals entitled Here to Hear, featuring mainly songs written by Ted and Martin Turner. In 1990 the band went back into the studio to record the follow-up to Here to Hear. The band were shocked when founding member Upton, the band's drummer for their entire career, announced his retirement from the music industry. They enlisted drummer Robbie France, but replaced him with Ray Weston when it was determined that personal conflicts between France and Martin Turner could not be resolved. Strange Affair was released in May 1991, featuring mainly songs written by Andy Powell and Ted Turner. Later in 1991, the band decided to continue without founding member Martin Turner, with the bassist/vocalist being replaced by returnee Andy Pyle, who had been in the band years earlier. The band toured throughout 1992/93, releasing the live album The Ash Live in Chicago. 1994 saw the second and final departure of Ted Turner. Following Turner's departure, Pyle and Weston also left the band. Reunion years to present (1995–present) At this stage Andy Powell was the only original member left in Wishbone Ash. Powell enlisted guitarist/songwriter Roger Filgate, bassist/vocalist Tony Kishman, and drummer Mike Sturgis. The new line-up debuted on a short UK/European tour in spring 1995. By the time of the band's 25th anniversary tour in late 1995, Tony Kishman was finding touring difficult due to other performing engagements in the United States. Founding member Martin Turner replaced him on bass and vocals for the duration of the tour, before Kishman returned to record lead vocals for the band's next album. Illuminations was released in 1996 and featured the Powell, Filgate, Kishman, Sturgis line-up. Powell relied on fan donations and outside assistance to help finance the album. In 1997, Filgate, Kishman, and Sturgis departed, so Powell brought former drummer Weston back into the fold, along with new members guitarist Mark Birch and bassist Bob Skeat. Wishbone Ash then went on to release two electronic dance albums on UK indie label Invisible Hands Music. The albums contained electronic beats blended with Wishbone Ash guitar riffs. Trance Visionary was the first of the pair, spawning a 12" single of four mixes that was a clubland smash and reached number 38 on the UK dance chart. Psychic Terrorism followed. The band then released an acoustic album of classic and new songs entitled Bare Bones before hitting the road in 2000 to celebrate their 30th anniversary. A filmed show was held at Shepherd's Bush Empire in London, where the band welcomed special guests Wisefield and Hamill as well as other friends for a star-studded concert that resulted in Live Dates 3 and a live DVD. In 2001, Mark Birch was replaced by Finnish guitarist Ben Granfelt. The band hit the road for their most extensive touring schedule in years. Wishbone Ash returned to the studio in 2002 for the Bona Fide album. 2003 saw the band touring across the world with Savoy Brown, playing their largest number of American dates since the 1980s. Ben Granfelt left the band in 2004 to continue working on his solo career. Granfelt's mentor, Muddy Manninen joined the band. In late 2006, the band released a new studio album entitled Clan Destiny. In 2007, longtime drummer Ray Weston left the band, stating that he was tired of constant touring and wanted to concentrate on different things. He was replaced by Joe Crabtree, known for his work with Pendragon and King Crimson violinist David Cross. In late 2007, the band released Power of Eternity; their first with new member Joe Crabtree. On 25 November 2011 Wishbone Ash released their 23rd album, the well received Elegant Stealth, which is also the first album to be recorded by the same line up as the predecessor since 1989. In 2013 a court case relating to a trade mark infringement and the use of the name 'Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash' was decided. The court ruled in favour of Andy Powell with the comprehensive judgement forming a clear history of the band since its inception. On 19 February 2014 the 24th studio album Blue Horizon was released. The reviews for this album were generally very positive indeed. As of 2014 this line-up of the band, having been together since 2007, became the longest-lasting line-up of Wishbone Ash in the group's history. On 16 May 2015, Wishbone Ash recorded a live to vinyl album at Metropolis Studios. On 21–23 May 2015, Wishbone Ash recorded the DVD Live in Paris at in France. The performance included additional percussion and guitar contributions from Andy's son Aynsley Powell. In May 2017, it was announced that Mark Abrahams, a long time Wishbone Ash fan, would be joining on guitar duties. Abrahams is a guitarist who previously owned Vision Guitars, a guitar shop in Castleford, West Yorkshire, England. On 24 September 2019 it was announced that Wishbone Ash were signed to Steamhammer/SPV and will release Coat of Arms, their first studio album in six years, on 28 February 2020. The album's lead single, "We Stand as One", was premiered on to the band's 50th anniversary in autumn 2019 and was released on 10 January 2020. The second single "Back in the Day" was released on 7 February 2020. The album cover has been created by a heraldry artist Olaf Keller in the Regal Coat of Arms design studio. For some dates on their 2021 tour, drummer Mike Sturgis rejoined the band in place of Joe Crabtree. In February 2022 Mike Truscott became Wishbone Ash's official drummer. Martin Turner - (Ex Wishbone Ash) Martin Turner began touring in 2004 with "Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash", performing material by the classic line ups of the band. Occasionally Ted Turner and Laurie Wisefield have joined his group on stage as guests. He published his autobiography in 2012. In 2013 Andy Powell took legal action to protect the Wishbone Ash registered trademark and prevent Martin Turner from using his chosen group name. The court ruled in favour of Andy Powell and Martin Turner's application to appeal was refused. Since then he has toured and recorded with his band as "Martin Turner - (Ex Wishbone Ash)". Special events Wishbone Ash have developed two group gatherings, AshCon in the UK and AshFest in the United States. These began in 1994 and have developed into gatherings of the 'faithful' and have since become annual fixtures. Personnel Current members Andy Powell – guitar, vocals (1969–present) Bob Skeat – bass, backing vocals (1997–present) Mark Abrahams – guitar (2017–present) Mike Truscott – drums, percussion (2022 - present) Former members Steve Upton – drums, percussion (1969–1990) Ted Turner – guitar, vocals, banjo (1969–1974; 1987–1994) Martin Turner – bass, vocals, keyboards (1969–1980; 1987–1991; 1995–1996) Laurie Wisefield – guitar, vocals, banjo (1974–1985) Joe Crabtree – drums, percussion (2007–2022) Discography Wishbone Ash (1970) Pilgrimage (1971) Argus (1972) Wishbone Four (1973) There's the Rub (1974) Locked In (1976) New England (1976) Front Page News (1977) No Smoke Without Fire (1978) Just Testing (1980) Number the Brave (1981) Twin Barrels Burning (1982) Raw to the Bone (1985) Nouveau Calls (1987) Here to Hear (1989) Strange Affair (1991) Illuminations (1996) Trance Visionary (1997) (electronic re-recordings) Psychic Terrorism (1998) (electronic re-recordings) Bare Bones (1999) (acoustic re-recordings) Bona Fide (2002) Clan Destiny (2006) Power of Eternity (2007) Elegant Stealth (2011) Blue Horizon (2014) Coat of Arms (2020) References External links English progressive rock groups Musical groups established in 1969 Musical quartets English rock music groups I.R.S. Records artists Decca Records artists 1969 establishments in England	true	[ "The 2003 Euro Formula 3000 Series was scheduled over 10 rounds and contested over 9 rounds. 10 different teams, 26 different drivers competed. All teams raced with Lola T99/50 chassis with Zytek engines.\n\nDriver and team lineup\n\nRace calendar\nThe season was scheduled to start at Autódromo do Estoril on 27 April, but the round was cancelled by promoter.\n\nResults\n\nChampionships standings\n\n† — Drivers did not finish the race, but were classified as they completed over 90% of the race distance.\n\nSee also\n 2003 International Formula 3000 season\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nOfficial Euroseries 3000 site\n\nFormula 3000\nAuto GP\nEuro Formula 3000", "In fluid dynamics, the Kapitza instability is an instability that occurs in fluid films flowing down walls. The instability is characterised by the formation of capillary waves on the free surface of the film. The instability is named after Pyotr Kapitsa, who described and analysed the instability in 1948. The free surface waves are known as roll waves.\n\nRoll waves in granular materials\n\nA similar instability has been observed in granular flow, and this instability can be predicted using the Saint-Venant equations with appropriate modifications accounting for the frictional properties of granular flows.\n\nReferences\n\nFluid dynamic instability" ]
[ "Wishbone Ash", "Line-up instability (1981-1986)", "who did the lineup instability start with?", "Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton," ]	C_fe1460a2b98e490eb5c14e10722b3dc5_1	where was John Wetton from?	2	where was John Wetton from?	Wishbone Ash	Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and UK. Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song, although during album sessions he had offered songs such as "Here Comes the Feeling" that would eventually sell millions when released on Asia's 1982 debut album. Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and rejoined Asia. Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder. Also joining the band was female backing vocalist, Claire Hamill, who had sung on both the Just Testing and Number the Brave albums. In 1982, after Hamill's departure, the band experimented with heavy metal on the Twin Barrels Burning album. It became the highest charting Wishbone Ash album in years (UK #22). Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983, to be replaced by bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze). The group continued with a heavy metal side on 1985's Raw to the Bone, which became the first Wishbone Ash album not to make the charts. Not long after, Wisefield left after serving as guitarist in the band for eleven years, going on to a varied career that would include work with Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Roger Chapman, Jeff Wayne and the Queen musical We Will Rock You. He was replaced by Jamie Crompton, who in turn was succeeded briefly by Phil Palmer. Early in 1986, Mervyn Spence quit as well, to be replaced by ex-Kinks bassist Andy Pyle. CANNOTANSWER	John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and UK.	Wishbone Ash are a British rock band who achieved success in the early and mid-1970s. Their popular albums included Wishbone Ash (1970), Pilgrimage (1971), Argus (1972), Wishbone Four (1973), There's the Rub (1974), and New England (1976). Wishbone Ash are noted for their extensive use of harmony twin lead guitars, which had been attracting electric blues bands since Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page had played together in the Yardbirds in 1966. Their contributions helped Andy Powell and Ted Turner to be voted "Two of the Ten Most Important Guitarists in Rock History" (Traffic magazine 1989), and to appear in the "Top 20 Guitarists of All Time" (Rolling Stone). Melody Maker (1972) described Powell and Turner as "the most interesting two guitar team since the days when Beck and Page graced The Yardbirds". Several notable bands have cited Wishbone Ash as an influence, including Iron Maiden, Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Thin Lizzy, Metallica, Dream Theater, Overkill and Opeth. Formed in Torquay, Devon, in 1969, out of the ashes of trio The Empty Vessels (originally known as The Torinoes, later briefly being renamed Tanglewood in 1969), which had been formed by Wishbone Ash's founding member Martin Turner (bass & vocals) in 1963 and complemented by Steve Upton (drums and percussion) in 1966. The original Wishbone Ash line-up was completed by guitarists/vocalists Andy Powell and Ted Turner. In 1974, Ted Turner left the band, and was replaced by Laurie Wisefield. The band continued on with strong critical and commercial success until 1980. There followed line-ups featuring former bass players from King Crimson (John Wetton), Uriah Heep (Trevor Bolder), and Trapeze (Mervyn Spence), Wisefield left in 1985. In 1987, however, the original line-up reunited for several albums – Nouveau Calls, Here to Hear and Strange Affair – until 1990, when Upton quit the band. After Martin Turner was replaced in 1991, the band recorded The Ash Live in Chicago, before Ted Turner left in 1993. This left Andy Powell as the sole remaining original founding member of Wishbone Ash to continue the band on into the future. History Formation and rise to fame (1969–1980) Wishbone Ash were formed in October 1969 by bass guitarist Martin Turner and drummer Steve Upton. When Tanglewood's original guitarist, Martin's brother Glenn Turner left the trio and returned to his native Devon, their manager, Miles Copeland III advertised for a guitar player and also for a keyboard player. After an extensive search for a guitarist, the band could not decide between the final two candidates, Andy Powell and Ted Turner (no relation to Martin). It was suggested that they try both guitar players "just to see what it sounds like". Differing from the twin lead sound of Southern rock pioneer The Allman Brothers Band, Wishbone Ash included strong elements of progressive rock, and also of folk and classical music. After the band members wrote several suggested band names on two sheets of paper, Martin Turner picked one word from each list – 'Wishbone' and 'Ash'. In early 1970, the band secured an opening spot for Deep Purple. Its guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore, later recommended Wishbone Ash to producer Derek Lawrence, as well as helping them secure a record deal with Decca/MCA Records. The band's debut album, Wishbone Ash, was released in December 1970. One year later, the group released Pilgrimage. The band peaked commercially in 1972 with Argus, their highest placed entry in the UK Albums Chart (#3). The album was voted by the readers of Sounds as the "best rock album of the year", also "Top British Album" (Melody Maker). The band were getting international acclaim for their live performances as they gained popularity around the world. The band had now begun to play major arenas as headliners. Wishbone Four (1973) was the band's first record without producer Derek Lawrence, as the band decided to produce the album themselves. In December 1973, the band released a double live album, Live Dates. There was an album released called Wishbone Ash Live in Memphis, which was a promo to FM radio stations but never sold in stores. Not long after, guitarist Ted Turner left the band. After replacing Turner with guitarist Laurie Wisefield (ex-Home), the band relocated to the US and recorded There's the Rub (1974). Locked In (1976), produced by Tom Dowd, saw the band moving towards US soft-rock territory and the group began touring with a keyboard player. 1976's New England returned to the traditional Wishbone Ash style. Front Page News (1977) was the band's last album of this period that was recorded in the US. In 1978, after years of experimental albums, the band decided to return to its roots with No Smoke Without Fire, the first to be produced by Derek Lawrence since Argus in 1972. The album contained mainly songs written by Laurie Wisefield and Martin Turner. The band spent six months making the next album, Just Testing which was released in February 1980. Pressured by MCA to make more commercial music, Andy Powell, Laurie Wisefield and Steve Upton expressed to bassist/vocalist Martin Turner that they planned to recruit a lead singer / frontman, thus restricting Martin Turner's duties to bass guitar only. Turner felt unable to support such plans and described the position he was being put in as "untenable". Following a band meeting at his house, Martin Turner parted company with the band. Ironically, the band never recruited the proposed frontman and Turner, in his 2012 autobiography, described the situation as "constructive dismissal". However this was not a view held by the rest of the remaining band members or the then management. Line-up changes (1981–1986) Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and U.K. Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song, although during album sessions he had offered songs such as "Here Comes the Feeling" that would eventually sell millions when released on Asia's 1982 debut album. Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and instead co-founded Asia. Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder. Also joining the band was female backing vocalist, Claire Hamill, who had sung on both the Just Testing and Number the Brave albums. In 1982, after Hamill's departure, the band experimented with heavy metal on the Twin Barrels Burning album. It became the highest charting Wishbone Ash album in years (UK #22). Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983, to be replaced by bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze). The group continued with a rock side on 1985's Raw to the Bone, which became the first Wishbone Ash album not to make the charts. Not long after, Wisefield left after serving as guitarist in the band for eleven years, going on to a varied career that would include work with Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Roger Chapman, Jeff Wayne and the Queen musical We Will Rock You. He was replaced by Jamie Crompton, who in turn was succeeded briefly by Phil Palmer. Early in 1986, Mervyn Spence quit as well, to be replaced by ex-Kinks bassist Andy Pyle. Reunions and departures (1987–1994) In 1987, I.R.S. Records founder and original Wishbone manager Miles Copeland III began a series of albums entitled No Speak, which featured all instrumental music. To launch the label successfully, Copeland needed a big name band that would bring publicity to the project. Copeland approached the four founding members of Wishbone Ash about having the original line-up record an all-instrumental album. For the first time in fourteen years, Andy Powell and Steve Upton joined forces with Martin Turner and Ted Turner to record the album Nouveau Calls, released in February 1988. The original line-up's tour of 1988 was a huge success, as the band played large venues for the first time since the late 1970s. In August 1989, the band released a reunion album with vocals entitled Here to Hear, featuring mainly songs written by Ted and Martin Turner. In 1990 the band went back into the studio to record the follow-up to Here to Hear. The band were shocked when founding member Upton, the band's drummer for their entire career, announced his retirement from the music industry. They enlisted drummer Robbie France, but replaced him with Ray Weston when it was determined that personal conflicts between France and Martin Turner could not be resolved. Strange Affair was released in May 1991, featuring mainly songs written by Andy Powell and Ted Turner. Later in 1991, the band decided to continue without founding member Martin Turner, with the bassist/vocalist being replaced by returnee Andy Pyle, who had been in the band years earlier. The band toured throughout 1992/93, releasing the live album The Ash Live in Chicago. 1994 saw the second and final departure of Ted Turner. Following Turner's departure, Pyle and Weston also left the band. Reunion years to present (1995–present) At this stage Andy Powell was the only original member left in Wishbone Ash. Powell enlisted guitarist/songwriter Roger Filgate, bassist/vocalist Tony Kishman, and drummer Mike Sturgis. The new line-up debuted on a short UK/European tour in spring 1995. By the time of the band's 25th anniversary tour in late 1995, Tony Kishman was finding touring difficult due to other performing engagements in the United States. Founding member Martin Turner replaced him on bass and vocals for the duration of the tour, before Kishman returned to record lead vocals for the band's next album. Illuminations was released in 1996 and featured the Powell, Filgate, Kishman, Sturgis line-up. Powell relied on fan donations and outside assistance to help finance the album. In 1997, Filgate, Kishman, and Sturgis departed, so Powell brought former drummer Weston back into the fold, along with new members guitarist Mark Birch and bassist Bob Skeat. Wishbone Ash then went on to release two electronic dance albums on UK indie label Invisible Hands Music. The albums contained electronic beats blended with Wishbone Ash guitar riffs. Trance Visionary was the first of the pair, spawning a 12" single of four mixes that was a clubland smash and reached number 38 on the UK dance chart. Psychic Terrorism followed. The band then released an acoustic album of classic and new songs entitled Bare Bones before hitting the road in 2000 to celebrate their 30th anniversary. A filmed show was held at Shepherd's Bush Empire in London, where the band welcomed special guests Wisefield and Hamill as well as other friends for a star-studded concert that resulted in Live Dates 3 and a live DVD. In 2001, Mark Birch was replaced by Finnish guitarist Ben Granfelt. The band hit the road for their most extensive touring schedule in years. Wishbone Ash returned to the studio in 2002 for the Bona Fide album. 2003 saw the band touring across the world with Savoy Brown, playing their largest number of American dates since the 1980s. Ben Granfelt left the band in 2004 to continue working on his solo career. Granfelt's mentor, Muddy Manninen joined the band. In late 2006, the band released a new studio album entitled Clan Destiny. In 2007, longtime drummer Ray Weston left the band, stating that he was tired of constant touring and wanted to concentrate on different things. He was replaced by Joe Crabtree, known for his work with Pendragon and King Crimson violinist David Cross. In late 2007, the band released Power of Eternity; their first with new member Joe Crabtree. On 25 November 2011 Wishbone Ash released their 23rd album, the well received Elegant Stealth, which is also the first album to be recorded by the same line up as the predecessor since 1989. In 2013 a court case relating to a trade mark infringement and the use of the name 'Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash' was decided. The court ruled in favour of Andy Powell with the comprehensive judgement forming a clear history of the band since its inception. On 19 February 2014 the 24th studio album Blue Horizon was released. The reviews for this album were generally very positive indeed. As of 2014 this line-up of the band, having been together since 2007, became the longest-lasting line-up of Wishbone Ash in the group's history. On 16 May 2015, Wishbone Ash recorded a live to vinyl album at Metropolis Studios. On 21–23 May 2015, Wishbone Ash recorded the DVD Live in Paris at in France. The performance included additional percussion and guitar contributions from Andy's son Aynsley Powell. In May 2017, it was announced that Mark Abrahams, a long time Wishbone Ash fan, would be joining on guitar duties. Abrahams is a guitarist who previously owned Vision Guitars, a guitar shop in Castleford, West Yorkshire, England. On 24 September 2019 it was announced that Wishbone Ash were signed to Steamhammer/SPV and will release Coat of Arms, their first studio album in six years, on 28 February 2020. The album's lead single, "We Stand as One", was premiered on to the band's 50th anniversary in autumn 2019 and was released on 10 January 2020. The second single "Back in the Day" was released on 7 February 2020. The album cover has been created by a heraldry artist Olaf Keller in the Regal Coat of Arms design studio. For some dates on their 2021 tour, drummer Mike Sturgis rejoined the band in place of Joe Crabtree. In February 2022 Mike Truscott became Wishbone Ash's official drummer. Martin Turner - (Ex Wishbone Ash) Martin Turner began touring in 2004 with "Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash", performing material by the classic line ups of the band. Occasionally Ted Turner and Laurie Wisefield have joined his group on stage as guests. He published his autobiography in 2012. In 2013 Andy Powell took legal action to protect the Wishbone Ash registered trademark and prevent Martin Turner from using his chosen group name. The court ruled in favour of Andy Powell and Martin Turner's application to appeal was refused. Since then he has toured and recorded with his band as "Martin Turner - (Ex Wishbone Ash)". Special events Wishbone Ash have developed two group gatherings, AshCon in the UK and AshFest in the United States. These began in 1994 and have developed into gatherings of the 'faithful' and have since become annual fixtures. Personnel Current members Andy Powell – guitar, vocals (1969–present) Bob Skeat – bass, backing vocals (1997–present) Mark Abrahams – guitar (2017–present) Mike Truscott – drums, percussion (2022 - present) Former members Steve Upton – drums, percussion (1969–1990) Ted Turner – guitar, vocals, banjo (1969–1974; 1987–1994) Martin Turner – bass, vocals, keyboards (1969–1980; 1987–1991; 1995–1996) Laurie Wisefield – guitar, vocals, banjo (1974–1985) Joe Crabtree – drums, percussion (2007–2022) Discography Wishbone Ash (1970) Pilgrimage (1971) Argus (1972) Wishbone Four (1973) There's the Rub (1974) Locked In (1976) New England (1976) Front Page News (1977) No Smoke Without Fire (1978) Just Testing (1980) Number the Brave (1981) Twin Barrels Burning (1982) Raw to the Bone (1985) Nouveau Calls (1987) Here to Hear (1989) Strange Affair (1991) Illuminations (1996) Trance Visionary (1997) (electronic re-recordings) Psychic Terrorism (1998) (electronic re-recordings) Bare Bones (1999) (acoustic re-recordings) Bona Fide (2002) Clan Destiny (2006) Power of Eternity (2007) Elegant Stealth (2011) Blue Horizon (2014) Coat of Arms (2020) References External links English progressive rock groups Musical groups established in 1969 Musical quartets English rock music groups I.R.S. Records artists Decca Records artists 1969 establishments in England	false	[ "King Crimson Live in Mainz is a live album by the band King Crimson, released through the King Crimson Collectors' Club in March 2001. The album was recorded at Eltzer Hof, Mainz, Germany, March 30, 1974.\n\nLike other concerts from the European tour of early 1974, this show was recorded directly from the soundboard. Four tracks (\"The Savage\", \"Arabica\", \"Atria\" and \"Trio\") were improvisations. The liner notes were written by John Wetton in December 2000.\n\nTrack listing\n\"Improv: The Savage\" (David Cross, Robert Fripp, John Wetton, Bill Bruford) – 2:12\n\"Doctor Diamond\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford, Richard Palmer-James) – 5:48\n\"Improv: Arabica\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford) – 2:29\n\"Exiles\" (Cross, Fripp, Palmer-James) – 7:01\n\"Improv: Atria\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford) – 6:14\n\"The Night Watch\" (Fripp, Wetton, Palmer-James) – 5:07\n\"Starless\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford, Palmer-James) – 12:27\n\"Lament\" (Fripp, Wetton, Palmer-James) – 4:20\n\"Improv: Trio\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford) – 4:36\n\"Easy Money\" (Fripp, Wetton, Palmer-James) – 7:51\n\nPersonnel\nDavid Cross – violin, Mellotron, electric piano\nRobert Fripp – guitar, Mellotron, electric piano\nJohn Wetton – bass guitar, vocals\nBill Bruford – drums, percussion\n\nProduced by David Singleton and Alex R. Mundy\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n King Crimson - Live in Mainz 1974 (rel. 2001) album releases & credits at Discogs\n\n2001 live albums\nKing Crimson Collector's Club albums", "The Great Deceiver is a 4 CD box set by the band King Crimson, consisting of live recordings from 1973 and 1974, released on Virgin Records in 1992. In 2007, it was reissued on Fripp's Discipline Global Mobile label as two separate 2-CD sets, each featuring new artwork.\n\nThe box set features portions of concert recordings of the band from 1973 to 1974. All tracks are performed by the lineup of guitarist/keyboardist Robert Fripp, bassist/vocalist John Wetton, violinist/keyboardist David Cross and drummer Bill Bruford. Percussionist Jamie Muir left the band in early 1973, and hence is not featured on the set. The band's 30 June 1974 concert from Providence, Rhode Island is presented in its entirety on CDs 1 and 2; this was the second-to-last live concert ever performed by this incarnation of King Crimson.\n\nKing Crimson's \"Walk On\" music in 1973-74 was an excerpt of \"The Heavenly Music Corporation,\" from the album (No Pussyfooting) by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. These \"walk-ons\" are reproduced here, and indexed as separate tracks.\n\nThree recordings from this box set were previously available on other King Crimson albums, albeit in slightly altered forms. An abbreviated version of \"We'll Let You Know\" appears on the Starless and Bible Black album, released in 1974. Similarly, an abbreviated version of \"Providence\" was included on the Red album, also released in 1974. The live performance of \"21st Century Schizoid Man\" on CD Two was issued in 1975 as part of the album USA, featuring overdubbed violin from Eddie Jobson.\n\nMany of the recordings on this album are band improvisations. \"The Law of Maximum Distress\" appears in two sections, as the tape ran out in the middle of the song. Much of the missing material seems to be used on \"The Mincer\" from Starless and Bible Black. As Robert Fripp notes in the CD jacket, \"Most live recording follows the policy of two machines in use simultaneously to meet an eventuality such as this. We learn.\"\n\nThe liner notes to The Great Deceiver runs to 68 pages. These notes feature comments from Fripp, Wetton and Cross, annotated excerpts from Fripp's 1974 diary, reviews of the previous King Crimson box set, Frame by Frame: The Essential King Crimson (1991), and a complete listing of all concerts performed by the band in 1973 and 1974.\n\nThe track \"Exiles\" is credited to Fripp/Wetton/Palmer-James on this box set. The correct credit, as listed on Larks' Tongues in Aspic and confirmed by BMI's records, is Cross/Fripp/Palmer-James. Despite having no legal co-writing credit for the song, John Wetton has indicated in interviews that he wrote the bridge for \"Exiles.\"\n\nTrack listing\n\nDisc 1: Things Are Not as They Seem...\nRecorded at the Palace Theatre, Providence, Rhode Island, United States, 30 June 1974.\n\"Walk On ... No Pussyfooting\" (Robert Fripp, Brian Eno) – 0:52\n\"Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part Two\" (Fripp) – 6:12\n\"Lament\" (Fripp, John Wetton, Richard Palmer-James) – 4:04\n\"Exiles\" (David Cross, Fripp, Palmer-James) – 7:00\n\"Improv - A Voyage to the Centre of the Cosmos\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bill Bruford) – 14:41\n\"Easy Money\" (Fripp, Wetton, Palmer-James) – 7:14\n\"Providence\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford) – 9:47\n\"Fracture\" (Fripp) – 10:47\n\"Starless\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford, Palmer-James) – 11:56\n\nDisc 2: Sleight of Hand (or Now You Don't See It Again) and...\nTracks 1-2 recorded at the Palace Theatre, Providence, Rhode Island, United States, 30 June 1974.\nTracks 3-11 recorded at the Glasgow Apollo, Glasgow, Scotland, UK, 23 October 1973.\nTracks 12-13 recorded at Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, United States, 29 June 1974.\n\n(Note: Only the first half of \"The Night Watch\" is taken from the Glasgow performance; the second half was taken from the Zurich show featured on CD Four. The liner notes indicate that there were technical problems with both recordings, and that the splice was done \"to honour the spirit and sense of Glasgow's performance\".)\n\n\"21st Century Schizoid Man\" (Fripp, Ian McDonald, Greg Lake, Michael Giles, Peter Sinfield) – 7:32\n\"Walk off from Providence ... No Pussyfooting\" (Fripp, Eno) – 1:15\n\"Sharks' Lungs in Lemsip\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford) – 2:30\n\"Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part One\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford, Jamie Muir) – 7:25\n\"Book of Saturday\" (Fripp, Wetton, Palmer-James) – 2:49\n\"Easy Money\" (Fripp, Wetton, Palmer-James) – 6:43\n\"We'll Let You Know\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford) – 4:54\n\"The Night Watch\" (Fripp, Wetton, Palmer-James) – 4:54\n\"Improv - Tight Scrummy\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford) – 8:27\n\"Peace - A Theme\" (Fripp) – 1:01\n\"Cat Food\" (Fripp, Sinfield, McDonald) – 4:14\n\"Easy Money...\" (Fripp, Wetton, Palmer-James) – 2:19\n\"...It is for You, but Not for Us\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford) – 7:25\n\nDisc 3: ...Acts of Deception (the Magic Circus, or Weasels Stole Our Fruit)\nTracks 1-11 recorded at the Stanley Warner Theatre, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania United States, 29 April 1974.\nTracks 12-13 recorded at Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, United States, 29 June 1974.\n\"Walk On ... No Pussyfooting\" (Fripp, Eno) – 1:15\n\"The Great Deceiver\" (Fripp, Wetton, Palmer-James) – 3:32\n\"Improv - Bartley Butsford\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford) – 3:13\n\"Exiles\" (Cross, Fripp, Palmer-James) – 6:23\n\"Improv - Daniel Dust\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford) – 4:40\n\"The Night Watch\" (Fripp, Wetton, Palmer-James) – 4:18\n\"Doctor Diamond\" (Cross, Wetton, Fripp, Bruford, Palmer-James) – 4:52\n\"Starless\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford, Palmer-James) – 11:36\n\"Improv - Wilton Carpet\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford) – 5:52\n\"The Talking Drum\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford, Muir) – 5:29\n\"Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part Two\" (abbreviated) (Fripp) – 2:22\n\"Applause and announcement\" – 2:19\n\"Improv - Is There Life Out There?\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford) – 11:50\n\nDisc 4: ...But Neither Are They Otherwise\nTracks 1-4 recorded at Massey Hall, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 24 June 1974.\nTracks 5-12 recorded at the Volkshaus, Zürich, Switzerland, 15 November 1973.\n\"Improv - The Golden Walnut\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford) – 11:14\n\"The Night Watch\" (Fripp, Wetton, Palmer-James) – 4:22\n\"Fracture\" (Fripp) – 10:48\n\"Improv - Clueless and Slightly Slack\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford) – 8:36\n\"Walk On ... No Pussyfooting\" (Fripp, Eno) – 1:00\n\"Improv - Some Pussyfooting\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford) – 2:23\n\"Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part One\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford, Muir) – 7:41\n\"Improv - The Law of Maximum Distress, Part One\" (Bruford, Cross, Fripp, Wetton) – 6:31\n\"Improv - The Law of Maximum Distress, Part Two\" (Bruford, Cross, Fripp, Wetton) – 2:17\n\"Easy Money\" (Fripp, Wetton, Palmer-James) – 6:57\n\"Improv - Some More Pussyfooting\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford) – 5:50\n\"The Talking Drum\" (Cross, Fripp, Wetton, Bruford, Muir) – 6:05\n\nPersonnel\nRobert Fripp – guitar, mellotron, electric piano\nJohn Wetton – bass guitar, vocals\nDavid Cross – violin, viola, mellotron, electric piano\nBill Bruford – drums, percussion\n\nExecutive producer: Robert Fripp. Mixing by Fripp, Tony Arnold and David Singleton.\n\nReferences\n\nAlbums produced by Robert Fripp\n1992 live albums\n1992 compilation albums\nKing Crimson live albums\nKing Crimson compilation albums\nE.G. Records compilation albums\nE.G. Records live albums\nVirgin Records live albums\nDiscipline Global Mobile albums" ]
[ "Wishbone Ash", "Line-up instability (1981-1986)", "who did the lineup instability start with?", "Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton,", "where was John Wetton from?", "John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and UK." ]	C_fe1460a2b98e490eb5c14e10722b3dc5_1	did they release any songs sung by John?	3	did Wishbone Ash release any songs sung by John Wetton?	Wishbone Ash	Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and UK. Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song, although during album sessions he had offered songs such as "Here Comes the Feeling" that would eventually sell millions when released on Asia's 1982 debut album. Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and rejoined Asia. Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder. Also joining the band was female backing vocalist, Claire Hamill, who had sung on both the Just Testing and Number the Brave albums. In 1982, after Hamill's departure, the band experimented with heavy metal on the Twin Barrels Burning album. It became the highest charting Wishbone Ash album in years (UK #22). Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983, to be replaced by bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze). The group continued with a heavy metal side on 1985's Raw to the Bone, which became the first Wishbone Ash album not to make the charts. Not long after, Wisefield left after serving as guitarist in the band for eleven years, going on to a varied career that would include work with Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Roger Chapman, Jeff Wayne and the Queen musical We Will Rock You. He was replaced by Jamie Crompton, who in turn was succeeded briefly by Phil Palmer. Early in 1986, Mervyn Spence quit as well, to be replaced by ex-Kinks bassist Andy Pyle. CANNOTANSWER	featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song,	Wishbone Ash are a British rock band who achieved success in the early and mid-1970s. Their popular albums included Wishbone Ash (1970), Pilgrimage (1971), Argus (1972), Wishbone Four (1973), There's the Rub (1974), and New England (1976). Wishbone Ash are noted for their extensive use of harmony twin lead guitars, which had been attracting electric blues bands since Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page had played together in the Yardbirds in 1966. Their contributions helped Andy Powell and Ted Turner to be voted "Two of the Ten Most Important Guitarists in Rock History" (Traffic magazine 1989), and to appear in the "Top 20 Guitarists of All Time" (Rolling Stone). Melody Maker (1972) described Powell and Turner as "the most interesting two guitar team since the days when Beck and Page graced The Yardbirds". Several notable bands have cited Wishbone Ash as an influence, including Iron Maiden, Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Thin Lizzy, Metallica, Dream Theater, Overkill and Opeth. Formed in Torquay, Devon, in 1969, out of the ashes of trio The Empty Vessels (originally known as The Torinoes, later briefly being renamed Tanglewood in 1969), which had been formed by Wishbone Ash's founding member Martin Turner (bass & vocals) in 1963 and complemented by Steve Upton (drums and percussion) in 1966. The original Wishbone Ash line-up was completed by guitarists/vocalists Andy Powell and Ted Turner. In 1974, Ted Turner left the band, and was replaced by Laurie Wisefield. The band continued on with strong critical and commercial success until 1980. There followed line-ups featuring former bass players from King Crimson (John Wetton), Uriah Heep (Trevor Bolder), and Trapeze (Mervyn Spence), Wisefield left in 1985. In 1987, however, the original line-up reunited for several albums – Nouveau Calls, Here to Hear and Strange Affair – until 1990, when Upton quit the band. After Martin Turner was replaced in 1991, the band recorded The Ash Live in Chicago, before Ted Turner left in 1993. This left Andy Powell as the sole remaining original founding member of Wishbone Ash to continue the band on into the future. History Formation and rise to fame (1969–1980) Wishbone Ash were formed in October 1969 by bass guitarist Martin Turner and drummer Steve Upton. When Tanglewood's original guitarist, Martin's brother Glenn Turner left the trio and returned to his native Devon, their manager, Miles Copeland III advertised for a guitar player and also for a keyboard player. After an extensive search for a guitarist, the band could not decide between the final two candidates, Andy Powell and Ted Turner (no relation to Martin). It was suggested that they try both guitar players "just to see what it sounds like". Differing from the twin lead sound of Southern rock pioneer The Allman Brothers Band, Wishbone Ash included strong elements of progressive rock, and also of folk and classical music. After the band members wrote several suggested band names on two sheets of paper, Martin Turner picked one word from each list – 'Wishbone' and 'Ash'. In early 1970, the band secured an opening spot for Deep Purple. Its guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore, later recommended Wishbone Ash to producer Derek Lawrence, as well as helping them secure a record deal with Decca/MCA Records. The band's debut album, Wishbone Ash, was released in December 1970. One year later, the group released Pilgrimage. The band peaked commercially in 1972 with Argus, their highest placed entry in the UK Albums Chart (#3). The album was voted by the readers of Sounds as the "best rock album of the year", also "Top British Album" (Melody Maker). The band were getting international acclaim for their live performances as they gained popularity around the world. The band had now begun to play major arenas as headliners. Wishbone Four (1973) was the band's first record without producer Derek Lawrence, as the band decided to produce the album themselves. In December 1973, the band released a double live album, Live Dates. There was an album released called Wishbone Ash Live in Memphis, which was a promo to FM radio stations but never sold in stores. Not long after, guitarist Ted Turner left the band. After replacing Turner with guitarist Laurie Wisefield (ex-Home), the band relocated to the US and recorded There's the Rub (1974). Locked In (1976), produced by Tom Dowd, saw the band moving towards US soft-rock territory and the group began touring with a keyboard player. 1976's New England returned to the traditional Wishbone Ash style. Front Page News (1977) was the band's last album of this period that was recorded in the US. In 1978, after years of experimental albums, the band decided to return to its roots with No Smoke Without Fire, the first to be produced by Derek Lawrence since Argus in 1972. The album contained mainly songs written by Laurie Wisefield and Martin Turner. The band spent six months making the next album, Just Testing which was released in February 1980. Pressured by MCA to make more commercial music, Andy Powell, Laurie Wisefield and Steve Upton expressed to bassist/vocalist Martin Turner that they planned to recruit a lead singer / frontman, thus restricting Martin Turner's duties to bass guitar only. Turner felt unable to support such plans and described the position he was being put in as "untenable". Following a band meeting at his house, Martin Turner parted company with the band. Ironically, the band never recruited the proposed frontman and Turner, in his 2012 autobiography, described the situation as "constructive dismissal". However this was not a view held by the rest of the remaining band members or the then management. Line-up changes (1981–1986) Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and U.K. Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song, although during album sessions he had offered songs such as "Here Comes the Feeling" that would eventually sell millions when released on Asia's 1982 debut album. Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and instead co-founded Asia. Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder. Also joining the band was female backing vocalist, Claire Hamill, who had sung on both the Just Testing and Number the Brave albums. In 1982, after Hamill's departure, the band experimented with heavy metal on the Twin Barrels Burning album. It became the highest charting Wishbone Ash album in years (UK #22). Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983, to be replaced by bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze). The group continued with a rock side on 1985's Raw to the Bone, which became the first Wishbone Ash album not to make the charts. Not long after, Wisefield left after serving as guitarist in the band for eleven years, going on to a varied career that would include work with Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Roger Chapman, Jeff Wayne and the Queen musical We Will Rock You. He was replaced by Jamie Crompton, who in turn was succeeded briefly by Phil Palmer. Early in 1986, Mervyn Spence quit as well, to be replaced by ex-Kinks bassist Andy Pyle. Reunions and departures (1987–1994) In 1987, I.R.S. Records founder and original Wishbone manager Miles Copeland III began a series of albums entitled No Speak, which featured all instrumental music. To launch the label successfully, Copeland needed a big name band that would bring publicity to the project. Copeland approached the four founding members of Wishbone Ash about having the original line-up record an all-instrumental album. For the first time in fourteen years, Andy Powell and Steve Upton joined forces with Martin Turner and Ted Turner to record the album Nouveau Calls, released in February 1988. The original line-up's tour of 1988 was a huge success, as the band played large venues for the first time since the late 1970s. In August 1989, the band released a reunion album with vocals entitled Here to Hear, featuring mainly songs written by Ted and Martin Turner. In 1990 the band went back into the studio to record the follow-up to Here to Hear. The band were shocked when founding member Upton, the band's drummer for their entire career, announced his retirement from the music industry. They enlisted drummer Robbie France, but replaced him with Ray Weston when it was determined that personal conflicts between France and Martin Turner could not be resolved. Strange Affair was released in May 1991, featuring mainly songs written by Andy Powell and Ted Turner. Later in 1991, the band decided to continue without founding member Martin Turner, with the bassist/vocalist being replaced by returnee Andy Pyle, who had been in the band years earlier. The band toured throughout 1992/93, releasing the live album The Ash Live in Chicago. 1994 saw the second and final departure of Ted Turner. Following Turner's departure, Pyle and Weston also left the band. Reunion years to present (1995–present) At this stage Andy Powell was the only original member left in Wishbone Ash. Powell enlisted guitarist/songwriter Roger Filgate, bassist/vocalist Tony Kishman, and drummer Mike Sturgis. The new line-up debuted on a short UK/European tour in spring 1995. By the time of the band's 25th anniversary tour in late 1995, Tony Kishman was finding touring difficult due to other performing engagements in the United States. Founding member Martin Turner replaced him on bass and vocals for the duration of the tour, before Kishman returned to record lead vocals for the band's next album. Illuminations was released in 1996 and featured the Powell, Filgate, Kishman, Sturgis line-up. Powell relied on fan donations and outside assistance to help finance the album. In 1997, Filgate, Kishman, and Sturgis departed, so Powell brought former drummer Weston back into the fold, along with new members guitarist Mark Birch and bassist Bob Skeat. Wishbone Ash then went on to release two electronic dance albums on UK indie label Invisible Hands Music. The albums contained electronic beats blended with Wishbone Ash guitar riffs. Trance Visionary was the first of the pair, spawning a 12" single of four mixes that was a clubland smash and reached number 38 on the UK dance chart. Psychic Terrorism followed. The band then released an acoustic album of classic and new songs entitled Bare Bones before hitting the road in 2000 to celebrate their 30th anniversary. A filmed show was held at Shepherd's Bush Empire in London, where the band welcomed special guests Wisefield and Hamill as well as other friends for a star-studded concert that resulted in Live Dates 3 and a live DVD. In 2001, Mark Birch was replaced by Finnish guitarist Ben Granfelt. The band hit the road for their most extensive touring schedule in years. Wishbone Ash returned to the studio in 2002 for the Bona Fide album. 2003 saw the band touring across the world with Savoy Brown, playing their largest number of American dates since the 1980s. Ben Granfelt left the band in 2004 to continue working on his solo career. Granfelt's mentor, Muddy Manninen joined the band. In late 2006, the band released a new studio album entitled Clan Destiny. In 2007, longtime drummer Ray Weston left the band, stating that he was tired of constant touring and wanted to concentrate on different things. He was replaced by Joe Crabtree, known for his work with Pendragon and King Crimson violinist David Cross. In late 2007, the band released Power of Eternity; their first with new member Joe Crabtree. On 25 November 2011 Wishbone Ash released their 23rd album, the well received Elegant Stealth, which is also the first album to be recorded by the same line up as the predecessor since 1989. In 2013 a court case relating to a trade mark infringement and the use of the name 'Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash' was decided. The court ruled in favour of Andy Powell with the comprehensive judgement forming a clear history of the band since its inception. On 19 February 2014 the 24th studio album Blue Horizon was released. The reviews for this album were generally very positive indeed. As of 2014 this line-up of the band, having been together since 2007, became the longest-lasting line-up of Wishbone Ash in the group's history. On 16 May 2015, Wishbone Ash recorded a live to vinyl album at Metropolis Studios. On 21–23 May 2015, Wishbone Ash recorded the DVD Live in Paris at in France. The performance included additional percussion and guitar contributions from Andy's son Aynsley Powell. In May 2017, it was announced that Mark Abrahams, a long time Wishbone Ash fan, would be joining on guitar duties. Abrahams is a guitarist who previously owned Vision Guitars, a guitar shop in Castleford, West Yorkshire, England. On 24 September 2019 it was announced that Wishbone Ash were signed to Steamhammer/SPV and will release Coat of Arms, their first studio album in six years, on 28 February 2020. The album's lead single, "We Stand as One", was premiered on to the band's 50th anniversary in autumn 2019 and was released on 10 January 2020. The second single "Back in the Day" was released on 7 February 2020. The album cover has been created by a heraldry artist Olaf Keller in the Regal Coat of Arms design studio. For some dates on their 2021 tour, drummer Mike Sturgis rejoined the band in place of Joe Crabtree. In February 2022 Mike Truscott became Wishbone Ash's official drummer. Martin Turner - (Ex Wishbone Ash) Martin Turner began touring in 2004 with "Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash", performing material by the classic line ups of the band. Occasionally Ted Turner and Laurie Wisefield have joined his group on stage as guests. He published his autobiography in 2012. In 2013 Andy Powell took legal action to protect the Wishbone Ash registered trademark and prevent Martin Turner from using his chosen group name. The court ruled in favour of Andy Powell and Martin Turner's application to appeal was refused. Since then he has toured and recorded with his band as "Martin Turner - (Ex Wishbone Ash)". Special events Wishbone Ash have developed two group gatherings, AshCon in the UK and AshFest in the United States. These began in 1994 and have developed into gatherings of the 'faithful' and have since become annual fixtures. Personnel Current members Andy Powell – guitar, vocals (1969–present) Bob Skeat – bass, backing vocals (1997–present) Mark Abrahams – guitar (2017–present) Mike Truscott – drums, percussion (2022 - present) Former members Steve Upton – drums, percussion (1969–1990) Ted Turner – guitar, vocals, banjo (1969–1974; 1987–1994) Martin Turner – bass, vocals, keyboards (1969–1980; 1987–1991; 1995–1996) Laurie Wisefield – guitar, vocals, banjo (1974–1985) Joe Crabtree – drums, percussion (2007–2022) Discography Wishbone Ash (1970) Pilgrimage (1971) Argus (1972) Wishbone Four (1973) There's the Rub (1974) Locked In (1976) New England (1976) Front Page News (1977) No Smoke Without Fire (1978) Just Testing (1980) Number the Brave (1981) Twin Barrels Burning (1982) Raw to the Bone (1985) Nouveau Calls (1987) Here to Hear (1989) Strange Affair (1991) Illuminations (1996) Trance Visionary (1997) (electronic re-recordings) Psychic Terrorism (1998) (electronic re-recordings) Bare Bones (1999) (acoustic re-recordings) Bona Fide (2002) Clan Destiny (2006) Power of Eternity (2007) Elegant Stealth (2011) Blue Horizon (2014) Coat of Arms (2020) References External links English progressive rock groups Musical groups established in 1969 Musical quartets English rock music groups I.R.S. Records artists Decca Records artists 1969 establishments in England	true	[ "\"Give Me the Simple Life\" is a 1945 song written by Rube Bloom (music) and Harry Ruby (lyrics). It was introduced in the 1946 film Wake Up and Dream.\n\nChart recordings\n Bing Crosby - Decca single, recorded August 29, 1945 with Jimmy Dorsey and His Orchestra. This charted briefly in 1946.\n Benny Goodman & his Orchestra with vocal by Liza Morrow, (Columbia single, 1945). This also charted briefly in 1946.\n\nFilm appearances\n1946 The Dark Corner - played on the radio in the background. This film had a May, 1946 release date which preceded the December, 1946 release date of Wake Up And Dream.\n1946 Wake Up and Dream - sung by John Payne and June Haver.\n1978 A Wedding - played on piano and sung by Tony Llorens.\n1995 Father of the Bride Part II - sung by Steve Tyrell\n1953 Dangerous Crossing - Dance scene on ship with Jeanne Crain\n\nReferences\n\n1945 songs\nSongs with music by Rube Bloom\nSongs with lyrics by Harry Ruby\nSongs with music by Harry Ruby", "\"From Denver to L.A.\" is a song sung by Elton John, appearing on the soundtrack of the 1970 movie, The Games. The song was released as a single in the U.S. in July 1970, miscredited on the record label to \"Elton Johns\". The single was issued just as John's career was starting to take off, but was quickly withdrawn because both John and his then-current record company objected to its release. It is now an extremely rare collectors' item.\n\nJohn said of the song: \"Actually, 'From Denver to L.A.' was withdrawn, so if you have got a copy, it's worth a small fortune. It was a 25 quid session I did at Olympic Studios and I just sang the song, and it was for the Michael Winner movie The Games. And that's it.\"\n\nTrack listing\n\nPromo 1\n \"From Denver to L.A.\" (mono)\n \"From Denver to L.A.\" (stereo)\n\nPromo 2\n \"From Denver to L.A.\" (mono)\n \"Warm Summer Rain\" (by the Barbara Moore Singers)\n\nThe B-side is also from the soundtrack, and is not an Elton John recording.\nThis single was withdrawn before any stock copies were released.\n\nReferences\n\nElton John songs\n1970 songs\nSongs with music by Francis Lai\nSongs written by Hal Shaper" ]
[ "Wishbone Ash", "Line-up instability (1981-1986)", "who did the lineup instability start with?", "Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton,", "where was John Wetton from?", "John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and UK.", "did they release any songs sung by John?", "featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song," ]	C_fe1460a2b98e490eb5c14e10722b3dc5_1	was the song on an album or was it a solo song?	4	Was the song sung by Wetton for Wishbown Ash on an album or was it a solo song?	Wishbone Ash	Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and UK. Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song, although during album sessions he had offered songs such as "Here Comes the Feeling" that would eventually sell millions when released on Asia's 1982 debut album. Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and rejoined Asia. Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder. Also joining the band was female backing vocalist, Claire Hamill, who had sung on both the Just Testing and Number the Brave albums. In 1982, after Hamill's departure, the band experimented with heavy metal on the Twin Barrels Burning album. It became the highest charting Wishbone Ash album in years (UK #22). Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983, to be replaced by bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze). The group continued with a heavy metal side on 1985's Raw to the Bone, which became the first Wishbone Ash album not to make the charts. Not long after, Wisefield left after serving as guitarist in the band for eleven years, going on to a varied career that would include work with Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Roger Chapman, Jeff Wayne and the Queen musical We Will Rock You. He was replaced by Jamie Crompton, who in turn was succeeded briefly by Phil Palmer. Early in 1986, Mervyn Spence quit as well, to be replaced by ex-Kinks bassist Andy Pyle. CANNOTANSWER	Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song,	Wishbone Ash are a British rock band who achieved success in the early and mid-1970s. Their popular albums included Wishbone Ash (1970), Pilgrimage (1971), Argus (1972), Wishbone Four (1973), There's the Rub (1974), and New England (1976). Wishbone Ash are noted for their extensive use of harmony twin lead guitars, which had been attracting electric blues bands since Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page had played together in the Yardbirds in 1966. Their contributions helped Andy Powell and Ted Turner to be voted "Two of the Ten Most Important Guitarists in Rock History" (Traffic magazine 1989), and to appear in the "Top 20 Guitarists of All Time" (Rolling Stone). Melody Maker (1972) described Powell and Turner as "the most interesting two guitar team since the days when Beck and Page graced The Yardbirds". Several notable bands have cited Wishbone Ash as an influence, including Iron Maiden, Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Thin Lizzy, Metallica, Dream Theater, Overkill and Opeth. Formed in Torquay, Devon, in 1969, out of the ashes of trio The Empty Vessels (originally known as The Torinoes, later briefly being renamed Tanglewood in 1969), which had been formed by Wishbone Ash's founding member Martin Turner (bass & vocals) in 1963 and complemented by Steve Upton (drums and percussion) in 1966. The original Wishbone Ash line-up was completed by guitarists/vocalists Andy Powell and Ted Turner. In 1974, Ted Turner left the band, and was replaced by Laurie Wisefield. The band continued on with strong critical and commercial success until 1980. There followed line-ups featuring former bass players from King Crimson (John Wetton), Uriah Heep (Trevor Bolder), and Trapeze (Mervyn Spence), Wisefield left in 1985. In 1987, however, the original line-up reunited for several albums – Nouveau Calls, Here to Hear and Strange Affair – until 1990, when Upton quit the band. After Martin Turner was replaced in 1991, the band recorded The Ash Live in Chicago, before Ted Turner left in 1993. This left Andy Powell as the sole remaining original founding member of Wishbone Ash to continue the band on into the future. History Formation and rise to fame (1969–1980) Wishbone Ash were formed in October 1969 by bass guitarist Martin Turner and drummer Steve Upton. When Tanglewood's original guitarist, Martin's brother Glenn Turner left the trio and returned to his native Devon, their manager, Miles Copeland III advertised for a guitar player and also for a keyboard player. After an extensive search for a guitarist, the band could not decide between the final two candidates, Andy Powell and Ted Turner (no relation to Martin). It was suggested that they try both guitar players "just to see what it sounds like". Differing from the twin lead sound of Southern rock pioneer The Allman Brothers Band, Wishbone Ash included strong elements of progressive rock, and also of folk and classical music. After the band members wrote several suggested band names on two sheets of paper, Martin Turner picked one word from each list – 'Wishbone' and 'Ash'. In early 1970, the band secured an opening spot for Deep Purple. Its guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore, later recommended Wishbone Ash to producer Derek Lawrence, as well as helping them secure a record deal with Decca/MCA Records. The band's debut album, Wishbone Ash, was released in December 1970. One year later, the group released Pilgrimage. The band peaked commercially in 1972 with Argus, their highest placed entry in the UK Albums Chart (#3). The album was voted by the readers of Sounds as the "best rock album of the year", also "Top British Album" (Melody Maker). The band were getting international acclaim for their live performances as they gained popularity around the world. The band had now begun to play major arenas as headliners. Wishbone Four (1973) was the band's first record without producer Derek Lawrence, as the band decided to produce the album themselves. In December 1973, the band released a double live album, Live Dates. There was an album released called Wishbone Ash Live in Memphis, which was a promo to FM radio stations but never sold in stores. Not long after, guitarist Ted Turner left the band. After replacing Turner with guitarist Laurie Wisefield (ex-Home), the band relocated to the US and recorded There's the Rub (1974). Locked In (1976), produced by Tom Dowd, saw the band moving towards US soft-rock territory and the group began touring with a keyboard player. 1976's New England returned to the traditional Wishbone Ash style. Front Page News (1977) was the band's last album of this period that was recorded in the US. In 1978, after years of experimental albums, the band decided to return to its roots with No Smoke Without Fire, the first to be produced by Derek Lawrence since Argus in 1972. The album contained mainly songs written by Laurie Wisefield and Martin Turner. The band spent six months making the next album, Just Testing which was released in February 1980. Pressured by MCA to make more commercial music, Andy Powell, Laurie Wisefield and Steve Upton expressed to bassist/vocalist Martin Turner that they planned to recruit a lead singer / frontman, thus restricting Martin Turner's duties to bass guitar only. Turner felt unable to support such plans and described the position he was being put in as "untenable". Following a band meeting at his house, Martin Turner parted company with the band. Ironically, the band never recruited the proposed frontman and Turner, in his 2012 autobiography, described the situation as "constructive dismissal". However this was not a view held by the rest of the remaining band members or the then management. Line-up changes (1981–1986) Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and U.K. Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song, although during album sessions he had offered songs such as "Here Comes the Feeling" that would eventually sell millions when released on Asia's 1982 debut album. Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and instead co-founded Asia. Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder. Also joining the band was female backing vocalist, Claire Hamill, who had sung on both the Just Testing and Number the Brave albums. In 1982, after Hamill's departure, the band experimented with heavy metal on the Twin Barrels Burning album. It became the highest charting Wishbone Ash album in years (UK #22). Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983, to be replaced by bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze). The group continued with a rock side on 1985's Raw to the Bone, which became the first Wishbone Ash album not to make the charts. Not long after, Wisefield left after serving as guitarist in the band for eleven years, going on to a varied career that would include work with Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Roger Chapman, Jeff Wayne and the Queen musical We Will Rock You. He was replaced by Jamie Crompton, who in turn was succeeded briefly by Phil Palmer. Early in 1986, Mervyn Spence quit as well, to be replaced by ex-Kinks bassist Andy Pyle. Reunions and departures (1987–1994) In 1987, I.R.S. Records founder and original Wishbone manager Miles Copeland III began a series of albums entitled No Speak, which featured all instrumental music. To launch the label successfully, Copeland needed a big name band that would bring publicity to the project. Copeland approached the four founding members of Wishbone Ash about having the original line-up record an all-instrumental album. For the first time in fourteen years, Andy Powell and Steve Upton joined forces with Martin Turner and Ted Turner to record the album Nouveau Calls, released in February 1988. The original line-up's tour of 1988 was a huge success, as the band played large venues for the first time since the late 1970s. In August 1989, the band released a reunion album with vocals entitled Here to Hear, featuring mainly songs written by Ted and Martin Turner. In 1990 the band went back into the studio to record the follow-up to Here to Hear. The band were shocked when founding member Upton, the band's drummer for their entire career, announced his retirement from the music industry. They enlisted drummer Robbie France, but replaced him with Ray Weston when it was determined that personal conflicts between France and Martin Turner could not be resolved. Strange Affair was released in May 1991, featuring mainly songs written by Andy Powell and Ted Turner. Later in 1991, the band decided to continue without founding member Martin Turner, with the bassist/vocalist being replaced by returnee Andy Pyle, who had been in the band years earlier. The band toured throughout 1992/93, releasing the live album The Ash Live in Chicago. 1994 saw the second and final departure of Ted Turner. Following Turner's departure, Pyle and Weston also left the band. Reunion years to present (1995–present) At this stage Andy Powell was the only original member left in Wishbone Ash. Powell enlisted guitarist/songwriter Roger Filgate, bassist/vocalist Tony Kishman, and drummer Mike Sturgis. The new line-up debuted on a short UK/European tour in spring 1995. By the time of the band's 25th anniversary tour in late 1995, Tony Kishman was finding touring difficult due to other performing engagements in the United States. Founding member Martin Turner replaced him on bass and vocals for the duration of the tour, before Kishman returned to record lead vocals for the band's next album. Illuminations was released in 1996 and featured the Powell, Filgate, Kishman, Sturgis line-up. Powell relied on fan donations and outside assistance to help finance the album. In 1997, Filgate, Kishman, and Sturgis departed, so Powell brought former drummer Weston back into the fold, along with new members guitarist Mark Birch and bassist Bob Skeat. Wishbone Ash then went on to release two electronic dance albums on UK indie label Invisible Hands Music. The albums contained electronic beats blended with Wishbone Ash guitar riffs. Trance Visionary was the first of the pair, spawning a 12" single of four mixes that was a clubland smash and reached number 38 on the UK dance chart. Psychic Terrorism followed. The band then released an acoustic album of classic and new songs entitled Bare Bones before hitting the road in 2000 to celebrate their 30th anniversary. A filmed show was held at Shepherd's Bush Empire in London, where the band welcomed special guests Wisefield and Hamill as well as other friends for a star-studded concert that resulted in Live Dates 3 and a live DVD. In 2001, Mark Birch was replaced by Finnish guitarist Ben Granfelt. The band hit the road for their most extensive touring schedule in years. Wishbone Ash returned to the studio in 2002 for the Bona Fide album. 2003 saw the band touring across the world with Savoy Brown, playing their largest number of American dates since the 1980s. Ben Granfelt left the band in 2004 to continue working on his solo career. Granfelt's mentor, Muddy Manninen joined the band. In late 2006, the band released a new studio album entitled Clan Destiny. In 2007, longtime drummer Ray Weston left the band, stating that he was tired of constant touring and wanted to concentrate on different things. He was replaced by Joe Crabtree, known for his work with Pendragon and King Crimson violinist David Cross. In late 2007, the band released Power of Eternity; their first with new member Joe Crabtree. On 25 November 2011 Wishbone Ash released their 23rd album, the well received Elegant Stealth, which is also the first album to be recorded by the same line up as the predecessor since 1989. In 2013 a court case relating to a trade mark infringement and the use of the name 'Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash' was decided. The court ruled in favour of Andy Powell with the comprehensive judgement forming a clear history of the band since its inception. On 19 February 2014 the 24th studio album Blue Horizon was released. The reviews for this album were generally very positive indeed. As of 2014 this line-up of the band, having been together since 2007, became the longest-lasting line-up of Wishbone Ash in the group's history. On 16 May 2015, Wishbone Ash recorded a live to vinyl album at Metropolis Studios. On 21–23 May 2015, Wishbone Ash recorded the DVD Live in Paris at in France. The performance included additional percussion and guitar contributions from Andy's son Aynsley Powell. In May 2017, it was announced that Mark Abrahams, a long time Wishbone Ash fan, would be joining on guitar duties. Abrahams is a guitarist who previously owned Vision Guitars, a guitar shop in Castleford, West Yorkshire, England. On 24 September 2019 it was announced that Wishbone Ash were signed to Steamhammer/SPV and will release Coat of Arms, their first studio album in six years, on 28 February 2020. The album's lead single, "We Stand as One", was premiered on to the band's 50th anniversary in autumn 2019 and was released on 10 January 2020. The second single "Back in the Day" was released on 7 February 2020. The album cover has been created by a heraldry artist Olaf Keller in the Regal Coat of Arms design studio. For some dates on their 2021 tour, drummer Mike Sturgis rejoined the band in place of Joe Crabtree. In February 2022 Mike Truscott became Wishbone Ash's official drummer. Martin Turner - (Ex Wishbone Ash) Martin Turner began touring in 2004 with "Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash", performing material by the classic line ups of the band. Occasionally Ted Turner and Laurie Wisefield have joined his group on stage as guests. He published his autobiography in 2012. In 2013 Andy Powell took legal action to protect the Wishbone Ash registered trademark and prevent Martin Turner from using his chosen group name. The court ruled in favour of Andy Powell and Martin Turner's application to appeal was refused. Since then he has toured and recorded with his band as "Martin Turner - (Ex Wishbone Ash)". Special events Wishbone Ash have developed two group gatherings, AshCon in the UK and AshFest in the United States. These began in 1994 and have developed into gatherings of the 'faithful' and have since become annual fixtures. Personnel Current members Andy Powell – guitar, vocals (1969–present) Bob Skeat – bass, backing vocals (1997–present) Mark Abrahams – guitar (2017–present) Mike Truscott – drums, percussion (2022 - present) Former members Steve Upton – drums, percussion (1969–1990) Ted Turner – guitar, vocals, banjo (1969–1974; 1987–1994) Martin Turner – bass, vocals, keyboards (1969–1980; 1987–1991; 1995–1996) Laurie Wisefield – guitar, vocals, banjo (1974–1985) Joe Crabtree – drums, percussion (2007–2022) Discography Wishbone Ash (1970) Pilgrimage (1971) Argus (1972) Wishbone Four (1973) There's the Rub (1974) Locked In (1976) New England (1976) Front Page News (1977) No Smoke Without Fire (1978) Just Testing (1980) Number the Brave (1981) Twin Barrels Burning (1982) Raw to the Bone (1985) Nouveau Calls (1987) Here to Hear (1989) Strange Affair (1991) Illuminations (1996) Trance Visionary (1997) (electronic re-recordings) Psychic Terrorism (1998) (electronic re-recordings) Bare Bones (1999) (acoustic re-recordings) Bona Fide (2002) Clan Destiny (2006) Power of Eternity (2007) Elegant Stealth (2011) Blue Horizon (2014) Coat of Arms (2020) References External links English progressive rock groups Musical groups established in 1969 Musical quartets English rock music groups I.R.S. Records artists Decca Records artists 1969 establishments in England	true	[ "Songbook is an acoustic live album by American musician and Soundgarden vocalist Chris Cornell, released on November 21, 2011. The live album features songs recorded during Cornell's Songbook Tour, an acoustic solo tour which took place from March to May 2011 in the US and Canada, and is his first live album as a solo artist.\n\nThe songs on the tour varied in every show, and the album was recorded during various shows on the tour, and includes songs from Cornell's whole career: solo material, Soundgarden songs, Audioslave songs, Temple of the Dog songs, as well as covers of Led Zeppelin's \"Thank You\" and John Lennon's \"Imagine\".\n\nThe album debuted on the Billboard 200 at No. 69. It has sold 86,000 copies in the US as of August 2015.\n\nSong Information\nThe album includes a new song by Chris Cornell, entitled \"The Keeper\"; the song was written exclusively for the Marc Forster directed 2011 film, Machine Gun Preacher, and released as the lead track from the film's soundtrack in August 2011. Another new song on the album is \"Cleaning My Gun\", a song Cornell had been playing live during his acoustic shows for years but was never previously released on an album.\n\nThe first track on the album \"As Hope and Promise Fade\", was previously released as a hidden track on Cornell's third solo album, Scream, under the title \"Two Drink Minimum\".\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2011 live albums\nChris Cornell albums", "Days in Frames is a solo album by Kevin Hearn. It is his third solo album, and his seventh solo release including his Thin Buckle releases. The album was made available for pre-order on iTunes November 17, 2014, and was made available for streaming on CBC Music Canada on November 18. The album was released November 25, 2014. The song \"Midnight Sun\" was dedicated to Shuvinai Ashoona an Inuk artist who had painted a guitar for Hearn.\n\nTrack listing\n\nSingles\nThe first single from the album, Gallerina, was released November 8, 2014. Those who pre-ordered the album on iTunes received an automatic download of the single.\n\nReferences\n\n2014 albums\nKevin Hearn and Thin Buckle albums" ]
[ "Wishbone Ash", "Line-up instability (1981-1986)", "who did the lineup instability start with?", "Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton,", "where was John Wetton from?", "John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and UK.", "did they release any songs sung by John?", "featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song,", "was the song on an album or was it a solo song?", "Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song," ]	C_fe1460a2b98e490eb5c14e10722b3dc5_1	how did he react to the just one song idea?	5	how did John Wetton react to the just one song idea?	Wishbone Ash	Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and UK. Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song, although during album sessions he had offered songs such as "Here Comes the Feeling" that would eventually sell millions when released on Asia's 1982 debut album. Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and rejoined Asia. Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder. Also joining the band was female backing vocalist, Claire Hamill, who had sung on both the Just Testing and Number the Brave albums. In 1982, after Hamill's departure, the band experimented with heavy metal on the Twin Barrels Burning album. It became the highest charting Wishbone Ash album in years (UK #22). Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983, to be replaced by bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze). The group continued with a heavy metal side on 1985's Raw to the Bone, which became the first Wishbone Ash album not to make the charts. Not long after, Wisefield left after serving as guitarist in the band for eleven years, going on to a varied career that would include work with Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Roger Chapman, Jeff Wayne and the Queen musical We Will Rock You. He was replaced by Jamie Crompton, who in turn was succeeded briefly by Phil Palmer. Early in 1986, Mervyn Spence quit as well, to be replaced by ex-Kinks bassist Andy Pyle. CANNOTANSWER	Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and rejoined Asia.	Wishbone Ash are a British rock band who achieved success in the early and mid-1970s. Their popular albums included Wishbone Ash (1970), Pilgrimage (1971), Argus (1972), Wishbone Four (1973), There's the Rub (1974), and New England (1976). Wishbone Ash are noted for their extensive use of harmony twin lead guitars, which had been attracting electric blues bands since Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page had played together in the Yardbirds in 1966. Their contributions helped Andy Powell and Ted Turner to be voted "Two of the Ten Most Important Guitarists in Rock History" (Traffic magazine 1989), and to appear in the "Top 20 Guitarists of All Time" (Rolling Stone). Melody Maker (1972) described Powell and Turner as "the most interesting two guitar team since the days when Beck and Page graced The Yardbirds". Several notable bands have cited Wishbone Ash as an influence, including Iron Maiden, Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Thin Lizzy, Metallica, Dream Theater, Overkill and Opeth. Formed in Torquay, Devon, in 1969, out of the ashes of trio The Empty Vessels (originally known as The Torinoes, later briefly being renamed Tanglewood in 1969), which had been formed by Wishbone Ash's founding member Martin Turner (bass & vocals) in 1963 and complemented by Steve Upton (drums and percussion) in 1966. The original Wishbone Ash line-up was completed by guitarists/vocalists Andy Powell and Ted Turner. In 1974, Ted Turner left the band, and was replaced by Laurie Wisefield. The band continued on with strong critical and commercial success until 1980. There followed line-ups featuring former bass players from King Crimson (John Wetton), Uriah Heep (Trevor Bolder), and Trapeze (Mervyn Spence), Wisefield left in 1985. In 1987, however, the original line-up reunited for several albums – Nouveau Calls, Here to Hear and Strange Affair – until 1990, when Upton quit the band. After Martin Turner was replaced in 1991, the band recorded The Ash Live in Chicago, before Ted Turner left in 1993. This left Andy Powell as the sole remaining original founding member of Wishbone Ash to continue the band on into the future. History Formation and rise to fame (1969–1980) Wishbone Ash were formed in October 1969 by bass guitarist Martin Turner and drummer Steve Upton. When Tanglewood's original guitarist, Martin's brother Glenn Turner left the trio and returned to his native Devon, their manager, Miles Copeland III advertised for a guitar player and also for a keyboard player. After an extensive search for a guitarist, the band could not decide between the final two candidates, Andy Powell and Ted Turner (no relation to Martin). It was suggested that they try both guitar players "just to see what it sounds like". Differing from the twin lead sound of Southern rock pioneer The Allman Brothers Band, Wishbone Ash included strong elements of progressive rock, and also of folk and classical music. After the band members wrote several suggested band names on two sheets of paper, Martin Turner picked one word from each list – 'Wishbone' and 'Ash'. In early 1970, the band secured an opening spot for Deep Purple. Its guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore, later recommended Wishbone Ash to producer Derek Lawrence, as well as helping them secure a record deal with Decca/MCA Records. The band's debut album, Wishbone Ash, was released in December 1970. One year later, the group released Pilgrimage. The band peaked commercially in 1972 with Argus, their highest placed entry in the UK Albums Chart (#3). The album was voted by the readers of Sounds as the "best rock album of the year", also "Top British Album" (Melody Maker). The band were getting international acclaim for their live performances as they gained popularity around the world. The band had now begun to play major arenas as headliners. Wishbone Four (1973) was the band's first record without producer Derek Lawrence, as the band decided to produce the album themselves. In December 1973, the band released a double live album, Live Dates. There was an album released called Wishbone Ash Live in Memphis, which was a promo to FM radio stations but never sold in stores. Not long after, guitarist Ted Turner left the band. After replacing Turner with guitarist Laurie Wisefield (ex-Home), the band relocated to the US and recorded There's the Rub (1974). Locked In (1976), produced by Tom Dowd, saw the band moving towards US soft-rock territory and the group began touring with a keyboard player. 1976's New England returned to the traditional Wishbone Ash style. Front Page News (1977) was the band's last album of this period that was recorded in the US. In 1978, after years of experimental albums, the band decided to return to its roots with No Smoke Without Fire, the first to be produced by Derek Lawrence since Argus in 1972. The album contained mainly songs written by Laurie Wisefield and Martin Turner. The band spent six months making the next album, Just Testing which was released in February 1980. Pressured by MCA to make more commercial music, Andy Powell, Laurie Wisefield and Steve Upton expressed to bassist/vocalist Martin Turner that they planned to recruit a lead singer / frontman, thus restricting Martin Turner's duties to bass guitar only. Turner felt unable to support such plans and described the position he was being put in as "untenable". Following a band meeting at his house, Martin Turner parted company with the band. Ironically, the band never recruited the proposed frontman and Turner, in his 2012 autobiography, described the situation as "constructive dismissal". However this was not a view held by the rest of the remaining band members or the then management. Line-up changes (1981–1986) Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and U.K. Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song, although during album sessions he had offered songs such as "Here Comes the Feeling" that would eventually sell millions when released on Asia's 1982 debut album. Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and instead co-founded Asia. Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder. Also joining the band was female backing vocalist, Claire Hamill, who had sung on both the Just Testing and Number the Brave albums. In 1982, after Hamill's departure, the band experimented with heavy metal on the Twin Barrels Burning album. It became the highest charting Wishbone Ash album in years (UK #22). Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983, to be replaced by bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze). The group continued with a rock side on 1985's Raw to the Bone, which became the first Wishbone Ash album not to make the charts. Not long after, Wisefield left after serving as guitarist in the band for eleven years, going on to a varied career that would include work with Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Roger Chapman, Jeff Wayne and the Queen musical We Will Rock You. He was replaced by Jamie Crompton, who in turn was succeeded briefly by Phil Palmer. Early in 1986, Mervyn Spence quit as well, to be replaced by ex-Kinks bassist Andy Pyle. Reunions and departures (1987–1994) In 1987, I.R.S. Records founder and original Wishbone manager Miles Copeland III began a series of albums entitled No Speak, which featured all instrumental music. To launch the label successfully, Copeland needed a big name band that would bring publicity to the project. Copeland approached the four founding members of Wishbone Ash about having the original line-up record an all-instrumental album. For the first time in fourteen years, Andy Powell and Steve Upton joined forces with Martin Turner and Ted Turner to record the album Nouveau Calls, released in February 1988. The original line-up's tour of 1988 was a huge success, as the band played large venues for the first time since the late 1970s. In August 1989, the band released a reunion album with vocals entitled Here to Hear, featuring mainly songs written by Ted and Martin Turner. In 1990 the band went back into the studio to record the follow-up to Here to Hear. The band were shocked when founding member Upton, the band's drummer for their entire career, announced his retirement from the music industry. They enlisted drummer Robbie France, but replaced him with Ray Weston when it was determined that personal conflicts between France and Martin Turner could not be resolved. Strange Affair was released in May 1991, featuring mainly songs written by Andy Powell and Ted Turner. Later in 1991, the band decided to continue without founding member Martin Turner, with the bassist/vocalist being replaced by returnee Andy Pyle, who had been in the band years earlier. The band toured throughout 1992/93, releasing the live album The Ash Live in Chicago. 1994 saw the second and final departure of Ted Turner. Following Turner's departure, Pyle and Weston also left the band. Reunion years to present (1995–present) At this stage Andy Powell was the only original member left in Wishbone Ash. Powell enlisted guitarist/songwriter Roger Filgate, bassist/vocalist Tony Kishman, and drummer Mike Sturgis. The new line-up debuted on a short UK/European tour in spring 1995. By the time of the band's 25th anniversary tour in late 1995, Tony Kishman was finding touring difficult due to other performing engagements in the United States. Founding member Martin Turner replaced him on bass and vocals for the duration of the tour, before Kishman returned to record lead vocals for the band's next album. Illuminations was released in 1996 and featured the Powell, Filgate, Kishman, Sturgis line-up. Powell relied on fan donations and outside assistance to help finance the album. In 1997, Filgate, Kishman, and Sturgis departed, so Powell brought former drummer Weston back into the fold, along with new members guitarist Mark Birch and bassist Bob Skeat. Wishbone Ash then went on to release two electronic dance albums on UK indie label Invisible Hands Music. The albums contained electronic beats blended with Wishbone Ash guitar riffs. Trance Visionary was the first of the pair, spawning a 12" single of four mixes that was a clubland smash and reached number 38 on the UK dance chart. Psychic Terrorism followed. The band then released an acoustic album of classic and new songs entitled Bare Bones before hitting the road in 2000 to celebrate their 30th anniversary. A filmed show was held at Shepherd's Bush Empire in London, where the band welcomed special guests Wisefield and Hamill as well as other friends for a star-studded concert that resulted in Live Dates 3 and a live DVD. In 2001, Mark Birch was replaced by Finnish guitarist Ben Granfelt. The band hit the road for their most extensive touring schedule in years. Wishbone Ash returned to the studio in 2002 for the Bona Fide album. 2003 saw the band touring across the world with Savoy Brown, playing their largest number of American dates since the 1980s. Ben Granfelt left the band in 2004 to continue working on his solo career. Granfelt's mentor, Muddy Manninen joined the band. In late 2006, the band released a new studio album entitled Clan Destiny. In 2007, longtime drummer Ray Weston left the band, stating that he was tired of constant touring and wanted to concentrate on different things. He was replaced by Joe Crabtree, known for his work with Pendragon and King Crimson violinist David Cross. In late 2007, the band released Power of Eternity; their first with new member Joe Crabtree. On 25 November 2011 Wishbone Ash released their 23rd album, the well received Elegant Stealth, which is also the first album to be recorded by the same line up as the predecessor since 1989. In 2013 a court case relating to a trade mark infringement and the use of the name 'Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash' was decided. The court ruled in favour of Andy Powell with the comprehensive judgement forming a clear history of the band since its inception. On 19 February 2014 the 24th studio album Blue Horizon was released. The reviews for this album were generally very positive indeed. As of 2014 this line-up of the band, having been together since 2007, became the longest-lasting line-up of Wishbone Ash in the group's history. On 16 May 2015, Wishbone Ash recorded a live to vinyl album at Metropolis Studios. On 21–23 May 2015, Wishbone Ash recorded the DVD Live in Paris at in France. The performance included additional percussion and guitar contributions from Andy's son Aynsley Powell. In May 2017, it was announced that Mark Abrahams, a long time Wishbone Ash fan, would be joining on guitar duties. Abrahams is a guitarist who previously owned Vision Guitars, a guitar shop in Castleford, West Yorkshire, England. On 24 September 2019 it was announced that Wishbone Ash were signed to Steamhammer/SPV and will release Coat of Arms, their first studio album in six years, on 28 February 2020. The album's lead single, "We Stand as One", was premiered on to the band's 50th anniversary in autumn 2019 and was released on 10 January 2020. The second single "Back in the Day" was released on 7 February 2020. The album cover has been created by a heraldry artist Olaf Keller in the Regal Coat of Arms design studio. For some dates on their 2021 tour, drummer Mike Sturgis rejoined the band in place of Joe Crabtree. In February 2022 Mike Truscott became Wishbone Ash's official drummer. Martin Turner - (Ex Wishbone Ash) Martin Turner began touring in 2004 with "Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash", performing material by the classic line ups of the band. Occasionally Ted Turner and Laurie Wisefield have joined his group on stage as guests. He published his autobiography in 2012. In 2013 Andy Powell took legal action to protect the Wishbone Ash registered trademark and prevent Martin Turner from using his chosen group name. The court ruled in favour of Andy Powell and Martin Turner's application to appeal was refused. Since then he has toured and recorded with his band as "Martin Turner - (Ex Wishbone Ash)". Special events Wishbone Ash have developed two group gatherings, AshCon in the UK and AshFest in the United States. These began in 1994 and have developed into gatherings of the 'faithful' and have since become annual fixtures. Personnel Current members Andy Powell – guitar, vocals (1969–present) Bob Skeat – bass, backing vocals (1997–present) Mark Abrahams – guitar (2017–present) Mike Truscott – drums, percussion (2022 - present) Former members Steve Upton – drums, percussion (1969–1990) Ted Turner – guitar, vocals, banjo (1969–1974; 1987–1994) Martin Turner – bass, vocals, keyboards (1969–1980; 1987–1991; 1995–1996) Laurie Wisefield – guitar, vocals, banjo (1974–1985) Joe Crabtree – drums, percussion (2007–2022) Discography Wishbone Ash (1970) Pilgrimage (1971) Argus (1972) Wishbone Four (1973) There's the Rub (1974) Locked In (1976) New England (1976) Front Page News (1977) No Smoke Without Fire (1978) Just Testing (1980) Number the Brave (1981) Twin Barrels Burning (1982) Raw to the Bone (1985) Nouveau Calls (1987) Here to Hear (1989) Strange Affair (1991) Illuminations (1996) Trance Visionary (1997) (electronic re-recordings) Psychic Terrorism (1998) (electronic re-recordings) Bare Bones (1999) (acoustic re-recordings) Bona Fide (2002) Clan Destiny (2006) Power of Eternity (2007) Elegant Stealth (2011) Blue Horizon (2014) Coat of Arms (2020) References External links English progressive rock groups Musical groups established in 1969 Musical quartets English rock music groups I.R.S. Records artists Decca Records artists 1969 establishments in England	false	[ "\"React\" is the lead single from Erick Sermon's fifth studio album, React. The song was produced by Just Blaze and featured Sermon's fellow Def Squad member Redman. The song appears on the soundtrack to the 2003 film, Honey, and in the 2003 video game, NBA Street Vol. 2.\n\n\"React\" became Sermon's second and last top-40 hit, reaching No. 36 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song sampled the Sahir Ludhianvi written song \"Chandhi Ka Badan\", which was performed by Meena Kapoor, on the song's hook. The translation of the sampled line is \"If someone wants to commit suicide, so what can you do?\" to which Sermon responds \"Whatever she said, then I'm that\". The use of the sample drew criticism from the Hindi-speaking community.\n\nTrack listing\n\"React\" (Radio Mix)- 3:45 \n\"React\" (Instrumental)- 3:44 \n\"React\" (Club Mix)- 3:45 \n\"React\" (Instrumental)- 3:44\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nReferences\n\n2002 singles\n2002 songs\nErick Sermon songs\nRedman (rapper) songs\nJ Records singles\nSong recordings produced by Just Blaze\nSongs written by Erick Sermon\nSongs written by Redman (rapper)", "\"React\" is a song by American hip hop group Onyx. It was released on June 2, 1998 by JMJ Records, Rush Associated Labels and Def Jam as the third single from Onyx's third album, Shut 'Em Down. The song featured Onyx affiliates X1, Bonifucco and Still Livin' and a then unknown 50 Cent in his first official appearance on a song.\n\nProduced by Bud'da, React was successful on the R&B and rap charts, peaking at 62 on the US Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles & Tracks and 44 on the US Hot Rap Singles.\n\nAllmusic highlighted the song itself when they reviewed the album.\n\nBackground\n50 Cent mentioned Jam Master Jay as the man who put him on a song, during his book From Pieces to Weight: Once Upon a Time in Southside, Queens:\n\"...Jam Master Jay got me on a song called \"React\". At the time we did a song, no one expected it to be a single. They just put me on the song as a favor to Jay because I was the new nigga in his camp.\n\nMusic video\n\"React\" was the first music video directed by Director X; and it premiered on \"Rap City\" aired on BET on June 13, 1998. The video concept called for rappers to be hockey players. 50 Cent spoke on his appearance in the video \"React\" when asked about the last time he went ice-skating.\"...It actually was the Onyx video. I had to learn for the video. I didn't know why. I was like 'What the—?' I asked them to put me in the box. Like an actual [penalty box]\".\n\nThe video can be found on the 2008's DVD Onyx: 15 Years Of Videos, History And Violence.\n\nControversy\nThe beef between Onyx and 50 Cent started on Def Jam's \"Survival Of The Illest\" concert at the legendary world-famous Apollo Theater. The concert was held on July 18, 1998. During performing the song \"React\" rapper Scarred 4 Life (also known as Clay Da Raider) performed 50 Cent's verse. Later, 50 would diss Sticky Fingaz on a number of mixtapes, including 50's underground hit \"How To Rob\". Then he would fight with Fredro at the rehearsal for the 2003 VIBE Awards. In a 2008 interview for AllHipHop Fredro Starr made a comment about 50 Cent:\"...50 is a smart businessman and at the end of the day we gave him respect. We put him on records when we was at the top of the game. He didn't even have a car. We gave him respect on the strength of Jam Master Jay. What did we get in return? Someone talking slick on mixtapes? Swinging on n****s?\"\n\nReleases\n\n12\" vinyl single track listing\nA-Side:\n\"React\" (Radio Edit) - 4:25 (Featuring 50 Cent, Bonifucco, Still Livin, X1 [Uncredited])\n\"Broke Willies\" (Radio Edit) - 4:08 (Featuring X1 [Uncredited])\n\"Shut 'Em Down\" (Remix)- 4:07 (Featuring Big Pun, Noreaga)\n\nB-Side:\n\"React\" (TV track)- 4:26\n\"Broke Willies\" (TV Track) - 4:09\n\"Shut 'Em Down\" (Remix) (TV Track) - 4:07\n\nCD promo single track listing\n\"React\" (Radio Edit)- 4:26 (Featuring 50 Cent, Bonifucco, Still Livin, X1 [Uncredited])\n\"Broke Willies\" (Radio Edit)- 4:11 (Featuring X1 [Uncredited])\n\"Shut 'Em Down (Remix)\" (Radio Edit)- 4:02 (Featuring Big Pun, Noreaga)\n\nNotes\n The single version of \"Broke Willies\" is very different in music from the album version.\n\nSamples\n\"Eastside Connection\" by Frisco Disco\n\nNotes\n LL Cool J is the first rap artist who used the same sample in his 1985 song \"You'll Rock\" (Remix) produced by Rick Rubin.\n\nPersonnel \n Onyx - performer, vocals, co-producer (\"Broke Willies\")\n Fredro Starr - performer, vocals\n Sticky Fingaz - performer, vocals\n Sonny Seeza - performer, vocals\n Bud'da - producer (\"React\")\n Keith Horne - producer (\"Broke Willies\")\n Don Elliot - engineer (\"Broke Willies\")\n Self - producer (\"Shut 'Em Down (Remix)\")\n Ken \"DURO\" Ifill - engineer, mixing\n DJ LS One - engineer, mixing, scratches\n Patrick Viala - remixing (\"Shut 'Em Down (Remix)\")\n Tony Black - mixing, remixing (\"Shut 'Em Down (Remix)\")\n Tom Coyne - mastering\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nReact at Discogs\nReact at RapGenius\n\n1998 singles\nJMJ Records singles\n50 Cent songs\nOnyx (group) songs\nSongs written by 50 Cent\nMusic videos directed by Director X\nPosse cuts" ]
[ "Wishbone Ash", "Line-up instability (1981-1986)", "who did the lineup instability start with?", "Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton,", "where was John Wetton from?", "John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and UK.", "did they release any songs sung by John?", "featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song,", "was the song on an album or was it a solo song?", "Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song,", "how did he react to the just one song idea?", "Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and rejoined Asia." ]	C_fe1460a2b98e490eb5c14e10722b3dc5_1	who replaced him?	6	who replaced Wetton in Weishbone Ash?	Wishbone Ash	Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and UK. Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song, although during album sessions he had offered songs such as "Here Comes the Feeling" that would eventually sell millions when released on Asia's 1982 debut album. Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and rejoined Asia. Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder. Also joining the band was female backing vocalist, Claire Hamill, who had sung on both the Just Testing and Number the Brave albums. In 1982, after Hamill's departure, the band experimented with heavy metal on the Twin Barrels Burning album. It became the highest charting Wishbone Ash album in years (UK #22). Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983, to be replaced by bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze). The group continued with a heavy metal side on 1985's Raw to the Bone, which became the first Wishbone Ash album not to make the charts. Not long after, Wisefield left after serving as guitarist in the band for eleven years, going on to a varied career that would include work with Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Roger Chapman, Jeff Wayne and the Queen musical We Will Rock You. He was replaced by Jamie Crompton, who in turn was succeeded briefly by Phil Palmer. Early in 1986, Mervyn Spence quit as well, to be replaced by ex-Kinks bassist Andy Pyle. CANNOTANSWER	Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder.	Wishbone Ash are a British rock band who achieved success in the early and mid-1970s. Their popular albums included Wishbone Ash (1970), Pilgrimage (1971), Argus (1972), Wishbone Four (1973), There's the Rub (1974), and New England (1976). Wishbone Ash are noted for their extensive use of harmony twin lead guitars, which had been attracting electric blues bands since Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page had played together in the Yardbirds in 1966. Their contributions helped Andy Powell and Ted Turner to be voted "Two of the Ten Most Important Guitarists in Rock History" (Traffic magazine 1989), and to appear in the "Top 20 Guitarists of All Time" (Rolling Stone). Melody Maker (1972) described Powell and Turner as "the most interesting two guitar team since the days when Beck and Page graced The Yardbirds". Several notable bands have cited Wishbone Ash as an influence, including Iron Maiden, Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Thin Lizzy, Metallica, Dream Theater, Overkill and Opeth. Formed in Torquay, Devon, in 1969, out of the ashes of trio The Empty Vessels (originally known as The Torinoes, later briefly being renamed Tanglewood in 1969), which had been formed by Wishbone Ash's founding member Martin Turner (bass & vocals) in 1963 and complemented by Steve Upton (drums and percussion) in 1966. The original Wishbone Ash line-up was completed by guitarists/vocalists Andy Powell and Ted Turner. In 1974, Ted Turner left the band, and was replaced by Laurie Wisefield. The band continued on with strong critical and commercial success until 1980. There followed line-ups featuring former bass players from King Crimson (John Wetton), Uriah Heep (Trevor Bolder), and Trapeze (Mervyn Spence), Wisefield left in 1985. In 1987, however, the original line-up reunited for several albums – Nouveau Calls, Here to Hear and Strange Affair – until 1990, when Upton quit the band. After Martin Turner was replaced in 1991, the band recorded The Ash Live in Chicago, before Ted Turner left in 1993. This left Andy Powell as the sole remaining original founding member of Wishbone Ash to continue the band on into the future. History Formation and rise to fame (1969–1980) Wishbone Ash were formed in October 1969 by bass guitarist Martin Turner and drummer Steve Upton. When Tanglewood's original guitarist, Martin's brother Glenn Turner left the trio and returned to his native Devon, their manager, Miles Copeland III advertised for a guitar player and also for a keyboard player. After an extensive search for a guitarist, the band could not decide between the final two candidates, Andy Powell and Ted Turner (no relation to Martin). It was suggested that they try both guitar players "just to see what it sounds like". Differing from the twin lead sound of Southern rock pioneer The Allman Brothers Band, Wishbone Ash included strong elements of progressive rock, and also of folk and classical music. After the band members wrote several suggested band names on two sheets of paper, Martin Turner picked one word from each list – 'Wishbone' and 'Ash'. In early 1970, the band secured an opening spot for Deep Purple. Its guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore, later recommended Wishbone Ash to producer Derek Lawrence, as well as helping them secure a record deal with Decca/MCA Records. The band's debut album, Wishbone Ash, was released in December 1970. One year later, the group released Pilgrimage. The band peaked commercially in 1972 with Argus, their highest placed entry in the UK Albums Chart (#3). The album was voted by the readers of Sounds as the "best rock album of the year", also "Top British Album" (Melody Maker). The band were getting international acclaim for their live performances as they gained popularity around the world. The band had now begun to play major arenas as headliners. Wishbone Four (1973) was the band's first record without producer Derek Lawrence, as the band decided to produce the album themselves. In December 1973, the band released a double live album, Live Dates. There was an album released called Wishbone Ash Live in Memphis, which was a promo to FM radio stations but never sold in stores. Not long after, guitarist Ted Turner left the band. After replacing Turner with guitarist Laurie Wisefield (ex-Home), the band relocated to the US and recorded There's the Rub (1974). Locked In (1976), produced by Tom Dowd, saw the band moving towards US soft-rock territory and the group began touring with a keyboard player. 1976's New England returned to the traditional Wishbone Ash style. Front Page News (1977) was the band's last album of this period that was recorded in the US. In 1978, after years of experimental albums, the band decided to return to its roots with No Smoke Without Fire, the first to be produced by Derek Lawrence since Argus in 1972. The album contained mainly songs written by Laurie Wisefield and Martin Turner. The band spent six months making the next album, Just Testing which was released in February 1980. Pressured by MCA to make more commercial music, Andy Powell, Laurie Wisefield and Steve Upton expressed to bassist/vocalist Martin Turner that they planned to recruit a lead singer / frontman, thus restricting Martin Turner's duties to bass guitar only. Turner felt unable to support such plans and described the position he was being put in as "untenable". Following a band meeting at his house, Martin Turner parted company with the band. Ironically, the band never recruited the proposed frontman and Turner, in his 2012 autobiography, described the situation as "constructive dismissal". However this was not a view held by the rest of the remaining band members or the then management. Line-up changes (1981–1986) Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and U.K. Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song, although during album sessions he had offered songs such as "Here Comes the Feeling" that would eventually sell millions when released on Asia's 1982 debut album. Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and instead co-founded Asia. Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder. Also joining the band was female backing vocalist, Claire Hamill, who had sung on both the Just Testing and Number the Brave albums. In 1982, after Hamill's departure, the band experimented with heavy metal on the Twin Barrels Burning album. It became the highest charting Wishbone Ash album in years (UK #22). Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983, to be replaced by bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze). The group continued with a rock side on 1985's Raw to the Bone, which became the first Wishbone Ash album not to make the charts. Not long after, Wisefield left after serving as guitarist in the band for eleven years, going on to a varied career that would include work with Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Roger Chapman, Jeff Wayne and the Queen musical We Will Rock You. He was replaced by Jamie Crompton, who in turn was succeeded briefly by Phil Palmer. Early in 1986, Mervyn Spence quit as well, to be replaced by ex-Kinks bassist Andy Pyle. Reunions and departures (1987–1994) In 1987, I.R.S. Records founder and original Wishbone manager Miles Copeland III began a series of albums entitled No Speak, which featured all instrumental music. To launch the label successfully, Copeland needed a big name band that would bring publicity to the project. Copeland approached the four founding members of Wishbone Ash about having the original line-up record an all-instrumental album. For the first time in fourteen years, Andy Powell and Steve Upton joined forces with Martin Turner and Ted Turner to record the album Nouveau Calls, released in February 1988. The original line-up's tour of 1988 was a huge success, as the band played large venues for the first time since the late 1970s. In August 1989, the band released a reunion album with vocals entitled Here to Hear, featuring mainly songs written by Ted and Martin Turner. In 1990 the band went back into the studio to record the follow-up to Here to Hear. The band were shocked when founding member Upton, the band's drummer for their entire career, announced his retirement from the music industry. They enlisted drummer Robbie France, but replaced him with Ray Weston when it was determined that personal conflicts between France and Martin Turner could not be resolved. Strange Affair was released in May 1991, featuring mainly songs written by Andy Powell and Ted Turner. Later in 1991, the band decided to continue without founding member Martin Turner, with the bassist/vocalist being replaced by returnee Andy Pyle, who had been in the band years earlier. The band toured throughout 1992/93, releasing the live album The Ash Live in Chicago. 1994 saw the second and final departure of Ted Turner. Following Turner's departure, Pyle and Weston also left the band. Reunion years to present (1995–present) At this stage Andy Powell was the only original member left in Wishbone Ash. Powell enlisted guitarist/songwriter Roger Filgate, bassist/vocalist Tony Kishman, and drummer Mike Sturgis. The new line-up debuted on a short UK/European tour in spring 1995. By the time of the band's 25th anniversary tour in late 1995, Tony Kishman was finding touring difficult due to other performing engagements in the United States. Founding member Martin Turner replaced him on bass and vocals for the duration of the tour, before Kishman returned to record lead vocals for the band's next album. Illuminations was released in 1996 and featured the Powell, Filgate, Kishman, Sturgis line-up. Powell relied on fan donations and outside assistance to help finance the album. In 1997, Filgate, Kishman, and Sturgis departed, so Powell brought former drummer Weston back into the fold, along with new members guitarist Mark Birch and bassist Bob Skeat. Wishbone Ash then went on to release two electronic dance albums on UK indie label Invisible Hands Music. The albums contained electronic beats blended with Wishbone Ash guitar riffs. Trance Visionary was the first of the pair, spawning a 12" single of four mixes that was a clubland smash and reached number 38 on the UK dance chart. Psychic Terrorism followed. The band then released an acoustic album of classic and new songs entitled Bare Bones before hitting the road in 2000 to celebrate their 30th anniversary. A filmed show was held at Shepherd's Bush Empire in London, where the band welcomed special guests Wisefield and Hamill as well as other friends for a star-studded concert that resulted in Live Dates 3 and a live DVD. In 2001, Mark Birch was replaced by Finnish guitarist Ben Granfelt. The band hit the road for their most extensive touring schedule in years. Wishbone Ash returned to the studio in 2002 for the Bona Fide album. 2003 saw the band touring across the world with Savoy Brown, playing their largest number of American dates since the 1980s. Ben Granfelt left the band in 2004 to continue working on his solo career. Granfelt's mentor, Muddy Manninen joined the band. In late 2006, the band released a new studio album entitled Clan Destiny. In 2007, longtime drummer Ray Weston left the band, stating that he was tired of constant touring and wanted to concentrate on different things. He was replaced by Joe Crabtree, known for his work with Pendragon and King Crimson violinist David Cross. In late 2007, the band released Power of Eternity; their first with new member Joe Crabtree. On 25 November 2011 Wishbone Ash released their 23rd album, the well received Elegant Stealth, which is also the first album to be recorded by the same line up as the predecessor since 1989. In 2013 a court case relating to a trade mark infringement and the use of the name 'Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash' was decided. The court ruled in favour of Andy Powell with the comprehensive judgement forming a clear history of the band since its inception. On 19 February 2014 the 24th studio album Blue Horizon was released. The reviews for this album were generally very positive indeed. As of 2014 this line-up of the band, having been together since 2007, became the longest-lasting line-up of Wishbone Ash in the group's history. On 16 May 2015, Wishbone Ash recorded a live to vinyl album at Metropolis Studios. On 21–23 May 2015, Wishbone Ash recorded the DVD Live in Paris at in France. The performance included additional percussion and guitar contributions from Andy's son Aynsley Powell. In May 2017, it was announced that Mark Abrahams, a long time Wishbone Ash fan, would be joining on guitar duties. Abrahams is a guitarist who previously owned Vision Guitars, a guitar shop in Castleford, West Yorkshire, England. On 24 September 2019 it was announced that Wishbone Ash were signed to Steamhammer/SPV and will release Coat of Arms, their first studio album in six years, on 28 February 2020. The album's lead single, "We Stand as One", was premiered on to the band's 50th anniversary in autumn 2019 and was released on 10 January 2020. The second single "Back in the Day" was released on 7 February 2020. The album cover has been created by a heraldry artist Olaf Keller in the Regal Coat of Arms design studio. For some dates on their 2021 tour, drummer Mike Sturgis rejoined the band in place of Joe Crabtree. In February 2022 Mike Truscott became Wishbone Ash's official drummer. Martin Turner - (Ex Wishbone Ash) Martin Turner began touring in 2004 with "Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash", performing material by the classic line ups of the band. Occasionally Ted Turner and Laurie Wisefield have joined his group on stage as guests. He published his autobiography in 2012. In 2013 Andy Powell took legal action to protect the Wishbone Ash registered trademark and prevent Martin Turner from using his chosen group name. The court ruled in favour of Andy Powell and Martin Turner's application to appeal was refused. Since then he has toured and recorded with his band as "Martin Turner - (Ex Wishbone Ash)". Special events Wishbone Ash have developed two group gatherings, AshCon in the UK and AshFest in the United States. These began in 1994 and have developed into gatherings of the 'faithful' and have since become annual fixtures. Personnel Current members Andy Powell – guitar, vocals (1969–present) Bob Skeat – bass, backing vocals (1997–present) Mark Abrahams – guitar (2017–present) Mike Truscott – drums, percussion (2022 - present) Former members Steve Upton – drums, percussion (1969–1990) Ted Turner – guitar, vocals, banjo (1969–1974; 1987–1994) Martin Turner – bass, vocals, keyboards (1969–1980; 1987–1991; 1995–1996) Laurie Wisefield – guitar, vocals, banjo (1974–1985) Joe Crabtree – drums, percussion (2007–2022) Discography Wishbone Ash (1970) Pilgrimage (1971) Argus (1972) Wishbone Four (1973) There's the Rub (1974) Locked In (1976) New England (1976) Front Page News (1977) No Smoke Without Fire (1978) Just Testing (1980) Number the Brave (1981) Twin Barrels Burning (1982) Raw to the Bone (1985) Nouveau Calls (1987) Here to Hear (1989) Strange Affair (1991) Illuminations (1996) Trance Visionary (1997) (electronic re-recordings) Psychic Terrorism (1998) (electronic re-recordings) Bare Bones (1999) (acoustic re-recordings) Bona Fide (2002) Clan Destiny (2006) Power of Eternity (2007) Elegant Stealth (2011) Blue Horizon (2014) Coat of Arms (2020) References External links English progressive rock groups Musical groups established in 1969 Musical quartets English rock music groups I.R.S. Records artists Decca Records artists 1969 establishments in England	true	[ "The 7th General Junta was the meeting of the General Junta, the parliament of the Principality of Asturias, with the membership determined by the results of the regional election held on 27 May 2007. The congress met for the first time on 21 June 2007.\n\nElection \nThe 7th Asturian regional election was held on 27 May 2007. At the election the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) remained the largest party in the General Junta but fell short of a majority again.\n\nHistory \nThe new parliament met for the first time on 21 June 2007. María Jesús Álvarez (PSOE) was elected as the president of the General Junta, with the support of PSOE and IU-BA-LV.\n\nDeaths, resignations and suspensions \nThe 7th General Junta has seen the following deaths, resignations and suspensions:\n\n 26 November 2008 - Manuel Aurelio Martín (IU/IX) and Noemí Martín (IU/IX) resigned after being appointed Minister of Rural Affairs and Fisheries and Minister of Social Welfare and Housing in the Asturian Government. Diana Camafeita (IU/IX) and Emilia Vázquez (IU/IX) replaced them respectively on 11 December 2008.\n 22 December 2009 - Francisco Javier García (IU/IX) resigned due to political disagreements with his party. Roberto Colunga (BA) replaced him on 4 February 2010.\n 13 July 2010 - Roberto Colunga (BA) left the United Left-Bloc of Asturias-The Greens group due to political disagreements with United Left, the biggest member of the coalition. He officially joined the Mixed group on 1 August 2010.\n 3 January 2011 - Pelayo Roces (PP) resigned in order to support former deputy prime minister of Spain, Francisco Álvarez-Cascos, who left the party after he wasn't picked as nominee for President of Asturias ahead of the 2007 Asturian regional election. José Manuel Felgueres replaced him on 10 February 2011.\n 31 January 2011 - Emilio Rodríguez (PP) resigned in order to join Asturias Forum (FAC), a split from the People's Party led by former deputy prime minister of Spain, Francisco Álvarez-Cascos. Pablo Álvarez (PP) replaced him on 17 February 2011.\n 3 February 2011 - Cristina Coto (PP) resigned in order to join Asturias Forum (FAC). María Isabel Pérez (PP) replaced her on 24 February 2011.\n 8 February 2011 - Marcial González (PP) resigned in order to join Asturias Forum (FAC). Rebeca Heli Álvarez (PP) replaced him on 10 March 2011.\n 17 February 2011 - Luis Servando Peláez (PP) resigned in order to join Asturias Forum (FAC). Álvaro Álvarez (PP) replaced him on 10 March 2011.\n\nMembers\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n\n Official website of the General Junta\n All members of the General Junta\n\nGeneral Junta of the Principality of Asturias\n2007 establishments in Spain", "Shemp may refer to:\n Fake Shemp, someone who appears in a film as a replacement for another actor or person\n Shemp Howard (1895-1955), American actor, source of the above term after actors replaced him in films after his death" ]
[ "Wishbone Ash", "Line-up instability (1981-1986)", "who did the lineup instability start with?", "Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton,", "where was John Wetton from?", "John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and UK.", "did they release any songs sung by John?", "featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song,", "was the song on an album or was it a solo song?", "Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song,", "how did he react to the just one song idea?", "Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and rejoined Asia.", "who replaced him?", "Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder." ]	C_fe1460a2b98e490eb5c14e10722b3dc5_1	did anybody else leave?	7	Did anybody else leave Wishbone Ash aside from Wetton?	Wishbone Ash	Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and UK. Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song, although during album sessions he had offered songs such as "Here Comes the Feeling" that would eventually sell millions when released on Asia's 1982 debut album. Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and rejoined Asia. Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder. Also joining the band was female backing vocalist, Claire Hamill, who had sung on both the Just Testing and Number the Brave albums. In 1982, after Hamill's departure, the band experimented with heavy metal on the Twin Barrels Burning album. It became the highest charting Wishbone Ash album in years (UK #22). Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983, to be replaced by bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze). The group continued with a heavy metal side on 1985's Raw to the Bone, which became the first Wishbone Ash album not to make the charts. Not long after, Wisefield left after serving as guitarist in the band for eleven years, going on to a varied career that would include work with Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Roger Chapman, Jeff Wayne and the Queen musical We Will Rock You. He was replaced by Jamie Crompton, who in turn was succeeded briefly by Phil Palmer. Early in 1986, Mervyn Spence quit as well, to be replaced by ex-Kinks bassist Andy Pyle. CANNOTANSWER	Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983,	Wishbone Ash are a British rock band who achieved success in the early and mid-1970s. Their popular albums included Wishbone Ash (1970), Pilgrimage (1971), Argus (1972), Wishbone Four (1973), There's the Rub (1974), and New England (1976). Wishbone Ash are noted for their extensive use of harmony twin lead guitars, which had been attracting electric blues bands since Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page had played together in the Yardbirds in 1966. Their contributions helped Andy Powell and Ted Turner to be voted "Two of the Ten Most Important Guitarists in Rock History" (Traffic magazine 1989), and to appear in the "Top 20 Guitarists of All Time" (Rolling Stone). Melody Maker (1972) described Powell and Turner as "the most interesting two guitar team since the days when Beck and Page graced The Yardbirds". Several notable bands have cited Wishbone Ash as an influence, including Iron Maiden, Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Thin Lizzy, Metallica, Dream Theater, Overkill and Opeth. Formed in Torquay, Devon, in 1969, out of the ashes of trio The Empty Vessels (originally known as The Torinoes, later briefly being renamed Tanglewood in 1969), which had been formed by Wishbone Ash's founding member Martin Turner (bass & vocals) in 1963 and complemented by Steve Upton (drums and percussion) in 1966. The original Wishbone Ash line-up was completed by guitarists/vocalists Andy Powell and Ted Turner. In 1974, Ted Turner left the band, and was replaced by Laurie Wisefield. The band continued on with strong critical and commercial success until 1980. There followed line-ups featuring former bass players from King Crimson (John Wetton), Uriah Heep (Trevor Bolder), and Trapeze (Mervyn Spence), Wisefield left in 1985. In 1987, however, the original line-up reunited for several albums – Nouveau Calls, Here to Hear and Strange Affair – until 1990, when Upton quit the band. After Martin Turner was replaced in 1991, the band recorded The Ash Live in Chicago, before Ted Turner left in 1993. This left Andy Powell as the sole remaining original founding member of Wishbone Ash to continue the band on into the future. History Formation and rise to fame (1969–1980) Wishbone Ash were formed in October 1969 by bass guitarist Martin Turner and drummer Steve Upton. When Tanglewood's original guitarist, Martin's brother Glenn Turner left the trio and returned to his native Devon, their manager, Miles Copeland III advertised for a guitar player and also for a keyboard player. After an extensive search for a guitarist, the band could not decide between the final two candidates, Andy Powell and Ted Turner (no relation to Martin). It was suggested that they try both guitar players "just to see what it sounds like". Differing from the twin lead sound of Southern rock pioneer The Allman Brothers Band, Wishbone Ash included strong elements of progressive rock, and also of folk and classical music. After the band members wrote several suggested band names on two sheets of paper, Martin Turner picked one word from each list – 'Wishbone' and 'Ash'. In early 1970, the band secured an opening spot for Deep Purple. Its guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore, later recommended Wishbone Ash to producer Derek Lawrence, as well as helping them secure a record deal with Decca/MCA Records. The band's debut album, Wishbone Ash, was released in December 1970. One year later, the group released Pilgrimage. The band peaked commercially in 1972 with Argus, their highest placed entry in the UK Albums Chart (#3). The album was voted by the readers of Sounds as the "best rock album of the year", also "Top British Album" (Melody Maker). The band were getting international acclaim for their live performances as they gained popularity around the world. The band had now begun to play major arenas as headliners. Wishbone Four (1973) was the band's first record without producer Derek Lawrence, as the band decided to produce the album themselves. In December 1973, the band released a double live album, Live Dates. There was an album released called Wishbone Ash Live in Memphis, which was a promo to FM radio stations but never sold in stores. Not long after, guitarist Ted Turner left the band. After replacing Turner with guitarist Laurie Wisefield (ex-Home), the band relocated to the US and recorded There's the Rub (1974). Locked In (1976), produced by Tom Dowd, saw the band moving towards US soft-rock territory and the group began touring with a keyboard player. 1976's New England returned to the traditional Wishbone Ash style. Front Page News (1977) was the band's last album of this period that was recorded in the US. In 1978, after years of experimental albums, the band decided to return to its roots with No Smoke Without Fire, the first to be produced by Derek Lawrence since Argus in 1972. The album contained mainly songs written by Laurie Wisefield and Martin Turner. The band spent six months making the next album, Just Testing which was released in February 1980. Pressured by MCA to make more commercial music, Andy Powell, Laurie Wisefield and Steve Upton expressed to bassist/vocalist Martin Turner that they planned to recruit a lead singer / frontman, thus restricting Martin Turner's duties to bass guitar only. Turner felt unable to support such plans and described the position he was being put in as "untenable". Following a band meeting at his house, Martin Turner parted company with the band. Ironically, the band never recruited the proposed frontman and Turner, in his 2012 autobiography, described the situation as "constructive dismissal". However this was not a view held by the rest of the remaining band members or the then management. Line-up changes (1981–1986) Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and U.K. Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song, although during album sessions he had offered songs such as "Here Comes the Feeling" that would eventually sell millions when released on Asia's 1982 debut album. Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and instead co-founded Asia. Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder. Also joining the band was female backing vocalist, Claire Hamill, who had sung on both the Just Testing and Number the Brave albums. In 1982, after Hamill's departure, the band experimented with heavy metal on the Twin Barrels Burning album. It became the highest charting Wishbone Ash album in years (UK #22). Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983, to be replaced by bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze). The group continued with a rock side on 1985's Raw to the Bone, which became the first Wishbone Ash album not to make the charts. Not long after, Wisefield left after serving as guitarist in the band for eleven years, going on to a varied career that would include work with Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Roger Chapman, Jeff Wayne and the Queen musical We Will Rock You. He was replaced by Jamie Crompton, who in turn was succeeded briefly by Phil Palmer. Early in 1986, Mervyn Spence quit as well, to be replaced by ex-Kinks bassist Andy Pyle. Reunions and departures (1987–1994) In 1987, I.R.S. Records founder and original Wishbone manager Miles Copeland III began a series of albums entitled No Speak, which featured all instrumental music. To launch the label successfully, Copeland needed a big name band that would bring publicity to the project. Copeland approached the four founding members of Wishbone Ash about having the original line-up record an all-instrumental album. For the first time in fourteen years, Andy Powell and Steve Upton joined forces with Martin Turner and Ted Turner to record the album Nouveau Calls, released in February 1988. The original line-up's tour of 1988 was a huge success, as the band played large venues for the first time since the late 1970s. In August 1989, the band released a reunion album with vocals entitled Here to Hear, featuring mainly songs written by Ted and Martin Turner. In 1990 the band went back into the studio to record the follow-up to Here to Hear. The band were shocked when founding member Upton, the band's drummer for their entire career, announced his retirement from the music industry. They enlisted drummer Robbie France, but replaced him with Ray Weston when it was determined that personal conflicts between France and Martin Turner could not be resolved. Strange Affair was released in May 1991, featuring mainly songs written by Andy Powell and Ted Turner. Later in 1991, the band decided to continue without founding member Martin Turner, with the bassist/vocalist being replaced by returnee Andy Pyle, who had been in the band years earlier. The band toured throughout 1992/93, releasing the live album The Ash Live in Chicago. 1994 saw the second and final departure of Ted Turner. Following Turner's departure, Pyle and Weston also left the band. Reunion years to present (1995–present) At this stage Andy Powell was the only original member left in Wishbone Ash. Powell enlisted guitarist/songwriter Roger Filgate, bassist/vocalist Tony Kishman, and drummer Mike Sturgis. The new line-up debuted on a short UK/European tour in spring 1995. By the time of the band's 25th anniversary tour in late 1995, Tony Kishman was finding touring difficult due to other performing engagements in the United States. Founding member Martin Turner replaced him on bass and vocals for the duration of the tour, before Kishman returned to record lead vocals for the band's next album. Illuminations was released in 1996 and featured the Powell, Filgate, Kishman, Sturgis line-up. Powell relied on fan donations and outside assistance to help finance the album. In 1997, Filgate, Kishman, and Sturgis departed, so Powell brought former drummer Weston back into the fold, along with new members guitarist Mark Birch and bassist Bob Skeat. Wishbone Ash then went on to release two electronic dance albums on UK indie label Invisible Hands Music. The albums contained electronic beats blended with Wishbone Ash guitar riffs. Trance Visionary was the first of the pair, spawning a 12" single of four mixes that was a clubland smash and reached number 38 on the UK dance chart. Psychic Terrorism followed. The band then released an acoustic album of classic and new songs entitled Bare Bones before hitting the road in 2000 to celebrate their 30th anniversary. A filmed show was held at Shepherd's Bush Empire in London, where the band welcomed special guests Wisefield and Hamill as well as other friends for a star-studded concert that resulted in Live Dates 3 and a live DVD. In 2001, Mark Birch was replaced by Finnish guitarist Ben Granfelt. The band hit the road for their most extensive touring schedule in years. Wishbone Ash returned to the studio in 2002 for the Bona Fide album. 2003 saw the band touring across the world with Savoy Brown, playing their largest number of American dates since the 1980s. Ben Granfelt left the band in 2004 to continue working on his solo career. Granfelt's mentor, Muddy Manninen joined the band. In late 2006, the band released a new studio album entitled Clan Destiny. In 2007, longtime drummer Ray Weston left the band, stating that he was tired of constant touring and wanted to concentrate on different things. He was replaced by Joe Crabtree, known for his work with Pendragon and King Crimson violinist David Cross. In late 2007, the band released Power of Eternity; their first with new member Joe Crabtree. On 25 November 2011 Wishbone Ash released their 23rd album, the well received Elegant Stealth, which is also the first album to be recorded by the same line up as the predecessor since 1989. In 2013 a court case relating to a trade mark infringement and the use of the name 'Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash' was decided. The court ruled in favour of Andy Powell with the comprehensive judgement forming a clear history of the band since its inception. On 19 February 2014 the 24th studio album Blue Horizon was released. The reviews for this album were generally very positive indeed. As of 2014 this line-up of the band, having been together since 2007, became the longest-lasting line-up of Wishbone Ash in the group's history. On 16 May 2015, Wishbone Ash recorded a live to vinyl album at Metropolis Studios. On 21–23 May 2015, Wishbone Ash recorded the DVD Live in Paris at in France. The performance included additional percussion and guitar contributions from Andy's son Aynsley Powell. In May 2017, it was announced that Mark Abrahams, a long time Wishbone Ash fan, would be joining on guitar duties. Abrahams is a guitarist who previously owned Vision Guitars, a guitar shop in Castleford, West Yorkshire, England. On 24 September 2019 it was announced that Wishbone Ash were signed to Steamhammer/SPV and will release Coat of Arms, their first studio album in six years, on 28 February 2020. The album's lead single, "We Stand as One", was premiered on to the band's 50th anniversary in autumn 2019 and was released on 10 January 2020. The second single "Back in the Day" was released on 7 February 2020. The album cover has been created by a heraldry artist Olaf Keller in the Regal Coat of Arms design studio. For some dates on their 2021 tour, drummer Mike Sturgis rejoined the band in place of Joe Crabtree. In February 2022 Mike Truscott became Wishbone Ash's official drummer. Martin Turner - (Ex Wishbone Ash) Martin Turner began touring in 2004 with "Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash", performing material by the classic line ups of the band. Occasionally Ted Turner and Laurie Wisefield have joined his group on stage as guests. He published his autobiography in 2012. In 2013 Andy Powell took legal action to protect the Wishbone Ash registered trademark and prevent Martin Turner from using his chosen group name. The court ruled in favour of Andy Powell and Martin Turner's application to appeal was refused. Since then he has toured and recorded with his band as "Martin Turner - (Ex Wishbone Ash)". Special events Wishbone Ash have developed two group gatherings, AshCon in the UK and AshFest in the United States. These began in 1994 and have developed into gatherings of the 'faithful' and have since become annual fixtures. Personnel Current members Andy Powell – guitar, vocals (1969–present) Bob Skeat – bass, backing vocals (1997–present) Mark Abrahams – guitar (2017–present) Mike Truscott – drums, percussion (2022 - present) Former members Steve Upton – drums, percussion (1969–1990) Ted Turner – guitar, vocals, banjo (1969–1974; 1987–1994) Martin Turner – bass, vocals, keyboards (1969–1980; 1987–1991; 1995–1996) Laurie Wisefield – guitar, vocals, banjo (1974–1985) Joe Crabtree – drums, percussion (2007–2022) Discography Wishbone Ash (1970) Pilgrimage (1971) Argus (1972) Wishbone Four (1973) There's the Rub (1974) Locked In (1976) New England (1976) Front Page News (1977) No Smoke Without Fire (1978) Just Testing (1980) Number the Brave (1981) Twin Barrels Burning (1982) Raw to the Bone (1985) Nouveau Calls (1987) Here to Hear (1989) Strange Affair (1991) Illuminations (1996) Trance Visionary (1997) (electronic re-recordings) Psychic Terrorism (1998) (electronic re-recordings) Bare Bones (1999) (acoustic re-recordings) Bona Fide (2002) Clan Destiny (2006) Power of Eternity (2007) Elegant Stealth (2011) Blue Horizon (2014) Coat of Arms (2020) References External links English progressive rock groups Musical groups established in 1969 Musical quartets English rock music groups I.R.S. Records artists Decca Records artists 1969 establishments in England	true	[ "\"I Don't Know Anybody Else\" is a song by the Italian music group Black Box. It was the second single from their debut album Dreamland (1990), and was originally released in the United States in December 1989. It was released worldwide in the early months of 1990 and had a great success in record charts, including Ireland, Switzerland, Norway and the United Kingdom, where it reached the Top 5. In other countries, it peaked between number 5 and number 10. It entered the UK Singles Chart on February 17, 1990 and remained for eight weeks.\n\nThe song features an uncredited Martha Wash on lead vocals. The title is a misheard lyric lifted from \"Love Sensation\" by Loleatta Holloway, the original line being \"I love nobody else\", using the same melody line as the chorus of \"I Don't Know Anybody Else\".\n\nCritical reception\nBillboard stated that the \"groove remains in trendy Italo-house vein with diva-styled vocals fueling the fire of tune's brain-imbedding hook.\" A reviewer from Cash Box wrote that \"the group who surprised everyone by breaking out of clubs and onto the pop charts clocks in with its second single, driven by the same intense vocals and formidable House groove that skyrocketed its U.S. debut single, \"Everybody, Everybody\".\" The Daily Vault's Michael R. Smith described it as \"effective and timeless\" in his review of Dreamland, and added that it now \"sound fresher and fuller of life than ever.\" Gene Sandbloom from The Network Forty wrote that the song \"has every bit the house power, but this time lead vocalist Katrin Quinol kicks off with an Annie Lennox intro that leaves you almost exhausted after four minutes.\" Chris Heath from Smash Hits noted that it is \"exceedingly similar\" to \"Ride on Time\" and said it is \"slightly brilliant\".\n\nVibe magazine listed the song at number 11 in their list of Before EDM: 30 Dance Tracks from The '90s That Changed the Game in 2013. They wrote that the song \"helped propel Italian house group Black Box into international fame thanks to the track’s strong vocals (exhibited by Martha Wash) fused with beats laid down by club DJ Daniele Davoli and keyboard wiz Mirko Limoni\".\n\nChart performance\n\"I Don't Know Anybody Else\" was successful on the charts on several continents. In Europe, it managed to climb into the Top 10 in Austria, Finland (number two), France, Ireland (number two), Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, as well as on the Eurochart Hot 100, where it hit number five. In the UK, the single peaked at number four in its second week at the UK Singles Chart, on February 18, 1990. Additionally, it was a Top 20 hit in West Germany and a Top 30 hit in the Netherlands. Outside Europe, it peaked at number-one on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play in the United States and was a Top 10 hit in Australia, where it peaked at number six and was awarded a gold record after 35,000 singles were sold there. In New Zealand, it went to number 25.\n\nMusic video\nA music video was made for \"I Don't Know Anybody Else\", directed by Judith Briant. It features the group performing the song in a club. Briant also directed the video for \"Ride on Time\" (with Greg Copeland). \"I Don't Know Anybody Else\" was later published on Black Box' official YouTube channel in June 2009. The video has amassed more than 7,1 million views as of September 2021.\n\nTrack listings\n\n CD maxi\n \"I Don't Know Anybody Else\" (we got salsoul mix) — 5:40\n \"I Don't Know Anybody Else\" (DJ Lelewel mix) — 6:47\n \"I Don't Know Anybody Else\" (a cappella) — 3:40\n \"I Don't Know Anybody Else\" (hurley's house mix) — 7:00\n \"I Don't Know Anybody Else\" (hurley's house dub) — 5:08\n \"I Don't Know Anybody Else\" (deephouse instrumental) — 4:30\n\n 12\" maxi\n \"I Don't Know Anybody Else\" (melody mix) — 6:36\n \"I Don't Know Anybody Else\" (house club) — 6:15\n\n 7\" single\n \"I Don't Know Anybody Else\" (melody mix) — 4:30\n \"I Don't Know Anybody Else\" (house club) — 4:00\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nCertifications and sales\n\nSee also\n List of number-one dance singles of 1991 (U.S.)\n\nReferences\n\n1990 singles\nBlack Box (band) songs\nMartha Wash songs\n1989 songs\nPolydor Records singles", "Good Weird Feeling is the third studio album by Canadian rock band Odds. The album spawned the hit singles \"Truth Untold\", \"Eat My Brain\", \"Satisfied\", \"Mercy To Go\" and \" I Would Be Your Man\". Music journalist Larry LeBlanc included the album in his list of Top 10 records of 1995, ranking it #5. It was nominated for \"Best Rock Album\" at the 1996 Juno Awards. It is the band's most commercially successful album, being certified Platinum in Canada.\n\nTrack listing\n\n \"Truth Untold\" (3:54)\n \"Smokescreen (Come and Get Me)\" (3:46)\n \"Radios of Heaven\" (4:08)\n \"I Would Be Your Man\" (3:26)\n \"Satisfied\" (3:00)\n \"Break the Bed\" (5:13)\n \"Oh Sorrow, Oh Shame\" (4:29)\n \"Eat My Brain\" (4:25)\n \"The Last Drink\" (3:09)\n \"Anybody Else But Me\" (3:50)\n \"Mercy to Go\" (5:17)\n \"Leave It There\" (6:25)\n \"We'll Talk\" (4:16)\n\nReferences\n\n1995 albums\nOdds (band) albums\nElektra Records albums" ]
[ "Wishbone Ash", "Line-up instability (1981-1986)", "who did the lineup instability start with?", "Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton,", "where was John Wetton from?", "John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and UK.", "did they release any songs sung by John?", "featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song,", "was the song on an album or was it a solo song?", "Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song,", "how did he react to the just one song idea?", "Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and rejoined Asia.", "who replaced him?", "Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder.", "did anybody else leave?", "Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983," ]	C_fe1460a2b98e490eb5c14e10722b3dc5_1	who replaced Bolder?	8	who replaced Bolder in Wishbown Ash?	Wishbone Ash	Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and UK. Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song, although during album sessions he had offered songs such as "Here Comes the Feeling" that would eventually sell millions when released on Asia's 1982 debut album. Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and rejoined Asia. Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder. Also joining the band was female backing vocalist, Claire Hamill, who had sung on both the Just Testing and Number the Brave albums. In 1982, after Hamill's departure, the band experimented with heavy metal on the Twin Barrels Burning album. It became the highest charting Wishbone Ash album in years (UK #22). Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983, to be replaced by bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze). The group continued with a heavy metal side on 1985's Raw to the Bone, which became the first Wishbone Ash album not to make the charts. Not long after, Wisefield left after serving as guitarist in the band for eleven years, going on to a varied career that would include work with Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Roger Chapman, Jeff Wayne and the Queen musical We Will Rock You. He was replaced by Jamie Crompton, who in turn was succeeded briefly by Phil Palmer. Early in 1986, Mervyn Spence quit as well, to be replaced by ex-Kinks bassist Andy Pyle. CANNOTANSWER	bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze).	Wishbone Ash are a British rock band who achieved success in the early and mid-1970s. Their popular albums included Wishbone Ash (1970), Pilgrimage (1971), Argus (1972), Wishbone Four (1973), There's the Rub (1974), and New England (1976). Wishbone Ash are noted for their extensive use of harmony twin lead guitars, which had been attracting electric blues bands since Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page had played together in the Yardbirds in 1966. Their contributions helped Andy Powell and Ted Turner to be voted "Two of the Ten Most Important Guitarists in Rock History" (Traffic magazine 1989), and to appear in the "Top 20 Guitarists of All Time" (Rolling Stone). Melody Maker (1972) described Powell and Turner as "the most interesting two guitar team since the days when Beck and Page graced The Yardbirds". Several notable bands have cited Wishbone Ash as an influence, including Iron Maiden, Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Thin Lizzy, Metallica, Dream Theater, Overkill and Opeth. Formed in Torquay, Devon, in 1969, out of the ashes of trio The Empty Vessels (originally known as The Torinoes, later briefly being renamed Tanglewood in 1969), which had been formed by Wishbone Ash's founding member Martin Turner (bass & vocals) in 1963 and complemented by Steve Upton (drums and percussion) in 1966. The original Wishbone Ash line-up was completed by guitarists/vocalists Andy Powell and Ted Turner. In 1974, Ted Turner left the band, and was replaced by Laurie Wisefield. The band continued on with strong critical and commercial success until 1980. There followed line-ups featuring former bass players from King Crimson (John Wetton), Uriah Heep (Trevor Bolder), and Trapeze (Mervyn Spence), Wisefield left in 1985. In 1987, however, the original line-up reunited for several albums – Nouveau Calls, Here to Hear and Strange Affair – until 1990, when Upton quit the band. After Martin Turner was replaced in 1991, the band recorded The Ash Live in Chicago, before Ted Turner left in 1993. This left Andy Powell as the sole remaining original founding member of Wishbone Ash to continue the band on into the future. History Formation and rise to fame (1969–1980) Wishbone Ash were formed in October 1969 by bass guitarist Martin Turner and drummer Steve Upton. When Tanglewood's original guitarist, Martin's brother Glenn Turner left the trio and returned to his native Devon, their manager, Miles Copeland III advertised for a guitar player and also for a keyboard player. After an extensive search for a guitarist, the band could not decide between the final two candidates, Andy Powell and Ted Turner (no relation to Martin). It was suggested that they try both guitar players "just to see what it sounds like". Differing from the twin lead sound of Southern rock pioneer The Allman Brothers Band, Wishbone Ash included strong elements of progressive rock, and also of folk and classical music. After the band members wrote several suggested band names on two sheets of paper, Martin Turner picked one word from each list – 'Wishbone' and 'Ash'. In early 1970, the band secured an opening spot for Deep Purple. Its guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore, later recommended Wishbone Ash to producer Derek Lawrence, as well as helping them secure a record deal with Decca/MCA Records. The band's debut album, Wishbone Ash, was released in December 1970. One year later, the group released Pilgrimage. The band peaked commercially in 1972 with Argus, their highest placed entry in the UK Albums Chart (#3). The album was voted by the readers of Sounds as the "best rock album of the year", also "Top British Album" (Melody Maker). The band were getting international acclaim for their live performances as they gained popularity around the world. The band had now begun to play major arenas as headliners. Wishbone Four (1973) was the band's first record without producer Derek Lawrence, as the band decided to produce the album themselves. In December 1973, the band released a double live album, Live Dates. There was an album released called Wishbone Ash Live in Memphis, which was a promo to FM radio stations but never sold in stores. Not long after, guitarist Ted Turner left the band. After replacing Turner with guitarist Laurie Wisefield (ex-Home), the band relocated to the US and recorded There's the Rub (1974). Locked In (1976), produced by Tom Dowd, saw the band moving towards US soft-rock territory and the group began touring with a keyboard player. 1976's New England returned to the traditional Wishbone Ash style. Front Page News (1977) was the band's last album of this period that was recorded in the US. In 1978, after years of experimental albums, the band decided to return to its roots with No Smoke Without Fire, the first to be produced by Derek Lawrence since Argus in 1972. The album contained mainly songs written by Laurie Wisefield and Martin Turner. The band spent six months making the next album, Just Testing which was released in February 1980. Pressured by MCA to make more commercial music, Andy Powell, Laurie Wisefield and Steve Upton expressed to bassist/vocalist Martin Turner that they planned to recruit a lead singer / frontman, thus restricting Martin Turner's duties to bass guitar only. Turner felt unable to support such plans and described the position he was being put in as "untenable". Following a band meeting at his house, Martin Turner parted company with the band. Ironically, the band never recruited the proposed frontman and Turner, in his 2012 autobiography, described the situation as "constructive dismissal". However this was not a view held by the rest of the remaining band members or the then management. Line-up changes (1981–1986) Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and U.K. Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song, although during album sessions he had offered songs such as "Here Comes the Feeling" that would eventually sell millions when released on Asia's 1982 debut album. Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and instead co-founded Asia. Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder. Also joining the band was female backing vocalist, Claire Hamill, who had sung on both the Just Testing and Number the Brave albums. In 1982, after Hamill's departure, the band experimented with heavy metal on the Twin Barrels Burning album. It became the highest charting Wishbone Ash album in years (UK #22). Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983, to be replaced by bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze). The group continued with a rock side on 1985's Raw to the Bone, which became the first Wishbone Ash album not to make the charts. Not long after, Wisefield left after serving as guitarist in the band for eleven years, going on to a varied career that would include work with Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Roger Chapman, Jeff Wayne and the Queen musical We Will Rock You. He was replaced by Jamie Crompton, who in turn was succeeded briefly by Phil Palmer. Early in 1986, Mervyn Spence quit as well, to be replaced by ex-Kinks bassist Andy Pyle. Reunions and departures (1987–1994) In 1987, I.R.S. Records founder and original Wishbone manager Miles Copeland III began a series of albums entitled No Speak, which featured all instrumental music. To launch the label successfully, Copeland needed a big name band that would bring publicity to the project. Copeland approached the four founding members of Wishbone Ash about having the original line-up record an all-instrumental album. For the first time in fourteen years, Andy Powell and Steve Upton joined forces with Martin Turner and Ted Turner to record the album Nouveau Calls, released in February 1988. The original line-up's tour of 1988 was a huge success, as the band played large venues for the first time since the late 1970s. In August 1989, the band released a reunion album with vocals entitled Here to Hear, featuring mainly songs written by Ted and Martin Turner. In 1990 the band went back into the studio to record the follow-up to Here to Hear. The band were shocked when founding member Upton, the band's drummer for their entire career, announced his retirement from the music industry. They enlisted drummer Robbie France, but replaced him with Ray Weston when it was determined that personal conflicts between France and Martin Turner could not be resolved. Strange Affair was released in May 1991, featuring mainly songs written by Andy Powell and Ted Turner. Later in 1991, the band decided to continue without founding member Martin Turner, with the bassist/vocalist being replaced by returnee Andy Pyle, who had been in the band years earlier. The band toured throughout 1992/93, releasing the live album The Ash Live in Chicago. 1994 saw the second and final departure of Ted Turner. Following Turner's departure, Pyle and Weston also left the band. Reunion years to present (1995–present) At this stage Andy Powell was the only original member left in Wishbone Ash. Powell enlisted guitarist/songwriter Roger Filgate, bassist/vocalist Tony Kishman, and drummer Mike Sturgis. The new line-up debuted on a short UK/European tour in spring 1995. By the time of the band's 25th anniversary tour in late 1995, Tony Kishman was finding touring difficult due to other performing engagements in the United States. Founding member Martin Turner replaced him on bass and vocals for the duration of the tour, before Kishman returned to record lead vocals for the band's next album. Illuminations was released in 1996 and featured the Powell, Filgate, Kishman, Sturgis line-up. Powell relied on fan donations and outside assistance to help finance the album. In 1997, Filgate, Kishman, and Sturgis departed, so Powell brought former drummer Weston back into the fold, along with new members guitarist Mark Birch and bassist Bob Skeat. Wishbone Ash then went on to release two electronic dance albums on UK indie label Invisible Hands Music. The albums contained electronic beats blended with Wishbone Ash guitar riffs. Trance Visionary was the first of the pair, spawning a 12" single of four mixes that was a clubland smash and reached number 38 on the UK dance chart. Psychic Terrorism followed. The band then released an acoustic album of classic and new songs entitled Bare Bones before hitting the road in 2000 to celebrate their 30th anniversary. A filmed show was held at Shepherd's Bush Empire in London, where the band welcomed special guests Wisefield and Hamill as well as other friends for a star-studded concert that resulted in Live Dates 3 and a live DVD. In 2001, Mark Birch was replaced by Finnish guitarist Ben Granfelt. The band hit the road for their most extensive touring schedule in years. Wishbone Ash returned to the studio in 2002 for the Bona Fide album. 2003 saw the band touring across the world with Savoy Brown, playing their largest number of American dates since the 1980s. Ben Granfelt left the band in 2004 to continue working on his solo career. Granfelt's mentor, Muddy Manninen joined the band. In late 2006, the band released a new studio album entitled Clan Destiny. In 2007, longtime drummer Ray Weston left the band, stating that he was tired of constant touring and wanted to concentrate on different things. He was replaced by Joe Crabtree, known for his work with Pendragon and King Crimson violinist David Cross. In late 2007, the band released Power of Eternity; their first with new member Joe Crabtree. On 25 November 2011 Wishbone Ash released their 23rd album, the well received Elegant Stealth, which is also the first album to be recorded by the same line up as the predecessor since 1989. In 2013 a court case relating to a trade mark infringement and the use of the name 'Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash' was decided. The court ruled in favour of Andy Powell with the comprehensive judgement forming a clear history of the band since its inception. On 19 February 2014 the 24th studio album Blue Horizon was released. The reviews for this album were generally very positive indeed. As of 2014 this line-up of the band, having been together since 2007, became the longest-lasting line-up of Wishbone Ash in the group's history. On 16 May 2015, Wishbone Ash recorded a live to vinyl album at Metropolis Studios. On 21–23 May 2015, Wishbone Ash recorded the DVD Live in Paris at in France. The performance included additional percussion and guitar contributions from Andy's son Aynsley Powell. In May 2017, it was announced that Mark Abrahams, a long time Wishbone Ash fan, would be joining on guitar duties. Abrahams is a guitarist who previously owned Vision Guitars, a guitar shop in Castleford, West Yorkshire, England. On 24 September 2019 it was announced that Wishbone Ash were signed to Steamhammer/SPV and will release Coat of Arms, their first studio album in six years, on 28 February 2020. The album's lead single, "We Stand as One", was premiered on to the band's 50th anniversary in autumn 2019 and was released on 10 January 2020. The second single "Back in the Day" was released on 7 February 2020. The album cover has been created by a heraldry artist Olaf Keller in the Regal Coat of Arms design studio. For some dates on their 2021 tour, drummer Mike Sturgis rejoined the band in place of Joe Crabtree. In February 2022 Mike Truscott became Wishbone Ash's official drummer. Martin Turner - (Ex Wishbone Ash) Martin Turner began touring in 2004 with "Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash", performing material by the classic line ups of the band. Occasionally Ted Turner and Laurie Wisefield have joined his group on stage as guests. He published his autobiography in 2012. In 2013 Andy Powell took legal action to protect the Wishbone Ash registered trademark and prevent Martin Turner from using his chosen group name. The court ruled in favour of Andy Powell and Martin Turner's application to appeal was refused. Since then he has toured and recorded with his band as "Martin Turner - (Ex Wishbone Ash)". Special events Wishbone Ash have developed two group gatherings, AshCon in the UK and AshFest in the United States. These began in 1994 and have developed into gatherings of the 'faithful' and have since become annual fixtures. Personnel Current members Andy Powell – guitar, vocals (1969–present) Bob Skeat – bass, backing vocals (1997–present) Mark Abrahams – guitar (2017–present) Mike Truscott – drums, percussion (2022 - present) Former members Steve Upton – drums, percussion (1969–1990) Ted Turner – guitar, vocals, banjo (1969–1974; 1987–1994) Martin Turner – bass, vocals, keyboards (1969–1980; 1987–1991; 1995–1996) Laurie Wisefield – guitar, vocals, banjo (1974–1985) Joe Crabtree – drums, percussion (2007–2022) Discography Wishbone Ash (1970) Pilgrimage (1971) Argus (1972) Wishbone Four (1973) There's the Rub (1974) Locked In (1976) New England (1976) Front Page News (1977) No Smoke Without Fire (1978) Just Testing (1980) Number the Brave (1981) Twin Barrels Burning (1982) Raw to the Bone (1985) Nouveau Calls (1987) Here to Hear (1989) Strange Affair (1991) Illuminations (1996) Trance Visionary (1997) (electronic re-recordings) Psychic Terrorism (1998) (electronic re-recordings) Bare Bones (1999) (acoustic re-recordings) Bona Fide (2002) Clan Destiny (2006) Power of Eternity (2007) Elegant Stealth (2011) Blue Horizon (2014) Coat of Arms (2020) References External links English progressive rock groups Musical groups established in 1969 Musical quartets English rock music groups I.R.S. Records artists Decca Records artists 1969 establishments in England	true	[ "Bolder is an English surname. Notable people with the surname include:\n\nAdam Bolder (born 1980), English footballer\nBob Bolder (born 1958), English footballer\nChris Bolder (born 1982), English footballer\nLinda Bolder (born 1988), Israeli-Dutch Olympic judoka\nRobert Bolder (1859–1937), English film actor\nTrevor Bolder (1950–2013), English rock bass guitarist\n\nSee also \n Bould (surname)\n Boulder (disambiguation)", "Adam Peter Bolder (born 25 October 1980) is an English professional footballer who most recently played as a midfielder for National League North side North Ferriby United.\n\nHe has previously played for Hull City, Derby County, Queens Park Rangers, Sheffield Wednesday, Millwall, Bradford City, Burton Albion, Harrogate Town and Scarborough Athletic.\n\nCareer\n\nHull City\nBolder began his career in Hull City where he signed his first professional contract in August 1998. His first league game for Hull was against Hartlepool United in January 1999 and that was his only league game for the Tigers in the 1998–99 season. After playing 19 league games for Hull in the first part of the 1999–2000 season he left the club.\n\nDerby County\nBolder signed for Derby County in March 2000. His first match for Derby was against Manchester United in May 2001 and his second league game this season came against Ipswich Town two weeks later. The following season, he made 11 league appearances for the Rams before he established himself as a first team player with 45 league games and six league goals in the 2002–03 season. His first league goal came in August 2002 against Grimsby Town. Derby won that game 2–1 and Bolder scored both goals for Derby. Bolder then played in 24 league games and scored one league goal in the 2003–04 season, 36 league games and two league goals in the 2004–05 season and 35 league games and two league goals in the 2005–06 season. After playing 13 league games in the first part of the 2006–07 season for Derby, Bolder went out of the first team in early November 2006 and his final appearance for the club from Derbyshire came in a league game against West Bromwich Albion in December 2006.\n\nQueens Park Rangers\nIn January 2007 Bolder signed a two-and-a-half-year-long contract for Queens Park Rangers, where he was reunited with his former boss, John Gregory. QPR were struggling at the time, and there was a lack of grit and determination within the team. Bolder came in, and added steel to the midfield, with some good tackling performances and an excellent range of passing. Combined with the signings of Danny Cullip and Lee Camp (on loan), Bolder helped QPR to avoid relegation, quite comfortably in the end and was named as club captain. On 27 October 2007, Bolder scored his first goal for Queens Park Rangers in a 1–0 win over Charlton Athletic at The Valley which lifted QPR off the bottom of the table. On 8 February 2008, it was announced that Bolder would be joining fellow Championship side Sheffield Wednesday on a month's loan, which was later extended to the end of the 2007–08 season. On 8 April 2008 Bolder scored his first goals in an Owls shirt, netting twice in the Steel City Derby against Sheffield United in a 2–2 draw.\n\nMillwall\nHe joined Millwall initially on loan on 6 November 2008, before joining them permanently on 29 January 2009, in a deal that will keep him at the club until 2011.\n\nOn 5 March 2010 Bolder joined League Two side Bradford City on a one-month loan deal. During his spell at Bradford he scored once against Morecambe.\n\nBurton Albion\nBolder signed for Football League Two side Burton Albion on 22 July 2010.\n\nBolder was released by the club at the end of the 2011–12 season. He signed for Harrogate Town for the start of the 2012–13 season.\n\nNorth Ferriby United\nFor the start of the 2014–15 season he signed for North Ferriby United.\n\nScarborough Athletic\nHe signed for Scarborough Athletic at the start of the 2016–17 season.\n\nNorth Ferriby United\nOn 26 November 2017 Bolder signed for North Ferriby United with his brother Chris being appointed as manager 2 days later.\n\nPersonal life\nBolder is the older brother of fellow footballer Chris Bolder. The two brothers featured in one same game against each other. A 3–1 win for his brothers Grimsby Town over Derby County on Boxing Day 2002. However they were not on the field at the same time with Adam being replaced by Georgi Kinkladze in the 46th minute, meanwhile Chris came on to replace Iain Ward in the 72nd minute.\n\nCareer statistics\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nAdam Bolder player profile at qpr.co.uk\nRollin, Glenda & Rollin, Jack: Sky Sports Football Yearbook 2006–07 (page 469), Headline Book Publishing, London. \n\n1980 births\nLiving people\nFootballers from Kingston upon Hull\nEnglish footballers\nDerby County F.C. players\nHull City A.F.C. players\nQueens Park Rangers F.C. players\nSheffield Wednesday F.C. players\nMillwall F.C. players\nBurton Albion F.C. players\nPremier League players\nEnglish Football League players\nBradford City A.F.C. players\nHarrogate Town A.F.C. players\nNorth Ferriby United A.F.C. players\nScarborough Athletic F.C. players\nAssociation football midfielders" ]
[ "Wishbone Ash", "Line-up instability (1981-1986)", "who did the lineup instability start with?", "Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton,", "where was John Wetton from?", "John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and UK.", "did they release any songs sung by John?", "featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song,", "was the song on an album or was it a solo song?", "Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song,", "how did he react to the just one song idea?", "Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and rejoined Asia.", "who replaced him?", "Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder.", "did anybody else leave?", "Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983,", "who replaced Bolder?", "bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze)." ]	C_fe1460a2b98e490eb5c14e10722b3dc5_1	did they release an album after bolder left?	9	did Wishbown ASh release an album after bolder left?	Wishbone Ash	Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and UK. Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song, although during album sessions he had offered songs such as "Here Comes the Feeling" that would eventually sell millions when released on Asia's 1982 debut album. Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and rejoined Asia. Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder. Also joining the band was female backing vocalist, Claire Hamill, who had sung on both the Just Testing and Number the Brave albums. In 1982, after Hamill's departure, the band experimented with heavy metal on the Twin Barrels Burning album. It became the highest charting Wishbone Ash album in years (UK #22). Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983, to be replaced by bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze). The group continued with a heavy metal side on 1985's Raw to the Bone, which became the first Wishbone Ash album not to make the charts. Not long after, Wisefield left after serving as guitarist in the band for eleven years, going on to a varied career that would include work with Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Roger Chapman, Jeff Wayne and the Queen musical We Will Rock You. He was replaced by Jamie Crompton, who in turn was succeeded briefly by Phil Palmer. Early in 1986, Mervyn Spence quit as well, to be replaced by ex-Kinks bassist Andy Pyle. CANNOTANSWER	The group continued with a heavy metal side on 1985's Raw to the Bone,	Wishbone Ash are a British rock band who achieved success in the early and mid-1970s. Their popular albums included Wishbone Ash (1970), Pilgrimage (1971), Argus (1972), Wishbone Four (1973), There's the Rub (1974), and New England (1976). Wishbone Ash are noted for their extensive use of harmony twin lead guitars, which had been attracting electric blues bands since Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page had played together in the Yardbirds in 1966. Their contributions helped Andy Powell and Ted Turner to be voted "Two of the Ten Most Important Guitarists in Rock History" (Traffic magazine 1989), and to appear in the "Top 20 Guitarists of All Time" (Rolling Stone). Melody Maker (1972) described Powell and Turner as "the most interesting two guitar team since the days when Beck and Page graced The Yardbirds". Several notable bands have cited Wishbone Ash as an influence, including Iron Maiden, Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Thin Lizzy, Metallica, Dream Theater, Overkill and Opeth. Formed in Torquay, Devon, in 1969, out of the ashes of trio The Empty Vessels (originally known as The Torinoes, later briefly being renamed Tanglewood in 1969), which had been formed by Wishbone Ash's founding member Martin Turner (bass & vocals) in 1963 and complemented by Steve Upton (drums and percussion) in 1966. The original Wishbone Ash line-up was completed by guitarists/vocalists Andy Powell and Ted Turner. In 1974, Ted Turner left the band, and was replaced by Laurie Wisefield. The band continued on with strong critical and commercial success until 1980. There followed line-ups featuring former bass players from King Crimson (John Wetton), Uriah Heep (Trevor Bolder), and Trapeze (Mervyn Spence), Wisefield left in 1985. In 1987, however, the original line-up reunited for several albums – Nouveau Calls, Here to Hear and Strange Affair – until 1990, when Upton quit the band. After Martin Turner was replaced in 1991, the band recorded The Ash Live in Chicago, before Ted Turner left in 1993. This left Andy Powell as the sole remaining original founding member of Wishbone Ash to continue the band on into the future. History Formation and rise to fame (1969–1980) Wishbone Ash were formed in October 1969 by bass guitarist Martin Turner and drummer Steve Upton. When Tanglewood's original guitarist, Martin's brother Glenn Turner left the trio and returned to his native Devon, their manager, Miles Copeland III advertised for a guitar player and also for a keyboard player. After an extensive search for a guitarist, the band could not decide between the final two candidates, Andy Powell and Ted Turner (no relation to Martin). It was suggested that they try both guitar players "just to see what it sounds like". Differing from the twin lead sound of Southern rock pioneer The Allman Brothers Band, Wishbone Ash included strong elements of progressive rock, and also of folk and classical music. After the band members wrote several suggested band names on two sheets of paper, Martin Turner picked one word from each list – 'Wishbone' and 'Ash'. In early 1970, the band secured an opening spot for Deep Purple. Its guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore, later recommended Wishbone Ash to producer Derek Lawrence, as well as helping them secure a record deal with Decca/MCA Records. The band's debut album, Wishbone Ash, was released in December 1970. One year later, the group released Pilgrimage. The band peaked commercially in 1972 with Argus, their highest placed entry in the UK Albums Chart (#3). The album was voted by the readers of Sounds as the "best rock album of the year", also "Top British Album" (Melody Maker). The band were getting international acclaim for their live performances as they gained popularity around the world. The band had now begun to play major arenas as headliners. Wishbone Four (1973) was the band's first record without producer Derek Lawrence, as the band decided to produce the album themselves. In December 1973, the band released a double live album, Live Dates. There was an album released called Wishbone Ash Live in Memphis, which was a promo to FM radio stations but never sold in stores. Not long after, guitarist Ted Turner left the band. After replacing Turner with guitarist Laurie Wisefield (ex-Home), the band relocated to the US and recorded There's the Rub (1974). Locked In (1976), produced by Tom Dowd, saw the band moving towards US soft-rock territory and the group began touring with a keyboard player. 1976's New England returned to the traditional Wishbone Ash style. Front Page News (1977) was the band's last album of this period that was recorded in the US. In 1978, after years of experimental albums, the band decided to return to its roots with No Smoke Without Fire, the first to be produced by Derek Lawrence since Argus in 1972. The album contained mainly songs written by Laurie Wisefield and Martin Turner. The band spent six months making the next album, Just Testing which was released in February 1980. Pressured by MCA to make more commercial music, Andy Powell, Laurie Wisefield and Steve Upton expressed to bassist/vocalist Martin Turner that they planned to recruit a lead singer / frontman, thus restricting Martin Turner's duties to bass guitar only. Turner felt unable to support such plans and described the position he was being put in as "untenable". Following a band meeting at his house, Martin Turner parted company with the band. Ironically, the band never recruited the proposed frontman and Turner, in his 2012 autobiography, described the situation as "constructive dismissal". However this was not a view held by the rest of the remaining band members or the then management. Line-up changes (1981–1986) Turner was replaced by bassist and vocalist John Wetton, formerly of Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, Uriah Heep and U.K. Number the Brave was released in April 1981 and featured Wetton's lead vocals on just one song, although during album sessions he had offered songs such as "Here Comes the Feeling" that would eventually sell millions when released on Asia's 1982 debut album. Wetton did not continue with Wishbone Ash beyond the album sessions and instead co-founded Asia. Wetton was replaced on the Number the Brave tour by the former Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder. Also joining the band was female backing vocalist, Claire Hamill, who had sung on both the Just Testing and Number the Brave albums. In 1982, after Hamill's departure, the band experimented with heavy metal on the Twin Barrels Burning album. It became the highest charting Wishbone Ash album in years (UK #22). Bolder left the group to rejoin Uriah Heep in 1983, to be replaced by bassist/vocalist Mervyn Spence (ex-Trapeze). The group continued with a rock side on 1985's Raw to the Bone, which became the first Wishbone Ash album not to make the charts. Not long after, Wisefield left after serving as guitarist in the band for eleven years, going on to a varied career that would include work with Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Roger Chapman, Jeff Wayne and the Queen musical We Will Rock You. He was replaced by Jamie Crompton, who in turn was succeeded briefly by Phil Palmer. Early in 1986, Mervyn Spence quit as well, to be replaced by ex-Kinks bassist Andy Pyle. Reunions and departures (1987–1994) In 1987, I.R.S. Records founder and original Wishbone manager Miles Copeland III began a series of albums entitled No Speak, which featured all instrumental music. To launch the label successfully, Copeland needed a big name band that would bring publicity to the project. Copeland approached the four founding members of Wishbone Ash about having the original line-up record an all-instrumental album. For the first time in fourteen years, Andy Powell and Steve Upton joined forces with Martin Turner and Ted Turner to record the album Nouveau Calls, released in February 1988. The original line-up's tour of 1988 was a huge success, as the band played large venues for the first time since the late 1970s. In August 1989, the band released a reunion album with vocals entitled Here to Hear, featuring mainly songs written by Ted and Martin Turner. In 1990 the band went back into the studio to record the follow-up to Here to Hear. The band were shocked when founding member Upton, the band's drummer for their entire career, announced his retirement from the music industry. They enlisted drummer Robbie France, but replaced him with Ray Weston when it was determined that personal conflicts between France and Martin Turner could not be resolved. Strange Affair was released in May 1991, featuring mainly songs written by Andy Powell and Ted Turner. Later in 1991, the band decided to continue without founding member Martin Turner, with the bassist/vocalist being replaced by returnee Andy Pyle, who had been in the band years earlier. The band toured throughout 1992/93, releasing the live album The Ash Live in Chicago. 1994 saw the second and final departure of Ted Turner. Following Turner's departure, Pyle and Weston also left the band. Reunion years to present (1995–present) At this stage Andy Powell was the only original member left in Wishbone Ash. Powell enlisted guitarist/songwriter Roger Filgate, bassist/vocalist Tony Kishman, and drummer Mike Sturgis. The new line-up debuted on a short UK/European tour in spring 1995. By the time of the band's 25th anniversary tour in late 1995, Tony Kishman was finding touring difficult due to other performing engagements in the United States. Founding member Martin Turner replaced him on bass and vocals for the duration of the tour, before Kishman returned to record lead vocals for the band's next album. Illuminations was released in 1996 and featured the Powell, Filgate, Kishman, Sturgis line-up. Powell relied on fan donations and outside assistance to help finance the album. In 1997, Filgate, Kishman, and Sturgis departed, so Powell brought former drummer Weston back into the fold, along with new members guitarist Mark Birch and bassist Bob Skeat. Wishbone Ash then went on to release two electronic dance albums on UK indie label Invisible Hands Music. The albums contained electronic beats blended with Wishbone Ash guitar riffs. Trance Visionary was the first of the pair, spawning a 12" single of four mixes that was a clubland smash and reached number 38 on the UK dance chart. Psychic Terrorism followed. The band then released an acoustic album of classic and new songs entitled Bare Bones before hitting the road in 2000 to celebrate their 30th anniversary. A filmed show was held at Shepherd's Bush Empire in London, where the band welcomed special guests Wisefield and Hamill as well as other friends for a star-studded concert that resulted in Live Dates 3 and a live DVD. In 2001, Mark Birch was replaced by Finnish guitarist Ben Granfelt. The band hit the road for their most extensive touring schedule in years. Wishbone Ash returned to the studio in 2002 for the Bona Fide album. 2003 saw the band touring across the world with Savoy Brown, playing their largest number of American dates since the 1980s. Ben Granfelt left the band in 2004 to continue working on his solo career. Granfelt's mentor, Muddy Manninen joined the band. In late 2006, the band released a new studio album entitled Clan Destiny. In 2007, longtime drummer Ray Weston left the band, stating that he was tired of constant touring and wanted to concentrate on different things. He was replaced by Joe Crabtree, known for his work with Pendragon and King Crimson violinist David Cross. In late 2007, the band released Power of Eternity; their first with new member Joe Crabtree. On 25 November 2011 Wishbone Ash released their 23rd album, the well received Elegant Stealth, which is also the first album to be recorded by the same line up as the predecessor since 1989. In 2013 a court case relating to a trade mark infringement and the use of the name 'Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash' was decided. The court ruled in favour of Andy Powell with the comprehensive judgement forming a clear history of the band since its inception. On 19 February 2014 the 24th studio album Blue Horizon was released. The reviews for this album were generally very positive indeed. As of 2014 this line-up of the band, having been together since 2007, became the longest-lasting line-up of Wishbone Ash in the group's history. On 16 May 2015, Wishbone Ash recorded a live to vinyl album at Metropolis Studios. On 21–23 May 2015, Wishbone Ash recorded the DVD Live in Paris at in France. The performance included additional percussion and guitar contributions from Andy's son Aynsley Powell. In May 2017, it was announced that Mark Abrahams, a long time Wishbone Ash fan, would be joining on guitar duties. Abrahams is a guitarist who previously owned Vision Guitars, a guitar shop in Castleford, West Yorkshire, England. On 24 September 2019 it was announced that Wishbone Ash were signed to Steamhammer/SPV and will release Coat of Arms, their first studio album in six years, on 28 February 2020. The album's lead single, "We Stand as One", was premiered on to the band's 50th anniversary in autumn 2019 and was released on 10 January 2020. The second single "Back in the Day" was released on 7 February 2020. The album cover has been created by a heraldry artist Olaf Keller in the Regal Coat of Arms design studio. For some dates on their 2021 tour, drummer Mike Sturgis rejoined the band in place of Joe Crabtree. In February 2022 Mike Truscott became Wishbone Ash's official drummer. Martin Turner - (Ex Wishbone Ash) Martin Turner began touring in 2004 with "Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash", performing material by the classic line ups of the band. Occasionally Ted Turner and Laurie Wisefield have joined his group on stage as guests. He published his autobiography in 2012. In 2013 Andy Powell took legal action to protect the Wishbone Ash registered trademark and prevent Martin Turner from using his chosen group name. The court ruled in favour of Andy Powell and Martin Turner's application to appeal was refused. Since then he has toured and recorded with his band as "Martin Turner - (Ex Wishbone Ash)". Special events Wishbone Ash have developed two group gatherings, AshCon in the UK and AshFest in the United States. These began in 1994 and have developed into gatherings of the 'faithful' and have since become annual fixtures. Personnel Current members Andy Powell – guitar, vocals (1969–present) Bob Skeat – bass, backing vocals (1997–present) Mark Abrahams – guitar (2017–present) Mike Truscott – drums, percussion (2022 - present) Former members Steve Upton – drums, percussion (1969–1990) Ted Turner – guitar, vocals, banjo (1969–1974; 1987–1994) Martin Turner – bass, vocals, keyboards (1969–1980; 1987–1991; 1995–1996) Laurie Wisefield – guitar, vocals, banjo (1974–1985) Joe Crabtree – drums, percussion (2007–2022) Discography Wishbone Ash (1970) Pilgrimage (1971) Argus (1972) Wishbone Four (1973) There's the Rub (1974) Locked In (1976) New England (1976) Front Page News (1977) No Smoke Without Fire (1978) Just Testing (1980) Number the Brave (1981) Twin Barrels Burning (1982) Raw to the Bone (1985) Nouveau Calls (1987) Here to Hear (1989) Strange Affair (1991) Illuminations (1996) Trance Visionary (1997) (electronic re-recordings) Psychic Terrorism (1998) (electronic re-recordings) Bare Bones (1999) (acoustic re-recordings) Bona Fide (2002) Clan Destiny (2006) Power of Eternity (2007) Elegant Stealth (2011) Blue Horizon (2014) Coat of Arms (2020) References External links English progressive rock groups Musical groups established in 1969 Musical quartets English rock music groups I.R.S. Records artists Decca Records artists 1969 establishments in England	false	[ "Christopher James Bolder (born 19 August 1982) is an English former professional footballer and the manager of Northern Counties East League side North Ferriby.\n\nBolder was a midfielder in career that lasted from 2001 until 2017, although he only played professionally in the Football League for Grimsby Town between 2001 and 2004, having initially come through the youth ranks at Hull City. Following his release from Grimsby, Bolder moved into Non-League football and turned out for Ossett Town and Guiseley as well as notably spending seven seasons over two spells with North Ferriby United. He later played for Scarborough Athletic where in his final two seasons he also acted as assistant manager. He returned to North Ferriby as manager but after the club was liquidated he took over as manager of the Ferriby's phoenix club in 2019.\n\nPlaying career\n\nGrimsby Town\nBolder and brother Adam were part of the junior setup at Hull City, and both left the club at a young age to pursue career's in the higher divisions. Chris left Hull in the summer of 2001, to sign a professional contract with Grimsby Town, who at the time were several divisions higher than Hull. He made the move to Blundell Park with fellow City youngster Graham Hockless, and the pair slotted into the club's reserve squad. Bolder failed to make an appearance in his first season with The Mariners, and did not make his debut until nearly 18 months later playing against his brothers team Derby County in a 3–1 victory on Boxing Day 2002. He went on to make a handful of appearances that season but was unable to help Grimsby in there relegation battle, and they dropped down into the Second Division. He was to make only seven showings the following season and was released in May 2004 following another relegation.\n\nNon-league\nBolder first joined Ossett Town following his release from The Mariners. He went on to spend seven seasons in total with North Ferriby United over two spells which were separated with a season at Guiseley in 2008. He later joined Scarborough Athletic.\n\nPersonal life\nBolder is the younger brother of fellow footballer Adam Bolder.\n\nCoaching career\nIn December 2015, Bolder was appointed assistant manager of Scarborough Athletic under Steve Kittrick, still registered as a player. In April 2017, he retired as player after collapsing during a game due to breathing difficulties. He continued at the club in his role as assistant manager. On 28 November 2017, Bolder left his position as assistant manager of Scarborough Athletic to become manager of North Ferriby United. He was sacked in October 2018 after a period with bad results.\n\nIn January 2019, he returned to Scarborough Athletic as assistant manager, once again under Steve Kittrick. The duo was sacked for the second time on 16 March 2019. On 6 May 2019, he was appointed assistant manager of Matlock Town under Kittrick again, but Bolder left after only one week to return to North Ferriby as their new manager for the 2019/20 season.\n\nReferences\n\n1982 births\nLiving people\nFootballers from Kingston upon Hull\nEnglish footballers\nHull City A.F.C. players\nGrimsby Town F.C. players\nOssett Town F.C. players\nNorth Ferriby United A.F.C. players\nGuiseley A.F.C. players\nScarborough Athletic F.C. players\nEnglish Football League players\nNorthern Premier League players\nAssociation football midfielders", "Wishbone Ash are an English hard rock band from Torquay, Devon. Formed in October 1969, the group originally included bassist and lead vocalist Martin Turner, guitarists and vocalists Andy Powell and Ted Turner, and drummer Steve Upton. Their first lineup change came in the spring of 1974, when Ted Turner was replaced by former Home guitarist Laurie Wisefield. Martin Turner had also left by 1980, with John Wetton replacing him for the 1981 album Number the Brave. After Wetton left to form Asia in early 1981, Trevor Bolder joined Wishbone Ash and remained until 1983, when he returned to his previous band Uriah Heep. Bolder was replaced by former Trapeze bassist and vocalist Mervyn Spence. Wisefield was replaced by Jamie Crompton in late 1985, and Andy Pyle replaced Spence in 1986.\n\nIn 1987, Martin and Ted Turner returned as part of an original lineup reformation for former manager Miles Copeland's I.R.S. No Speak instrumental album series, to which they contributed Nouveau Calls at the end of the year. Powell was left as the sole remaining constant member of Wishbone Ash by mid-1990, when Upton left the group and retired from the music business. He was replaced briefly by Robbie France and later in the year by Ray Weston, both of whom featured on the 1991 release Strange Affair. Shortly after the album's release, Martin Turner was fired from the group on 1 October 1991, with Pyle returning to take his place. Ted Turner was the final original member of the band to leave in early 1994, with bassist Pyle and drummer Weston following him in leaving the group shortly after.\n\nPowell rebuilt the band with the addition of guitarist Roger Filgate, bassist Tony Kishman and drummer Mike Sturgis. Martin Turner briefly returned for the group's 25th anniversary tour in 1995 and began working on new material, before leaving for a third and final time. After the release and touring of Illuminations, Filgate, Kishman and Sturgis were replaced by Mark Birch, Bob Skeat and Weston, respectively. Birch remained until 2001, when he was replaced by Finnish guitarist Ben Granfelt. After the studio album Bona Fide and live release Almighty Blues: London & Beyond, Granfelt left in 2004 after playing his final show on 30 October. He was replaced by another Finnish guitarist, Jyrki \"Muddy\" Manninen. Long-term drummer Weston left for a second time in early 2007 due to tiring of touring, with Joe Crabtree taking his place. The band's latest change in personnel came on 9 May 2017, when Mark Abrahams replaced Manninen as their ninth guitarist.\n\nMembers\n\nCurrent\n\nFormer\n\nTimeline\n\nLineups\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nWishbone Ash official website\n\nWishbone Ash" ]
[ "The Outfield", "Subsequent efforts and continued success (1987-1991)" ]	C_ca39bc01bfb047f687650f5d6bc7ec9b_0	what efforts were made?	1	what efforts were made by The Outfield?	The Outfield	1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single "Since You've Been Gone" (not to be confused with the 1970s Rainbow and Head East hit of the same name) and the minor radio/MTV hit "No Surrender", and the album was certified Gold in the US A US summer tour opening for Night Ranger followed. For the group's third album, 1989's Voices of Babylon, a new producer (David Kahne) and sound was evident. The title track was a Top 25 single and "My Paradise" was a mid-sized album-rock hit, but overall the group's popularity continued to decline. After the Babylon LP, Alan Jackman parted ways with the band and was replaced for a concert tour by Paul Read. Spinks and Lewis continued as a duo, switched labels and began recording Diamond Days for MCA. Playing drums on the disc was session drummer Simon Dawson. The LP, released in 1990, produced a Top 30 US hit, "For You". Quick to follow was "One Hot Country", included on the soundtrack for the 1991 action film If Looks Could Kill. The Outfield returned with 1992's Rockeye. Its leadoff single, "Closer to Me", was a near Top 40 hit, and a second release, "Winning It All", gained some notice due to extensive play during NBC's NBA Finals coverage, NBA Superstars series featuring Larry Bird, the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics and the film The Mighty Ducks. Simon Dawson, who played on Rockeye, would eventually become the band's official third member. CANNOTANSWER	1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'.	The Outfield were an English rock band based in London, England. The band achieved success in the mid-1980s and are best remembered for their hit single, "Your Love". The band's lineup consisted of guitarist John Spinks, vocalist and bassist Tony Lewis, and drummer Alan Jackman. They had an unusual experience for a British band in that they enjoyed commercial success in the US, but never in their homeland. The band began recording during the mid-1980s, and released their first album, Play Deep, in 1985 through Columbia Records. The album reached No. 9 on the Billboard 200 list and then reached triple platinum in the United States. The band's single "Your Love" reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 as well as No. 7 on the Mainstream Rock chart, and it became their signature song. The band continued to record and tour through the 1980s and then into the early 1990s. While subsequent albums Bangin' (1987) and Voices of Babylon (1989) saw some chart successes, the group's popularity waned. Drummer Alan Jackman left and, now as a duo, they recorded Diamond Days in 1991. After the disappointing response to their 1992 album Rockeye, which represented a shift towards progressive rock and arena rock, the group essentially disbanded in the 1990s. They resumed touring in 1998, and thereafter released two live albums via their website, along with a new studio album, Any Time Now in 2004, which was later re-released in 2006. In 2011, the band released their final album, Replay, with original drummer Alan Jackman re-joining the band. Spinks died in 2014 after which the group officially disbanded. On 22 March 2018, lead singer/bassist Tony Lewis announced a solo album called Out of the Darkness, which was released on 29 June 2018 through Madison Records. Two of the original members have died: John Spinks in 2014, from cancer; and Tony Lewis in 2020. History Formation and commercial success (1984–1986) Bassist/singer Tony Lewis, guitarist/keyboardist and songwriter John Spinks and drummer Alan Jackman played together in the late 1970s in a straightforward power pop band called Sirius B. After rehearsing for about six months and playing several gigs, their style did not match the punk rock that was surging in popularity in England and they broke up. Several years afterward, the three gathered back together in London's East End under the name The Baseball Boys. They performed in and around England until a demo got them signed to Columbia/CBS Records in 1984. Spinks adopted the name 'Baseball Boys' from a teen gang called "The Baseball Furies" in the cult film The Warriors, a movie that he had just seen. Although he used the name as a joke and "just to be outrageous", record company people responded favourably. The band got a reputation as a very "American-sounding" group and signed in the US after playing for just a few months in England. Their manager, an American living in England, recommended a new band name with a similar attitude since 'Baseball Boys' seemed too "tacky" and "tongue-in-cheek". Spinks has said, "The Outfield was the most left-wing kind of thing we liked." Spinks expressed an interest in the American sport of baseball, while also being a devoted fan of association football. He claimed that the group "didn't know what an outfield was" until they visited the U.S., and that, "We're just learning about baseball. It's an acquired taste and we're trying to acquire a taste for it." He expounded upon this in a Chicago Tribune piece: Play Deep Their debut album, Play Deep produced by William Wittman, was issued in 1985 and was a success. The album reached triple platinum sales status and the Top 10 in the US album charts; it also featured a Top 10 single entry with "Your Love", which peaked at No. 6. It went on to be featured in a number of 80s-themed compilation albums, and over 1,000 covers and remixes by other artists have been released physically and/or online. The band toured extensively, opening for Journey and Starship. Spinks made a point of mentioning in interviews that the band was "totally into not smoking or doing drugs". Bangin’ 1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single "Since You've Been Gone" (not to be confused with the 1970s Rainbow and Head East hit of the same name), which also hit #11 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart. Furthermore, they had a minor radio/MTV hit "No Surrender". The album sold reasonably well and was certified Gold in the United States. A US summer tour opening for Night Ranger followed. Voices of Babylon For the group's third album, 1989's Voices of Babylon, a new producer (David Kahne) and sound was evident. The title track was a Top 25 single and hit #2 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart . The follow-up song, "My Paradise", was a mid-sized album-rock hit reaching #34 in the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart but overall the group's popularity continued to decline. Diamond Days After the Babylon LP, Alan Jackman parted ways with the band and was replaced for a concert tour by Paul Read. Spinks and Lewis continued as a duo, switched labels and began recording Diamond Days for MCA. Playing drums on the disc was session drummer Simon Dawson. The LP, released in 1990, produced a Top 30 US hit, "For You". Quick to follow was "One Hot Country", included on the soundtrack for the 1991 action film If Looks Could Kill. Later years and aftermath The Outfield returned with 1992's Rockeye. Its leadoff single, "Closer to Me", was a near Top 40 hit, and a second release, "Winning It All", gained some notice due to extensive play during NBC's NBA Finals coverage, NBA Superstars series featuring Larry Bird, the 1992 Summer Olympics, Chicago Bulls championship ring ceremonies and the film The Mighty Ducks. Simon Dawson, who played on Rockeye, would eventually become the band's official third member. The band took an extended hiatus during the mid-1990s as changing musical fashions, especially the popularity of edgier bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam, made life difficult for older bands with a less fashionable aesthetic. The Outfield returned to their East End roots, and often played low-key gigs at a local pub, where much of the clientele were unaware that the group had sold millions of records in the US. Unfortunately, this situation was typical of the problems The Outfield had faced in their homeland: little recognition and a much smaller following than they had experienced in the US. Nevertheless, the band would reappear with a fan-club-only release, entitled It Ain't Over..., and resume touring. Soon thereafter, in 1999, they released Extra Innings, an odds-and-ends compilation of new and older, unreleased songs. In the early 2000s, the band issued two live collections via their official website: Live in Brazil and The Outfield Live. In 2004, the band released Any Time Now, a new studio album, through Tower Records, and later released a new version of the album in March 2006 through Sidewinder Records. In 2009, the original line up of John Spinks, Tony Lewis and Alan Jackman returned to a London recording studio to record their first album together since Voices of Babylon was recorded in 1988. In addition, The Outfield announced Brent Bitner had taken over the band's management and launched their official Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace pages in November 2009. On 22 March 2011, The Outfield announced that their upcoming album would be called Replay. Replay was recorded in various studios in the south of England that included production work at the legendary Abbey Road Studios. Replay was produced by The Outfield and Brent Bitner with executive production by John Spinks. On 28 June 2011, Replay was released to rave reviews. The lead single, "California Sun", was a regional number one AOR chart hit and has subsequently been the second most added song on AC radio as of 15 August 2011. A limited advanced release of the band's possible second single, "A Long, Long Time Ago", reached number one on Worldwide FM ClassX Radio's AOR chart in the second week of August 2011. In 2013, the band rerecorded vocals to their single "Your Love" to be incorporated into American DJ Morgan Page's reworking of the song, which was released in the summer of that year. Though credited to Page, the single was listed as featuring The Outfield. On 9 July 2014, John Spinks died of liver cancer. He was 60 years old. After taking a few years off from music, lead singer/bassist Tony Lewis announced his return with a solo album, Out of the Darkness, which was released on 29 June 2018 through Madison Records and with the help of his wife Carol and their collaborative songwriting. On 20 October 2020, singer Tony Lewis died suddenly and unexpectedly at his home near London. Style and influences The Outfield were considered a pop rock, power pop, or a new wave group. Annelise Wamsley of the Tampa Bay Times described the band's style in 1987: "the Outfield specializes in what you could call an early '80s American Sound. It's music by recipe: You to take hyper-macho hard rock and tone it down so it will appeal to the over-17 set. You need a simple hook that can be repeated a dozen or so times, lots of electric guitar solos, a standard rock beat and basic lyrics." John Spinks said in 1986 interview with the Los Angeles Times that he was very influenced by "the music that gives me a rush" and that he "grew up on the Beatles". Interestingly, it was also said that the band wanted to be a "car stereo sort of poppy version of the band Rush. "61 Seconds and "Mystery Man" are evidence of this. He also cited contemporaries Journey, Foreigner, and Mr. Mister – particularly the latter's hit "Broken Wings". In that interview, he expanded upon the band's strong foundation in melody: Wamsely made a similar remark, writing, "This is the stuff people listen to in their cars, on the way to work or play at high school dances." Criticism often centered on their generic sound. "The music is hopelessly, numbingly derivative of just about every Journey/Foreigner/Cars cliché in the book — with none of the style that makes those bands special," said Matt Damsker, rock critic for the Hartford Courant. Members Final known lineup Tony Lewis – vocals, bass guitar (1984–2014; died 2020) John Spinks – guitar, vocals (1984–2014; died 2014) Alan Jackman – drums, percussion (1984–1989, 2009–2014) Former member Simon Dawson – drums (1989–2009) Discography Studio albums Compilations Playing the Field (1992) Big Innings: The Best of The Outfield (1996) Super Hits (1998) Demo and Rarities (2010) Playlist: The Very Best of The Outfield (2011) The Baseball Boys: Early Demos and Rare Tracks (2020) Final Innings (2021) Live albums Live in Brazil (2001) The Outfield Live (2005) Singles Featured singles Music videos References External links Tony Lewis's official website The Outfield at AllMusic The Outfield at Legacy Recordings The Outfield at 45cat.com English new wave musical groups English power pop groups Musical groups from London Musical groups established in 1983 Musical groups disestablished in 2014 Columbia Records artists MCA Records artists 1983 establishments in England 2014 disestablishments in England	true	[ "Dustin Skinner (born April 20, 1985) is an American former stock car racing driver. He has competed in one NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race, in 2008 at Martinsville Speedway. He is the son of Mike Skinner.\n\nRacing career\nSkinner started his racing career in 1998, driving go-karts. He later moved on to Fast Trucks at various Florida racetracks, and ran Daytona International Speedway as a part of the IPOWER Dash series in 2004. He tested a NASCAR Craftsman Truck at New Smyrna Speedway in October 2007. In October 2008, Skinner made his only NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series start at Martinsville Speedway, starting 31st and finishing 34th after an early-race incident in turn three derailed his efforts. The start came with Germain Racing, an affiliate of Toyota Racing Development, whom Skinner had also worked with in late model racing. The start with Germain came after a driver development program with Key Motorsports did not come to fruition; in March 2008 the team announced that they were looking to field Skinner in up to six Truck races that year, dependent on sponsorship.\n\nAfter his driving career finished, Skinner transitioned into a mechanic role, working in Florida to prepare racecars in that state. He also helps, along with brother Jamie Skinner, on father Mike Skinner's late model efforts.\n\nIn 2020, Skinner came under fire for racist comments made regarding Bubba Wallace, the only Black full-time Cup Series driver in NASCAR, after a noose was found in Wallace's garage stall at Talladega Superspeedway. Skinner stated, \"Frankly I wish they would've tied [the noose] to [Wallace] and drug him around the pits because he has single handedly destroyed what I grew up watching and cared about for 30 years now.\" Skinner later backtracked his statement, saying, \"I disagree with what [Wallace] is doing, but it was stupidly foolish for me to say what I said and I truly regret every bit of it. If there was a way to take last night back I would. All I can do is say I'm sorry.\"\n\nMotorsports career results\n\nNASCAR\n(key) (Bold – Pole position awarded by qualifying time. Italics – Pole position earned by points standings or practice time. * – Most laps led.)\n\nCraftsman Truck Series\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\n1985 births\nLiving people\nNASCAR drivers\nRacing drivers from North Carolina\nSportspeople from Greensboro, North Carolina", "Hearts and Minds was a public relations campaign used in the Iraq War (2003-2011).\n\nBackground\n\nThe operation to \"win Iraqi hearts and minds\", had been established before the war started. One Central Command planner noted that psychological operations (PSYOPs) were slated to play \"a crucial role ... to any conflict in Iraq and to the war on terrorism\". Senior US military leaders placed such an importance on the operation that they reworked the way in which the related PSYOPs were carried out, often citing the failures during Operation Enduring Freedom, where it took as long as two days to get PSYOPs through the approval process.\n\nJune 2004 Congressional Hearing, \"Iraq: Winning Hearts and Minds\"\n\nNoting that, \"The United States and its Coalition partners are attempting to win the hearts and minds of the people in Iraq while providing military security and support to economic and political reform programs. But some assumptions made about Iraq proved faulty, and some policy decisions were controversial and created more doubt than confidence in U.S. capabilities and intentions,\" Christopher Shays (R-CT), Chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations held hearings on June 15, 2004, with the aim of determining \"corrective actions that might be undertaken to regain the confidence and cooperation (hearts and minds) of the Iraqi people, improve public diplomacy messages, and help chart the course for future efforts in Iraq.\"\n\nThe hearing focused upon two main questions: 1. What policy decisions made by the Coalition Provisional Authority contributed to changes in Iraqi confidence and cooperation? and, 2. What steps does the United States need to take to regain the confidence and cooperation of the Iraqi people?\n\nSee also\nWinning hearts and minds\n\"Hearts and Minds\" in the Vietnam War\nShock and awe\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n\nJohn Tierney, \"Iraqi Family Ties Complicate American Efforts for Change,\" New York Times, September 27, 2003. \nAmatzia Baram, \"The Iraqi Tribes and the Post-Saddam System,\" The Brookings Institution Iraq Memo #18, July 8, 2003. \nPaul Wolfowitz, \"The Road Map For A Sovereign Iraq,\" Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2004.\nSteve Tatham, Royal Naval Spokesman Iraq, \"Losing Arab Hearts & Minds; The Coalition, Al-Jazeera and Muslim Public opinion\" Hurst&Co London 2006.\n\nPublic relations\nIraq War\nUnited States propaganda in Iraq" ]
[ "The Outfield", "Subsequent efforts and continued success (1987-1991)", "what efforts were made?", "1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'." ]	C_ca39bc01bfb047f687650f5d6bc7ec9b_0	Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?	2	Besides 1987 seeing the release of The Outfield's second album, are there any other interesting aspects about this article?	The Outfield	1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single "Since You've Been Gone" (not to be confused with the 1970s Rainbow and Head East hit of the same name) and the minor radio/MTV hit "No Surrender", and the album was certified Gold in the US A US summer tour opening for Night Ranger followed. For the group's third album, 1989's Voices of Babylon, a new producer (David Kahne) and sound was evident. The title track was a Top 25 single and "My Paradise" was a mid-sized album-rock hit, but overall the group's popularity continued to decline. After the Babylon LP, Alan Jackman parted ways with the band and was replaced for a concert tour by Paul Read. Spinks and Lewis continued as a duo, switched labels and began recording Diamond Days for MCA. Playing drums on the disc was session drummer Simon Dawson. The LP, released in 1990, produced a Top 30 US hit, "For You". Quick to follow was "One Hot Country", included on the soundtrack for the 1991 action film If Looks Could Kill. The Outfield returned with 1992's Rockeye. Its leadoff single, "Closer to Me", was a near Top 40 hit, and a second release, "Winning It All", gained some notice due to extensive play during NBC's NBA Finals coverage, NBA Superstars series featuring Larry Bird, the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics and the film The Mighty Ducks. Simon Dawson, who played on Rockeye, would eventually become the band's official third member. CANNOTANSWER	Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single "Since You've Been Gone	The Outfield were an English rock band based in London, England. The band achieved success in the mid-1980s and are best remembered for their hit single, "Your Love". The band's lineup consisted of guitarist John Spinks, vocalist and bassist Tony Lewis, and drummer Alan Jackman. They had an unusual experience for a British band in that they enjoyed commercial success in the US, but never in their homeland. The band began recording during the mid-1980s, and released their first album, Play Deep, in 1985 through Columbia Records. The album reached No. 9 on the Billboard 200 list and then reached triple platinum in the United States. The band's single "Your Love" reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 as well as No. 7 on the Mainstream Rock chart, and it became their signature song. The band continued to record and tour through the 1980s and then into the early 1990s. While subsequent albums Bangin' (1987) and Voices of Babylon (1989) saw some chart successes, the group's popularity waned. Drummer Alan Jackman left and, now as a duo, they recorded Diamond Days in 1991. After the disappointing response to their 1992 album Rockeye, which represented a shift towards progressive rock and arena rock, the group essentially disbanded in the 1990s. They resumed touring in 1998, and thereafter released two live albums via their website, along with a new studio album, Any Time Now in 2004, which was later re-released in 2006. In 2011, the band released their final album, Replay, with original drummer Alan Jackman re-joining the band. Spinks died in 2014 after which the group officially disbanded. On 22 March 2018, lead singer/bassist Tony Lewis announced a solo album called Out of the Darkness, which was released on 29 June 2018 through Madison Records. Two of the original members have died: John Spinks in 2014, from cancer; and Tony Lewis in 2020. History Formation and commercial success (1984–1986) Bassist/singer Tony Lewis, guitarist/keyboardist and songwriter John Spinks and drummer Alan Jackman played together in the late 1970s in a straightforward power pop band called Sirius B. After rehearsing for about six months and playing several gigs, their style did not match the punk rock that was surging in popularity in England and they broke up. Several years afterward, the three gathered back together in London's East End under the name The Baseball Boys. They performed in and around England until a demo got them signed to Columbia/CBS Records in 1984. Spinks adopted the name 'Baseball Boys' from a teen gang called "The Baseball Furies" in the cult film The Warriors, a movie that he had just seen. Although he used the name as a joke and "just to be outrageous", record company people responded favourably. The band got a reputation as a very "American-sounding" group and signed in the US after playing for just a few months in England. Their manager, an American living in England, recommended a new band name with a similar attitude since 'Baseball Boys' seemed too "tacky" and "tongue-in-cheek". Spinks has said, "The Outfield was the most left-wing kind of thing we liked." Spinks expressed an interest in the American sport of baseball, while also being a devoted fan of association football. He claimed that the group "didn't know what an outfield was" until they visited the U.S., and that, "We're just learning about baseball. It's an acquired taste and we're trying to acquire a taste for it." He expounded upon this in a Chicago Tribune piece: Play Deep Their debut album, Play Deep produced by William Wittman, was issued in 1985 and was a success. The album reached triple platinum sales status and the Top 10 in the US album charts; it also featured a Top 10 single entry with "Your Love", which peaked at No. 6. It went on to be featured in a number of 80s-themed compilation albums, and over 1,000 covers and remixes by other artists have been released physically and/or online. The band toured extensively, opening for Journey and Starship. Spinks made a point of mentioning in interviews that the band was "totally into not smoking or doing drugs". Bangin’ 1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single "Since You've Been Gone" (not to be confused with the 1970s Rainbow and Head East hit of the same name), which also hit #11 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart. Furthermore, they had a minor radio/MTV hit "No Surrender". The album sold reasonably well and was certified Gold in the United States. A US summer tour opening for Night Ranger followed. Voices of Babylon For the group's third album, 1989's Voices of Babylon, a new producer (David Kahne) and sound was evident. The title track was a Top 25 single and hit #2 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart . The follow-up song, "My Paradise", was a mid-sized album-rock hit reaching #34 in the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart but overall the group's popularity continued to decline. Diamond Days After the Babylon LP, Alan Jackman parted ways with the band and was replaced for a concert tour by Paul Read. Spinks and Lewis continued as a duo, switched labels and began recording Diamond Days for MCA. Playing drums on the disc was session drummer Simon Dawson. The LP, released in 1990, produced a Top 30 US hit, "For You". Quick to follow was "One Hot Country", included on the soundtrack for the 1991 action film If Looks Could Kill. Later years and aftermath The Outfield returned with 1992's Rockeye. Its leadoff single, "Closer to Me", was a near Top 40 hit, and a second release, "Winning It All", gained some notice due to extensive play during NBC's NBA Finals coverage, NBA Superstars series featuring Larry Bird, the 1992 Summer Olympics, Chicago Bulls championship ring ceremonies and the film The Mighty Ducks. Simon Dawson, who played on Rockeye, would eventually become the band's official third member. The band took an extended hiatus during the mid-1990s as changing musical fashions, especially the popularity of edgier bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam, made life difficult for older bands with a less fashionable aesthetic. The Outfield returned to their East End roots, and often played low-key gigs at a local pub, where much of the clientele were unaware that the group had sold millions of records in the US. Unfortunately, this situation was typical of the problems The Outfield had faced in their homeland: little recognition and a much smaller following than they had experienced in the US. Nevertheless, the band would reappear with a fan-club-only release, entitled It Ain't Over..., and resume touring. Soon thereafter, in 1999, they released Extra Innings, an odds-and-ends compilation of new and older, unreleased songs. In the early 2000s, the band issued two live collections via their official website: Live in Brazil and The Outfield Live. In 2004, the band released Any Time Now, a new studio album, through Tower Records, and later released a new version of the album in March 2006 through Sidewinder Records. In 2009, the original line up of John Spinks, Tony Lewis and Alan Jackman returned to a London recording studio to record their first album together since Voices of Babylon was recorded in 1988. In addition, The Outfield announced Brent Bitner had taken over the band's management and launched their official Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace pages in November 2009. On 22 March 2011, The Outfield announced that their upcoming album would be called Replay. Replay was recorded in various studios in the south of England that included production work at the legendary Abbey Road Studios. Replay was produced by The Outfield and Brent Bitner with executive production by John Spinks. On 28 June 2011, Replay was released to rave reviews. The lead single, "California Sun", was a regional number one AOR chart hit and has subsequently been the second most added song on AC radio as of 15 August 2011. A limited advanced release of the band's possible second single, "A Long, Long Time Ago", reached number one on Worldwide FM ClassX Radio's AOR chart in the second week of August 2011. In 2013, the band rerecorded vocals to their single "Your Love" to be incorporated into American DJ Morgan Page's reworking of the song, which was released in the summer of that year. Though credited to Page, the single was listed as featuring The Outfield. On 9 July 2014, John Spinks died of liver cancer. He was 60 years old. After taking a few years off from music, lead singer/bassist Tony Lewis announced his return with a solo album, Out of the Darkness, which was released on 29 June 2018 through Madison Records and with the help of his wife Carol and their collaborative songwriting. On 20 October 2020, singer Tony Lewis died suddenly and unexpectedly at his home near London. Style and influences The Outfield were considered a pop rock, power pop, or a new wave group. Annelise Wamsley of the Tampa Bay Times described the band's style in 1987: "the Outfield specializes in what you could call an early '80s American Sound. It's music by recipe: You to take hyper-macho hard rock and tone it down so it will appeal to the over-17 set. You need a simple hook that can be repeated a dozen or so times, lots of electric guitar solos, a standard rock beat and basic lyrics." John Spinks said in 1986 interview with the Los Angeles Times that he was very influenced by "the music that gives me a rush" and that he "grew up on the Beatles". Interestingly, it was also said that the band wanted to be a "car stereo sort of poppy version of the band Rush. "61 Seconds and "Mystery Man" are evidence of this. He also cited contemporaries Journey, Foreigner, and Mr. Mister – particularly the latter's hit "Broken Wings". In that interview, he expanded upon the band's strong foundation in melody: Wamsely made a similar remark, writing, "This is the stuff people listen to in their cars, on the way to work or play at high school dances." Criticism often centered on their generic sound. "The music is hopelessly, numbingly derivative of just about every Journey/Foreigner/Cars cliché in the book — with none of the style that makes those bands special," said Matt Damsker, rock critic for the Hartford Courant. Members Final known lineup Tony Lewis – vocals, bass guitar (1984–2014; died 2020) John Spinks – guitar, vocals (1984–2014; died 2014) Alan Jackman – drums, percussion (1984–1989, 2009–2014) Former member Simon Dawson – drums (1989–2009) Discography Studio albums Compilations Playing the Field (1992) Big Innings: The Best of The Outfield (1996) Super Hits (1998) Demo and Rarities (2010) Playlist: The Very Best of The Outfield (2011) The Baseball Boys: Early Demos and Rare Tracks (2020) Final Innings (2021) Live albums Live in Brazil (2001) The Outfield Live (2005) Singles Featured singles Music videos References External links Tony Lewis's official website The Outfield at AllMusic The Outfield at Legacy Recordings The Outfield at 45cat.com English new wave musical groups English power pop groups Musical groups from London Musical groups established in 1983 Musical groups disestablished in 2014 Columbia Records artists MCA Records artists 1983 establishments in England 2014 disestablishments in England	false	[ "Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region", "Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts" ]
[ "The Outfield", "Subsequent efforts and continued success (1987-1991)", "what efforts were made?", "1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'.", "Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?", "Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single \"Since You've Been Gone" ]	C_ca39bc01bfb047f687650f5d6bc7ec9b_0	did they win any other awards?	3	did The Outfield win any other awards, besides a Top 40 single "Since You've Been Gone"??	The Outfield	1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single "Since You've Been Gone" (not to be confused with the 1970s Rainbow and Head East hit of the same name) and the minor radio/MTV hit "No Surrender", and the album was certified Gold in the US A US summer tour opening for Night Ranger followed. For the group's third album, 1989's Voices of Babylon, a new producer (David Kahne) and sound was evident. The title track was a Top 25 single and "My Paradise" was a mid-sized album-rock hit, but overall the group's popularity continued to decline. After the Babylon LP, Alan Jackman parted ways with the band and was replaced for a concert tour by Paul Read. Spinks and Lewis continued as a duo, switched labels and began recording Diamond Days for MCA. Playing drums on the disc was session drummer Simon Dawson. The LP, released in 1990, produced a Top 30 US hit, "For You". Quick to follow was "One Hot Country", included on the soundtrack for the 1991 action film If Looks Could Kill. The Outfield returned with 1992's Rockeye. Its leadoff single, "Closer to Me", was a near Top 40 hit, and a second release, "Winning It All", gained some notice due to extensive play during NBC's NBA Finals coverage, NBA Superstars series featuring Larry Bird, the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics and the film The Mighty Ducks. Simon Dawson, who played on Rockeye, would eventually become the band's official third member. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER	The Outfield were an English rock band based in London, England. The band achieved success in the mid-1980s and are best remembered for their hit single, "Your Love". The band's lineup consisted of guitarist John Spinks, vocalist and bassist Tony Lewis, and drummer Alan Jackman. They had an unusual experience for a British band in that they enjoyed commercial success in the US, but never in their homeland. The band began recording during the mid-1980s, and released their first album, Play Deep, in 1985 through Columbia Records. The album reached No. 9 on the Billboard 200 list and then reached triple platinum in the United States. The band's single "Your Love" reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 as well as No. 7 on the Mainstream Rock chart, and it became their signature song. The band continued to record and tour through the 1980s and then into the early 1990s. While subsequent albums Bangin' (1987) and Voices of Babylon (1989) saw some chart successes, the group's popularity waned. Drummer Alan Jackman left and, now as a duo, they recorded Diamond Days in 1991. After the disappointing response to their 1992 album Rockeye, which represented a shift towards progressive rock and arena rock, the group essentially disbanded in the 1990s. They resumed touring in 1998, and thereafter released two live albums via their website, along with a new studio album, Any Time Now in 2004, which was later re-released in 2006. In 2011, the band released their final album, Replay, with original drummer Alan Jackman re-joining the band. Spinks died in 2014 after which the group officially disbanded. On 22 March 2018, lead singer/bassist Tony Lewis announced a solo album called Out of the Darkness, which was released on 29 June 2018 through Madison Records. Two of the original members have died: John Spinks in 2014, from cancer; and Tony Lewis in 2020. History Formation and commercial success (1984–1986) Bassist/singer Tony Lewis, guitarist/keyboardist and songwriter John Spinks and drummer Alan Jackman played together in the late 1970s in a straightforward power pop band called Sirius B. After rehearsing for about six months and playing several gigs, their style did not match the punk rock that was surging in popularity in England and they broke up. Several years afterward, the three gathered back together in London's East End under the name The Baseball Boys. They performed in and around England until a demo got them signed to Columbia/CBS Records in 1984. Spinks adopted the name 'Baseball Boys' from a teen gang called "The Baseball Furies" in the cult film The Warriors, a movie that he had just seen. Although he used the name as a joke and "just to be outrageous", record company people responded favourably. The band got a reputation as a very "American-sounding" group and signed in the US after playing for just a few months in England. Their manager, an American living in England, recommended a new band name with a similar attitude since 'Baseball Boys' seemed too "tacky" and "tongue-in-cheek". Spinks has said, "The Outfield was the most left-wing kind of thing we liked." Spinks expressed an interest in the American sport of baseball, while also being a devoted fan of association football. He claimed that the group "didn't know what an outfield was" until they visited the U.S., and that, "We're just learning about baseball. It's an acquired taste and we're trying to acquire a taste for it." He expounded upon this in a Chicago Tribune piece: Play Deep Their debut album, Play Deep produced by William Wittman, was issued in 1985 and was a success. The album reached triple platinum sales status and the Top 10 in the US album charts; it also featured a Top 10 single entry with "Your Love", which peaked at No. 6. It went on to be featured in a number of 80s-themed compilation albums, and over 1,000 covers and remixes by other artists have been released physically and/or online. The band toured extensively, opening for Journey and Starship. Spinks made a point of mentioning in interviews that the band was "totally into not smoking or doing drugs". Bangin’ 1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single "Since You've Been Gone" (not to be confused with the 1970s Rainbow and Head East hit of the same name), which also hit #11 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart. Furthermore, they had a minor radio/MTV hit "No Surrender". The album sold reasonably well and was certified Gold in the United States. A US summer tour opening for Night Ranger followed. Voices of Babylon For the group's third album, 1989's Voices of Babylon, a new producer (David Kahne) and sound was evident. The title track was a Top 25 single and hit #2 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart . The follow-up song, "My Paradise", was a mid-sized album-rock hit reaching #34 in the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart but overall the group's popularity continued to decline. Diamond Days After the Babylon LP, Alan Jackman parted ways with the band and was replaced for a concert tour by Paul Read. Spinks and Lewis continued as a duo, switched labels and began recording Diamond Days for MCA. Playing drums on the disc was session drummer Simon Dawson. The LP, released in 1990, produced a Top 30 US hit, "For You". Quick to follow was "One Hot Country", included on the soundtrack for the 1991 action film If Looks Could Kill. Later years and aftermath The Outfield returned with 1992's Rockeye. Its leadoff single, "Closer to Me", was a near Top 40 hit, and a second release, "Winning It All", gained some notice due to extensive play during NBC's NBA Finals coverage, NBA Superstars series featuring Larry Bird, the 1992 Summer Olympics, Chicago Bulls championship ring ceremonies and the film The Mighty Ducks. Simon Dawson, who played on Rockeye, would eventually become the band's official third member. The band took an extended hiatus during the mid-1990s as changing musical fashions, especially the popularity of edgier bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam, made life difficult for older bands with a less fashionable aesthetic. The Outfield returned to their East End roots, and often played low-key gigs at a local pub, where much of the clientele were unaware that the group had sold millions of records in the US. Unfortunately, this situation was typical of the problems The Outfield had faced in their homeland: little recognition and a much smaller following than they had experienced in the US. Nevertheless, the band would reappear with a fan-club-only release, entitled It Ain't Over..., and resume touring. Soon thereafter, in 1999, they released Extra Innings, an odds-and-ends compilation of new and older, unreleased songs. In the early 2000s, the band issued two live collections via their official website: Live in Brazil and The Outfield Live. In 2004, the band released Any Time Now, a new studio album, through Tower Records, and later released a new version of the album in March 2006 through Sidewinder Records. In 2009, the original line up of John Spinks, Tony Lewis and Alan Jackman returned to a London recording studio to record their first album together since Voices of Babylon was recorded in 1988. In addition, The Outfield announced Brent Bitner had taken over the band's management and launched their official Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace pages in November 2009. On 22 March 2011, The Outfield announced that their upcoming album would be called Replay. Replay was recorded in various studios in the south of England that included production work at the legendary Abbey Road Studios. Replay was produced by The Outfield and Brent Bitner with executive production by John Spinks. On 28 June 2011, Replay was released to rave reviews. The lead single, "California Sun", was a regional number one AOR chart hit and has subsequently been the second most added song on AC radio as of 15 August 2011. A limited advanced release of the band's possible second single, "A Long, Long Time Ago", reached number one on Worldwide FM ClassX Radio's AOR chart in the second week of August 2011. In 2013, the band rerecorded vocals to their single "Your Love" to be incorporated into American DJ Morgan Page's reworking of the song, which was released in the summer of that year. Though credited to Page, the single was listed as featuring The Outfield. On 9 July 2014, John Spinks died of liver cancer. He was 60 years old. After taking a few years off from music, lead singer/bassist Tony Lewis announced his return with a solo album, Out of the Darkness, which was released on 29 June 2018 through Madison Records and with the help of his wife Carol and their collaborative songwriting. On 20 October 2020, singer Tony Lewis died suddenly and unexpectedly at his home near London. Style and influences The Outfield were considered a pop rock, power pop, or a new wave group. Annelise Wamsley of the Tampa Bay Times described the band's style in 1987: "the Outfield specializes in what you could call an early '80s American Sound. It's music by recipe: You to take hyper-macho hard rock and tone it down so it will appeal to the over-17 set. You need a simple hook that can be repeated a dozen or so times, lots of electric guitar solos, a standard rock beat and basic lyrics." John Spinks said in 1986 interview with the Los Angeles Times that he was very influenced by "the music that gives me a rush" and that he "grew up on the Beatles". Interestingly, it was also said that the band wanted to be a "car stereo sort of poppy version of the band Rush. "61 Seconds and "Mystery Man" are evidence of this. He also cited contemporaries Journey, Foreigner, and Mr. Mister – particularly the latter's hit "Broken Wings". In that interview, he expanded upon the band's strong foundation in melody: Wamsely made a similar remark, writing, "This is the stuff people listen to in their cars, on the way to work or play at high school dances." Criticism often centered on their generic sound. "The music is hopelessly, numbingly derivative of just about every Journey/Foreigner/Cars cliché in the book — with none of the style that makes those bands special," said Matt Damsker, rock critic for the Hartford Courant. Members Final known lineup Tony Lewis – vocals, bass guitar (1984–2014; died 2020) John Spinks – guitar, vocals (1984–2014; died 2014) Alan Jackman – drums, percussion (1984–1989, 2009–2014) Former member Simon Dawson – drums (1989–2009) Discography Studio albums Compilations Playing the Field (1992) Big Innings: The Best of The Outfield (1996) Super Hits (1998) Demo and Rarities (2010) Playlist: The Very Best of The Outfield (2011) The Baseball Boys: Early Demos and Rare Tracks (2020) Final Innings (2021) Live albums Live in Brazil (2001) The Outfield Live (2005) Singles Featured singles Music videos References External links Tony Lewis's official website The Outfield at AllMusic The Outfield at Legacy Recordings The Outfield at 45cat.com English new wave musical groups English power pop groups Musical groups from London Musical groups established in 1983 Musical groups disestablished in 2014 Columbia Records artists MCA Records artists 1983 establishments in England 2014 disestablishments in England	false	[ "Le Cousin is a 1997 French film directed by Alain Corneau.\n\nPlot \nThe film deals with the relationship of the police and an informant in the drug scene.\n\nAwards and nominations\nLe Cousin was nominated for 5 César Awards but did not win in any category.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1997 films\n1997 crime films\nFilms about drugs\nFilms directed by Alain Corneau\nFrench crime films\nFrench films\nFrench-language films", "The 1952–53 Boston Bruins season was the Bruins' 29th season in the National Hockey League (NHL).\n\nOffseason\n\nRegular season\n\nFinal standings\n\nRecord vs. opponents\n\nSchedule and results\n\nPlayoffs\n\nPlayer statistics\n\nRegular season\nScoring\n\nGoaltending\n\nPlayoffs\nScoring\n\nGoaltending\n\nAwards and records\n\nAwards\n\nThe Boston Bruins did not win any NHL awards for the 1952-53 NHL season.\n\nAll-Star teams\n\nTransactions\n\nThe following is a list of all transactions that have occurred for the Boston Bruins during the 1952–53 NHL season. It lists which team each player has been traded to and for which player(s) or other consideration(s), if applicable.\n\nSee also\n1952–53 NHL season\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nBoston Bruins season, 1952-53\nBoston Bruins season, 1952-53\nBoston Bruins seasons\nBoston\nBoston\n1950s in Boston" ]
[ "The Outfield", "Subsequent efforts and continued success (1987-1991)", "what efforts were made?", "1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'.", "Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?", "Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single \"Since You've Been Gone", "did they win any other awards?", "I don't know." ]	C_ca39bc01bfb047f687650f5d6bc7ec9b_0	what was the biggest success?	4	what was the biggest success for The Outfield?	The Outfield	1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single "Since You've Been Gone" (not to be confused with the 1970s Rainbow and Head East hit of the same name) and the minor radio/MTV hit "No Surrender", and the album was certified Gold in the US A US summer tour opening for Night Ranger followed. For the group's third album, 1989's Voices of Babylon, a new producer (David Kahne) and sound was evident. The title track was a Top 25 single and "My Paradise" was a mid-sized album-rock hit, but overall the group's popularity continued to decline. After the Babylon LP, Alan Jackman parted ways with the band and was replaced for a concert tour by Paul Read. Spinks and Lewis continued as a duo, switched labels and began recording Diamond Days for MCA. Playing drums on the disc was session drummer Simon Dawson. The LP, released in 1990, produced a Top 30 US hit, "For You". Quick to follow was "One Hot Country", included on the soundtrack for the 1991 action film If Looks Could Kill. The Outfield returned with 1992's Rockeye. Its leadoff single, "Closer to Me", was a near Top 40 hit, and a second release, "Winning It All", gained some notice due to extensive play during NBC's NBA Finals coverage, NBA Superstars series featuring Larry Bird, the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics and the film The Mighty Ducks. Simon Dawson, who played on Rockeye, would eventually become the band's official third member. CANNOTANSWER	"Closer to Me", was a near Top 40 hit, and a second release, "Winning It All", gained some notice due to extensive play	The Outfield were an English rock band based in London, England. The band achieved success in the mid-1980s and are best remembered for their hit single, "Your Love". The band's lineup consisted of guitarist John Spinks, vocalist and bassist Tony Lewis, and drummer Alan Jackman. They had an unusual experience for a British band in that they enjoyed commercial success in the US, but never in their homeland. The band began recording during the mid-1980s, and released their first album, Play Deep, in 1985 through Columbia Records. The album reached No. 9 on the Billboard 200 list and then reached triple platinum in the United States. The band's single "Your Love" reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 as well as No. 7 on the Mainstream Rock chart, and it became their signature song. The band continued to record and tour through the 1980s and then into the early 1990s. While subsequent albums Bangin' (1987) and Voices of Babylon (1989) saw some chart successes, the group's popularity waned. Drummer Alan Jackman left and, now as a duo, they recorded Diamond Days in 1991. After the disappointing response to their 1992 album Rockeye, which represented a shift towards progressive rock and arena rock, the group essentially disbanded in the 1990s. They resumed touring in 1998, and thereafter released two live albums via their website, along with a new studio album, Any Time Now in 2004, which was later re-released in 2006. In 2011, the band released their final album, Replay, with original drummer Alan Jackman re-joining the band. Spinks died in 2014 after which the group officially disbanded. On 22 March 2018, lead singer/bassist Tony Lewis announced a solo album called Out of the Darkness, which was released on 29 June 2018 through Madison Records. Two of the original members have died: John Spinks in 2014, from cancer; and Tony Lewis in 2020. History Formation and commercial success (1984–1986) Bassist/singer Tony Lewis, guitarist/keyboardist and songwriter John Spinks and drummer Alan Jackman played together in the late 1970s in a straightforward power pop band called Sirius B. After rehearsing for about six months and playing several gigs, their style did not match the punk rock that was surging in popularity in England and they broke up. Several years afterward, the three gathered back together in London's East End under the name The Baseball Boys. They performed in and around England until a demo got them signed to Columbia/CBS Records in 1984. Spinks adopted the name 'Baseball Boys' from a teen gang called "The Baseball Furies" in the cult film The Warriors, a movie that he had just seen. Although he used the name as a joke and "just to be outrageous", record company people responded favourably. The band got a reputation as a very "American-sounding" group and signed in the US after playing for just a few months in England. Their manager, an American living in England, recommended a new band name with a similar attitude since 'Baseball Boys' seemed too "tacky" and "tongue-in-cheek". Spinks has said, "The Outfield was the most left-wing kind of thing we liked." Spinks expressed an interest in the American sport of baseball, while also being a devoted fan of association football. He claimed that the group "didn't know what an outfield was" until they visited the U.S., and that, "We're just learning about baseball. It's an acquired taste and we're trying to acquire a taste for it." He expounded upon this in a Chicago Tribune piece: Play Deep Their debut album, Play Deep produced by William Wittman, was issued in 1985 and was a success. The album reached triple platinum sales status and the Top 10 in the US album charts; it also featured a Top 10 single entry with "Your Love", which peaked at No. 6. It went on to be featured in a number of 80s-themed compilation albums, and over 1,000 covers and remixes by other artists have been released physically and/or online. The band toured extensively, opening for Journey and Starship. Spinks made a point of mentioning in interviews that the band was "totally into not smoking or doing drugs". Bangin’ 1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single "Since You've Been Gone" (not to be confused with the 1970s Rainbow and Head East hit of the same name), which also hit #11 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart. Furthermore, they had a minor radio/MTV hit "No Surrender". The album sold reasonably well and was certified Gold in the United States. A US summer tour opening for Night Ranger followed. Voices of Babylon For the group's third album, 1989's Voices of Babylon, a new producer (David Kahne) and sound was evident. The title track was a Top 25 single and hit #2 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart . The follow-up song, "My Paradise", was a mid-sized album-rock hit reaching #34 in the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart but overall the group's popularity continued to decline. Diamond Days After the Babylon LP, Alan Jackman parted ways with the band and was replaced for a concert tour by Paul Read. Spinks and Lewis continued as a duo, switched labels and began recording Diamond Days for MCA. Playing drums on the disc was session drummer Simon Dawson. The LP, released in 1990, produced a Top 30 US hit, "For You". Quick to follow was "One Hot Country", included on the soundtrack for the 1991 action film If Looks Could Kill. Later years and aftermath The Outfield returned with 1992's Rockeye. Its leadoff single, "Closer to Me", was a near Top 40 hit, and a second release, "Winning It All", gained some notice due to extensive play during NBC's NBA Finals coverage, NBA Superstars series featuring Larry Bird, the 1992 Summer Olympics, Chicago Bulls championship ring ceremonies and the film The Mighty Ducks. Simon Dawson, who played on Rockeye, would eventually become the band's official third member. The band took an extended hiatus during the mid-1990s as changing musical fashions, especially the popularity of edgier bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam, made life difficult for older bands with a less fashionable aesthetic. The Outfield returned to their East End roots, and often played low-key gigs at a local pub, where much of the clientele were unaware that the group had sold millions of records in the US. Unfortunately, this situation was typical of the problems The Outfield had faced in their homeland: little recognition and a much smaller following than they had experienced in the US. Nevertheless, the band would reappear with a fan-club-only release, entitled It Ain't Over..., and resume touring. Soon thereafter, in 1999, they released Extra Innings, an odds-and-ends compilation of new and older, unreleased songs. In the early 2000s, the band issued two live collections via their official website: Live in Brazil and The Outfield Live. In 2004, the band released Any Time Now, a new studio album, through Tower Records, and later released a new version of the album in March 2006 through Sidewinder Records. In 2009, the original line up of John Spinks, Tony Lewis and Alan Jackman returned to a London recording studio to record their first album together since Voices of Babylon was recorded in 1988. In addition, The Outfield announced Brent Bitner had taken over the band's management and launched their official Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace pages in November 2009. On 22 March 2011, The Outfield announced that their upcoming album would be called Replay. Replay was recorded in various studios in the south of England that included production work at the legendary Abbey Road Studios. Replay was produced by The Outfield and Brent Bitner with executive production by John Spinks. On 28 June 2011, Replay was released to rave reviews. The lead single, "California Sun", was a regional number one AOR chart hit and has subsequently been the second most added song on AC radio as of 15 August 2011. A limited advanced release of the band's possible second single, "A Long, Long Time Ago", reached number one on Worldwide FM ClassX Radio's AOR chart in the second week of August 2011. In 2013, the band rerecorded vocals to their single "Your Love" to be incorporated into American DJ Morgan Page's reworking of the song, which was released in the summer of that year. Though credited to Page, the single was listed as featuring The Outfield. On 9 July 2014, John Spinks died of liver cancer. He was 60 years old. After taking a few years off from music, lead singer/bassist Tony Lewis announced his return with a solo album, Out of the Darkness, which was released on 29 June 2018 through Madison Records and with the help of his wife Carol and their collaborative songwriting. On 20 October 2020, singer Tony Lewis died suddenly and unexpectedly at his home near London. Style and influences The Outfield were considered a pop rock, power pop, or a new wave group. Annelise Wamsley of the Tampa Bay Times described the band's style in 1987: "the Outfield specializes in what you could call an early '80s American Sound. It's music by recipe: You to take hyper-macho hard rock and tone it down so it will appeal to the over-17 set. You need a simple hook that can be repeated a dozen or so times, lots of electric guitar solos, a standard rock beat and basic lyrics." John Spinks said in 1986 interview with the Los Angeles Times that he was very influenced by "the music that gives me a rush" and that he "grew up on the Beatles". Interestingly, it was also said that the band wanted to be a "car stereo sort of poppy version of the band Rush. "61 Seconds and "Mystery Man" are evidence of this. He also cited contemporaries Journey, Foreigner, and Mr. Mister – particularly the latter's hit "Broken Wings". In that interview, he expanded upon the band's strong foundation in melody: Wamsely made a similar remark, writing, "This is the stuff people listen to in their cars, on the way to work or play at high school dances." Criticism often centered on their generic sound. "The music is hopelessly, numbingly derivative of just about every Journey/Foreigner/Cars cliché in the book — with none of the style that makes those bands special," said Matt Damsker, rock critic for the Hartford Courant. Members Final known lineup Tony Lewis – vocals, bass guitar (1984–2014; died 2020) John Spinks – guitar, vocals (1984–2014; died 2014) Alan Jackman – drums, percussion (1984–1989, 2009–2014) Former member Simon Dawson – drums (1989–2009) Discography Studio albums Compilations Playing the Field (1992) Big Innings: The Best of The Outfield (1996) Super Hits (1998) Demo and Rarities (2010) Playlist: The Very Best of The Outfield (2011) The Baseball Boys: Early Demos and Rare Tracks (2020) Final Innings (2021) Live albums Live in Brazil (2001) The Outfield Live (2005) Singles Featured singles Music videos References External links Tony Lewis's official website The Outfield at AllMusic The Outfield at Legacy Recordings The Outfield at 45cat.com English new wave musical groups English power pop groups Musical groups from London Musical groups established in 1983 Musical groups disestablished in 2014 Columbia Records artists MCA Records artists 1983 establishments in England 2014 disestablishments in England	true	[ "While You Can is the first studio album from American Pop singer, Lucy Woodward, released in April 2003 on Atlantic Records. The standard version of the album contains 11 songs, while the version of the album released in Japan contains two bonus tracks, \"Vine To Vine\" and \"(There's Gotta Be) More To Life\", which in turn was later recorded by pop singer Stacie Orrico. It went on to become a moderate success for Orrico.\n\nThe debut single from the album, Dumb Girls, was released in February 2003 and remains Woodward's biggest hit to date. The second and third singles, Blindsided and Trouble With Me, failed to make any major impact, however, the song What's Good For Me was a very minor success, appearing on several soundtracks, including in the 2003 film What a Girl Wants.\n\nTrack listing\nDumb Girls 3:40\nBlindsided 3:24\nTrust Me (You Don't Wanna See This) 3:13\nIs This Hollywood 3:32\nTrouble With Me 3:44\nWhat's Good For Me 4:01\nStanding 4:12\nThe Breakdown 3:42\nAlways Something 3:59\nGettin' It On 3:20\nDone 4:07\nMore To Life (Japan Bonus Track) 2:54\nVine To Vine (Japan Bonus Track) 4:14\n\nSingles\n\"Dumb Girls\" (2003)\n\"Blindsided\" (2003)\n\"Trouble With Me\" (2004)\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences\n\n2003 albums\nLucy Woodward albums", "\"Then What\" is a song by Australian rapper Illy and was released in May 2019 as the lead single from Illy's forthcoming sixth studio album, The Space Between (2021). \"Then What\" peaked at number 33 on the ARIA Charts and was certified platinum.\n\n\"Then What\" was written about the changes since Illy's last album Two Degrees in 2016 and its success. Illy told Ben & Liam on Triple J \"You notice people come around that weren't there before. When the times are good, they're there, and inevitably you sort of go quiet, start working on new stuff and they're not around anymore. It's not something to get bummed about, I find it funny because it's a cliché but it's true. I wanted to write a song addressing that.\"\n\nAt the APRA Music Awards of 2020, \"Then What\" was nominated for Most Performed Urban Work of the Year.\n\nReception\nZanda Wilson from The Music Network said \"('Then What') is cut from the same cloth as some of his biggest radio hits, with Illy's clean and energetic combination of rapping and singing underpinned by production with pop sensibilities.\"\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nCertifications\n\nReferences \n\n2019 singles\n2019 songs\nIlly (rapper) songs" ]
[ "The Outfield", "Subsequent efforts and continued success (1987-1991)", "what efforts were made?", "1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'.", "Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?", "Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single \"Since You've Been Gone", "did they win any other awards?", "I don't know.", "what was the biggest success?", "\"Closer to Me\", was a near Top 40 hit, and a second release, \"Winning It All\", gained some notice due to extensive play" ]	C_ca39bc01bfb047f687650f5d6bc7ec9b_0	did they break up at any point?	5	did The Outfield break up at any point?	The Outfield	1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single "Since You've Been Gone" (not to be confused with the 1970s Rainbow and Head East hit of the same name) and the minor radio/MTV hit "No Surrender", and the album was certified Gold in the US A US summer tour opening for Night Ranger followed. For the group's third album, 1989's Voices of Babylon, a new producer (David Kahne) and sound was evident. The title track was a Top 25 single and "My Paradise" was a mid-sized album-rock hit, but overall the group's popularity continued to decline. After the Babylon LP, Alan Jackman parted ways with the band and was replaced for a concert tour by Paul Read. Spinks and Lewis continued as a duo, switched labels and began recording Diamond Days for MCA. Playing drums on the disc was session drummer Simon Dawson. The LP, released in 1990, produced a Top 30 US hit, "For You". Quick to follow was "One Hot Country", included on the soundtrack for the 1991 action film If Looks Could Kill. The Outfield returned with 1992's Rockeye. Its leadoff single, "Closer to Me", was a near Top 40 hit, and a second release, "Winning It All", gained some notice due to extensive play during NBC's NBA Finals coverage, NBA Superstars series featuring Larry Bird, the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics and the film The Mighty Ducks. Simon Dawson, who played on Rockeye, would eventually become the band's official third member. CANNOTANSWER	Simon Dawson, who played on Rockeye, would eventually become the band's official third member.	The Outfield were an English rock band based in London, England. The band achieved success in the mid-1980s and are best remembered for their hit single, "Your Love". The band's lineup consisted of guitarist John Spinks, vocalist and bassist Tony Lewis, and drummer Alan Jackman. They had an unusual experience for a British band in that they enjoyed commercial success in the US, but never in their homeland. The band began recording during the mid-1980s, and released their first album, Play Deep, in 1985 through Columbia Records. The album reached No. 9 on the Billboard 200 list and then reached triple platinum in the United States. The band's single "Your Love" reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 as well as No. 7 on the Mainstream Rock chart, and it became their signature song. The band continued to record and tour through the 1980s and then into the early 1990s. While subsequent albums Bangin' (1987) and Voices of Babylon (1989) saw some chart successes, the group's popularity waned. Drummer Alan Jackman left and, now as a duo, they recorded Diamond Days in 1991. After the disappointing response to their 1992 album Rockeye, which represented a shift towards progressive rock and arena rock, the group essentially disbanded in the 1990s. They resumed touring in 1998, and thereafter released two live albums via their website, along with a new studio album, Any Time Now in 2004, which was later re-released in 2006. In 2011, the band released their final album, Replay, with original drummer Alan Jackman re-joining the band. Spinks died in 2014 after which the group officially disbanded. On 22 March 2018, lead singer/bassist Tony Lewis announced a solo album called Out of the Darkness, which was released on 29 June 2018 through Madison Records. Two of the original members have died: John Spinks in 2014, from cancer; and Tony Lewis in 2020. History Formation and commercial success (1984–1986) Bassist/singer Tony Lewis, guitarist/keyboardist and songwriter John Spinks and drummer Alan Jackman played together in the late 1970s in a straightforward power pop band called Sirius B. After rehearsing for about six months and playing several gigs, their style did not match the punk rock that was surging in popularity in England and they broke up. Several years afterward, the three gathered back together in London's East End under the name The Baseball Boys. They performed in and around England until a demo got them signed to Columbia/CBS Records in 1984. Spinks adopted the name 'Baseball Boys' from a teen gang called "The Baseball Furies" in the cult film The Warriors, a movie that he had just seen. Although he used the name as a joke and "just to be outrageous", record company people responded favourably. The band got a reputation as a very "American-sounding" group and signed in the US after playing for just a few months in England. Their manager, an American living in England, recommended a new band name with a similar attitude since 'Baseball Boys' seemed too "tacky" and "tongue-in-cheek". Spinks has said, "The Outfield was the most left-wing kind of thing we liked." Spinks expressed an interest in the American sport of baseball, while also being a devoted fan of association football. He claimed that the group "didn't know what an outfield was" until they visited the U.S., and that, "We're just learning about baseball. It's an acquired taste and we're trying to acquire a taste for it." He expounded upon this in a Chicago Tribune piece: Play Deep Their debut album, Play Deep produced by William Wittman, was issued in 1985 and was a success. The album reached triple platinum sales status and the Top 10 in the US album charts; it also featured a Top 10 single entry with "Your Love", which peaked at No. 6. It went on to be featured in a number of 80s-themed compilation albums, and over 1,000 covers and remixes by other artists have been released physically and/or online. The band toured extensively, opening for Journey and Starship. Spinks made a point of mentioning in interviews that the band was "totally into not smoking or doing drugs". Bangin’ 1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single "Since You've Been Gone" (not to be confused with the 1970s Rainbow and Head East hit of the same name), which also hit #11 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart. Furthermore, they had a minor radio/MTV hit "No Surrender". The album sold reasonably well and was certified Gold in the United States. A US summer tour opening for Night Ranger followed. Voices of Babylon For the group's third album, 1989's Voices of Babylon, a new producer (David Kahne) and sound was evident. The title track was a Top 25 single and hit #2 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart . The follow-up song, "My Paradise", was a mid-sized album-rock hit reaching #34 in the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart but overall the group's popularity continued to decline. Diamond Days After the Babylon LP, Alan Jackman parted ways with the band and was replaced for a concert tour by Paul Read. Spinks and Lewis continued as a duo, switched labels and began recording Diamond Days for MCA. Playing drums on the disc was session drummer Simon Dawson. The LP, released in 1990, produced a Top 30 US hit, "For You". Quick to follow was "One Hot Country", included on the soundtrack for the 1991 action film If Looks Could Kill. Later years and aftermath The Outfield returned with 1992's Rockeye. Its leadoff single, "Closer to Me", was a near Top 40 hit, and a second release, "Winning It All", gained some notice due to extensive play during NBC's NBA Finals coverage, NBA Superstars series featuring Larry Bird, the 1992 Summer Olympics, Chicago Bulls championship ring ceremonies and the film The Mighty Ducks. Simon Dawson, who played on Rockeye, would eventually become the band's official third member. The band took an extended hiatus during the mid-1990s as changing musical fashions, especially the popularity of edgier bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam, made life difficult for older bands with a less fashionable aesthetic. The Outfield returned to their East End roots, and often played low-key gigs at a local pub, where much of the clientele were unaware that the group had sold millions of records in the US. Unfortunately, this situation was typical of the problems The Outfield had faced in their homeland: little recognition and a much smaller following than they had experienced in the US. Nevertheless, the band would reappear with a fan-club-only release, entitled It Ain't Over..., and resume touring. Soon thereafter, in 1999, they released Extra Innings, an odds-and-ends compilation of new and older, unreleased songs. In the early 2000s, the band issued two live collections via their official website: Live in Brazil and The Outfield Live. In 2004, the band released Any Time Now, a new studio album, through Tower Records, and later released a new version of the album in March 2006 through Sidewinder Records. In 2009, the original line up of John Spinks, Tony Lewis and Alan Jackman returned to a London recording studio to record their first album together since Voices of Babylon was recorded in 1988. In addition, The Outfield announced Brent Bitner had taken over the band's management and launched their official Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace pages in November 2009. On 22 March 2011, The Outfield announced that their upcoming album would be called Replay. Replay was recorded in various studios in the south of England that included production work at the legendary Abbey Road Studios. Replay was produced by The Outfield and Brent Bitner with executive production by John Spinks. On 28 June 2011, Replay was released to rave reviews. The lead single, "California Sun", was a regional number one AOR chart hit and has subsequently been the second most added song on AC radio as of 15 August 2011. A limited advanced release of the band's possible second single, "A Long, Long Time Ago", reached number one on Worldwide FM ClassX Radio's AOR chart in the second week of August 2011. In 2013, the band rerecorded vocals to their single "Your Love" to be incorporated into American DJ Morgan Page's reworking of the song, which was released in the summer of that year. Though credited to Page, the single was listed as featuring The Outfield. On 9 July 2014, John Spinks died of liver cancer. He was 60 years old. After taking a few years off from music, lead singer/bassist Tony Lewis announced his return with a solo album, Out of the Darkness, which was released on 29 June 2018 through Madison Records and with the help of his wife Carol and their collaborative songwriting. On 20 October 2020, singer Tony Lewis died suddenly and unexpectedly at his home near London. Style and influences The Outfield were considered a pop rock, power pop, or a new wave group. Annelise Wamsley of the Tampa Bay Times described the band's style in 1987: "the Outfield specializes in what you could call an early '80s American Sound. It's music by recipe: You to take hyper-macho hard rock and tone it down so it will appeal to the over-17 set. You need a simple hook that can be repeated a dozen or so times, lots of electric guitar solos, a standard rock beat and basic lyrics." John Spinks said in 1986 interview with the Los Angeles Times that he was very influenced by "the music that gives me a rush" and that he "grew up on the Beatles". Interestingly, it was also said that the band wanted to be a "car stereo sort of poppy version of the band Rush. "61 Seconds and "Mystery Man" are evidence of this. He also cited contemporaries Journey, Foreigner, and Mr. Mister – particularly the latter's hit "Broken Wings". In that interview, he expanded upon the band's strong foundation in melody: Wamsely made a similar remark, writing, "This is the stuff people listen to in their cars, on the way to work or play at high school dances." Criticism often centered on their generic sound. "The music is hopelessly, numbingly derivative of just about every Journey/Foreigner/Cars cliché in the book — with none of the style that makes those bands special," said Matt Damsker, rock critic for the Hartford Courant. Members Final known lineup Tony Lewis – vocals, bass guitar (1984–2014; died 2020) John Spinks – guitar, vocals (1984–2014; died 2014) Alan Jackman – drums, percussion (1984–1989, 2009–2014) Former member Simon Dawson – drums (1989–2009) Discography Studio albums Compilations Playing the Field (1992) Big Innings: The Best of The Outfield (1996) Super Hits (1998) Demo and Rarities (2010) Playlist: The Very Best of The Outfield (2011) The Baseball Boys: Early Demos and Rare Tracks (2020) Final Innings (2021) Live albums Live in Brazil (2001) The Outfield Live (2005) Singles Featured singles Music videos References External links Tony Lewis's official website The Outfield at AllMusic The Outfield at Legacy Recordings The Outfield at 45cat.com English new wave musical groups English power pop groups Musical groups from London Musical groups established in 1983 Musical groups disestablished in 2014 Columbia Records artists MCA Records artists 1983 establishments in England 2014 disestablishments in England	true	[ "The break-even point (BEP) in economics, business—and specifically cost accounting—is the point at which total cost and total revenue are equal, i.e. \"even\". There is no net loss or gain, and one has \"broken even\", though opportunity costs have been paid and capital has received the risk-adjusted, expected return. In short, all costs that must be paid are paid, and there is neither profit or loss.\n\nOverview \nThe break-even point (BEP) or break-even level represents the sales amount—in either unit (quantity) or revenue (sales) terms—that is required to cover total costs, consisting of both fixed and variable costs to the company. Total profit at the break-even point is zero. It is only possible for a firm to pass the break-even point if the dollar value of sales is higher than the variable cost per unit. This means that the selling price of the goods must be higher than what the company paid for the good or its components for them to cover the initial price they paid (variable and fixed costs). Once they surpass the break-even price, the company can start making a profit.\n\nThe break-even point is one of the most commonly used concepts of financial analysis, and is not only limited to economic use, but can also be used by entrepreneurs, accountants, financial planners, managers and even marketers. Break-even points can be useful to all avenues of a business, as it allows employees to identify required outputs and work towards meeting these.\n\nThe break-even value is not a generic value as such and will vary dependent on the individual business. Some businesses may have a higher or lower break-even point. However, it is important that each business develop a break-even point calculation, as this will enable them to see the number of units they need to sell to cover their variable costs. Each sale will also make a contribution to the payment of fixed costs as well.\n\nFor example, a business that sells tables needs to make annual sales of 200 tables to break-even. At present the company is selling fewer than 200 tables and is therefore operating at a loss. As a business, they must consider increasing the number of tables they sell annually in order to make enough money to pay fixed and variable costs.\n\nIf the business does not think that they can sell the required number of units, they could consider the following options:\n\n1. Reduce the fixed costs. This could be done through a number or negotiations, such as reductions in rent payments, or through better management of bills or other costs.\n\n2. Reduce the variable costs, (which could be done by finding a new supplier that sells tables for less).\n\nEither option can reduce the break-even point so the business need not sell as many tables as before, and could still pay fixed costs.\n\nPurpose\n\nThe main purpose of break-even analysis is to determine the minimum output that must be exceeded for a business to profit. It also is a rough indicator of the earnings impact of a marketing activity. A firm can analyze ideal output levels to be knowledgeable on the amount of sales and revenue that would meet and surpass the break-even point. If a business doesn't meet this level, it often becomes difficult to continue operation.\n\nThe break-even point is one of the simplest, yet least-used analytical tools. Identifying a break-even point helps provide a dynamic view of the relationships between sales, costs, and profits. For example, expressing break-even sales as a percentage of actual sales can help managers understand when to expect to break even (by linking the percent to when in the week or month this percent of sales might occur).\n\nThe break-even point is a special case of Target Income Sales, where Target Income is 0 (breaking even). This is very important for financial analysis. Any sales made past the breakeven point can be considered profit (after all initial costs have been paid)\n\nBreak-even analysis can also provide data that can be useful to the marketing department of a business as well, as it provides financial goals that the business can pass on to marketers so they can try to increase sales.\n\nBreak-even analysis can also help businesses see where they could re-structure or cut costs for optimum results. This may help the business become more effective and achieve higher returns. In many cases, if an entrepreneurial venture is seeking to get off of the ground and enter into a market it is advised that they formulate a break-even analysis to suggest to potential financial backers that the business has the potential to be viable and at what points.\n\nConstruction\nIn the linear Cost-Volume-Profit Analysis model (where marginal costs and marginal revenues are constant, among other assumptions), the break-even point (BEP) (in terms of Unit Sales (X)) can be directly computed in terms of Total Revenue (TR) and Total Costs (TC) as:\n\nwhere:\n TFC is Total Fixed Costs,\n P is Unit Sale Price, and\n V is Unit Variable Cost.\n\nThe quantity, , is of interest in its own right, and is called the Unit Contribution Margin (C): it is the marginal profit per unit, or alternatively the portion of each sale that contributes to Fixed Costs. Thus the break-even point can be more simply computed as the point where Total Contribution = Total Fixed Cost:\n\nTo calculate the break-even point in terms of revenue (a.k.a. currency units, a.k.a. sales proceeds) instead of Unit Sales (X), the above calculation can be multiplied by Price, or, equivalently, the Contribution Margin Ratio (Unit Contribution Margin over Price) can be calculated:\n\nR=C,\nWhere R is revenue generated,\nC is cost incurred i.e. \nFixed costs + Variable Costs\nor\n\nor,\nBreak Even Analysis\nQ = TFC/c/s ratio = Break Even\n\nMargin of safety\nMargin of safety represents the strength of the business. It enables a business to know what is the exact amount it has gained or lost and whether they are over or below the break-even point. In break-even analysis, margin of safety is the extent by which actual or projected sales exceed the break-even sales.\n\nMargin of safety = (current output - breakeven output)\n\nMargin of safety% = (current output - breakeven output)/current output × 100\n\nWhen dealing with budgets you would instead replace \"Current output\" with \"Budgeted output.\"\nIf P/V ratio is given then profit/PV ratio.\n\nBreak-even analysis\nBy inserting different prices into the formula, you will obtain a number of break-even points, one for each possible price charged. If the firm changes the selling price for its product, from $2 to $2.30, in the example above, then it would have to sell only 1000/(2.3 - 0.6)= 589 units to break even, rather than 715.\n\nTo make the results clearer, they can be graphed. To do this, draw the total cost curve (TC in the diagram), which shows the total cost associated with each possible level of output, the fixed cost curve (FC) which shows the costs that do not vary with output level, and finally the various total revenue lines (R1, R2, and R3), which show the total amount of revenue received at each output level, given the price you will be charging.\n\nThe break-even points (A,B,C) are the points of intersection between the total cost curve (TC) and a total revenue curve (R1, R2, or R3). The break-even quantity at each selling price can be read off the horizontal axis and the break-even price at each selling price can be read off the vertical axis. The total cost, total revenue, and fixed cost curves can each be constructed with simple formula. For example, the total revenue curve is simply the product of selling price times quantity for each output quantity. The data used in these formula come either from accounting records or from various estimation techniques such as regression analysis.\n\nLimitations \n The Break-even analysis is only a supply\n the scale of production is likely to cause fixed costs to rise.\n It assumes average variable costs are constant per unit of output\n (i.e., there is no change in the quantity of goods held in inventory at the beginning of the period and the quantity of goods held in inventory at the end of the period).\n In multi-product companies, it assumes that the relative proportions\n\nSee also \n Cost-plus pricing\n Pricing\n Production, costs, and pricing\n Contribution margin\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n Dayananda, D.; Irons, R.; Harrison, S.; Herbohn, J.; and P. Rowland, 2002, Capital Budgeting: Financial Appraisal of Investment Projects. Cambridge University Press. pp. 150.\n Dean, Joel. \"Cost structures of enterprises and break-even charts.\" The American Economic Review (1948): 153-164.\n Patrick, A. W. \"Some Observations on the Break-Even Chart.\" Accounting Review (1958): 573-580.\n Tucker, Spencer A. The break-even system: A tool for profit planning. Prentice-Hall, 1963.\n Tucker, Spencer A. Profit planning decisions with the break-even system. Thomond Press: distribution to the book trade in the US by Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1980.\n\nExternal links\n\n Example of Break Even Point using Microsoft Excel\n MASB Official Website\n Breakeven Point Calculator\n\nPricing\nProfit\nManagement accounting", "Break-even (or break even), often abbreviated as B/E in finance, (sometimes called point of equilibrium) is the point of balance making neither a profit nor a loss. Any number below the break-even point constitutes a loss while any number above it shows a profit. The term originates in finance but the concept has been applied in other fields.\n\nIn economics\n\nIn economics and business, specifically cost accounting, the break-even point (BEP) is the point at which cost or expenses and revenue are equal: there is no net loss or gain, and one has \"broken even\". A profit or loss has not been made, although opportunity costs have been \"paid\" and capital has received the risk-adjusted, expected return. In other words, it is the point at which the total revenue of a business exceeds its total costs, and the business begins to create wealth instead of consuming it. It is shown graphically as the point where the total revenue and total cost curves meet. In the linear case the break-even point is equal to the fixed costs divided by the contribution margin per unit.\n\nThe break-even point is achieved when the generated profits match the total costs accumulated until the date of profit generation. Establishing the break-even point helps businesses in setting plans for the levels of production it needs to maintain to be profitable.\n\nIn finance\nThe accounting method of calculating break-even point does not include cost of working capital. The financial method of calculating break-even, called value added break-even analysis, is used to assess the feasibility of a project. This method not only accounts for all costs, it also includes the opportunity costs of the capital required to develop a project.\n\nIn other fields\nIn nuclear fusion research, the term break-even refers to a fusion energy gain factor equal to unity; this is also known as the Lawson criterion. The notion can also be found in more general phenomena, such as percolation. In energy, the break-even point is the point where usable energy gotten from a process equals the input energy.\n\nIn computer science, the term (used infrequently) refers to a point in the life cycle of a programming language where the language can be used to code its own compiler or interpreter. This is also called self-hosting.\n\nIn medicine, it is a postulated state when the advances of medicine permit every year an increase of one year or more of the life expectancy of the living, therefore leading to medical immortality, barring accidental death.\n\nIn soccer, the break-even requirement was adopted by UEFA. It is known as UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulations. Its purpose is to prohibit clubs from spending more money on transfers than they earn as businesses, i.e. revenue per each fiscal year excluding donations from sponsors or advertisers.\n\nReferences\n\nProfit\nPricing\nManagement accounting" ]
[ "The Outfield", "Subsequent efforts and continued success (1987-1991)", "what efforts were made?", "1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'.", "Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?", "Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single \"Since You've Been Gone", "did they win any other awards?", "I don't know.", "what was the biggest success?", "\"Closer to Me\", was a near Top 40 hit, and a second release, \"Winning It All\", gained some notice due to extensive play", "did they break up at any point?", "Simon Dawson, who played on Rockeye, would eventually become the band's official third member." ]	C_ca39bc01bfb047f687650f5d6bc7ec9b_0	where did they play?	6	where did The Outfield play?	The Outfield	1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single "Since You've Been Gone" (not to be confused with the 1970s Rainbow and Head East hit of the same name) and the minor radio/MTV hit "No Surrender", and the album was certified Gold in the US A US summer tour opening for Night Ranger followed. For the group's third album, 1989's Voices of Babylon, a new producer (David Kahne) and sound was evident. The title track was a Top 25 single and "My Paradise" was a mid-sized album-rock hit, but overall the group's popularity continued to decline. After the Babylon LP, Alan Jackman parted ways with the band and was replaced for a concert tour by Paul Read. Spinks and Lewis continued as a duo, switched labels and began recording Diamond Days for MCA. Playing drums on the disc was session drummer Simon Dawson. The LP, released in 1990, produced a Top 30 US hit, "For You". Quick to follow was "One Hot Country", included on the soundtrack for the 1991 action film If Looks Could Kill. The Outfield returned with 1992's Rockeye. Its leadoff single, "Closer to Me", was a near Top 40 hit, and a second release, "Winning It All", gained some notice due to extensive play during NBC's NBA Finals coverage, NBA Superstars series featuring Larry Bird, the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics and the film The Mighty Ducks. Simon Dawson, who played on Rockeye, would eventually become the band's official third member. CANNOTANSWER	US summer tour	The Outfield were an English rock band based in London, England. The band achieved success in the mid-1980s and are best remembered for their hit single, "Your Love". The band's lineup consisted of guitarist John Spinks, vocalist and bassist Tony Lewis, and drummer Alan Jackman. They had an unusual experience for a British band in that they enjoyed commercial success in the US, but never in their homeland. The band began recording during the mid-1980s, and released their first album, Play Deep, in 1985 through Columbia Records. The album reached No. 9 on the Billboard 200 list and then reached triple platinum in the United States. The band's single "Your Love" reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 as well as No. 7 on the Mainstream Rock chart, and it became their signature song. The band continued to record and tour through the 1980s and then into the early 1990s. While subsequent albums Bangin' (1987) and Voices of Babylon (1989) saw some chart successes, the group's popularity waned. Drummer Alan Jackman left and, now as a duo, they recorded Diamond Days in 1991. After the disappointing response to their 1992 album Rockeye, which represented a shift towards progressive rock and arena rock, the group essentially disbanded in the 1990s. They resumed touring in 1998, and thereafter released two live albums via their website, along with a new studio album, Any Time Now in 2004, which was later re-released in 2006. In 2011, the band released their final album, Replay, with original drummer Alan Jackman re-joining the band. Spinks died in 2014 after which the group officially disbanded. On 22 March 2018, lead singer/bassist Tony Lewis announced a solo album called Out of the Darkness, which was released on 29 June 2018 through Madison Records. Two of the original members have died: John Spinks in 2014, from cancer; and Tony Lewis in 2020. History Formation and commercial success (1984–1986) Bassist/singer Tony Lewis, guitarist/keyboardist and songwriter John Spinks and drummer Alan Jackman played together in the late 1970s in a straightforward power pop band called Sirius B. After rehearsing for about six months and playing several gigs, their style did not match the punk rock that was surging in popularity in England and they broke up. Several years afterward, the three gathered back together in London's East End under the name The Baseball Boys. They performed in and around England until a demo got them signed to Columbia/CBS Records in 1984. Spinks adopted the name 'Baseball Boys' from a teen gang called "The Baseball Furies" in the cult film The Warriors, a movie that he had just seen. Although he used the name as a joke and "just to be outrageous", record company people responded favourably. The band got a reputation as a very "American-sounding" group and signed in the US after playing for just a few months in England. Their manager, an American living in England, recommended a new band name with a similar attitude since 'Baseball Boys' seemed too "tacky" and "tongue-in-cheek". Spinks has said, "The Outfield was the most left-wing kind of thing we liked." Spinks expressed an interest in the American sport of baseball, while also being a devoted fan of association football. He claimed that the group "didn't know what an outfield was" until they visited the U.S., and that, "We're just learning about baseball. It's an acquired taste and we're trying to acquire a taste for it." He expounded upon this in a Chicago Tribune piece: Play Deep Their debut album, Play Deep produced by William Wittman, was issued in 1985 and was a success. The album reached triple platinum sales status and the Top 10 in the US album charts; it also featured a Top 10 single entry with "Your Love", which peaked at No. 6. It went on to be featured in a number of 80s-themed compilation albums, and over 1,000 covers and remixes by other artists have been released physically and/or online. The band toured extensively, opening for Journey and Starship. Spinks made a point of mentioning in interviews that the band was "totally into not smoking or doing drugs". Bangin’ 1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single "Since You've Been Gone" (not to be confused with the 1970s Rainbow and Head East hit of the same name), which also hit #11 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart. Furthermore, they had a minor radio/MTV hit "No Surrender". The album sold reasonably well and was certified Gold in the United States. A US summer tour opening for Night Ranger followed. Voices of Babylon For the group's third album, 1989's Voices of Babylon, a new producer (David Kahne) and sound was evident. The title track was a Top 25 single and hit #2 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart . The follow-up song, "My Paradise", was a mid-sized album-rock hit reaching #34 in the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart but overall the group's popularity continued to decline. Diamond Days After the Babylon LP, Alan Jackman parted ways with the band and was replaced for a concert tour by Paul Read. Spinks and Lewis continued as a duo, switched labels and began recording Diamond Days for MCA. Playing drums on the disc was session drummer Simon Dawson. The LP, released in 1990, produced a Top 30 US hit, "For You". Quick to follow was "One Hot Country", included on the soundtrack for the 1991 action film If Looks Could Kill. Later years and aftermath The Outfield returned with 1992's Rockeye. Its leadoff single, "Closer to Me", was a near Top 40 hit, and a second release, "Winning It All", gained some notice due to extensive play during NBC's NBA Finals coverage, NBA Superstars series featuring Larry Bird, the 1992 Summer Olympics, Chicago Bulls championship ring ceremonies and the film The Mighty Ducks. Simon Dawson, who played on Rockeye, would eventually become the band's official third member. The band took an extended hiatus during the mid-1990s as changing musical fashions, especially the popularity of edgier bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam, made life difficult for older bands with a less fashionable aesthetic. The Outfield returned to their East End roots, and often played low-key gigs at a local pub, where much of the clientele were unaware that the group had sold millions of records in the US. Unfortunately, this situation was typical of the problems The Outfield had faced in their homeland: little recognition and a much smaller following than they had experienced in the US. Nevertheless, the band would reappear with a fan-club-only release, entitled It Ain't Over..., and resume touring. Soon thereafter, in 1999, they released Extra Innings, an odds-and-ends compilation of new and older, unreleased songs. In the early 2000s, the band issued two live collections via their official website: Live in Brazil and The Outfield Live. In 2004, the band released Any Time Now, a new studio album, through Tower Records, and later released a new version of the album in March 2006 through Sidewinder Records. In 2009, the original line up of John Spinks, Tony Lewis and Alan Jackman returned to a London recording studio to record their first album together since Voices of Babylon was recorded in 1988. In addition, The Outfield announced Brent Bitner had taken over the band's management and launched their official Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace pages in November 2009. On 22 March 2011, The Outfield announced that their upcoming album would be called Replay. Replay was recorded in various studios in the south of England that included production work at the legendary Abbey Road Studios. Replay was produced by The Outfield and Brent Bitner with executive production by John Spinks. On 28 June 2011, Replay was released to rave reviews. The lead single, "California Sun", was a regional number one AOR chart hit and has subsequently been the second most added song on AC radio as of 15 August 2011. A limited advanced release of the band's possible second single, "A Long, Long Time Ago", reached number one on Worldwide FM ClassX Radio's AOR chart in the second week of August 2011. In 2013, the band rerecorded vocals to their single "Your Love" to be incorporated into American DJ Morgan Page's reworking of the song, which was released in the summer of that year. Though credited to Page, the single was listed as featuring The Outfield. On 9 July 2014, John Spinks died of liver cancer. He was 60 years old. After taking a few years off from music, lead singer/bassist Tony Lewis announced his return with a solo album, Out of the Darkness, which was released on 29 June 2018 through Madison Records and with the help of his wife Carol and their collaborative songwriting. On 20 October 2020, singer Tony Lewis died suddenly and unexpectedly at his home near London. Style and influences The Outfield were considered a pop rock, power pop, or a new wave group. Annelise Wamsley of the Tampa Bay Times described the band's style in 1987: "the Outfield specializes in what you could call an early '80s American Sound. It's music by recipe: You to take hyper-macho hard rock and tone it down so it will appeal to the over-17 set. You need a simple hook that can be repeated a dozen or so times, lots of electric guitar solos, a standard rock beat and basic lyrics." John Spinks said in 1986 interview with the Los Angeles Times that he was very influenced by "the music that gives me a rush" and that he "grew up on the Beatles". Interestingly, it was also said that the band wanted to be a "car stereo sort of poppy version of the band Rush. "61 Seconds and "Mystery Man" are evidence of this. He also cited contemporaries Journey, Foreigner, and Mr. Mister – particularly the latter's hit "Broken Wings". In that interview, he expanded upon the band's strong foundation in melody: Wamsely made a similar remark, writing, "This is the stuff people listen to in their cars, on the way to work or play at high school dances." Criticism often centered on their generic sound. "The music is hopelessly, numbingly derivative of just about every Journey/Foreigner/Cars cliché in the book — with none of the style that makes those bands special," said Matt Damsker, rock critic for the Hartford Courant. Members Final known lineup Tony Lewis – vocals, bass guitar (1984–2014; died 2020) John Spinks – guitar, vocals (1984–2014; died 2014) Alan Jackman – drums, percussion (1984–1989, 2009–2014) Former member Simon Dawson – drums (1989–2009) Discography Studio albums Compilations Playing the Field (1992) Big Innings: The Best of The Outfield (1996) Super Hits (1998) Demo and Rarities (2010) Playlist: The Very Best of The Outfield (2011) The Baseball Boys: Early Demos and Rare Tracks (2020) Final Innings (2021) Live albums Live in Brazil (2001) The Outfield Live (2005) Singles Featured singles Music videos References External links Tony Lewis's official website The Outfield at AllMusic The Outfield at Legacy Recordings The Outfield at 45cat.com English new wave musical groups English power pop groups Musical groups from London Musical groups established in 1983 Musical groups disestablished in 2014 Columbia Records artists MCA Records artists 1983 establishments in England 2014 disestablishments in England	true	[ "The 2020 NC State Wolfpack women's soccer team represented NC State University during the 2020 NCAA Division I women's soccer season. The Wolfpack were led by head coach Tim Santoro, in his ninth season. They played home games at Dail Soccer Field. This was the team's 37th season playing organized women's college soccer and their 34th playing in the Atlantic Coast Conference.\n\nDue to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ACC played a reduced schedule in 2020 and the NCAA Tournament was postponed to 2021. The ACC did not play a spring league schedule, but did allow teams to play non-conference games that would count toward their 2020 record in the lead up to the NCAA Tournament.\n\nThe Wolfpack did not play in the fall season. However, they did resume play for the spring non-conference season.\n\nThe Wolfpack finished the spring season 5–3–1 and did not receive an at-large invitation to the NCAA Tournament. Their non-invitation broke a four-year streak of being invited to the tournament.\n\nPrevious season \n\nThe Wolfpack finished the season 12–7–4, 4–2–4 in ACC play to finish in fifth place. As the fifth seed in the ACC Tournament, they defeated Louisville in the Quarterfinals before falling to eventual champions North Carolina in the Semifinals. They received an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament where they defeated Navy and Arkansas before losing to BYU in the Round of 16.\n\nSquad\n\nRoster\n\nUpdated March 12, 2021\n\nTeam Management\n\nSource:\n\nSchedule\n\nSource:\n\n\|-\n!colspan=6 style=\"\"\| Spring Regular season\n\nRankings\n\nFall 2020\n\nSpring 2021\n\nReferences\n\nNC State\nNC State Wolfpack women's soccer seasons\n2020 in sports in North Carolina", "The Zanesville Mark Grays were an Ohio League and Independent football team that existed for seven seasons. They played in 4 Ohio League seasons.\n\nOhio League\nTheir first season was in 1916. They played two games against the same team, the \"Newark Fitzsimmons\". They lost both games. The next year they played two games against the Fitzsimmons, and they won both. In 1918 they did not play any games. In 1919 they played 8 games and had a 7–1 record.\n\nIndependent\nIn 1920 they played 6 games and had a record of 3-1-2. They played two games against the Columbus Panhandles, an NFL (then known as the APFA) team. They did not play in 1921. Their last season was in 1922 where they had a 1–0 record.\n\nReferences\n\nAmerican football teams established in 1916\nAmerican football teams disestablished in 1922\nDefunct American football teams in Ohio" ]
[ "The Outfield", "Subsequent efforts and continued success (1987-1991)", "what efforts were made?", "1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'.", "Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?", "Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single \"Since You've Been Gone", "did they win any other awards?", "I don't know.", "what was the biggest success?", "\"Closer to Me\", was a near Top 40 hit, and a second release, \"Winning It All\", gained some notice due to extensive play", "did they break up at any point?", "Simon Dawson, who played on Rockeye, would eventually become the band's official third member.", "where did they play?", "US summer tour" ]	C_ca39bc01bfb047f687650f5d6bc7ec9b_0	did they play anywhere else?	7	did The Outfield play anywhere else, besides US summer tour?	The Outfield	1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single "Since You've Been Gone" (not to be confused with the 1970s Rainbow and Head East hit of the same name) and the minor radio/MTV hit "No Surrender", and the album was certified Gold in the US A US summer tour opening for Night Ranger followed. For the group's third album, 1989's Voices of Babylon, a new producer (David Kahne) and sound was evident. The title track was a Top 25 single and "My Paradise" was a mid-sized album-rock hit, but overall the group's popularity continued to decline. After the Babylon LP, Alan Jackman parted ways with the band and was replaced for a concert tour by Paul Read. Spinks and Lewis continued as a duo, switched labels and began recording Diamond Days for MCA. Playing drums on the disc was session drummer Simon Dawson. The LP, released in 1990, produced a Top 30 US hit, "For You". Quick to follow was "One Hot Country", included on the soundtrack for the 1991 action film If Looks Could Kill. The Outfield returned with 1992's Rockeye. Its leadoff single, "Closer to Me", was a near Top 40 hit, and a second release, "Winning It All", gained some notice due to extensive play during NBC's NBA Finals coverage, NBA Superstars series featuring Larry Bird, the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics and the film The Mighty Ducks. Simon Dawson, who played on Rockeye, would eventually become the band's official third member. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER	The Outfield were an English rock band based in London, England. The band achieved success in the mid-1980s and are best remembered for their hit single, "Your Love". The band's lineup consisted of guitarist John Spinks, vocalist and bassist Tony Lewis, and drummer Alan Jackman. They had an unusual experience for a British band in that they enjoyed commercial success in the US, but never in their homeland. The band began recording during the mid-1980s, and released their first album, Play Deep, in 1985 through Columbia Records. The album reached No. 9 on the Billboard 200 list and then reached triple platinum in the United States. The band's single "Your Love" reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 as well as No. 7 on the Mainstream Rock chart, and it became their signature song. The band continued to record and tour through the 1980s and then into the early 1990s. While subsequent albums Bangin' (1987) and Voices of Babylon (1989) saw some chart successes, the group's popularity waned. Drummer Alan Jackman left and, now as a duo, they recorded Diamond Days in 1991. After the disappointing response to their 1992 album Rockeye, which represented a shift towards progressive rock and arena rock, the group essentially disbanded in the 1990s. They resumed touring in 1998, and thereafter released two live albums via their website, along with a new studio album, Any Time Now in 2004, which was later re-released in 2006. In 2011, the band released their final album, Replay, with original drummer Alan Jackman re-joining the band. Spinks died in 2014 after which the group officially disbanded. On 22 March 2018, lead singer/bassist Tony Lewis announced a solo album called Out of the Darkness, which was released on 29 June 2018 through Madison Records. Two of the original members have died: John Spinks in 2014, from cancer; and Tony Lewis in 2020. History Formation and commercial success (1984–1986) Bassist/singer Tony Lewis, guitarist/keyboardist and songwriter John Spinks and drummer Alan Jackman played together in the late 1970s in a straightforward power pop band called Sirius B. After rehearsing for about six months and playing several gigs, their style did not match the punk rock that was surging in popularity in England and they broke up. Several years afterward, the three gathered back together in London's East End under the name The Baseball Boys. They performed in and around England until a demo got them signed to Columbia/CBS Records in 1984. Spinks adopted the name 'Baseball Boys' from a teen gang called "The Baseball Furies" in the cult film The Warriors, a movie that he had just seen. Although he used the name as a joke and "just to be outrageous", record company people responded favourably. The band got a reputation as a very "American-sounding" group and signed in the US after playing for just a few months in England. Their manager, an American living in England, recommended a new band name with a similar attitude since 'Baseball Boys' seemed too "tacky" and "tongue-in-cheek". Spinks has said, "The Outfield was the most left-wing kind of thing we liked." Spinks expressed an interest in the American sport of baseball, while also being a devoted fan of association football. He claimed that the group "didn't know what an outfield was" until they visited the U.S., and that, "We're just learning about baseball. It's an acquired taste and we're trying to acquire a taste for it." He expounded upon this in a Chicago Tribune piece: Play Deep Their debut album, Play Deep produced by William Wittman, was issued in 1985 and was a success. The album reached triple platinum sales status and the Top 10 in the US album charts; it also featured a Top 10 single entry with "Your Love", which peaked at No. 6. It went on to be featured in a number of 80s-themed compilation albums, and over 1,000 covers and remixes by other artists have been released physically and/or online. The band toured extensively, opening for Journey and Starship. Spinks made a point of mentioning in interviews that the band was "totally into not smoking or doing drugs". Bangin’ 1987 saw the release of their second album, Bangin'. This album did not achieve the acclaim of Play Deep, but it did spawn a Top 40 single "Since You've Been Gone" (not to be confused with the 1970s Rainbow and Head East hit of the same name), which also hit #11 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart. Furthermore, they had a minor radio/MTV hit "No Surrender". The album sold reasonably well and was certified Gold in the United States. A US summer tour opening for Night Ranger followed. Voices of Babylon For the group's third album, 1989's Voices of Babylon, a new producer (David Kahne) and sound was evident. The title track was a Top 25 single and hit #2 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart . The follow-up song, "My Paradise", was a mid-sized album-rock hit reaching #34 in the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart but overall the group's popularity continued to decline. Diamond Days After the Babylon LP, Alan Jackman parted ways with the band and was replaced for a concert tour by Paul Read. Spinks and Lewis continued as a duo, switched labels and began recording Diamond Days for MCA. Playing drums on the disc was session drummer Simon Dawson. The LP, released in 1990, produced a Top 30 US hit, "For You". Quick to follow was "One Hot Country", included on the soundtrack for the 1991 action film If Looks Could Kill. Later years and aftermath The Outfield returned with 1992's Rockeye. Its leadoff single, "Closer to Me", was a near Top 40 hit, and a second release, "Winning It All", gained some notice due to extensive play during NBC's NBA Finals coverage, NBA Superstars series featuring Larry Bird, the 1992 Summer Olympics, Chicago Bulls championship ring ceremonies and the film The Mighty Ducks. Simon Dawson, who played on Rockeye, would eventually become the band's official third member. The band took an extended hiatus during the mid-1990s as changing musical fashions, especially the popularity of edgier bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam, made life difficult for older bands with a less fashionable aesthetic. The Outfield returned to their East End roots, and often played low-key gigs at a local pub, where much of the clientele were unaware that the group had sold millions of records in the US. Unfortunately, this situation was typical of the problems The Outfield had faced in their homeland: little recognition and a much smaller following than they had experienced in the US. Nevertheless, the band would reappear with a fan-club-only release, entitled It Ain't Over..., and resume touring. Soon thereafter, in 1999, they released Extra Innings, an odds-and-ends compilation of new and older, unreleased songs. In the early 2000s, the band issued two live collections via their official website: Live in Brazil and The Outfield Live. In 2004, the band released Any Time Now, a new studio album, through Tower Records, and later released a new version of the album in March 2006 through Sidewinder Records. In 2009, the original line up of John Spinks, Tony Lewis and Alan Jackman returned to a London recording studio to record their first album together since Voices of Babylon was recorded in 1988. In addition, The Outfield announced Brent Bitner had taken over the band's management and launched their official Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace pages in November 2009. On 22 March 2011, The Outfield announced that their upcoming album would be called Replay. Replay was recorded in various studios in the south of England that included production work at the legendary Abbey Road Studios. Replay was produced by The Outfield and Brent Bitner with executive production by John Spinks. On 28 June 2011, Replay was released to rave reviews. The lead single, "California Sun", was a regional number one AOR chart hit and has subsequently been the second most added song on AC radio as of 15 August 2011. A limited advanced release of the band's possible second single, "A Long, Long Time Ago", reached number one on Worldwide FM ClassX Radio's AOR chart in the second week of August 2011. In 2013, the band rerecorded vocals to their single "Your Love" to be incorporated into American DJ Morgan Page's reworking of the song, which was released in the summer of that year. Though credited to Page, the single was listed as featuring The Outfield. On 9 July 2014, John Spinks died of liver cancer. He was 60 years old. After taking a few years off from music, lead singer/bassist Tony Lewis announced his return with a solo album, Out of the Darkness, which was released on 29 June 2018 through Madison Records and with the help of his wife Carol and their collaborative songwriting. On 20 October 2020, singer Tony Lewis died suddenly and unexpectedly at his home near London. Style and influences The Outfield were considered a pop rock, power pop, or a new wave group. Annelise Wamsley of the Tampa Bay Times described the band's style in 1987: "the Outfield specializes in what you could call an early '80s American Sound. It's music by recipe: You to take hyper-macho hard rock and tone it down so it will appeal to the over-17 set. You need a simple hook that can be repeated a dozen or so times, lots of electric guitar solos, a standard rock beat and basic lyrics." John Spinks said in 1986 interview with the Los Angeles Times that he was very influenced by "the music that gives me a rush" and that he "grew up on the Beatles". Interestingly, it was also said that the band wanted to be a "car stereo sort of poppy version of the band Rush. "61 Seconds and "Mystery Man" are evidence of this. He also cited contemporaries Journey, Foreigner, and Mr. Mister – particularly the latter's hit "Broken Wings". In that interview, he expanded upon the band's strong foundation in melody: Wamsely made a similar remark, writing, "This is the stuff people listen to in their cars, on the way to work or play at high school dances." Criticism often centered on their generic sound. "The music is hopelessly, numbingly derivative of just about every Journey/Foreigner/Cars cliché in the book — with none of the style that makes those bands special," said Matt Damsker, rock critic for the Hartford Courant. Members Final known lineup Tony Lewis – vocals, bass guitar (1984–2014; died 2020) John Spinks – guitar, vocals (1984–2014; died 2014) Alan Jackman – drums, percussion (1984–1989, 2009–2014) Former member Simon Dawson – drums (1989–2009) Discography Studio albums Compilations Playing the Field (1992) Big Innings: The Best of The Outfield (1996) Super Hits (1998) Demo and Rarities (2010) Playlist: The Very Best of The Outfield (2011) The Baseball Boys: Early Demos and Rare Tracks (2020) Final Innings (2021) Live albums Live in Brazil (2001) The Outfield Live (2005) Singles Featured singles Music videos References External links Tony Lewis's official website The Outfield at AllMusic The Outfield at Legacy Recordings The Outfield at 45cat.com English new wave musical groups English power pop groups Musical groups from London Musical groups established in 1983 Musical groups disestablished in 2014 Columbia Records artists MCA Records artists 1983 establishments in England 2014 disestablishments in England	false	[ "\"Be Someone Else\" is a song by Slimmy, released in 2010 as the lead single from his second studio album Be Someone Else. The single wasn't particularly successful, charting anywhere.\nA music video was also made for \"Be Someone Else\", produced by Riot Films. It premiered on 27 June 2010 on YouTube.\n\nBackground\n\"Be Someone Else\" was unveiled as the album's lead single. The song was written by Fernandes and produced by Quico Serrano and Mark J Turner. It was released to MySpace on 1 January 2010.\n\nMusic video\nA music video was also made for \"Be Someone Else\", produced by Riot Films. It premiered on 27 June 2010 on YouTube. The music video features two different scenes which alternate with each other many times during the video. The first scene features Slimmy performing the song with an electric guitar and the second scene features Slimmy performing with the band in the background.\n\nChart performance\nThe single wasn't particularly successful, charting anywhere.\n\nLive performances\n A Very Slimmy Tour\n Be Someone Else Tour\n\nTrack listing\n\nDigital single\n\"Be Someone Else\" (album version) - 3:22\n\nPersonnel\nTaken from the album's booklet.\n\nPaulo Fernandes – main vocals, guitar\nPaulo Garim – bass\nTó-Zé – drums\n\nRelease history\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nOfficial music video at YouTube.\n\n2010 singles\nEnglish-language Portuguese songs\n2009 songs", "Tropicario is a Finnish public aquarium, that was previously located in Hämeenlinna, Finland; due to the lack of visitors the park relocated to Helsinki, Finland in February 2007. The public aquarium is specialized in snakes and lizards.\nOn their website they claim to have more Constrictor species than anywhere else in Scandinavia.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nZoos in Finland\nBuildings and structures in Helsinki" ]
[ "Booker T (wrestler)", "Harlem Heat (1993-1997)" ]	C_1f3ea57e1286415abc8b8322888efbdf_1	How did Harlem Heat start?	1	How did Harlem Heat start?	Booker T (wrestler)	Booker and his brother Stevie Ray signed with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) after Sid Vicious recommended they sign with the company. In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane. They became heels and were on Harley Race and Col. Rob Parker's team in the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster. They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled. In 1994, they acquired the services of Sensational Sherri, dubbed 'Sister' Sherri, as their manager and changed their names back to Booker T and Stevie Ray, at their request. By the end of 1994, they held the WCW Tag Team Championship after defeating Stars and Stripes (The Patriot and Marcus Alexander Bagwell) in December. After dropping the title to The Nasty Boys, Harlem Heat regained the belts on June 24, 1995. Afterward, Harlem Heat got into a feud with Col. Parker's "Stud Stable" of "Dirty" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Parker and Sherri were carrying on a love affair and Parker eventually left the Stud Stable in favor of the Heat to be with Sherri. Harlem Heat won the WCW World Tag Team titles at Fall Brawl 1995, defeating Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Their third title reign only lasted one day, but the duo regained the tag team title nine days later from The American Males (Buff Bagwell and Scotty Riggs). On the June 24, 1996 Nitro, Harlem Heat defeated Lex Luger and Sting to capture their fifth WCW World Tag Team titles. Three days after losing the tag team titles to the Steiner Brothers, Harlem Heat regained the titles back from the Steiners on July 27. On September 23, Booker T and Stevie Ray were defeated by Public Enemy (Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge) but took the titles back for the seventh time on October 1. They lost the Tag Team Championship to the Outsiders (Kevin Nash and Scott Hall) on October 27. Subsequently, they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces. They then entered into a brief feud against Col. Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they won. In 1997, they feuded with Public Enemy (Grunge & Rocco), The Steiners, and the nWo. In fall 1997, they fired Sherri and added a new manager, Jacqueline. They were briefly put out of action by the nWo and returned to feud with the Faces of Fear (Meng and The Barbarian). Stevie then took five months off from WCW to recover from an ankle injury and Jacqueline left for the WWF. CANNOTANSWER	In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane.	Booker T. Huffman Jr. (born March 1, 1966) better known by his ring name Booker T, is an American professional wrestler, professional wrestling promoter and color commentator. He is currently signed to WWE, and is also the owner and founder of the independent promotion Reality of Wrestling (ROW) in Texas City, Texas. Booker has been named by peers and industry commentators as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of his era; he was voted WWE's greatest World Heavyweight Champion in a 2013 viewer poll. Booker is best known for his time in World Championship Wrestling (WCW), the World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment (WWF/E), and Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA), holding 35 championships between those organizations. He is the most decorated wrestler in WCW history, having held 21 titles, including a record six WCW World Television Championships (along with being the first African American titleholder), and a record eleven WCW World Tag Team Championships: ten as one half of Harlem Heat with his brother, Lash "Stevie Ray" Huffman in WCW (most reigns within that company), and one in the WWF with Test. Booker was the final WCW World Heavyweight Champion and WCW United States Heavyweight Champion within the active WCW organisation. Booker is a six-time world champion in professional wrestling, having won the WCW World Heavyweight Championship five times, and WWE's World Heavyweight Championship once. With his fifth WCW Championship win (which occurred in the WWF), Booker T became the second African-American to win a world championship in WWF/E (after The Rock), and also the first to be of non-mixed race. He is also the winner of the 2006 King of the Ring tournament, the sixteenth Triple Crown Champion, and the eighth Grand Slam Champion (under original format) in WWE history. As the ninth WCW Triple Crown Champion, Booker is one of five men to achieve both the WWE and WCW Triple Crowns. He has headlined multiple pay-per-view events for the WWF/E, WCW and TNA throughout his career. Booker was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame on April 6, 2013, by his brother, Lash. Both he and Lash were inducted together into the 2019 class on April 6, 2019 as Harlem Heat, rendering Booker a two-time Hall of Famer. Early life Huffman was born the youngest of eight children, in Plain Dealing, Louisiana, though his birthplace is often misidentified as Houston, Texas. By the time Booker was 13, both of his parents had died and he lived with his 16-year-old sister. He would move in with his older brother Lash "Stevie Ray" Huffman at age 17. In high school, Huffman was a drum major. He also played football and basketball. Professional wrestling career Early Career (1986–1993) As a single father working at a storage company in Houston, Texas, Huffman was looking to make a better life for himself and his son. His brother Lash (Stevie Ray) suggested that he and Booker check out a new wrestling school being opened, run by Ivan Putski, in conjunction with his Western Wrestling Alliance organization. His boss from the storage company sponsored the money to pay for the wrestling lessons. Booker trained under Scott Casey, who helped to turn Booker's background as a gangster and dancer into "sports entertainment", teaching the newcomer in-ring psychology and ring generalship. Eight weeks later, Booker debuted as "G.I. Bro" on Putski's Western Wrestling Alliance Live! program. The character was a tie-in to the raging Gulf War and the WWF's Sgt. Slaughter angle. Even though the WWA met its demise some time later, Booker continued to wrestle on the Texas independent circuit, often with his brother Lash, who performed as Stevie Ray. They were spotted by Skandor Akbar who hired them to work for the Global Wrestling Federation (GWF), where he and Eddie Gilbert were involved. Gilbert teamed Stevie Ray and Booker T together as the Ebony Experience, and they won the GWF Tag Team Championship on July 31, 1992. During their time with GWF, they held the tag title a total of three times. Subsequently, Booker T and Stevie Ray left the GWF to work for World Championship Wrestling. World Championship Wrestling Harlem Heat (1993–1997) Booker and his brother Stevie Ray signed with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) after Sid Vicious recommended they sign with the company. In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane. They became heels and were on Harley Race and Col. Rob Parker's team in the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster. They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled. In 1994, they acquired the services of Sensational Sherri, dubbed 'Sister' Sherri, as their manager and changed their names back to Booker T and Stevie Ray, at their request. By the end of 1994, they held the WCW Tag Team Championship after defeating Stars and Stripes (The Patriot and Marcus Alexander Bagwell) in December. After dropping the title to The Nasty Boys, Harlem Heat regained the belts on June 24, 1995. Afterward, Harlem Heat got into a feud with Col. Parker's "Stud Stable" of "Dirty" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Parker and Sherri were carrying on a love affair and Parker eventually left the Stud Stable in favor of the Heat to be with Sherri. Harlem Heat won the WCW World Tag Team titles at Fall Brawl 1995, defeating Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Their third title reign only lasted one day, but the duo regained the tag team title nine days later from The American Males (Buff Bagwell and Scotty Riggs). On the June 24, 1996 Nitro, Harlem Heat defeated Lex Luger and Sting to capture their fifth WCW World Tag Team titles. Three days after losing the tag team titles to the Steiner Brothers, Harlem Heat regained the titles back from the Steiners on July 27. On September 23, Booker T and Stevie Ray were defeated by Public Enemy (Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge) but took the titles back for the seventh time on October 1. They lost the Tag Team Championship to the Outsiders (Kevin Nash and Scott Hall) on October 27. Subsequently, they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces. They then entered into a brief feud against Col. Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they won. In 1997, they feuded with Public Enemy (Grunge & Rocco), The Steiners, and the nWo. In fall 1997, they fired Sherri and added a new manager, Jacqueline. They were briefly put out of action by the nWo and returned to feud with the Faces of Fear (Meng and The Barbarian). Stevie then took five months off from WCW to recover from an ankle injury and Jacqueline left for the WWF. World Television Champion (1997–1999) Booker made the transition into singles action and won the WCW World Television Championship from Disco Inferno on the December 29, 1997 episode of Nitro. Booker feuded over the title with Perry Saturn and Rick Martel culminating in a gauntlet match at SuperBrawl VIII. Martel, the man that was originally supposed to win the match, went down early due to a knee injury, meaning the finish and the remainder of the match had to be called in the ring. During spring 1998, Booker began feuding with Chris Benoit. Benoit cost Booker the TV title during a match against Fit Finlay. As a result, Booker and Benoit engaged in a "best-of-seven series" with the winner meeting Finlay for the title. After seven matches and interference from Bret Hart and Stevie Ray, Booker T won the series, and on June 14, regained the Television Championship. Booker scored a clean pinfall victory over Bret Hart on the edition of February 22 of Nitro. The following month, he regained the TV Championship from Scott Steiner, who, in turn, defeated Booker in the finals of the WCW United States Heavyweight Championship tournament. Booker lost the Television title to Rick Steiner a month later at Slamboree. Harlem Heat reunion (1999–2000) By mid-1999, Booker had convinced his brother, Stevie Ray, to leave the nWo and reunite Harlem Heat. Harlem Heat defeated Bam Bam Bigelow and Kanyon for the WCW World Tag Team titles at Road Wild. They lost the WCW World Tag Team titles to Barry and Kendall Windham on August 23, but Harlem Heat regained them about a month later at Fall Brawl. When The Filthy Animals were stripped of the WCW World Tag Team belts due to an injury suffered by Rey Mysterio Jr., the title was put up in a three-way dance at Halloween Havoc. Harlem Heat claimed their tenth WCW World Tag Team title defeating Hugh Morrus and Brian Knobs and Konnan and Kidman. By late 1999, a female bodybuilder named Midnight had joined Harlem Heat. Stevie neglected her help and started disputing with Booker over her. Stevie Ray eventually challenged Midnight in a match that decided whether or not she would stay with Harlem Heat. After being defeated with a surprise small package, Stevie Ray turned on both Booker and Midnight to form Harlem Heat, Inc. with Big T, Kash, and J. Biggs. Stevie Ray and Big T dubbed themselves Harlem Heat 2000. Throughout this period, Huffman was referred to simply as Booker, as Harlem Heat 2000 won the rights to the name "T" in a match with Big T against Booker on February 20, 2000 at SuperBrawl X. Kidman and Booker T defeated Harlem Heat 2000 (Ray and Big T) at Uncensored 2000. When Vince Russo and Eric Bischoff formed The New Blood, Huffman eventually completely changed his in-ring persona, helping lead Captain Rection's military-themed Misfits In Action stable as G.I. Bro, reprising his gimmicks from his days in the WWA. He defeated Shawn Stasiak at the Great American Bash in a Boot Camp match. He returned to the Booker T name on the June 19 Nitro, promoting Rection to the status of General and demanding the Misfits start standing up to the New Blood. WCW World Heavyweight Champion (2000–2001) Huffman was elevated to main event status in 2000. After WCW booker Vince Russo grew disgruntled with Hulk Hogan's politics, he fired Hogan during the live broadcast of Bash at the Beach and announced an impromptu match between Jeff Jarrett and Huffman for the WCW World Heavyweight Championship. Huffman won the match, in the process becoming the second ever African American champion in WCW after Ron Simmons, and the third African American to win a World Heavyweight title. He lost the title to Kevin Nash on August 28 on Nitro. He regained the title a few weeks later in a steel cage match with Nash at Fall Brawl, but again lost the title, this time to Vince Russo himself in a cage match (Russo was speared out of the cage by Goldberg and won the title), Russo vacated the title and Booker won it for the third time in a San Francisco 49er Box Match against Jeff Jarrett on the October 2 episode of Nitro. Booker's next feud was with Scott Steiner, to whom he eventually lost the title in a Straitjacket steel cage match. Steiner won by TKO when he put an unconscious Booker into the Steiner Recliner at Mayhem. Steiner was WCW's longest reigning champion in years, whilst Booker was briefly out with an injury. Booker returned to the roster and defeated Rick Steiner for the WCW United States Heavyweight Championship at Greed. This made Booker the ninth WCW Triple Crown winner. On the final episode of Nitro, he defeated Scott Steiner to win the WCW World Heavyweight Championship for the fourth time. According to sports journalist Michael Landsberg, Huffman was salaried at "close to a million dollars a year" in WCW. He won a total of twenty-one titles within the organization, making him the most decorated performer in its history. Booker was also the reigning WCW United States Heavyweight Champion and WCW World Heavyweight Champion when he accepted a contract with the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment The Alliance (2001–2002) After WCW was bought by the World Wrestling Federation in March 2001, Booker T made his debut at the King of the Ring pay-per-view in 2001 attacking WWF Champion Stone Cold Steve Austin during his match, promptly injuring him in his very first move in the WWF. He later turned heel and became a leading member of The Alliance during the Invasion storyline. In his debut match in the company, Booker defended his WCW Championship against Buff Bagwell on the July 2 episode of Raw; sports journalist Michael Landsberg reported that many have called this bout "the worst match ever". At InVasion, The Alliance defeated Team WWF when Austin joined the Alliance. On the July 26 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T gave up his WCW United States Championship and handed it over to Chris Kanyon. He later lost the WCW Championship to Kurt Angle, but he went on to win the title back on the July 30 episode of Raw. Booker T kept the title until SummerSlam, when he lost it to The Rock after feuding with him over the similarity in their gimmicks and their identical finishing moves, the Book End/Rock Bottom. Booker T won the WCW Tag Team Championship for an eleventh time, this time with Test, and he also had a WWF Tag Team Championship reign with Test. At the Survivor Series, Booker T was eliminated third by The Rock after a roll-up and eventually The Alliance was defeated, causing them to disband. In its aftermath, Booker remained a heel, and he joined forces with Vince McMahon and The Boss Man in December to feud with Steve Austin. After Booker T cost Austin a match against Chris Jericho for the Undisputed WWF Championship at Vengeance, Austin gained revenge by attacking Booker T in a grocery store by covering him in food. Then the week after Booker T vandalized Austin's truck causing Austin to chase Booker T around a bingo hall and a church. Booker T's first WrestleMania appearance was at WrestleMania X8 against Edge, a match he lost. They feuded over who would appear in a fictional Japanese shampoo commercial. When the brand extension was introduced in March, Booker T was drafted to the Raw brand. At Insurrextion, Booker briefly held the WWF Hardcore Championship twice, defeating Stevie Richards only to lose it to Crash Holly seconds later. He then re-defeated Crash and lost the title to Stevie Richards a few minutes later. Feud with Evolution (2002–2003) Goldust began trying to start a tag team with Booker, but Goldust kept costing Booker matches. With the nWo now operating in WWE, Booker T was eventually invited into the faction. His time there was short-lived, when he was kicked out of the group by Shawn Michaels after a superkick from Michaels. Booker then turned face and found a partnership with Goldust and the pair teamed to battle the nWo. Booker and Goldust had a WWE Tag Team Championship match against The Un-Americans (Christian and Lance Storm) at SummerSlam, but The Un-Americans retained after interference from Test. At No Mercy, Booker and Goldust battled Chris Jericho and Christian for the World Tag Team Championship, but they lost the match with Jericho using the title belt on Goldust. He spent the rest of 2002 teaming with Goldust. They won the World Tag Team Championship at Armageddon in a Tag Team Elimination match defeating the teams of Christian and Chris Jericho, Lance Storm and William Regal, and the Dudley Boyz. They held the belts for about three weeks, when they lost them to Regal and Storm. Booker and Goldust lost the rematch and decided to go their separate ways. The gimmick for Booker and Goldust was Goldust being a strange, yet dependable ally who Booker eventually warmed up to after initial skepticism. By 2003, however, Booker T's popularity had soared and he amicably separated from Goldust, at Goldust's request, in order to pursue the World Heavyweight Championship. In February 2003, he eliminated The Rock to win a battle royal to become the number one contender to the World Heavyweight Championship at WrestleMania XIX. Booker targeted Evolution after Batista and Randy Orton attacked Booker's former partner, Goldust. Several weeks before WrestleMania, the incumbent champion and Evolution's leader, Triple H, cut a controversial promo on Booker T. Triple H downplayed Booker T's WCW success, pointing out that the WCW World Heavyweight Championship had been held by non-wrestlers like booker Vince Russo and actor David Arquette, calling WCW and its title "a joke", despite the fact that, as World Heavyweight Champion, Triple H was holding the WCW World Heavyweight Championship's physical belt, the Big Gold Belt, and that Triple H's Evolution stablemate, Ric Flair, had been a multiple-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion. He said that "people like" Booker T would never win world championships in WWE. This promo is often interpreted as racist due to Triple H referencing Booker T's "nappy" hair and implying that Booker T was just in WWE to dance and entertain for "people like" Triple H. During the WrestleMania XIX press conference Michael Cole asked Triple H as to whether he had deliberately cut a racist promo, Triple H claimed this was not the case and that he was just referring to Booker's criminal past. A week later, Booker attacked Triple H in the bathroom and laid him out after Triple H had thrown a dollar bill at him, ordering Booker to get him a towel. However, Booker T lost to Triple H at WrestleMania. For several weeks, he teamed with Shawn Michaels and Kevin Nash in a feud against Triple H, Ric Flair, and Chris Jericho. At Backlash, Booker's team lost when Triple H pinned Nash after a sledgehammer shot. Various feuds (2003–2005) Afterward, Booker set his sights on the newly reactivated Intercontinental Championship. After losing a battle royal for the title at Judgment Day, Booker feuded with the champion Christian. After a few matches, Booker defeated Christian to become the new Intercontinental Champion on the July 7 episode of Raw. About a month later, because of a nagging back injury, Booker lost the Intercontinental title back to Christian at a non-televised house show on August 10. Booker, meanwhile, was out of action until October. Booker returned on the October 20 episode of Raw and subsequently joined Team Austin at Survivor Series for a match to determine whether Eric Bischoff or Stone Cold Steve Austin (both co-general managers) would be the sole General Manager of Raw. Team Bischoff won the match. Booker then feuded with Mark Henry, who eliminated him in the Survivor Series match. Booker defeated Henry at Armageddon. On the February 16, 2004 episode of Raw, Booker T and Rob Van Dam defeated Ric Flair and Batista for the World Tag Team Championship. Booker and Van Dam held the titles for a month, even defending the belts at WrestleMania XX in a Fatal 4-Way tag team match. Eight days later on the March 22 episode of Raw, they lost the World Tag Team Championship back to Ric Flair and Batista. He and Rob Van Dam, never got their rematch due to Rob Van Dam being drafted to SmackDown! that very same night. On March 23, 2004 he was "traded" (along with the Dudley Boyz) to the SmackDown! brand in exchange for Triple H, but as part of a new storyline, he appeared unhappy with the move calling SmackDown! "the minor leagues" and even disrespected Eddie Guerrero, the brand's WWE Champion, turning heel in the process. Later on, Booker T bragged about how he was the biggest star on SmackDown! and feuded with The Undertaker. Booker tried to utilize voodoo magic to try to overcome his "supernatural" foe; however, it did nothing to prevent him from losing to the Undertaker at Judgment Day. In mid-2004, Booker T set his sights on the United States Championship along with its champion, John Cena. After Cena got on the bad side of General Manager Kurt Angle, he did his best to get the title away from Cena. Cena successfully defended the title at The Great American Bash in a four-way elimination match against Booker, René Duprée, and Rob Van Dam. After Cena was stripped of his title by Angle for "laying a hand" on the GM, Booker took advantage of the situation and won an eight-man elimination match to win the vacant United States Championship, thus becoming the one-hundredth United States Champion in history, in a match that also featured Cena, Dupree, Billy Gunn, Charlie Haas, Luther Reigns, Kenzo Suzuki and Van Dam. Booker won by last eliminating both Cena and Van Dam in the course of less than 10 seconds After Angle was fired by Mr. McMahon for embellishing his injuries, Theodore Long began his first tenure as SmackDown! General Manager, and booked a best-of-five series of matches for the United States Championship between Booker and Cena. The first match took place at SummerSlam in Toronto and saw Cena gain the pinfall victory to go up 1–0 in the series. Booker would bounce back and win the next two matches, on the August 26 edition of SmackDown! in Fresno, California and a live event the next night in Sydney, Australia, to take a 2–1 lead. The next match in the series wouldn't come until the September 16 SmackDown! from Spokane, Washington, where Cena won and tied the series at two apiece. The series culminated at No Mercy, where Cena won the series 3–2, and thusly, the United States Championship. On October 21, SmackDown! General Manager Theodore Long placed Booker in a six-man tag team match with Rob Van Dam and Rey Mysterio against John "Bradshaw" Layfield (JBL), René Duprée, and Kenzo Suzuki. JBL expected Booker to betray his partners, but instead Booker pinned him, thus turning face again. Booker T faced JBL for the WWE Championship at the Survivor Series on November 14, but lost after he was hit in the head with the championship belt. The next night, Booker T demanded a rematch, citing Orlando Jordan's interference. He was then joined by Eddie Guerrero and The Undertaker who also wanted a shot at JBL's title, prompting Theodore Long to make a fatal four-way match for the WWE Championship at Armageddon. Once again, Booker failed to win the title, as JBL retained it. He then briefly teamed with Eddie Guerrero, at one point challenging Mysterio and Van Dam for the WWE Tag Team Championship, and feuded with Heidenreich. Booker won a 30-man Battle Royal dark match at WrestleMania 21 last eliminating Raw's Viscera and Chris Masters. Subsequently, Booker was part of the tournament to name a new number one contender and made it to the Final Four. After Kurt Angle eliminated Booker, he returned the favor, costing Angle the match against JBL. The storyline then turned to a sexual nature, as Angle began stalking Booker's new wife, Sharmell. Booker defeated Angle at Judgment Day. On the May 26 episode of SmackDown!, Booker participated in a "Winners Choice" Battle Royal, with the winner choosing his opponent for the next week. Kurt Angle won and wanted to wrestle Sharmell. Booker protested, and the match was made into a Handicap match. Angle won by pinning Sharmell in a sexual position. The next week, Booker gained revenge on Angle, defeating him with a Scissors Kick. On the June 30 episode of SmackDown!, JBL defeated Christian, The Undertaker, Chris Benoit, Muhammad Hassan, and Booker T in a six-man elimination match for the SmackDown! Championship. During the match, Booker got specifically involved with Christian. Booker later defeated Christian at The Great American Bash. United States Champion (2005–2006) Booker T began teaming with Chris Benoit, eying his United States Championship again. Benoit was allowed to pick his next challenger to see who would face him at No Mercy, so Booker, Christian, and Orlando Jordan tried to impress Benoit by winning matches. He instead decided not choose one opponent, so he made it a fatal four-way for No Mercy, where Benoit successfully defended his title. On the October 21 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T defeated Benoit for the United States Championship, due to unseen help from Sharmell. Theodore Long later showed footage of Sharmell interfering in Booker's matches. Booker went to apologize to Benoit and give him a rematch, but then attacked Benoit, busting him open with the United States title belt and turning heel once again. Booker then boasted that he had been fully aware of what Sharmell had been doing and had been playing dumb to fool everyone. On the November 25 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T defended the United States Championship against Benoit. The match ended when Benoit superplexed Booker and two referees made a three count on either competitor, claiming that their wrestler had won. Booker was stripped of the belt by Theodore Long, because of the confusion of who won since they pinned each other at the same time. Long decided to put Benoit and Booker against each other in a best of seven series, just as the two had in their WCW days. Booker took an early 3–0 lead. In a must win match during Armageddon, Benoit was able to defeat Booker T to bring the series to 3–1. At a house show, Booker was injured, and he did not wrestle again until after the "Best of Seven" series with Benoit was completed. Booker was scheduled to face Benoit in Match 5 of the Best of Seven Series at the December 30 taping of SmackDown!. At the beginning of the show, General Manager Theodore Long said that Booker would have to forfeit. Both Booker and Benoit protested, with Benoit not wanting a cheap victory. Booker managed to persuade Long to allow him to choose a stand-in for the matches. Booker chose Randy Orton as his replacement. Benoit was able to tie the series 3–3 after beating Orton in two consecutive matches on the December 30 and January 6, 2006 episodes of SmackDown!. Orton, however, was able to defeat Benoit in the final match on the January 13 episode of SmackDown! to win the series and the title for Booker T, who held the title until No Way Out where Benoit won it back. On the February 24 episode of SmackDown!, Booker and Sharmell provided guest commentary for a match involving The Boogeyman. After defeating his opponents, Boogeyman dumped a bucket of worms onto the announce table where they were sitting, frightening the two. Over the next few weeks, Boogeyman would stalk Booker and Sharmell. Booker and Boogeyman were set to face off on the March 18 Saturday Night's Main Event XXXII, but the match was canceled due to Booker faking a knee injury to escape competition. The feud eventually culminated at WrestleMania 22, with Booker and Sharmell losing to Boogeyman. The couple received a restraining order against The Boogeyman on the April 7 episode of SmackDown!, ending the feud. King Booker and World Heavyweight Champion (2006–2007) Booker next entered the 2006 King of the Ring tournament on SmackDown!, advancing through to the finals due to a bye as his semi-final opponent, Kurt Angle, was unable to wrestle. The finals were held at Judgment Day where Booker defeated Bobby Lashley. Upon winning the King of the Ring tournament, Booker began wrestling as "King Booker" and began acting like he was an actual monarch ruling "The SmackDown! Kingdom". Booker formed a royal court that included his wife, Queen Sharmell, Sir William Regal, and Sir Finlay, and began including the mannerisms and attire of a stereotypical English-style king as part of the character, all the way down to wearing a crown and cape and speaking in a fake English accent. However, whenever King Booker would get angry he would launch into a tirade in the style of Booker T (an example of this was an episode of SmackDown! where Theodore Long would inform him he would be facing The Undertaker), which lent some comedic aspect to the character; he even went as far as having Lashley kiss his "royal" feet. After gaining his title of King, Booker continued to feud with Lashley. After Lashley defeated John "Bradshaw" Layfield (JBL) for the United States Championship at the end of May, Booker began chasing after the title and even resorted to making Lashley kiss his "royal feet" on the June 2 episode of SmackDown!. The feud ended after a steel cage match on the June 30 episode of SmackDown! where Lashley defeated Booker by escaping the cage to retain the United States Championship. The next week, Booker entered a battle royal on SmackDown! with the winner to challenge Rey Mysterio for his World Heavyweight Championship at The Great American Bash. Booker won the battle royal and then defeated Mysterio at The Great American Bash to win the World Heavyweight Championship after Chavo Guerrero betrayed Mysterio by hitting him with a steel chair. This was Booker's first world championship since joining WWE and the win caused him to proclaim himself as the "King of the World". This win would also make Booker the sixteenth Triple Crown Champion and eighth Grand Slam Champion (under the original format) in the history of the WWE. After Booker won the World Heavyweight Championship, he began a rivalry with the returning former champion Batista, who vowed to regain the title he was forced to forfeit due to injury. This rivalry spilled over to real life when the two got into a legitimate fistfight at a SummerSlam pay-per-view commercial shoot, reportedly due to Batista considering himself superior to the rest of the roster due to his quick climb to main event status. According to sources, both men were left bloodied and bruised, however Booker was reportedly praised by many wrestlers in the back for speaking his mind to Batista about his attitude. At SummerSlam, Booker lost to Batista by disqualification after Queen Sharmell interfered on his behalf (thus retaining the title), but at No Mercy, Booker defeated Batista, Lashley and his own stablemate, Finlay, in a Fatal 4-Way match. Before the match, Booker assaulted Sir William Regal, resulting in the breakup of the King's Court. Despite the break-up of his Court, Booker lost to Batista by disqualification on the October 20 episode on SmackDown!, due to interference from WWE Champion John Cena from Raw and ECW World Champion Big Show, the two of whom King Booker was to face at Cyber Sunday in a "champion of champions" match. At Cyber Sunday, the fans voted for the World Heavyweight Championship to be on the line. Booker retained after defeating Big Show and Cena with help from Kevin Federline. After Cyber Sunday, the feud between King Booker and Batista continued with Batista unable to wrest the title from Booker. Eventually this led to a match at Survivor Series on November 26, where Booker declared that if Batista failed to defeat him this time, it would be the last World Heavyweight Championship match he would receive as long as Booker was champion. At Survivor Series, SmackDown! General Manager Theodore Long decided that if Booker got counted out or disqualified, he would lose the title. Late in the match, Queen Sharmell handed Booker his title belt while referee Nick Patrick was not looking. While she had Patrick distracted, Booker attempted to hit Batista with the belt. Batista moved out of the way, knocked the belt out of Booker's hands and hit him in the head with it, and King Booker lost the World Heavyweight Championship to Batista. After losing the title, Booker feuded alongside former royal court member Finlay against Batista and John Cena, which led up to Armageddon where they lost. While competing in the Royal Rumble match, King Booker was eliminated by Kane. A frustrated Booker returned to the ring illegally and eliminated Kane. This started a short feud between the two resulting in a match at No Way Out, which Kane won. On the February 23 episode of SmackDown!, Booker won a Falls Count Anywhere Money in the Bank qualifying match, defeating Kane (with assistance from The Great Khali) and earned himself a spot in the match at WrestleMania 23. At WrestleMania, Matt Hardy set up Sharmell for a Twist of Fate during the Money in the Bank match with the briefcase in Booker's grasp – thus forcing him to choose between a guaranteed title shot and his wife. He chose to defend Sharmell and lost the match. On the April 6 episode of SmackDown!, Booker attempted to take revenge. However, he lost the match against Matt Hardy, and Sharmell declared her disappointment in him and slapped him. In an attempt to impress Sharmell, Booker attacked The Undertaker but was Tombstoned on an announce table. Booker was removed from television to deal with a knee injury. Draft to RAW, WWE Championship pursuit and departure (2007) On the June 11 episode of Raw, both King Booker and Queen Sharmell were drafted to the Raw brand as part of the WWE Draft. He then began a short feud with John Cena over the WWE Championship, Booker would wrestle Cena in a Five Pack Challenge along with Bobby Lashley, Mick Foley and Randy Orton at Vengeance: Night of Champions for the title in a losing effort. Cena would retain at the event by pinning Foley. On the July 16 episode of Raw, King Booker came to the ring using Triple H's theme music "The King of Kings", even using his video. King Booker declared that neither Triple H nor Jerry Lawler could be known as "The King". Booker began a feud with Lawler, defeating him on the August 6 episode of Raw where the loser had to crown the winner the next week. When the time came, Lawler refused, declaring that Triple H was still a king and announcing that King Booker would battle Triple H at SummerSlam. Booker attacked Lawler, throwing him into the ring post and hitting him with a television monitor. At SummerSlam, Booker lost to the returning Triple H. On the August 27 episode of Raw, Booker wrestled against John Cena in a non-title match, which he lost by disqualification when Randy Orton interfered. In August, he was linked to Signature Pharmacy, a company thought to be distributing performance-enhancing drugs. He was suspended by WWE for violating its Wellness Policy. He denied using any drugs and being a customer of Signature Pharmacy. In October 2007, Booker T requested his and Sharmell's release from their WWE contracts due to the pressure he had in WWE and being burned out, which WWE granted. Total Nonstop Action Wrestling Feud with Bobby Roode (2007–2008) At the Genesis pay-per-view on November 11, 2007, Huffman debuted in Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) as Sting's mystery partner in a tag team match against Kurt Angle and Kevin Nash for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship, reverting to his Booker T character. His wife Sharmell also debuted, interfering in the match on Booker and Sting's behalf when Karen Angle interfered on behalf of Kurt Angle and Nash. On the November 29 episode of Impact!, Booker said he came to TNA to test his skills against the young talent, take TNA to a higher level, and win the TNA World Heavyweight Championship. Robert Roode came to the ring and challenged Booker to a match, claiming he has been pushed down by washed-up wrestlers and has-beens. Booker won his Impact! debut match, but afterwards, Christian Cage and Robert Roode beat down Booker until Kaz made the save. At Turning Point, Booker and Kaz defeated Roode and Cage when Booker pinned Cage. Booker and Sharmell won a mixed tag team match against Robert Roode and Ms. Brooks at Final Resolution. After the match, Roode punched Sharmell in the face, leading to a match at Against All Odds. While the punch was intended to be a work, Roode had in fact made contact with Sharmell during the punch, dislocating her jaw and causing her to be off TV for a few weeks, therefore making it into a shoot. The rivalry, however, went ahead as planned where Booker and Roode wrestled to a double-countout at Against All Odds, which saw them brawl to the parking lot. Roode defeated Booker in strap match at Destination X after hitting Booker with a pair of handcuffs. In a special live episode of Impact!, Booker T and Robert Roode had another outing, this time with the fans being able to vote on the stipulation of the match. At Booker's request during a pre-match promo, the match became a First Blood Match, beating the Last Man Standing and I Quit stipulations. Booker T would go on to win the match-up. At Lockdown, Booker T and Sharmell defeated Robert Roode and Payton Banks after Sharmell pinned Banks with a roll-up. The Main Event Mafia (2008–2010) Booker T turned heel for the first time in TNA at Sacrifice by attacking Christian Cage and Rhino from behind with a steel chair. This came about as a result of losing a tag team match up against Christian Cage and Rhino, with them furthering themselves in the Deuces Wild Tag Team Tournament. Booker then competed in the King of the Mountain match for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship at Slammiversary. He was seconds away from winning the match, when Kevin Nash stopped him and performed a Jackknife Powerbomb; Samoa Joe would later go on to win the match. On the next Impact!, Booker challenged Joe to a title match at Victory Road, which Joe would later accept. Also around this time he reverted to a gimmick similar to his King Booker gimmick albeit while proclaiming himself a supposed king of Africa. The match at Victory Road ended in a draw after Sharmell replaced the referee and counted after the match was already over. At Hard Justice, Samoa Joe defeated Booker after a guitar shot, thus reclaiming physical possession of the title belt, which Booker had kept after Victory Road. Later he introduced the TNA Legends Championship and became the first official champion. Booker T successfully defended the title at Turning Point against Cage. At Final Resolution, Booker T, Kevin Nash, Scott Steiner, and Sting defeated The TNA Front Line (A.J. Styles, Brother Devon, Brother Ray, and Samoa Joe) in an eight-man tag team match to allow Sting to retain his TNA World Heavyweight Championship. At Genesis, Booker T, Scott Steiner, and Cute Kip lost a six-man tag team match to Mick Foley, A.J. Styles, and Brother Devon. The next month at Against All Odds, Booker T defeated Shane Sewell to retain the Legends Championship. Booker T lost the title to A.J. Styles at Destination X. At Lockdown, Team Angle (Booker T, Kevin Nash, Kurt Angle, and Scott Steiner) lost to Team Jarrett (A.J. Styles, Christopher Daniels, Jeff Jarrett, and Samoa Joe) in a Lethal Lockdown match. At Sacrifice, Booker T received a rematch for the Legends Championship, but lost to A.J. Styles in a "I Quit" match. Booker T went go on to form the Mafia's resident tag team with Scott Steiner, and at Victory Road, Steiner and Booker defeated Beer Money, Inc. to win the TNA World Tag Team Championship, marking Booker's 15th World Tag Team title reign overall. Then at Hard Justice, Booker T and Steiner retained the World Tag Team Championship against Team 3D. Prior to No Surrender, Booker, Steiner, and British Invasion won a match to gain the man advantage at No Surrender's Lethal Lockdown match against Team 3D and Beer Money, Inc. Even with the advantage, Booker T's team lost at No Surrender when James Storm of Beer Money pinned Doug Williams of The British Invasion. At Bound for Glory, Booker and Steiner lost the TNA World Tag Team Titles to the British Invasion in a four way Full Metal Mayhem Tag Team match, which also included Team 3D and Beer Money; during the match Booker was taken out on a stretcher. Afterwards it was reported that the PPV had been Booker's final appearance with the company, and his and Sharmell's profiles were removed from the official TNA roster. On May 21, 2010, Booker T made a one night return to TNA at a live event in Lake Charles, Louisiana, replacing A.J. Styles, who was unable to attend the event due to travel issues, and wrestled Rob Van Dam for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship in a losing effort. Puerto Rico and Mexico (2009–2010) Booker T debuted in the International Wrestling Association (IWA) on Histeria Boricua, a special event held on January 6, 2009. There he was booked against Chicano, the incumbent IWA Undisputed Heavyweight Champion. The match was won by Cotto, who reversed a "Book End" attempt and scored a pinfall victory. On July 11, 2010, Booker T was booked by World Wrestling Council in a match against Carlito which also involved Orlando Colón and El Mesias. On September 16, 2010, Booker T made his debut for Mexican promotion Perros del Mal. In the main event of the evening he teamed up with Dr. Wagner Jr. and El Mesías, who represented rival promotion AAA, against El Hijo del Perro Aguayo, Damián 666 and Halloween. After Aguayo pinned El Mesías, Booker turned on Wagner, unmasked him and joined Perros del Mal. Return to WWE Color commentator and part-time wrestler (2011–2012) On January 30, 2011 Booker T returned to WWE to take part in the Royal Rumble. Booker entered the match at number 21 and was eliminated by Mason Ryan. On the February 1 taping of SmackDown, Huffman debuted as the show's new color commentator, working beside Josh Mathews and Michael Cole, replacing Matt Striker. He coached on the returning Tough Enough competition, and at Elimination Chamber he introduced Trish Stratus as a fellow coach. On the June 6 episode of Raw, Booker wrestled his first match on the brand in four years, gaining a victory against Jack Swagger by count out. On the November 21 episode of Raw, Cody Rhodes threw water in Booker T's face after Rhodes allegedly heard Booker T criticize him, thus starting a conflict between the two. On the November 29 episode of SmackDown Booker was scheduled to face Rhodes in a match but it did not happen after Rhodes attacked him from behind him during a backstage interview. On the December 9 episode of SmackDown, Rhodes attacked Booker again while heading to the announcer's table leaving him with paramedics. Later that night, Booker T attacked Rhodes during his match with Daniel Bryan, leading to an Intercontinental Championship match at TLC: Tables, Ladders & Chairs, which Rhodes won. On the December 26 episode of Raw, Booker defeated Rhodes in a non-title match. On the January 6, 2012, episode of SmackDown, Booker challenged Rhodes a second time for the Intercontinental Championship, but once again failed to win the title. Booker T along with fellow commentators Jerry Lawler and Michael Cole all participated in the 2012 Royal Rumble. On the March 26, 2012 episode of Raw, Booker T saved Teddy Long from an attempted attack by Mark Henry, thus becoming the sixth and final member of Team Teddy at WrestleMania XXVIII, where Team Johnny emerged victorious. This was his last official match for the WWE. On the July 9 episode of Raw, Jerry Lawler won by pinfall against Michael Cole in a WrestleMania XXVII rematch. However, Booker, who was subbing for Lawler on commentary, threw Cole back into the ring after he tried to escape. This caused the anonymous Raw General Manager to reverse the decision and give Cole the win as a result of a disqualification. SmackDown General Manager and Hall of Fame (2012–2013) On July 31, 2012, Booker T was appointed the new General Manager of SmackDown. Booker would quickly add Eve Torres and Theodore Long to his staff, as his assistant and senior adviser respectively. Booker was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame by his brother, Stevie Ray, the night before WrestleMania 29. On the April 19 SmackDown, Booker became angry with Long for making matches without his consent. Big Show arrived and thanked Long for doing a better job than Booker, further infuriating him. On the April 22 Raw, upset with Long for making a World Heavyweight Championship match at Extreme Rules, made it a Triple Threat match. Booker took time off for a torn distal triceps, and had surgery for it on June 12. On the July 19 SmackDown, he returned to continue as SmackDown General Manager, but soon lost the job to Vickie Guerrero, on Vince McMahon's orders. Return to commentary and pre-show panelist (2014–present) Since 2014, Booker T has commonly done work on the WWE Network, including the Raw pre-show and also being a part of the "expert panel" on Kickoff shows before each pay-per-view event. On the 2015 premiere of Raw, Booker T replaced Jerry Lawler, who was suffering from diverticulitis, for commentating. However, it was later announced that Booker would be returning on a full-time basis to take Lawler's place on Raw, with Lawler moving to SmackDown. On the March 30 episode of Raw, Booker, along with JBL and Michael Cole, were injured by Brock Lesnar after Seth Rollins refused Lesnar his WWE World Heavyweight Championship rematch. Booker was replaced by Byron Saxton for commentating as he became a coach for the sixth season of WWE Tough Enough. On August 6, 2016, Booker T replaced Tommy Dreamer in an intergender tag team match for Dreamer's House of Hardcore promotion. Booker T returned to his old "King Booker" gimmick in a segment with the SmackDown Live Survivor Series tag teams where he gave a motivational speech and convinced Breezango (Tyler Breeze and Fandango) to join the team. In December 2016, after Jerry Lawler and Lita left the pre-show team, WWE ended their Raw and SmackDown pre-shows leaving Booker T to the WWE pay-per-view pre-shows and other WWE Network specials. Following the 2017 WWE Superstar Shake-up, Booker T replaced David Otunga as color commentator on Raw. On the January 29, 2018 episode of Raw, Booker was replaced on commentary by the returning Jonathan Coachman. On the August 28 episode of SmackDown Live Booker T made a surprise appearance as "King Booker" in the opening segment when he interrupted and joined in on The New Day's "five timers" celebration, following the latter's fifth tag team championship win. In 2020, Booker made his return by wrestling at the Reality of Wrestling promotion. Legacy Longtime wrestler Kurt Angle said of Booker: "He's done it all... he legitimately is one of the top five best of all time." In 2001, sports journalist Michael Landsberg stated that Booker was considered "one of the best wrestlers alive", capable of "any match, any style". Industry veteran John Layfield later described him as "the best acquisition that WWE got when they bought WCW" in 2001. Booker's 21 WCW titles render him the most decorated wrestler in the company's history. He was the first African American WCW World Television Champion. Harlem Heat were recognized by WWE as being – along with The Steiner Brothers – WCW's greatest ever tag team. Considering both Booker's WCW and WWF/E accoldades, WWE recognizes him as one of the most decorated performers of all-time. With his fifth WCW Championship win (which occurred in the WWF), Booker T became the second African-American to win a world championship in WWF/E (after The Rock), and the first to be of non-mixed race. Booker was voted WWE's greatest World Heavyweight Champion in a 2013 viewer poll. Other media In 2000, Booker appeared in the film Ready to Rumble, starring as himself. He has appeared in an episode of Charmed, called "Wrestling with Demons" alongside Buff Bagwell and Scott Steiner. In 2001, along with several other WWE wrestlers, Booker competed on an episode of The Weakest Link, being eliminated second from the show. He also has appeared on Comedy Central and MTV. On January 13, 2004, the album WWE Originals was released, featuring Booker T performing "Can You Dig It?". On April 21, 2007, Booker began hosting a radio show titled Tea Time with King Booker on KBME 790 AM in Houston. During the week of November 5, 2007, he appeared on Family Feud with several other WWE wrestlers. On September 1, 2012, Booker released his first autobiography, Booker T: From Prison to Promise, with Medallion Press. Booker T made appearances to promote the book with The Score Television Network with Arda Ocal which aired on August 29, 2012. He conducted a sixteen-page interview with Pro Wrestling Illustrated in the 2012 volume #50 issue. On March 10, 2015, Booker released his second autobiography, Booker T: Wrestling Royalty with Medallion Press. In 2015, Booker T started a show on KILT (AM) that is also podcast on Radio.com called "Heated Conversations – with Booker T". The show is aired Saturday Nights locally in Houston, Texas and covers subjects from Wrestling, MMA and Boxing to all sports. It has featured the biggest names from the WWE as well as NBA Stars like Dwight Howard. In February 2019, Booker T sued video game company Activision over the Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 character David "Prophet" Wilkes. The lawsuit claimed that the Black Ops character contained similarities to Booker's GI Bro comic book character. On 19 September, 2021 All41 Studios and Microgaming released WWE Legends: Link & Win, a game for mobile and desktop browsers. Booker T was featured as one of four main characters alongside Macho Man Randy Savage, Stone Cold Steve Austin and Eddie Guerrero. Video games Music videos Personal life Relationships and family Booker married his first wife Levestia on May 23, 1996. Booker presented her to the Nitro crowd the night after his WCW World Heavyweight Championship win at Bash at the Beach. Levestia was also used to further the feud between himself and Jeff Jarrett when Jarrett hit her in the head with a guitar on Nitro on July 31, 2000. However, they divorced on May 8, 2001. Booker has a son, from a previous relationship with a high school girlfriend, named Brandon (born in 1982), with whom he has a strained relationship due to his time spent on the road. Booker married his girlfriend of five years, Sharmell Sullivan, in February 2005. The couple welcomed their twins, a boy named Kendrick and a girl named Kennedy, in 2010. Booker and his brother Lash opened a wrestling school in Houston in 2005. Booker T is also a fan of Formula One, and was in attendance at the 2012 U.S Grand Prix as a guest of Lewis Hamilton. Reality of Wrestling In 2005, Huffman started his own wrestling promotion in Houston, Texas, called Pro Wrestling Alliance. In 2012, the promotion rebranded to Reality of Wrestling. After his final 2013 event, Christmas Chaos, ROW was near to close, but Houston business man Hilton Koch, who assisted the event, became a partner with Booker. On February 21, 2015, Booker T and Stevie Ray reunited as Harlem Heat for one last match in Reality of Wrestling for the promotion's "The Final Heat" event. They defeated the Heavenly Bodies to win the ROW Tag Team Championship. On March 14, the titles were vacated. In February 2020, Booker T returned to wrestle for the promotion in an eight-man tag team match. Politics On December 10, 2016, Huffman announced that he would be running in the 2019 Houston mayoral election. He was quoted saying that, "2020 is going to be a new era in the city of Houston. We're going to be looked at now from a different perspective. The cool city, 2020 is coming." Huffman was quoted in 2016, stating his focus for the three years leading up to the 2019 election would be concentrated on the city's "homeless, underprivileged, and low income areas." However, in September 2019, Huffman was not among the 12 names listed who applied for the election ballot. Legal issues Huffman spent nineteen months in prison after pleading guilty to armed robberies at Wendy's restaurants in Houston. He and his partners wore Wendy's uniforms during the holdups since they had been working there for 2½ years. Because of the gunmen's uniforms and familiarity with the fast food chain's operations, police suspected the robberies were inside jobs—and it did not take long before Huffman and three other men were found. He pleaded guilty in December 1987 to two aggravated robbery counts and was sentenced to five years in prison. Huffman was released after serving 19 months, and was placed on parole until April 1992. Championships and accomplishments Cauliflower Alley Club Tag Team Award (2018) – with Stevie Ray George Tragos/Lou Thesz Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame Class of 2018 Global Wrestling Federation GWF Tag Team Championship (3 times) – with Stevie Ray Las Vegas Pro Wrestling LVPW UWF Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Prairie Wrestling Alliance PWA Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Pro Wrestling Illustrated Inspirational Wrestler of the Year (2000) Most Improved Wrestler of the Year (1998) Tag Team of the Year (1995, 1996) with Stevie Ray Ranked No. 5 of the top 500 wrestlers in the PWI 500 in 2001 Southern Championship Wrestling Florida SCW Florida Southern Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Texas All-Pro Wrestling TAP Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Reality of Wrestling ROW Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Stevie Ray Total Nonstop Action Wrestling TNA Legends Championship (1 time, inaugural) TNA World Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Scott Steiner TNA Year End Awards (2 times) Memorable Moment of the Year (2007) Who To Watch in 2008 (2007) World Championship Wrestling WCW World Heavyweight Championship (4 times) WCW World Television Championship (6 times) WCW United States Heavyweight Championship (1 time) WCW World Tag Team Championship (10 times) – with Stevie Ray Ninth WCW Triple Crown Champion World Wrestling Federation/World Wrestling Entertainment/WWE WCW Championship (1 time) World Heavyweight Championship (1 time) World Tag Team Championship (3 times) – with Test (1), Goldust (1) and Rob Van Dam (1) WCW Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Test WWE Intercontinental Championship (1 time) WWE United States Championship (3 times) WWF Hardcore Championship (2 times) King of the Ring (2006) Sixteenth Triple Crown Champion Eighth Grand Slam Champion (under original format) WWE Hall of Fame (2 times) Class of 2013 – individually Class of 2019 – as a member of Harlem Heat Wrestling Observer Newsletter Most Underrated (2002) Worst Television Announcer (2017) Notes References External links 1965 births African-American male professional wrestlers American color commentators American male professional wrestlers American robbers American sportspeople convicted of crimes Living people NWA/WCW World Television Champions NWA/WCW/WWE United States Heavyweight Champions Professional wrestlers from Texas Professional wrestling announcers Professional wrestling podcasters Professional wrestling promoters Sportspeople from Houston The New World Order (professional wrestling) members TNA Legends/Global/Television/King of the Mountain Champions TNA/Impact World Tag Team Champions WCW World Heavyweight Champions World Heavyweight Champions (WWE) WWE Grand Slam champions WWE Hall of Fame inductees WWF/WWE Hardcore Champions WWF/WWE Intercontinental Champions WWF/WWE King Crown's Champions/King of the Ring winners	true	[ "Harlem Heat was a professional wrestling tag team composed of two brothers, Booker and Lash Huffman (better known as Booker T and Stevie Ray). The team achieved their greatest success in World Championship Wrestling (WCW), where they won the WCW World Tag Team Championship a record ten times. Kevin Powers of WWE remarked: \"When debating the greatest tag team in WCW history, Harlem Heat and The Steiner Brothers are more or less interchangeable.\"\n\nHarlem Heat was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame on April 6, 2019 as part of the 2019 class.\n\nHistory\n\nThe Ebony Experience \nBooker T and Stevie Ray started to team together as The Huffman Brothers in Ivan Putski's Western Wrestling Alliance after a brief feud with each other. Soon after, the WWA ceased operating and the brothers started touring the Texas Independent circuit until they caught the eye of Skandor Akbar who was involved with the Global Wrestling Federation out of Dallas in 1992. The brothers were repackaged as The Ebony Experience and quickly rose through the ranks of the GWF tag team division under the guidance of Gary Hart, defeating Skandor Akbar's \"Goodfellows\" (\"Gorgeous\" Gary Young and Steve Dane) for the GWF Tag Team Championship on July 31, 1992. Their first run with the GWF tag title lasted only a week before they were defeated by The Blackbirds (”Iceman” King Parsons and Action Jackson). Booker and Stevie Ray made a comeback and defeated the cheating birds in September.\n\nThe second run with the title lasted a bit longer than a week, but was ultimately short lived as the Rough Riders (Black Bart and Johnny Mantell) won the gold on October 23. The title loss was forced due to Booker T suffering a knee injury that needed surgery and time off to recover. In early 1993 the Ebony Experience returned to action and started to chase The Bad Breed (Axl and Ian Rotten) who had won the titles while Booker T recovered. On February 26 the Ebony Experience won their third GWF Tag Team championship, becoming the only team to hold that title three times. Their third run with the title proved to be their longest as they held them until May 7 where Guido Falcone and Vito Mussolini (known as The Sicilian Stallions) defeated them for the titles. Not long after this Booker T and Stevie Ray left the GWF, having signed with World Championship Wrestling (WCW).\n\nHarlem Heat \nIn August 1993, the brothers debuted in WCW as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane. They were then billed from Harlem. Originally, they were supposed to be a pair of wrestling slaves won in a card game by manager Col. Rob Parker, but was changed due to racial sensitivity based on their look, coming out to the ring in wrist and foot shackles. They became heels and teamed with Vader and Sid Vicious in the War Games at Fall Brawl on September 19, 1993, against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster. They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled.\n\nSister Sherri began managing the team in 1994 and changed their names back to Booker T and Stevie Ray, at their request. By the end of 1994, they were already Tag Team Champions, having defeated Stars and Stripes (The Patriot and Marcus Alexander Bagwell) in December, en route to a five-month title reign. This would be their first of ten WCW World Tag Team Championship reigns together.\n\nAfter dropping the title to the Nasty Boys, Harlem Heat regained the belts on June 24, 1995. Harlem Heat became tweeners and entered a feud with Col. Parker's Stud Stable of \"Dirty\" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck, eventually dropping the titles to them on an episode of Saturday Night on July 22, 1995, thanks to interference from Parker. Parker and Sherri were carrying on a love affair and Parker eventually left the Stud Stable in favor of the Heat to be with Sherri. Harlem Heat regained the WCW World Tag Team titles from Slater and Buck at Fall Brawl 1995. Their third title only lasted one day, but the duo regained the tag team title nine days later from the American Males (Marcus Alexander Bagwell and Scotty Riggs). On the June 24, 1996 Nitro, Harlem Heat defeated Lex Luger and Sting to capture their fifth WCW World Tag Team titles. Three days after losing the tag team titles to the Steiner Brothers, Harlem Heat regained the straps from the Steiners on July 27, 1996. On September 23, 1996 Booker T and Stevie Ray were defeated by Public Enemy (Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge) but took the titles back for the seventh time on October 1, 1996.\n\nAfter the loss of their seventh WCW World Tag Team Championship, to The Outsiders (Kevin Nash and Scott Hall) on October 27, 1996 they became full-fledged faces when they fired Col. Parker and beat him up. They briefly feuded against Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they would win. In 1997, they feuded with Public Enemy, The Steiners, and the nWo. On the July 7, 1997 Nitro, they fired Sherri and added a new manager, Jacqueline, on the September 15 Nitro. They were briefly put out of action by the nWo, but returned to feud with the Faces of Fear (Meng and The Barbarian). Stevie then took five months off from WCW to recover from an ankle injury and Jacqueline left for the WWF while Booker made a transition to singles competition. Booker managed to win the WCW World Television Championship during Stevie's absence. Upon his return to WCW, Stevie Ray joined the New World Order, while Booker continued to be a rising singles star. Despite being on opposite sides they managed to peacefully co-exist (despite Booker expressing dismay at Stevie for joining the nWo).\n\nBy mid-1999, Booker was able to convince his brother to leave the nWo and reunited Harlem Heat once more. The two defeated Bam Bam Bigelow and Kanyon for their record-breaking eighth WCW World Tag Team championships at the 1999 Road Wild but lost them to Barry and Kendall Windham. Harlem Heat would defeat them about a month later at the 1999 Fall Brawl for the WCW World Tag Team titles.\nWhen The Filthy Animals were stripped of the WCW World Tag Team belts due to an injury suffered by Rey Mysterio Jr., the title was put up in a three-way dance at Halloween Havoc 1999. Harlem Heat claimed their tenth WCW World Tag Team title defeating members of The First Family (Hugh Morrus and Brian Knobs) and the Filthy Animals (Konnan and Billy Kidman).\n\nHarlem Heat 2000 \nIn late 1999, a female bodybuilder named Midnight joined Harlem Heat. While Booker T liked the addition, Stevie Ray neglected her help and started arguing with Booker T. Ray eventually challenged Midnight in a match that would decide whether she would stay with Harlem Heat. After being defeated with a surprise small package, Stevie Ray turned on both Booker T and Midnight.\n\nIn February, 2000 Stevie Ray formed Harlem Heat, Inc. with Big T, Kash (formerly known as 4x4 from The No Limit Soldiers) and J. Biggs. Stevie Ray and Big T referred to themselves as Harlem Heat 2000.\n\nBooker T lost the rights to his music and the \"T\" in his name, as it was owned by Harlem Heat and was referred to simply as Booker. Harlem Heat 2000 won the rights to the Harlem Heat name when Big T pinned Booker on February 20, 2000 at SuperBrawl 2000, and also the rights to use the \"Rap Sheet\" theme, as he used a cartoonish theme called \"The Woodchuck's Game\". Kidman and Booker defeated Harlem Heat 2000 (Stevie Ray and Big T) at Uncensored.\n\nThe Final Heat \nOn February 21, 2015, Booker T and Stevie Ray reunited as Harlem Heat for one last match at Booker T's promotion, Reality of Wrestling's The Final Heat event, where they defeated The New Heavenly Bodies for the ROW Tag Team Championship.\n\nChampionships and accomplishments \nCauliflower Alley Club\nTag Team Award (2018)\n Global Wrestling Federation\n GWF Tag Team Championship (3 times)\n Pro Wrestling Illustrated\n Tag Team of the Year (1995, 1996)\n Ranked No. 62 of the 100 best tag teams of the PWI Years in 2003\n Reality of Wrestling\n ROW Tag Team Championship (1 time)\nWorld Championship Wrestling\n WCW World Tag Team Championship (10 times)\n WCW World Television Championship (7 times) – Booker T (6), Stevie Ray (1)\n WWE\n WWE Hall of Fame (Class of 2019)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Harlem Heat on Online World of Wrestling\n\nIndependent promotions teams and stables\nNew Japan Pro-Wrestling teams and stables\nWorld Championship Wrestling teams and stables\nWWE Hall of Fame team inductees", "Theodore Reade is an American professional wrestler who is known for his short-lived stint in World Championship Wrestling. As of 2013 Reade was working on the independent circuit.\n\nWorld Championship Wrestling\nIn 1999 Reade went under the ring name 4x4 and debuted in World Championship Wrestling as a member of Master P's No Limit Soldiers along with BA, Chase Tatum, Konnan, Rey Mysterio, Jr. and Swoll. They later feuded with The West Texas Rednecks due to the Rednecks hatred of rap music. After the soldiers broke up 4x4 changed his name to Cassius by joining a heel stable called Harlem Heat 2000 and acted as a bodyguard, the group, consisting of the leader Stevie Ray, Big T and manager J. Biggs, then began feuding with Booker T. although the feud didn't last long and Harlem Heat 2000 began to split up. Reade's presence would draw attention of the audience simply due to his enormous physical size.\n\nChampionships and accomplishments\nNortheast Wrestling\nBattle Royal winner\n\nPersonal life\nHas worked as a bodyguard for Mike Tyson, 50 Cent, Winky Wright, Robbie Keane and other celebrities\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Teddy Reade's Profile\n WCW Uncensored 2000: Kidman & Booker T. vs Harlem Heat 2000\n WCW Monday Nitro: Harlem Heat 2000 vs Kidman & Booker T.\n WCW Spring Stampede: Harlem Heat 2000 vs Shane Douglas & Buff Bagwell\n\nAfrican-American male professional wrestlers\nAmerican male professional wrestlers\nBodyguards\nLiving people\nYear of birth missing (living people)\n21st-century African-American people" ]
[ "Booker T (wrestler)", "Harlem Heat (1993-1997)", "How did Harlem Heat start?", "In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane." ]	C_1f3ea57e1286415abc8b8322888efbdf_1	Did they win a lot in the beginning?	2	Did Harlem Heat win a lot in the beginning?	Booker T (wrestler)	Booker and his brother Stevie Ray signed with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) after Sid Vicious recommended they sign with the company. In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane. They became heels and were on Harley Race and Col. Rob Parker's team in the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster. They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled. In 1994, they acquired the services of Sensational Sherri, dubbed 'Sister' Sherri, as their manager and changed their names back to Booker T and Stevie Ray, at their request. By the end of 1994, they held the WCW Tag Team Championship after defeating Stars and Stripes (The Patriot and Marcus Alexander Bagwell) in December. After dropping the title to The Nasty Boys, Harlem Heat regained the belts on June 24, 1995. Afterward, Harlem Heat got into a feud with Col. Parker's "Stud Stable" of "Dirty" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Parker and Sherri were carrying on a love affair and Parker eventually left the Stud Stable in favor of the Heat to be with Sherri. Harlem Heat won the WCW World Tag Team titles at Fall Brawl 1995, defeating Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Their third title reign only lasted one day, but the duo regained the tag team title nine days later from The American Males (Buff Bagwell and Scotty Riggs). On the June 24, 1996 Nitro, Harlem Heat defeated Lex Luger and Sting to capture their fifth WCW World Tag Team titles. Three days after losing the tag team titles to the Steiner Brothers, Harlem Heat regained the titles back from the Steiners on July 27. On September 23, Booker T and Stevie Ray were defeated by Public Enemy (Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge) but took the titles back for the seventh time on October 1. They lost the Tag Team Championship to the Outsiders (Kevin Nash and Scott Hall) on October 27. Subsequently, they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces. They then entered into a brief feud against Col. Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they won. In 1997, they feuded with Public Enemy (Grunge & Rocco), The Steiners, and the nWo. In fall 1997, they fired Sherri and added a new manager, Jacqueline. They were briefly put out of action by the nWo and returned to feud with the Faces of Fear (Meng and The Barbarian). Stevie then took five months off from WCW to recover from an ankle injury and Jacqueline left for the WWF. CANNOTANSWER	They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled.	Booker T. Huffman Jr. (born March 1, 1966) better known by his ring name Booker T, is an American professional wrestler, professional wrestling promoter and color commentator. He is currently signed to WWE, and is also the owner and founder of the independent promotion Reality of Wrestling (ROW) in Texas City, Texas. Booker has been named by peers and industry commentators as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of his era; he was voted WWE's greatest World Heavyweight Champion in a 2013 viewer poll. Booker is best known for his time in World Championship Wrestling (WCW), the World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment (WWF/E), and Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA), holding 35 championships between those organizations. He is the most decorated wrestler in WCW history, having held 21 titles, including a record six WCW World Television Championships (along with being the first African American titleholder), and a record eleven WCW World Tag Team Championships: ten as one half of Harlem Heat with his brother, Lash "Stevie Ray" Huffman in WCW (most reigns within that company), and one in the WWF with Test. Booker was the final WCW World Heavyweight Champion and WCW United States Heavyweight Champion within the active WCW organisation. Booker is a six-time world champion in professional wrestling, having won the WCW World Heavyweight Championship five times, and WWE's World Heavyweight Championship once. With his fifth WCW Championship win (which occurred in the WWF), Booker T became the second African-American to win a world championship in WWF/E (after The Rock), and also the first to be of non-mixed race. He is also the winner of the 2006 King of the Ring tournament, the sixteenth Triple Crown Champion, and the eighth Grand Slam Champion (under original format) in WWE history. As the ninth WCW Triple Crown Champion, Booker is one of five men to achieve both the WWE and WCW Triple Crowns. He has headlined multiple pay-per-view events for the WWF/E, WCW and TNA throughout his career. Booker was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame on April 6, 2013, by his brother, Lash. Both he and Lash were inducted together into the 2019 class on April 6, 2019 as Harlem Heat, rendering Booker a two-time Hall of Famer. Early life Huffman was born the youngest of eight children, in Plain Dealing, Louisiana, though his birthplace is often misidentified as Houston, Texas. By the time Booker was 13, both of his parents had died and he lived with his 16-year-old sister. He would move in with his older brother Lash "Stevie Ray" Huffman at age 17. In high school, Huffman was a drum major. He also played football and basketball. Professional wrestling career Early Career (1986–1993) As a single father working at a storage company in Houston, Texas, Huffman was looking to make a better life for himself and his son. His brother Lash (Stevie Ray) suggested that he and Booker check out a new wrestling school being opened, run by Ivan Putski, in conjunction with his Western Wrestling Alliance organization. His boss from the storage company sponsored the money to pay for the wrestling lessons. Booker trained under Scott Casey, who helped to turn Booker's background as a gangster and dancer into "sports entertainment", teaching the newcomer in-ring psychology and ring generalship. Eight weeks later, Booker debuted as "G.I. Bro" on Putski's Western Wrestling Alliance Live! program. The character was a tie-in to the raging Gulf War and the WWF's Sgt. Slaughter angle. Even though the WWA met its demise some time later, Booker continued to wrestle on the Texas independent circuit, often with his brother Lash, who performed as Stevie Ray. They were spotted by Skandor Akbar who hired them to work for the Global Wrestling Federation (GWF), where he and Eddie Gilbert were involved. Gilbert teamed Stevie Ray and Booker T together as the Ebony Experience, and they won the GWF Tag Team Championship on July 31, 1992. During their time with GWF, they held the tag title a total of three times. Subsequently, Booker T and Stevie Ray left the GWF to work for World Championship Wrestling. World Championship Wrestling Harlem Heat (1993–1997) Booker and his brother Stevie Ray signed with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) after Sid Vicious recommended they sign with the company. In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane. They became heels and were on Harley Race and Col. Rob Parker's team in the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster. They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled. In 1994, they acquired the services of Sensational Sherri, dubbed 'Sister' Sherri, as their manager and changed their names back to Booker T and Stevie Ray, at their request. By the end of 1994, they held the WCW Tag Team Championship after defeating Stars and Stripes (The Patriot and Marcus Alexander Bagwell) in December. After dropping the title to The Nasty Boys, Harlem Heat regained the belts on June 24, 1995. Afterward, Harlem Heat got into a feud with Col. Parker's "Stud Stable" of "Dirty" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Parker and Sherri were carrying on a love affair and Parker eventually left the Stud Stable in favor of the Heat to be with Sherri. Harlem Heat won the WCW World Tag Team titles at Fall Brawl 1995, defeating Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Their third title reign only lasted one day, but the duo regained the tag team title nine days later from The American Males (Buff Bagwell and Scotty Riggs). On the June 24, 1996 Nitro, Harlem Heat defeated Lex Luger and Sting to capture their fifth WCW World Tag Team titles. Three days after losing the tag team titles to the Steiner Brothers, Harlem Heat regained the titles back from the Steiners on July 27. On September 23, Booker T and Stevie Ray were defeated by Public Enemy (Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge) but took the titles back for the seventh time on October 1. They lost the Tag Team Championship to the Outsiders (Kevin Nash and Scott Hall) on October 27. Subsequently, they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces. They then entered into a brief feud against Col. Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they won. In 1997, they feuded with Public Enemy (Grunge & Rocco), The Steiners, and the nWo. In fall 1997, they fired Sherri and added a new manager, Jacqueline. They were briefly put out of action by the nWo and returned to feud with the Faces of Fear (Meng and The Barbarian). Stevie then took five months off from WCW to recover from an ankle injury and Jacqueline left for the WWF. World Television Champion (1997–1999) Booker made the transition into singles action and won the WCW World Television Championship from Disco Inferno on the December 29, 1997 episode of Nitro. Booker feuded over the title with Perry Saturn and Rick Martel culminating in a gauntlet match at SuperBrawl VIII. Martel, the man that was originally supposed to win the match, went down early due to a knee injury, meaning the finish and the remainder of the match had to be called in the ring. During spring 1998, Booker began feuding with Chris Benoit. Benoit cost Booker the TV title during a match against Fit Finlay. As a result, Booker and Benoit engaged in a "best-of-seven series" with the winner meeting Finlay for the title. After seven matches and interference from Bret Hart and Stevie Ray, Booker T won the series, and on June 14, regained the Television Championship. Booker scored a clean pinfall victory over Bret Hart on the edition of February 22 of Nitro. The following month, he regained the TV Championship from Scott Steiner, who, in turn, defeated Booker in the finals of the WCW United States Heavyweight Championship tournament. Booker lost the Television title to Rick Steiner a month later at Slamboree. Harlem Heat reunion (1999–2000) By mid-1999, Booker had convinced his brother, Stevie Ray, to leave the nWo and reunite Harlem Heat. Harlem Heat defeated Bam Bam Bigelow and Kanyon for the WCW World Tag Team titles at Road Wild. They lost the WCW World Tag Team titles to Barry and Kendall Windham on August 23, but Harlem Heat regained them about a month later at Fall Brawl. When The Filthy Animals were stripped of the WCW World Tag Team belts due to an injury suffered by Rey Mysterio Jr., the title was put up in a three-way dance at Halloween Havoc. Harlem Heat claimed their tenth WCW World Tag Team title defeating Hugh Morrus and Brian Knobs and Konnan and Kidman. By late 1999, a female bodybuilder named Midnight had joined Harlem Heat. Stevie neglected her help and started disputing with Booker over her. Stevie Ray eventually challenged Midnight in a match that decided whether or not she would stay with Harlem Heat. After being defeated with a surprise small package, Stevie Ray turned on both Booker and Midnight to form Harlem Heat, Inc. with Big T, Kash, and J. Biggs. Stevie Ray and Big T dubbed themselves Harlem Heat 2000. Throughout this period, Huffman was referred to simply as Booker, as Harlem Heat 2000 won the rights to the name "T" in a match with Big T against Booker on February 20, 2000 at SuperBrawl X. Kidman and Booker T defeated Harlem Heat 2000 (Ray and Big T) at Uncensored 2000. When Vince Russo and Eric Bischoff formed The New Blood, Huffman eventually completely changed his in-ring persona, helping lead Captain Rection's military-themed Misfits In Action stable as G.I. Bro, reprising his gimmicks from his days in the WWA. He defeated Shawn Stasiak at the Great American Bash in a Boot Camp match. He returned to the Booker T name on the June 19 Nitro, promoting Rection to the status of General and demanding the Misfits start standing up to the New Blood. WCW World Heavyweight Champion (2000–2001) Huffman was elevated to main event status in 2000. After WCW booker Vince Russo grew disgruntled with Hulk Hogan's politics, he fired Hogan during the live broadcast of Bash at the Beach and announced an impromptu match between Jeff Jarrett and Huffman for the WCW World Heavyweight Championship. Huffman won the match, in the process becoming the second ever African American champion in WCW after Ron Simmons, and the third African American to win a World Heavyweight title. He lost the title to Kevin Nash on August 28 on Nitro. He regained the title a few weeks later in a steel cage match with Nash at Fall Brawl, but again lost the title, this time to Vince Russo himself in a cage match (Russo was speared out of the cage by Goldberg and won the title), Russo vacated the title and Booker won it for the third time in a San Francisco 49er Box Match against Jeff Jarrett on the October 2 episode of Nitro. Booker's next feud was with Scott Steiner, to whom he eventually lost the title in a Straitjacket steel cage match. Steiner won by TKO when he put an unconscious Booker into the Steiner Recliner at Mayhem. Steiner was WCW's longest reigning champion in years, whilst Booker was briefly out with an injury. Booker returned to the roster and defeated Rick Steiner for the WCW United States Heavyweight Championship at Greed. This made Booker the ninth WCW Triple Crown winner. On the final episode of Nitro, he defeated Scott Steiner to win the WCW World Heavyweight Championship for the fourth time. According to sports journalist Michael Landsberg, Huffman was salaried at "close to a million dollars a year" in WCW. He won a total of twenty-one titles within the organization, making him the most decorated performer in its history. Booker was also the reigning WCW United States Heavyweight Champion and WCW World Heavyweight Champion when he accepted a contract with the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment The Alliance (2001–2002) After WCW was bought by the World Wrestling Federation in March 2001, Booker T made his debut at the King of the Ring pay-per-view in 2001 attacking WWF Champion Stone Cold Steve Austin during his match, promptly injuring him in his very first move in the WWF. He later turned heel and became a leading member of The Alliance during the Invasion storyline. In his debut match in the company, Booker defended his WCW Championship against Buff Bagwell on the July 2 episode of Raw; sports journalist Michael Landsberg reported that many have called this bout "the worst match ever". At InVasion, The Alliance defeated Team WWF when Austin joined the Alliance. On the July 26 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T gave up his WCW United States Championship and handed it over to Chris Kanyon. He later lost the WCW Championship to Kurt Angle, but he went on to win the title back on the July 30 episode of Raw. Booker T kept the title until SummerSlam, when he lost it to The Rock after feuding with him over the similarity in their gimmicks and their identical finishing moves, the Book End/Rock Bottom. Booker T won the WCW Tag Team Championship for an eleventh time, this time with Test, and he also had a WWF Tag Team Championship reign with Test. At the Survivor Series, Booker T was eliminated third by The Rock after a roll-up and eventually The Alliance was defeated, causing them to disband. In its aftermath, Booker remained a heel, and he joined forces with Vince McMahon and The Boss Man in December to feud with Steve Austin. After Booker T cost Austin a match against Chris Jericho for the Undisputed WWF Championship at Vengeance, Austin gained revenge by attacking Booker T in a grocery store by covering him in food. Then the week after Booker T vandalized Austin's truck causing Austin to chase Booker T around a bingo hall and a church. Booker T's first WrestleMania appearance was at WrestleMania X8 against Edge, a match he lost. They feuded over who would appear in a fictional Japanese shampoo commercial. When the brand extension was introduced in March, Booker T was drafted to the Raw brand. At Insurrextion, Booker briefly held the WWF Hardcore Championship twice, defeating Stevie Richards only to lose it to Crash Holly seconds later. He then re-defeated Crash and lost the title to Stevie Richards a few minutes later. Feud with Evolution (2002–2003) Goldust began trying to start a tag team with Booker, but Goldust kept costing Booker matches. With the nWo now operating in WWE, Booker T was eventually invited into the faction. His time there was short-lived, when he was kicked out of the group by Shawn Michaels after a superkick from Michaels. Booker then turned face and found a partnership with Goldust and the pair teamed to battle the nWo. Booker and Goldust had a WWE Tag Team Championship match against The Un-Americans (Christian and Lance Storm) at SummerSlam, but The Un-Americans retained after interference from Test. At No Mercy, Booker and Goldust battled Chris Jericho and Christian for the World Tag Team Championship, but they lost the match with Jericho using the title belt on Goldust. He spent the rest of 2002 teaming with Goldust. They won the World Tag Team Championship at Armageddon in a Tag Team Elimination match defeating the teams of Christian and Chris Jericho, Lance Storm and William Regal, and the Dudley Boyz. They held the belts for about three weeks, when they lost them to Regal and Storm. Booker and Goldust lost the rematch and decided to go their separate ways. The gimmick for Booker and Goldust was Goldust being a strange, yet dependable ally who Booker eventually warmed up to after initial skepticism. By 2003, however, Booker T's popularity had soared and he amicably separated from Goldust, at Goldust's request, in order to pursue the World Heavyweight Championship. In February 2003, he eliminated The Rock to win a battle royal to become the number one contender to the World Heavyweight Championship at WrestleMania XIX. Booker targeted Evolution after Batista and Randy Orton attacked Booker's former partner, Goldust. Several weeks before WrestleMania, the incumbent champion and Evolution's leader, Triple H, cut a controversial promo on Booker T. Triple H downplayed Booker T's WCW success, pointing out that the WCW World Heavyweight Championship had been held by non-wrestlers like booker Vince Russo and actor David Arquette, calling WCW and its title "a joke", despite the fact that, as World Heavyweight Champion, Triple H was holding the WCW World Heavyweight Championship's physical belt, the Big Gold Belt, and that Triple H's Evolution stablemate, Ric Flair, had been a multiple-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion. He said that "people like" Booker T would never win world championships in WWE. This promo is often interpreted as racist due to Triple H referencing Booker T's "nappy" hair and implying that Booker T was just in WWE to dance and entertain for "people like" Triple H. During the WrestleMania XIX press conference Michael Cole asked Triple H as to whether he had deliberately cut a racist promo, Triple H claimed this was not the case and that he was just referring to Booker's criminal past. A week later, Booker attacked Triple H in the bathroom and laid him out after Triple H had thrown a dollar bill at him, ordering Booker to get him a towel. However, Booker T lost to Triple H at WrestleMania. For several weeks, he teamed with Shawn Michaels and Kevin Nash in a feud against Triple H, Ric Flair, and Chris Jericho. At Backlash, Booker's team lost when Triple H pinned Nash after a sledgehammer shot. Various feuds (2003–2005) Afterward, Booker set his sights on the newly reactivated Intercontinental Championship. After losing a battle royal for the title at Judgment Day, Booker feuded with the champion Christian. After a few matches, Booker defeated Christian to become the new Intercontinental Champion on the July 7 episode of Raw. About a month later, because of a nagging back injury, Booker lost the Intercontinental title back to Christian at a non-televised house show on August 10. Booker, meanwhile, was out of action until October. Booker returned on the October 20 episode of Raw and subsequently joined Team Austin at Survivor Series for a match to determine whether Eric Bischoff or Stone Cold Steve Austin (both co-general managers) would be the sole General Manager of Raw. Team Bischoff won the match. Booker then feuded with Mark Henry, who eliminated him in the Survivor Series match. Booker defeated Henry at Armageddon. On the February 16, 2004 episode of Raw, Booker T and Rob Van Dam defeated Ric Flair and Batista for the World Tag Team Championship. Booker and Van Dam held the titles for a month, even defending the belts at WrestleMania XX in a Fatal 4-Way tag team match. Eight days later on the March 22 episode of Raw, they lost the World Tag Team Championship back to Ric Flair and Batista. He and Rob Van Dam, never got their rematch due to Rob Van Dam being drafted to SmackDown! that very same night. On March 23, 2004 he was "traded" (along with the Dudley Boyz) to the SmackDown! brand in exchange for Triple H, but as part of a new storyline, he appeared unhappy with the move calling SmackDown! "the minor leagues" and even disrespected Eddie Guerrero, the brand's WWE Champion, turning heel in the process. Later on, Booker T bragged about how he was the biggest star on SmackDown! and feuded with The Undertaker. Booker tried to utilize voodoo magic to try to overcome his "supernatural" foe; however, it did nothing to prevent him from losing to the Undertaker at Judgment Day. In mid-2004, Booker T set his sights on the United States Championship along with its champion, John Cena. After Cena got on the bad side of General Manager Kurt Angle, he did his best to get the title away from Cena. Cena successfully defended the title at The Great American Bash in a four-way elimination match against Booker, René Duprée, and Rob Van Dam. After Cena was stripped of his title by Angle for "laying a hand" on the GM, Booker took advantage of the situation and won an eight-man elimination match to win the vacant United States Championship, thus becoming the one-hundredth United States Champion in history, in a match that also featured Cena, Dupree, Billy Gunn, Charlie Haas, Luther Reigns, Kenzo Suzuki and Van Dam. Booker won by last eliminating both Cena and Van Dam in the course of less than 10 seconds After Angle was fired by Mr. McMahon for embellishing his injuries, Theodore Long began his first tenure as SmackDown! General Manager, and booked a best-of-five series of matches for the United States Championship between Booker and Cena. The first match took place at SummerSlam in Toronto and saw Cena gain the pinfall victory to go up 1–0 in the series. Booker would bounce back and win the next two matches, on the August 26 edition of SmackDown! in Fresno, California and a live event the next night in Sydney, Australia, to take a 2–1 lead. The next match in the series wouldn't come until the September 16 SmackDown! from Spokane, Washington, where Cena won and tied the series at two apiece. The series culminated at No Mercy, where Cena won the series 3–2, and thusly, the United States Championship. On October 21, SmackDown! General Manager Theodore Long placed Booker in a six-man tag team match with Rob Van Dam and Rey Mysterio against John "Bradshaw" Layfield (JBL), René Duprée, and Kenzo Suzuki. JBL expected Booker to betray his partners, but instead Booker pinned him, thus turning face again. Booker T faced JBL for the WWE Championship at the Survivor Series on November 14, but lost after he was hit in the head with the championship belt. The next night, Booker T demanded a rematch, citing Orlando Jordan's interference. He was then joined by Eddie Guerrero and The Undertaker who also wanted a shot at JBL's title, prompting Theodore Long to make a fatal four-way match for the WWE Championship at Armageddon. Once again, Booker failed to win the title, as JBL retained it. He then briefly teamed with Eddie Guerrero, at one point challenging Mysterio and Van Dam for the WWE Tag Team Championship, and feuded with Heidenreich. Booker won a 30-man Battle Royal dark match at WrestleMania 21 last eliminating Raw's Viscera and Chris Masters. Subsequently, Booker was part of the tournament to name a new number one contender and made it to the Final Four. After Kurt Angle eliminated Booker, he returned the favor, costing Angle the match against JBL. The storyline then turned to a sexual nature, as Angle began stalking Booker's new wife, Sharmell. Booker defeated Angle at Judgment Day. On the May 26 episode of SmackDown!, Booker participated in a "Winners Choice" Battle Royal, with the winner choosing his opponent for the next week. Kurt Angle won and wanted to wrestle Sharmell. Booker protested, and the match was made into a Handicap match. Angle won by pinning Sharmell in a sexual position. The next week, Booker gained revenge on Angle, defeating him with a Scissors Kick. On the June 30 episode of SmackDown!, JBL defeated Christian, The Undertaker, Chris Benoit, Muhammad Hassan, and Booker T in a six-man elimination match for the SmackDown! Championship. During the match, Booker got specifically involved with Christian. Booker later defeated Christian at The Great American Bash. United States Champion (2005–2006) Booker T began teaming with Chris Benoit, eying his United States Championship again. Benoit was allowed to pick his next challenger to see who would face him at No Mercy, so Booker, Christian, and Orlando Jordan tried to impress Benoit by winning matches. He instead decided not choose one opponent, so he made it a fatal four-way for No Mercy, where Benoit successfully defended his title. On the October 21 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T defeated Benoit for the United States Championship, due to unseen help from Sharmell. Theodore Long later showed footage of Sharmell interfering in Booker's matches. Booker went to apologize to Benoit and give him a rematch, but then attacked Benoit, busting him open with the United States title belt and turning heel once again. Booker then boasted that he had been fully aware of what Sharmell had been doing and had been playing dumb to fool everyone. On the November 25 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T defended the United States Championship against Benoit. The match ended when Benoit superplexed Booker and two referees made a three count on either competitor, claiming that their wrestler had won. Booker was stripped of the belt by Theodore Long, because of the confusion of who won since they pinned each other at the same time. Long decided to put Benoit and Booker against each other in a best of seven series, just as the two had in their WCW days. Booker took an early 3–0 lead. In a must win match during Armageddon, Benoit was able to defeat Booker T to bring the series to 3–1. At a house show, Booker was injured, and he did not wrestle again until after the "Best of Seven" series with Benoit was completed. Booker was scheduled to face Benoit in Match 5 of the Best of Seven Series at the December 30 taping of SmackDown!. At the beginning of the show, General Manager Theodore Long said that Booker would have to forfeit. Both Booker and Benoit protested, with Benoit not wanting a cheap victory. Booker managed to persuade Long to allow him to choose a stand-in for the matches. Booker chose Randy Orton as his replacement. Benoit was able to tie the series 3–3 after beating Orton in two consecutive matches on the December 30 and January 6, 2006 episodes of SmackDown!. Orton, however, was able to defeat Benoit in the final match on the January 13 episode of SmackDown! to win the series and the title for Booker T, who held the title until No Way Out where Benoit won it back. On the February 24 episode of SmackDown!, Booker and Sharmell provided guest commentary for a match involving The Boogeyman. After defeating his opponents, Boogeyman dumped a bucket of worms onto the announce table where they were sitting, frightening the two. Over the next few weeks, Boogeyman would stalk Booker and Sharmell. Booker and Boogeyman were set to face off on the March 18 Saturday Night's Main Event XXXII, but the match was canceled due to Booker faking a knee injury to escape competition. The feud eventually culminated at WrestleMania 22, with Booker and Sharmell losing to Boogeyman. The couple received a restraining order against The Boogeyman on the April 7 episode of SmackDown!, ending the feud. King Booker and World Heavyweight Champion (2006–2007) Booker next entered the 2006 King of the Ring tournament on SmackDown!, advancing through to the finals due to a bye as his semi-final opponent, Kurt Angle, was unable to wrestle. The finals were held at Judgment Day where Booker defeated Bobby Lashley. Upon winning the King of the Ring tournament, Booker began wrestling as "King Booker" and began acting like he was an actual monarch ruling "The SmackDown! Kingdom". Booker formed a royal court that included his wife, Queen Sharmell, Sir William Regal, and Sir Finlay, and began including the mannerisms and attire of a stereotypical English-style king as part of the character, all the way down to wearing a crown and cape and speaking in a fake English accent. However, whenever King Booker would get angry he would launch into a tirade in the style of Booker T (an example of this was an episode of SmackDown! where Theodore Long would inform him he would be facing The Undertaker), which lent some comedic aspect to the character; he even went as far as having Lashley kiss his "royal" feet. After gaining his title of King, Booker continued to feud with Lashley. After Lashley defeated John "Bradshaw" Layfield (JBL) for the United States Championship at the end of May, Booker began chasing after the title and even resorted to making Lashley kiss his "royal feet" on the June 2 episode of SmackDown!. The feud ended after a steel cage match on the June 30 episode of SmackDown! where Lashley defeated Booker by escaping the cage to retain the United States Championship. The next week, Booker entered a battle royal on SmackDown! with the winner to challenge Rey Mysterio for his World Heavyweight Championship at The Great American Bash. Booker won the battle royal and then defeated Mysterio at The Great American Bash to win the World Heavyweight Championship after Chavo Guerrero betrayed Mysterio by hitting him with a steel chair. This was Booker's first world championship since joining WWE and the win caused him to proclaim himself as the "King of the World". This win would also make Booker the sixteenth Triple Crown Champion and eighth Grand Slam Champion (under the original format) in the history of the WWE. After Booker won the World Heavyweight Championship, he began a rivalry with the returning former champion Batista, who vowed to regain the title he was forced to forfeit due to injury. This rivalry spilled over to real life when the two got into a legitimate fistfight at a SummerSlam pay-per-view commercial shoot, reportedly due to Batista considering himself superior to the rest of the roster due to his quick climb to main event status. According to sources, both men were left bloodied and bruised, however Booker was reportedly praised by many wrestlers in the back for speaking his mind to Batista about his attitude. At SummerSlam, Booker lost to Batista by disqualification after Queen Sharmell interfered on his behalf (thus retaining the title), but at No Mercy, Booker defeated Batista, Lashley and his own stablemate, Finlay, in a Fatal 4-Way match. Before the match, Booker assaulted Sir William Regal, resulting in the breakup of the King's Court. Despite the break-up of his Court, Booker lost to Batista by disqualification on the October 20 episode on SmackDown!, due to interference from WWE Champion John Cena from Raw and ECW World Champion Big Show, the two of whom King Booker was to face at Cyber Sunday in a "champion of champions" match. At Cyber Sunday, the fans voted for the World Heavyweight Championship to be on the line. Booker retained after defeating Big Show and Cena with help from Kevin Federline. After Cyber Sunday, the feud between King Booker and Batista continued with Batista unable to wrest the title from Booker. Eventually this led to a match at Survivor Series on November 26, where Booker declared that if Batista failed to defeat him this time, it would be the last World Heavyweight Championship match he would receive as long as Booker was champion. At Survivor Series, SmackDown! General Manager Theodore Long decided that if Booker got counted out or disqualified, he would lose the title. Late in the match, Queen Sharmell handed Booker his title belt while referee Nick Patrick was not looking. While she had Patrick distracted, Booker attempted to hit Batista with the belt. Batista moved out of the way, knocked the belt out of Booker's hands and hit him in the head with it, and King Booker lost the World Heavyweight Championship to Batista. After losing the title, Booker feuded alongside former royal court member Finlay against Batista and John Cena, which led up to Armageddon where they lost. While competing in the Royal Rumble match, King Booker was eliminated by Kane. A frustrated Booker returned to the ring illegally and eliminated Kane. This started a short feud between the two resulting in a match at No Way Out, which Kane won. On the February 23 episode of SmackDown!, Booker won a Falls Count Anywhere Money in the Bank qualifying match, defeating Kane (with assistance from The Great Khali) and earned himself a spot in the match at WrestleMania 23. At WrestleMania, Matt Hardy set up Sharmell for a Twist of Fate during the Money in the Bank match with the briefcase in Booker's grasp – thus forcing him to choose between a guaranteed title shot and his wife. He chose to defend Sharmell and lost the match. On the April 6 episode of SmackDown!, Booker attempted to take revenge. However, he lost the match against Matt Hardy, and Sharmell declared her disappointment in him and slapped him. In an attempt to impress Sharmell, Booker attacked The Undertaker but was Tombstoned on an announce table. Booker was removed from television to deal with a knee injury. Draft to RAW, WWE Championship pursuit and departure (2007) On the June 11 episode of Raw, both King Booker and Queen Sharmell were drafted to the Raw brand as part of the WWE Draft. He then began a short feud with John Cena over the WWE Championship, Booker would wrestle Cena in a Five Pack Challenge along with Bobby Lashley, Mick Foley and Randy Orton at Vengeance: Night of Champions for the title in a losing effort. Cena would retain at the event by pinning Foley. On the July 16 episode of Raw, King Booker came to the ring using Triple H's theme music "The King of Kings", even using his video. King Booker declared that neither Triple H nor Jerry Lawler could be known as "The King". Booker began a feud with Lawler, defeating him on the August 6 episode of Raw where the loser had to crown the winner the next week. When the time came, Lawler refused, declaring that Triple H was still a king and announcing that King Booker would battle Triple H at SummerSlam. Booker attacked Lawler, throwing him into the ring post and hitting him with a television monitor. At SummerSlam, Booker lost to the returning Triple H. On the August 27 episode of Raw, Booker wrestled against John Cena in a non-title match, which he lost by disqualification when Randy Orton interfered. In August, he was linked to Signature Pharmacy, a company thought to be distributing performance-enhancing drugs. He was suspended by WWE for violating its Wellness Policy. He denied using any drugs and being a customer of Signature Pharmacy. In October 2007, Booker T requested his and Sharmell's release from their WWE contracts due to the pressure he had in WWE and being burned out, which WWE granted. Total Nonstop Action Wrestling Feud with Bobby Roode (2007–2008) At the Genesis pay-per-view on November 11, 2007, Huffman debuted in Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) as Sting's mystery partner in a tag team match against Kurt Angle and Kevin Nash for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship, reverting to his Booker T character. His wife Sharmell also debuted, interfering in the match on Booker and Sting's behalf when Karen Angle interfered on behalf of Kurt Angle and Nash. On the November 29 episode of Impact!, Booker said he came to TNA to test his skills against the young talent, take TNA to a higher level, and win the TNA World Heavyweight Championship. Robert Roode came to the ring and challenged Booker to a match, claiming he has been pushed down by washed-up wrestlers and has-beens. Booker won his Impact! debut match, but afterwards, Christian Cage and Robert Roode beat down Booker until Kaz made the save. At Turning Point, Booker and Kaz defeated Roode and Cage when Booker pinned Cage. Booker and Sharmell won a mixed tag team match against Robert Roode and Ms. Brooks at Final Resolution. After the match, Roode punched Sharmell in the face, leading to a match at Against All Odds. While the punch was intended to be a work, Roode had in fact made contact with Sharmell during the punch, dislocating her jaw and causing her to be off TV for a few weeks, therefore making it into a shoot. The rivalry, however, went ahead as planned where Booker and Roode wrestled to a double-countout at Against All Odds, which saw them brawl to the parking lot. Roode defeated Booker in strap match at Destination X after hitting Booker with a pair of handcuffs. In a special live episode of Impact!, Booker T and Robert Roode had another outing, this time with the fans being able to vote on the stipulation of the match. At Booker's request during a pre-match promo, the match became a First Blood Match, beating the Last Man Standing and I Quit stipulations. Booker T would go on to win the match-up. At Lockdown, Booker T and Sharmell defeated Robert Roode and Payton Banks after Sharmell pinned Banks with a roll-up. The Main Event Mafia (2008–2010) Booker T turned heel for the first time in TNA at Sacrifice by attacking Christian Cage and Rhino from behind with a steel chair. This came about as a result of losing a tag team match up against Christian Cage and Rhino, with them furthering themselves in the Deuces Wild Tag Team Tournament. Booker then competed in the King of the Mountain match for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship at Slammiversary. He was seconds away from winning the match, when Kevin Nash stopped him and performed a Jackknife Powerbomb; Samoa Joe would later go on to win the match. On the next Impact!, Booker challenged Joe to a title match at Victory Road, which Joe would later accept. Also around this time he reverted to a gimmick similar to his King Booker gimmick albeit while proclaiming himself a supposed king of Africa. The match at Victory Road ended in a draw after Sharmell replaced the referee and counted after the match was already over. At Hard Justice, Samoa Joe defeated Booker after a guitar shot, thus reclaiming physical possession of the title belt, which Booker had kept after Victory Road. Later he introduced the TNA Legends Championship and became the first official champion. Booker T successfully defended the title at Turning Point against Cage. At Final Resolution, Booker T, Kevin Nash, Scott Steiner, and Sting defeated The TNA Front Line (A.J. Styles, Brother Devon, Brother Ray, and Samoa Joe) in an eight-man tag team match to allow Sting to retain his TNA World Heavyweight Championship. At Genesis, Booker T, Scott Steiner, and Cute Kip lost a six-man tag team match to Mick Foley, A.J. Styles, and Brother Devon. The next month at Against All Odds, Booker T defeated Shane Sewell to retain the Legends Championship. Booker T lost the title to A.J. Styles at Destination X. At Lockdown, Team Angle (Booker T, Kevin Nash, Kurt Angle, and Scott Steiner) lost to Team Jarrett (A.J. Styles, Christopher Daniels, Jeff Jarrett, and Samoa Joe) in a Lethal Lockdown match. At Sacrifice, Booker T received a rematch for the Legends Championship, but lost to A.J. Styles in a "I Quit" match. Booker T went go on to form the Mafia's resident tag team with Scott Steiner, and at Victory Road, Steiner and Booker defeated Beer Money, Inc. to win the TNA World Tag Team Championship, marking Booker's 15th World Tag Team title reign overall. Then at Hard Justice, Booker T and Steiner retained the World Tag Team Championship against Team 3D. Prior to No Surrender, Booker, Steiner, and British Invasion won a match to gain the man advantage at No Surrender's Lethal Lockdown match against Team 3D and Beer Money, Inc. Even with the advantage, Booker T's team lost at No Surrender when James Storm of Beer Money pinned Doug Williams of The British Invasion. At Bound for Glory, Booker and Steiner lost the TNA World Tag Team Titles to the British Invasion in a four way Full Metal Mayhem Tag Team match, which also included Team 3D and Beer Money; during the match Booker was taken out on a stretcher. Afterwards it was reported that the PPV had been Booker's final appearance with the company, and his and Sharmell's profiles were removed from the official TNA roster. On May 21, 2010, Booker T made a one night return to TNA at a live event in Lake Charles, Louisiana, replacing A.J. Styles, who was unable to attend the event due to travel issues, and wrestled Rob Van Dam for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship in a losing effort. Puerto Rico and Mexico (2009–2010) Booker T debuted in the International Wrestling Association (IWA) on Histeria Boricua, a special event held on January 6, 2009. There he was booked against Chicano, the incumbent IWA Undisputed Heavyweight Champion. The match was won by Cotto, who reversed a "Book End" attempt and scored a pinfall victory. On July 11, 2010, Booker T was booked by World Wrestling Council in a match against Carlito which also involved Orlando Colón and El Mesias. On September 16, 2010, Booker T made his debut for Mexican promotion Perros del Mal. In the main event of the evening he teamed up with Dr. Wagner Jr. and El Mesías, who represented rival promotion AAA, against El Hijo del Perro Aguayo, Damián 666 and Halloween. After Aguayo pinned El Mesías, Booker turned on Wagner, unmasked him and joined Perros del Mal. Return to WWE Color commentator and part-time wrestler (2011–2012) On January 30, 2011 Booker T returned to WWE to take part in the Royal Rumble. Booker entered the match at number 21 and was eliminated by Mason Ryan. On the February 1 taping of SmackDown, Huffman debuted as the show's new color commentator, working beside Josh Mathews and Michael Cole, replacing Matt Striker. He coached on the returning Tough Enough competition, and at Elimination Chamber he introduced Trish Stratus as a fellow coach. On the June 6 episode of Raw, Booker wrestled his first match on the brand in four years, gaining a victory against Jack Swagger by count out. On the November 21 episode of Raw, Cody Rhodes threw water in Booker T's face after Rhodes allegedly heard Booker T criticize him, thus starting a conflict between the two. On the November 29 episode of SmackDown Booker was scheduled to face Rhodes in a match but it did not happen after Rhodes attacked him from behind him during a backstage interview. On the December 9 episode of SmackDown, Rhodes attacked Booker again while heading to the announcer's table leaving him with paramedics. Later that night, Booker T attacked Rhodes during his match with Daniel Bryan, leading to an Intercontinental Championship match at TLC: Tables, Ladders & Chairs, which Rhodes won. On the December 26 episode of Raw, Booker defeated Rhodes in a non-title match. On the January 6, 2012, episode of SmackDown, Booker challenged Rhodes a second time for the Intercontinental Championship, but once again failed to win the title. Booker T along with fellow commentators Jerry Lawler and Michael Cole all participated in the 2012 Royal Rumble. On the March 26, 2012 episode of Raw, Booker T saved Teddy Long from an attempted attack by Mark Henry, thus becoming the sixth and final member of Team Teddy at WrestleMania XXVIII, where Team Johnny emerged victorious. This was his last official match for the WWE. On the July 9 episode of Raw, Jerry Lawler won by pinfall against Michael Cole in a WrestleMania XXVII rematch. However, Booker, who was subbing for Lawler on commentary, threw Cole back into the ring after he tried to escape. This caused the anonymous Raw General Manager to reverse the decision and give Cole the win as a result of a disqualification. SmackDown General Manager and Hall of Fame (2012–2013) On July 31, 2012, Booker T was appointed the new General Manager of SmackDown. Booker would quickly add Eve Torres and Theodore Long to his staff, as his assistant and senior adviser respectively. Booker was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame by his brother, Stevie Ray, the night before WrestleMania 29. On the April 19 SmackDown, Booker became angry with Long for making matches without his consent. Big Show arrived and thanked Long for doing a better job than Booker, further infuriating him. On the April 22 Raw, upset with Long for making a World Heavyweight Championship match at Extreme Rules, made it a Triple Threat match. Booker took time off for a torn distal triceps, and had surgery for it on June 12. On the July 19 SmackDown, he returned to continue as SmackDown General Manager, but soon lost the job to Vickie Guerrero, on Vince McMahon's orders. Return to commentary and pre-show panelist (2014–present) Since 2014, Booker T has commonly done work on the WWE Network, including the Raw pre-show and also being a part of the "expert panel" on Kickoff shows before each pay-per-view event. On the 2015 premiere of Raw, Booker T replaced Jerry Lawler, who was suffering from diverticulitis, for commentating. However, it was later announced that Booker would be returning on a full-time basis to take Lawler's place on Raw, with Lawler moving to SmackDown. On the March 30 episode of Raw, Booker, along with JBL and Michael Cole, were injured by Brock Lesnar after Seth Rollins refused Lesnar his WWE World Heavyweight Championship rematch. Booker was replaced by Byron Saxton for commentating as he became a coach for the sixth season of WWE Tough Enough. On August 6, 2016, Booker T replaced Tommy Dreamer in an intergender tag team match for Dreamer's House of Hardcore promotion. Booker T returned to his old "King Booker" gimmick in a segment with the SmackDown Live Survivor Series tag teams where he gave a motivational speech and convinced Breezango (Tyler Breeze and Fandango) to join the team. In December 2016, after Jerry Lawler and Lita left the pre-show team, WWE ended their Raw and SmackDown pre-shows leaving Booker T to the WWE pay-per-view pre-shows and other WWE Network specials. Following the 2017 WWE Superstar Shake-up, Booker T replaced David Otunga as color commentator on Raw. On the January 29, 2018 episode of Raw, Booker was replaced on commentary by the returning Jonathan Coachman. On the August 28 episode of SmackDown Live Booker T made a surprise appearance as "King Booker" in the opening segment when he interrupted and joined in on The New Day's "five timers" celebration, following the latter's fifth tag team championship win. In 2020, Booker made his return by wrestling at the Reality of Wrestling promotion. Legacy Longtime wrestler Kurt Angle said of Booker: "He's done it all... he legitimately is one of the top five best of all time." In 2001, sports journalist Michael Landsberg stated that Booker was considered "one of the best wrestlers alive", capable of "any match, any style". Industry veteran John Layfield later described him as "the best acquisition that WWE got when they bought WCW" in 2001. Booker's 21 WCW titles render him the most decorated wrestler in the company's history. He was the first African American WCW World Television Champion. Harlem Heat were recognized by WWE as being – along with The Steiner Brothers – WCW's greatest ever tag team. Considering both Booker's WCW and WWF/E accoldades, WWE recognizes him as one of the most decorated performers of all-time. With his fifth WCW Championship win (which occurred in the WWF), Booker T became the second African-American to win a world championship in WWF/E (after The Rock), and the first to be of non-mixed race. Booker was voted WWE's greatest World Heavyweight Champion in a 2013 viewer poll. Other media In 2000, Booker appeared in the film Ready to Rumble, starring as himself. He has appeared in an episode of Charmed, called "Wrestling with Demons" alongside Buff Bagwell and Scott Steiner. In 2001, along with several other WWE wrestlers, Booker competed on an episode of The Weakest Link, being eliminated second from the show. He also has appeared on Comedy Central and MTV. On January 13, 2004, the album WWE Originals was released, featuring Booker T performing "Can You Dig It?". On April 21, 2007, Booker began hosting a radio show titled Tea Time with King Booker on KBME 790 AM in Houston. During the week of November 5, 2007, he appeared on Family Feud with several other WWE wrestlers. On September 1, 2012, Booker released his first autobiography, Booker T: From Prison to Promise, with Medallion Press. Booker T made appearances to promote the book with The Score Television Network with Arda Ocal which aired on August 29, 2012. He conducted a sixteen-page interview with Pro Wrestling Illustrated in the 2012 volume #50 issue. On March 10, 2015, Booker released his second autobiography, Booker T: Wrestling Royalty with Medallion Press. In 2015, Booker T started a show on KILT (AM) that is also podcast on Radio.com called "Heated Conversations – with Booker T". The show is aired Saturday Nights locally in Houston, Texas and covers subjects from Wrestling, MMA and Boxing to all sports. It has featured the biggest names from the WWE as well as NBA Stars like Dwight Howard. In February 2019, Booker T sued video game company Activision over the Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 character David "Prophet" Wilkes. The lawsuit claimed that the Black Ops character contained similarities to Booker's GI Bro comic book character. On 19 September, 2021 All41 Studios and Microgaming released WWE Legends: Link & Win, a game for mobile and desktop browsers. Booker T was featured as one of four main characters alongside Macho Man Randy Savage, Stone Cold Steve Austin and Eddie Guerrero. Video games Music videos Personal life Relationships and family Booker married his first wife Levestia on May 23, 1996. Booker presented her to the Nitro crowd the night after his WCW World Heavyweight Championship win at Bash at the Beach. Levestia was also used to further the feud between himself and Jeff Jarrett when Jarrett hit her in the head with a guitar on Nitro on July 31, 2000. However, they divorced on May 8, 2001. Booker has a son, from a previous relationship with a high school girlfriend, named Brandon (born in 1982), with whom he has a strained relationship due to his time spent on the road. Booker married his girlfriend of five years, Sharmell Sullivan, in February 2005. The couple welcomed their twins, a boy named Kendrick and a girl named Kennedy, in 2010. Booker and his brother Lash opened a wrestling school in Houston in 2005. Booker T is also a fan of Formula One, and was in attendance at the 2012 U.S Grand Prix as a guest of Lewis Hamilton. Reality of Wrestling In 2005, Huffman started his own wrestling promotion in Houston, Texas, called Pro Wrestling Alliance. In 2012, the promotion rebranded to Reality of Wrestling. After his final 2013 event, Christmas Chaos, ROW was near to close, but Houston business man Hilton Koch, who assisted the event, became a partner with Booker. On February 21, 2015, Booker T and Stevie Ray reunited as Harlem Heat for one last match in Reality of Wrestling for the promotion's "The Final Heat" event. They defeated the Heavenly Bodies to win the ROW Tag Team Championship. On March 14, the titles were vacated. In February 2020, Booker T returned to wrestle for the promotion in an eight-man tag team match. Politics On December 10, 2016, Huffman announced that he would be running in the 2019 Houston mayoral election. He was quoted saying that, "2020 is going to be a new era in the city of Houston. We're going to be looked at now from a different perspective. The cool city, 2020 is coming." Huffman was quoted in 2016, stating his focus for the three years leading up to the 2019 election would be concentrated on the city's "homeless, underprivileged, and low income areas." However, in September 2019, Huffman was not among the 12 names listed who applied for the election ballot. Legal issues Huffman spent nineteen months in prison after pleading guilty to armed robberies at Wendy's restaurants in Houston. He and his partners wore Wendy's uniforms during the holdups since they had been working there for 2½ years. Because of the gunmen's uniforms and familiarity with the fast food chain's operations, police suspected the robberies were inside jobs—and it did not take long before Huffman and three other men were found. He pleaded guilty in December 1987 to two aggravated robbery counts and was sentenced to five years in prison. Huffman was released after serving 19 months, and was placed on parole until April 1992. Championships and accomplishments Cauliflower Alley Club Tag Team Award (2018) – with Stevie Ray George Tragos/Lou Thesz Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame Class of 2018 Global Wrestling Federation GWF Tag Team Championship (3 times) – with Stevie Ray Las Vegas Pro Wrestling LVPW UWF Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Prairie Wrestling Alliance PWA Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Pro Wrestling Illustrated Inspirational Wrestler of the Year (2000) Most Improved Wrestler of the Year (1998) Tag Team of the Year (1995, 1996) with Stevie Ray Ranked No. 5 of the top 500 wrestlers in the PWI 500 in 2001 Southern Championship Wrestling Florida SCW Florida Southern Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Texas All-Pro Wrestling TAP Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Reality of Wrestling ROW Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Stevie Ray Total Nonstop Action Wrestling TNA Legends Championship (1 time, inaugural) TNA World Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Scott Steiner TNA Year End Awards (2 times) Memorable Moment of the Year (2007) Who To Watch in 2008 (2007) World Championship Wrestling WCW World Heavyweight Championship (4 times) WCW World Television Championship (6 times) WCW United States Heavyweight Championship (1 time) WCW World Tag Team Championship (10 times) – with Stevie Ray Ninth WCW Triple Crown Champion World Wrestling Federation/World Wrestling Entertainment/WWE WCW Championship (1 time) World Heavyweight Championship (1 time) World Tag Team Championship (3 times) – with Test (1), Goldust (1) and Rob Van Dam (1) WCW Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Test WWE Intercontinental Championship (1 time) WWE United States Championship (3 times) WWF Hardcore Championship (2 times) King of the Ring (2006) Sixteenth Triple Crown Champion Eighth Grand Slam Champion (under original format) WWE Hall of Fame (2 times) Class of 2013 – individually Class of 2019 – as a member of Harlem Heat Wrestling Observer Newsletter Most Underrated (2002) Worst Television Announcer (2017) Notes References External links 1965 births African-American male professional wrestlers American color commentators American male professional wrestlers American robbers American sportspeople convicted of crimes Living people NWA/WCW World Television Champions NWA/WCW/WWE United States Heavyweight Champions Professional wrestlers from Texas Professional wrestling announcers Professional wrestling podcasters Professional wrestling promoters Sportspeople from Houston The New World Order (professional wrestling) members TNA Legends/Global/Television/King of the Mountain Champions TNA/Impact World Tag Team Champions WCW World Heavyweight Champions World Heavyweight Champions (WWE) WWE Grand Slam champions WWE Hall of Fame inductees WWF/WWE Hardcore Champions WWF/WWE Intercontinental Champions WWF/WWE King Crown's Champions/King of the Ring winners	true	[ "Roberto Michael Castro (born 15 July 1989) is an Ecuadorian footballer who plays for América de Quito.\n\nClub career\nCastro has always played for Deportivo Quito. Castro first broke into the first team squad in 2006. In the 2006 and 2007 seasons, he was used a lot because of his great ability to defend. However, in the 2008 season, he helped Deportivo Quito win the Copa Pilsener 2008. He was a key player in that season and he did start a lot of matches including coming in as a substitute. He started 28 matches and only came as a substitute 1 time in the season.\n\nInternational career\nCastro was part of Ecuador's squad in the 2007 Pan American Games. He was one of the key figures in his country's gold medal win of the tournament. He was also called up to participate in the 2009 South American Youth Championship where Ecuador was eliminated early by a coin toss.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1989 births\nLiving people\nSportspeople from Quito\nEcuadorian footballers\nS.D. Quito footballers\nFootballers at the 2011 Pan American Games\nAssociation football central defenders\nPan American Games competitors for Ecuador", "Treateth is a melodic death metal band. In the beginning named Hostilis of Mort. They are from Guatemala City, Guatemala. Formed at the end of 2007, as an idea of Erick and Marco Orozco, who always get a lot of trouble for find members for the band that be qualified by the expectations for the brothers. Treateth stars in 2008, when the actual vocalist came into the band. The band has released one EP, five singles, and one studio album being recorded.\n\nBiography\n\nHostilis of Mort \n\nThe band began, at late 2007 with the original band members and creators of Treateth, the brothers Marco and Erick. At the beginning the band was called Hostilis Of Mort, but what they two wanted to play deserved a different name, so Treateth was born. The two brothers went to a lot of trouble finding good members for the band since the beginning, but, no one filled the expectations of the brothers, so, no one stayed much in the band, since they finally found Pablo, Josue and Lin.\n\nTreateth Began 4 October 2008 when they entered a Band contest named Rock-A-Guate. Treateth went to the finals, but didn't win the contest, but they won much more, Completing finally the line-up with front-girl Lin.\n\nIneo Di Legato\nA Demo was released at the beginning of 2009 as a \"Good Bye\" to the old Treateth and a Welcome to the new Metal Band Treateth. The demo was a compilation of 3 of a few more songs that the band used to play in shows called \"Ineo di Legato\".\n\nThe songs on the demo are:\n\nEugenics\n\nTrack listing:\n\nTreateth en 2010-2011\nTreateth, now complete, began writing new stuff, Treateth got serious, with brutal vocals, sick drumming, and mixing some crazy guitar riffs and what is something that in the band can't miss is the Melodic riffs, giving the band a new and brutal sound, a FULL-METAL sound.\n\nNow Treateh is working in his second studio album called \"Beneath The Gods\".\n\nMembers\n\nCurrent members \n\n Linda Orellana - Vocals\n Marco Orozco - Lead Guitar / Back Vocals\n Luis Solis - 2nd Guitar\n Erick Orozco - Bass\n Josue del Valle - Drums\n\nPast members\n Pablo Rios - 2nd Guitar\n\nDiscography\n\nDemos and EP \nIneo di Legato (2008)\n\nStudio albums\nEugenics (2010)\nBeneath The Gods (2011–2012)\n\nSingles \n Scars of a new beginning\n Unreachable\n Consilium of Occasus\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Myspace\n\nGuatemalan heavy metal musical groups\nDeath metal musical groups\nMusical quartets\nMusical groups established in 2008\nMusical groups disestablished in 2011" ]
[ "Booker T (wrestler)", "Harlem Heat (1993-1997)", "How did Harlem Heat start?", "In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane.", "Did they win a lot in the beginning?", "They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled." ]	C_1f3ea57e1286415abc8b8322888efbdf_1	Who were they facing?	3	Who were Harlem Heat facing?	Booker T (wrestler)	Booker and his brother Stevie Ray signed with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) after Sid Vicious recommended they sign with the company. In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane. They became heels and were on Harley Race and Col. Rob Parker's team in the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster. They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled. In 1994, they acquired the services of Sensational Sherri, dubbed 'Sister' Sherri, as their manager and changed their names back to Booker T and Stevie Ray, at their request. By the end of 1994, they held the WCW Tag Team Championship after defeating Stars and Stripes (The Patriot and Marcus Alexander Bagwell) in December. After dropping the title to The Nasty Boys, Harlem Heat regained the belts on June 24, 1995. Afterward, Harlem Heat got into a feud with Col. Parker's "Stud Stable" of "Dirty" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Parker and Sherri were carrying on a love affair and Parker eventually left the Stud Stable in favor of the Heat to be with Sherri. Harlem Heat won the WCW World Tag Team titles at Fall Brawl 1995, defeating Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Their third title reign only lasted one day, but the duo regained the tag team title nine days later from The American Males (Buff Bagwell and Scotty Riggs). On the June 24, 1996 Nitro, Harlem Heat defeated Lex Luger and Sting to capture their fifth WCW World Tag Team titles. Three days after losing the tag team titles to the Steiner Brothers, Harlem Heat regained the titles back from the Steiners on July 27. On September 23, Booker T and Stevie Ray were defeated by Public Enemy (Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge) but took the titles back for the seventh time on October 1. They lost the Tag Team Championship to the Outsiders (Kevin Nash and Scott Hall) on October 27. Subsequently, they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces. They then entered into a brief feud against Col. Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they won. In 1997, they feuded with Public Enemy (Grunge & Rocco), The Steiners, and the nWo. In fall 1997, they fired Sherri and added a new manager, Jacqueline. They were briefly put out of action by the nWo and returned to feud with the Faces of Fear (Meng and The Barbarian). Stevie then took five months off from WCW to recover from an ankle injury and Jacqueline left for the WWF. CANNOTANSWER	the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster.	Booker T. Huffman Jr. (born March 1, 1966) better known by his ring name Booker T, is an American professional wrestler, professional wrestling promoter and color commentator. He is currently signed to WWE, and is also the owner and founder of the independent promotion Reality of Wrestling (ROW) in Texas City, Texas. Booker has been named by peers and industry commentators as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of his era; he was voted WWE's greatest World Heavyweight Champion in a 2013 viewer poll. Booker is best known for his time in World Championship Wrestling (WCW), the World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment (WWF/E), and Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA), holding 35 championships between those organizations. He is the most decorated wrestler in WCW history, having held 21 titles, including a record six WCW World Television Championships (along with being the first African American titleholder), and a record eleven WCW World Tag Team Championships: ten as one half of Harlem Heat with his brother, Lash "Stevie Ray" Huffman in WCW (most reigns within that company), and one in the WWF with Test. Booker was the final WCW World Heavyweight Champion and WCW United States Heavyweight Champion within the active WCW organisation. Booker is a six-time world champion in professional wrestling, having won the WCW World Heavyweight Championship five times, and WWE's World Heavyweight Championship once. With his fifth WCW Championship win (which occurred in the WWF), Booker T became the second African-American to win a world championship in WWF/E (after The Rock), and also the first to be of non-mixed race. He is also the winner of the 2006 King of the Ring tournament, the sixteenth Triple Crown Champion, and the eighth Grand Slam Champion (under original format) in WWE history. As the ninth WCW Triple Crown Champion, Booker is one of five men to achieve both the WWE and WCW Triple Crowns. He has headlined multiple pay-per-view events for the WWF/E, WCW and TNA throughout his career. Booker was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame on April 6, 2013, by his brother, Lash. Both he and Lash were inducted together into the 2019 class on April 6, 2019 as Harlem Heat, rendering Booker a two-time Hall of Famer. Early life Huffman was born the youngest of eight children, in Plain Dealing, Louisiana, though his birthplace is often misidentified as Houston, Texas. By the time Booker was 13, both of his parents had died and he lived with his 16-year-old sister. He would move in with his older brother Lash "Stevie Ray" Huffman at age 17. In high school, Huffman was a drum major. He also played football and basketball. Professional wrestling career Early Career (1986–1993) As a single father working at a storage company in Houston, Texas, Huffman was looking to make a better life for himself and his son. His brother Lash (Stevie Ray) suggested that he and Booker check out a new wrestling school being opened, run by Ivan Putski, in conjunction with his Western Wrestling Alliance organization. His boss from the storage company sponsored the money to pay for the wrestling lessons. Booker trained under Scott Casey, who helped to turn Booker's background as a gangster and dancer into "sports entertainment", teaching the newcomer in-ring psychology and ring generalship. Eight weeks later, Booker debuted as "G.I. Bro" on Putski's Western Wrestling Alliance Live! program. The character was a tie-in to the raging Gulf War and the WWF's Sgt. Slaughter angle. Even though the WWA met its demise some time later, Booker continued to wrestle on the Texas independent circuit, often with his brother Lash, who performed as Stevie Ray. They were spotted by Skandor Akbar who hired them to work for the Global Wrestling Federation (GWF), where he and Eddie Gilbert were involved. Gilbert teamed Stevie Ray and Booker T together as the Ebony Experience, and they won the GWF Tag Team Championship on July 31, 1992. During their time with GWF, they held the tag title a total of three times. Subsequently, Booker T and Stevie Ray left the GWF to work for World Championship Wrestling. World Championship Wrestling Harlem Heat (1993–1997) Booker and his brother Stevie Ray signed with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) after Sid Vicious recommended they sign with the company. In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane. They became heels and were on Harley Race and Col. Rob Parker's team in the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster. They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled. In 1994, they acquired the services of Sensational Sherri, dubbed 'Sister' Sherri, as their manager and changed their names back to Booker T and Stevie Ray, at their request. By the end of 1994, they held the WCW Tag Team Championship after defeating Stars and Stripes (The Patriot and Marcus Alexander Bagwell) in December. After dropping the title to The Nasty Boys, Harlem Heat regained the belts on June 24, 1995. Afterward, Harlem Heat got into a feud with Col. Parker's "Stud Stable" of "Dirty" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Parker and Sherri were carrying on a love affair and Parker eventually left the Stud Stable in favor of the Heat to be with Sherri. Harlem Heat won the WCW World Tag Team titles at Fall Brawl 1995, defeating Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Their third title reign only lasted one day, but the duo regained the tag team title nine days later from The American Males (Buff Bagwell and Scotty Riggs). On the June 24, 1996 Nitro, Harlem Heat defeated Lex Luger and Sting to capture their fifth WCW World Tag Team titles. Three days after losing the tag team titles to the Steiner Brothers, Harlem Heat regained the titles back from the Steiners on July 27. On September 23, Booker T and Stevie Ray were defeated by Public Enemy (Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge) but took the titles back for the seventh time on October 1. They lost the Tag Team Championship to the Outsiders (Kevin Nash and Scott Hall) on October 27. Subsequently, they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces. They then entered into a brief feud against Col. Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they won. In 1997, they feuded with Public Enemy (Grunge & Rocco), The Steiners, and the nWo. In fall 1997, they fired Sherri and added a new manager, Jacqueline. They were briefly put out of action by the nWo and returned to feud with the Faces of Fear (Meng and The Barbarian). Stevie then took five months off from WCW to recover from an ankle injury and Jacqueline left for the WWF. World Television Champion (1997–1999) Booker made the transition into singles action and won the WCW World Television Championship from Disco Inferno on the December 29, 1997 episode of Nitro. Booker feuded over the title with Perry Saturn and Rick Martel culminating in a gauntlet match at SuperBrawl VIII. Martel, the man that was originally supposed to win the match, went down early due to a knee injury, meaning the finish and the remainder of the match had to be called in the ring. During spring 1998, Booker began feuding with Chris Benoit. Benoit cost Booker the TV title during a match against Fit Finlay. As a result, Booker and Benoit engaged in a "best-of-seven series" with the winner meeting Finlay for the title. After seven matches and interference from Bret Hart and Stevie Ray, Booker T won the series, and on June 14, regained the Television Championship. Booker scored a clean pinfall victory over Bret Hart on the edition of February 22 of Nitro. The following month, he regained the TV Championship from Scott Steiner, who, in turn, defeated Booker in the finals of the WCW United States Heavyweight Championship tournament. Booker lost the Television title to Rick Steiner a month later at Slamboree. Harlem Heat reunion (1999–2000) By mid-1999, Booker had convinced his brother, Stevie Ray, to leave the nWo and reunite Harlem Heat. Harlem Heat defeated Bam Bam Bigelow and Kanyon for the WCW World Tag Team titles at Road Wild. They lost the WCW World Tag Team titles to Barry and Kendall Windham on August 23, but Harlem Heat regained them about a month later at Fall Brawl. When The Filthy Animals were stripped of the WCW World Tag Team belts due to an injury suffered by Rey Mysterio Jr., the title was put up in a three-way dance at Halloween Havoc. Harlem Heat claimed their tenth WCW World Tag Team title defeating Hugh Morrus and Brian Knobs and Konnan and Kidman. By late 1999, a female bodybuilder named Midnight had joined Harlem Heat. Stevie neglected her help and started disputing with Booker over her. Stevie Ray eventually challenged Midnight in a match that decided whether or not she would stay with Harlem Heat. After being defeated with a surprise small package, Stevie Ray turned on both Booker and Midnight to form Harlem Heat, Inc. with Big T, Kash, and J. Biggs. Stevie Ray and Big T dubbed themselves Harlem Heat 2000. Throughout this period, Huffman was referred to simply as Booker, as Harlem Heat 2000 won the rights to the name "T" in a match with Big T against Booker on February 20, 2000 at SuperBrawl X. Kidman and Booker T defeated Harlem Heat 2000 (Ray and Big T) at Uncensored 2000. When Vince Russo and Eric Bischoff formed The New Blood, Huffman eventually completely changed his in-ring persona, helping lead Captain Rection's military-themed Misfits In Action stable as G.I. Bro, reprising his gimmicks from his days in the WWA. He defeated Shawn Stasiak at the Great American Bash in a Boot Camp match. He returned to the Booker T name on the June 19 Nitro, promoting Rection to the status of General and demanding the Misfits start standing up to the New Blood. WCW World Heavyweight Champion (2000–2001) Huffman was elevated to main event status in 2000. After WCW booker Vince Russo grew disgruntled with Hulk Hogan's politics, he fired Hogan during the live broadcast of Bash at the Beach and announced an impromptu match between Jeff Jarrett and Huffman for the WCW World Heavyweight Championship. Huffman won the match, in the process becoming the second ever African American champion in WCW after Ron Simmons, and the third African American to win a World Heavyweight title. He lost the title to Kevin Nash on August 28 on Nitro. He regained the title a few weeks later in a steel cage match with Nash at Fall Brawl, but again lost the title, this time to Vince Russo himself in a cage match (Russo was speared out of the cage by Goldberg and won the title), Russo vacated the title and Booker won it for the third time in a San Francisco 49er Box Match against Jeff Jarrett on the October 2 episode of Nitro. Booker's next feud was with Scott Steiner, to whom he eventually lost the title in a Straitjacket steel cage match. Steiner won by TKO when he put an unconscious Booker into the Steiner Recliner at Mayhem. Steiner was WCW's longest reigning champion in years, whilst Booker was briefly out with an injury. Booker returned to the roster and defeated Rick Steiner for the WCW United States Heavyweight Championship at Greed. This made Booker the ninth WCW Triple Crown winner. On the final episode of Nitro, he defeated Scott Steiner to win the WCW World Heavyweight Championship for the fourth time. According to sports journalist Michael Landsberg, Huffman was salaried at "close to a million dollars a year" in WCW. He won a total of twenty-one titles within the organization, making him the most decorated performer in its history. Booker was also the reigning WCW United States Heavyweight Champion and WCW World Heavyweight Champion when he accepted a contract with the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment The Alliance (2001–2002) After WCW was bought by the World Wrestling Federation in March 2001, Booker T made his debut at the King of the Ring pay-per-view in 2001 attacking WWF Champion Stone Cold Steve Austin during his match, promptly injuring him in his very first move in the WWF. He later turned heel and became a leading member of The Alliance during the Invasion storyline. In his debut match in the company, Booker defended his WCW Championship against Buff Bagwell on the July 2 episode of Raw; sports journalist Michael Landsberg reported that many have called this bout "the worst match ever". At InVasion, The Alliance defeated Team WWF when Austin joined the Alliance. On the July 26 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T gave up his WCW United States Championship and handed it over to Chris Kanyon. He later lost the WCW Championship to Kurt Angle, but he went on to win the title back on the July 30 episode of Raw. Booker T kept the title until SummerSlam, when he lost it to The Rock after feuding with him over the similarity in their gimmicks and their identical finishing moves, the Book End/Rock Bottom. Booker T won the WCW Tag Team Championship for an eleventh time, this time with Test, and he also had a WWF Tag Team Championship reign with Test. At the Survivor Series, Booker T was eliminated third by The Rock after a roll-up and eventually The Alliance was defeated, causing them to disband. In its aftermath, Booker remained a heel, and he joined forces with Vince McMahon and The Boss Man in December to feud with Steve Austin. After Booker T cost Austin a match against Chris Jericho for the Undisputed WWF Championship at Vengeance, Austin gained revenge by attacking Booker T in a grocery store by covering him in food. Then the week after Booker T vandalized Austin's truck causing Austin to chase Booker T around a bingo hall and a church. Booker T's first WrestleMania appearance was at WrestleMania X8 against Edge, a match he lost. They feuded over who would appear in a fictional Japanese shampoo commercial. When the brand extension was introduced in March, Booker T was drafted to the Raw brand. At Insurrextion, Booker briefly held the WWF Hardcore Championship twice, defeating Stevie Richards only to lose it to Crash Holly seconds later. He then re-defeated Crash and lost the title to Stevie Richards a few minutes later. Feud with Evolution (2002–2003) Goldust began trying to start a tag team with Booker, but Goldust kept costing Booker matches. With the nWo now operating in WWE, Booker T was eventually invited into the faction. His time there was short-lived, when he was kicked out of the group by Shawn Michaels after a superkick from Michaels. Booker then turned face and found a partnership with Goldust and the pair teamed to battle the nWo. Booker and Goldust had a WWE Tag Team Championship match against The Un-Americans (Christian and Lance Storm) at SummerSlam, but The Un-Americans retained after interference from Test. At No Mercy, Booker and Goldust battled Chris Jericho and Christian for the World Tag Team Championship, but they lost the match with Jericho using the title belt on Goldust. He spent the rest of 2002 teaming with Goldust. They won the World Tag Team Championship at Armageddon in a Tag Team Elimination match defeating the teams of Christian and Chris Jericho, Lance Storm and William Regal, and the Dudley Boyz. They held the belts for about three weeks, when they lost them to Regal and Storm. Booker and Goldust lost the rematch and decided to go their separate ways. The gimmick for Booker and Goldust was Goldust being a strange, yet dependable ally who Booker eventually warmed up to after initial skepticism. By 2003, however, Booker T's popularity had soared and he amicably separated from Goldust, at Goldust's request, in order to pursue the World Heavyweight Championship. In February 2003, he eliminated The Rock to win a battle royal to become the number one contender to the World Heavyweight Championship at WrestleMania XIX. Booker targeted Evolution after Batista and Randy Orton attacked Booker's former partner, Goldust. Several weeks before WrestleMania, the incumbent champion and Evolution's leader, Triple H, cut a controversial promo on Booker T. Triple H downplayed Booker T's WCW success, pointing out that the WCW World Heavyweight Championship had been held by non-wrestlers like booker Vince Russo and actor David Arquette, calling WCW and its title "a joke", despite the fact that, as World Heavyweight Champion, Triple H was holding the WCW World Heavyweight Championship's physical belt, the Big Gold Belt, and that Triple H's Evolution stablemate, Ric Flair, had been a multiple-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion. He said that "people like" Booker T would never win world championships in WWE. This promo is often interpreted as racist due to Triple H referencing Booker T's "nappy" hair and implying that Booker T was just in WWE to dance and entertain for "people like" Triple H. During the WrestleMania XIX press conference Michael Cole asked Triple H as to whether he had deliberately cut a racist promo, Triple H claimed this was not the case and that he was just referring to Booker's criminal past. A week later, Booker attacked Triple H in the bathroom and laid him out after Triple H had thrown a dollar bill at him, ordering Booker to get him a towel. However, Booker T lost to Triple H at WrestleMania. For several weeks, he teamed with Shawn Michaels and Kevin Nash in a feud against Triple H, Ric Flair, and Chris Jericho. At Backlash, Booker's team lost when Triple H pinned Nash after a sledgehammer shot. Various feuds (2003–2005) Afterward, Booker set his sights on the newly reactivated Intercontinental Championship. After losing a battle royal for the title at Judgment Day, Booker feuded with the champion Christian. After a few matches, Booker defeated Christian to become the new Intercontinental Champion on the July 7 episode of Raw. About a month later, because of a nagging back injury, Booker lost the Intercontinental title back to Christian at a non-televised house show on August 10. Booker, meanwhile, was out of action until October. Booker returned on the October 20 episode of Raw and subsequently joined Team Austin at Survivor Series for a match to determine whether Eric Bischoff or Stone Cold Steve Austin (both co-general managers) would be the sole General Manager of Raw. Team Bischoff won the match. Booker then feuded with Mark Henry, who eliminated him in the Survivor Series match. Booker defeated Henry at Armageddon. On the February 16, 2004 episode of Raw, Booker T and Rob Van Dam defeated Ric Flair and Batista for the World Tag Team Championship. Booker and Van Dam held the titles for a month, even defending the belts at WrestleMania XX in a Fatal 4-Way tag team match. Eight days later on the March 22 episode of Raw, they lost the World Tag Team Championship back to Ric Flair and Batista. He and Rob Van Dam, never got their rematch due to Rob Van Dam being drafted to SmackDown! that very same night. On March 23, 2004 he was "traded" (along with the Dudley Boyz) to the SmackDown! brand in exchange for Triple H, but as part of a new storyline, he appeared unhappy with the move calling SmackDown! "the minor leagues" and even disrespected Eddie Guerrero, the brand's WWE Champion, turning heel in the process. Later on, Booker T bragged about how he was the biggest star on SmackDown! and feuded with The Undertaker. Booker tried to utilize voodoo magic to try to overcome his "supernatural" foe; however, it did nothing to prevent him from losing to the Undertaker at Judgment Day. In mid-2004, Booker T set his sights on the United States Championship along with its champion, John Cena. After Cena got on the bad side of General Manager Kurt Angle, he did his best to get the title away from Cena. Cena successfully defended the title at The Great American Bash in a four-way elimination match against Booker, René Duprée, and Rob Van Dam. After Cena was stripped of his title by Angle for "laying a hand" on the GM, Booker took advantage of the situation and won an eight-man elimination match to win the vacant United States Championship, thus becoming the one-hundredth United States Champion in history, in a match that also featured Cena, Dupree, Billy Gunn, Charlie Haas, Luther Reigns, Kenzo Suzuki and Van Dam. Booker won by last eliminating both Cena and Van Dam in the course of less than 10 seconds After Angle was fired by Mr. McMahon for embellishing his injuries, Theodore Long began his first tenure as SmackDown! General Manager, and booked a best-of-five series of matches for the United States Championship between Booker and Cena. The first match took place at SummerSlam in Toronto and saw Cena gain the pinfall victory to go up 1–0 in the series. Booker would bounce back and win the next two matches, on the August 26 edition of SmackDown! in Fresno, California and a live event the next night in Sydney, Australia, to take a 2–1 lead. The next match in the series wouldn't come until the September 16 SmackDown! from Spokane, Washington, where Cena won and tied the series at two apiece. The series culminated at No Mercy, where Cena won the series 3–2, and thusly, the United States Championship. On October 21, SmackDown! General Manager Theodore Long placed Booker in a six-man tag team match with Rob Van Dam and Rey Mysterio against John "Bradshaw" Layfield (JBL), René Duprée, and Kenzo Suzuki. JBL expected Booker to betray his partners, but instead Booker pinned him, thus turning face again. Booker T faced JBL for the WWE Championship at the Survivor Series on November 14, but lost after he was hit in the head with the championship belt. The next night, Booker T demanded a rematch, citing Orlando Jordan's interference. He was then joined by Eddie Guerrero and The Undertaker who also wanted a shot at JBL's title, prompting Theodore Long to make a fatal four-way match for the WWE Championship at Armageddon. Once again, Booker failed to win the title, as JBL retained it. He then briefly teamed with Eddie Guerrero, at one point challenging Mysterio and Van Dam for the WWE Tag Team Championship, and feuded with Heidenreich. Booker won a 30-man Battle Royal dark match at WrestleMania 21 last eliminating Raw's Viscera and Chris Masters. Subsequently, Booker was part of the tournament to name a new number one contender and made it to the Final Four. After Kurt Angle eliminated Booker, he returned the favor, costing Angle the match against JBL. The storyline then turned to a sexual nature, as Angle began stalking Booker's new wife, Sharmell. Booker defeated Angle at Judgment Day. On the May 26 episode of SmackDown!, Booker participated in a "Winners Choice" Battle Royal, with the winner choosing his opponent for the next week. Kurt Angle won and wanted to wrestle Sharmell. Booker protested, and the match was made into a Handicap match. Angle won by pinning Sharmell in a sexual position. The next week, Booker gained revenge on Angle, defeating him with a Scissors Kick. On the June 30 episode of SmackDown!, JBL defeated Christian, The Undertaker, Chris Benoit, Muhammad Hassan, and Booker T in a six-man elimination match for the SmackDown! Championship. During the match, Booker got specifically involved with Christian. Booker later defeated Christian at The Great American Bash. United States Champion (2005–2006) Booker T began teaming with Chris Benoit, eying his United States Championship again. Benoit was allowed to pick his next challenger to see who would face him at No Mercy, so Booker, Christian, and Orlando Jordan tried to impress Benoit by winning matches. He instead decided not choose one opponent, so he made it a fatal four-way for No Mercy, where Benoit successfully defended his title. On the October 21 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T defeated Benoit for the United States Championship, due to unseen help from Sharmell. Theodore Long later showed footage of Sharmell interfering in Booker's matches. Booker went to apologize to Benoit and give him a rematch, but then attacked Benoit, busting him open with the United States title belt and turning heel once again. Booker then boasted that he had been fully aware of what Sharmell had been doing and had been playing dumb to fool everyone. On the November 25 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T defended the United States Championship against Benoit. The match ended when Benoit superplexed Booker and two referees made a three count on either competitor, claiming that their wrestler had won. Booker was stripped of the belt by Theodore Long, because of the confusion of who won since they pinned each other at the same time. Long decided to put Benoit and Booker against each other in a best of seven series, just as the two had in their WCW days. Booker took an early 3–0 lead. In a must win match during Armageddon, Benoit was able to defeat Booker T to bring the series to 3–1. At a house show, Booker was injured, and he did not wrestle again until after the "Best of Seven" series with Benoit was completed. Booker was scheduled to face Benoit in Match 5 of the Best of Seven Series at the December 30 taping of SmackDown!. At the beginning of the show, General Manager Theodore Long said that Booker would have to forfeit. Both Booker and Benoit protested, with Benoit not wanting a cheap victory. Booker managed to persuade Long to allow him to choose a stand-in for the matches. Booker chose Randy Orton as his replacement. Benoit was able to tie the series 3–3 after beating Orton in two consecutive matches on the December 30 and January 6, 2006 episodes of SmackDown!. Orton, however, was able to defeat Benoit in the final match on the January 13 episode of SmackDown! to win the series and the title for Booker T, who held the title until No Way Out where Benoit won it back. On the February 24 episode of SmackDown!, Booker and Sharmell provided guest commentary for a match involving The Boogeyman. After defeating his opponents, Boogeyman dumped a bucket of worms onto the announce table where they were sitting, frightening the two. Over the next few weeks, Boogeyman would stalk Booker and Sharmell. Booker and Boogeyman were set to face off on the March 18 Saturday Night's Main Event XXXII, but the match was canceled due to Booker faking a knee injury to escape competition. The feud eventually culminated at WrestleMania 22, with Booker and Sharmell losing to Boogeyman. The couple received a restraining order against The Boogeyman on the April 7 episode of SmackDown!, ending the feud. King Booker and World Heavyweight Champion (2006–2007) Booker next entered the 2006 King of the Ring tournament on SmackDown!, advancing through to the finals due to a bye as his semi-final opponent, Kurt Angle, was unable to wrestle. The finals were held at Judgment Day where Booker defeated Bobby Lashley. Upon winning the King of the Ring tournament, Booker began wrestling as "King Booker" and began acting like he was an actual monarch ruling "The SmackDown! Kingdom". Booker formed a royal court that included his wife, Queen Sharmell, Sir William Regal, and Sir Finlay, and began including the mannerisms and attire of a stereotypical English-style king as part of the character, all the way down to wearing a crown and cape and speaking in a fake English accent. However, whenever King Booker would get angry he would launch into a tirade in the style of Booker T (an example of this was an episode of SmackDown! where Theodore Long would inform him he would be facing The Undertaker), which lent some comedic aspect to the character; he even went as far as having Lashley kiss his "royal" feet. After gaining his title of King, Booker continued to feud with Lashley. After Lashley defeated John "Bradshaw" Layfield (JBL) for the United States Championship at the end of May, Booker began chasing after the title and even resorted to making Lashley kiss his "royal feet" on the June 2 episode of SmackDown!. The feud ended after a steel cage match on the June 30 episode of SmackDown! where Lashley defeated Booker by escaping the cage to retain the United States Championship. The next week, Booker entered a battle royal on SmackDown! with the winner to challenge Rey Mysterio for his World Heavyweight Championship at The Great American Bash. Booker won the battle royal and then defeated Mysterio at The Great American Bash to win the World Heavyweight Championship after Chavo Guerrero betrayed Mysterio by hitting him with a steel chair. This was Booker's first world championship since joining WWE and the win caused him to proclaim himself as the "King of the World". This win would also make Booker the sixteenth Triple Crown Champion and eighth Grand Slam Champion (under the original format) in the history of the WWE. After Booker won the World Heavyweight Championship, he began a rivalry with the returning former champion Batista, who vowed to regain the title he was forced to forfeit due to injury. This rivalry spilled over to real life when the two got into a legitimate fistfight at a SummerSlam pay-per-view commercial shoot, reportedly due to Batista considering himself superior to the rest of the roster due to his quick climb to main event status. According to sources, both men were left bloodied and bruised, however Booker was reportedly praised by many wrestlers in the back for speaking his mind to Batista about his attitude. At SummerSlam, Booker lost to Batista by disqualification after Queen Sharmell interfered on his behalf (thus retaining the title), but at No Mercy, Booker defeated Batista, Lashley and his own stablemate, Finlay, in a Fatal 4-Way match. Before the match, Booker assaulted Sir William Regal, resulting in the breakup of the King's Court. Despite the break-up of his Court, Booker lost to Batista by disqualification on the October 20 episode on SmackDown!, due to interference from WWE Champion John Cena from Raw and ECW World Champion Big Show, the two of whom King Booker was to face at Cyber Sunday in a "champion of champions" match. At Cyber Sunday, the fans voted for the World Heavyweight Championship to be on the line. Booker retained after defeating Big Show and Cena with help from Kevin Federline. After Cyber Sunday, the feud between King Booker and Batista continued with Batista unable to wrest the title from Booker. Eventually this led to a match at Survivor Series on November 26, where Booker declared that if Batista failed to defeat him this time, it would be the last World Heavyweight Championship match he would receive as long as Booker was champion. At Survivor Series, SmackDown! General Manager Theodore Long decided that if Booker got counted out or disqualified, he would lose the title. Late in the match, Queen Sharmell handed Booker his title belt while referee Nick Patrick was not looking. While she had Patrick distracted, Booker attempted to hit Batista with the belt. Batista moved out of the way, knocked the belt out of Booker's hands and hit him in the head with it, and King Booker lost the World Heavyweight Championship to Batista. After losing the title, Booker feuded alongside former royal court member Finlay against Batista and John Cena, which led up to Armageddon where they lost. While competing in the Royal Rumble match, King Booker was eliminated by Kane. A frustrated Booker returned to the ring illegally and eliminated Kane. This started a short feud between the two resulting in a match at No Way Out, which Kane won. On the February 23 episode of SmackDown!, Booker won a Falls Count Anywhere Money in the Bank qualifying match, defeating Kane (with assistance from The Great Khali) and earned himself a spot in the match at WrestleMania 23. At WrestleMania, Matt Hardy set up Sharmell for a Twist of Fate during the Money in the Bank match with the briefcase in Booker's grasp – thus forcing him to choose between a guaranteed title shot and his wife. He chose to defend Sharmell and lost the match. On the April 6 episode of SmackDown!, Booker attempted to take revenge. However, he lost the match against Matt Hardy, and Sharmell declared her disappointment in him and slapped him. In an attempt to impress Sharmell, Booker attacked The Undertaker but was Tombstoned on an announce table. Booker was removed from television to deal with a knee injury. Draft to RAW, WWE Championship pursuit and departure (2007) On the June 11 episode of Raw, both King Booker and Queen Sharmell were drafted to the Raw brand as part of the WWE Draft. He then began a short feud with John Cena over the WWE Championship, Booker would wrestle Cena in a Five Pack Challenge along with Bobby Lashley, Mick Foley and Randy Orton at Vengeance: Night of Champions for the title in a losing effort. Cena would retain at the event by pinning Foley. On the July 16 episode of Raw, King Booker came to the ring using Triple H's theme music "The King of Kings", even using his video. King Booker declared that neither Triple H nor Jerry Lawler could be known as "The King". Booker began a feud with Lawler, defeating him on the August 6 episode of Raw where the loser had to crown the winner the next week. When the time came, Lawler refused, declaring that Triple H was still a king and announcing that King Booker would battle Triple H at SummerSlam. Booker attacked Lawler, throwing him into the ring post and hitting him with a television monitor. At SummerSlam, Booker lost to the returning Triple H. On the August 27 episode of Raw, Booker wrestled against John Cena in a non-title match, which he lost by disqualification when Randy Orton interfered. In August, he was linked to Signature Pharmacy, a company thought to be distributing performance-enhancing drugs. He was suspended by WWE for violating its Wellness Policy. He denied using any drugs and being a customer of Signature Pharmacy. In October 2007, Booker T requested his and Sharmell's release from their WWE contracts due to the pressure he had in WWE and being burned out, which WWE granted. Total Nonstop Action Wrestling Feud with Bobby Roode (2007–2008) At the Genesis pay-per-view on November 11, 2007, Huffman debuted in Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) as Sting's mystery partner in a tag team match against Kurt Angle and Kevin Nash for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship, reverting to his Booker T character. His wife Sharmell also debuted, interfering in the match on Booker and Sting's behalf when Karen Angle interfered on behalf of Kurt Angle and Nash. On the November 29 episode of Impact!, Booker said he came to TNA to test his skills against the young talent, take TNA to a higher level, and win the TNA World Heavyweight Championship. Robert Roode came to the ring and challenged Booker to a match, claiming he has been pushed down by washed-up wrestlers and has-beens. Booker won his Impact! debut match, but afterwards, Christian Cage and Robert Roode beat down Booker until Kaz made the save. At Turning Point, Booker and Kaz defeated Roode and Cage when Booker pinned Cage. Booker and Sharmell won a mixed tag team match against Robert Roode and Ms. Brooks at Final Resolution. After the match, Roode punched Sharmell in the face, leading to a match at Against All Odds. While the punch was intended to be a work, Roode had in fact made contact with Sharmell during the punch, dislocating her jaw and causing her to be off TV for a few weeks, therefore making it into a shoot. The rivalry, however, went ahead as planned where Booker and Roode wrestled to a double-countout at Against All Odds, which saw them brawl to the parking lot. Roode defeated Booker in strap match at Destination X after hitting Booker with a pair of handcuffs. In a special live episode of Impact!, Booker T and Robert Roode had another outing, this time with the fans being able to vote on the stipulation of the match. At Booker's request during a pre-match promo, the match became a First Blood Match, beating the Last Man Standing and I Quit stipulations. Booker T would go on to win the match-up. At Lockdown, Booker T and Sharmell defeated Robert Roode and Payton Banks after Sharmell pinned Banks with a roll-up. The Main Event Mafia (2008–2010) Booker T turned heel for the first time in TNA at Sacrifice by attacking Christian Cage and Rhino from behind with a steel chair. This came about as a result of losing a tag team match up against Christian Cage and Rhino, with them furthering themselves in the Deuces Wild Tag Team Tournament. Booker then competed in the King of the Mountain match for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship at Slammiversary. He was seconds away from winning the match, when Kevin Nash stopped him and performed a Jackknife Powerbomb; Samoa Joe would later go on to win the match. On the next Impact!, Booker challenged Joe to a title match at Victory Road, which Joe would later accept. Also around this time he reverted to a gimmick similar to his King Booker gimmick albeit while proclaiming himself a supposed king of Africa. The match at Victory Road ended in a draw after Sharmell replaced the referee and counted after the match was already over. At Hard Justice, Samoa Joe defeated Booker after a guitar shot, thus reclaiming physical possession of the title belt, which Booker had kept after Victory Road. Later he introduced the TNA Legends Championship and became the first official champion. Booker T successfully defended the title at Turning Point against Cage. At Final Resolution, Booker T, Kevin Nash, Scott Steiner, and Sting defeated The TNA Front Line (A.J. Styles, Brother Devon, Brother Ray, and Samoa Joe) in an eight-man tag team match to allow Sting to retain his TNA World Heavyweight Championship. At Genesis, Booker T, Scott Steiner, and Cute Kip lost a six-man tag team match to Mick Foley, A.J. Styles, and Brother Devon. The next month at Against All Odds, Booker T defeated Shane Sewell to retain the Legends Championship. Booker T lost the title to A.J. Styles at Destination X. At Lockdown, Team Angle (Booker T, Kevin Nash, Kurt Angle, and Scott Steiner) lost to Team Jarrett (A.J. Styles, Christopher Daniels, Jeff Jarrett, and Samoa Joe) in a Lethal Lockdown match. At Sacrifice, Booker T received a rematch for the Legends Championship, but lost to A.J. Styles in a "I Quit" match. Booker T went go on to form the Mafia's resident tag team with Scott Steiner, and at Victory Road, Steiner and Booker defeated Beer Money, Inc. to win the TNA World Tag Team Championship, marking Booker's 15th World Tag Team title reign overall. Then at Hard Justice, Booker T and Steiner retained the World Tag Team Championship against Team 3D. Prior to No Surrender, Booker, Steiner, and British Invasion won a match to gain the man advantage at No Surrender's Lethal Lockdown match against Team 3D and Beer Money, Inc. Even with the advantage, Booker T's team lost at No Surrender when James Storm of Beer Money pinned Doug Williams of The British Invasion. At Bound for Glory, Booker and Steiner lost the TNA World Tag Team Titles to the British Invasion in a four way Full Metal Mayhem Tag Team match, which also included Team 3D and Beer Money; during the match Booker was taken out on a stretcher. Afterwards it was reported that the PPV had been Booker's final appearance with the company, and his and Sharmell's profiles were removed from the official TNA roster. On May 21, 2010, Booker T made a one night return to TNA at a live event in Lake Charles, Louisiana, replacing A.J. Styles, who was unable to attend the event due to travel issues, and wrestled Rob Van Dam for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship in a losing effort. Puerto Rico and Mexico (2009–2010) Booker T debuted in the International Wrestling Association (IWA) on Histeria Boricua, a special event held on January 6, 2009. There he was booked against Chicano, the incumbent IWA Undisputed Heavyweight Champion. The match was won by Cotto, who reversed a "Book End" attempt and scored a pinfall victory. On July 11, 2010, Booker T was booked by World Wrestling Council in a match against Carlito which also involved Orlando Colón and El Mesias. On September 16, 2010, Booker T made his debut for Mexican promotion Perros del Mal. In the main event of the evening he teamed up with Dr. Wagner Jr. and El Mesías, who represented rival promotion AAA, against El Hijo del Perro Aguayo, Damián 666 and Halloween. After Aguayo pinned El Mesías, Booker turned on Wagner, unmasked him and joined Perros del Mal. Return to WWE Color commentator and part-time wrestler (2011–2012) On January 30, 2011 Booker T returned to WWE to take part in the Royal Rumble. Booker entered the match at number 21 and was eliminated by Mason Ryan. On the February 1 taping of SmackDown, Huffman debuted as the show's new color commentator, working beside Josh Mathews and Michael Cole, replacing Matt Striker. He coached on the returning Tough Enough competition, and at Elimination Chamber he introduced Trish Stratus as a fellow coach. On the June 6 episode of Raw, Booker wrestled his first match on the brand in four years, gaining a victory against Jack Swagger by count out. On the November 21 episode of Raw, Cody Rhodes threw water in Booker T's face after Rhodes allegedly heard Booker T criticize him, thus starting a conflict between the two. On the November 29 episode of SmackDown Booker was scheduled to face Rhodes in a match but it did not happen after Rhodes attacked him from behind him during a backstage interview. On the December 9 episode of SmackDown, Rhodes attacked Booker again while heading to the announcer's table leaving him with paramedics. Later that night, Booker T attacked Rhodes during his match with Daniel Bryan, leading to an Intercontinental Championship match at TLC: Tables, Ladders & Chairs, which Rhodes won. On the December 26 episode of Raw, Booker defeated Rhodes in a non-title match. On the January 6, 2012, episode of SmackDown, Booker challenged Rhodes a second time for the Intercontinental Championship, but once again failed to win the title. Booker T along with fellow commentators Jerry Lawler and Michael Cole all participated in the 2012 Royal Rumble. On the March 26, 2012 episode of Raw, Booker T saved Teddy Long from an attempted attack by Mark Henry, thus becoming the sixth and final member of Team Teddy at WrestleMania XXVIII, where Team Johnny emerged victorious. This was his last official match for the WWE. On the July 9 episode of Raw, Jerry Lawler won by pinfall against Michael Cole in a WrestleMania XXVII rematch. However, Booker, who was subbing for Lawler on commentary, threw Cole back into the ring after he tried to escape. This caused the anonymous Raw General Manager to reverse the decision and give Cole the win as a result of a disqualification. SmackDown General Manager and Hall of Fame (2012–2013) On July 31, 2012, Booker T was appointed the new General Manager of SmackDown. Booker would quickly add Eve Torres and Theodore Long to his staff, as his assistant and senior adviser respectively. Booker was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame by his brother, Stevie Ray, the night before WrestleMania 29. On the April 19 SmackDown, Booker became angry with Long for making matches without his consent. Big Show arrived and thanked Long for doing a better job than Booker, further infuriating him. On the April 22 Raw, upset with Long for making a World Heavyweight Championship match at Extreme Rules, made it a Triple Threat match. Booker took time off for a torn distal triceps, and had surgery for it on June 12. On the July 19 SmackDown, he returned to continue as SmackDown General Manager, but soon lost the job to Vickie Guerrero, on Vince McMahon's orders. Return to commentary and pre-show panelist (2014–present) Since 2014, Booker T has commonly done work on the WWE Network, including the Raw pre-show and also being a part of the "expert panel" on Kickoff shows before each pay-per-view event. On the 2015 premiere of Raw, Booker T replaced Jerry Lawler, who was suffering from diverticulitis, for commentating. However, it was later announced that Booker would be returning on a full-time basis to take Lawler's place on Raw, with Lawler moving to SmackDown. On the March 30 episode of Raw, Booker, along with JBL and Michael Cole, were injured by Brock Lesnar after Seth Rollins refused Lesnar his WWE World Heavyweight Championship rematch. Booker was replaced by Byron Saxton for commentating as he became a coach for the sixth season of WWE Tough Enough. On August 6, 2016, Booker T replaced Tommy Dreamer in an intergender tag team match for Dreamer's House of Hardcore promotion. Booker T returned to his old "King Booker" gimmick in a segment with the SmackDown Live Survivor Series tag teams where he gave a motivational speech and convinced Breezango (Tyler Breeze and Fandango) to join the team. In December 2016, after Jerry Lawler and Lita left the pre-show team, WWE ended their Raw and SmackDown pre-shows leaving Booker T to the WWE pay-per-view pre-shows and other WWE Network specials. Following the 2017 WWE Superstar Shake-up, Booker T replaced David Otunga as color commentator on Raw. On the January 29, 2018 episode of Raw, Booker was replaced on commentary by the returning Jonathan Coachman. On the August 28 episode of SmackDown Live Booker T made a surprise appearance as "King Booker" in the opening segment when he interrupted and joined in on The New Day's "five timers" celebration, following the latter's fifth tag team championship win. In 2020, Booker made his return by wrestling at the Reality of Wrestling promotion. Legacy Longtime wrestler Kurt Angle said of Booker: "He's done it all... he legitimately is one of the top five best of all time." In 2001, sports journalist Michael Landsberg stated that Booker was considered "one of the best wrestlers alive", capable of "any match, any style". Industry veteran John Layfield later described him as "the best acquisition that WWE got when they bought WCW" in 2001. Booker's 21 WCW titles render him the most decorated wrestler in the company's history. He was the first African American WCW World Television Champion. Harlem Heat were recognized by WWE as being – along with The Steiner Brothers – WCW's greatest ever tag team. Considering both Booker's WCW and WWF/E accoldades, WWE recognizes him as one of the most decorated performers of all-time. With his fifth WCW Championship win (which occurred in the WWF), Booker T became the second African-American to win a world championship in WWF/E (after The Rock), and the first to be of non-mixed race. Booker was voted WWE's greatest World Heavyweight Champion in a 2013 viewer poll. Other media In 2000, Booker appeared in the film Ready to Rumble, starring as himself. He has appeared in an episode of Charmed, called "Wrestling with Demons" alongside Buff Bagwell and Scott Steiner. In 2001, along with several other WWE wrestlers, Booker competed on an episode of The Weakest Link, being eliminated second from the show. He also has appeared on Comedy Central and MTV. On January 13, 2004, the album WWE Originals was released, featuring Booker T performing "Can You Dig It?". On April 21, 2007, Booker began hosting a radio show titled Tea Time with King Booker on KBME 790 AM in Houston. During the week of November 5, 2007, he appeared on Family Feud with several other WWE wrestlers. On September 1, 2012, Booker released his first autobiography, Booker T: From Prison to Promise, with Medallion Press. Booker T made appearances to promote the book with The Score Television Network with Arda Ocal which aired on August 29, 2012. He conducted a sixteen-page interview with Pro Wrestling Illustrated in the 2012 volume #50 issue. On March 10, 2015, Booker released his second autobiography, Booker T: Wrestling Royalty with Medallion Press. In 2015, Booker T started a show on KILT (AM) that is also podcast on Radio.com called "Heated Conversations – with Booker T". The show is aired Saturday Nights locally in Houston, Texas and covers subjects from Wrestling, MMA and Boxing to all sports. It has featured the biggest names from the WWE as well as NBA Stars like Dwight Howard. In February 2019, Booker T sued video game company Activision over the Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 character David "Prophet" Wilkes. The lawsuit claimed that the Black Ops character contained similarities to Booker's GI Bro comic book character. On 19 September, 2021 All41 Studios and Microgaming released WWE Legends: Link & Win, a game for mobile and desktop browsers. Booker T was featured as one of four main characters alongside Macho Man Randy Savage, Stone Cold Steve Austin and Eddie Guerrero. Video games Music videos Personal life Relationships and family Booker married his first wife Levestia on May 23, 1996. Booker presented her to the Nitro crowd the night after his WCW World Heavyweight Championship win at Bash at the Beach. Levestia was also used to further the feud between himself and Jeff Jarrett when Jarrett hit her in the head with a guitar on Nitro on July 31, 2000. However, they divorced on May 8, 2001. Booker has a son, from a previous relationship with a high school girlfriend, named Brandon (born in 1982), with whom he has a strained relationship due to his time spent on the road. Booker married his girlfriend of five years, Sharmell Sullivan, in February 2005. The couple welcomed their twins, a boy named Kendrick and a girl named Kennedy, in 2010. Booker and his brother Lash opened a wrestling school in Houston in 2005. Booker T is also a fan of Formula One, and was in attendance at the 2012 U.S Grand Prix as a guest of Lewis Hamilton. Reality of Wrestling In 2005, Huffman started his own wrestling promotion in Houston, Texas, called Pro Wrestling Alliance. In 2012, the promotion rebranded to Reality of Wrestling. After his final 2013 event, Christmas Chaos, ROW was near to close, but Houston business man Hilton Koch, who assisted the event, became a partner with Booker. On February 21, 2015, Booker T and Stevie Ray reunited as Harlem Heat for one last match in Reality of Wrestling for the promotion's "The Final Heat" event. They defeated the Heavenly Bodies to win the ROW Tag Team Championship. On March 14, the titles were vacated. In February 2020, Booker T returned to wrestle for the promotion in an eight-man tag team match. Politics On December 10, 2016, Huffman announced that he would be running in the 2019 Houston mayoral election. He was quoted saying that, "2020 is going to be a new era in the city of Houston. We're going to be looked at now from a different perspective. The cool city, 2020 is coming." Huffman was quoted in 2016, stating his focus for the three years leading up to the 2019 election would be concentrated on the city's "homeless, underprivileged, and low income areas." However, in September 2019, Huffman was not among the 12 names listed who applied for the election ballot. Legal issues Huffman spent nineteen months in prison after pleading guilty to armed robberies at Wendy's restaurants in Houston. He and his partners wore Wendy's uniforms during the holdups since they had been working there for 2½ years. Because of the gunmen's uniforms and familiarity with the fast food chain's operations, police suspected the robberies were inside jobs—and it did not take long before Huffman and three other men were found. He pleaded guilty in December 1987 to two aggravated robbery counts and was sentenced to five years in prison. Huffman was released after serving 19 months, and was placed on parole until April 1992. Championships and accomplishments Cauliflower Alley Club Tag Team Award (2018) – with Stevie Ray George Tragos/Lou Thesz Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame Class of 2018 Global Wrestling Federation GWF Tag Team Championship (3 times) – with Stevie Ray Las Vegas Pro Wrestling LVPW UWF Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Prairie Wrestling Alliance PWA Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Pro Wrestling Illustrated Inspirational Wrestler of the Year (2000) Most Improved Wrestler of the Year (1998) Tag Team of the Year (1995, 1996) with Stevie Ray Ranked No. 5 of the top 500 wrestlers in the PWI 500 in 2001 Southern Championship Wrestling Florida SCW Florida Southern Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Texas All-Pro Wrestling TAP Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Reality of Wrestling ROW Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Stevie Ray Total Nonstop Action Wrestling TNA Legends Championship (1 time, inaugural) TNA World Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Scott Steiner TNA Year End Awards (2 times) Memorable Moment of the Year (2007) Who To Watch in 2008 (2007) World Championship Wrestling WCW World Heavyweight Championship (4 times) WCW World Television Championship (6 times) WCW United States Heavyweight Championship (1 time) WCW World Tag Team Championship (10 times) – with Stevie Ray Ninth WCW Triple Crown Champion World Wrestling Federation/World Wrestling Entertainment/WWE WCW Championship (1 time) World Heavyweight Championship (1 time) World Tag Team Championship (3 times) – with Test (1), Goldust (1) and Rob Van Dam (1) WCW Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Test WWE Intercontinental Championship (1 time) WWE United States Championship (3 times) WWF Hardcore Championship (2 times) King of the Ring (2006) Sixteenth Triple Crown Champion Eighth Grand Slam Champion (under original format) WWE Hall of Fame (2 times) Class of 2013 – individually Class of 2019 – as a member of Harlem Heat Wrestling Observer Newsletter Most Underrated (2002) Worst Television Announcer (2017) Notes References External links 1965 births African-American male professional wrestlers American color commentators American male professional wrestlers American robbers American sportspeople convicted of crimes Living people NWA/WCW World Television Champions NWA/WCW/WWE United States Heavyweight Champions Professional wrestlers from Texas Professional wrestling announcers Professional wrestling podcasters Professional wrestling promoters Sportspeople from Houston The New World Order (professional wrestling) members TNA Legends/Global/Television/King of the Mountain Champions TNA/Impact World Tag Team Champions WCW World Heavyweight Champions World Heavyweight Champions (WWE) WWE Grand Slam champions WWE Hall of Fame inductees WWF/WWE Hardcore Champions WWF/WWE Intercontinental Champions WWF/WWE King Crown's Champions/King of the Ring winners	true	[ "Facing or trailing are railway turnouts (or 'points' in the UK) in respect to whether they are divergent or convergent. When a train traverses a turnout in a facing direction, it may diverge onto either of the two routes. When travelled in a trailing direction, the two routes converge onto each other.\n\nHistory \nIn the early history of railways in Britain, when signalling and interlocking were primitive, and staff were inexperienced, facing turnouts were a hazard, because a train travelling at high speed could be accidentally switched into a slow speed divergence or dead end. Facing turnouts were therefore banned, except when absolutely necessary. However, facing turnouts cannot be avoided where there are crossing loops on single lines.\n\nWith the widespread availability of electrically interlocked signalling in modern times, the rule against facing turnouts has been relaxed.\n\nDiamond crossings \nFixed diamond crossings (with no moving parts) count as trailing points in both directions, although in very exceptional circumstances such as propelling a train in reverse over fine angle diamond crossings they can derail wagons as they bunch up.\n\nSwitched diamonds, which contain two stub turnouts in disguise, count as facing turnouts in both directions and are also known as moveable angles (UK).\n\nMoveable crossings \nFixed V-crossings are trailable in both directions. Moveable crossings are effectively facing in both directions and must be correctly aligned.\n\nStub switches \nStub switches are effectively facing in both directions and must be correctly aligned.\n\nDouble junctions \nDouble junctions are now configurable in a number of different ways, whereby the number of facing and trailing turnouts vary.\n\nGoods siding \nThe goods siding on a double line (in the above diagram) uses two trailing points and a diamond. It can be shunted by trains in either direction.\n\nThis was widely done in New South Wales, though later on the diamond crossing was replaced with a pair of ladder crossovers; such as:\n Bredalabane (S)\n Jerrawa (S)\n Woy Woy (N)\n Newbridge (W)\n\nReferences \n\nRail junction types", "In sewing and tailoring, facing is a small piece of fabric, separate or a part of the fabric itself, used to finish the fabric edges. Facing makes a garment look professionally finished with the seams well hidden inside the folds of the facing. Facing is mostly used to finish the edges in necklines, armholes, hems and openings. They are also used widely in all other sewing like quilts and home decor items like curtain hems.\n\nThere are basically three types of facing. 1. Shaped facing 2. Extended facing 3. Bias facing\n\nShaped facings are cut to match the outside shape of the piece to provide a neat finish, and are often cut from the same pattern pieces. Shaped facings are typically made of the same fabric as the garment, but may also be made of lighter-weight fabric or in a contrasting color as a design element. Extended facings are extensions of the garment fabric, folded back and usually stabilized. Bias facings are strips of lightweight fabric cut on the true bias (US) or cross-grain (UK), and shaped rather than cut to match the edge to which they are applied.\n\nAfter sewing the structural seam of a facing, it must also be under-stitched to prevent it rolling to the outside. Under-stitching is done close to the seam line, attaching the facing to the seam allowance. A facing can also be used decoratively by applying it from the inside, allowing it to be turned to the outside as a contrasting piece. An all-in-one facing is used to finish the armhole and neckline of a garment together, all at once. Interfacing, grading and clipping the seams are all terms closely associated with facing.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n \n \n\nSewing\nParts of clothing" ]
[ "Booker T (wrestler)", "Harlem Heat (1993-1997)", "How did Harlem Heat start?", "In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane.", "Did they win a lot in the beginning?", "They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled.", "Who were they facing?", "the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster." ]	C_1f3ea57e1286415abc8b8322888efbdf_1	Did they have any signature moves?	4	Did Harlem Heat have any signature moves?	Booker T (wrestler)	Booker and his brother Stevie Ray signed with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) after Sid Vicious recommended they sign with the company. In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane. They became heels and were on Harley Race and Col. Rob Parker's team in the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster. They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled. In 1994, they acquired the services of Sensational Sherri, dubbed 'Sister' Sherri, as their manager and changed their names back to Booker T and Stevie Ray, at their request. By the end of 1994, they held the WCW Tag Team Championship after defeating Stars and Stripes (The Patriot and Marcus Alexander Bagwell) in December. After dropping the title to The Nasty Boys, Harlem Heat regained the belts on June 24, 1995. Afterward, Harlem Heat got into a feud with Col. Parker's "Stud Stable" of "Dirty" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Parker and Sherri were carrying on a love affair and Parker eventually left the Stud Stable in favor of the Heat to be with Sherri. Harlem Heat won the WCW World Tag Team titles at Fall Brawl 1995, defeating Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Their third title reign only lasted one day, but the duo regained the tag team title nine days later from The American Males (Buff Bagwell and Scotty Riggs). On the June 24, 1996 Nitro, Harlem Heat defeated Lex Luger and Sting to capture their fifth WCW World Tag Team titles. Three days after losing the tag team titles to the Steiner Brothers, Harlem Heat regained the titles back from the Steiners on July 27. On September 23, Booker T and Stevie Ray were defeated by Public Enemy (Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge) but took the titles back for the seventh time on October 1. They lost the Tag Team Championship to the Outsiders (Kevin Nash and Scott Hall) on October 27. Subsequently, they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces. They then entered into a brief feud against Col. Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they won. In 1997, they feuded with Public Enemy (Grunge & Rocco), The Steiners, and the nWo. In fall 1997, they fired Sherri and added a new manager, Jacqueline. They were briefly put out of action by the nWo and returned to feud with the Faces of Fear (Meng and The Barbarian). Stevie then took five months off from WCW to recover from an ankle injury and Jacqueline left for the WWF. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER	Booker T. Huffman Jr. (born March 1, 1966) better known by his ring name Booker T, is an American professional wrestler, professional wrestling promoter and color commentator. He is currently signed to WWE, and is also the owner and founder of the independent promotion Reality of Wrestling (ROW) in Texas City, Texas. Booker has been named by peers and industry commentators as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of his era; he was voted WWE's greatest World Heavyweight Champion in a 2013 viewer poll. Booker is best known for his time in World Championship Wrestling (WCW), the World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment (WWF/E), and Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA), holding 35 championships between those organizations. He is the most decorated wrestler in WCW history, having held 21 titles, including a record six WCW World Television Championships (along with being the first African American titleholder), and a record eleven WCW World Tag Team Championships: ten as one half of Harlem Heat with his brother, Lash "Stevie Ray" Huffman in WCW (most reigns within that company), and one in the WWF with Test. Booker was the final WCW World Heavyweight Champion and WCW United States Heavyweight Champion within the active WCW organisation. Booker is a six-time world champion in professional wrestling, having won the WCW World Heavyweight Championship five times, and WWE's World Heavyweight Championship once. With his fifth WCW Championship win (which occurred in the WWF), Booker T became the second African-American to win a world championship in WWF/E (after The Rock), and also the first to be of non-mixed race. He is also the winner of the 2006 King of the Ring tournament, the sixteenth Triple Crown Champion, and the eighth Grand Slam Champion (under original format) in WWE history. As the ninth WCW Triple Crown Champion, Booker is one of five men to achieve both the WWE and WCW Triple Crowns. He has headlined multiple pay-per-view events for the WWF/E, WCW and TNA throughout his career. Booker was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame on April 6, 2013, by his brother, Lash. Both he and Lash were inducted together into the 2019 class on April 6, 2019 as Harlem Heat, rendering Booker a two-time Hall of Famer. Early life Huffman was born the youngest of eight children, in Plain Dealing, Louisiana, though his birthplace is often misidentified as Houston, Texas. By the time Booker was 13, both of his parents had died and he lived with his 16-year-old sister. He would move in with his older brother Lash "Stevie Ray" Huffman at age 17. In high school, Huffman was a drum major. He also played football and basketball. Professional wrestling career Early Career (1986–1993) As a single father working at a storage company in Houston, Texas, Huffman was looking to make a better life for himself and his son. His brother Lash (Stevie Ray) suggested that he and Booker check out a new wrestling school being opened, run by Ivan Putski, in conjunction with his Western Wrestling Alliance organization. His boss from the storage company sponsored the money to pay for the wrestling lessons. Booker trained under Scott Casey, who helped to turn Booker's background as a gangster and dancer into "sports entertainment", teaching the newcomer in-ring psychology and ring generalship. Eight weeks later, Booker debuted as "G.I. Bro" on Putski's Western Wrestling Alliance Live! program. The character was a tie-in to the raging Gulf War and the WWF's Sgt. Slaughter angle. Even though the WWA met its demise some time later, Booker continued to wrestle on the Texas independent circuit, often with his brother Lash, who performed as Stevie Ray. They were spotted by Skandor Akbar who hired them to work for the Global Wrestling Federation (GWF), where he and Eddie Gilbert were involved. Gilbert teamed Stevie Ray and Booker T together as the Ebony Experience, and they won the GWF Tag Team Championship on July 31, 1992. During their time with GWF, they held the tag title a total of three times. Subsequently, Booker T and Stevie Ray left the GWF to work for World Championship Wrestling. World Championship Wrestling Harlem Heat (1993–1997) Booker and his brother Stevie Ray signed with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) after Sid Vicious recommended they sign with the company. In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane. They became heels and were on Harley Race and Col. Rob Parker's team in the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster. They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled. In 1994, they acquired the services of Sensational Sherri, dubbed 'Sister' Sherri, as their manager and changed their names back to Booker T and Stevie Ray, at their request. By the end of 1994, they held the WCW Tag Team Championship after defeating Stars and Stripes (The Patriot and Marcus Alexander Bagwell) in December. After dropping the title to The Nasty Boys, Harlem Heat regained the belts on June 24, 1995. Afterward, Harlem Heat got into a feud with Col. Parker's "Stud Stable" of "Dirty" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Parker and Sherri were carrying on a love affair and Parker eventually left the Stud Stable in favor of the Heat to be with Sherri. Harlem Heat won the WCW World Tag Team titles at Fall Brawl 1995, defeating Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Their third title reign only lasted one day, but the duo regained the tag team title nine days later from The American Males (Buff Bagwell and Scotty Riggs). On the June 24, 1996 Nitro, Harlem Heat defeated Lex Luger and Sting to capture their fifth WCW World Tag Team titles. Three days after losing the tag team titles to the Steiner Brothers, Harlem Heat regained the titles back from the Steiners on July 27. On September 23, Booker T and Stevie Ray were defeated by Public Enemy (Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge) but took the titles back for the seventh time on October 1. They lost the Tag Team Championship to the Outsiders (Kevin Nash and Scott Hall) on October 27. Subsequently, they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces. They then entered into a brief feud against Col. Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they won. In 1997, they feuded with Public Enemy (Grunge & Rocco), The Steiners, and the nWo. In fall 1997, they fired Sherri and added a new manager, Jacqueline. They were briefly put out of action by the nWo and returned to feud with the Faces of Fear (Meng and The Barbarian). Stevie then took five months off from WCW to recover from an ankle injury and Jacqueline left for the WWF. World Television Champion (1997–1999) Booker made the transition into singles action and won the WCW World Television Championship from Disco Inferno on the December 29, 1997 episode of Nitro. Booker feuded over the title with Perry Saturn and Rick Martel culminating in a gauntlet match at SuperBrawl VIII. Martel, the man that was originally supposed to win the match, went down early due to a knee injury, meaning the finish and the remainder of the match had to be called in the ring. During spring 1998, Booker began feuding with Chris Benoit. Benoit cost Booker the TV title during a match against Fit Finlay. As a result, Booker and Benoit engaged in a "best-of-seven series" with the winner meeting Finlay for the title. After seven matches and interference from Bret Hart and Stevie Ray, Booker T won the series, and on June 14, regained the Television Championship. Booker scored a clean pinfall victory over Bret Hart on the edition of February 22 of Nitro. The following month, he regained the TV Championship from Scott Steiner, who, in turn, defeated Booker in the finals of the WCW United States Heavyweight Championship tournament. Booker lost the Television title to Rick Steiner a month later at Slamboree. Harlem Heat reunion (1999–2000) By mid-1999, Booker had convinced his brother, Stevie Ray, to leave the nWo and reunite Harlem Heat. Harlem Heat defeated Bam Bam Bigelow and Kanyon for the WCW World Tag Team titles at Road Wild. They lost the WCW World Tag Team titles to Barry and Kendall Windham on August 23, but Harlem Heat regained them about a month later at Fall Brawl. When The Filthy Animals were stripped of the WCW World Tag Team belts due to an injury suffered by Rey Mysterio Jr., the title was put up in a three-way dance at Halloween Havoc. Harlem Heat claimed their tenth WCW World Tag Team title defeating Hugh Morrus and Brian Knobs and Konnan and Kidman. By late 1999, a female bodybuilder named Midnight had joined Harlem Heat. Stevie neglected her help and started disputing with Booker over her. Stevie Ray eventually challenged Midnight in a match that decided whether or not she would stay with Harlem Heat. After being defeated with a surprise small package, Stevie Ray turned on both Booker and Midnight to form Harlem Heat, Inc. with Big T, Kash, and J. Biggs. Stevie Ray and Big T dubbed themselves Harlem Heat 2000. Throughout this period, Huffman was referred to simply as Booker, as Harlem Heat 2000 won the rights to the name "T" in a match with Big T against Booker on February 20, 2000 at SuperBrawl X. Kidman and Booker T defeated Harlem Heat 2000 (Ray and Big T) at Uncensored 2000. When Vince Russo and Eric Bischoff formed The New Blood, Huffman eventually completely changed his in-ring persona, helping lead Captain Rection's military-themed Misfits In Action stable as G.I. Bro, reprising his gimmicks from his days in the WWA. He defeated Shawn Stasiak at the Great American Bash in a Boot Camp match. He returned to the Booker T name on the June 19 Nitro, promoting Rection to the status of General and demanding the Misfits start standing up to the New Blood. WCW World Heavyweight Champion (2000–2001) Huffman was elevated to main event status in 2000. After WCW booker Vince Russo grew disgruntled with Hulk Hogan's politics, he fired Hogan during the live broadcast of Bash at the Beach and announced an impromptu match between Jeff Jarrett and Huffman for the WCW World Heavyweight Championship. Huffman won the match, in the process becoming the second ever African American champion in WCW after Ron Simmons, and the third African American to win a World Heavyweight title. He lost the title to Kevin Nash on August 28 on Nitro. He regained the title a few weeks later in a steel cage match with Nash at Fall Brawl, but again lost the title, this time to Vince Russo himself in a cage match (Russo was speared out of the cage by Goldberg and won the title), Russo vacated the title and Booker won it for the third time in a San Francisco 49er Box Match against Jeff Jarrett on the October 2 episode of Nitro. Booker's next feud was with Scott Steiner, to whom he eventually lost the title in a Straitjacket steel cage match. Steiner won by TKO when he put an unconscious Booker into the Steiner Recliner at Mayhem. Steiner was WCW's longest reigning champion in years, whilst Booker was briefly out with an injury. Booker returned to the roster and defeated Rick Steiner for the WCW United States Heavyweight Championship at Greed. This made Booker the ninth WCW Triple Crown winner. On the final episode of Nitro, he defeated Scott Steiner to win the WCW World Heavyweight Championship for the fourth time. According to sports journalist Michael Landsberg, Huffman was salaried at "close to a million dollars a year" in WCW. He won a total of twenty-one titles within the organization, making him the most decorated performer in its history. Booker was also the reigning WCW United States Heavyweight Champion and WCW World Heavyweight Champion when he accepted a contract with the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment The Alliance (2001–2002) After WCW was bought by the World Wrestling Federation in March 2001, Booker T made his debut at the King of the Ring pay-per-view in 2001 attacking WWF Champion Stone Cold Steve Austin during his match, promptly injuring him in his very first move in the WWF. He later turned heel and became a leading member of The Alliance during the Invasion storyline. In his debut match in the company, Booker defended his WCW Championship against Buff Bagwell on the July 2 episode of Raw; sports journalist Michael Landsberg reported that many have called this bout "the worst match ever". At InVasion, The Alliance defeated Team WWF when Austin joined the Alliance. On the July 26 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T gave up his WCW United States Championship and handed it over to Chris Kanyon. He later lost the WCW Championship to Kurt Angle, but he went on to win the title back on the July 30 episode of Raw. Booker T kept the title until SummerSlam, when he lost it to The Rock after feuding with him over the similarity in their gimmicks and their identical finishing moves, the Book End/Rock Bottom. Booker T won the WCW Tag Team Championship for an eleventh time, this time with Test, and he also had a WWF Tag Team Championship reign with Test. At the Survivor Series, Booker T was eliminated third by The Rock after a roll-up and eventually The Alliance was defeated, causing them to disband. In its aftermath, Booker remained a heel, and he joined forces with Vince McMahon and The Boss Man in December to feud with Steve Austin. After Booker T cost Austin a match against Chris Jericho for the Undisputed WWF Championship at Vengeance, Austin gained revenge by attacking Booker T in a grocery store by covering him in food. Then the week after Booker T vandalized Austin's truck causing Austin to chase Booker T around a bingo hall and a church. Booker T's first WrestleMania appearance was at WrestleMania X8 against Edge, a match he lost. They feuded over who would appear in a fictional Japanese shampoo commercial. When the brand extension was introduced in March, Booker T was drafted to the Raw brand. At Insurrextion, Booker briefly held the WWF Hardcore Championship twice, defeating Stevie Richards only to lose it to Crash Holly seconds later. He then re-defeated Crash and lost the title to Stevie Richards a few minutes later. Feud with Evolution (2002–2003) Goldust began trying to start a tag team with Booker, but Goldust kept costing Booker matches. With the nWo now operating in WWE, Booker T was eventually invited into the faction. His time there was short-lived, when he was kicked out of the group by Shawn Michaels after a superkick from Michaels. Booker then turned face and found a partnership with Goldust and the pair teamed to battle the nWo. Booker and Goldust had a WWE Tag Team Championship match against The Un-Americans (Christian and Lance Storm) at SummerSlam, but The Un-Americans retained after interference from Test. At No Mercy, Booker and Goldust battled Chris Jericho and Christian for the World Tag Team Championship, but they lost the match with Jericho using the title belt on Goldust. He spent the rest of 2002 teaming with Goldust. They won the World Tag Team Championship at Armageddon in a Tag Team Elimination match defeating the teams of Christian and Chris Jericho, Lance Storm and William Regal, and the Dudley Boyz. They held the belts for about three weeks, when they lost them to Regal and Storm. Booker and Goldust lost the rematch and decided to go their separate ways. The gimmick for Booker and Goldust was Goldust being a strange, yet dependable ally who Booker eventually warmed up to after initial skepticism. By 2003, however, Booker T's popularity had soared and he amicably separated from Goldust, at Goldust's request, in order to pursue the World Heavyweight Championship. In February 2003, he eliminated The Rock to win a battle royal to become the number one contender to the World Heavyweight Championship at WrestleMania XIX. Booker targeted Evolution after Batista and Randy Orton attacked Booker's former partner, Goldust. Several weeks before WrestleMania, the incumbent champion and Evolution's leader, Triple H, cut a controversial promo on Booker T. Triple H downplayed Booker T's WCW success, pointing out that the WCW World Heavyweight Championship had been held by non-wrestlers like booker Vince Russo and actor David Arquette, calling WCW and its title "a joke", despite the fact that, as World Heavyweight Champion, Triple H was holding the WCW World Heavyweight Championship's physical belt, the Big Gold Belt, and that Triple H's Evolution stablemate, Ric Flair, had been a multiple-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion. He said that "people like" Booker T would never win world championships in WWE. This promo is often interpreted as racist due to Triple H referencing Booker T's "nappy" hair and implying that Booker T was just in WWE to dance and entertain for "people like" Triple H. During the WrestleMania XIX press conference Michael Cole asked Triple H as to whether he had deliberately cut a racist promo, Triple H claimed this was not the case and that he was just referring to Booker's criminal past. A week later, Booker attacked Triple H in the bathroom and laid him out after Triple H had thrown a dollar bill at him, ordering Booker to get him a towel. However, Booker T lost to Triple H at WrestleMania. For several weeks, he teamed with Shawn Michaels and Kevin Nash in a feud against Triple H, Ric Flair, and Chris Jericho. At Backlash, Booker's team lost when Triple H pinned Nash after a sledgehammer shot. Various feuds (2003–2005) Afterward, Booker set his sights on the newly reactivated Intercontinental Championship. After losing a battle royal for the title at Judgment Day, Booker feuded with the champion Christian. After a few matches, Booker defeated Christian to become the new Intercontinental Champion on the July 7 episode of Raw. About a month later, because of a nagging back injury, Booker lost the Intercontinental title back to Christian at a non-televised house show on August 10. Booker, meanwhile, was out of action until October. Booker returned on the October 20 episode of Raw and subsequently joined Team Austin at Survivor Series for a match to determine whether Eric Bischoff or Stone Cold Steve Austin (both co-general managers) would be the sole General Manager of Raw. Team Bischoff won the match. Booker then feuded with Mark Henry, who eliminated him in the Survivor Series match. Booker defeated Henry at Armageddon. On the February 16, 2004 episode of Raw, Booker T and Rob Van Dam defeated Ric Flair and Batista for the World Tag Team Championship. Booker and Van Dam held the titles for a month, even defending the belts at WrestleMania XX in a Fatal 4-Way tag team match. Eight days later on the March 22 episode of Raw, they lost the World Tag Team Championship back to Ric Flair and Batista. He and Rob Van Dam, never got their rematch due to Rob Van Dam being drafted to SmackDown! that very same night. On March 23, 2004 he was "traded" (along with the Dudley Boyz) to the SmackDown! brand in exchange for Triple H, but as part of a new storyline, he appeared unhappy with the move calling SmackDown! "the minor leagues" and even disrespected Eddie Guerrero, the brand's WWE Champion, turning heel in the process. Later on, Booker T bragged about how he was the biggest star on SmackDown! and feuded with The Undertaker. Booker tried to utilize voodoo magic to try to overcome his "supernatural" foe; however, it did nothing to prevent him from losing to the Undertaker at Judgment Day. In mid-2004, Booker T set his sights on the United States Championship along with its champion, John Cena. After Cena got on the bad side of General Manager Kurt Angle, he did his best to get the title away from Cena. Cena successfully defended the title at The Great American Bash in a four-way elimination match against Booker, René Duprée, and Rob Van Dam. After Cena was stripped of his title by Angle for "laying a hand" on the GM, Booker took advantage of the situation and won an eight-man elimination match to win the vacant United States Championship, thus becoming the one-hundredth United States Champion in history, in a match that also featured Cena, Dupree, Billy Gunn, Charlie Haas, Luther Reigns, Kenzo Suzuki and Van Dam. Booker won by last eliminating both Cena and Van Dam in the course of less than 10 seconds After Angle was fired by Mr. McMahon for embellishing his injuries, Theodore Long began his first tenure as SmackDown! General Manager, and booked a best-of-five series of matches for the United States Championship between Booker and Cena. The first match took place at SummerSlam in Toronto and saw Cena gain the pinfall victory to go up 1–0 in the series. Booker would bounce back and win the next two matches, on the August 26 edition of SmackDown! in Fresno, California and a live event the next night in Sydney, Australia, to take a 2–1 lead. The next match in the series wouldn't come until the September 16 SmackDown! from Spokane, Washington, where Cena won and tied the series at two apiece. The series culminated at No Mercy, where Cena won the series 3–2, and thusly, the United States Championship. On October 21, SmackDown! General Manager Theodore Long placed Booker in a six-man tag team match with Rob Van Dam and Rey Mysterio against John "Bradshaw" Layfield (JBL), René Duprée, and Kenzo Suzuki. JBL expected Booker to betray his partners, but instead Booker pinned him, thus turning face again. Booker T faced JBL for the WWE Championship at the Survivor Series on November 14, but lost after he was hit in the head with the championship belt. The next night, Booker T demanded a rematch, citing Orlando Jordan's interference. He was then joined by Eddie Guerrero and The Undertaker who also wanted a shot at JBL's title, prompting Theodore Long to make a fatal four-way match for the WWE Championship at Armageddon. Once again, Booker failed to win the title, as JBL retained it. He then briefly teamed with Eddie Guerrero, at one point challenging Mysterio and Van Dam for the WWE Tag Team Championship, and feuded with Heidenreich. Booker won a 30-man Battle Royal dark match at WrestleMania 21 last eliminating Raw's Viscera and Chris Masters. Subsequently, Booker was part of the tournament to name a new number one contender and made it to the Final Four. After Kurt Angle eliminated Booker, he returned the favor, costing Angle the match against JBL. The storyline then turned to a sexual nature, as Angle began stalking Booker's new wife, Sharmell. Booker defeated Angle at Judgment Day. On the May 26 episode of SmackDown!, Booker participated in a "Winners Choice" Battle Royal, with the winner choosing his opponent for the next week. Kurt Angle won and wanted to wrestle Sharmell. Booker protested, and the match was made into a Handicap match. Angle won by pinning Sharmell in a sexual position. The next week, Booker gained revenge on Angle, defeating him with a Scissors Kick. On the June 30 episode of SmackDown!, JBL defeated Christian, The Undertaker, Chris Benoit, Muhammad Hassan, and Booker T in a six-man elimination match for the SmackDown! Championship. During the match, Booker got specifically involved with Christian. Booker later defeated Christian at The Great American Bash. United States Champion (2005–2006) Booker T began teaming with Chris Benoit, eying his United States Championship again. Benoit was allowed to pick his next challenger to see who would face him at No Mercy, so Booker, Christian, and Orlando Jordan tried to impress Benoit by winning matches. He instead decided not choose one opponent, so he made it a fatal four-way for No Mercy, where Benoit successfully defended his title. On the October 21 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T defeated Benoit for the United States Championship, due to unseen help from Sharmell. Theodore Long later showed footage of Sharmell interfering in Booker's matches. Booker went to apologize to Benoit and give him a rematch, but then attacked Benoit, busting him open with the United States title belt and turning heel once again. Booker then boasted that he had been fully aware of what Sharmell had been doing and had been playing dumb to fool everyone. On the November 25 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T defended the United States Championship against Benoit. The match ended when Benoit superplexed Booker and two referees made a three count on either competitor, claiming that their wrestler had won. Booker was stripped of the belt by Theodore Long, because of the confusion of who won since they pinned each other at the same time. Long decided to put Benoit and Booker against each other in a best of seven series, just as the two had in their WCW days. Booker took an early 3–0 lead. In a must win match during Armageddon, Benoit was able to defeat Booker T to bring the series to 3–1. At a house show, Booker was injured, and he did not wrestle again until after the "Best of Seven" series with Benoit was completed. Booker was scheduled to face Benoit in Match 5 of the Best of Seven Series at the December 30 taping of SmackDown!. At the beginning of the show, General Manager Theodore Long said that Booker would have to forfeit. Both Booker and Benoit protested, with Benoit not wanting a cheap victory. Booker managed to persuade Long to allow him to choose a stand-in for the matches. Booker chose Randy Orton as his replacement. Benoit was able to tie the series 3–3 after beating Orton in two consecutive matches on the December 30 and January 6, 2006 episodes of SmackDown!. Orton, however, was able to defeat Benoit in the final match on the January 13 episode of SmackDown! to win the series and the title for Booker T, who held the title until No Way Out where Benoit won it back. On the February 24 episode of SmackDown!, Booker and Sharmell provided guest commentary for a match involving The Boogeyman. After defeating his opponents, Boogeyman dumped a bucket of worms onto the announce table where they were sitting, frightening the two. Over the next few weeks, Boogeyman would stalk Booker and Sharmell. Booker and Boogeyman were set to face off on the March 18 Saturday Night's Main Event XXXII, but the match was canceled due to Booker faking a knee injury to escape competition. The feud eventually culminated at WrestleMania 22, with Booker and Sharmell losing to Boogeyman. The couple received a restraining order against The Boogeyman on the April 7 episode of SmackDown!, ending the feud. King Booker and World Heavyweight Champion (2006–2007) Booker next entered the 2006 King of the Ring tournament on SmackDown!, advancing through to the finals due to a bye as his semi-final opponent, Kurt Angle, was unable to wrestle. The finals were held at Judgment Day where Booker defeated Bobby Lashley. Upon winning the King of the Ring tournament, Booker began wrestling as "King Booker" and began acting like he was an actual monarch ruling "The SmackDown! Kingdom". Booker formed a royal court that included his wife, Queen Sharmell, Sir William Regal, and Sir Finlay, and began including the mannerisms and attire of a stereotypical English-style king as part of the character, all the way down to wearing a crown and cape and speaking in a fake English accent. However, whenever King Booker would get angry he would launch into a tirade in the style of Booker T (an example of this was an episode of SmackDown! where Theodore Long would inform him he would be facing The Undertaker), which lent some comedic aspect to the character; he even went as far as having Lashley kiss his "royal" feet. After gaining his title of King, Booker continued to feud with Lashley. After Lashley defeated John "Bradshaw" Layfield (JBL) for the United States Championship at the end of May, Booker began chasing after the title and even resorted to making Lashley kiss his "royal feet" on the June 2 episode of SmackDown!. The feud ended after a steel cage match on the June 30 episode of SmackDown! where Lashley defeated Booker by escaping the cage to retain the United States Championship. The next week, Booker entered a battle royal on SmackDown! with the winner to challenge Rey Mysterio for his World Heavyweight Championship at The Great American Bash. Booker won the battle royal and then defeated Mysterio at The Great American Bash to win the World Heavyweight Championship after Chavo Guerrero betrayed Mysterio by hitting him with a steel chair. This was Booker's first world championship since joining WWE and the win caused him to proclaim himself as the "King of the World". This win would also make Booker the sixteenth Triple Crown Champion and eighth Grand Slam Champion (under the original format) in the history of the WWE. After Booker won the World Heavyweight Championship, he began a rivalry with the returning former champion Batista, who vowed to regain the title he was forced to forfeit due to injury. This rivalry spilled over to real life when the two got into a legitimate fistfight at a SummerSlam pay-per-view commercial shoot, reportedly due to Batista considering himself superior to the rest of the roster due to his quick climb to main event status. According to sources, both men were left bloodied and bruised, however Booker was reportedly praised by many wrestlers in the back for speaking his mind to Batista about his attitude. At SummerSlam, Booker lost to Batista by disqualification after Queen Sharmell interfered on his behalf (thus retaining the title), but at No Mercy, Booker defeated Batista, Lashley and his own stablemate, Finlay, in a Fatal 4-Way match. Before the match, Booker assaulted Sir William Regal, resulting in the breakup of the King's Court. Despite the break-up of his Court, Booker lost to Batista by disqualification on the October 20 episode on SmackDown!, due to interference from WWE Champion John Cena from Raw and ECW World Champion Big Show, the two of whom King Booker was to face at Cyber Sunday in a "champion of champions" match. At Cyber Sunday, the fans voted for the World Heavyweight Championship to be on the line. Booker retained after defeating Big Show and Cena with help from Kevin Federline. After Cyber Sunday, the feud between King Booker and Batista continued with Batista unable to wrest the title from Booker. Eventually this led to a match at Survivor Series on November 26, where Booker declared that if Batista failed to defeat him this time, it would be the last World Heavyweight Championship match he would receive as long as Booker was champion. At Survivor Series, SmackDown! General Manager Theodore Long decided that if Booker got counted out or disqualified, he would lose the title. Late in the match, Queen Sharmell handed Booker his title belt while referee Nick Patrick was not looking. While she had Patrick distracted, Booker attempted to hit Batista with the belt. Batista moved out of the way, knocked the belt out of Booker's hands and hit him in the head with it, and King Booker lost the World Heavyweight Championship to Batista. After losing the title, Booker feuded alongside former royal court member Finlay against Batista and John Cena, which led up to Armageddon where they lost. While competing in the Royal Rumble match, King Booker was eliminated by Kane. A frustrated Booker returned to the ring illegally and eliminated Kane. This started a short feud between the two resulting in a match at No Way Out, which Kane won. On the February 23 episode of SmackDown!, Booker won a Falls Count Anywhere Money in the Bank qualifying match, defeating Kane (with assistance from The Great Khali) and earned himself a spot in the match at WrestleMania 23. At WrestleMania, Matt Hardy set up Sharmell for a Twist of Fate during the Money in the Bank match with the briefcase in Booker's grasp – thus forcing him to choose between a guaranteed title shot and his wife. He chose to defend Sharmell and lost the match. On the April 6 episode of SmackDown!, Booker attempted to take revenge. However, he lost the match against Matt Hardy, and Sharmell declared her disappointment in him and slapped him. In an attempt to impress Sharmell, Booker attacked The Undertaker but was Tombstoned on an announce table. Booker was removed from television to deal with a knee injury. Draft to RAW, WWE Championship pursuit and departure (2007) On the June 11 episode of Raw, both King Booker and Queen Sharmell were drafted to the Raw brand as part of the WWE Draft. He then began a short feud with John Cena over the WWE Championship, Booker would wrestle Cena in a Five Pack Challenge along with Bobby Lashley, Mick Foley and Randy Orton at Vengeance: Night of Champions for the title in a losing effort. Cena would retain at the event by pinning Foley. On the July 16 episode of Raw, King Booker came to the ring using Triple H's theme music "The King of Kings", even using his video. King Booker declared that neither Triple H nor Jerry Lawler could be known as "The King". Booker began a feud with Lawler, defeating him on the August 6 episode of Raw where the loser had to crown the winner the next week. When the time came, Lawler refused, declaring that Triple H was still a king and announcing that King Booker would battle Triple H at SummerSlam. Booker attacked Lawler, throwing him into the ring post and hitting him with a television monitor. At SummerSlam, Booker lost to the returning Triple H. On the August 27 episode of Raw, Booker wrestled against John Cena in a non-title match, which he lost by disqualification when Randy Orton interfered. In August, he was linked to Signature Pharmacy, a company thought to be distributing performance-enhancing drugs. He was suspended by WWE for violating its Wellness Policy. He denied using any drugs and being a customer of Signature Pharmacy. In October 2007, Booker T requested his and Sharmell's release from their WWE contracts due to the pressure he had in WWE and being burned out, which WWE granted. Total Nonstop Action Wrestling Feud with Bobby Roode (2007–2008) At the Genesis pay-per-view on November 11, 2007, Huffman debuted in Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) as Sting's mystery partner in a tag team match against Kurt Angle and Kevin Nash for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship, reverting to his Booker T character. His wife Sharmell also debuted, interfering in the match on Booker and Sting's behalf when Karen Angle interfered on behalf of Kurt Angle and Nash. On the November 29 episode of Impact!, Booker said he came to TNA to test his skills against the young talent, take TNA to a higher level, and win the TNA World Heavyweight Championship. Robert Roode came to the ring and challenged Booker to a match, claiming he has been pushed down by washed-up wrestlers and has-beens. Booker won his Impact! debut match, but afterwards, Christian Cage and Robert Roode beat down Booker until Kaz made the save. At Turning Point, Booker and Kaz defeated Roode and Cage when Booker pinned Cage. Booker and Sharmell won a mixed tag team match against Robert Roode and Ms. Brooks at Final Resolution. After the match, Roode punched Sharmell in the face, leading to a match at Against All Odds. While the punch was intended to be a work, Roode had in fact made contact with Sharmell during the punch, dislocating her jaw and causing her to be off TV for a few weeks, therefore making it into a shoot. The rivalry, however, went ahead as planned where Booker and Roode wrestled to a double-countout at Against All Odds, which saw them brawl to the parking lot. Roode defeated Booker in strap match at Destination X after hitting Booker with a pair of handcuffs. In a special live episode of Impact!, Booker T and Robert Roode had another outing, this time with the fans being able to vote on the stipulation of the match. At Booker's request during a pre-match promo, the match became a First Blood Match, beating the Last Man Standing and I Quit stipulations. Booker T would go on to win the match-up. At Lockdown, Booker T and Sharmell defeated Robert Roode and Payton Banks after Sharmell pinned Banks with a roll-up. The Main Event Mafia (2008–2010) Booker T turned heel for the first time in TNA at Sacrifice by attacking Christian Cage and Rhino from behind with a steel chair. This came about as a result of losing a tag team match up against Christian Cage and Rhino, with them furthering themselves in the Deuces Wild Tag Team Tournament. Booker then competed in the King of the Mountain match for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship at Slammiversary. He was seconds away from winning the match, when Kevin Nash stopped him and performed a Jackknife Powerbomb; Samoa Joe would later go on to win the match. On the next Impact!, Booker challenged Joe to a title match at Victory Road, which Joe would later accept. Also around this time he reverted to a gimmick similar to his King Booker gimmick albeit while proclaiming himself a supposed king of Africa. The match at Victory Road ended in a draw after Sharmell replaced the referee and counted after the match was already over. At Hard Justice, Samoa Joe defeated Booker after a guitar shot, thus reclaiming physical possession of the title belt, which Booker had kept after Victory Road. Later he introduced the TNA Legends Championship and became the first official champion. Booker T successfully defended the title at Turning Point against Cage. At Final Resolution, Booker T, Kevin Nash, Scott Steiner, and Sting defeated The TNA Front Line (A.J. Styles, Brother Devon, Brother Ray, and Samoa Joe) in an eight-man tag team match to allow Sting to retain his TNA World Heavyweight Championship. At Genesis, Booker T, Scott Steiner, and Cute Kip lost a six-man tag team match to Mick Foley, A.J. Styles, and Brother Devon. The next month at Against All Odds, Booker T defeated Shane Sewell to retain the Legends Championship. Booker T lost the title to A.J. Styles at Destination X. At Lockdown, Team Angle (Booker T, Kevin Nash, Kurt Angle, and Scott Steiner) lost to Team Jarrett (A.J. Styles, Christopher Daniels, Jeff Jarrett, and Samoa Joe) in a Lethal Lockdown match. At Sacrifice, Booker T received a rematch for the Legends Championship, but lost to A.J. Styles in a "I Quit" match. Booker T went go on to form the Mafia's resident tag team with Scott Steiner, and at Victory Road, Steiner and Booker defeated Beer Money, Inc. to win the TNA World Tag Team Championship, marking Booker's 15th World Tag Team title reign overall. Then at Hard Justice, Booker T and Steiner retained the World Tag Team Championship against Team 3D. Prior to No Surrender, Booker, Steiner, and British Invasion won a match to gain the man advantage at No Surrender's Lethal Lockdown match against Team 3D and Beer Money, Inc. Even with the advantage, Booker T's team lost at No Surrender when James Storm of Beer Money pinned Doug Williams of The British Invasion. At Bound for Glory, Booker and Steiner lost the TNA World Tag Team Titles to the British Invasion in a four way Full Metal Mayhem Tag Team match, which also included Team 3D and Beer Money; during the match Booker was taken out on a stretcher. Afterwards it was reported that the PPV had been Booker's final appearance with the company, and his and Sharmell's profiles were removed from the official TNA roster. On May 21, 2010, Booker T made a one night return to TNA at a live event in Lake Charles, Louisiana, replacing A.J. Styles, who was unable to attend the event due to travel issues, and wrestled Rob Van Dam for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship in a losing effort. Puerto Rico and Mexico (2009–2010) Booker T debuted in the International Wrestling Association (IWA) on Histeria Boricua, a special event held on January 6, 2009. There he was booked against Chicano, the incumbent IWA Undisputed Heavyweight Champion. The match was won by Cotto, who reversed a "Book End" attempt and scored a pinfall victory. On July 11, 2010, Booker T was booked by World Wrestling Council in a match against Carlito which also involved Orlando Colón and El Mesias. On September 16, 2010, Booker T made his debut for Mexican promotion Perros del Mal. In the main event of the evening he teamed up with Dr. Wagner Jr. and El Mesías, who represented rival promotion AAA, against El Hijo del Perro Aguayo, Damián 666 and Halloween. After Aguayo pinned El Mesías, Booker turned on Wagner, unmasked him and joined Perros del Mal. Return to WWE Color commentator and part-time wrestler (2011–2012) On January 30, 2011 Booker T returned to WWE to take part in the Royal Rumble. Booker entered the match at number 21 and was eliminated by Mason Ryan. On the February 1 taping of SmackDown, Huffman debuted as the show's new color commentator, working beside Josh Mathews and Michael Cole, replacing Matt Striker. He coached on the returning Tough Enough competition, and at Elimination Chamber he introduced Trish Stratus as a fellow coach. On the June 6 episode of Raw, Booker wrestled his first match on the brand in four years, gaining a victory against Jack Swagger by count out. On the November 21 episode of Raw, Cody Rhodes threw water in Booker T's face after Rhodes allegedly heard Booker T criticize him, thus starting a conflict between the two. On the November 29 episode of SmackDown Booker was scheduled to face Rhodes in a match but it did not happen after Rhodes attacked him from behind him during a backstage interview. On the December 9 episode of SmackDown, Rhodes attacked Booker again while heading to the announcer's table leaving him with paramedics. Later that night, Booker T attacked Rhodes during his match with Daniel Bryan, leading to an Intercontinental Championship match at TLC: Tables, Ladders & Chairs, which Rhodes won. On the December 26 episode of Raw, Booker defeated Rhodes in a non-title match. On the January 6, 2012, episode of SmackDown, Booker challenged Rhodes a second time for the Intercontinental Championship, but once again failed to win the title. Booker T along with fellow commentators Jerry Lawler and Michael Cole all participated in the 2012 Royal Rumble. On the March 26, 2012 episode of Raw, Booker T saved Teddy Long from an attempted attack by Mark Henry, thus becoming the sixth and final member of Team Teddy at WrestleMania XXVIII, where Team Johnny emerged victorious. This was his last official match for the WWE. On the July 9 episode of Raw, Jerry Lawler won by pinfall against Michael Cole in a WrestleMania XXVII rematch. However, Booker, who was subbing for Lawler on commentary, threw Cole back into the ring after he tried to escape. This caused the anonymous Raw General Manager to reverse the decision and give Cole the win as a result of a disqualification. SmackDown General Manager and Hall of Fame (2012–2013) On July 31, 2012, Booker T was appointed the new General Manager of SmackDown. Booker would quickly add Eve Torres and Theodore Long to his staff, as his assistant and senior adviser respectively. Booker was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame by his brother, Stevie Ray, the night before WrestleMania 29. On the April 19 SmackDown, Booker became angry with Long for making matches without his consent. Big Show arrived and thanked Long for doing a better job than Booker, further infuriating him. On the April 22 Raw, upset with Long for making a World Heavyweight Championship match at Extreme Rules, made it a Triple Threat match. Booker took time off for a torn distal triceps, and had surgery for it on June 12. On the July 19 SmackDown, he returned to continue as SmackDown General Manager, but soon lost the job to Vickie Guerrero, on Vince McMahon's orders. Return to commentary and pre-show panelist (2014–present) Since 2014, Booker T has commonly done work on the WWE Network, including the Raw pre-show and also being a part of the "expert panel" on Kickoff shows before each pay-per-view event. On the 2015 premiere of Raw, Booker T replaced Jerry Lawler, who was suffering from diverticulitis, for commentating. However, it was later announced that Booker would be returning on a full-time basis to take Lawler's place on Raw, with Lawler moving to SmackDown. On the March 30 episode of Raw, Booker, along with JBL and Michael Cole, were injured by Brock Lesnar after Seth Rollins refused Lesnar his WWE World Heavyweight Championship rematch. Booker was replaced by Byron Saxton for commentating as he became a coach for the sixth season of WWE Tough Enough. On August 6, 2016, Booker T replaced Tommy Dreamer in an intergender tag team match for Dreamer's House of Hardcore promotion. Booker T returned to his old "King Booker" gimmick in a segment with the SmackDown Live Survivor Series tag teams where he gave a motivational speech and convinced Breezango (Tyler Breeze and Fandango) to join the team. In December 2016, after Jerry Lawler and Lita left the pre-show team, WWE ended their Raw and SmackDown pre-shows leaving Booker T to the WWE pay-per-view pre-shows and other WWE Network specials. Following the 2017 WWE Superstar Shake-up, Booker T replaced David Otunga as color commentator on Raw. On the January 29, 2018 episode of Raw, Booker was replaced on commentary by the returning Jonathan Coachman. On the August 28 episode of SmackDown Live Booker T made a surprise appearance as "King Booker" in the opening segment when he interrupted and joined in on The New Day's "five timers" celebration, following the latter's fifth tag team championship win. In 2020, Booker made his return by wrestling at the Reality of Wrestling promotion. Legacy Longtime wrestler Kurt Angle said of Booker: "He's done it all... he legitimately is one of the top five best of all time." In 2001, sports journalist Michael Landsberg stated that Booker was considered "one of the best wrestlers alive", capable of "any match, any style". Industry veteran John Layfield later described him as "the best acquisition that WWE got when they bought WCW" in 2001. Booker's 21 WCW titles render him the most decorated wrestler in the company's history. He was the first African American WCW World Television Champion. Harlem Heat were recognized by WWE as being – along with The Steiner Brothers – WCW's greatest ever tag team. Considering both Booker's WCW and WWF/E accoldades, WWE recognizes him as one of the most decorated performers of all-time. With his fifth WCW Championship win (which occurred in the WWF), Booker T became the second African-American to win a world championship in WWF/E (after The Rock), and the first to be of non-mixed race. Booker was voted WWE's greatest World Heavyweight Champion in a 2013 viewer poll. Other media In 2000, Booker appeared in the film Ready to Rumble, starring as himself. He has appeared in an episode of Charmed, called "Wrestling with Demons" alongside Buff Bagwell and Scott Steiner. In 2001, along with several other WWE wrestlers, Booker competed on an episode of The Weakest Link, being eliminated second from the show. He also has appeared on Comedy Central and MTV. On January 13, 2004, the album WWE Originals was released, featuring Booker T performing "Can You Dig It?". On April 21, 2007, Booker began hosting a radio show titled Tea Time with King Booker on KBME 790 AM in Houston. During the week of November 5, 2007, he appeared on Family Feud with several other WWE wrestlers. On September 1, 2012, Booker released his first autobiography, Booker T: From Prison to Promise, with Medallion Press. Booker T made appearances to promote the book with The Score Television Network with Arda Ocal which aired on August 29, 2012. He conducted a sixteen-page interview with Pro Wrestling Illustrated in the 2012 volume #50 issue. On March 10, 2015, Booker released his second autobiography, Booker T: Wrestling Royalty with Medallion Press. In 2015, Booker T started a show on KILT (AM) that is also podcast on Radio.com called "Heated Conversations – with Booker T". The show is aired Saturday Nights locally in Houston, Texas and covers subjects from Wrestling, MMA and Boxing to all sports. It has featured the biggest names from the WWE as well as NBA Stars like Dwight Howard. In February 2019, Booker T sued video game company Activision over the Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 character David "Prophet" Wilkes. The lawsuit claimed that the Black Ops character contained similarities to Booker's GI Bro comic book character. On 19 September, 2021 All41 Studios and Microgaming released WWE Legends: Link & Win, a game for mobile and desktop browsers. Booker T was featured as one of four main characters alongside Macho Man Randy Savage, Stone Cold Steve Austin and Eddie Guerrero. Video games Music videos Personal life Relationships and family Booker married his first wife Levestia on May 23, 1996. Booker presented her to the Nitro crowd the night after his WCW World Heavyweight Championship win at Bash at the Beach. Levestia was also used to further the feud between himself and Jeff Jarrett when Jarrett hit her in the head with a guitar on Nitro on July 31, 2000. However, they divorced on May 8, 2001. Booker has a son, from a previous relationship with a high school girlfriend, named Brandon (born in 1982), with whom he has a strained relationship due to his time spent on the road. Booker married his girlfriend of five years, Sharmell Sullivan, in February 2005. The couple welcomed their twins, a boy named Kendrick and a girl named Kennedy, in 2010. Booker and his brother Lash opened a wrestling school in Houston in 2005. Booker T is also a fan of Formula One, and was in attendance at the 2012 U.S Grand Prix as a guest of Lewis Hamilton. Reality of Wrestling In 2005, Huffman started his own wrestling promotion in Houston, Texas, called Pro Wrestling Alliance. In 2012, the promotion rebranded to Reality of Wrestling. After his final 2013 event, Christmas Chaos, ROW was near to close, but Houston business man Hilton Koch, who assisted the event, became a partner with Booker. On February 21, 2015, Booker T and Stevie Ray reunited as Harlem Heat for one last match in Reality of Wrestling for the promotion's "The Final Heat" event. They defeated the Heavenly Bodies to win the ROW Tag Team Championship. On March 14, the titles were vacated. In February 2020, Booker T returned to wrestle for the promotion in an eight-man tag team match. Politics On December 10, 2016, Huffman announced that he would be running in the 2019 Houston mayoral election. He was quoted saying that, "2020 is going to be a new era in the city of Houston. We're going to be looked at now from a different perspective. The cool city, 2020 is coming." Huffman was quoted in 2016, stating his focus for the three years leading up to the 2019 election would be concentrated on the city's "homeless, underprivileged, and low income areas." However, in September 2019, Huffman was not among the 12 names listed who applied for the election ballot. Legal issues Huffman spent nineteen months in prison after pleading guilty to armed robberies at Wendy's restaurants in Houston. He and his partners wore Wendy's uniforms during the holdups since they had been working there for 2½ years. Because of the gunmen's uniforms and familiarity with the fast food chain's operations, police suspected the robberies were inside jobs—and it did not take long before Huffman and three other men were found. He pleaded guilty in December 1987 to two aggravated robbery counts and was sentenced to five years in prison. Huffman was released after serving 19 months, and was placed on parole until April 1992. Championships and accomplishments Cauliflower Alley Club Tag Team Award (2018) – with Stevie Ray George Tragos/Lou Thesz Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame Class of 2018 Global Wrestling Federation GWF Tag Team Championship (3 times) – with Stevie Ray Las Vegas Pro Wrestling LVPW UWF Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Prairie Wrestling Alliance PWA Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Pro Wrestling Illustrated Inspirational Wrestler of the Year (2000) Most Improved Wrestler of the Year (1998) Tag Team of the Year (1995, 1996) with Stevie Ray Ranked No. 5 of the top 500 wrestlers in the PWI 500 in 2001 Southern Championship Wrestling Florida SCW Florida Southern Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Texas All-Pro Wrestling TAP Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Reality of Wrestling ROW Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Stevie Ray Total Nonstop Action Wrestling TNA Legends Championship (1 time, inaugural) TNA World Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Scott Steiner TNA Year End Awards (2 times) Memorable Moment of the Year (2007) Who To Watch in 2008 (2007) World Championship Wrestling WCW World Heavyweight Championship (4 times) WCW World Television Championship (6 times) WCW United States Heavyweight Championship (1 time) WCW World Tag Team Championship (10 times) – with Stevie Ray Ninth WCW Triple Crown Champion World Wrestling Federation/World Wrestling Entertainment/WWE WCW Championship (1 time) World Heavyweight Championship (1 time) World Tag Team Championship (3 times) – with Test (1), Goldust (1) and Rob Van Dam (1) WCW Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Test WWE Intercontinental Championship (1 time) WWE United States Championship (3 times) WWF Hardcore Championship (2 times) King of the Ring (2006) Sixteenth Triple Crown Champion Eighth Grand Slam Champion (under original format) WWE Hall of Fame (2 times) Class of 2013 – individually Class of 2019 – as a member of Harlem Heat Wrestling Observer Newsletter Most Underrated (2002) Worst Television Announcer (2017) Notes References External links 1965 births African-American male professional wrestlers American color commentators American male professional wrestlers American robbers American sportspeople convicted of crimes Living people NWA/WCW World Television Champions NWA/WCW/WWE United States Heavyweight Champions Professional wrestlers from Texas Professional wrestling announcers Professional wrestling podcasters Professional wrestling promoters Sportspeople from Houston The New World Order (professional wrestling) members TNA Legends/Global/Television/King of the Mountain Champions TNA/Impact World Tag Team Champions WCW World Heavyweight Champions World Heavyweight Champions (WWE) WWE Grand Slam champions WWE Hall of Fame inductees WWF/WWE Hardcore Champions WWF/WWE Intercontinental Champions WWF/WWE King Crown's Champions/King of the Ring winners	false	[ "This is the list of episodes for the Nickelodeon promotion, Wrestling Association of Championship Krushers.\n\nWeb Videos\nWhen the WACK website launched, two sets of web-only videos were included in each wrestler's profile. They were called \"Behind the WACK\" and \"Signature Moves Videos\". However, the \"Signature Moves\" videos have never been released.\n\nBehind the WACK\n\"Behind the WACK\" videos contain each wrestler's history, how they joined the league, and a few minor facts about them. They are around two minutes long.\n\nSignature Moves\nAlong with the \"Behind the WACK\" videos, the profiles on the WACK website also come with signature moves videos. Although they haven't been released on the website, they were filmed at the same time as the \"Behind-the-WACK\" videos and why they were not released is unknown.\n\nEpisodes\n\nLists of comedy television series episodes", "This is a list of Portuguese football transfers for the summer of 2009. The summer transfer window opened on 1 July and closed at midnight on 31 August. Players may have been bought before the transfer windows opens, but may only joined their new club on 1 July. Only moves involving Primeira Liga clubs are listed. Additionally, players without a club may join a club at any time.\n\nTransfers\n\n A player who signed with a club before the opening of the summer transfer window, will officially join his new club on 1 July. While a player who joined a club after 1 July will join his new club following his signature of the contract.\n\nReferences\n\n2009–10 in Portuguese football\nFootball transfers summer 2009\nLists of Portuguese football transfers" ]
[ "Booker T (wrestler)", "Harlem Heat (1993-1997)", "How did Harlem Heat start?", "In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane.", "Did they win a lot in the beginning?", "They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled.", "Who were they facing?", "the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster.", "Did they have any signature moves?", "I don't know." ]	C_1f3ea57e1286415abc8b8322888efbdf_1	Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?	5	Other than Harlem Heat's opponents, are there any other interesting aspects about this article?	Booker T (wrestler)	Booker and his brother Stevie Ray signed with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) after Sid Vicious recommended they sign with the company. In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane. They became heels and were on Harley Race and Col. Rob Parker's team in the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster. They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled. In 1994, they acquired the services of Sensational Sherri, dubbed 'Sister' Sherri, as their manager and changed their names back to Booker T and Stevie Ray, at their request. By the end of 1994, they held the WCW Tag Team Championship after defeating Stars and Stripes (The Patriot and Marcus Alexander Bagwell) in December. After dropping the title to The Nasty Boys, Harlem Heat regained the belts on June 24, 1995. Afterward, Harlem Heat got into a feud with Col. Parker's "Stud Stable" of "Dirty" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Parker and Sherri were carrying on a love affair and Parker eventually left the Stud Stable in favor of the Heat to be with Sherri. Harlem Heat won the WCW World Tag Team titles at Fall Brawl 1995, defeating Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Their third title reign only lasted one day, but the duo regained the tag team title nine days later from The American Males (Buff Bagwell and Scotty Riggs). On the June 24, 1996 Nitro, Harlem Heat defeated Lex Luger and Sting to capture their fifth WCW World Tag Team titles. Three days after losing the tag team titles to the Steiner Brothers, Harlem Heat regained the titles back from the Steiners on July 27. On September 23, Booker T and Stevie Ray were defeated by Public Enemy (Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge) but took the titles back for the seventh time on October 1. They lost the Tag Team Championship to the Outsiders (Kevin Nash and Scott Hall) on October 27. Subsequently, they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces. They then entered into a brief feud against Col. Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they won. In 1997, they feuded with Public Enemy (Grunge & Rocco), The Steiners, and the nWo. In fall 1997, they fired Sherri and added a new manager, Jacqueline. They were briefly put out of action by the nWo and returned to feud with the Faces of Fear (Meng and The Barbarian). Stevie then took five months off from WCW to recover from an ankle injury and Jacqueline left for the WWF. CANNOTANSWER	they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces.	Booker T. Huffman Jr. (born March 1, 1966) better known by his ring name Booker T, is an American professional wrestler, professional wrestling promoter and color commentator. He is currently signed to WWE, and is also the owner and founder of the independent promotion Reality of Wrestling (ROW) in Texas City, Texas. Booker has been named by peers and industry commentators as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of his era; he was voted WWE's greatest World Heavyweight Champion in a 2013 viewer poll. Booker is best known for his time in World Championship Wrestling (WCW), the World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment (WWF/E), and Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA), holding 35 championships between those organizations. He is the most decorated wrestler in WCW history, having held 21 titles, including a record six WCW World Television Championships (along with being the first African American titleholder), and a record eleven WCW World Tag Team Championships: ten as one half of Harlem Heat with his brother, Lash "Stevie Ray" Huffman in WCW (most reigns within that company), and one in the WWF with Test. Booker was the final WCW World Heavyweight Champion and WCW United States Heavyweight Champion within the active WCW organisation. Booker is a six-time world champion in professional wrestling, having won the WCW World Heavyweight Championship five times, and WWE's World Heavyweight Championship once. With his fifth WCW Championship win (which occurred in the WWF), Booker T became the second African-American to win a world championship in WWF/E (after The Rock), and also the first to be of non-mixed race. He is also the winner of the 2006 King of the Ring tournament, the sixteenth Triple Crown Champion, and the eighth Grand Slam Champion (under original format) in WWE history. As the ninth WCW Triple Crown Champion, Booker is one of five men to achieve both the WWE and WCW Triple Crowns. He has headlined multiple pay-per-view events for the WWF/E, WCW and TNA throughout his career. Booker was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame on April 6, 2013, by his brother, Lash. Both he and Lash were inducted together into the 2019 class on April 6, 2019 as Harlem Heat, rendering Booker a two-time Hall of Famer. Early life Huffman was born the youngest of eight children, in Plain Dealing, Louisiana, though his birthplace is often misidentified as Houston, Texas. By the time Booker was 13, both of his parents had died and he lived with his 16-year-old sister. He would move in with his older brother Lash "Stevie Ray" Huffman at age 17. In high school, Huffman was a drum major. He also played football and basketball. Professional wrestling career Early Career (1986–1993) As a single father working at a storage company in Houston, Texas, Huffman was looking to make a better life for himself and his son. His brother Lash (Stevie Ray) suggested that he and Booker check out a new wrestling school being opened, run by Ivan Putski, in conjunction with his Western Wrestling Alliance organization. His boss from the storage company sponsored the money to pay for the wrestling lessons. Booker trained under Scott Casey, who helped to turn Booker's background as a gangster and dancer into "sports entertainment", teaching the newcomer in-ring psychology and ring generalship. Eight weeks later, Booker debuted as "G.I. Bro" on Putski's Western Wrestling Alliance Live! program. The character was a tie-in to the raging Gulf War and the WWF's Sgt. Slaughter angle. Even though the WWA met its demise some time later, Booker continued to wrestle on the Texas independent circuit, often with his brother Lash, who performed as Stevie Ray. They were spotted by Skandor Akbar who hired them to work for the Global Wrestling Federation (GWF), where he and Eddie Gilbert were involved. Gilbert teamed Stevie Ray and Booker T together as the Ebony Experience, and they won the GWF Tag Team Championship on July 31, 1992. During their time with GWF, they held the tag title a total of three times. Subsequently, Booker T and Stevie Ray left the GWF to work for World Championship Wrestling. World Championship Wrestling Harlem Heat (1993–1997) Booker and his brother Stevie Ray signed with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) after Sid Vicious recommended they sign with the company. In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane. They became heels and were on Harley Race and Col. Rob Parker's team in the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster. They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled. In 1994, they acquired the services of Sensational Sherri, dubbed 'Sister' Sherri, as their manager and changed their names back to Booker T and Stevie Ray, at their request. By the end of 1994, they held the WCW Tag Team Championship after defeating Stars and Stripes (The Patriot and Marcus Alexander Bagwell) in December. After dropping the title to The Nasty Boys, Harlem Heat regained the belts on June 24, 1995. Afterward, Harlem Heat got into a feud with Col. Parker's "Stud Stable" of "Dirty" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Parker and Sherri were carrying on a love affair and Parker eventually left the Stud Stable in favor of the Heat to be with Sherri. Harlem Heat won the WCW World Tag Team titles at Fall Brawl 1995, defeating Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Their third title reign only lasted one day, but the duo regained the tag team title nine days later from The American Males (Buff Bagwell and Scotty Riggs). On the June 24, 1996 Nitro, Harlem Heat defeated Lex Luger and Sting to capture their fifth WCW World Tag Team titles. Three days after losing the tag team titles to the Steiner Brothers, Harlem Heat regained the titles back from the Steiners on July 27. On September 23, Booker T and Stevie Ray were defeated by Public Enemy (Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge) but took the titles back for the seventh time on October 1. They lost the Tag Team Championship to the Outsiders (Kevin Nash and Scott Hall) on October 27. Subsequently, they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces. They then entered into a brief feud against Col. Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they won. In 1997, they feuded with Public Enemy (Grunge & Rocco), The Steiners, and the nWo. In fall 1997, they fired Sherri and added a new manager, Jacqueline. They were briefly put out of action by the nWo and returned to feud with the Faces of Fear (Meng and The Barbarian). Stevie then took five months off from WCW to recover from an ankle injury and Jacqueline left for the WWF. World Television Champion (1997–1999) Booker made the transition into singles action and won the WCW World Television Championship from Disco Inferno on the December 29, 1997 episode of Nitro. Booker feuded over the title with Perry Saturn and Rick Martel culminating in a gauntlet match at SuperBrawl VIII. Martel, the man that was originally supposed to win the match, went down early due to a knee injury, meaning the finish and the remainder of the match had to be called in the ring. During spring 1998, Booker began feuding with Chris Benoit. Benoit cost Booker the TV title during a match against Fit Finlay. As a result, Booker and Benoit engaged in a "best-of-seven series" with the winner meeting Finlay for the title. After seven matches and interference from Bret Hart and Stevie Ray, Booker T won the series, and on June 14, regained the Television Championship. Booker scored a clean pinfall victory over Bret Hart on the edition of February 22 of Nitro. The following month, he regained the TV Championship from Scott Steiner, who, in turn, defeated Booker in the finals of the WCW United States Heavyweight Championship tournament. Booker lost the Television title to Rick Steiner a month later at Slamboree. Harlem Heat reunion (1999–2000) By mid-1999, Booker had convinced his brother, Stevie Ray, to leave the nWo and reunite Harlem Heat. Harlem Heat defeated Bam Bam Bigelow and Kanyon for the WCW World Tag Team titles at Road Wild. They lost the WCW World Tag Team titles to Barry and Kendall Windham on August 23, but Harlem Heat regained them about a month later at Fall Brawl. When The Filthy Animals were stripped of the WCW World Tag Team belts due to an injury suffered by Rey Mysterio Jr., the title was put up in a three-way dance at Halloween Havoc. Harlem Heat claimed their tenth WCW World Tag Team title defeating Hugh Morrus and Brian Knobs and Konnan and Kidman. By late 1999, a female bodybuilder named Midnight had joined Harlem Heat. Stevie neglected her help and started disputing with Booker over her. Stevie Ray eventually challenged Midnight in a match that decided whether or not she would stay with Harlem Heat. After being defeated with a surprise small package, Stevie Ray turned on both Booker and Midnight to form Harlem Heat, Inc. with Big T, Kash, and J. Biggs. Stevie Ray and Big T dubbed themselves Harlem Heat 2000. Throughout this period, Huffman was referred to simply as Booker, as Harlem Heat 2000 won the rights to the name "T" in a match with Big T against Booker on February 20, 2000 at SuperBrawl X. Kidman and Booker T defeated Harlem Heat 2000 (Ray and Big T) at Uncensored 2000. When Vince Russo and Eric Bischoff formed The New Blood, Huffman eventually completely changed his in-ring persona, helping lead Captain Rection's military-themed Misfits In Action stable as G.I. Bro, reprising his gimmicks from his days in the WWA. He defeated Shawn Stasiak at the Great American Bash in a Boot Camp match. He returned to the Booker T name on the June 19 Nitro, promoting Rection to the status of General and demanding the Misfits start standing up to the New Blood. WCW World Heavyweight Champion (2000–2001) Huffman was elevated to main event status in 2000. After WCW booker Vince Russo grew disgruntled with Hulk Hogan's politics, he fired Hogan during the live broadcast of Bash at the Beach and announced an impromptu match between Jeff Jarrett and Huffman for the WCW World Heavyweight Championship. Huffman won the match, in the process becoming the second ever African American champion in WCW after Ron Simmons, and the third African American to win a World Heavyweight title. He lost the title to Kevin Nash on August 28 on Nitro. He regained the title a few weeks later in a steel cage match with Nash at Fall Brawl, but again lost the title, this time to Vince Russo himself in a cage match (Russo was speared out of the cage by Goldberg and won the title), Russo vacated the title and Booker won it for the third time in a San Francisco 49er Box Match against Jeff Jarrett on the October 2 episode of Nitro. Booker's next feud was with Scott Steiner, to whom he eventually lost the title in a Straitjacket steel cage match. Steiner won by TKO when he put an unconscious Booker into the Steiner Recliner at Mayhem. Steiner was WCW's longest reigning champion in years, whilst Booker was briefly out with an injury. Booker returned to the roster and defeated Rick Steiner for the WCW United States Heavyweight Championship at Greed. This made Booker the ninth WCW Triple Crown winner. On the final episode of Nitro, he defeated Scott Steiner to win the WCW World Heavyweight Championship for the fourth time. According to sports journalist Michael Landsberg, Huffman was salaried at "close to a million dollars a year" in WCW. He won a total of twenty-one titles within the organization, making him the most decorated performer in its history. Booker was also the reigning WCW United States Heavyweight Champion and WCW World Heavyweight Champion when he accepted a contract with the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment The Alliance (2001–2002) After WCW was bought by the World Wrestling Federation in March 2001, Booker T made his debut at the King of the Ring pay-per-view in 2001 attacking WWF Champion Stone Cold Steve Austin during his match, promptly injuring him in his very first move in the WWF. He later turned heel and became a leading member of The Alliance during the Invasion storyline. In his debut match in the company, Booker defended his WCW Championship against Buff Bagwell on the July 2 episode of Raw; sports journalist Michael Landsberg reported that many have called this bout "the worst match ever". At InVasion, The Alliance defeated Team WWF when Austin joined the Alliance. On the July 26 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T gave up his WCW United States Championship and handed it over to Chris Kanyon. He later lost the WCW Championship to Kurt Angle, but he went on to win the title back on the July 30 episode of Raw. Booker T kept the title until SummerSlam, when he lost it to The Rock after feuding with him over the similarity in their gimmicks and their identical finishing moves, the Book End/Rock Bottom. Booker T won the WCW Tag Team Championship for an eleventh time, this time with Test, and he also had a WWF Tag Team Championship reign with Test. At the Survivor Series, Booker T was eliminated third by The Rock after a roll-up and eventually The Alliance was defeated, causing them to disband. In its aftermath, Booker remained a heel, and he joined forces with Vince McMahon and The Boss Man in December to feud with Steve Austin. After Booker T cost Austin a match against Chris Jericho for the Undisputed WWF Championship at Vengeance, Austin gained revenge by attacking Booker T in a grocery store by covering him in food. Then the week after Booker T vandalized Austin's truck causing Austin to chase Booker T around a bingo hall and a church. Booker T's first WrestleMania appearance was at WrestleMania X8 against Edge, a match he lost. They feuded over who would appear in a fictional Japanese shampoo commercial. When the brand extension was introduced in March, Booker T was drafted to the Raw brand. At Insurrextion, Booker briefly held the WWF Hardcore Championship twice, defeating Stevie Richards only to lose it to Crash Holly seconds later. He then re-defeated Crash and lost the title to Stevie Richards a few minutes later. Feud with Evolution (2002–2003) Goldust began trying to start a tag team with Booker, but Goldust kept costing Booker matches. With the nWo now operating in WWE, Booker T was eventually invited into the faction. His time there was short-lived, when he was kicked out of the group by Shawn Michaels after a superkick from Michaels. Booker then turned face and found a partnership with Goldust and the pair teamed to battle the nWo. Booker and Goldust had a WWE Tag Team Championship match against The Un-Americans (Christian and Lance Storm) at SummerSlam, but The Un-Americans retained after interference from Test. At No Mercy, Booker and Goldust battled Chris Jericho and Christian for the World Tag Team Championship, but they lost the match with Jericho using the title belt on Goldust. He spent the rest of 2002 teaming with Goldust. They won the World Tag Team Championship at Armageddon in a Tag Team Elimination match defeating the teams of Christian and Chris Jericho, Lance Storm and William Regal, and the Dudley Boyz. They held the belts for about three weeks, when they lost them to Regal and Storm. Booker and Goldust lost the rematch and decided to go their separate ways. The gimmick for Booker and Goldust was Goldust being a strange, yet dependable ally who Booker eventually warmed up to after initial skepticism. By 2003, however, Booker T's popularity had soared and he amicably separated from Goldust, at Goldust's request, in order to pursue the World Heavyweight Championship. In February 2003, he eliminated The Rock to win a battle royal to become the number one contender to the World Heavyweight Championship at WrestleMania XIX. Booker targeted Evolution after Batista and Randy Orton attacked Booker's former partner, Goldust. Several weeks before WrestleMania, the incumbent champion and Evolution's leader, Triple H, cut a controversial promo on Booker T. Triple H downplayed Booker T's WCW success, pointing out that the WCW World Heavyweight Championship had been held by non-wrestlers like booker Vince Russo and actor David Arquette, calling WCW and its title "a joke", despite the fact that, as World Heavyweight Champion, Triple H was holding the WCW World Heavyweight Championship's physical belt, the Big Gold Belt, and that Triple H's Evolution stablemate, Ric Flair, had been a multiple-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion. He said that "people like" Booker T would never win world championships in WWE. This promo is often interpreted as racist due to Triple H referencing Booker T's "nappy" hair and implying that Booker T was just in WWE to dance and entertain for "people like" Triple H. During the WrestleMania XIX press conference Michael Cole asked Triple H as to whether he had deliberately cut a racist promo, Triple H claimed this was not the case and that he was just referring to Booker's criminal past. A week later, Booker attacked Triple H in the bathroom and laid him out after Triple H had thrown a dollar bill at him, ordering Booker to get him a towel. However, Booker T lost to Triple H at WrestleMania. For several weeks, he teamed with Shawn Michaels and Kevin Nash in a feud against Triple H, Ric Flair, and Chris Jericho. At Backlash, Booker's team lost when Triple H pinned Nash after a sledgehammer shot. Various feuds (2003–2005) Afterward, Booker set his sights on the newly reactivated Intercontinental Championship. After losing a battle royal for the title at Judgment Day, Booker feuded with the champion Christian. After a few matches, Booker defeated Christian to become the new Intercontinental Champion on the July 7 episode of Raw. About a month later, because of a nagging back injury, Booker lost the Intercontinental title back to Christian at a non-televised house show on August 10. Booker, meanwhile, was out of action until October. Booker returned on the October 20 episode of Raw and subsequently joined Team Austin at Survivor Series for a match to determine whether Eric Bischoff or Stone Cold Steve Austin (both co-general managers) would be the sole General Manager of Raw. Team Bischoff won the match. Booker then feuded with Mark Henry, who eliminated him in the Survivor Series match. Booker defeated Henry at Armageddon. On the February 16, 2004 episode of Raw, Booker T and Rob Van Dam defeated Ric Flair and Batista for the World Tag Team Championship. Booker and Van Dam held the titles for a month, even defending the belts at WrestleMania XX in a Fatal 4-Way tag team match. Eight days later on the March 22 episode of Raw, they lost the World Tag Team Championship back to Ric Flair and Batista. He and Rob Van Dam, never got their rematch due to Rob Van Dam being drafted to SmackDown! that very same night. On March 23, 2004 he was "traded" (along with the Dudley Boyz) to the SmackDown! brand in exchange for Triple H, but as part of a new storyline, he appeared unhappy with the move calling SmackDown! "the minor leagues" and even disrespected Eddie Guerrero, the brand's WWE Champion, turning heel in the process. Later on, Booker T bragged about how he was the biggest star on SmackDown! and feuded with The Undertaker. Booker tried to utilize voodoo magic to try to overcome his "supernatural" foe; however, it did nothing to prevent him from losing to the Undertaker at Judgment Day. In mid-2004, Booker T set his sights on the United States Championship along with its champion, John Cena. After Cena got on the bad side of General Manager Kurt Angle, he did his best to get the title away from Cena. Cena successfully defended the title at The Great American Bash in a four-way elimination match against Booker, René Duprée, and Rob Van Dam. After Cena was stripped of his title by Angle for "laying a hand" on the GM, Booker took advantage of the situation and won an eight-man elimination match to win the vacant United States Championship, thus becoming the one-hundredth United States Champion in history, in a match that also featured Cena, Dupree, Billy Gunn, Charlie Haas, Luther Reigns, Kenzo Suzuki and Van Dam. Booker won by last eliminating both Cena and Van Dam in the course of less than 10 seconds After Angle was fired by Mr. McMahon for embellishing his injuries, Theodore Long began his first tenure as SmackDown! General Manager, and booked a best-of-five series of matches for the United States Championship between Booker and Cena. The first match took place at SummerSlam in Toronto and saw Cena gain the pinfall victory to go up 1–0 in the series. Booker would bounce back and win the next two matches, on the August 26 edition of SmackDown! in Fresno, California and a live event the next night in Sydney, Australia, to take a 2–1 lead. The next match in the series wouldn't come until the September 16 SmackDown! from Spokane, Washington, where Cena won and tied the series at two apiece. The series culminated at No Mercy, where Cena won the series 3–2, and thusly, the United States Championship. On October 21, SmackDown! General Manager Theodore Long placed Booker in a six-man tag team match with Rob Van Dam and Rey Mysterio against John "Bradshaw" Layfield (JBL), René Duprée, and Kenzo Suzuki. JBL expected Booker to betray his partners, but instead Booker pinned him, thus turning face again. Booker T faced JBL for the WWE Championship at the Survivor Series on November 14, but lost after he was hit in the head with the championship belt. The next night, Booker T demanded a rematch, citing Orlando Jordan's interference. He was then joined by Eddie Guerrero and The Undertaker who also wanted a shot at JBL's title, prompting Theodore Long to make a fatal four-way match for the WWE Championship at Armageddon. Once again, Booker failed to win the title, as JBL retained it. He then briefly teamed with Eddie Guerrero, at one point challenging Mysterio and Van Dam for the WWE Tag Team Championship, and feuded with Heidenreich. Booker won a 30-man Battle Royal dark match at WrestleMania 21 last eliminating Raw's Viscera and Chris Masters. Subsequently, Booker was part of the tournament to name a new number one contender and made it to the Final Four. After Kurt Angle eliminated Booker, he returned the favor, costing Angle the match against JBL. The storyline then turned to a sexual nature, as Angle began stalking Booker's new wife, Sharmell. Booker defeated Angle at Judgment Day. On the May 26 episode of SmackDown!, Booker participated in a "Winners Choice" Battle Royal, with the winner choosing his opponent for the next week. Kurt Angle won and wanted to wrestle Sharmell. Booker protested, and the match was made into a Handicap match. Angle won by pinning Sharmell in a sexual position. The next week, Booker gained revenge on Angle, defeating him with a Scissors Kick. On the June 30 episode of SmackDown!, JBL defeated Christian, The Undertaker, Chris Benoit, Muhammad Hassan, and Booker T in a six-man elimination match for the SmackDown! Championship. During the match, Booker got specifically involved with Christian. Booker later defeated Christian at The Great American Bash. United States Champion (2005–2006) Booker T began teaming with Chris Benoit, eying his United States Championship again. Benoit was allowed to pick his next challenger to see who would face him at No Mercy, so Booker, Christian, and Orlando Jordan tried to impress Benoit by winning matches. He instead decided not choose one opponent, so he made it a fatal four-way for No Mercy, where Benoit successfully defended his title. On the October 21 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T defeated Benoit for the United States Championship, due to unseen help from Sharmell. Theodore Long later showed footage of Sharmell interfering in Booker's matches. Booker went to apologize to Benoit and give him a rematch, but then attacked Benoit, busting him open with the United States title belt and turning heel once again. Booker then boasted that he had been fully aware of what Sharmell had been doing and had been playing dumb to fool everyone. On the November 25 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T defended the United States Championship against Benoit. The match ended when Benoit superplexed Booker and two referees made a three count on either competitor, claiming that their wrestler had won. Booker was stripped of the belt by Theodore Long, because of the confusion of who won since they pinned each other at the same time. Long decided to put Benoit and Booker against each other in a best of seven series, just as the two had in their WCW days. Booker took an early 3–0 lead. In a must win match during Armageddon, Benoit was able to defeat Booker T to bring the series to 3–1. At a house show, Booker was injured, and he did not wrestle again until after the "Best of Seven" series with Benoit was completed. Booker was scheduled to face Benoit in Match 5 of the Best of Seven Series at the December 30 taping of SmackDown!. At the beginning of the show, General Manager Theodore Long said that Booker would have to forfeit. Both Booker and Benoit protested, with Benoit not wanting a cheap victory. Booker managed to persuade Long to allow him to choose a stand-in for the matches. Booker chose Randy Orton as his replacement. Benoit was able to tie the series 3–3 after beating Orton in two consecutive matches on the December 30 and January 6, 2006 episodes of SmackDown!. Orton, however, was able to defeat Benoit in the final match on the January 13 episode of SmackDown! to win the series and the title for Booker T, who held the title until No Way Out where Benoit won it back. On the February 24 episode of SmackDown!, Booker and Sharmell provided guest commentary for a match involving The Boogeyman. After defeating his opponents, Boogeyman dumped a bucket of worms onto the announce table where they were sitting, frightening the two. Over the next few weeks, Boogeyman would stalk Booker and Sharmell. Booker and Boogeyman were set to face off on the March 18 Saturday Night's Main Event XXXII, but the match was canceled due to Booker faking a knee injury to escape competition. The feud eventually culminated at WrestleMania 22, with Booker and Sharmell losing to Boogeyman. The couple received a restraining order against The Boogeyman on the April 7 episode of SmackDown!, ending the feud. King Booker and World Heavyweight Champion (2006–2007) Booker next entered the 2006 King of the Ring tournament on SmackDown!, advancing through to the finals due to a bye as his semi-final opponent, Kurt Angle, was unable to wrestle. The finals were held at Judgment Day where Booker defeated Bobby Lashley. Upon winning the King of the Ring tournament, Booker began wrestling as "King Booker" and began acting like he was an actual monarch ruling "The SmackDown! Kingdom". Booker formed a royal court that included his wife, Queen Sharmell, Sir William Regal, and Sir Finlay, and began including the mannerisms and attire of a stereotypical English-style king as part of the character, all the way down to wearing a crown and cape and speaking in a fake English accent. However, whenever King Booker would get angry he would launch into a tirade in the style of Booker T (an example of this was an episode of SmackDown! where Theodore Long would inform him he would be facing The Undertaker), which lent some comedic aspect to the character; he even went as far as having Lashley kiss his "royal" feet. After gaining his title of King, Booker continued to feud with Lashley. After Lashley defeated John "Bradshaw" Layfield (JBL) for the United States Championship at the end of May, Booker began chasing after the title and even resorted to making Lashley kiss his "royal feet" on the June 2 episode of SmackDown!. The feud ended after a steel cage match on the June 30 episode of SmackDown! where Lashley defeated Booker by escaping the cage to retain the United States Championship. The next week, Booker entered a battle royal on SmackDown! with the winner to challenge Rey Mysterio for his World Heavyweight Championship at The Great American Bash. Booker won the battle royal and then defeated Mysterio at The Great American Bash to win the World Heavyweight Championship after Chavo Guerrero betrayed Mysterio by hitting him with a steel chair. This was Booker's first world championship since joining WWE and the win caused him to proclaim himself as the "King of the World". This win would also make Booker the sixteenth Triple Crown Champion and eighth Grand Slam Champion (under the original format) in the history of the WWE. After Booker won the World Heavyweight Championship, he began a rivalry with the returning former champion Batista, who vowed to regain the title he was forced to forfeit due to injury. This rivalry spilled over to real life when the two got into a legitimate fistfight at a SummerSlam pay-per-view commercial shoot, reportedly due to Batista considering himself superior to the rest of the roster due to his quick climb to main event status. According to sources, both men were left bloodied and bruised, however Booker was reportedly praised by many wrestlers in the back for speaking his mind to Batista about his attitude. At SummerSlam, Booker lost to Batista by disqualification after Queen Sharmell interfered on his behalf (thus retaining the title), but at No Mercy, Booker defeated Batista, Lashley and his own stablemate, Finlay, in a Fatal 4-Way match. Before the match, Booker assaulted Sir William Regal, resulting in the breakup of the King's Court. Despite the break-up of his Court, Booker lost to Batista by disqualification on the October 20 episode on SmackDown!, due to interference from WWE Champion John Cena from Raw and ECW World Champion Big Show, the two of whom King Booker was to face at Cyber Sunday in a "champion of champions" match. At Cyber Sunday, the fans voted for the World Heavyweight Championship to be on the line. Booker retained after defeating Big Show and Cena with help from Kevin Federline. After Cyber Sunday, the feud between King Booker and Batista continued with Batista unable to wrest the title from Booker. Eventually this led to a match at Survivor Series on November 26, where Booker declared that if Batista failed to defeat him this time, it would be the last World Heavyweight Championship match he would receive as long as Booker was champion. At Survivor Series, SmackDown! General Manager Theodore Long decided that if Booker got counted out or disqualified, he would lose the title. Late in the match, Queen Sharmell handed Booker his title belt while referee Nick Patrick was not looking. While she had Patrick distracted, Booker attempted to hit Batista with the belt. Batista moved out of the way, knocked the belt out of Booker's hands and hit him in the head with it, and King Booker lost the World Heavyweight Championship to Batista. After losing the title, Booker feuded alongside former royal court member Finlay against Batista and John Cena, which led up to Armageddon where they lost. While competing in the Royal Rumble match, King Booker was eliminated by Kane. A frustrated Booker returned to the ring illegally and eliminated Kane. This started a short feud between the two resulting in a match at No Way Out, which Kane won. On the February 23 episode of SmackDown!, Booker won a Falls Count Anywhere Money in the Bank qualifying match, defeating Kane (with assistance from The Great Khali) and earned himself a spot in the match at WrestleMania 23. At WrestleMania, Matt Hardy set up Sharmell for a Twist of Fate during the Money in the Bank match with the briefcase in Booker's grasp – thus forcing him to choose between a guaranteed title shot and his wife. He chose to defend Sharmell and lost the match. On the April 6 episode of SmackDown!, Booker attempted to take revenge. However, he lost the match against Matt Hardy, and Sharmell declared her disappointment in him and slapped him. In an attempt to impress Sharmell, Booker attacked The Undertaker but was Tombstoned on an announce table. Booker was removed from television to deal with a knee injury. Draft to RAW, WWE Championship pursuit and departure (2007) On the June 11 episode of Raw, both King Booker and Queen Sharmell were drafted to the Raw brand as part of the WWE Draft. He then began a short feud with John Cena over the WWE Championship, Booker would wrestle Cena in a Five Pack Challenge along with Bobby Lashley, Mick Foley and Randy Orton at Vengeance: Night of Champions for the title in a losing effort. Cena would retain at the event by pinning Foley. On the July 16 episode of Raw, King Booker came to the ring using Triple H's theme music "The King of Kings", even using his video. King Booker declared that neither Triple H nor Jerry Lawler could be known as "The King". Booker began a feud with Lawler, defeating him on the August 6 episode of Raw where the loser had to crown the winner the next week. When the time came, Lawler refused, declaring that Triple H was still a king and announcing that King Booker would battle Triple H at SummerSlam. Booker attacked Lawler, throwing him into the ring post and hitting him with a television monitor. At SummerSlam, Booker lost to the returning Triple H. On the August 27 episode of Raw, Booker wrestled against John Cena in a non-title match, which he lost by disqualification when Randy Orton interfered. In August, he was linked to Signature Pharmacy, a company thought to be distributing performance-enhancing drugs. He was suspended by WWE for violating its Wellness Policy. He denied using any drugs and being a customer of Signature Pharmacy. In October 2007, Booker T requested his and Sharmell's release from their WWE contracts due to the pressure he had in WWE and being burned out, which WWE granted. Total Nonstop Action Wrestling Feud with Bobby Roode (2007–2008) At the Genesis pay-per-view on November 11, 2007, Huffman debuted in Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) as Sting's mystery partner in a tag team match against Kurt Angle and Kevin Nash for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship, reverting to his Booker T character. His wife Sharmell also debuted, interfering in the match on Booker and Sting's behalf when Karen Angle interfered on behalf of Kurt Angle and Nash. On the November 29 episode of Impact!, Booker said he came to TNA to test his skills against the young talent, take TNA to a higher level, and win the TNA World Heavyweight Championship. Robert Roode came to the ring and challenged Booker to a match, claiming he has been pushed down by washed-up wrestlers and has-beens. Booker won his Impact! debut match, but afterwards, Christian Cage and Robert Roode beat down Booker until Kaz made the save. At Turning Point, Booker and Kaz defeated Roode and Cage when Booker pinned Cage. Booker and Sharmell won a mixed tag team match against Robert Roode and Ms. Brooks at Final Resolution. After the match, Roode punched Sharmell in the face, leading to a match at Against All Odds. While the punch was intended to be a work, Roode had in fact made contact with Sharmell during the punch, dislocating her jaw and causing her to be off TV for a few weeks, therefore making it into a shoot. The rivalry, however, went ahead as planned where Booker and Roode wrestled to a double-countout at Against All Odds, which saw them brawl to the parking lot. Roode defeated Booker in strap match at Destination X after hitting Booker with a pair of handcuffs. In a special live episode of Impact!, Booker T and Robert Roode had another outing, this time with the fans being able to vote on the stipulation of the match. At Booker's request during a pre-match promo, the match became a First Blood Match, beating the Last Man Standing and I Quit stipulations. Booker T would go on to win the match-up. At Lockdown, Booker T and Sharmell defeated Robert Roode and Payton Banks after Sharmell pinned Banks with a roll-up. The Main Event Mafia (2008–2010) Booker T turned heel for the first time in TNA at Sacrifice by attacking Christian Cage and Rhino from behind with a steel chair. This came about as a result of losing a tag team match up against Christian Cage and Rhino, with them furthering themselves in the Deuces Wild Tag Team Tournament. Booker then competed in the King of the Mountain match for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship at Slammiversary. He was seconds away from winning the match, when Kevin Nash stopped him and performed a Jackknife Powerbomb; Samoa Joe would later go on to win the match. On the next Impact!, Booker challenged Joe to a title match at Victory Road, which Joe would later accept. Also around this time he reverted to a gimmick similar to his King Booker gimmick albeit while proclaiming himself a supposed king of Africa. The match at Victory Road ended in a draw after Sharmell replaced the referee and counted after the match was already over. At Hard Justice, Samoa Joe defeated Booker after a guitar shot, thus reclaiming physical possession of the title belt, which Booker had kept after Victory Road. Later he introduced the TNA Legends Championship and became the first official champion. Booker T successfully defended the title at Turning Point against Cage. At Final Resolution, Booker T, Kevin Nash, Scott Steiner, and Sting defeated The TNA Front Line (A.J. Styles, Brother Devon, Brother Ray, and Samoa Joe) in an eight-man tag team match to allow Sting to retain his TNA World Heavyweight Championship. At Genesis, Booker T, Scott Steiner, and Cute Kip lost a six-man tag team match to Mick Foley, A.J. Styles, and Brother Devon. The next month at Against All Odds, Booker T defeated Shane Sewell to retain the Legends Championship. Booker T lost the title to A.J. Styles at Destination X. At Lockdown, Team Angle (Booker T, Kevin Nash, Kurt Angle, and Scott Steiner) lost to Team Jarrett (A.J. Styles, Christopher Daniels, Jeff Jarrett, and Samoa Joe) in a Lethal Lockdown match. At Sacrifice, Booker T received a rematch for the Legends Championship, but lost to A.J. Styles in a "I Quit" match. Booker T went go on to form the Mafia's resident tag team with Scott Steiner, and at Victory Road, Steiner and Booker defeated Beer Money, Inc. to win the TNA World Tag Team Championship, marking Booker's 15th World Tag Team title reign overall. Then at Hard Justice, Booker T and Steiner retained the World Tag Team Championship against Team 3D. Prior to No Surrender, Booker, Steiner, and British Invasion won a match to gain the man advantage at No Surrender's Lethal Lockdown match against Team 3D and Beer Money, Inc. Even with the advantage, Booker T's team lost at No Surrender when James Storm of Beer Money pinned Doug Williams of The British Invasion. At Bound for Glory, Booker and Steiner lost the TNA World Tag Team Titles to the British Invasion in a four way Full Metal Mayhem Tag Team match, which also included Team 3D and Beer Money; during the match Booker was taken out on a stretcher. Afterwards it was reported that the PPV had been Booker's final appearance with the company, and his and Sharmell's profiles were removed from the official TNA roster. On May 21, 2010, Booker T made a one night return to TNA at a live event in Lake Charles, Louisiana, replacing A.J. Styles, who was unable to attend the event due to travel issues, and wrestled Rob Van Dam for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship in a losing effort. Puerto Rico and Mexico (2009–2010) Booker T debuted in the International Wrestling Association (IWA) on Histeria Boricua, a special event held on January 6, 2009. There he was booked against Chicano, the incumbent IWA Undisputed Heavyweight Champion. The match was won by Cotto, who reversed a "Book End" attempt and scored a pinfall victory. On July 11, 2010, Booker T was booked by World Wrestling Council in a match against Carlito which also involved Orlando Colón and El Mesias. On September 16, 2010, Booker T made his debut for Mexican promotion Perros del Mal. In the main event of the evening he teamed up with Dr. Wagner Jr. and El Mesías, who represented rival promotion AAA, against El Hijo del Perro Aguayo, Damián 666 and Halloween. After Aguayo pinned El Mesías, Booker turned on Wagner, unmasked him and joined Perros del Mal. Return to WWE Color commentator and part-time wrestler (2011–2012) On January 30, 2011 Booker T returned to WWE to take part in the Royal Rumble. Booker entered the match at number 21 and was eliminated by Mason Ryan. On the February 1 taping of SmackDown, Huffman debuted as the show's new color commentator, working beside Josh Mathews and Michael Cole, replacing Matt Striker. He coached on the returning Tough Enough competition, and at Elimination Chamber he introduced Trish Stratus as a fellow coach. On the June 6 episode of Raw, Booker wrestled his first match on the brand in four years, gaining a victory against Jack Swagger by count out. On the November 21 episode of Raw, Cody Rhodes threw water in Booker T's face after Rhodes allegedly heard Booker T criticize him, thus starting a conflict between the two. On the November 29 episode of SmackDown Booker was scheduled to face Rhodes in a match but it did not happen after Rhodes attacked him from behind him during a backstage interview. On the December 9 episode of SmackDown, Rhodes attacked Booker again while heading to the announcer's table leaving him with paramedics. Later that night, Booker T attacked Rhodes during his match with Daniel Bryan, leading to an Intercontinental Championship match at TLC: Tables, Ladders & Chairs, which Rhodes won. On the December 26 episode of Raw, Booker defeated Rhodes in a non-title match. On the January 6, 2012, episode of SmackDown, Booker challenged Rhodes a second time for the Intercontinental Championship, but once again failed to win the title. Booker T along with fellow commentators Jerry Lawler and Michael Cole all participated in the 2012 Royal Rumble. On the March 26, 2012 episode of Raw, Booker T saved Teddy Long from an attempted attack by Mark Henry, thus becoming the sixth and final member of Team Teddy at WrestleMania XXVIII, where Team Johnny emerged victorious. This was his last official match for the WWE. On the July 9 episode of Raw, Jerry Lawler won by pinfall against Michael Cole in a WrestleMania XXVII rematch. However, Booker, who was subbing for Lawler on commentary, threw Cole back into the ring after he tried to escape. This caused the anonymous Raw General Manager to reverse the decision and give Cole the win as a result of a disqualification. SmackDown General Manager and Hall of Fame (2012–2013) On July 31, 2012, Booker T was appointed the new General Manager of SmackDown. Booker would quickly add Eve Torres and Theodore Long to his staff, as his assistant and senior adviser respectively. Booker was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame by his brother, Stevie Ray, the night before WrestleMania 29. On the April 19 SmackDown, Booker became angry with Long for making matches without his consent. Big Show arrived and thanked Long for doing a better job than Booker, further infuriating him. On the April 22 Raw, upset with Long for making a World Heavyweight Championship match at Extreme Rules, made it a Triple Threat match. Booker took time off for a torn distal triceps, and had surgery for it on June 12. On the July 19 SmackDown, he returned to continue as SmackDown General Manager, but soon lost the job to Vickie Guerrero, on Vince McMahon's orders. Return to commentary and pre-show panelist (2014–present) Since 2014, Booker T has commonly done work on the WWE Network, including the Raw pre-show and also being a part of the "expert panel" on Kickoff shows before each pay-per-view event. On the 2015 premiere of Raw, Booker T replaced Jerry Lawler, who was suffering from diverticulitis, for commentating. However, it was later announced that Booker would be returning on a full-time basis to take Lawler's place on Raw, with Lawler moving to SmackDown. On the March 30 episode of Raw, Booker, along with JBL and Michael Cole, were injured by Brock Lesnar after Seth Rollins refused Lesnar his WWE World Heavyweight Championship rematch. Booker was replaced by Byron Saxton for commentating as he became a coach for the sixth season of WWE Tough Enough. On August 6, 2016, Booker T replaced Tommy Dreamer in an intergender tag team match for Dreamer's House of Hardcore promotion. Booker T returned to his old "King Booker" gimmick in a segment with the SmackDown Live Survivor Series tag teams where he gave a motivational speech and convinced Breezango (Tyler Breeze and Fandango) to join the team. In December 2016, after Jerry Lawler and Lita left the pre-show team, WWE ended their Raw and SmackDown pre-shows leaving Booker T to the WWE pay-per-view pre-shows and other WWE Network specials. Following the 2017 WWE Superstar Shake-up, Booker T replaced David Otunga as color commentator on Raw. On the January 29, 2018 episode of Raw, Booker was replaced on commentary by the returning Jonathan Coachman. On the August 28 episode of SmackDown Live Booker T made a surprise appearance as "King Booker" in the opening segment when he interrupted and joined in on The New Day's "five timers" celebration, following the latter's fifth tag team championship win. In 2020, Booker made his return by wrestling at the Reality of Wrestling promotion. Legacy Longtime wrestler Kurt Angle said of Booker: "He's done it all... he legitimately is one of the top five best of all time." In 2001, sports journalist Michael Landsberg stated that Booker was considered "one of the best wrestlers alive", capable of "any match, any style". Industry veteran John Layfield later described him as "the best acquisition that WWE got when they bought WCW" in 2001. Booker's 21 WCW titles render him the most decorated wrestler in the company's history. He was the first African American WCW World Television Champion. Harlem Heat were recognized by WWE as being – along with The Steiner Brothers – WCW's greatest ever tag team. Considering both Booker's WCW and WWF/E accoldades, WWE recognizes him as one of the most decorated performers of all-time. With his fifth WCW Championship win (which occurred in the WWF), Booker T became the second African-American to win a world championship in WWF/E (after The Rock), and the first to be of non-mixed race. Booker was voted WWE's greatest World Heavyweight Champion in a 2013 viewer poll. Other media In 2000, Booker appeared in the film Ready to Rumble, starring as himself. He has appeared in an episode of Charmed, called "Wrestling with Demons" alongside Buff Bagwell and Scott Steiner. In 2001, along with several other WWE wrestlers, Booker competed on an episode of The Weakest Link, being eliminated second from the show. He also has appeared on Comedy Central and MTV. On January 13, 2004, the album WWE Originals was released, featuring Booker T performing "Can You Dig It?". On April 21, 2007, Booker began hosting a radio show titled Tea Time with King Booker on KBME 790 AM in Houston. During the week of November 5, 2007, he appeared on Family Feud with several other WWE wrestlers. On September 1, 2012, Booker released his first autobiography, Booker T: From Prison to Promise, with Medallion Press. Booker T made appearances to promote the book with The Score Television Network with Arda Ocal which aired on August 29, 2012. He conducted a sixteen-page interview with Pro Wrestling Illustrated in the 2012 volume #50 issue. On March 10, 2015, Booker released his second autobiography, Booker T: Wrestling Royalty with Medallion Press. In 2015, Booker T started a show on KILT (AM) that is also podcast on Radio.com called "Heated Conversations – with Booker T". The show is aired Saturday Nights locally in Houston, Texas and covers subjects from Wrestling, MMA and Boxing to all sports. It has featured the biggest names from the WWE as well as NBA Stars like Dwight Howard. In February 2019, Booker T sued video game company Activision over the Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 character David "Prophet" Wilkes. The lawsuit claimed that the Black Ops character contained similarities to Booker's GI Bro comic book character. On 19 September, 2021 All41 Studios and Microgaming released WWE Legends: Link & Win, a game for mobile and desktop browsers. Booker T was featured as one of four main characters alongside Macho Man Randy Savage, Stone Cold Steve Austin and Eddie Guerrero. Video games Music videos Personal life Relationships and family Booker married his first wife Levestia on May 23, 1996. Booker presented her to the Nitro crowd the night after his WCW World Heavyweight Championship win at Bash at the Beach. Levestia was also used to further the feud between himself and Jeff Jarrett when Jarrett hit her in the head with a guitar on Nitro on July 31, 2000. However, they divorced on May 8, 2001. Booker has a son, from a previous relationship with a high school girlfriend, named Brandon (born in 1982), with whom he has a strained relationship due to his time spent on the road. Booker married his girlfriend of five years, Sharmell Sullivan, in February 2005. The couple welcomed their twins, a boy named Kendrick and a girl named Kennedy, in 2010. Booker and his brother Lash opened a wrestling school in Houston in 2005. Booker T is also a fan of Formula One, and was in attendance at the 2012 U.S Grand Prix as a guest of Lewis Hamilton. Reality of Wrestling In 2005, Huffman started his own wrestling promotion in Houston, Texas, called Pro Wrestling Alliance. In 2012, the promotion rebranded to Reality of Wrestling. After his final 2013 event, Christmas Chaos, ROW was near to close, but Houston business man Hilton Koch, who assisted the event, became a partner with Booker. On February 21, 2015, Booker T and Stevie Ray reunited as Harlem Heat for one last match in Reality of Wrestling for the promotion's "The Final Heat" event. They defeated the Heavenly Bodies to win the ROW Tag Team Championship. On March 14, the titles were vacated. In February 2020, Booker T returned to wrestle for the promotion in an eight-man tag team match. Politics On December 10, 2016, Huffman announced that he would be running in the 2019 Houston mayoral election. He was quoted saying that, "2020 is going to be a new era in the city of Houston. We're going to be looked at now from a different perspective. The cool city, 2020 is coming." Huffman was quoted in 2016, stating his focus for the three years leading up to the 2019 election would be concentrated on the city's "homeless, underprivileged, and low income areas." However, in September 2019, Huffman was not among the 12 names listed who applied for the election ballot. Legal issues Huffman spent nineteen months in prison after pleading guilty to armed robberies at Wendy's restaurants in Houston. He and his partners wore Wendy's uniforms during the holdups since they had been working there for 2½ years. Because of the gunmen's uniforms and familiarity with the fast food chain's operations, police suspected the robberies were inside jobs—and it did not take long before Huffman and three other men were found. He pleaded guilty in December 1987 to two aggravated robbery counts and was sentenced to five years in prison. Huffman was released after serving 19 months, and was placed on parole until April 1992. Championships and accomplishments Cauliflower Alley Club Tag Team Award (2018) – with Stevie Ray George Tragos/Lou Thesz Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame Class of 2018 Global Wrestling Federation GWF Tag Team Championship (3 times) – with Stevie Ray Las Vegas Pro Wrestling LVPW UWF Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Prairie Wrestling Alliance PWA Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Pro Wrestling Illustrated Inspirational Wrestler of the Year (2000) Most Improved Wrestler of the Year (1998) Tag Team of the Year (1995, 1996) with Stevie Ray Ranked No. 5 of the top 500 wrestlers in the PWI 500 in 2001 Southern Championship Wrestling Florida SCW Florida Southern Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Texas All-Pro Wrestling TAP Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Reality of Wrestling ROW Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Stevie Ray Total Nonstop Action Wrestling TNA Legends Championship (1 time, inaugural) TNA World Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Scott Steiner TNA Year End Awards (2 times) Memorable Moment of the Year (2007) Who To Watch in 2008 (2007) World Championship Wrestling WCW World Heavyweight Championship (4 times) WCW World Television Championship (6 times) WCW United States Heavyweight Championship (1 time) WCW World Tag Team Championship (10 times) – with Stevie Ray Ninth WCW Triple Crown Champion World Wrestling Federation/World Wrestling Entertainment/WWE WCW Championship (1 time) World Heavyweight Championship (1 time) World Tag Team Championship (3 times) – with Test (1), Goldust (1) and Rob Van Dam (1) WCW Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Test WWE Intercontinental Championship (1 time) WWE United States Championship (3 times) WWF Hardcore Championship (2 times) King of the Ring (2006) Sixteenth Triple Crown Champion Eighth Grand Slam Champion (under original format) WWE Hall of Fame (2 times) Class of 2013 – individually Class of 2019 – as a member of Harlem Heat Wrestling Observer Newsletter Most Underrated (2002) Worst Television Announcer (2017) Notes References External links 1965 births African-American male professional wrestlers American color commentators American male professional wrestlers American robbers American sportspeople convicted of crimes Living people NWA/WCW World Television Champions NWA/WCW/WWE United States Heavyweight Champions Professional wrestlers from Texas Professional wrestling announcers Professional wrestling podcasters Professional wrestling promoters Sportspeople from Houston The New World Order (professional wrestling) members TNA Legends/Global/Television/King of the Mountain Champions TNA/Impact World Tag Team Champions WCW World Heavyweight Champions World Heavyweight Champions (WWE) WWE Grand Slam champions WWE Hall of Fame inductees WWF/WWE Hardcore Champions WWF/WWE Intercontinental Champions WWF/WWE King Crown's Champions/King of the Ring winners	true	[ "Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region", "Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts" ]
[ "Booker T (wrestler)", "Harlem Heat (1993-1997)", "How did Harlem Heat start?", "In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane.", "Did they win a lot in the beginning?", "They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled.", "Who were they facing?", "the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster.", "Did they have any signature moves?", "I don't know.", "Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?", "they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces." ]	C_1f3ea57e1286415abc8b8322888efbdf_1	Why did they fire Col. Parker and beat him up?	6	Why did Harlem Heat fire Col. Parker and beat him up?	Booker T (wrestler)	Booker and his brother Stevie Ray signed with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) after Sid Vicious recommended they sign with the company. In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane. They became heels and were on Harley Race and Col. Rob Parker's team in the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster. They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled. In 1994, they acquired the services of Sensational Sherri, dubbed 'Sister' Sherri, as their manager and changed their names back to Booker T and Stevie Ray, at their request. By the end of 1994, they held the WCW Tag Team Championship after defeating Stars and Stripes (The Patriot and Marcus Alexander Bagwell) in December. After dropping the title to The Nasty Boys, Harlem Heat regained the belts on June 24, 1995. Afterward, Harlem Heat got into a feud with Col. Parker's "Stud Stable" of "Dirty" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Parker and Sherri were carrying on a love affair and Parker eventually left the Stud Stable in favor of the Heat to be with Sherri. Harlem Heat won the WCW World Tag Team titles at Fall Brawl 1995, defeating Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Their third title reign only lasted one day, but the duo regained the tag team title nine days later from The American Males (Buff Bagwell and Scotty Riggs). On the June 24, 1996 Nitro, Harlem Heat defeated Lex Luger and Sting to capture their fifth WCW World Tag Team titles. Three days after losing the tag team titles to the Steiner Brothers, Harlem Heat regained the titles back from the Steiners on July 27. On September 23, Booker T and Stevie Ray were defeated by Public Enemy (Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge) but took the titles back for the seventh time on October 1. They lost the Tag Team Championship to the Outsiders (Kevin Nash and Scott Hall) on October 27. Subsequently, they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces. They then entered into a brief feud against Col. Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they won. In 1997, they feuded with Public Enemy (Grunge & Rocco), The Steiners, and the nWo. In fall 1997, they fired Sherri and added a new manager, Jacqueline. They were briefly put out of action by the nWo and returned to feud with the Faces of Fear (Meng and The Barbarian). Stevie then took five months off from WCW to recover from an ankle injury and Jacqueline left for the WWF. CANNOTANSWER	on October 27.	Booker T. Huffman Jr. (born March 1, 1966) better known by his ring name Booker T, is an American professional wrestler, professional wrestling promoter and color commentator. He is currently signed to WWE, and is also the owner and founder of the independent promotion Reality of Wrestling (ROW) in Texas City, Texas. Booker has been named by peers and industry commentators as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of his era; he was voted WWE's greatest World Heavyweight Champion in a 2013 viewer poll. Booker is best known for his time in World Championship Wrestling (WCW), the World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment (WWF/E), and Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA), holding 35 championships between those organizations. He is the most decorated wrestler in WCW history, having held 21 titles, including a record six WCW World Television Championships (along with being the first African American titleholder), and a record eleven WCW World Tag Team Championships: ten as one half of Harlem Heat with his brother, Lash "Stevie Ray" Huffman in WCW (most reigns within that company), and one in the WWF with Test. Booker was the final WCW World Heavyweight Champion and WCW United States Heavyweight Champion within the active WCW organisation. Booker is a six-time world champion in professional wrestling, having won the WCW World Heavyweight Championship five times, and WWE's World Heavyweight Championship once. With his fifth WCW Championship win (which occurred in the WWF), Booker T became the second African-American to win a world championship in WWF/E (after The Rock), and also the first to be of non-mixed race. He is also the winner of the 2006 King of the Ring tournament, the sixteenth Triple Crown Champion, and the eighth Grand Slam Champion (under original format) in WWE history. As the ninth WCW Triple Crown Champion, Booker is one of five men to achieve both the WWE and WCW Triple Crowns. He has headlined multiple pay-per-view events for the WWF/E, WCW and TNA throughout his career. Booker was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame on April 6, 2013, by his brother, Lash. Both he and Lash were inducted together into the 2019 class on April 6, 2019 as Harlem Heat, rendering Booker a two-time Hall of Famer. Early life Huffman was born the youngest of eight children, in Plain Dealing, Louisiana, though his birthplace is often misidentified as Houston, Texas. By the time Booker was 13, both of his parents had died and he lived with his 16-year-old sister. He would move in with his older brother Lash "Stevie Ray" Huffman at age 17. In high school, Huffman was a drum major. He also played football and basketball. Professional wrestling career Early Career (1986–1993) As a single father working at a storage company in Houston, Texas, Huffman was looking to make a better life for himself and his son. His brother Lash (Stevie Ray) suggested that he and Booker check out a new wrestling school being opened, run by Ivan Putski, in conjunction with his Western Wrestling Alliance organization. His boss from the storage company sponsored the money to pay for the wrestling lessons. Booker trained under Scott Casey, who helped to turn Booker's background as a gangster and dancer into "sports entertainment", teaching the newcomer in-ring psychology and ring generalship. Eight weeks later, Booker debuted as "G.I. Bro" on Putski's Western Wrestling Alliance Live! program. The character was a tie-in to the raging Gulf War and the WWF's Sgt. Slaughter angle. Even though the WWA met its demise some time later, Booker continued to wrestle on the Texas independent circuit, often with his brother Lash, who performed as Stevie Ray. They were spotted by Skandor Akbar who hired them to work for the Global Wrestling Federation (GWF), where he and Eddie Gilbert were involved. Gilbert teamed Stevie Ray and Booker T together as the Ebony Experience, and they won the GWF Tag Team Championship on July 31, 1992. During their time with GWF, they held the tag title a total of three times. Subsequently, Booker T and Stevie Ray left the GWF to work for World Championship Wrestling. World Championship Wrestling Harlem Heat (1993–1997) Booker and his brother Stevie Ray signed with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) after Sid Vicious recommended they sign with the company. In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane. They became heels and were on Harley Race and Col. Rob Parker's team in the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster. They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled. In 1994, they acquired the services of Sensational Sherri, dubbed 'Sister' Sherri, as their manager and changed their names back to Booker T and Stevie Ray, at their request. By the end of 1994, they held the WCW Tag Team Championship after defeating Stars and Stripes (The Patriot and Marcus Alexander Bagwell) in December. After dropping the title to The Nasty Boys, Harlem Heat regained the belts on June 24, 1995. Afterward, Harlem Heat got into a feud with Col. Parker's "Stud Stable" of "Dirty" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Parker and Sherri were carrying on a love affair and Parker eventually left the Stud Stable in favor of the Heat to be with Sherri. Harlem Heat won the WCW World Tag Team titles at Fall Brawl 1995, defeating Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Their third title reign only lasted one day, but the duo regained the tag team title nine days later from The American Males (Buff Bagwell and Scotty Riggs). On the June 24, 1996 Nitro, Harlem Heat defeated Lex Luger and Sting to capture their fifth WCW World Tag Team titles. Three days after losing the tag team titles to the Steiner Brothers, Harlem Heat regained the titles back from the Steiners on July 27. On September 23, Booker T and Stevie Ray were defeated by Public Enemy (Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge) but took the titles back for the seventh time on October 1. They lost the Tag Team Championship to the Outsiders (Kevin Nash and Scott Hall) on October 27. Subsequently, they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces. They then entered into a brief feud against Col. Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they won. In 1997, they feuded with Public Enemy (Grunge & Rocco), The Steiners, and the nWo. In fall 1997, they fired Sherri and added a new manager, Jacqueline. They were briefly put out of action by the nWo and returned to feud with the Faces of Fear (Meng and The Barbarian). Stevie then took five months off from WCW to recover from an ankle injury and Jacqueline left for the WWF. World Television Champion (1997–1999) Booker made the transition into singles action and won the WCW World Television Championship from Disco Inferno on the December 29, 1997 episode of Nitro. Booker feuded over the title with Perry Saturn and Rick Martel culminating in a gauntlet match at SuperBrawl VIII. Martel, the man that was originally supposed to win the match, went down early due to a knee injury, meaning the finish and the remainder of the match had to be called in the ring. During spring 1998, Booker began feuding with Chris Benoit. Benoit cost Booker the TV title during a match against Fit Finlay. As a result, Booker and Benoit engaged in a "best-of-seven series" with the winner meeting Finlay for the title. After seven matches and interference from Bret Hart and Stevie Ray, Booker T won the series, and on June 14, regained the Television Championship. Booker scored a clean pinfall victory over Bret Hart on the edition of February 22 of Nitro. The following month, he regained the TV Championship from Scott Steiner, who, in turn, defeated Booker in the finals of the WCW United States Heavyweight Championship tournament. Booker lost the Television title to Rick Steiner a month later at Slamboree. Harlem Heat reunion (1999–2000) By mid-1999, Booker had convinced his brother, Stevie Ray, to leave the nWo and reunite Harlem Heat. Harlem Heat defeated Bam Bam Bigelow and Kanyon for the WCW World Tag Team titles at Road Wild. They lost the WCW World Tag Team titles to Barry and Kendall Windham on August 23, but Harlem Heat regained them about a month later at Fall Brawl. When The Filthy Animals were stripped of the WCW World Tag Team belts due to an injury suffered by Rey Mysterio Jr., the title was put up in a three-way dance at Halloween Havoc. Harlem Heat claimed their tenth WCW World Tag Team title defeating Hugh Morrus and Brian Knobs and Konnan and Kidman. By late 1999, a female bodybuilder named Midnight had joined Harlem Heat. Stevie neglected her help and started disputing with Booker over her. Stevie Ray eventually challenged Midnight in a match that decided whether or not she would stay with Harlem Heat. After being defeated with a surprise small package, Stevie Ray turned on both Booker and Midnight to form Harlem Heat, Inc. with Big T, Kash, and J. Biggs. Stevie Ray and Big T dubbed themselves Harlem Heat 2000. Throughout this period, Huffman was referred to simply as Booker, as Harlem Heat 2000 won the rights to the name "T" in a match with Big T against Booker on February 20, 2000 at SuperBrawl X. Kidman and Booker T defeated Harlem Heat 2000 (Ray and Big T) at Uncensored 2000. When Vince Russo and Eric Bischoff formed The New Blood, Huffman eventually completely changed his in-ring persona, helping lead Captain Rection's military-themed Misfits In Action stable as G.I. Bro, reprising his gimmicks from his days in the WWA. He defeated Shawn Stasiak at the Great American Bash in a Boot Camp match. He returned to the Booker T name on the June 19 Nitro, promoting Rection to the status of General and demanding the Misfits start standing up to the New Blood. WCW World Heavyweight Champion (2000–2001) Huffman was elevated to main event status in 2000. After WCW booker Vince Russo grew disgruntled with Hulk Hogan's politics, he fired Hogan during the live broadcast of Bash at the Beach and announced an impromptu match between Jeff Jarrett and Huffman for the WCW World Heavyweight Championship. Huffman won the match, in the process becoming the second ever African American champion in WCW after Ron Simmons, and the third African American to win a World Heavyweight title. He lost the title to Kevin Nash on August 28 on Nitro. He regained the title a few weeks later in a steel cage match with Nash at Fall Brawl, but again lost the title, this time to Vince Russo himself in a cage match (Russo was speared out of the cage by Goldberg and won the title), Russo vacated the title and Booker won it for the third time in a San Francisco 49er Box Match against Jeff Jarrett on the October 2 episode of Nitro. Booker's next feud was with Scott Steiner, to whom he eventually lost the title in a Straitjacket steel cage match. Steiner won by TKO when he put an unconscious Booker into the Steiner Recliner at Mayhem. Steiner was WCW's longest reigning champion in years, whilst Booker was briefly out with an injury. Booker returned to the roster and defeated Rick Steiner for the WCW United States Heavyweight Championship at Greed. This made Booker the ninth WCW Triple Crown winner. On the final episode of Nitro, he defeated Scott Steiner to win the WCW World Heavyweight Championship for the fourth time. According to sports journalist Michael Landsberg, Huffman was salaried at "close to a million dollars a year" in WCW. He won a total of twenty-one titles within the organization, making him the most decorated performer in its history. Booker was also the reigning WCW United States Heavyweight Champion and WCW World Heavyweight Champion when he accepted a contract with the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment The Alliance (2001–2002) After WCW was bought by the World Wrestling Federation in March 2001, Booker T made his debut at the King of the Ring pay-per-view in 2001 attacking WWF Champion Stone Cold Steve Austin during his match, promptly injuring him in his very first move in the WWF. He later turned heel and became a leading member of The Alliance during the Invasion storyline. In his debut match in the company, Booker defended his WCW Championship against Buff Bagwell on the July 2 episode of Raw; sports journalist Michael Landsberg reported that many have called this bout "the worst match ever". At InVasion, The Alliance defeated Team WWF when Austin joined the Alliance. On the July 26 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T gave up his WCW United States Championship and handed it over to Chris Kanyon. He later lost the WCW Championship to Kurt Angle, but he went on to win the title back on the July 30 episode of Raw. Booker T kept the title until SummerSlam, when he lost it to The Rock after feuding with him over the similarity in their gimmicks and their identical finishing moves, the Book End/Rock Bottom. Booker T won the WCW Tag Team Championship for an eleventh time, this time with Test, and he also had a WWF Tag Team Championship reign with Test. At the Survivor Series, Booker T was eliminated third by The Rock after a roll-up and eventually The Alliance was defeated, causing them to disband. In its aftermath, Booker remained a heel, and he joined forces with Vince McMahon and The Boss Man in December to feud with Steve Austin. After Booker T cost Austin a match against Chris Jericho for the Undisputed WWF Championship at Vengeance, Austin gained revenge by attacking Booker T in a grocery store by covering him in food. Then the week after Booker T vandalized Austin's truck causing Austin to chase Booker T around a bingo hall and a church. Booker T's first WrestleMania appearance was at WrestleMania X8 against Edge, a match he lost. They feuded over who would appear in a fictional Japanese shampoo commercial. When the brand extension was introduced in March, Booker T was drafted to the Raw brand. At Insurrextion, Booker briefly held the WWF Hardcore Championship twice, defeating Stevie Richards only to lose it to Crash Holly seconds later. He then re-defeated Crash and lost the title to Stevie Richards a few minutes later. Feud with Evolution (2002–2003) Goldust began trying to start a tag team with Booker, but Goldust kept costing Booker matches. With the nWo now operating in WWE, Booker T was eventually invited into the faction. His time there was short-lived, when he was kicked out of the group by Shawn Michaels after a superkick from Michaels. Booker then turned face and found a partnership with Goldust and the pair teamed to battle the nWo. Booker and Goldust had a WWE Tag Team Championship match against The Un-Americans (Christian and Lance Storm) at SummerSlam, but The Un-Americans retained after interference from Test. At No Mercy, Booker and Goldust battled Chris Jericho and Christian for the World Tag Team Championship, but they lost the match with Jericho using the title belt on Goldust. He spent the rest of 2002 teaming with Goldust. They won the World Tag Team Championship at Armageddon in a Tag Team Elimination match defeating the teams of Christian and Chris Jericho, Lance Storm and William Regal, and the Dudley Boyz. They held the belts for about three weeks, when they lost them to Regal and Storm. Booker and Goldust lost the rematch and decided to go their separate ways. The gimmick for Booker and Goldust was Goldust being a strange, yet dependable ally who Booker eventually warmed up to after initial skepticism. By 2003, however, Booker T's popularity had soared and he amicably separated from Goldust, at Goldust's request, in order to pursue the World Heavyweight Championship. In February 2003, he eliminated The Rock to win a battle royal to become the number one contender to the World Heavyweight Championship at WrestleMania XIX. Booker targeted Evolution after Batista and Randy Orton attacked Booker's former partner, Goldust. Several weeks before WrestleMania, the incumbent champion and Evolution's leader, Triple H, cut a controversial promo on Booker T. Triple H downplayed Booker T's WCW success, pointing out that the WCW World Heavyweight Championship had been held by non-wrestlers like booker Vince Russo and actor David Arquette, calling WCW and its title "a joke", despite the fact that, as World Heavyweight Champion, Triple H was holding the WCW World Heavyweight Championship's physical belt, the Big Gold Belt, and that Triple H's Evolution stablemate, Ric Flair, had been a multiple-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion. He said that "people like" Booker T would never win world championships in WWE. This promo is often interpreted as racist due to Triple H referencing Booker T's "nappy" hair and implying that Booker T was just in WWE to dance and entertain for "people like" Triple H. During the WrestleMania XIX press conference Michael Cole asked Triple H as to whether he had deliberately cut a racist promo, Triple H claimed this was not the case and that he was just referring to Booker's criminal past. A week later, Booker attacked Triple H in the bathroom and laid him out after Triple H had thrown a dollar bill at him, ordering Booker to get him a towel. However, Booker T lost to Triple H at WrestleMania. For several weeks, he teamed with Shawn Michaels and Kevin Nash in a feud against Triple H, Ric Flair, and Chris Jericho. At Backlash, Booker's team lost when Triple H pinned Nash after a sledgehammer shot. Various feuds (2003–2005) Afterward, Booker set his sights on the newly reactivated Intercontinental Championship. After losing a battle royal for the title at Judgment Day, Booker feuded with the champion Christian. After a few matches, Booker defeated Christian to become the new Intercontinental Champion on the July 7 episode of Raw. About a month later, because of a nagging back injury, Booker lost the Intercontinental title back to Christian at a non-televised house show on August 10. Booker, meanwhile, was out of action until October. Booker returned on the October 20 episode of Raw and subsequently joined Team Austin at Survivor Series for a match to determine whether Eric Bischoff or Stone Cold Steve Austin (both co-general managers) would be the sole General Manager of Raw. Team Bischoff won the match. Booker then feuded with Mark Henry, who eliminated him in the Survivor Series match. Booker defeated Henry at Armageddon. On the February 16, 2004 episode of Raw, Booker T and Rob Van Dam defeated Ric Flair and Batista for the World Tag Team Championship. Booker and Van Dam held the titles for a month, even defending the belts at WrestleMania XX in a Fatal 4-Way tag team match. Eight days later on the March 22 episode of Raw, they lost the World Tag Team Championship back to Ric Flair and Batista. He and Rob Van Dam, never got their rematch due to Rob Van Dam being drafted to SmackDown! that very same night. On March 23, 2004 he was "traded" (along with the Dudley Boyz) to the SmackDown! brand in exchange for Triple H, but as part of a new storyline, he appeared unhappy with the move calling SmackDown! "the minor leagues" and even disrespected Eddie Guerrero, the brand's WWE Champion, turning heel in the process. Later on, Booker T bragged about how he was the biggest star on SmackDown! and feuded with The Undertaker. Booker tried to utilize voodoo magic to try to overcome his "supernatural" foe; however, it did nothing to prevent him from losing to the Undertaker at Judgment Day. In mid-2004, Booker T set his sights on the United States Championship along with its champion, John Cena. After Cena got on the bad side of General Manager Kurt Angle, he did his best to get the title away from Cena. Cena successfully defended the title at The Great American Bash in a four-way elimination match against Booker, René Duprée, and Rob Van Dam. After Cena was stripped of his title by Angle for "laying a hand" on the GM, Booker took advantage of the situation and won an eight-man elimination match to win the vacant United States Championship, thus becoming the one-hundredth United States Champion in history, in a match that also featured Cena, Dupree, Billy Gunn, Charlie Haas, Luther Reigns, Kenzo Suzuki and Van Dam. Booker won by last eliminating both Cena and Van Dam in the course of less than 10 seconds After Angle was fired by Mr. McMahon for embellishing his injuries, Theodore Long began his first tenure as SmackDown! General Manager, and booked a best-of-five series of matches for the United States Championship between Booker and Cena. The first match took place at SummerSlam in Toronto and saw Cena gain the pinfall victory to go up 1–0 in the series. Booker would bounce back and win the next two matches, on the August 26 edition of SmackDown! in Fresno, California and a live event the next night in Sydney, Australia, to take a 2–1 lead. The next match in the series wouldn't come until the September 16 SmackDown! from Spokane, Washington, where Cena won and tied the series at two apiece. The series culminated at No Mercy, where Cena won the series 3–2, and thusly, the United States Championship. On October 21, SmackDown! General Manager Theodore Long placed Booker in a six-man tag team match with Rob Van Dam and Rey Mysterio against John "Bradshaw" Layfield (JBL), René Duprée, and Kenzo Suzuki. JBL expected Booker to betray his partners, but instead Booker pinned him, thus turning face again. Booker T faced JBL for the WWE Championship at the Survivor Series on November 14, but lost after he was hit in the head with the championship belt. The next night, Booker T demanded a rematch, citing Orlando Jordan's interference. He was then joined by Eddie Guerrero and The Undertaker who also wanted a shot at JBL's title, prompting Theodore Long to make a fatal four-way match for the WWE Championship at Armageddon. Once again, Booker failed to win the title, as JBL retained it. He then briefly teamed with Eddie Guerrero, at one point challenging Mysterio and Van Dam for the WWE Tag Team Championship, and feuded with Heidenreich. Booker won a 30-man Battle Royal dark match at WrestleMania 21 last eliminating Raw's Viscera and Chris Masters. Subsequently, Booker was part of the tournament to name a new number one contender and made it to the Final Four. After Kurt Angle eliminated Booker, he returned the favor, costing Angle the match against JBL. The storyline then turned to a sexual nature, as Angle began stalking Booker's new wife, Sharmell. Booker defeated Angle at Judgment Day. On the May 26 episode of SmackDown!, Booker participated in a "Winners Choice" Battle Royal, with the winner choosing his opponent for the next week. Kurt Angle won and wanted to wrestle Sharmell. Booker protested, and the match was made into a Handicap match. Angle won by pinning Sharmell in a sexual position. The next week, Booker gained revenge on Angle, defeating him with a Scissors Kick. On the June 30 episode of SmackDown!, JBL defeated Christian, The Undertaker, Chris Benoit, Muhammad Hassan, and Booker T in a six-man elimination match for the SmackDown! Championship. During the match, Booker got specifically involved with Christian. Booker later defeated Christian at The Great American Bash. United States Champion (2005–2006) Booker T began teaming with Chris Benoit, eying his United States Championship again. Benoit was allowed to pick his next challenger to see who would face him at No Mercy, so Booker, Christian, and Orlando Jordan tried to impress Benoit by winning matches. He instead decided not choose one opponent, so he made it a fatal four-way for No Mercy, where Benoit successfully defended his title. On the October 21 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T defeated Benoit for the United States Championship, due to unseen help from Sharmell. Theodore Long later showed footage of Sharmell interfering in Booker's matches. Booker went to apologize to Benoit and give him a rematch, but then attacked Benoit, busting him open with the United States title belt and turning heel once again. Booker then boasted that he had been fully aware of what Sharmell had been doing and had been playing dumb to fool everyone. On the November 25 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T defended the United States Championship against Benoit. The match ended when Benoit superplexed Booker and two referees made a three count on either competitor, claiming that their wrestler had won. Booker was stripped of the belt by Theodore Long, because of the confusion of who won since they pinned each other at the same time. Long decided to put Benoit and Booker against each other in a best of seven series, just as the two had in their WCW days. Booker took an early 3–0 lead. In a must win match during Armageddon, Benoit was able to defeat Booker T to bring the series to 3–1. At a house show, Booker was injured, and he did not wrestle again until after the "Best of Seven" series with Benoit was completed. Booker was scheduled to face Benoit in Match 5 of the Best of Seven Series at the December 30 taping of SmackDown!. At the beginning of the show, General Manager Theodore Long said that Booker would have to forfeit. Both Booker and Benoit protested, with Benoit not wanting a cheap victory. Booker managed to persuade Long to allow him to choose a stand-in for the matches. Booker chose Randy Orton as his replacement. Benoit was able to tie the series 3–3 after beating Orton in two consecutive matches on the December 30 and January 6, 2006 episodes of SmackDown!. Orton, however, was able to defeat Benoit in the final match on the January 13 episode of SmackDown! to win the series and the title for Booker T, who held the title until No Way Out where Benoit won it back. On the February 24 episode of SmackDown!, Booker and Sharmell provided guest commentary for a match involving The Boogeyman. After defeating his opponents, Boogeyman dumped a bucket of worms onto the announce table where they were sitting, frightening the two. Over the next few weeks, Boogeyman would stalk Booker and Sharmell. Booker and Boogeyman were set to face off on the March 18 Saturday Night's Main Event XXXII, but the match was canceled due to Booker faking a knee injury to escape competition. The feud eventually culminated at WrestleMania 22, with Booker and Sharmell losing to Boogeyman. The couple received a restraining order against The Boogeyman on the April 7 episode of SmackDown!, ending the feud. King Booker and World Heavyweight Champion (2006–2007) Booker next entered the 2006 King of the Ring tournament on SmackDown!, advancing through to the finals due to a bye as his semi-final opponent, Kurt Angle, was unable to wrestle. The finals were held at Judgment Day where Booker defeated Bobby Lashley. Upon winning the King of the Ring tournament, Booker began wrestling as "King Booker" and began acting like he was an actual monarch ruling "The SmackDown! Kingdom". Booker formed a royal court that included his wife, Queen Sharmell, Sir William Regal, and Sir Finlay, and began including the mannerisms and attire of a stereotypical English-style king as part of the character, all the way down to wearing a crown and cape and speaking in a fake English accent. However, whenever King Booker would get angry he would launch into a tirade in the style of Booker T (an example of this was an episode of SmackDown! where Theodore Long would inform him he would be facing The Undertaker), which lent some comedic aspect to the character; he even went as far as having Lashley kiss his "royal" feet. After gaining his title of King, Booker continued to feud with Lashley. After Lashley defeated John "Bradshaw" Layfield (JBL) for the United States Championship at the end of May, Booker began chasing after the title and even resorted to making Lashley kiss his "royal feet" on the June 2 episode of SmackDown!. The feud ended after a steel cage match on the June 30 episode of SmackDown! where Lashley defeated Booker by escaping the cage to retain the United States Championship. The next week, Booker entered a battle royal on SmackDown! with the winner to challenge Rey Mysterio for his World Heavyweight Championship at The Great American Bash. Booker won the battle royal and then defeated Mysterio at The Great American Bash to win the World Heavyweight Championship after Chavo Guerrero betrayed Mysterio by hitting him with a steel chair. This was Booker's first world championship since joining WWE and the win caused him to proclaim himself as the "King of the World". This win would also make Booker the sixteenth Triple Crown Champion and eighth Grand Slam Champion (under the original format) in the history of the WWE. After Booker won the World Heavyweight Championship, he began a rivalry with the returning former champion Batista, who vowed to regain the title he was forced to forfeit due to injury. This rivalry spilled over to real life when the two got into a legitimate fistfight at a SummerSlam pay-per-view commercial shoot, reportedly due to Batista considering himself superior to the rest of the roster due to his quick climb to main event status. According to sources, both men were left bloodied and bruised, however Booker was reportedly praised by many wrestlers in the back for speaking his mind to Batista about his attitude. At SummerSlam, Booker lost to Batista by disqualification after Queen Sharmell interfered on his behalf (thus retaining the title), but at No Mercy, Booker defeated Batista, Lashley and his own stablemate, Finlay, in a Fatal 4-Way match. Before the match, Booker assaulted Sir William Regal, resulting in the breakup of the King's Court. Despite the break-up of his Court, Booker lost to Batista by disqualification on the October 20 episode on SmackDown!, due to interference from WWE Champion John Cena from Raw and ECW World Champion Big Show, the two of whom King Booker was to face at Cyber Sunday in a "champion of champions" match. At Cyber Sunday, the fans voted for the World Heavyweight Championship to be on the line. Booker retained after defeating Big Show and Cena with help from Kevin Federline. After Cyber Sunday, the feud between King Booker and Batista continued with Batista unable to wrest the title from Booker. Eventually this led to a match at Survivor Series on November 26, where Booker declared that if Batista failed to defeat him this time, it would be the last World Heavyweight Championship match he would receive as long as Booker was champion. At Survivor Series, SmackDown! General Manager Theodore Long decided that if Booker got counted out or disqualified, he would lose the title. Late in the match, Queen Sharmell handed Booker his title belt while referee Nick Patrick was not looking. While she had Patrick distracted, Booker attempted to hit Batista with the belt. Batista moved out of the way, knocked the belt out of Booker's hands and hit him in the head with it, and King Booker lost the World Heavyweight Championship to Batista. After losing the title, Booker feuded alongside former royal court member Finlay against Batista and John Cena, which led up to Armageddon where they lost. While competing in the Royal Rumble match, King Booker was eliminated by Kane. A frustrated Booker returned to the ring illegally and eliminated Kane. This started a short feud between the two resulting in a match at No Way Out, which Kane won. On the February 23 episode of SmackDown!, Booker won a Falls Count Anywhere Money in the Bank qualifying match, defeating Kane (with assistance from The Great Khali) and earned himself a spot in the match at WrestleMania 23. At WrestleMania, Matt Hardy set up Sharmell for a Twist of Fate during the Money in the Bank match with the briefcase in Booker's grasp – thus forcing him to choose between a guaranteed title shot and his wife. He chose to defend Sharmell and lost the match. On the April 6 episode of SmackDown!, Booker attempted to take revenge. However, he lost the match against Matt Hardy, and Sharmell declared her disappointment in him and slapped him. In an attempt to impress Sharmell, Booker attacked The Undertaker but was Tombstoned on an announce table. Booker was removed from television to deal with a knee injury. Draft to RAW, WWE Championship pursuit and departure (2007) On the June 11 episode of Raw, both King Booker and Queen Sharmell were drafted to the Raw brand as part of the WWE Draft. He then began a short feud with John Cena over the WWE Championship, Booker would wrestle Cena in a Five Pack Challenge along with Bobby Lashley, Mick Foley and Randy Orton at Vengeance: Night of Champions for the title in a losing effort. Cena would retain at the event by pinning Foley. On the July 16 episode of Raw, King Booker came to the ring using Triple H's theme music "The King of Kings", even using his video. King Booker declared that neither Triple H nor Jerry Lawler could be known as "The King". Booker began a feud with Lawler, defeating him on the August 6 episode of Raw where the loser had to crown the winner the next week. When the time came, Lawler refused, declaring that Triple H was still a king and announcing that King Booker would battle Triple H at SummerSlam. Booker attacked Lawler, throwing him into the ring post and hitting him with a television monitor. At SummerSlam, Booker lost to the returning Triple H. On the August 27 episode of Raw, Booker wrestled against John Cena in a non-title match, which he lost by disqualification when Randy Orton interfered. In August, he was linked to Signature Pharmacy, a company thought to be distributing performance-enhancing drugs. He was suspended by WWE for violating its Wellness Policy. He denied using any drugs and being a customer of Signature Pharmacy. In October 2007, Booker T requested his and Sharmell's release from their WWE contracts due to the pressure he had in WWE and being burned out, which WWE granted. Total Nonstop Action Wrestling Feud with Bobby Roode (2007–2008) At the Genesis pay-per-view on November 11, 2007, Huffman debuted in Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) as Sting's mystery partner in a tag team match against Kurt Angle and Kevin Nash for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship, reverting to his Booker T character. His wife Sharmell also debuted, interfering in the match on Booker and Sting's behalf when Karen Angle interfered on behalf of Kurt Angle and Nash. On the November 29 episode of Impact!, Booker said he came to TNA to test his skills against the young talent, take TNA to a higher level, and win the TNA World Heavyweight Championship. Robert Roode came to the ring and challenged Booker to a match, claiming he has been pushed down by washed-up wrestlers and has-beens. Booker won his Impact! debut match, but afterwards, Christian Cage and Robert Roode beat down Booker until Kaz made the save. At Turning Point, Booker and Kaz defeated Roode and Cage when Booker pinned Cage. Booker and Sharmell won a mixed tag team match against Robert Roode and Ms. Brooks at Final Resolution. After the match, Roode punched Sharmell in the face, leading to a match at Against All Odds. While the punch was intended to be a work, Roode had in fact made contact with Sharmell during the punch, dislocating her jaw and causing her to be off TV for a few weeks, therefore making it into a shoot. The rivalry, however, went ahead as planned where Booker and Roode wrestled to a double-countout at Against All Odds, which saw them brawl to the parking lot. Roode defeated Booker in strap match at Destination X after hitting Booker with a pair of handcuffs. In a special live episode of Impact!, Booker T and Robert Roode had another outing, this time with the fans being able to vote on the stipulation of the match. At Booker's request during a pre-match promo, the match became a First Blood Match, beating the Last Man Standing and I Quit stipulations. Booker T would go on to win the match-up. At Lockdown, Booker T and Sharmell defeated Robert Roode and Payton Banks after Sharmell pinned Banks with a roll-up. The Main Event Mafia (2008–2010) Booker T turned heel for the first time in TNA at Sacrifice by attacking Christian Cage and Rhino from behind with a steel chair. This came about as a result of losing a tag team match up against Christian Cage and Rhino, with them furthering themselves in the Deuces Wild Tag Team Tournament. Booker then competed in the King of the Mountain match for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship at Slammiversary. He was seconds away from winning the match, when Kevin Nash stopped him and performed a Jackknife Powerbomb; Samoa Joe would later go on to win the match. On the next Impact!, Booker challenged Joe to a title match at Victory Road, which Joe would later accept. Also around this time he reverted to a gimmick similar to his King Booker gimmick albeit while proclaiming himself a supposed king of Africa. The match at Victory Road ended in a draw after Sharmell replaced the referee and counted after the match was already over. At Hard Justice, Samoa Joe defeated Booker after a guitar shot, thus reclaiming physical possession of the title belt, which Booker had kept after Victory Road. Later he introduced the TNA Legends Championship and became the first official champion. Booker T successfully defended the title at Turning Point against Cage. At Final Resolution, Booker T, Kevin Nash, Scott Steiner, and Sting defeated The TNA Front Line (A.J. Styles, Brother Devon, Brother Ray, and Samoa Joe) in an eight-man tag team match to allow Sting to retain his TNA World Heavyweight Championship. At Genesis, Booker T, Scott Steiner, and Cute Kip lost a six-man tag team match to Mick Foley, A.J. Styles, and Brother Devon. The next month at Against All Odds, Booker T defeated Shane Sewell to retain the Legends Championship. Booker T lost the title to A.J. Styles at Destination X. At Lockdown, Team Angle (Booker T, Kevin Nash, Kurt Angle, and Scott Steiner) lost to Team Jarrett (A.J. Styles, Christopher Daniels, Jeff Jarrett, and Samoa Joe) in a Lethal Lockdown match. At Sacrifice, Booker T received a rematch for the Legends Championship, but lost to A.J. Styles in a "I Quit" match. Booker T went go on to form the Mafia's resident tag team with Scott Steiner, and at Victory Road, Steiner and Booker defeated Beer Money, Inc. to win the TNA World Tag Team Championship, marking Booker's 15th World Tag Team title reign overall. Then at Hard Justice, Booker T and Steiner retained the World Tag Team Championship against Team 3D. Prior to No Surrender, Booker, Steiner, and British Invasion won a match to gain the man advantage at No Surrender's Lethal Lockdown match against Team 3D and Beer Money, Inc. Even with the advantage, Booker T's team lost at No Surrender when James Storm of Beer Money pinned Doug Williams of The British Invasion. At Bound for Glory, Booker and Steiner lost the TNA World Tag Team Titles to the British Invasion in a four way Full Metal Mayhem Tag Team match, which also included Team 3D and Beer Money; during the match Booker was taken out on a stretcher. Afterwards it was reported that the PPV had been Booker's final appearance with the company, and his and Sharmell's profiles were removed from the official TNA roster. On May 21, 2010, Booker T made a one night return to TNA at a live event in Lake Charles, Louisiana, replacing A.J. Styles, who was unable to attend the event due to travel issues, and wrestled Rob Van Dam for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship in a losing effort. Puerto Rico and Mexico (2009–2010) Booker T debuted in the International Wrestling Association (IWA) on Histeria Boricua, a special event held on January 6, 2009. There he was booked against Chicano, the incumbent IWA Undisputed Heavyweight Champion. The match was won by Cotto, who reversed a "Book End" attempt and scored a pinfall victory. On July 11, 2010, Booker T was booked by World Wrestling Council in a match against Carlito which also involved Orlando Colón and El Mesias. On September 16, 2010, Booker T made his debut for Mexican promotion Perros del Mal. In the main event of the evening he teamed up with Dr. Wagner Jr. and El Mesías, who represented rival promotion AAA, against El Hijo del Perro Aguayo, Damián 666 and Halloween. After Aguayo pinned El Mesías, Booker turned on Wagner, unmasked him and joined Perros del Mal. Return to WWE Color commentator and part-time wrestler (2011–2012) On January 30, 2011 Booker T returned to WWE to take part in the Royal Rumble. Booker entered the match at number 21 and was eliminated by Mason Ryan. On the February 1 taping of SmackDown, Huffman debuted as the show's new color commentator, working beside Josh Mathews and Michael Cole, replacing Matt Striker. He coached on the returning Tough Enough competition, and at Elimination Chamber he introduced Trish Stratus as a fellow coach. On the June 6 episode of Raw, Booker wrestled his first match on the brand in four years, gaining a victory against Jack Swagger by count out. On the November 21 episode of Raw, Cody Rhodes threw water in Booker T's face after Rhodes allegedly heard Booker T criticize him, thus starting a conflict between the two. On the November 29 episode of SmackDown Booker was scheduled to face Rhodes in a match but it did not happen after Rhodes attacked him from behind him during a backstage interview. On the December 9 episode of SmackDown, Rhodes attacked Booker again while heading to the announcer's table leaving him with paramedics. Later that night, Booker T attacked Rhodes during his match with Daniel Bryan, leading to an Intercontinental Championship match at TLC: Tables, Ladders & Chairs, which Rhodes won. On the December 26 episode of Raw, Booker defeated Rhodes in a non-title match. On the January 6, 2012, episode of SmackDown, Booker challenged Rhodes a second time for the Intercontinental Championship, but once again failed to win the title. Booker T along with fellow commentators Jerry Lawler and Michael Cole all participated in the 2012 Royal Rumble. On the March 26, 2012 episode of Raw, Booker T saved Teddy Long from an attempted attack by Mark Henry, thus becoming the sixth and final member of Team Teddy at WrestleMania XXVIII, where Team Johnny emerged victorious. This was his last official match for the WWE. On the July 9 episode of Raw, Jerry Lawler won by pinfall against Michael Cole in a WrestleMania XXVII rematch. However, Booker, who was subbing for Lawler on commentary, threw Cole back into the ring after he tried to escape. This caused the anonymous Raw General Manager to reverse the decision and give Cole the win as a result of a disqualification. SmackDown General Manager and Hall of Fame (2012–2013) On July 31, 2012, Booker T was appointed the new General Manager of SmackDown. Booker would quickly add Eve Torres and Theodore Long to his staff, as his assistant and senior adviser respectively. Booker was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame by his brother, Stevie Ray, the night before WrestleMania 29. On the April 19 SmackDown, Booker became angry with Long for making matches without his consent. Big Show arrived and thanked Long for doing a better job than Booker, further infuriating him. On the April 22 Raw, upset with Long for making a World Heavyweight Championship match at Extreme Rules, made it a Triple Threat match. Booker took time off for a torn distal triceps, and had surgery for it on June 12. On the July 19 SmackDown, he returned to continue as SmackDown General Manager, but soon lost the job to Vickie Guerrero, on Vince McMahon's orders. Return to commentary and pre-show panelist (2014–present) Since 2014, Booker T has commonly done work on the WWE Network, including the Raw pre-show and also being a part of the "expert panel" on Kickoff shows before each pay-per-view event. On the 2015 premiere of Raw, Booker T replaced Jerry Lawler, who was suffering from diverticulitis, for commentating. However, it was later announced that Booker would be returning on a full-time basis to take Lawler's place on Raw, with Lawler moving to SmackDown. On the March 30 episode of Raw, Booker, along with JBL and Michael Cole, were injured by Brock Lesnar after Seth Rollins refused Lesnar his WWE World Heavyweight Championship rematch. Booker was replaced by Byron Saxton for commentating as he became a coach for the sixth season of WWE Tough Enough. On August 6, 2016, Booker T replaced Tommy Dreamer in an intergender tag team match for Dreamer's House of Hardcore promotion. Booker T returned to his old "King Booker" gimmick in a segment with the SmackDown Live Survivor Series tag teams where he gave a motivational speech and convinced Breezango (Tyler Breeze and Fandango) to join the team. In December 2016, after Jerry Lawler and Lita left the pre-show team, WWE ended their Raw and SmackDown pre-shows leaving Booker T to the WWE pay-per-view pre-shows and other WWE Network specials. Following the 2017 WWE Superstar Shake-up, Booker T replaced David Otunga as color commentator on Raw. On the January 29, 2018 episode of Raw, Booker was replaced on commentary by the returning Jonathan Coachman. On the August 28 episode of SmackDown Live Booker T made a surprise appearance as "King Booker" in the opening segment when he interrupted and joined in on The New Day's "five timers" celebration, following the latter's fifth tag team championship win. In 2020, Booker made his return by wrestling at the Reality of Wrestling promotion. Legacy Longtime wrestler Kurt Angle said of Booker: "He's done it all... he legitimately is one of the top five best of all time." In 2001, sports journalist Michael Landsberg stated that Booker was considered "one of the best wrestlers alive", capable of "any match, any style". Industry veteran John Layfield later described him as "the best acquisition that WWE got when they bought WCW" in 2001. Booker's 21 WCW titles render him the most decorated wrestler in the company's history. He was the first African American WCW World Television Champion. Harlem Heat were recognized by WWE as being – along with The Steiner Brothers – WCW's greatest ever tag team. Considering both Booker's WCW and WWF/E accoldades, WWE recognizes him as one of the most decorated performers of all-time. With his fifth WCW Championship win (which occurred in the WWF), Booker T became the second African-American to win a world championship in WWF/E (after The Rock), and the first to be of non-mixed race. Booker was voted WWE's greatest World Heavyweight Champion in a 2013 viewer poll. Other media In 2000, Booker appeared in the film Ready to Rumble, starring as himself. He has appeared in an episode of Charmed, called "Wrestling with Demons" alongside Buff Bagwell and Scott Steiner. In 2001, along with several other WWE wrestlers, Booker competed on an episode of The Weakest Link, being eliminated second from the show. He also has appeared on Comedy Central and MTV. On January 13, 2004, the album WWE Originals was released, featuring Booker T performing "Can You Dig It?". On April 21, 2007, Booker began hosting a radio show titled Tea Time with King Booker on KBME 790 AM in Houston. During the week of November 5, 2007, he appeared on Family Feud with several other WWE wrestlers. On September 1, 2012, Booker released his first autobiography, Booker T: From Prison to Promise, with Medallion Press. Booker T made appearances to promote the book with The Score Television Network with Arda Ocal which aired on August 29, 2012. He conducted a sixteen-page interview with Pro Wrestling Illustrated in the 2012 volume #50 issue. On March 10, 2015, Booker released his second autobiography, Booker T: Wrestling Royalty with Medallion Press. In 2015, Booker T started a show on KILT (AM) that is also podcast on Radio.com called "Heated Conversations – with Booker T". The show is aired Saturday Nights locally in Houston, Texas and covers subjects from Wrestling, MMA and Boxing to all sports. It has featured the biggest names from the WWE as well as NBA Stars like Dwight Howard. In February 2019, Booker T sued video game company Activision over the Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 character David "Prophet" Wilkes. The lawsuit claimed that the Black Ops character contained similarities to Booker's GI Bro comic book character. On 19 September, 2021 All41 Studios and Microgaming released WWE Legends: Link & Win, a game for mobile and desktop browsers. Booker T was featured as one of four main characters alongside Macho Man Randy Savage, Stone Cold Steve Austin and Eddie Guerrero. Video games Music videos Personal life Relationships and family Booker married his first wife Levestia on May 23, 1996. Booker presented her to the Nitro crowd the night after his WCW World Heavyweight Championship win at Bash at the Beach. Levestia was also used to further the feud between himself and Jeff Jarrett when Jarrett hit her in the head with a guitar on Nitro on July 31, 2000. However, they divorced on May 8, 2001. Booker has a son, from a previous relationship with a high school girlfriend, named Brandon (born in 1982), with whom he has a strained relationship due to his time spent on the road. Booker married his girlfriend of five years, Sharmell Sullivan, in February 2005. The couple welcomed their twins, a boy named Kendrick and a girl named Kennedy, in 2010. Booker and his brother Lash opened a wrestling school in Houston in 2005. Booker T is also a fan of Formula One, and was in attendance at the 2012 U.S Grand Prix as a guest of Lewis Hamilton. Reality of Wrestling In 2005, Huffman started his own wrestling promotion in Houston, Texas, called Pro Wrestling Alliance. In 2012, the promotion rebranded to Reality of Wrestling. After his final 2013 event, Christmas Chaos, ROW was near to close, but Houston business man Hilton Koch, who assisted the event, became a partner with Booker. On February 21, 2015, Booker T and Stevie Ray reunited as Harlem Heat for one last match in Reality of Wrestling for the promotion's "The Final Heat" event. They defeated the Heavenly Bodies to win the ROW Tag Team Championship. On March 14, the titles were vacated. In February 2020, Booker T returned to wrestle for the promotion in an eight-man tag team match. Politics On December 10, 2016, Huffman announced that he would be running in the 2019 Houston mayoral election. He was quoted saying that, "2020 is going to be a new era in the city of Houston. We're going to be looked at now from a different perspective. The cool city, 2020 is coming." Huffman was quoted in 2016, stating his focus for the three years leading up to the 2019 election would be concentrated on the city's "homeless, underprivileged, and low income areas." However, in September 2019, Huffman was not among the 12 names listed who applied for the election ballot. Legal issues Huffman spent nineteen months in prison after pleading guilty to armed robberies at Wendy's restaurants in Houston. He and his partners wore Wendy's uniforms during the holdups since they had been working there for 2½ years. Because of the gunmen's uniforms and familiarity with the fast food chain's operations, police suspected the robberies were inside jobs—and it did not take long before Huffman and three other men were found. He pleaded guilty in December 1987 to two aggravated robbery counts and was sentenced to five years in prison. Huffman was released after serving 19 months, and was placed on parole until April 1992. Championships and accomplishments Cauliflower Alley Club Tag Team Award (2018) – with Stevie Ray George Tragos/Lou Thesz Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame Class of 2018 Global Wrestling Federation GWF Tag Team Championship (3 times) – with Stevie Ray Las Vegas Pro Wrestling LVPW UWF Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Prairie Wrestling Alliance PWA Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Pro Wrestling Illustrated Inspirational Wrestler of the Year (2000) Most Improved Wrestler of the Year (1998) Tag Team of the Year (1995, 1996) with Stevie Ray Ranked No. 5 of the top 500 wrestlers in the PWI 500 in 2001 Southern Championship Wrestling Florida SCW Florida Southern Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Texas All-Pro Wrestling TAP Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Reality of Wrestling ROW Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Stevie Ray Total Nonstop Action Wrestling TNA Legends Championship (1 time, inaugural) TNA World Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Scott Steiner TNA Year End Awards (2 times) Memorable Moment of the Year (2007) Who To Watch in 2008 (2007) World Championship Wrestling WCW World Heavyweight Championship (4 times) WCW World Television Championship (6 times) WCW United States Heavyweight Championship (1 time) WCW World Tag Team Championship (10 times) – with Stevie Ray Ninth WCW Triple Crown Champion World Wrestling Federation/World Wrestling Entertainment/WWE WCW Championship (1 time) World Heavyweight Championship (1 time) World Tag Team Championship (3 times) – with Test (1), Goldust (1) and Rob Van Dam (1) WCW Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Test WWE Intercontinental Championship (1 time) WWE United States Championship (3 times) WWF Hardcore Championship (2 times) King of the Ring (2006) Sixteenth Triple Crown Champion Eighth Grand Slam Champion (under original format) WWE Hall of Fame (2 times) Class of 2013 – individually Class of 2019 – as a member of Harlem Heat Wrestling Observer Newsletter Most Underrated (2002) Worst Television Announcer (2017) Notes References External links 1965 births African-American male professional wrestlers American color commentators American male professional wrestlers American robbers American sportspeople convicted of crimes Living people NWA/WCW World Television Champions NWA/WCW/WWE United States Heavyweight Champions Professional wrestlers from Texas Professional wrestling announcers Professional wrestling podcasters Professional wrestling promoters Sportspeople from Houston The New World Order (professional wrestling) members TNA Legends/Global/Television/King of the Mountain Champions TNA/Impact World Tag Team Champions WCW World Heavyweight Champions World Heavyweight Champions (WWE) WWE Grand Slam champions WWE Hall of Fame inductees WWF/WWE Hardcore Champions WWF/WWE Intercontinental Champions WWF/WWE King Crown's Champions/King of the Ring winners	true	[ "Robert Welch (born May 14, 1949) is a professional wrestler and manager better known by his ring names Robert Fuller and Col. Robert Parker. Robert and his brother Ron co-owned Continental Championship Wrestling for a time.\n\nCareer\nFuller started wrestling in 1970 in the Alabama and Tennessee regions. He often teamed with his cousin Jimmy Golden and they won many tag team titles. In the 1980s, he took his brother Ron's idea and made a stable called The Stud Stable. Among the members in the independent versions of this stable were Golden, Sid Vicious, Cactus Jack, Dutch Mantel, Brickhouse Brown, Gary Young, and Brian Lee. He spent some time in the American Wrestling Association with Golden in 1988, and they feuded with The Rock 'n' Roll Express (Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson). He also wrestled in the Texas area where he teamed with Jeff Jarrett.\n\nIn 1993, Fuller went to World Championship Wrestling as manager Col. Robert Parker, a takeoff of Col. Tom Parker of Elvis Presley fame. He managed Sid Vicious and teamed with manager Harley Race and his protege, Vader to form \"The Masters of the Powerbomb\". They feuded with Sting and Davey Boy Smith. In 1994, he managed \"Stunning Steve\" Austin before reforming his \"Stud Stable\" with Golden as \"Bunkhouse Buck\", Meng, Dick Slater, Terry Funk and Arn Anderson. They feuded heavily with Dusty and Dustin Rhodes. In 1995, Col. Parker courted Sherri Martel to the dismay of both the Stud Stable and Sherri's charges, Harlem Heat. Parker and Sherri went to get married and Sherri was attacked by Madusa, who was supposed to be Parker's wife. Parker and Sherri split and feuded and then made up again, with Parker leaving the Stud Stable to help Sherri manage Harlem Heat. While with Harlem Heat, Parker's official title was \"promoter\", while Sherri retained the \"manager\" designation. One trademark of Parker's managing would be his fanning himself during matches. In October 1996, Harlem Heat fired Parker after he cost them the WCW World Tag Team Championships. He quickly started to manage The Amazing French Canadians (Jacques Rougeau and Carl Ouellet), trading in his gray suit for a French Foreign Legion uniform. Harlem Heat and The Amazing French Canadians began feuding.\n\nFuller was released from WCW in 1997 and in March 1998, he resurfaced in the WWF as Tennessee Lee, a character similar to his Col. Parker character, and began managing Jeff Jarrett. His time in the WWF was short-lived; he would be released in August 1998 and went back to wrestling with Golden on the independent circuit in Alabama. On June 2, 2006 in Irondale, Alabama, Fuller managed Shannon Spruill against El Mexico for the NWA Wrestle Birmingham Junior Heavyweight Championship. With the help of Fuller (who referred to Spruill as his \"Million Dollar Baby\"), Spruill defeated El Mexico to win her third wrestling title. On September 14, 2006, Fuller was seen, once again as Col. Parker, being interviewed by Robert Roode on TNA Impact!. On February 8, 2018, Fuller made a return to professional wrestling as Col. Robert Parker, a manager for Major League Wrestling. He reactivated The Stud Stable with the Dirty Blondes as his first signees.\n\nPersonal life\nRobert Fuller comes from a wrestling family: his father Buddy Fuller and his grandfather Roy Welch were wrestlers, as were his brother Ron Fuller and his cousin Jimmy Golden (\"Bunkhouse Buck\").\n\nHe has been married four times: Joyce Logan, who he has his oldest daughter Kimberly by; Sylvia Wilson (Miss Sylvia), who he has Katie and Charlotte by; Susan Lostraglio, who he had no children with; and his current wife Laverne Stewart. He has 7 grandchildren. Fuller currently resides in Seminole, Florida.\n\nChampionships and accomplishments\nChampionship Wrestling Alliance\nCWA Heavyweight Championship (1 time)\nCWA Television Championship (1 time)\n\nGeorgia Championship Wrestling\nNWA Georgia Tag Team Championship (4 times) – with Bob Armstrong\nNWA Macon Tag Team Championship (2 times) – with Jimmy Golden (1) and Don Muraco (1)\n\nNational Wrestling Alliance\nNWA Southeastern Heavyweight Championship (Northern Division) (4 times)\n\nNWA Florida\nPWF Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Kendall Windham\nNWA Wrestle Birmingham Alabama Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Jimmy Golden\nNWA National Tag Team titles (1 time) – with Jimmy Golden\n\nNWA Mid-America / Continental Wrestling Association\nAWA Southern Heavyweight Championship (2 times)\nAWA Southern Tag Team Championship (2 times) – with Toru Tanaka (1) and Bill Dundee) (1)\nCWA Tag Team Championship (3 times) – with Jimmy Golden (2) and Brian Lee (1)\nNWA Southern Heavyweight Championship (Memphis version) (1 time)\nNWA World Tag Team Championship (Mid-America Version) (1 time) – with Kevin Sullivan\nNWA United States Tag Team Championship (Mid-America version) (1 time) – with Ron Fuller\n\nNorth American Wrestling Association / South Atlantic Pro Wrestling\nNAWA/SAPW Heavyweight Championship (2 times)\n\nPro Wrestling Illustrated\nPWI ranked him #102 of the top 500 singles wrestlers in the PWI 500 in 1991\nPWI ranked him #332 of the top 500 singles wrestlers of the \"PWI Years\" in 2003\nPWI ranked him #80 of the top 100 tag teams of the \"PWI Years\" with Jimmy Golden in 2003\n\nSoutheastern Championship Wrestling\nNWA Southeastern Continental Heavyweight Championship (2 times)\nNWA Southeastern Continental Tag Team Championship (2 times) - with Jimmy Golden\nNWA Southeastern Heavyweight Championship (Northern Division) (2 times)\nNWA Southeastern Tag Team Championship (15 times) – with Ron Fuller (2), Eddie Boulder (1), Jos LeDuc (3), Bob Armstrong (2), and Jimmy Golden (7)\nNWA Southeastern Television Championship (2 times)\n\nUnited States Wrestling Association\nUSWA World Tag Team Championship (6 times) – with Brian Lee (2), Jeff Jarrett (3), and Mike Mitchell (1)\n\nUSA Wrestling\nUSA Heavyweight Championship (1 time)\nWorld Class Wrestling Association\nWCWA World Tag Team Championship (2 times) – with Jimmy Golden (1) and Brian Lee (1)\n\nRecords aren't clear as to which NWA affiliated promotion Fuller wrestled for when 4 of his 6 total reigns with it began. While the title was usually defended only in the Southeastern Championship Wrestling promotion, it was occasionally used in others such as Georgia Championship Wrestling.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\n1949 births\nLiving people\nAmerican male professional wrestlers\nProfessional wrestling managers and valets\nPeople from Memphis, Tennessee\nProfessional wrestlers from Tennessee\nProfessional wrestling promoters\nThe Stud Stable members\nPeople from Seminole, Florida", "Oliver Ditson (October 20, 1811 – December 21, 1888) was an American businessman and founder of Oliver Ditson and Company, one of the major music publishing houses of the late 19th century.\n\nEarly life and career \nOliver Ditson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, of Scottish ancestry, on October 20, 1811. His parents lived near the home of Paul Revere at the lower end of Hanover Street.\n\nIn 1823, just out of grammar school, Oliver became an employee of Col. Samuel Hale Parker, father of J.C.D. Parker, the organist and composer. Col. Parker owned a book store on Washington street, near Franklin Street in Boston, and kept in addition to his regular stock a few pieces of music. At the time the Waverley novels were making their appearance and Col. Parker was republishing them as rapidly as they could be gotten from England.\n\nOliver left the bookstore to master the printer’s trade. About 1834, fire destroyed the store of Col. Parker. With what was saved he moved with his now indispensable young friend into a wooden building on Washington street, near School street, and later took a single counter in the famous ‘Old Corner Bookstore,’ then kept by William D. Ticknor in the gambrel roofed building erected in 1712, at the northwest corner of Washington and School streets. At this location, in 1834, the firm of Parker & Ditson was formed. Mr. Ditson was then twenty-three, and changed it into a music store.\n\nIn 1840, Ditson bought out Col. Parker’s interest and carried on the business of music seller and publisher under the name of Oliver Ditson.\n\nHe acquired the Oliver Ditson and Company moniker in 1857 when he began collaborating with John C. Haynes on what would become the John C. Haynes & Co.\n\nDitson's company published the first American edition of Haydn's The Creation, \"Jingle Bells\" and \"Darling Nelly Gray\", as well as most of the works of the Hutchinson Family - though Ditson refused to publish \"Get Off the Track\" due to its abolitionist sentiment.\n\nIn 1858, Ditson purchased Dwight's Journal of Music, a serious musical journal.\n\nDuring the American Civil War, Ditson released a number of popular songs, including \"Battle Hymn of the Republic\" and \"Tenting on the Old Camp Ground\".\n\nTheodore Presser purchased the Ditson catalogue in 1931.\n\nDeath \nOn December 21, 1888, Oliver Ditson, the pioneer of music publishing in America, died at his home in Boston at the age of seventy-seven.\n\nPublished by Ditson \n Levina Buoncuore Urbino. Biographical sketches of eminent musical composers. Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1876 Internet Archive\nCompositions for rhythm band by author and music educator J. Lilian Vandevere.\nAmerican editions of Edvard Grieg's piano works, edited by Bertha Tapper\nOrgan and vocal works by Fannie Morris Spencer.\n\nGallery\n\nReferences\n\nGeneral \n\n ; ; .\n ; ; .\n\nInline\n\nExternal links \n\n \"Profile: Ditson\", IMSLP.org. International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP: Petrucci Music Library)\n Temperance melodeon. Boston: O. Ditson, 1850. \n https://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/2492686114\n https://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/2492686298\n\n1811 births\n1888 deaths\nAmerican music publishers (people)\nBusinesspeople from Boston\n19th-century American businesspeople\n19th century in Boston\nCultural history of Boston" ]
[ "Booker T (wrestler)", "Harlem Heat (1993-1997)", "How did Harlem Heat start?", "In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane.", "Did they win a lot in the beginning?", "They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled.", "Who were they facing?", "the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster.", "Did they have any signature moves?", "I don't know.", "Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?", "they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces.", "Why did they fire Col. Parker and beat him up?", "on October 27." ]	C_1f3ea57e1286415abc8b8322888efbdf_1	What happened after his firing?	7	What happened after Col. Parker's firing?	Booker T (wrestler)	Booker and his brother Stevie Ray signed with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) after Sid Vicious recommended they sign with the company. In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane. They became heels and were on Harley Race and Col. Rob Parker's team in the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster. They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled. In 1994, they acquired the services of Sensational Sherri, dubbed 'Sister' Sherri, as their manager and changed their names back to Booker T and Stevie Ray, at their request. By the end of 1994, they held the WCW Tag Team Championship after defeating Stars and Stripes (The Patriot and Marcus Alexander Bagwell) in December. After dropping the title to The Nasty Boys, Harlem Heat regained the belts on June 24, 1995. Afterward, Harlem Heat got into a feud with Col. Parker's "Stud Stable" of "Dirty" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Parker and Sherri were carrying on a love affair and Parker eventually left the Stud Stable in favor of the Heat to be with Sherri. Harlem Heat won the WCW World Tag Team titles at Fall Brawl 1995, defeating Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Their third title reign only lasted one day, but the duo regained the tag team title nine days later from The American Males (Buff Bagwell and Scotty Riggs). On the June 24, 1996 Nitro, Harlem Heat defeated Lex Luger and Sting to capture their fifth WCW World Tag Team titles. Three days after losing the tag team titles to the Steiner Brothers, Harlem Heat regained the titles back from the Steiners on July 27. On September 23, Booker T and Stevie Ray were defeated by Public Enemy (Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge) but took the titles back for the seventh time on October 1. They lost the Tag Team Championship to the Outsiders (Kevin Nash and Scott Hall) on October 27. Subsequently, they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces. They then entered into a brief feud against Col. Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they won. In 1997, they feuded with Public Enemy (Grunge & Rocco), The Steiners, and the nWo. In fall 1997, they fired Sherri and added a new manager, Jacqueline. They were briefly put out of action by the nWo and returned to feud with the Faces of Fear (Meng and The Barbarian). Stevie then took five months off from WCW to recover from an ankle injury and Jacqueline left for the WWF. CANNOTANSWER	They then entered into a brief feud against Col. Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they won.	Booker T. Huffman Jr. (born March 1, 1966) better known by his ring name Booker T, is an American professional wrestler, professional wrestling promoter and color commentator. He is currently signed to WWE, and is also the owner and founder of the independent promotion Reality of Wrestling (ROW) in Texas City, Texas. Booker has been named by peers and industry commentators as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of his era; he was voted WWE's greatest World Heavyweight Champion in a 2013 viewer poll. Booker is best known for his time in World Championship Wrestling (WCW), the World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment (WWF/E), and Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA), holding 35 championships between those organizations. He is the most decorated wrestler in WCW history, having held 21 titles, including a record six WCW World Television Championships (along with being the first African American titleholder), and a record eleven WCW World Tag Team Championships: ten as one half of Harlem Heat with his brother, Lash "Stevie Ray" Huffman in WCW (most reigns within that company), and one in the WWF with Test. Booker was the final WCW World Heavyweight Champion and WCW United States Heavyweight Champion within the active WCW organisation. Booker is a six-time world champion in professional wrestling, having won the WCW World Heavyweight Championship five times, and WWE's World Heavyweight Championship once. With his fifth WCW Championship win (which occurred in the WWF), Booker T became the second African-American to win a world championship in WWF/E (after The Rock), and also the first to be of non-mixed race. He is also the winner of the 2006 King of the Ring tournament, the sixteenth Triple Crown Champion, and the eighth Grand Slam Champion (under original format) in WWE history. As the ninth WCW Triple Crown Champion, Booker is one of five men to achieve both the WWE and WCW Triple Crowns. He has headlined multiple pay-per-view events for the WWF/E, WCW and TNA throughout his career. Booker was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame on April 6, 2013, by his brother, Lash. Both he and Lash were inducted together into the 2019 class on April 6, 2019 as Harlem Heat, rendering Booker a two-time Hall of Famer. Early life Huffman was born the youngest of eight children, in Plain Dealing, Louisiana, though his birthplace is often misidentified as Houston, Texas. By the time Booker was 13, both of his parents had died and he lived with his 16-year-old sister. He would move in with his older brother Lash "Stevie Ray" Huffman at age 17. In high school, Huffman was a drum major. He also played football and basketball. Professional wrestling career Early Career (1986–1993) As a single father working at a storage company in Houston, Texas, Huffman was looking to make a better life for himself and his son. His brother Lash (Stevie Ray) suggested that he and Booker check out a new wrestling school being opened, run by Ivan Putski, in conjunction with his Western Wrestling Alliance organization. His boss from the storage company sponsored the money to pay for the wrestling lessons. Booker trained under Scott Casey, who helped to turn Booker's background as a gangster and dancer into "sports entertainment", teaching the newcomer in-ring psychology and ring generalship. Eight weeks later, Booker debuted as "G.I. Bro" on Putski's Western Wrestling Alliance Live! program. The character was a tie-in to the raging Gulf War and the WWF's Sgt. Slaughter angle. Even though the WWA met its demise some time later, Booker continued to wrestle on the Texas independent circuit, often with his brother Lash, who performed as Stevie Ray. They were spotted by Skandor Akbar who hired them to work for the Global Wrestling Federation (GWF), where he and Eddie Gilbert were involved. Gilbert teamed Stevie Ray and Booker T together as the Ebony Experience, and they won the GWF Tag Team Championship on July 31, 1992. During their time with GWF, they held the tag title a total of three times. Subsequently, Booker T and Stevie Ray left the GWF to work for World Championship Wrestling. World Championship Wrestling Harlem Heat (1993–1997) Booker and his brother Stevie Ray signed with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) after Sid Vicious recommended they sign with the company. In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane. They became heels and were on Harley Race and Col. Rob Parker's team in the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster. They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled. In 1994, they acquired the services of Sensational Sherri, dubbed 'Sister' Sherri, as their manager and changed their names back to Booker T and Stevie Ray, at their request. By the end of 1994, they held the WCW Tag Team Championship after defeating Stars and Stripes (The Patriot and Marcus Alexander Bagwell) in December. After dropping the title to The Nasty Boys, Harlem Heat regained the belts on June 24, 1995. Afterward, Harlem Heat got into a feud with Col. Parker's "Stud Stable" of "Dirty" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Parker and Sherri were carrying on a love affair and Parker eventually left the Stud Stable in favor of the Heat to be with Sherri. Harlem Heat won the WCW World Tag Team titles at Fall Brawl 1995, defeating Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Their third title reign only lasted one day, but the duo regained the tag team title nine days later from The American Males (Buff Bagwell and Scotty Riggs). On the June 24, 1996 Nitro, Harlem Heat defeated Lex Luger and Sting to capture their fifth WCW World Tag Team titles. Three days after losing the tag team titles to the Steiner Brothers, Harlem Heat regained the titles back from the Steiners on July 27. On September 23, Booker T and Stevie Ray were defeated by Public Enemy (Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge) but took the titles back for the seventh time on October 1. They lost the Tag Team Championship to the Outsiders (Kevin Nash and Scott Hall) on October 27. Subsequently, they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces. They then entered into a brief feud against Col. Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they won. In 1997, they feuded with Public Enemy (Grunge & Rocco), The Steiners, and the nWo. In fall 1997, they fired Sherri and added a new manager, Jacqueline. They were briefly put out of action by the nWo and returned to feud with the Faces of Fear (Meng and The Barbarian). Stevie then took five months off from WCW to recover from an ankle injury and Jacqueline left for the WWF. World Television Champion (1997–1999) Booker made the transition into singles action and won the WCW World Television Championship from Disco Inferno on the December 29, 1997 episode of Nitro. Booker feuded over the title with Perry Saturn and Rick Martel culminating in a gauntlet match at SuperBrawl VIII. Martel, the man that was originally supposed to win the match, went down early due to a knee injury, meaning the finish and the remainder of the match had to be called in the ring. During spring 1998, Booker began feuding with Chris Benoit. Benoit cost Booker the TV title during a match against Fit Finlay. As a result, Booker and Benoit engaged in a "best-of-seven series" with the winner meeting Finlay for the title. After seven matches and interference from Bret Hart and Stevie Ray, Booker T won the series, and on June 14, regained the Television Championship. Booker scored a clean pinfall victory over Bret Hart on the edition of February 22 of Nitro. The following month, he regained the TV Championship from Scott Steiner, who, in turn, defeated Booker in the finals of the WCW United States Heavyweight Championship tournament. Booker lost the Television title to Rick Steiner a month later at Slamboree. Harlem Heat reunion (1999–2000) By mid-1999, Booker had convinced his brother, Stevie Ray, to leave the nWo and reunite Harlem Heat. Harlem Heat defeated Bam Bam Bigelow and Kanyon for the WCW World Tag Team titles at Road Wild. They lost the WCW World Tag Team titles to Barry and Kendall Windham on August 23, but Harlem Heat regained them about a month later at Fall Brawl. When The Filthy Animals were stripped of the WCW World Tag Team belts due to an injury suffered by Rey Mysterio Jr., the title was put up in a three-way dance at Halloween Havoc. Harlem Heat claimed their tenth WCW World Tag Team title defeating Hugh Morrus and Brian Knobs and Konnan and Kidman. By late 1999, a female bodybuilder named Midnight had joined Harlem Heat. Stevie neglected her help and started disputing with Booker over her. Stevie Ray eventually challenged Midnight in a match that decided whether or not she would stay with Harlem Heat. After being defeated with a surprise small package, Stevie Ray turned on both Booker and Midnight to form Harlem Heat, Inc. with Big T, Kash, and J. Biggs. Stevie Ray and Big T dubbed themselves Harlem Heat 2000. Throughout this period, Huffman was referred to simply as Booker, as Harlem Heat 2000 won the rights to the name "T" in a match with Big T against Booker on February 20, 2000 at SuperBrawl X. Kidman and Booker T defeated Harlem Heat 2000 (Ray and Big T) at Uncensored 2000. When Vince Russo and Eric Bischoff formed The New Blood, Huffman eventually completely changed his in-ring persona, helping lead Captain Rection's military-themed Misfits In Action stable as G.I. Bro, reprising his gimmicks from his days in the WWA. He defeated Shawn Stasiak at the Great American Bash in a Boot Camp match. He returned to the Booker T name on the June 19 Nitro, promoting Rection to the status of General and demanding the Misfits start standing up to the New Blood. WCW World Heavyweight Champion (2000–2001) Huffman was elevated to main event status in 2000. After WCW booker Vince Russo grew disgruntled with Hulk Hogan's politics, he fired Hogan during the live broadcast of Bash at the Beach and announced an impromptu match between Jeff Jarrett and Huffman for the WCW World Heavyweight Championship. Huffman won the match, in the process becoming the second ever African American champion in WCW after Ron Simmons, and the third African American to win a World Heavyweight title. He lost the title to Kevin Nash on August 28 on Nitro. He regained the title a few weeks later in a steel cage match with Nash at Fall Brawl, but again lost the title, this time to Vince Russo himself in a cage match (Russo was speared out of the cage by Goldberg and won the title), Russo vacated the title and Booker won it for the third time in a San Francisco 49er Box Match against Jeff Jarrett on the October 2 episode of Nitro. Booker's next feud was with Scott Steiner, to whom he eventually lost the title in a Straitjacket steel cage match. Steiner won by TKO when he put an unconscious Booker into the Steiner Recliner at Mayhem. Steiner was WCW's longest reigning champion in years, whilst Booker was briefly out with an injury. Booker returned to the roster and defeated Rick Steiner for the WCW United States Heavyweight Championship at Greed. This made Booker the ninth WCW Triple Crown winner. On the final episode of Nitro, he defeated Scott Steiner to win the WCW World Heavyweight Championship for the fourth time. According to sports journalist Michael Landsberg, Huffman was salaried at "close to a million dollars a year" in WCW. He won a total of twenty-one titles within the organization, making him the most decorated performer in its history. Booker was also the reigning WCW United States Heavyweight Champion and WCW World Heavyweight Champion when he accepted a contract with the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment The Alliance (2001–2002) After WCW was bought by the World Wrestling Federation in March 2001, Booker T made his debut at the King of the Ring pay-per-view in 2001 attacking WWF Champion Stone Cold Steve Austin during his match, promptly injuring him in his very first move in the WWF. He later turned heel and became a leading member of The Alliance during the Invasion storyline. In his debut match in the company, Booker defended his WCW Championship against Buff Bagwell on the July 2 episode of Raw; sports journalist Michael Landsberg reported that many have called this bout "the worst match ever". At InVasion, The Alliance defeated Team WWF when Austin joined the Alliance. On the July 26 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T gave up his WCW United States Championship and handed it over to Chris Kanyon. He later lost the WCW Championship to Kurt Angle, but he went on to win the title back on the July 30 episode of Raw. Booker T kept the title until SummerSlam, when he lost it to The Rock after feuding with him over the similarity in their gimmicks and their identical finishing moves, the Book End/Rock Bottom. Booker T won the WCW Tag Team Championship for an eleventh time, this time with Test, and he also had a WWF Tag Team Championship reign with Test. At the Survivor Series, Booker T was eliminated third by The Rock after a roll-up and eventually The Alliance was defeated, causing them to disband. In its aftermath, Booker remained a heel, and he joined forces with Vince McMahon and The Boss Man in December to feud with Steve Austin. After Booker T cost Austin a match against Chris Jericho for the Undisputed WWF Championship at Vengeance, Austin gained revenge by attacking Booker T in a grocery store by covering him in food. Then the week after Booker T vandalized Austin's truck causing Austin to chase Booker T around a bingo hall and a church. Booker T's first WrestleMania appearance was at WrestleMania X8 against Edge, a match he lost. They feuded over who would appear in a fictional Japanese shampoo commercial. When the brand extension was introduced in March, Booker T was drafted to the Raw brand. At Insurrextion, Booker briefly held the WWF Hardcore Championship twice, defeating Stevie Richards only to lose it to Crash Holly seconds later. He then re-defeated Crash and lost the title to Stevie Richards a few minutes later. Feud with Evolution (2002–2003) Goldust began trying to start a tag team with Booker, but Goldust kept costing Booker matches. With the nWo now operating in WWE, Booker T was eventually invited into the faction. His time there was short-lived, when he was kicked out of the group by Shawn Michaels after a superkick from Michaels. Booker then turned face and found a partnership with Goldust and the pair teamed to battle the nWo. Booker and Goldust had a WWE Tag Team Championship match against The Un-Americans (Christian and Lance Storm) at SummerSlam, but The Un-Americans retained after interference from Test. At No Mercy, Booker and Goldust battled Chris Jericho and Christian for the World Tag Team Championship, but they lost the match with Jericho using the title belt on Goldust. He spent the rest of 2002 teaming with Goldust. They won the World Tag Team Championship at Armageddon in a Tag Team Elimination match defeating the teams of Christian and Chris Jericho, Lance Storm and William Regal, and the Dudley Boyz. They held the belts for about three weeks, when they lost them to Regal and Storm. Booker and Goldust lost the rematch and decided to go their separate ways. The gimmick for Booker and Goldust was Goldust being a strange, yet dependable ally who Booker eventually warmed up to after initial skepticism. By 2003, however, Booker T's popularity had soared and he amicably separated from Goldust, at Goldust's request, in order to pursue the World Heavyweight Championship. In February 2003, he eliminated The Rock to win a battle royal to become the number one contender to the World Heavyweight Championship at WrestleMania XIX. Booker targeted Evolution after Batista and Randy Orton attacked Booker's former partner, Goldust. Several weeks before WrestleMania, the incumbent champion and Evolution's leader, Triple H, cut a controversial promo on Booker T. Triple H downplayed Booker T's WCW success, pointing out that the WCW World Heavyweight Championship had been held by non-wrestlers like booker Vince Russo and actor David Arquette, calling WCW and its title "a joke", despite the fact that, as World Heavyweight Champion, Triple H was holding the WCW World Heavyweight Championship's physical belt, the Big Gold Belt, and that Triple H's Evolution stablemate, Ric Flair, had been a multiple-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion. He said that "people like" Booker T would never win world championships in WWE. This promo is often interpreted as racist due to Triple H referencing Booker T's "nappy" hair and implying that Booker T was just in WWE to dance and entertain for "people like" Triple H. During the WrestleMania XIX press conference Michael Cole asked Triple H as to whether he had deliberately cut a racist promo, Triple H claimed this was not the case and that he was just referring to Booker's criminal past. A week later, Booker attacked Triple H in the bathroom and laid him out after Triple H had thrown a dollar bill at him, ordering Booker to get him a towel. However, Booker T lost to Triple H at WrestleMania. For several weeks, he teamed with Shawn Michaels and Kevin Nash in a feud against Triple H, Ric Flair, and Chris Jericho. At Backlash, Booker's team lost when Triple H pinned Nash after a sledgehammer shot. Various feuds (2003–2005) Afterward, Booker set his sights on the newly reactivated Intercontinental Championship. After losing a battle royal for the title at Judgment Day, Booker feuded with the champion Christian. After a few matches, Booker defeated Christian to become the new Intercontinental Champion on the July 7 episode of Raw. About a month later, because of a nagging back injury, Booker lost the Intercontinental title back to Christian at a non-televised house show on August 10. Booker, meanwhile, was out of action until October. Booker returned on the October 20 episode of Raw and subsequently joined Team Austin at Survivor Series for a match to determine whether Eric Bischoff or Stone Cold Steve Austin (both co-general managers) would be the sole General Manager of Raw. Team Bischoff won the match. Booker then feuded with Mark Henry, who eliminated him in the Survivor Series match. Booker defeated Henry at Armageddon. On the February 16, 2004 episode of Raw, Booker T and Rob Van Dam defeated Ric Flair and Batista for the World Tag Team Championship. Booker and Van Dam held the titles for a month, even defending the belts at WrestleMania XX in a Fatal 4-Way tag team match. Eight days later on the March 22 episode of Raw, they lost the World Tag Team Championship back to Ric Flair and Batista. He and Rob Van Dam, never got their rematch due to Rob Van Dam being drafted to SmackDown! that very same night. On March 23, 2004 he was "traded" (along with the Dudley Boyz) to the SmackDown! brand in exchange for Triple H, but as part of a new storyline, he appeared unhappy with the move calling SmackDown! "the minor leagues" and even disrespected Eddie Guerrero, the brand's WWE Champion, turning heel in the process. Later on, Booker T bragged about how he was the biggest star on SmackDown! and feuded with The Undertaker. Booker tried to utilize voodoo magic to try to overcome his "supernatural" foe; however, it did nothing to prevent him from losing to the Undertaker at Judgment Day. In mid-2004, Booker T set his sights on the United States Championship along with its champion, John Cena. After Cena got on the bad side of General Manager Kurt Angle, he did his best to get the title away from Cena. Cena successfully defended the title at The Great American Bash in a four-way elimination match against Booker, René Duprée, and Rob Van Dam. After Cena was stripped of his title by Angle for "laying a hand" on the GM, Booker took advantage of the situation and won an eight-man elimination match to win the vacant United States Championship, thus becoming the one-hundredth United States Champion in history, in a match that also featured Cena, Dupree, Billy Gunn, Charlie Haas, Luther Reigns, Kenzo Suzuki and Van Dam. Booker won by last eliminating both Cena and Van Dam in the course of less than 10 seconds After Angle was fired by Mr. McMahon for embellishing his injuries, Theodore Long began his first tenure as SmackDown! General Manager, and booked a best-of-five series of matches for the United States Championship between Booker and Cena. The first match took place at SummerSlam in Toronto and saw Cena gain the pinfall victory to go up 1–0 in the series. Booker would bounce back and win the next two matches, on the August 26 edition of SmackDown! in Fresno, California and a live event the next night in Sydney, Australia, to take a 2–1 lead. The next match in the series wouldn't come until the September 16 SmackDown! from Spokane, Washington, where Cena won and tied the series at two apiece. The series culminated at No Mercy, where Cena won the series 3–2, and thusly, the United States Championship. On October 21, SmackDown! General Manager Theodore Long placed Booker in a six-man tag team match with Rob Van Dam and Rey Mysterio against John "Bradshaw" Layfield (JBL), René Duprée, and Kenzo Suzuki. JBL expected Booker to betray his partners, but instead Booker pinned him, thus turning face again. Booker T faced JBL for the WWE Championship at the Survivor Series on November 14, but lost after he was hit in the head with the championship belt. The next night, Booker T demanded a rematch, citing Orlando Jordan's interference. He was then joined by Eddie Guerrero and The Undertaker who also wanted a shot at JBL's title, prompting Theodore Long to make a fatal four-way match for the WWE Championship at Armageddon. Once again, Booker failed to win the title, as JBL retained it. He then briefly teamed with Eddie Guerrero, at one point challenging Mysterio and Van Dam for the WWE Tag Team Championship, and feuded with Heidenreich. Booker won a 30-man Battle Royal dark match at WrestleMania 21 last eliminating Raw's Viscera and Chris Masters. Subsequently, Booker was part of the tournament to name a new number one contender and made it to the Final Four. After Kurt Angle eliminated Booker, he returned the favor, costing Angle the match against JBL. The storyline then turned to a sexual nature, as Angle began stalking Booker's new wife, Sharmell. Booker defeated Angle at Judgment Day. On the May 26 episode of SmackDown!, Booker participated in a "Winners Choice" Battle Royal, with the winner choosing his opponent for the next week. Kurt Angle won and wanted to wrestle Sharmell. Booker protested, and the match was made into a Handicap match. Angle won by pinning Sharmell in a sexual position. The next week, Booker gained revenge on Angle, defeating him with a Scissors Kick. On the June 30 episode of SmackDown!, JBL defeated Christian, The Undertaker, Chris Benoit, Muhammad Hassan, and Booker T in a six-man elimination match for the SmackDown! Championship. During the match, Booker got specifically involved with Christian. Booker later defeated Christian at The Great American Bash. United States Champion (2005–2006) Booker T began teaming with Chris Benoit, eying his United States Championship again. Benoit was allowed to pick his next challenger to see who would face him at No Mercy, so Booker, Christian, and Orlando Jordan tried to impress Benoit by winning matches. He instead decided not choose one opponent, so he made it a fatal four-way for No Mercy, where Benoit successfully defended his title. On the October 21 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T defeated Benoit for the United States Championship, due to unseen help from Sharmell. Theodore Long later showed footage of Sharmell interfering in Booker's matches. Booker went to apologize to Benoit and give him a rematch, but then attacked Benoit, busting him open with the United States title belt and turning heel once again. Booker then boasted that he had been fully aware of what Sharmell had been doing and had been playing dumb to fool everyone. On the November 25 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T defended the United States Championship against Benoit. The match ended when Benoit superplexed Booker and two referees made a three count on either competitor, claiming that their wrestler had won. Booker was stripped of the belt by Theodore Long, because of the confusion of who won since they pinned each other at the same time. Long decided to put Benoit and Booker against each other in a best of seven series, just as the two had in their WCW days. Booker took an early 3–0 lead. In a must win match during Armageddon, Benoit was able to defeat Booker T to bring the series to 3–1. At a house show, Booker was injured, and he did not wrestle again until after the "Best of Seven" series with Benoit was completed. Booker was scheduled to face Benoit in Match 5 of the Best of Seven Series at the December 30 taping of SmackDown!. At the beginning of the show, General Manager Theodore Long said that Booker would have to forfeit. Both Booker and Benoit protested, with Benoit not wanting a cheap victory. Booker managed to persuade Long to allow him to choose a stand-in for the matches. Booker chose Randy Orton as his replacement. Benoit was able to tie the series 3–3 after beating Orton in two consecutive matches on the December 30 and January 6, 2006 episodes of SmackDown!. Orton, however, was able to defeat Benoit in the final match on the January 13 episode of SmackDown! to win the series and the title for Booker T, who held the title until No Way Out where Benoit won it back. On the February 24 episode of SmackDown!, Booker and Sharmell provided guest commentary for a match involving The Boogeyman. After defeating his opponents, Boogeyman dumped a bucket of worms onto the announce table where they were sitting, frightening the two. Over the next few weeks, Boogeyman would stalk Booker and Sharmell. Booker and Boogeyman were set to face off on the March 18 Saturday Night's Main Event XXXII, but the match was canceled due to Booker faking a knee injury to escape competition. The feud eventually culminated at WrestleMania 22, with Booker and Sharmell losing to Boogeyman. The couple received a restraining order against The Boogeyman on the April 7 episode of SmackDown!, ending the feud. King Booker and World Heavyweight Champion (2006–2007) Booker next entered the 2006 King of the Ring tournament on SmackDown!, advancing through to the finals due to a bye as his semi-final opponent, Kurt Angle, was unable to wrestle. The finals were held at Judgment Day where Booker defeated Bobby Lashley. Upon winning the King of the Ring tournament, Booker began wrestling as "King Booker" and began acting like he was an actual monarch ruling "The SmackDown! Kingdom". Booker formed a royal court that included his wife, Queen Sharmell, Sir William Regal, and Sir Finlay, and began including the mannerisms and attire of a stereotypical English-style king as part of the character, all the way down to wearing a crown and cape and speaking in a fake English accent. However, whenever King Booker would get angry he would launch into a tirade in the style of Booker T (an example of this was an episode of SmackDown! where Theodore Long would inform him he would be facing The Undertaker), which lent some comedic aspect to the character; he even went as far as having Lashley kiss his "royal" feet. After gaining his title of King, Booker continued to feud with Lashley. After Lashley defeated John "Bradshaw" Layfield (JBL) for the United States Championship at the end of May, Booker began chasing after the title and even resorted to making Lashley kiss his "royal feet" on the June 2 episode of SmackDown!. The feud ended after a steel cage match on the June 30 episode of SmackDown! where Lashley defeated Booker by escaping the cage to retain the United States Championship. The next week, Booker entered a battle royal on SmackDown! with the winner to challenge Rey Mysterio for his World Heavyweight Championship at The Great American Bash. Booker won the battle royal and then defeated Mysterio at The Great American Bash to win the World Heavyweight Championship after Chavo Guerrero betrayed Mysterio by hitting him with a steel chair. This was Booker's first world championship since joining WWE and the win caused him to proclaim himself as the "King of the World". This win would also make Booker the sixteenth Triple Crown Champion and eighth Grand Slam Champion (under the original format) in the history of the WWE. After Booker won the World Heavyweight Championship, he began a rivalry with the returning former champion Batista, who vowed to regain the title he was forced to forfeit due to injury. This rivalry spilled over to real life when the two got into a legitimate fistfight at a SummerSlam pay-per-view commercial shoot, reportedly due to Batista considering himself superior to the rest of the roster due to his quick climb to main event status. According to sources, both men were left bloodied and bruised, however Booker was reportedly praised by many wrestlers in the back for speaking his mind to Batista about his attitude. At SummerSlam, Booker lost to Batista by disqualification after Queen Sharmell interfered on his behalf (thus retaining the title), but at No Mercy, Booker defeated Batista, Lashley and his own stablemate, Finlay, in a Fatal 4-Way match. Before the match, Booker assaulted Sir William Regal, resulting in the breakup of the King's Court. Despite the break-up of his Court, Booker lost to Batista by disqualification on the October 20 episode on SmackDown!, due to interference from WWE Champion John Cena from Raw and ECW World Champion Big Show, the two of whom King Booker was to face at Cyber Sunday in a "champion of champions" match. At Cyber Sunday, the fans voted for the World Heavyweight Championship to be on the line. Booker retained after defeating Big Show and Cena with help from Kevin Federline. After Cyber Sunday, the feud between King Booker and Batista continued with Batista unable to wrest the title from Booker. Eventually this led to a match at Survivor Series on November 26, where Booker declared that if Batista failed to defeat him this time, it would be the last World Heavyweight Championship match he would receive as long as Booker was champion. At Survivor Series, SmackDown! General Manager Theodore Long decided that if Booker got counted out or disqualified, he would lose the title. Late in the match, Queen Sharmell handed Booker his title belt while referee Nick Patrick was not looking. While she had Patrick distracted, Booker attempted to hit Batista with the belt. Batista moved out of the way, knocked the belt out of Booker's hands and hit him in the head with it, and King Booker lost the World Heavyweight Championship to Batista. After losing the title, Booker feuded alongside former royal court member Finlay against Batista and John Cena, which led up to Armageddon where they lost. While competing in the Royal Rumble match, King Booker was eliminated by Kane. A frustrated Booker returned to the ring illegally and eliminated Kane. This started a short feud between the two resulting in a match at No Way Out, which Kane won. On the February 23 episode of SmackDown!, Booker won a Falls Count Anywhere Money in the Bank qualifying match, defeating Kane (with assistance from The Great Khali) and earned himself a spot in the match at WrestleMania 23. At WrestleMania, Matt Hardy set up Sharmell for a Twist of Fate during the Money in the Bank match with the briefcase in Booker's grasp – thus forcing him to choose between a guaranteed title shot and his wife. He chose to defend Sharmell and lost the match. On the April 6 episode of SmackDown!, Booker attempted to take revenge. However, he lost the match against Matt Hardy, and Sharmell declared her disappointment in him and slapped him. In an attempt to impress Sharmell, Booker attacked The Undertaker but was Tombstoned on an announce table. Booker was removed from television to deal with a knee injury. Draft to RAW, WWE Championship pursuit and departure (2007) On the June 11 episode of Raw, both King Booker and Queen Sharmell were drafted to the Raw brand as part of the WWE Draft. He then began a short feud with John Cena over the WWE Championship, Booker would wrestle Cena in a Five Pack Challenge along with Bobby Lashley, Mick Foley and Randy Orton at Vengeance: Night of Champions for the title in a losing effort. Cena would retain at the event by pinning Foley. On the July 16 episode of Raw, King Booker came to the ring using Triple H's theme music "The King of Kings", even using his video. King Booker declared that neither Triple H nor Jerry Lawler could be known as "The King". Booker began a feud with Lawler, defeating him on the August 6 episode of Raw where the loser had to crown the winner the next week. When the time came, Lawler refused, declaring that Triple H was still a king and announcing that King Booker would battle Triple H at SummerSlam. Booker attacked Lawler, throwing him into the ring post and hitting him with a television monitor. At SummerSlam, Booker lost to the returning Triple H. On the August 27 episode of Raw, Booker wrestled against John Cena in a non-title match, which he lost by disqualification when Randy Orton interfered. In August, he was linked to Signature Pharmacy, a company thought to be distributing performance-enhancing drugs. He was suspended by WWE for violating its Wellness Policy. He denied using any drugs and being a customer of Signature Pharmacy. In October 2007, Booker T requested his and Sharmell's release from their WWE contracts due to the pressure he had in WWE and being burned out, which WWE granted. Total Nonstop Action Wrestling Feud with Bobby Roode (2007–2008) At the Genesis pay-per-view on November 11, 2007, Huffman debuted in Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) as Sting's mystery partner in a tag team match against Kurt Angle and Kevin Nash for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship, reverting to his Booker T character. His wife Sharmell also debuted, interfering in the match on Booker and Sting's behalf when Karen Angle interfered on behalf of Kurt Angle and Nash. On the November 29 episode of Impact!, Booker said he came to TNA to test his skills against the young talent, take TNA to a higher level, and win the TNA World Heavyweight Championship. Robert Roode came to the ring and challenged Booker to a match, claiming he has been pushed down by washed-up wrestlers and has-beens. Booker won his Impact! debut match, but afterwards, Christian Cage and Robert Roode beat down Booker until Kaz made the save. At Turning Point, Booker and Kaz defeated Roode and Cage when Booker pinned Cage. Booker and Sharmell won a mixed tag team match against Robert Roode and Ms. Brooks at Final Resolution. After the match, Roode punched Sharmell in the face, leading to a match at Against All Odds. While the punch was intended to be a work, Roode had in fact made contact with Sharmell during the punch, dislocating her jaw and causing her to be off TV for a few weeks, therefore making it into a shoot. The rivalry, however, went ahead as planned where Booker and Roode wrestled to a double-countout at Against All Odds, which saw them brawl to the parking lot. Roode defeated Booker in strap match at Destination X after hitting Booker with a pair of handcuffs. In a special live episode of Impact!, Booker T and Robert Roode had another outing, this time with the fans being able to vote on the stipulation of the match. At Booker's request during a pre-match promo, the match became a First Blood Match, beating the Last Man Standing and I Quit stipulations. Booker T would go on to win the match-up. At Lockdown, Booker T and Sharmell defeated Robert Roode and Payton Banks after Sharmell pinned Banks with a roll-up. The Main Event Mafia (2008–2010) Booker T turned heel for the first time in TNA at Sacrifice by attacking Christian Cage and Rhino from behind with a steel chair. This came about as a result of losing a tag team match up against Christian Cage and Rhino, with them furthering themselves in the Deuces Wild Tag Team Tournament. Booker then competed in the King of the Mountain match for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship at Slammiversary. He was seconds away from winning the match, when Kevin Nash stopped him and performed a Jackknife Powerbomb; Samoa Joe would later go on to win the match. On the next Impact!, Booker challenged Joe to a title match at Victory Road, which Joe would later accept. Also around this time he reverted to a gimmick similar to his King Booker gimmick albeit while proclaiming himself a supposed king of Africa. The match at Victory Road ended in a draw after Sharmell replaced the referee and counted after the match was already over. At Hard Justice, Samoa Joe defeated Booker after a guitar shot, thus reclaiming physical possession of the title belt, which Booker had kept after Victory Road. Later he introduced the TNA Legends Championship and became the first official champion. Booker T successfully defended the title at Turning Point against Cage. At Final Resolution, Booker T, Kevin Nash, Scott Steiner, and Sting defeated The TNA Front Line (A.J. Styles, Brother Devon, Brother Ray, and Samoa Joe) in an eight-man tag team match to allow Sting to retain his TNA World Heavyweight Championship. At Genesis, Booker T, Scott Steiner, and Cute Kip lost a six-man tag team match to Mick Foley, A.J. Styles, and Brother Devon. The next month at Against All Odds, Booker T defeated Shane Sewell to retain the Legends Championship. Booker T lost the title to A.J. Styles at Destination X. At Lockdown, Team Angle (Booker T, Kevin Nash, Kurt Angle, and Scott Steiner) lost to Team Jarrett (A.J. Styles, Christopher Daniels, Jeff Jarrett, and Samoa Joe) in a Lethal Lockdown match. At Sacrifice, Booker T received a rematch for the Legends Championship, but lost to A.J. Styles in a "I Quit" match. Booker T went go on to form the Mafia's resident tag team with Scott Steiner, and at Victory Road, Steiner and Booker defeated Beer Money, Inc. to win the TNA World Tag Team Championship, marking Booker's 15th World Tag Team title reign overall. Then at Hard Justice, Booker T and Steiner retained the World Tag Team Championship against Team 3D. Prior to No Surrender, Booker, Steiner, and British Invasion won a match to gain the man advantage at No Surrender's Lethal Lockdown match against Team 3D and Beer Money, Inc. Even with the advantage, Booker T's team lost at No Surrender when James Storm of Beer Money pinned Doug Williams of The British Invasion. At Bound for Glory, Booker and Steiner lost the TNA World Tag Team Titles to the British Invasion in a four way Full Metal Mayhem Tag Team match, which also included Team 3D and Beer Money; during the match Booker was taken out on a stretcher. Afterwards it was reported that the PPV had been Booker's final appearance with the company, and his and Sharmell's profiles were removed from the official TNA roster. On May 21, 2010, Booker T made a one night return to TNA at a live event in Lake Charles, Louisiana, replacing A.J. Styles, who was unable to attend the event due to travel issues, and wrestled Rob Van Dam for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship in a losing effort. Puerto Rico and Mexico (2009–2010) Booker T debuted in the International Wrestling Association (IWA) on Histeria Boricua, a special event held on January 6, 2009. There he was booked against Chicano, the incumbent IWA Undisputed Heavyweight Champion. The match was won by Cotto, who reversed a "Book End" attempt and scored a pinfall victory. On July 11, 2010, Booker T was booked by World Wrestling Council in a match against Carlito which also involved Orlando Colón and El Mesias. On September 16, 2010, Booker T made his debut for Mexican promotion Perros del Mal. In the main event of the evening he teamed up with Dr. Wagner Jr. and El Mesías, who represented rival promotion AAA, against El Hijo del Perro Aguayo, Damián 666 and Halloween. After Aguayo pinned El Mesías, Booker turned on Wagner, unmasked him and joined Perros del Mal. Return to WWE Color commentator and part-time wrestler (2011–2012) On January 30, 2011 Booker T returned to WWE to take part in the Royal Rumble. Booker entered the match at number 21 and was eliminated by Mason Ryan. On the February 1 taping of SmackDown, Huffman debuted as the show's new color commentator, working beside Josh Mathews and Michael Cole, replacing Matt Striker. He coached on the returning Tough Enough competition, and at Elimination Chamber he introduced Trish Stratus as a fellow coach. On the June 6 episode of Raw, Booker wrestled his first match on the brand in four years, gaining a victory against Jack Swagger by count out. On the November 21 episode of Raw, Cody Rhodes threw water in Booker T's face after Rhodes allegedly heard Booker T criticize him, thus starting a conflict between the two. On the November 29 episode of SmackDown Booker was scheduled to face Rhodes in a match but it did not happen after Rhodes attacked him from behind him during a backstage interview. On the December 9 episode of SmackDown, Rhodes attacked Booker again while heading to the announcer's table leaving him with paramedics. Later that night, Booker T attacked Rhodes during his match with Daniel Bryan, leading to an Intercontinental Championship match at TLC: Tables, Ladders & Chairs, which Rhodes won. On the December 26 episode of Raw, Booker defeated Rhodes in a non-title match. On the January 6, 2012, episode of SmackDown, Booker challenged Rhodes a second time for the Intercontinental Championship, but once again failed to win the title. Booker T along with fellow commentators Jerry Lawler and Michael Cole all participated in the 2012 Royal Rumble. On the March 26, 2012 episode of Raw, Booker T saved Teddy Long from an attempted attack by Mark Henry, thus becoming the sixth and final member of Team Teddy at WrestleMania XXVIII, where Team Johnny emerged victorious. This was his last official match for the WWE. On the July 9 episode of Raw, Jerry Lawler won by pinfall against Michael Cole in a WrestleMania XXVII rematch. However, Booker, who was subbing for Lawler on commentary, threw Cole back into the ring after he tried to escape. This caused the anonymous Raw General Manager to reverse the decision and give Cole the win as a result of a disqualification. SmackDown General Manager and Hall of Fame (2012–2013) On July 31, 2012, Booker T was appointed the new General Manager of SmackDown. Booker would quickly add Eve Torres and Theodore Long to his staff, as his assistant and senior adviser respectively. Booker was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame by his brother, Stevie Ray, the night before WrestleMania 29. On the April 19 SmackDown, Booker became angry with Long for making matches without his consent. Big Show arrived and thanked Long for doing a better job than Booker, further infuriating him. On the April 22 Raw, upset with Long for making a World Heavyweight Championship match at Extreme Rules, made it a Triple Threat match. Booker took time off for a torn distal triceps, and had surgery for it on June 12. On the July 19 SmackDown, he returned to continue as SmackDown General Manager, but soon lost the job to Vickie Guerrero, on Vince McMahon's orders. Return to commentary and pre-show panelist (2014–present) Since 2014, Booker T has commonly done work on the WWE Network, including the Raw pre-show and also being a part of the "expert panel" on Kickoff shows before each pay-per-view event. On the 2015 premiere of Raw, Booker T replaced Jerry Lawler, who was suffering from diverticulitis, for commentating. However, it was later announced that Booker would be returning on a full-time basis to take Lawler's place on Raw, with Lawler moving to SmackDown. On the March 30 episode of Raw, Booker, along with JBL and Michael Cole, were injured by Brock Lesnar after Seth Rollins refused Lesnar his WWE World Heavyweight Championship rematch. Booker was replaced by Byron Saxton for commentating as he became a coach for the sixth season of WWE Tough Enough. On August 6, 2016, Booker T replaced Tommy Dreamer in an intergender tag team match for Dreamer's House of Hardcore promotion. Booker T returned to his old "King Booker" gimmick in a segment with the SmackDown Live Survivor Series tag teams where he gave a motivational speech and convinced Breezango (Tyler Breeze and Fandango) to join the team. In December 2016, after Jerry Lawler and Lita left the pre-show team, WWE ended their Raw and SmackDown pre-shows leaving Booker T to the WWE pay-per-view pre-shows and other WWE Network specials. Following the 2017 WWE Superstar Shake-up, Booker T replaced David Otunga as color commentator on Raw. On the January 29, 2018 episode of Raw, Booker was replaced on commentary by the returning Jonathan Coachman. On the August 28 episode of SmackDown Live Booker T made a surprise appearance as "King Booker" in the opening segment when he interrupted and joined in on The New Day's "five timers" celebration, following the latter's fifth tag team championship win. In 2020, Booker made his return by wrestling at the Reality of Wrestling promotion. Legacy Longtime wrestler Kurt Angle said of Booker: "He's done it all... he legitimately is one of the top five best of all time." In 2001, sports journalist Michael Landsberg stated that Booker was considered "one of the best wrestlers alive", capable of "any match, any style". Industry veteran John Layfield later described him as "the best acquisition that WWE got when they bought WCW" in 2001. Booker's 21 WCW titles render him the most decorated wrestler in the company's history. He was the first African American WCW World Television Champion. Harlem Heat were recognized by WWE as being – along with The Steiner Brothers – WCW's greatest ever tag team. Considering both Booker's WCW and WWF/E accoldades, WWE recognizes him as one of the most decorated performers of all-time. With his fifth WCW Championship win (which occurred in the WWF), Booker T became the second African-American to win a world championship in WWF/E (after The Rock), and the first to be of non-mixed race. Booker was voted WWE's greatest World Heavyweight Champion in a 2013 viewer poll. Other media In 2000, Booker appeared in the film Ready to Rumble, starring as himself. He has appeared in an episode of Charmed, called "Wrestling with Demons" alongside Buff Bagwell and Scott Steiner. In 2001, along with several other WWE wrestlers, Booker competed on an episode of The Weakest Link, being eliminated second from the show. He also has appeared on Comedy Central and MTV. On January 13, 2004, the album WWE Originals was released, featuring Booker T performing "Can You Dig It?". On April 21, 2007, Booker began hosting a radio show titled Tea Time with King Booker on KBME 790 AM in Houston. During the week of November 5, 2007, he appeared on Family Feud with several other WWE wrestlers. On September 1, 2012, Booker released his first autobiography, Booker T: From Prison to Promise, with Medallion Press. Booker T made appearances to promote the book with The Score Television Network with Arda Ocal which aired on August 29, 2012. He conducted a sixteen-page interview with Pro Wrestling Illustrated in the 2012 volume #50 issue. On March 10, 2015, Booker released his second autobiography, Booker T: Wrestling Royalty with Medallion Press. In 2015, Booker T started a show on KILT (AM) that is also podcast on Radio.com called "Heated Conversations – with Booker T". The show is aired Saturday Nights locally in Houston, Texas and covers subjects from Wrestling, MMA and Boxing to all sports. It has featured the biggest names from the WWE as well as NBA Stars like Dwight Howard. In February 2019, Booker T sued video game company Activision over the Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 character David "Prophet" Wilkes. The lawsuit claimed that the Black Ops character contained similarities to Booker's GI Bro comic book character. On 19 September, 2021 All41 Studios and Microgaming released WWE Legends: Link & Win, a game for mobile and desktop browsers. Booker T was featured as one of four main characters alongside Macho Man Randy Savage, Stone Cold Steve Austin and Eddie Guerrero. Video games Music videos Personal life Relationships and family Booker married his first wife Levestia on May 23, 1996. Booker presented her to the Nitro crowd the night after his WCW World Heavyweight Championship win at Bash at the Beach. Levestia was also used to further the feud between himself and Jeff Jarrett when Jarrett hit her in the head with a guitar on Nitro on July 31, 2000. However, they divorced on May 8, 2001. Booker has a son, from a previous relationship with a high school girlfriend, named Brandon (born in 1982), with whom he has a strained relationship due to his time spent on the road. Booker married his girlfriend of five years, Sharmell Sullivan, in February 2005. The couple welcomed their twins, a boy named Kendrick and a girl named Kennedy, in 2010. Booker and his brother Lash opened a wrestling school in Houston in 2005. Booker T is also a fan of Formula One, and was in attendance at the 2012 U.S Grand Prix as a guest of Lewis Hamilton. Reality of Wrestling In 2005, Huffman started his own wrestling promotion in Houston, Texas, called Pro Wrestling Alliance. In 2012, the promotion rebranded to Reality of Wrestling. After his final 2013 event, Christmas Chaos, ROW was near to close, but Houston business man Hilton Koch, who assisted the event, became a partner with Booker. On February 21, 2015, Booker T and Stevie Ray reunited as Harlem Heat for one last match in Reality of Wrestling for the promotion's "The Final Heat" event. They defeated the Heavenly Bodies to win the ROW Tag Team Championship. On March 14, the titles were vacated. In February 2020, Booker T returned to wrestle for the promotion in an eight-man tag team match. Politics On December 10, 2016, Huffman announced that he would be running in the 2019 Houston mayoral election. He was quoted saying that, "2020 is going to be a new era in the city of Houston. We're going to be looked at now from a different perspective. The cool city, 2020 is coming." Huffman was quoted in 2016, stating his focus for the three years leading up to the 2019 election would be concentrated on the city's "homeless, underprivileged, and low income areas." However, in September 2019, Huffman was not among the 12 names listed who applied for the election ballot. Legal issues Huffman spent nineteen months in prison after pleading guilty to armed robberies at Wendy's restaurants in Houston. He and his partners wore Wendy's uniforms during the holdups since they had been working there for 2½ years. Because of the gunmen's uniforms and familiarity with the fast food chain's operations, police suspected the robberies were inside jobs—and it did not take long before Huffman and three other men were found. He pleaded guilty in December 1987 to two aggravated robbery counts and was sentenced to five years in prison. Huffman was released after serving 19 months, and was placed on parole until April 1992. Championships and accomplishments Cauliflower Alley Club Tag Team Award (2018) – with Stevie Ray George Tragos/Lou Thesz Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame Class of 2018 Global Wrestling Federation GWF Tag Team Championship (3 times) – with Stevie Ray Las Vegas Pro Wrestling LVPW UWF Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Prairie Wrestling Alliance PWA Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Pro Wrestling Illustrated Inspirational Wrestler of the Year (2000) Most Improved Wrestler of the Year (1998) Tag Team of the Year (1995, 1996) with Stevie Ray Ranked No. 5 of the top 500 wrestlers in the PWI 500 in 2001 Southern Championship Wrestling Florida SCW Florida Southern Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Texas All-Pro Wrestling TAP Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Reality of Wrestling ROW Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Stevie Ray Total Nonstop Action Wrestling TNA Legends Championship (1 time, inaugural) TNA World Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Scott Steiner TNA Year End Awards (2 times) Memorable Moment of the Year (2007) Who To Watch in 2008 (2007) World Championship Wrestling WCW World Heavyweight Championship (4 times) WCW World Television Championship (6 times) WCW United States Heavyweight Championship (1 time) WCW World Tag Team Championship (10 times) – with Stevie Ray Ninth WCW Triple Crown Champion World Wrestling Federation/World Wrestling Entertainment/WWE WCW Championship (1 time) World Heavyweight Championship (1 time) World Tag Team Championship (3 times) – with Test (1), Goldust (1) and Rob Van Dam (1) WCW Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Test WWE Intercontinental Championship (1 time) WWE United States Championship (3 times) WWF Hardcore Championship (2 times) King of the Ring (2006) Sixteenth Triple Crown Champion Eighth Grand Slam Champion (under original format) WWE Hall of Fame (2 times) Class of 2013 – individually Class of 2019 – as a member of Harlem Heat Wrestling Observer Newsletter Most Underrated (2002) Worst Television Announcer (2017) Notes References External links 1965 births African-American male professional wrestlers American color commentators American male professional wrestlers American robbers American sportspeople convicted of crimes Living people NWA/WCW World Television Champions NWA/WCW/WWE United States Heavyweight Champions Professional wrestlers from Texas Professional wrestling announcers Professional wrestling podcasters Professional wrestling promoters Sportspeople from Houston The New World Order (professional wrestling) members TNA Legends/Global/Television/King of the Mountain Champions TNA/Impact World Tag Team Champions WCW World Heavyweight Champions World Heavyweight Champions (WWE) WWE Grand Slam champions WWE Hall of Fame inductees WWF/WWE Hardcore Champions WWF/WWE Intercontinental Champions WWF/WWE King Crown's Champions/King of the Ring winners	true	[ "Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor, in Spanish Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio (Book of the Examples of Count Lucanor and of Patronio), also commonly known as El Conde Lucanor, Libro de Patronio, or Libro de los ejemplos (original Old Castilian: Libro de los enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor et de Patronio), is one of the earliest works of prose in Castilian Spanish. It was first written in 1335.\n\nThe book is divided into four parts. The first and most well-known part is a series of 51 short stories (some no more than a page or two) drawn from various sources, such as Aesop and other classical writers, and Arabic folktales.\n\nTales of Count Lucanor was first printed in 1575 when it was published at Seville under the auspices of Argote de Molina. It was again printed at Madrid in 1642, after which it lay forgotten for nearly two centuries.\n\nPurpose and structure\n\nA didactic, moralistic purpose, which would color so much of the Spanish literature to follow (see Novela picaresca), is the mark of this book. Count Lucanor engages in conversation with his advisor Patronio, putting to him a problem (\"Some man has made me a proposition...\" or \"I fear that such and such person intends to...\") and asking for advice. Patronio responds always with the greatest humility, claiming not to wish to offer advice to so illustrious a person as the Count, but offering to tell him a story of which the Count's problem reminds him. (Thus, the stories are \"examples\" [ejemplos] of wise action.) At the end he advises the Count to do as the protagonist of his story did.\n\nEach chapter ends in more or less the same way, with slight variations on: \"And this pleased the Count greatly and he did just so, and found it well. And Don Johán (Juan) saw that this example was very good, and had it written in this book, and composed the following verses.\" A rhymed couplet closes, giving the moral of the story.\n\nOrigin of stories and influence on later literature\nMany of the stories written in the book are the first examples written in a modern European language of various stories, which many other writers would use in the proceeding centuries. Many of the stories he included were themselves derived from other stories, coming from western and Arab sources.\n\nShakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew has the basic elements of Tale 35, \"What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\".\n\nTale 32, \"What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth\" tells the story that Hans Christian Andersen made popular as The Emperor's New Clothes.\n\nStory 7, \"What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana\", a version of Aesop's The Milkmaid and Her Pail, was claimed by Max Müller to originate in the Hindu cycle Panchatantra.\n\nTale 2, \"What happened to a good Man and his Son, leading a beast to market,\" is the familiar fable The miller, his son and the donkey.\n\nIn 2016, Baroque Decay released a game under the name \"The Count Lucanor\". As well as some protagonists' names, certain events from the books inspired past events in the game.\n\nThe stories\n\nThe book opens with a prologue which introduces the characters of the Count and Patronio. The titles in the following list are those given in Keller and Keating's 1977 translation into English. James York's 1868 translation into English gives a significantly different ordering of the stories and omits the fifty-first.\n\n What Happened to a King and His Favorite \n What Happened to a Good Man and His Son \n How King Richard of England Leapt into the Sea against the Moors\n What a Genoese Said to His Soul When He Was about to Die \n What Happened to a Fox and a Crow Who Had a Piece of Cheese in His Beak\n How the Swallow Warned the Other Birds When She Saw Flax Being Sown \n What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana \n What Happened to a Man Whose Liver Had to Be Washed \n What Happened to Two Horses Which Were Thrown to the Lion \n What Happened to a Man Who on Account of Poverty and Lack of Other Food Was Eating Bitter Lentils \n What Happened to a Dean of Santiago de Compostela and Don Yllán, the Grand Master of Toledo\n What Happened to the Fox and the Rooster \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Hunting Partridges \n The Miracle of Saint Dominick When He Preached against the Usurer \n What Happened to Lorenzo Suárez at the Siege of Seville \n The Reply that count Fernán González Gave to His Relative Núño Laynes \n What Happened to a Very Hungry Man Who Was Half-heartedly Invited to Dinner \n What Happened to Pero Meléndez de Valdés When He Broke His Leg \n What Happened to the Crows and the Owls \n What Happened to a King for Whom a Man Promised to Perform Alchemy \n What Happened to a Young King and a Philosopher to Whom his Father Commended Him \n What Happened to the Lion and the Bull \n How the Ants Provide for Themselves \n What Happened to the King Who Wanted to Test His Three Sons \n What Happened to the Count of Provence and How He Was Freed from Prison by the Advice of Saladin\n What Happened to the Tree of Lies \n What Happened to an Emperor and to Don Alvarfáñez Minaya and Their Wives \n What Happened in Granada to Don Lorenzo Suárez Gallinato When He Beheaded the Renegade Chaplain \n What Happened to a Fox Who Lay down in the Street to Play Dead \n What Happened to King Abenabet of Seville and Ramayquía His Wife \n How a Cardinal Judged between the Canons of Paris and the Friars Minor \n What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth \n What Happened to Don Juan Manuel's Saker Falcon and an Eagle and a Heron \n What Happened to a Blind Man Who Was Leading Another \n What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\n What Happened to a Merchant When He Found His Son and His Wife Sleeping Together \n What Happened to Count Fernán González with His Men after He Had Won the Battle of Hacinas \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Loaded down with Precious Stones and Drowned in the River \n What Happened to a Man and a Swallow and a Sparrow \n Why the Seneschal of Carcassonne Lost His Soul \n What Happened to a King of Córdova Named Al-Haquem \n What Happened to a Woman of Sham Piety \n What Happened to Good and Evil and the Wise Man and the Madman \n What Happened to Don Pero Núñez the Loyal, to Don Ruy González de Zavallos, and to Don Gutier Roiz de Blaguiello with Don Rodrigo the Generous \n What Happened to a Man Who Became the Devil's Friend and Vassal \n What Happened to a Philosopher who by Accident Went down a Street Where Prostitutes Lived \n What Befell a Moor and His Sister Who Pretended That She Was Timid \n What Happened to a Man Who Tested His Friends \n What Happened to the Man Whom They Cast out Naked on an Island When They Took away from Him the Kingdom He Ruled \n What Happened to Saladin and a Lady, the Wife of a Knight Who Was His Vassal \n What Happened to a Christian King Who Was Very Powerful and Haughty\n\nReferences\n\nNotes\n\nBibliography\n\n Sturm, Harlan\n\n Wacks, David\n\nExternal links\n\nThe Internet Archive provides free access to the 1868 translation by James York.\nJSTOR has the to the 1977 translation by Keller and Keating.\nSelections in English and Spanish (pedagogical edition) with introduction, notes, and bibliography in Open Iberia/América (open access teaching anthology)\n\n14th-century books\nSpanish literature\n1335 books", "What Happened to Jones may refer to:\n What Happened to Jones (1897 play), a play by George Broadhurst\n What Happened to Jones (1915 film), a lost silent film\n What Happened to Jones (1920 film), a lost silent film\n What Happened to Jones (1926 film), a silent film comedy" ]
[ "Booker T (wrestler)", "Harlem Heat (1993-1997)", "How did Harlem Heat start?", "In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane.", "Did they win a lot in the beginning?", "They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled.", "Who were they facing?", "the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster.", "Did they have any signature moves?", "I don't know.", "Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?", "they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces.", "Why did they fire Col. Parker and beat him up?", "on October 27.", "What happened after his firing?", "They then entered into a brief feud against Col. Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they won." ]	C_1f3ea57e1286415abc8b8322888efbdf_1	What was the feud about?	8	What was the feud about between Harlem Heat and The Amazing French Canadians?	Booker T (wrestler)	Booker and his brother Stevie Ray signed with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) after Sid Vicious recommended they sign with the company. In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane. They became heels and were on Harley Race and Col. Rob Parker's team in the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster. They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled. In 1994, they acquired the services of Sensational Sherri, dubbed 'Sister' Sherri, as their manager and changed their names back to Booker T and Stevie Ray, at their request. By the end of 1994, they held the WCW Tag Team Championship after defeating Stars and Stripes (The Patriot and Marcus Alexander Bagwell) in December. After dropping the title to The Nasty Boys, Harlem Heat regained the belts on June 24, 1995. Afterward, Harlem Heat got into a feud with Col. Parker's "Stud Stable" of "Dirty" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Parker and Sherri were carrying on a love affair and Parker eventually left the Stud Stable in favor of the Heat to be with Sherri. Harlem Heat won the WCW World Tag Team titles at Fall Brawl 1995, defeating Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Their third title reign only lasted one day, but the duo regained the tag team title nine days later from The American Males (Buff Bagwell and Scotty Riggs). On the June 24, 1996 Nitro, Harlem Heat defeated Lex Luger and Sting to capture their fifth WCW World Tag Team titles. Three days after losing the tag team titles to the Steiner Brothers, Harlem Heat regained the titles back from the Steiners on July 27. On September 23, Booker T and Stevie Ray were defeated by Public Enemy (Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge) but took the titles back for the seventh time on October 1. They lost the Tag Team Championship to the Outsiders (Kevin Nash and Scott Hall) on October 27. Subsequently, they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces. They then entered into a brief feud against Col. Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they won. In 1997, they feuded with Public Enemy (Grunge & Rocco), The Steiners, and the nWo. In fall 1997, they fired Sherri and added a new manager, Jacqueline. They were briefly put out of action by the nWo and returned to feud with the Faces of Fear (Meng and The Barbarian). Stevie then took five months off from WCW to recover from an ankle injury and Jacqueline left for the WWF. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER	Booker T. Huffman Jr. (born March 1, 1966) better known by his ring name Booker T, is an American professional wrestler, professional wrestling promoter and color commentator. He is currently signed to WWE, and is also the owner and founder of the independent promotion Reality of Wrestling (ROW) in Texas City, Texas. Booker has been named by peers and industry commentators as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of his era; he was voted WWE's greatest World Heavyweight Champion in a 2013 viewer poll. Booker is best known for his time in World Championship Wrestling (WCW), the World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment (WWF/E), and Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA), holding 35 championships between those organizations. He is the most decorated wrestler in WCW history, having held 21 titles, including a record six WCW World Television Championships (along with being the first African American titleholder), and a record eleven WCW World Tag Team Championships: ten as one half of Harlem Heat with his brother, Lash "Stevie Ray" Huffman in WCW (most reigns within that company), and one in the WWF with Test. Booker was the final WCW World Heavyweight Champion and WCW United States Heavyweight Champion within the active WCW organisation. Booker is a six-time world champion in professional wrestling, having won the WCW World Heavyweight Championship five times, and WWE's World Heavyweight Championship once. With his fifth WCW Championship win (which occurred in the WWF), Booker T became the second African-American to win a world championship in WWF/E (after The Rock), and also the first to be of non-mixed race. He is also the winner of the 2006 King of the Ring tournament, the sixteenth Triple Crown Champion, and the eighth Grand Slam Champion (under original format) in WWE history. As the ninth WCW Triple Crown Champion, Booker is one of five men to achieve both the WWE and WCW Triple Crowns. He has headlined multiple pay-per-view events for the WWF/E, WCW and TNA throughout his career. Booker was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame on April 6, 2013, by his brother, Lash. Both he and Lash were inducted together into the 2019 class on April 6, 2019 as Harlem Heat, rendering Booker a two-time Hall of Famer. Early life Huffman was born the youngest of eight children, in Plain Dealing, Louisiana, though his birthplace is often misidentified as Houston, Texas. By the time Booker was 13, both of his parents had died and he lived with his 16-year-old sister. He would move in with his older brother Lash "Stevie Ray" Huffman at age 17. In high school, Huffman was a drum major. He also played football and basketball. Professional wrestling career Early Career (1986–1993) As a single father working at a storage company in Houston, Texas, Huffman was looking to make a better life for himself and his son. His brother Lash (Stevie Ray) suggested that he and Booker check out a new wrestling school being opened, run by Ivan Putski, in conjunction with his Western Wrestling Alliance organization. His boss from the storage company sponsored the money to pay for the wrestling lessons. Booker trained under Scott Casey, who helped to turn Booker's background as a gangster and dancer into "sports entertainment", teaching the newcomer in-ring psychology and ring generalship. Eight weeks later, Booker debuted as "G.I. Bro" on Putski's Western Wrestling Alliance Live! program. The character was a tie-in to the raging Gulf War and the WWF's Sgt. Slaughter angle. Even though the WWA met its demise some time later, Booker continued to wrestle on the Texas independent circuit, often with his brother Lash, who performed as Stevie Ray. They were spotted by Skandor Akbar who hired them to work for the Global Wrestling Federation (GWF), where he and Eddie Gilbert were involved. Gilbert teamed Stevie Ray and Booker T together as the Ebony Experience, and they won the GWF Tag Team Championship on July 31, 1992. During their time with GWF, they held the tag title a total of three times. Subsequently, Booker T and Stevie Ray left the GWF to work for World Championship Wrestling. World Championship Wrestling Harlem Heat (1993–1997) Booker and his brother Stevie Ray signed with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) after Sid Vicious recommended they sign with the company. In August 1993, they debuted as the tag team Harlem Heat, with Booker renamed Kole and Lash renamed Kane. They became heels and were on Harley Race and Col. Rob Parker's team in the WarGames match at Fall Brawl on September 19 against Sting, Davey Boy Smith, Dustin Rhodes, and The Shockmaster. They lost the match but were over as heels because of the caliber of faces they wrestled. In 1994, they acquired the services of Sensational Sherri, dubbed 'Sister' Sherri, as their manager and changed their names back to Booker T and Stevie Ray, at their request. By the end of 1994, they held the WCW Tag Team Championship after defeating Stars and Stripes (The Patriot and Marcus Alexander Bagwell) in December. After dropping the title to The Nasty Boys, Harlem Heat regained the belts on June 24, 1995. Afterward, Harlem Heat got into a feud with Col. Parker's "Stud Stable" of "Dirty" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Parker and Sherri were carrying on a love affair and Parker eventually left the Stud Stable in favor of the Heat to be with Sherri. Harlem Heat won the WCW World Tag Team titles at Fall Brawl 1995, defeating Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck. Their third title reign only lasted one day, but the duo regained the tag team title nine days later from The American Males (Buff Bagwell and Scotty Riggs). On the June 24, 1996 Nitro, Harlem Heat defeated Lex Luger and Sting to capture their fifth WCW World Tag Team titles. Three days after losing the tag team titles to the Steiner Brothers, Harlem Heat regained the titles back from the Steiners on July 27. On September 23, Booker T and Stevie Ray were defeated by Public Enemy (Rocco Rock and Johnny Grunge) but took the titles back for the seventh time on October 1. They lost the Tag Team Championship to the Outsiders (Kevin Nash and Scott Hall) on October 27. Subsequently, they fired Col. Parker and beat him up and became full-fledged faces. They then entered into a brief feud against Col. Parker's newest team The Amazing French Canadians, a feud they won. In 1997, they feuded with Public Enemy (Grunge & Rocco), The Steiners, and the nWo. In fall 1997, they fired Sherri and added a new manager, Jacqueline. They were briefly put out of action by the nWo and returned to feud with the Faces of Fear (Meng and The Barbarian). Stevie then took five months off from WCW to recover from an ankle injury and Jacqueline left for the WWF. World Television Champion (1997–1999) Booker made the transition into singles action and won the WCW World Television Championship from Disco Inferno on the December 29, 1997 episode of Nitro. Booker feuded over the title with Perry Saturn and Rick Martel culminating in a gauntlet match at SuperBrawl VIII. Martel, the man that was originally supposed to win the match, went down early due to a knee injury, meaning the finish and the remainder of the match had to be called in the ring. During spring 1998, Booker began feuding with Chris Benoit. Benoit cost Booker the TV title during a match against Fit Finlay. As a result, Booker and Benoit engaged in a "best-of-seven series" with the winner meeting Finlay for the title. After seven matches and interference from Bret Hart and Stevie Ray, Booker T won the series, and on June 14, regained the Television Championship. Booker scored a clean pinfall victory over Bret Hart on the edition of February 22 of Nitro. The following month, he regained the TV Championship from Scott Steiner, who, in turn, defeated Booker in the finals of the WCW United States Heavyweight Championship tournament. Booker lost the Television title to Rick Steiner a month later at Slamboree. Harlem Heat reunion (1999–2000) By mid-1999, Booker had convinced his brother, Stevie Ray, to leave the nWo and reunite Harlem Heat. Harlem Heat defeated Bam Bam Bigelow and Kanyon for the WCW World Tag Team titles at Road Wild. They lost the WCW World Tag Team titles to Barry and Kendall Windham on August 23, but Harlem Heat regained them about a month later at Fall Brawl. When The Filthy Animals were stripped of the WCW World Tag Team belts due to an injury suffered by Rey Mysterio Jr., the title was put up in a three-way dance at Halloween Havoc. Harlem Heat claimed their tenth WCW World Tag Team title defeating Hugh Morrus and Brian Knobs and Konnan and Kidman. By late 1999, a female bodybuilder named Midnight had joined Harlem Heat. Stevie neglected her help and started disputing with Booker over her. Stevie Ray eventually challenged Midnight in a match that decided whether or not she would stay with Harlem Heat. After being defeated with a surprise small package, Stevie Ray turned on both Booker and Midnight to form Harlem Heat, Inc. with Big T, Kash, and J. Biggs. Stevie Ray and Big T dubbed themselves Harlem Heat 2000. Throughout this period, Huffman was referred to simply as Booker, as Harlem Heat 2000 won the rights to the name "T" in a match with Big T against Booker on February 20, 2000 at SuperBrawl X. Kidman and Booker T defeated Harlem Heat 2000 (Ray and Big T) at Uncensored 2000. When Vince Russo and Eric Bischoff formed The New Blood, Huffman eventually completely changed his in-ring persona, helping lead Captain Rection's military-themed Misfits In Action stable as G.I. Bro, reprising his gimmicks from his days in the WWA. He defeated Shawn Stasiak at the Great American Bash in a Boot Camp match. He returned to the Booker T name on the June 19 Nitro, promoting Rection to the status of General and demanding the Misfits start standing up to the New Blood. WCW World Heavyweight Champion (2000–2001) Huffman was elevated to main event status in 2000. After WCW booker Vince Russo grew disgruntled with Hulk Hogan's politics, he fired Hogan during the live broadcast of Bash at the Beach and announced an impromptu match between Jeff Jarrett and Huffman for the WCW World Heavyweight Championship. Huffman won the match, in the process becoming the second ever African American champion in WCW after Ron Simmons, and the third African American to win a World Heavyweight title. He lost the title to Kevin Nash on August 28 on Nitro. He regained the title a few weeks later in a steel cage match with Nash at Fall Brawl, but again lost the title, this time to Vince Russo himself in a cage match (Russo was speared out of the cage by Goldberg and won the title), Russo vacated the title and Booker won it for the third time in a San Francisco 49er Box Match against Jeff Jarrett on the October 2 episode of Nitro. Booker's next feud was with Scott Steiner, to whom he eventually lost the title in a Straitjacket steel cage match. Steiner won by TKO when he put an unconscious Booker into the Steiner Recliner at Mayhem. Steiner was WCW's longest reigning champion in years, whilst Booker was briefly out with an injury. Booker returned to the roster and defeated Rick Steiner for the WCW United States Heavyweight Championship at Greed. This made Booker the ninth WCW Triple Crown winner. On the final episode of Nitro, he defeated Scott Steiner to win the WCW World Heavyweight Championship for the fourth time. According to sports journalist Michael Landsberg, Huffman was salaried at "close to a million dollars a year" in WCW. He won a total of twenty-one titles within the organization, making him the most decorated performer in its history. Booker was also the reigning WCW United States Heavyweight Champion and WCW World Heavyweight Champion when he accepted a contract with the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment The Alliance (2001–2002) After WCW was bought by the World Wrestling Federation in March 2001, Booker T made his debut at the King of the Ring pay-per-view in 2001 attacking WWF Champion Stone Cold Steve Austin during his match, promptly injuring him in his very first move in the WWF. He later turned heel and became a leading member of The Alliance during the Invasion storyline. In his debut match in the company, Booker defended his WCW Championship against Buff Bagwell on the July 2 episode of Raw; sports journalist Michael Landsberg reported that many have called this bout "the worst match ever". At InVasion, The Alliance defeated Team WWF when Austin joined the Alliance. On the July 26 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T gave up his WCW United States Championship and handed it over to Chris Kanyon. He later lost the WCW Championship to Kurt Angle, but he went on to win the title back on the July 30 episode of Raw. Booker T kept the title until SummerSlam, when he lost it to The Rock after feuding with him over the similarity in their gimmicks and their identical finishing moves, the Book End/Rock Bottom. Booker T won the WCW Tag Team Championship for an eleventh time, this time with Test, and he also had a WWF Tag Team Championship reign with Test. At the Survivor Series, Booker T was eliminated third by The Rock after a roll-up and eventually The Alliance was defeated, causing them to disband. In its aftermath, Booker remained a heel, and he joined forces with Vince McMahon and The Boss Man in December to feud with Steve Austin. After Booker T cost Austin a match against Chris Jericho for the Undisputed WWF Championship at Vengeance, Austin gained revenge by attacking Booker T in a grocery store by covering him in food. Then the week after Booker T vandalized Austin's truck causing Austin to chase Booker T around a bingo hall and a church. Booker T's first WrestleMania appearance was at WrestleMania X8 against Edge, a match he lost. They feuded over who would appear in a fictional Japanese shampoo commercial. When the brand extension was introduced in March, Booker T was drafted to the Raw brand. At Insurrextion, Booker briefly held the WWF Hardcore Championship twice, defeating Stevie Richards only to lose it to Crash Holly seconds later. He then re-defeated Crash and lost the title to Stevie Richards a few minutes later. Feud with Evolution (2002–2003) Goldust began trying to start a tag team with Booker, but Goldust kept costing Booker matches. With the nWo now operating in WWE, Booker T was eventually invited into the faction. His time there was short-lived, when he was kicked out of the group by Shawn Michaels after a superkick from Michaels. Booker then turned face and found a partnership with Goldust and the pair teamed to battle the nWo. Booker and Goldust had a WWE Tag Team Championship match against The Un-Americans (Christian and Lance Storm) at SummerSlam, but The Un-Americans retained after interference from Test. At No Mercy, Booker and Goldust battled Chris Jericho and Christian for the World Tag Team Championship, but they lost the match with Jericho using the title belt on Goldust. He spent the rest of 2002 teaming with Goldust. They won the World Tag Team Championship at Armageddon in a Tag Team Elimination match defeating the teams of Christian and Chris Jericho, Lance Storm and William Regal, and the Dudley Boyz. They held the belts for about three weeks, when they lost them to Regal and Storm. Booker and Goldust lost the rematch and decided to go their separate ways. The gimmick for Booker and Goldust was Goldust being a strange, yet dependable ally who Booker eventually warmed up to after initial skepticism. By 2003, however, Booker T's popularity had soared and he amicably separated from Goldust, at Goldust's request, in order to pursue the World Heavyweight Championship. In February 2003, he eliminated The Rock to win a battle royal to become the number one contender to the World Heavyweight Championship at WrestleMania XIX. Booker targeted Evolution after Batista and Randy Orton attacked Booker's former partner, Goldust. Several weeks before WrestleMania, the incumbent champion and Evolution's leader, Triple H, cut a controversial promo on Booker T. Triple H downplayed Booker T's WCW success, pointing out that the WCW World Heavyweight Championship had been held by non-wrestlers like booker Vince Russo and actor David Arquette, calling WCW and its title "a joke", despite the fact that, as World Heavyweight Champion, Triple H was holding the WCW World Heavyweight Championship's physical belt, the Big Gold Belt, and that Triple H's Evolution stablemate, Ric Flair, had been a multiple-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion. He said that "people like" Booker T would never win world championships in WWE. This promo is often interpreted as racist due to Triple H referencing Booker T's "nappy" hair and implying that Booker T was just in WWE to dance and entertain for "people like" Triple H. During the WrestleMania XIX press conference Michael Cole asked Triple H as to whether he had deliberately cut a racist promo, Triple H claimed this was not the case and that he was just referring to Booker's criminal past. A week later, Booker attacked Triple H in the bathroom and laid him out after Triple H had thrown a dollar bill at him, ordering Booker to get him a towel. However, Booker T lost to Triple H at WrestleMania. For several weeks, he teamed with Shawn Michaels and Kevin Nash in a feud against Triple H, Ric Flair, and Chris Jericho. At Backlash, Booker's team lost when Triple H pinned Nash after a sledgehammer shot. Various feuds (2003–2005) Afterward, Booker set his sights on the newly reactivated Intercontinental Championship. After losing a battle royal for the title at Judgment Day, Booker feuded with the champion Christian. After a few matches, Booker defeated Christian to become the new Intercontinental Champion on the July 7 episode of Raw. About a month later, because of a nagging back injury, Booker lost the Intercontinental title back to Christian at a non-televised house show on August 10. Booker, meanwhile, was out of action until October. Booker returned on the October 20 episode of Raw and subsequently joined Team Austin at Survivor Series for a match to determine whether Eric Bischoff or Stone Cold Steve Austin (both co-general managers) would be the sole General Manager of Raw. Team Bischoff won the match. Booker then feuded with Mark Henry, who eliminated him in the Survivor Series match. Booker defeated Henry at Armageddon. On the February 16, 2004 episode of Raw, Booker T and Rob Van Dam defeated Ric Flair and Batista for the World Tag Team Championship. Booker and Van Dam held the titles for a month, even defending the belts at WrestleMania XX in a Fatal 4-Way tag team match. Eight days later on the March 22 episode of Raw, they lost the World Tag Team Championship back to Ric Flair and Batista. He and Rob Van Dam, never got their rematch due to Rob Van Dam being drafted to SmackDown! that very same night. On March 23, 2004 he was "traded" (along with the Dudley Boyz) to the SmackDown! brand in exchange for Triple H, but as part of a new storyline, he appeared unhappy with the move calling SmackDown! "the minor leagues" and even disrespected Eddie Guerrero, the brand's WWE Champion, turning heel in the process. Later on, Booker T bragged about how he was the biggest star on SmackDown! and feuded with The Undertaker. Booker tried to utilize voodoo magic to try to overcome his "supernatural" foe; however, it did nothing to prevent him from losing to the Undertaker at Judgment Day. In mid-2004, Booker T set his sights on the United States Championship along with its champion, John Cena. After Cena got on the bad side of General Manager Kurt Angle, he did his best to get the title away from Cena. Cena successfully defended the title at The Great American Bash in a four-way elimination match against Booker, René Duprée, and Rob Van Dam. After Cena was stripped of his title by Angle for "laying a hand" on the GM, Booker took advantage of the situation and won an eight-man elimination match to win the vacant United States Championship, thus becoming the one-hundredth United States Champion in history, in a match that also featured Cena, Dupree, Billy Gunn, Charlie Haas, Luther Reigns, Kenzo Suzuki and Van Dam. Booker won by last eliminating both Cena and Van Dam in the course of less than 10 seconds After Angle was fired by Mr. McMahon for embellishing his injuries, Theodore Long began his first tenure as SmackDown! General Manager, and booked a best-of-five series of matches for the United States Championship between Booker and Cena. The first match took place at SummerSlam in Toronto and saw Cena gain the pinfall victory to go up 1–0 in the series. Booker would bounce back and win the next two matches, on the August 26 edition of SmackDown! in Fresno, California and a live event the next night in Sydney, Australia, to take a 2–1 lead. The next match in the series wouldn't come until the September 16 SmackDown! from Spokane, Washington, where Cena won and tied the series at two apiece. The series culminated at No Mercy, where Cena won the series 3–2, and thusly, the United States Championship. On October 21, SmackDown! General Manager Theodore Long placed Booker in a six-man tag team match with Rob Van Dam and Rey Mysterio against John "Bradshaw" Layfield (JBL), René Duprée, and Kenzo Suzuki. JBL expected Booker to betray his partners, but instead Booker pinned him, thus turning face again. Booker T faced JBL for the WWE Championship at the Survivor Series on November 14, but lost after he was hit in the head with the championship belt. The next night, Booker T demanded a rematch, citing Orlando Jordan's interference. He was then joined by Eddie Guerrero and The Undertaker who also wanted a shot at JBL's title, prompting Theodore Long to make a fatal four-way match for the WWE Championship at Armageddon. Once again, Booker failed to win the title, as JBL retained it. He then briefly teamed with Eddie Guerrero, at one point challenging Mysterio and Van Dam for the WWE Tag Team Championship, and feuded with Heidenreich. Booker won a 30-man Battle Royal dark match at WrestleMania 21 last eliminating Raw's Viscera and Chris Masters. Subsequently, Booker was part of the tournament to name a new number one contender and made it to the Final Four. After Kurt Angle eliminated Booker, he returned the favor, costing Angle the match against JBL. The storyline then turned to a sexual nature, as Angle began stalking Booker's new wife, Sharmell. Booker defeated Angle at Judgment Day. On the May 26 episode of SmackDown!, Booker participated in a "Winners Choice" Battle Royal, with the winner choosing his opponent for the next week. Kurt Angle won and wanted to wrestle Sharmell. Booker protested, and the match was made into a Handicap match. Angle won by pinning Sharmell in a sexual position. The next week, Booker gained revenge on Angle, defeating him with a Scissors Kick. On the June 30 episode of SmackDown!, JBL defeated Christian, The Undertaker, Chris Benoit, Muhammad Hassan, and Booker T in a six-man elimination match for the SmackDown! Championship. During the match, Booker got specifically involved with Christian. Booker later defeated Christian at The Great American Bash. United States Champion (2005–2006) Booker T began teaming with Chris Benoit, eying his United States Championship again. Benoit was allowed to pick his next challenger to see who would face him at No Mercy, so Booker, Christian, and Orlando Jordan tried to impress Benoit by winning matches. He instead decided not choose one opponent, so he made it a fatal four-way for No Mercy, where Benoit successfully defended his title. On the October 21 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T defeated Benoit for the United States Championship, due to unseen help from Sharmell. Theodore Long later showed footage of Sharmell interfering in Booker's matches. Booker went to apologize to Benoit and give him a rematch, but then attacked Benoit, busting him open with the United States title belt and turning heel once again. Booker then boasted that he had been fully aware of what Sharmell had been doing and had been playing dumb to fool everyone. On the November 25 episode of SmackDown!, Booker T defended the United States Championship against Benoit. The match ended when Benoit superplexed Booker and two referees made a three count on either competitor, claiming that their wrestler had won. Booker was stripped of the belt by Theodore Long, because of the confusion of who won since they pinned each other at the same time. Long decided to put Benoit and Booker against each other in a best of seven series, just as the two had in their WCW days. Booker took an early 3–0 lead. In a must win match during Armageddon, Benoit was able to defeat Booker T to bring the series to 3–1. At a house show, Booker was injured, and he did not wrestle again until after the "Best of Seven" series with Benoit was completed. Booker was scheduled to face Benoit in Match 5 of the Best of Seven Series at the December 30 taping of SmackDown!. At the beginning of the show, General Manager Theodore Long said that Booker would have to forfeit. Both Booker and Benoit protested, with Benoit not wanting a cheap victory. Booker managed to persuade Long to allow him to choose a stand-in for the matches. Booker chose Randy Orton as his replacement. Benoit was able to tie the series 3–3 after beating Orton in two consecutive matches on the December 30 and January 6, 2006 episodes of SmackDown!. Orton, however, was able to defeat Benoit in the final match on the January 13 episode of SmackDown! to win the series and the title for Booker T, who held the title until No Way Out where Benoit won it back. On the February 24 episode of SmackDown!, Booker and Sharmell provided guest commentary for a match involving The Boogeyman. After defeating his opponents, Boogeyman dumped a bucket of worms onto the announce table where they were sitting, frightening the two. Over the next few weeks, Boogeyman would stalk Booker and Sharmell. Booker and Boogeyman were set to face off on the March 18 Saturday Night's Main Event XXXII, but the match was canceled due to Booker faking a knee injury to escape competition. The feud eventually culminated at WrestleMania 22, with Booker and Sharmell losing to Boogeyman. The couple received a restraining order against The Boogeyman on the April 7 episode of SmackDown!, ending the feud. King Booker and World Heavyweight Champion (2006–2007) Booker next entered the 2006 King of the Ring tournament on SmackDown!, advancing through to the finals due to a bye as his semi-final opponent, Kurt Angle, was unable to wrestle. The finals were held at Judgment Day where Booker defeated Bobby Lashley. Upon winning the King of the Ring tournament, Booker began wrestling as "King Booker" and began acting like he was an actual monarch ruling "The SmackDown! Kingdom". Booker formed a royal court that included his wife, Queen Sharmell, Sir William Regal, and Sir Finlay, and began including the mannerisms and attire of a stereotypical English-style king as part of the character, all the way down to wearing a crown and cape and speaking in a fake English accent. However, whenever King Booker would get angry he would launch into a tirade in the style of Booker T (an example of this was an episode of SmackDown! where Theodore Long would inform him he would be facing The Undertaker), which lent some comedic aspect to the character; he even went as far as having Lashley kiss his "royal" feet. After gaining his title of King, Booker continued to feud with Lashley. After Lashley defeated John "Bradshaw" Layfield (JBL) for the United States Championship at the end of May, Booker began chasing after the title and even resorted to making Lashley kiss his "royal feet" on the June 2 episode of SmackDown!. The feud ended after a steel cage match on the June 30 episode of SmackDown! where Lashley defeated Booker by escaping the cage to retain the United States Championship. The next week, Booker entered a battle royal on SmackDown! with the winner to challenge Rey Mysterio for his World Heavyweight Championship at The Great American Bash. Booker won the battle royal and then defeated Mysterio at The Great American Bash to win the World Heavyweight Championship after Chavo Guerrero betrayed Mysterio by hitting him with a steel chair. This was Booker's first world championship since joining WWE and the win caused him to proclaim himself as the "King of the World". This win would also make Booker the sixteenth Triple Crown Champion and eighth Grand Slam Champion (under the original format) in the history of the WWE. After Booker won the World Heavyweight Championship, he began a rivalry with the returning former champion Batista, who vowed to regain the title he was forced to forfeit due to injury. This rivalry spilled over to real life when the two got into a legitimate fistfight at a SummerSlam pay-per-view commercial shoot, reportedly due to Batista considering himself superior to the rest of the roster due to his quick climb to main event status. According to sources, both men were left bloodied and bruised, however Booker was reportedly praised by many wrestlers in the back for speaking his mind to Batista about his attitude. At SummerSlam, Booker lost to Batista by disqualification after Queen Sharmell interfered on his behalf (thus retaining the title), but at No Mercy, Booker defeated Batista, Lashley and his own stablemate, Finlay, in a Fatal 4-Way match. Before the match, Booker assaulted Sir William Regal, resulting in the breakup of the King's Court. Despite the break-up of his Court, Booker lost to Batista by disqualification on the October 20 episode on SmackDown!, due to interference from WWE Champion John Cena from Raw and ECW World Champion Big Show, the two of whom King Booker was to face at Cyber Sunday in a "champion of champions" match. At Cyber Sunday, the fans voted for the World Heavyweight Championship to be on the line. Booker retained after defeating Big Show and Cena with help from Kevin Federline. After Cyber Sunday, the feud between King Booker and Batista continued with Batista unable to wrest the title from Booker. Eventually this led to a match at Survivor Series on November 26, where Booker declared that if Batista failed to defeat him this time, it would be the last World Heavyweight Championship match he would receive as long as Booker was champion. At Survivor Series, SmackDown! General Manager Theodore Long decided that if Booker got counted out or disqualified, he would lose the title. Late in the match, Queen Sharmell handed Booker his title belt while referee Nick Patrick was not looking. While she had Patrick distracted, Booker attempted to hit Batista with the belt. Batista moved out of the way, knocked the belt out of Booker's hands and hit him in the head with it, and King Booker lost the World Heavyweight Championship to Batista. After losing the title, Booker feuded alongside former royal court member Finlay against Batista and John Cena, which led up to Armageddon where they lost. While competing in the Royal Rumble match, King Booker was eliminated by Kane. A frustrated Booker returned to the ring illegally and eliminated Kane. This started a short feud between the two resulting in a match at No Way Out, which Kane won. On the February 23 episode of SmackDown!, Booker won a Falls Count Anywhere Money in the Bank qualifying match, defeating Kane (with assistance from The Great Khali) and earned himself a spot in the match at WrestleMania 23. At WrestleMania, Matt Hardy set up Sharmell for a Twist of Fate during the Money in the Bank match with the briefcase in Booker's grasp – thus forcing him to choose between a guaranteed title shot and his wife. He chose to defend Sharmell and lost the match. On the April 6 episode of SmackDown!, Booker attempted to take revenge. However, he lost the match against Matt Hardy, and Sharmell declared her disappointment in him and slapped him. In an attempt to impress Sharmell, Booker attacked The Undertaker but was Tombstoned on an announce table. Booker was removed from television to deal with a knee injury. Draft to RAW, WWE Championship pursuit and departure (2007) On the June 11 episode of Raw, both King Booker and Queen Sharmell were drafted to the Raw brand as part of the WWE Draft. He then began a short feud with John Cena over the WWE Championship, Booker would wrestle Cena in a Five Pack Challenge along with Bobby Lashley, Mick Foley and Randy Orton at Vengeance: Night of Champions for the title in a losing effort. Cena would retain at the event by pinning Foley. On the July 16 episode of Raw, King Booker came to the ring using Triple H's theme music "The King of Kings", even using his video. King Booker declared that neither Triple H nor Jerry Lawler could be known as "The King". Booker began a feud with Lawler, defeating him on the August 6 episode of Raw where the loser had to crown the winner the next week. When the time came, Lawler refused, declaring that Triple H was still a king and announcing that King Booker would battle Triple H at SummerSlam. Booker attacked Lawler, throwing him into the ring post and hitting him with a television monitor. At SummerSlam, Booker lost to the returning Triple H. On the August 27 episode of Raw, Booker wrestled against John Cena in a non-title match, which he lost by disqualification when Randy Orton interfered. In August, he was linked to Signature Pharmacy, a company thought to be distributing performance-enhancing drugs. He was suspended by WWE for violating its Wellness Policy. He denied using any drugs and being a customer of Signature Pharmacy. In October 2007, Booker T requested his and Sharmell's release from their WWE contracts due to the pressure he had in WWE and being burned out, which WWE granted. Total Nonstop Action Wrestling Feud with Bobby Roode (2007–2008) At the Genesis pay-per-view on November 11, 2007, Huffman debuted in Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) as Sting's mystery partner in a tag team match against Kurt Angle and Kevin Nash for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship, reverting to his Booker T character. His wife Sharmell also debuted, interfering in the match on Booker and Sting's behalf when Karen Angle interfered on behalf of Kurt Angle and Nash. On the November 29 episode of Impact!, Booker said he came to TNA to test his skills against the young talent, take TNA to a higher level, and win the TNA World Heavyweight Championship. Robert Roode came to the ring and challenged Booker to a match, claiming he has been pushed down by washed-up wrestlers and has-beens. Booker won his Impact! debut match, but afterwards, Christian Cage and Robert Roode beat down Booker until Kaz made the save. At Turning Point, Booker and Kaz defeated Roode and Cage when Booker pinned Cage. Booker and Sharmell won a mixed tag team match against Robert Roode and Ms. Brooks at Final Resolution. After the match, Roode punched Sharmell in the face, leading to a match at Against All Odds. While the punch was intended to be a work, Roode had in fact made contact with Sharmell during the punch, dislocating her jaw and causing her to be off TV for a few weeks, therefore making it into a shoot. The rivalry, however, went ahead as planned where Booker and Roode wrestled to a double-countout at Against All Odds, which saw them brawl to the parking lot. Roode defeated Booker in strap match at Destination X after hitting Booker with a pair of handcuffs. In a special live episode of Impact!, Booker T and Robert Roode had another outing, this time with the fans being able to vote on the stipulation of the match. At Booker's request during a pre-match promo, the match became a First Blood Match, beating the Last Man Standing and I Quit stipulations. Booker T would go on to win the match-up. At Lockdown, Booker T and Sharmell defeated Robert Roode and Payton Banks after Sharmell pinned Banks with a roll-up. The Main Event Mafia (2008–2010) Booker T turned heel for the first time in TNA at Sacrifice by attacking Christian Cage and Rhino from behind with a steel chair. This came about as a result of losing a tag team match up against Christian Cage and Rhino, with them furthering themselves in the Deuces Wild Tag Team Tournament. Booker then competed in the King of the Mountain match for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship at Slammiversary. He was seconds away from winning the match, when Kevin Nash stopped him and performed a Jackknife Powerbomb; Samoa Joe would later go on to win the match. On the next Impact!, Booker challenged Joe to a title match at Victory Road, which Joe would later accept. Also around this time he reverted to a gimmick similar to his King Booker gimmick albeit while proclaiming himself a supposed king of Africa. The match at Victory Road ended in a draw after Sharmell replaced the referee and counted after the match was already over. At Hard Justice, Samoa Joe defeated Booker after a guitar shot, thus reclaiming physical possession of the title belt, which Booker had kept after Victory Road. Later he introduced the TNA Legends Championship and became the first official champion. Booker T successfully defended the title at Turning Point against Cage. At Final Resolution, Booker T, Kevin Nash, Scott Steiner, and Sting defeated The TNA Front Line (A.J. Styles, Brother Devon, Brother Ray, and Samoa Joe) in an eight-man tag team match to allow Sting to retain his TNA World Heavyweight Championship. At Genesis, Booker T, Scott Steiner, and Cute Kip lost a six-man tag team match to Mick Foley, A.J. Styles, and Brother Devon. The next month at Against All Odds, Booker T defeated Shane Sewell to retain the Legends Championship. Booker T lost the title to A.J. Styles at Destination X. At Lockdown, Team Angle (Booker T, Kevin Nash, Kurt Angle, and Scott Steiner) lost to Team Jarrett (A.J. Styles, Christopher Daniels, Jeff Jarrett, and Samoa Joe) in a Lethal Lockdown match. At Sacrifice, Booker T received a rematch for the Legends Championship, but lost to A.J. Styles in a "I Quit" match. Booker T went go on to form the Mafia's resident tag team with Scott Steiner, and at Victory Road, Steiner and Booker defeated Beer Money, Inc. to win the TNA World Tag Team Championship, marking Booker's 15th World Tag Team title reign overall. Then at Hard Justice, Booker T and Steiner retained the World Tag Team Championship against Team 3D. Prior to No Surrender, Booker, Steiner, and British Invasion won a match to gain the man advantage at No Surrender's Lethal Lockdown match against Team 3D and Beer Money, Inc. Even with the advantage, Booker T's team lost at No Surrender when James Storm of Beer Money pinned Doug Williams of The British Invasion. At Bound for Glory, Booker and Steiner lost the TNA World Tag Team Titles to the British Invasion in a four way Full Metal Mayhem Tag Team match, which also included Team 3D and Beer Money; during the match Booker was taken out on a stretcher. Afterwards it was reported that the PPV had been Booker's final appearance with the company, and his and Sharmell's profiles were removed from the official TNA roster. On May 21, 2010, Booker T made a one night return to TNA at a live event in Lake Charles, Louisiana, replacing A.J. Styles, who was unable to attend the event due to travel issues, and wrestled Rob Van Dam for the TNA World Heavyweight Championship in a losing effort. Puerto Rico and Mexico (2009–2010) Booker T debuted in the International Wrestling Association (IWA) on Histeria Boricua, a special event held on January 6, 2009. There he was booked against Chicano, the incumbent IWA Undisputed Heavyweight Champion. The match was won by Cotto, who reversed a "Book End" attempt and scored a pinfall victory. On July 11, 2010, Booker T was booked by World Wrestling Council in a match against Carlito which also involved Orlando Colón and El Mesias. On September 16, 2010, Booker T made his debut for Mexican promotion Perros del Mal. In the main event of the evening he teamed up with Dr. Wagner Jr. and El Mesías, who represented rival promotion AAA, against El Hijo del Perro Aguayo, Damián 666 and Halloween. After Aguayo pinned El Mesías, Booker turned on Wagner, unmasked him and joined Perros del Mal. Return to WWE Color commentator and part-time wrestler (2011–2012) On January 30, 2011 Booker T returned to WWE to take part in the Royal Rumble. Booker entered the match at number 21 and was eliminated by Mason Ryan. On the February 1 taping of SmackDown, Huffman debuted as the show's new color commentator, working beside Josh Mathews and Michael Cole, replacing Matt Striker. He coached on the returning Tough Enough competition, and at Elimination Chamber he introduced Trish Stratus as a fellow coach. On the June 6 episode of Raw, Booker wrestled his first match on the brand in four years, gaining a victory against Jack Swagger by count out. On the November 21 episode of Raw, Cody Rhodes threw water in Booker T's face after Rhodes allegedly heard Booker T criticize him, thus starting a conflict between the two. On the November 29 episode of SmackDown Booker was scheduled to face Rhodes in a match but it did not happen after Rhodes attacked him from behind him during a backstage interview. On the December 9 episode of SmackDown, Rhodes attacked Booker again while heading to the announcer's table leaving him with paramedics. Later that night, Booker T attacked Rhodes during his match with Daniel Bryan, leading to an Intercontinental Championship match at TLC: Tables, Ladders & Chairs, which Rhodes won. On the December 26 episode of Raw, Booker defeated Rhodes in a non-title match. On the January 6, 2012, episode of SmackDown, Booker challenged Rhodes a second time for the Intercontinental Championship, but once again failed to win the title. Booker T along with fellow commentators Jerry Lawler and Michael Cole all participated in the 2012 Royal Rumble. On the March 26, 2012 episode of Raw, Booker T saved Teddy Long from an attempted attack by Mark Henry, thus becoming the sixth and final member of Team Teddy at WrestleMania XXVIII, where Team Johnny emerged victorious. This was his last official match for the WWE. On the July 9 episode of Raw, Jerry Lawler won by pinfall against Michael Cole in a WrestleMania XXVII rematch. However, Booker, who was subbing for Lawler on commentary, threw Cole back into the ring after he tried to escape. This caused the anonymous Raw General Manager to reverse the decision and give Cole the win as a result of a disqualification. SmackDown General Manager and Hall of Fame (2012–2013) On July 31, 2012, Booker T was appointed the new General Manager of SmackDown. Booker would quickly add Eve Torres and Theodore Long to his staff, as his assistant and senior adviser respectively. Booker was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame by his brother, Stevie Ray, the night before WrestleMania 29. On the April 19 SmackDown, Booker became angry with Long for making matches without his consent. Big Show arrived and thanked Long for doing a better job than Booker, further infuriating him. On the April 22 Raw, upset with Long for making a World Heavyweight Championship match at Extreme Rules, made it a Triple Threat match. Booker took time off for a torn distal triceps, and had surgery for it on June 12. On the July 19 SmackDown, he returned to continue as SmackDown General Manager, but soon lost the job to Vickie Guerrero, on Vince McMahon's orders. Return to commentary and pre-show panelist (2014–present) Since 2014, Booker T has commonly done work on the WWE Network, including the Raw pre-show and also being a part of the "expert panel" on Kickoff shows before each pay-per-view event. On the 2015 premiere of Raw, Booker T replaced Jerry Lawler, who was suffering from diverticulitis, for commentating. However, it was later announced that Booker would be returning on a full-time basis to take Lawler's place on Raw, with Lawler moving to SmackDown. On the March 30 episode of Raw, Booker, along with JBL and Michael Cole, were injured by Brock Lesnar after Seth Rollins refused Lesnar his WWE World Heavyweight Championship rematch. Booker was replaced by Byron Saxton for commentating as he became a coach for the sixth season of WWE Tough Enough. On August 6, 2016, Booker T replaced Tommy Dreamer in an intergender tag team match for Dreamer's House of Hardcore promotion. Booker T returned to his old "King Booker" gimmick in a segment with the SmackDown Live Survivor Series tag teams where he gave a motivational speech and convinced Breezango (Tyler Breeze and Fandango) to join the team. In December 2016, after Jerry Lawler and Lita left the pre-show team, WWE ended their Raw and SmackDown pre-shows leaving Booker T to the WWE pay-per-view pre-shows and other WWE Network specials. Following the 2017 WWE Superstar Shake-up, Booker T replaced David Otunga as color commentator on Raw. On the January 29, 2018 episode of Raw, Booker was replaced on commentary by the returning Jonathan Coachman. On the August 28 episode of SmackDown Live Booker T made a surprise appearance as "King Booker" in the opening segment when he interrupted and joined in on The New Day's "five timers" celebration, following the latter's fifth tag team championship win. In 2020, Booker made his return by wrestling at the Reality of Wrestling promotion. Legacy Longtime wrestler Kurt Angle said of Booker: "He's done it all... he legitimately is one of the top five best of all time." In 2001, sports journalist Michael Landsberg stated that Booker was considered "one of the best wrestlers alive", capable of "any match, any style". Industry veteran John Layfield later described him as "the best acquisition that WWE got when they bought WCW" in 2001. Booker's 21 WCW titles render him the most decorated wrestler in the company's history. He was the first African American WCW World Television Champion. Harlem Heat were recognized by WWE as being – along with The Steiner Brothers – WCW's greatest ever tag team. Considering both Booker's WCW and WWF/E accoldades, WWE recognizes him as one of the most decorated performers of all-time. With his fifth WCW Championship win (which occurred in the WWF), Booker T became the second African-American to win a world championship in WWF/E (after The Rock), and the first to be of non-mixed race. Booker was voted WWE's greatest World Heavyweight Champion in a 2013 viewer poll. Other media In 2000, Booker appeared in the film Ready to Rumble, starring as himself. He has appeared in an episode of Charmed, called "Wrestling with Demons" alongside Buff Bagwell and Scott Steiner. In 2001, along with several other WWE wrestlers, Booker competed on an episode of The Weakest Link, being eliminated second from the show. He also has appeared on Comedy Central and MTV. On January 13, 2004, the album WWE Originals was released, featuring Booker T performing "Can You Dig It?". On April 21, 2007, Booker began hosting a radio show titled Tea Time with King Booker on KBME 790 AM in Houston. During the week of November 5, 2007, he appeared on Family Feud with several other WWE wrestlers. On September 1, 2012, Booker released his first autobiography, Booker T: From Prison to Promise, with Medallion Press. Booker T made appearances to promote the book with The Score Television Network with Arda Ocal which aired on August 29, 2012. He conducted a sixteen-page interview with Pro Wrestling Illustrated in the 2012 volume #50 issue. On March 10, 2015, Booker released his second autobiography, Booker T: Wrestling Royalty with Medallion Press. In 2015, Booker T started a show on KILT (AM) that is also podcast on Radio.com called "Heated Conversations – with Booker T". The show is aired Saturday Nights locally in Houston, Texas and covers subjects from Wrestling, MMA and Boxing to all sports. It has featured the biggest names from the WWE as well as NBA Stars like Dwight Howard. In February 2019, Booker T sued video game company Activision over the Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 character David "Prophet" Wilkes. The lawsuit claimed that the Black Ops character contained similarities to Booker's GI Bro comic book character. On 19 September, 2021 All41 Studios and Microgaming released WWE Legends: Link & Win, a game for mobile and desktop browsers. Booker T was featured as one of four main characters alongside Macho Man Randy Savage, Stone Cold Steve Austin and Eddie Guerrero. Video games Music videos Personal life Relationships and family Booker married his first wife Levestia on May 23, 1996. Booker presented her to the Nitro crowd the night after his WCW World Heavyweight Championship win at Bash at the Beach. Levestia was also used to further the feud between himself and Jeff Jarrett when Jarrett hit her in the head with a guitar on Nitro on July 31, 2000. However, they divorced on May 8, 2001. Booker has a son, from a previous relationship with a high school girlfriend, named Brandon (born in 1982), with whom he has a strained relationship due to his time spent on the road. Booker married his girlfriend of five years, Sharmell Sullivan, in February 2005. The couple welcomed their twins, a boy named Kendrick and a girl named Kennedy, in 2010. Booker and his brother Lash opened a wrestling school in Houston in 2005. Booker T is also a fan of Formula One, and was in attendance at the 2012 U.S Grand Prix as a guest of Lewis Hamilton. Reality of Wrestling In 2005, Huffman started his own wrestling promotion in Houston, Texas, called Pro Wrestling Alliance. In 2012, the promotion rebranded to Reality of Wrestling. After his final 2013 event, Christmas Chaos, ROW was near to close, but Houston business man Hilton Koch, who assisted the event, became a partner with Booker. On February 21, 2015, Booker T and Stevie Ray reunited as Harlem Heat for one last match in Reality of Wrestling for the promotion's "The Final Heat" event. They defeated the Heavenly Bodies to win the ROW Tag Team Championship. On March 14, the titles were vacated. In February 2020, Booker T returned to wrestle for the promotion in an eight-man tag team match. Politics On December 10, 2016, Huffman announced that he would be running in the 2019 Houston mayoral election. He was quoted saying that, "2020 is going to be a new era in the city of Houston. We're going to be looked at now from a different perspective. The cool city, 2020 is coming." Huffman was quoted in 2016, stating his focus for the three years leading up to the 2019 election would be concentrated on the city's "homeless, underprivileged, and low income areas." However, in September 2019, Huffman was not among the 12 names listed who applied for the election ballot. Legal issues Huffman spent nineteen months in prison after pleading guilty to armed robberies at Wendy's restaurants in Houston. He and his partners wore Wendy's uniforms during the holdups since they had been working there for 2½ years. Because of the gunmen's uniforms and familiarity with the fast food chain's operations, police suspected the robberies were inside jobs—and it did not take long before Huffman and three other men were found. He pleaded guilty in December 1987 to two aggravated robbery counts and was sentenced to five years in prison. Huffman was released after serving 19 months, and was placed on parole until April 1992. Championships and accomplishments Cauliflower Alley Club Tag Team Award (2018) – with Stevie Ray George Tragos/Lou Thesz Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame Class of 2018 Global Wrestling Federation GWF Tag Team Championship (3 times) – with Stevie Ray Las Vegas Pro Wrestling LVPW UWF Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Prairie Wrestling Alliance PWA Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Pro Wrestling Illustrated Inspirational Wrestler of the Year (2000) Most Improved Wrestler of the Year (1998) Tag Team of the Year (1995, 1996) with Stevie Ray Ranked No. 5 of the top 500 wrestlers in the PWI 500 in 2001 Southern Championship Wrestling Florida SCW Florida Southern Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Texas All-Pro Wrestling TAP Heavyweight Championship (1 time) Reality of Wrestling ROW Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Stevie Ray Total Nonstop Action Wrestling TNA Legends Championship (1 time, inaugural) TNA World Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Scott Steiner TNA Year End Awards (2 times) Memorable Moment of the Year (2007) Who To Watch in 2008 (2007) World Championship Wrestling WCW World Heavyweight Championship (4 times) WCW World Television Championship (6 times) WCW United States Heavyweight Championship (1 time) WCW World Tag Team Championship (10 times) – with Stevie Ray Ninth WCW Triple Crown Champion World Wrestling Federation/World Wrestling Entertainment/WWE WCW Championship (1 time) World Heavyweight Championship (1 time) World Tag Team Championship (3 times) – with Test (1), Goldust (1) and Rob Van Dam (1) WCW Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Test WWE Intercontinental Championship (1 time) WWE United States Championship (3 times) WWF Hardcore Championship (2 times) King of the Ring (2006) Sixteenth Triple Crown Champion Eighth Grand Slam Champion (under original format) WWE Hall of Fame (2 times) Class of 2013 – individually Class of 2019 – as a member of Harlem Heat Wrestling Observer Newsletter Most Underrated (2002) Worst Television Announcer (2017) Notes References External links 1965 births African-American male professional wrestlers American color commentators American male professional wrestlers American robbers American sportspeople convicted of crimes Living people NWA/WCW World Television Champions NWA/WCW/WWE United States Heavyweight Champions Professional wrestlers from Texas Professional wrestling announcers Professional wrestling podcasters Professional wrestling promoters Sportspeople from Houston The New World Order (professional wrestling) members TNA Legends/Global/Television/King of the Mountain Champions TNA/Impact World Tag Team Champions WCW World Heavyweight Champions World Heavyweight Champions (WWE) WWE Grand Slam champions WWE Hall of Fame inductees WWF/WWE Hardcore Champions WWF/WWE Intercontinental Champions WWF/WWE King Crown's Champions/King of the Ring winners	false	[ "Family Feud is the fourth studio album by American rap group The Dayton Family, from Flint, Michigan. It was released on July 12, 2005, via Fast Life Records. The album spawned two singles: \"Chevys\" and \"Can't Get Out.\"\n\nTrack listing\nFamily Feud\nBulldoggin'\nWhere You From (featuring Capone)\nChevys\nWhat Would You Do\nMurder on My Block\nHate Me If You Wanna\nWhat is Your Issue?\nI'm a Gangsta\nAss Whoop\nWe Won't Fall\nReckless (featuring Cormega)\nCalico (featuring Kurupt)\nEveryday Hoe (featuring MC Breed)\nDayton Niggaz\nFormula 51\nGet Crunk\nEverything's Chicken (But the Bone)\nCan't Get Out\n\nChart history\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Family Feud by The Dayton Family on iTunes\n\n2005 albums\nThe Dayton Family albums", "A feud letter ( or Absagebrief) was a document in which a feud was announced, usually with few words, in medieval Europe. The letter had to be issued three days in advance to be legally valid.\n\nTo prevent the feud from becoming a case of murder and thus become punishable by law, those involved had to abide by the following rules:\n\n The feud, whether between knights or between the nobility and towns, had to be initiated by a formal feud letter.\n Killing innocent parties was forbidden.\n Razing of houses and laying waste to the land were allowed.\n During the feud, fighting was not permitted in churches or at home, and the parties were to be allowed to go to and to return from church or court without being molested.\n\nExamples \n Around 1444, the town of Soest declared war on the Archbishop of Cologne at the start of the Soest Feud with the following famous, brief feud letter:\n\n\"Wettet, biscop Dierich van Moeres, dat wy den vesten Junker Johan can Cleve lever hebbet alls Juwe, unde wert Juwe hiermit affgesaget\"(\"Know this, Bishop Dietrich of Moers, that we prefer the steadfast Junker, John of Cleves, to you, and hereby give you notice thereof.\")\n\nSee also\nThrow down the gauntlet\n\nLandfrieden - waiver of the right to feuding\n\nLegal documents\nLetter" ]
[ "Sean Combs", "Sean John" ]	C_07b75bf747f14969bd3b73fb1e58e27a_0	who is sean john?	1	Who is Sean John?	Sean Combs	In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John. It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000, and won in 2004. California billionaire Ronald Burkle invested $100 million into the company in 2003. Also in 2003, the National Labor Committee revealed that factories producing the clothing in Honduras were violating Honduran labor laws. Among the accusations were that workers were subjected to body searches and involuntary pregnancy tests. Bathrooms were locked and access tightly controlled. Employees were forced to work overtime and were paid sweatshop wages. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee told The New York Times that "Sean Puff Daddy obviously has a lot of clout, he can literally do a lot overnight to help these workers." Combs responded with an extensive investigation, telling reporters "I'm as pro-worker as they get". On February 14, 2004, Kernaghan announced that improvements had been implemented at the factory, including adding air conditioning and water purification systems, firing the most abusive supervisors, and allowing the formation of a labor union. In late 2006, the department store Macy's removed Sean John jackets from their shelves when they discovered that the clothing was made using raccoon dog fur. Combs had not known the jackets were made with dog fur, but as soon as he was alerted, he had production stopped. In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called "I Am King" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King, featured model Bar Refaeli in its advertisements. In early 2016, Sean John introduced the brand's GIRLS collection. CANNOTANSWER	In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John.	Sean John Combs (born November 4, 1969), also known by his stage name Puff Daddy (previously known as P. Diddy, Diddy, or Puffy), is an American rapper, actor, songwriter, record executive, record producer, and entrepreneur. Born in New York City and raised in the suburb of Mount Vernon, he worked as a talent director at Uptown Records before founding his own record label, Bad Boy Records in 1993. Combs has produced and cultivated artists such as The Notorious B.I.G., Mary J. Blige, and Usher. Combs' debut album, No Way Out (1997), has been certified seven times platinum. The album was followed by Forever (1999), The Saga Continues..., (2001) and Press Play (2006), all of which were commercially successful. In 2009, Combs formed the musical group Dirty Money; together, they released their highly successful debut album Last Train to Paris (2010). Combs has won three Grammy Awards and two MTV Video Music Awards and is the producer of MTV's Making the Band. In 2019, Forbes estimated his net worth at $740 million. In 1998, he launched his own clothing line Sean John. He was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000 and won in 2004. Early life Sean John Combs was born in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City on November 4, 1969. Raised in Mount Vernon, New York, his mother Janice Combs (née Smalls) was a model and teacher's assistant and his father, Melvin Earl Combs, served in the U.S. Air Force and was an associate of convicted New York drug dealer Frank Lucas. At age 33, Melvin was shot to death while sitting in his car on Central Park West, when Sean was two years old. Combs graduated from Mount Saint Michael Academy in 1987. He played football for the academy and his team won a division title in 1986. Combs said he was given the nickname "Puff" as a child, because he would "huff and puff" when he was angry. Combs was a business major at Howard University but left after his sophomore year. In 2014, he returned to Howard University to receive an Honorary Doctorate in Humanities and deliver the University's 146th Commencement Address. Career 1990–1996: Career beginnings Combs became an intern at New York's Uptown Records in 1990. While working as a talent director at Uptown, he helped develop Jodeci and Mary J. Blige. In his college days Combs had a reputation for throwing parties, some of which attracted up to a thousand participants. In 1991, Combs promoted an AIDS fundraiser with Heavy D held at the City College of New York (CCNY) gymnasium, following a charity basketball game. The event was oversold, and a stampede occurred in which nine people died. In 1993, after being fired from Uptown, Combs established his new label Bad Boy Entertainment as a joint venture with Arista Records, taking then-newcomer Christopher Wallace, better known as The Notorious B.I.G., with him. Both Wallace and Craig Mack quickly released hit singles, followed by successful LPs, particularly Wallace's Ready to Die. Combs signed more acts to Bad Boy, including Carl Thomas, Faith Evans, 112, Total, and Father MC. The Hitmen, his in-house production team, worked with Jodeci, Mary J. Blige, Usher, Lil' Kim, TLC, Mariah Carey, Boyz II Men, SWV, Aretha Franklin, and others. Mase and the Lox joined Bad Boy just as a widely publicized rivalry with the West Coast's Death Row Records was beginning. Combs and Wallace were criticized and parodied by Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight in songs and interviews during the mid-1990s. During 1994–1995, Combs produced several songs for TLC's CrazySexyCool, which finished the decade as number 25 on Billboard's list of top pop albums of the decade. 1997–1998: "Puff Daddy" and No Way Out In 1997, under the name Puff Daddy, Combs recorded his first commercial vocal work as a rapper. His debut single, "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", spent 28 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, peaking at number one. His debut album, No Way Out, was released on July 22, 1997, through Bad Boy Records. Originally titled Hell up in Harlem, the album underwent several changes after The Notorious B.I.G. was killed on March 9, 1997. Several of the label's artists made guest appearances on the album. No Way Out was a significant success, particularly in the United States, where it reached number one on the Billboard 200 in its first week of release, selling 561,000 copies. The album produced five singles: "I'll Be Missing You", a tribute to The Notorious B.I.G., was the first rap song to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100; it remained at the top of the chart for eleven consecutive weeks and topped several other charts worldwide. Four other singles – "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", "It's All About the Benjamins", "Been Around the World", and "Victory" – were also released. Combs collaborated with Jimmy Page on the song "Come with Me" for the 1998 film Godzilla. The album earned Combs five nominations at the 40th Grammy Awards in 1998, winning the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album. On September 7, 2000, the album was certified septuple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of over 7 million copies. In 1997, Combs was sued for landlord neglect by Inge Bongo. Combs denied the charges. By the late 1990s, he was being criticized for watering down and overly commercializing hip hop, and for using too many guest appearances, samples, and interpolations of past hits in his new songs. 1999–2000: Forever and Club New York In April 1999, Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records. Stoute was the manager for Nas, with whom Combs had filmed a video earlier that year for the song "Hate Me Now". Combs was concerned that the video, which featured a shot of Nas and Combs being crucified, was blasphemous. He asked for his scenes on the cross to be pulled, but after it aired unedited on MTV on April 15, Combs visited Stoute's offices and injured Stoute. Combs was charged with second-degree assault and criminal mischief, and was sentenced to attend a one-day anger management class. Forever, Combs's second solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999, in North America, and in the UK on the following day. It reached number two on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, where it remained for one week before being knocked off by Mary J. Blige's fourth album, Mary. The album received positive to mixed reviews from music critics and spawned three singles that have charted on the Billboard charts. It peaked at number four on the Canadian Albums Chart, Combs's highest-charting album in that country. On December 27, 1999, Combs and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were at Club New York in Manhattan when gunfire broke out. After a police investigation, Combs and fellow rapper Shyne were arrested for weapons violations and other charges. Combs was charged with four weapons-related charges and bribing his driver, Wardel Fenderson, to claim ownership of his gun. With a gag order in place, the highly publicized trial began. Combs's attorneys were Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Benjamin Brafman. Combs was found not guilty on all charges; Shyne was convicted on five of his eight charges and sentenced to ten years in prison. Combs and Lopez broke up shortly after. A lawsuit filed by Fenderson, who said he suffered emotional damage after the shooting, was settled in February 2004. Lawyers for both sides, having agreed to keep the settlement terms secret, said the matter had been "resolved to the satisfaction of all parties". 2001–2004: "P. Diddy" and The Saga Continues Combs changed his stage name from "Puff Daddy" to "P. Diddy" in 2001. The gospel album, Thank You, which had been completed just before the beginning of the weapons trial, was due to be released in March that year, but remains unreleased . He appeared as a drug dealer in the film Made and starred with Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball (both in 2001). He was arrested for driving on a suspended license in Florida. Combs began working with a series of unusual (for him) artists. For a short period of time, he was the manager of Kelis; they have a collaboration titled "Let's Get Ill". He was an opening act for 'N Sync on their Spring 2002 Celebrity Tour, and he signed California-based pop girl group Dream to his record label. Combs was a producer of the soundtrack album for the film Training Day (2001). In June 2001, Combs ended Bad Boy Entertainment's joint venture with Arista Records, gaining full control of Bad Boy, its catalogue, and its roster of artists. The Saga Continues..., released on July 10 in North America, was the last studio album released by the joint venture. The album reached number 2 on the Billboard 200 and the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums charts, and was eventually certified Platinum. It is the only studio album under the P. Diddy name, and the first album by Sean Combs not to feature any guest appearances by Jay-Z or Lil Kim. Combs was executive producer of the reality TV show Making the Band, which appeared on MTV from 2002 to 2009. The show involves interviewing candidates and creating musical acts that would then enter the music business. Acts who got their start this way include Da Band, Danity Kane, Day26, and Donnie Klang. In 2003 Combs ran in the New York City Marathon, raising $2million for the educational system of the city of New York. On March 10, 2004, he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss the marathon, which he finished in four hours and eighteen minutes. In 2004 Combs headed the campaign "Vote or Die" for the 2004 presidential election. On February 1, 2004, Combs (as P. Diddy) performed at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. 2005–2009: "Diddy" and Press Play On August 16, 2005, Combs announced on Today that he was altering his stage name yet again; he would be calling himself "Diddy". Combs said fans didn't know how to address him, which led to confusion. In November 2005, London-based musical artist and DJ Richard Dearlove, who had been performing under the name "Diddy" since 1992 nine years before Combs started using even "P. Diddy" sought an injunction in the High Court of Justice in London. He accepted an out-of-court settlement of £10,000 in damages and more than £100,000 in costs. Combs can no longer use the name Diddy in the UK, where he is still known as P. Diddy. An assault charge against Combs filed by Michigan television host Rogelio Mills was resolved in Combs's favor in 2005. Combs starred in the 2005 film Carlito's Way: Rise to Power. He played Walter Lee Younger in the 2004 Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun and the television adaptation that aired in February 2008. In 2005 Combs sold half of his record company to the Warner Music Group. He hosted the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards and was named one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2005 by Time magazine. He was mentioned in the country song "Play Something Country" by Brooks & Dunn: the lyricist says he "didn't come to hear P. Diddy", which is rhymed with "something thumpin' from the city". In 2006, when Combs refused to release musician Mase from his contractual obligations to allow him to join the group G-Unit, 50 Cent recorded a diss song, "Hip-Hop". The lyrics imply that Combs knew the identity of The Notorious B.I.G.'s murderer. The two later resolved the feud. Combs released his first album in four years, Press Play, on October 17, 2006, on the Bad Boy Records label. The album, featuring guest appearances by many popular artists, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart with sales of over 173,009. Its singles "Come to Me" and "Last Night" both reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100. The album became available to preview on MTV's The Leak on October 10, 2006, a week before being sold in stores. Press Play received mixed to positive reviews from critics, and was certified Gold on the RIAA ratings. On September 18, 2007, Combs teamed up with 50 Cent and Jay-Z for the "Forbes I Get Money Billion Dollar Remix". In March 2008, the Los Angeles Times claimed that The Notorious B.I.G. and Combs orchestrated the 1994 robbery and shooting of Tupac, substantiating the claim with supposed FBI documents; the newspaper later retracted the story, acknowledging that the documents had been fabricated. Dexter Isaac, an associate of record management executive Jimmy Henchman, confessed in 2012 that he had shot Tupac on Henchman's orders. In June 2008, Combs's representative denied rumors of another name change. Combs ventured into reality television in August 2008 with the premiere of his VH1 series I Want to Work for Diddy. He appeared—credited under his real name—in two episodes of Season 7 of CSI: Miami: "Presumed Guilty" and "Sink or Swim", in the role of lawyer Derek Powell. 2010–2013: Dirty Money and acting Combs created a rap supergroup in 2010 known as the Dream Team. The group consists of Combs, Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, Fat Joe, Busta Rhymes, Red Café, and Fabolous. Combs made an appearance at comedian Chris Gethard's live show in January 2010 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City. In June 2010 Combs played a role (credited as Sean Combs) in the comedy film Get Him to the Greek, as Sergio Roma, a record company executive. An Entourage series representative announced that Combs would guest star on an episode during the 2010 season. Last Train to Paris was released by Combs's group Dirty Money on December 13, 2010. The release was preceded by four singles "Angels", "Hello Good Morning", "Loving You No More", and "Coming Home", which experienced mixed success on the Billboard Hot 100. "Coming Home" was the most successful of the songs, peaking at number twelve on the U.S. Hot 100, number four in the UK, and number seven in Canada. On March 10, 2011, Diddy – Dirty Money performed "Coming Home" live on American Idol. On April 18, 2011, Combs appeared in season one of Hawaii Five-0, guest starring as an undercover NYPD detective. In November 2012 Combs appeared in an episode of the eighth season of the American sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. 2014–present: MMM (Money Making Mitch), No Way Out 2, and "Love" On February 26, 2014, Combs premiered "Big Homie", featuring Rick Ross and French Montana, as the first single from his mixtape MMM (Money Making Mitch), which was originally scheduled to be released that year. The song was released for digital download on March 24, and two days later the trailer for the music video was released. The full version of the music video was released on March 31. Combs used his former stage name Puff Daddy for the album. MMM was released as a free mixtape album of 12 tracks on November 4, 2015. In 2014 Combs and Guy Gerber announced that their joint album 11 11 would be available for free download. A new single called "Finna Get Loose" featuring Combs and Pharrell Williams was released on June 29, 2015. In July 2015, Bad Boy Entertainment artist Gizzle told the press that she is collaborating with Combs on what she describes as his last album, titled No Way Out 2, a sequel to his 1997 debut. She describes the music as unique: "The mindset is to just be classic and to be epic. And to really live up to that... we know it's a tall order, but we welcome the challenge." In April 2016, Combs announced that after this last album and tour, he plans to retire from the music industry to focus on acting. On May 20 and 21, 2016, Combs launched a tour of Bad Boy Records' biggest names to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the label. The documentary Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story, covering the two shows at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn as well as behind-the-scenes events, was released on June 23, 2017. The show toured to an additional twenty venues across the United States and Canada. On November 5, 2017, Combs announced that he would be going by the name Love, stating "My new name is Love, aka Brother Love". Two days later, he told the press he had been joking, but on January 3, 2018, he announced on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that he had changed his mind again, and will be using the new name after all. In 2019, Combs announced on Twitter that Making the Band would return to MTV in 2020. Combs executive-produced Nigerian singer Burna Boy's album, Twice as Tall, released on August 14, 2020. Business career Fortune magazine listed Combs at number twelve on their top 40 of entrepreneurs under 40 in 2002. Forbes Magazine estimates that for the year ending May 2017, Combs earned $130 million, ranking him number one among entertainers. In 2019 his estimated net worth was $740 million. Sean John In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John. It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000, and won in 2004. California billionaire Ronald Burkle invested $100 million into the company in 2003. Also in 2003, the National Labor Committee revealed that factories producing the clothing in Honduras were violating Honduran labor laws. Among the accusations were that workers were subjected to body searches and involuntary pregnancy tests. Bathrooms were locked and access tightly controlled. Employees were forced to work overtime and were paid sweatshop wages. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee told The New York Times that "Sean Puff Daddy obviously has a lot of clout, he can literally do a lot overnight to help these workers." Combs responded with an extensive investigation, telling reporters "I'm as pro-worker as they get". On February 14, 2004, Kernaghan announced that improvements had been implemented at the factory, including adding air conditioning and water purification systems, firing the most abusive supervisors, and allowing the formation of a labor union. In late 2006, the department store Macy's removed Sean John jackets from their shelves when they discovered that the clothing was made using raccoon dog fur. Combs had not known the jackets were made with dog fur, but as soon as he was alerted, he had production stopped. In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called "I Am King" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King Jr., featured model Bar Refaeli in its advertisements. In early 2016, Sean John introduced the brand's GIRLS collection. Other ventures Combs is the head of Combs Enterprises, an umbrella company for his portfolio of businesses. In addition to his clothing line, Combs owned two restaurants called Justin's, named after his son. The original New York location closed in September 2007; the Atlanta location closed in June 2012. He is the designer of the Dallas Mavericks alternate jersey. In October 2007 Combs agreed to help develop the Cîroc vodka brand for a 50 percent share of the profits. Combs acquired the Enyce clothing line from Liz Claiborne for $20 million on October 21, 2008. Combs has a major equity stake in Revolt TV, a television network that also has a film production branch. It began broadcasting in 2014. In February 2015, Combs teamed up with actor Mark Wahlberg and businessman Ronald Burkle of Yucaipa Companies to purchase a majority holding in Aquahydrate, a calorie-free beverage for athletes. John Cochran, former president of Fiji Water, is CEO of the company. In 2019 Combs became a major investor in PlayVS, which provides an infrastructure for competitive gaming in US high schools. The company was also backed by Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin. Personal life Family Combs is the father of six children. His first biological child, Justin, was born in 1993 to designer Misa Hylton-Brim. Justin attended UCLA on a football scholarship. Combs had an on-again, off-again relationship with Kimberly Porter (1970–2018), which lasted from 1994 to 2007. He raised and adopted Quincy (born 1991), Porter's son from a previous relationship with singer-producer Al B. Sure! Together they had a son, Christian (born 1998), and twin daughters, D'Lila Star and Jessie James (born 2006). Porter died of pneumonia on November 15, 2018. Five months before the birth of his twins, Combs's daughter, Chance, was born to Sarah Chapman. He took legal responsibility for Chance in October 2007. Combs was in a long-term relationship with Cassie Ventura from 2007 to 2018. Combs's sons Quincy and Justin both appeared on MTV's My Super Sweet 16. Combs threw Quincy a celebrity-studded party and gave him two cars as his 16th birthday present. For Justin's 16th birthday, Combs presented him with a $360,000 Maybach car. Combs owns a home in Alpine, New Jersey, which he purchased for $7million. Charity work and honors Combs founded Daddy's House Social Programs, an organization to help inner city youth, in 1995. Programs include tutoring, life skills classes, and an annual summer camp. Along with Jay-Z, he pledged $1 million to help support victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and donated clothing from his Sean John line to victims. He has donated computers and books to New York schools. In 1998, he received a Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley named October 13, 2006, as "Diddy Day" in honor of Combs's charity work. In 2008, Combs was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the first male rapper to be so honored. In 2014, Combs received an honorary doctorate from Howard University, where he gave the commencement speech for its 146th commencement ceremony. In his speech, Combs acknowledged that his experiences as a Howard student positively influenced his life. In 2016, Combs donated $1 million to Howard University to establish the Sean Combs Scholarship Fund to help students who are unable to pay their tuition. Wardrobe style Combs describes his wardrobe style as "swagger, timeless, diverse". On September 2, 2007, Combs held his ninth annual "White Party", at which guests are limited to an all-white dress code. The White Party, which has also been held in St. Tropez, was held in his home in East Hampton, New York. Combs stated, "This party is up there with the top three that I've thrown. It's a party that has legendary status. It's hard to throw a party that lives up to its legend." Religious views Combs was raised Catholic, and was an altar server as a boy. In 2008 he told The Daily Telegraph that he does not adhere to any specific religious denomination. He said, "I just follow right from wrong, so I could pray in a synagogue or a mosque or a church. I believe that there is only one God." On July 3, 2020, Combs invited his Twitter followers to view a 3-hour YouTube video posted by Louis Farrakhan. In the video Farrakhan made multiple anti-Semitic comments and repeatedly used the phrase "Synagogue of Satan". The video was removed from YouTube for violating its policy against hate speech. In response to comedian Nick Cannon being fired on July 14, 2020, from ViacomCBS for espousing anti-Semitic views, Combs tweeted that Cannon should "come home to RevoltTv" saying "We got your back and love you and what you have done for the culture." Discography Studio albums No Way Out (1997) Forever (1999) The Saga Continues... (2001) Press Play (2006) Awards and nominations NAACP Image Awards \|- \| 2009 \| A Raisin in the Sun \| Outstanding Actor in a Television Movie,Mini-Series or Dramatic Special \| \|- \| 2011 \| Diddy – Dirty Money \| Outstanding Duo or Group \| \|} BET Awards \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2002 \|\| "Bad Boy for Life" \|\| rowspan="2" \| Video of the Year \|\| \|- \| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" \|\| \|- \| 2003 \|\| "Bump, Bump, Bump" \|\| Coca-Cola Viewer's Choice Award \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2007 \|\| "Last Night" \|\| Best Collaboration \|\| \|- \| Diddy \|\| Best Male Hip-Hop Artist \|\| \|- \| 2010 \|\| rowspan="3" \| Diddy – Dirty Money \|\| rowspan="4" \| Best Group \|\| \|- \| 2011 \|\| \|- \| 2012 \|\| \|- \| 2016 \|\| Puff Daddy and the Family \|\| \|} BET Hip Hop Awards \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2008 \|\| "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is)..." \|\| Track of the Year \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| Sean Combs \|\| rowspan="2" \| Hustler of the Year \|\| \|- \| 2009 \|\| \|- \| rowspan="4" \| 2010 \|\| "All I Do Is Win (Remix)" \|\| rowspan="2" \| Reese's Perfect Combo Award \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| "Hello Good Morning (Remix)" \|\| \|- \| Best Club Banger \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| Sean Combs \|\| rowspan="2" \| Hustler of the Year \|\| \|- \| 2011 \|\| \|- \| 2012 \|\| rowspan="2" \| "Same Damn Time (Remix)" \|\| rowspan="2" \| Sweet 16: Best Featured Verse \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2013 \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| Sean Combs \|\| rowspan="2" \| Hustler of the Year \|\| \|- \| 2017 \|\| \|} MTV Europe Music Awards \|- \| rowspan="4" \| 1997 \|\| rowspan="2" \| "I'll Be Missing You" \|\| MTV Select \|\| \|- \| Best Song \|\| \|- \| rowspan="8" \| Sean Combs \|\| Best New Act \|\| \|- \| Best Hip-Hop \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 1998 \|\| Best Male \|\| \|- \| rowspan="5" \| Best Hip-Hop \|\| \|- \| 1999 \|\| \|- \| 2001 \|\| \|- \| 2002 \|\| \|- \| 2006 \|\| \|- \| 2011 \|\| Diddy – Dirty Money \|\| Best World Stage Performance \|\| \|} MTV Movie & TV Awards \|- \| 2018 \|\| Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story \|\| Best Music Documentary \|\| \|} MTV Video Music Awards \|- \| rowspan="2" \| \|\| rowspan="2" \| "I'll Be Missing You" \|\| Best R&B Video \|\| \|- \| Viewer's Choice \|\| \|- \| rowspan="3" \| \|\| rowspan="2" \| "It's All About the Benjamins" (Rock Remix) \|\| Video of the Year \|\| \|- \| Viewer's Choice \|\| \|- \| "Come with Me" \|\| Best Video from a Film \|\| \|- \| \|\| "Bad Boy for Life" \|\| Best Rap Video \|\| \|} Grammy Awards !Ref. \|- \| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="7" \| 1998 \| Puff Daddy \| Best New Artist \| \| rowspan="7"\| \|- \| No Way Out \| rowspan="2"\|Best Rap Album \| \|- \| Life After Death (as producer) \| \|- \| "Honey" (as songwriter) \| Best Rhythm & Blues Song \| \|- \| "I'll Be Missing You" (featuring Faith Evans & 112) \| rowspan="7"\|Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group \| \|- \| "Mo Money Mo Problems" (with The Notorious B.I.G. & Mase) \| \|- \| "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down" (featuring Mase) \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2000 \| "Satisfy You" (featuring R. Kelly) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2002 \| "Bad Boy for Life" (with Black Rob & Mark Curry) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2003 \| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" (with Busta Rhymes & Pharrell) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2004 \| "Shake Ya Tailfeather" (with Nelly & Murphy Lee) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2016 \| "All Day" (as songwriter) \| Best Rap Song \| \| \|} Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time Other awards In 2021, Combs was among the inaugural inductees into the Black Music and Entertainment Walk of Fame. Filmography Made (2001) Monster's Ball (2001) 2005 MTV Video Music Awards (2006) Seamless (2005) Carlito's Way: Rise to Power (2005) A Raisin in the Sun (2008) CSI Miami: episode "Sink or Swim" (2009) Get Him to the Greek (2010) I'm Still Here (2010) Hawaii Five-0: episode "Hoʻopaʻi" (2011) It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (TV series) (2012) Draft Day (2014) Muppets Most Wanted (2014) Black-ish (TV series) (2015) Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story (2017) The Defiant Ones (2017) Mary J. Blige's My Life (2021) Tours No Way Out Tour (1997–1998) Forever Tour (2000) References Sources External links 1969 births 20th-century American businesspeople 20th-century American male musicians 20th-century American rappers 21st-century American businesspeople 21st-century American male actors 21st-century American male musicians 21st-century American rappers Actors from Mount Vernon, New York African-American businesspeople African-American designers African-American fashion designers African-American film producers African-American male actors African-American male rappers African-American record producers American chairpersons of corporations American chief executives in the media industry American chief executives of fashion industry companies American corporate directors American cosmetics businesspeople American dance musicians American drink industry businesspeople American fashion businesspeople American fashion designers American film producers American hip hop record producers American landlords American male film actors American male rappers American male television actors American marketing businesspeople American mass media owners American music industry executives American music publishers (people) American music video directors American philanthropists American restaurateurs American retail chief executives American television company founders American television executives Bad Boy Records artists Businesspeople from New York City East Coast hip hop musicians Former Roman Catholics Grammy Award winners for rap music Howard University alumni Living people Male actors from New York City Music video codirectors Musicians from Mount Vernon, New York Participants in American reality television series People from Harlem Pop rappers Rappers from Manhattan Record producers from New York (state) Remixers	true	[ "Sean Lurie is an American feature film producer who is credited on multiple animated features. After a career spanning traditional animation management and digital ink and paint, Sean established himself as an animated feature film producer on such titles as The Rugrats Movie, Rugrats in Paris: The Movie, and The Wild Thornberrys Movie. Sean was hired by DisneyToon Studios (DTS) in 2004 and produced the second CGI feature produced at DTS, entitled Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure, of which John Lasseter is listed as executive producer. Sean is also the producer of Tinker Bell and the Mysterious Winter Woods.\n\nIn June 2010 Sean was promoted to VP of Production for The Walt Disney Company/Disney Toon Studios and as of January 2014 he is VP of Development for the Walt Disney Animation Studios.\n\nHe was nominated for an Oscar in 2016 for Inner Workings.\n\nSean is married with two children, and lives in Los Angeles.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\nFilm producers from California\nPeople from Los Angeles\nLiving people\nYear of birth missing (living people)", "The Ambassador of Ireland to the United States is the head of the Embassy of Ireland, Washington, DC, and the official representative of the Government of Ireland to the Government of the United States.\n\nDaniel Mulhall, appointed Ambassador in August 2017, was incumbent .\n\nThe Irish Embassy is located at 2234 Massachusetts Avenue, NW in Sheridan Circle since 1949 and the Ambassador’s residence is at 2244 S Street NW.\n\nAmbassadors\nDaniel Mulhall (August 2017 - )\n2013 - 2017: Anne Anderson\n2007 - 2013: Michael Collins\n2002 - 2007: Noel Fahey\n1997 - 2002: Sean O Huiginn\n1991 - 1997: Dermot Gallagher\n1985 - 1991: Padraic N. MacKernan\n1984 - 1985: Tadhg O'Sullivan\n1978 - 1984: Sean Donlon\n1973 - 1978: John G. Molloy\n1970 - 1973: William Warnock\n1964 - 1969: William P. Fay\n1960 - 1964: Thomas J. Kiernan\n1950 - 1960: John Joseph Hearne\n1947 - 1950: Sean Nunan\n1938 - 1947: Robert Brennan\n1929 - 1938: Michael MacWhite\n1924 - 1929: Timothy Smiddy\n\nReferences \n\nUnited States\nIreland" ]
[ "Sean Combs", "Sean John", "who is sean john?", "In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John." ]	C_07b75bf747f14969bd3b73fb1e58e27a_0	why did he want to start a clothing line?	2	Why Combs want to start a clothing line?	Sean Combs	In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John. It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000, and won in 2004. California billionaire Ronald Burkle invested $100 million into the company in 2003. Also in 2003, the National Labor Committee revealed that factories producing the clothing in Honduras were violating Honduran labor laws. Among the accusations were that workers were subjected to body searches and involuntary pregnancy tests. Bathrooms were locked and access tightly controlled. Employees were forced to work overtime and were paid sweatshop wages. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee told The New York Times that "Sean Puff Daddy obviously has a lot of clout, he can literally do a lot overnight to help these workers." Combs responded with an extensive investigation, telling reporters "I'm as pro-worker as they get". On February 14, 2004, Kernaghan announced that improvements had been implemented at the factory, including adding air conditioning and water purification systems, firing the most abusive supervisors, and allowing the formation of a labor union. In late 2006, the department store Macy's removed Sean John jackets from their shelves when they discovered that the clothing was made using raccoon dog fur. Combs had not known the jackets were made with dog fur, but as soon as he was alerted, he had production stopped. In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called "I Am King" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King, featured model Bar Refaeli in its advertisements. In early 2016, Sean John introduced the brand's GIRLS collection. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER	Sean John Combs (born November 4, 1969), also known by his stage name Puff Daddy (previously known as P. Diddy, Diddy, or Puffy), is an American rapper, actor, songwriter, record executive, record producer, and entrepreneur. Born in New York City and raised in the suburb of Mount Vernon, he worked as a talent director at Uptown Records before founding his own record label, Bad Boy Records in 1993. Combs has produced and cultivated artists such as The Notorious B.I.G., Mary J. Blige, and Usher. Combs' debut album, No Way Out (1997), has been certified seven times platinum. The album was followed by Forever (1999), The Saga Continues..., (2001) and Press Play (2006), all of which were commercially successful. In 2009, Combs formed the musical group Dirty Money; together, they released their highly successful debut album Last Train to Paris (2010). Combs has won three Grammy Awards and two MTV Video Music Awards and is the producer of MTV's Making the Band. In 2019, Forbes estimated his net worth at $740 million. In 1998, he launched his own clothing line Sean John. He was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000 and won in 2004. Early life Sean John Combs was born in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City on November 4, 1969. Raised in Mount Vernon, New York, his mother Janice Combs (née Smalls) was a model and teacher's assistant and his father, Melvin Earl Combs, served in the U.S. Air Force and was an associate of convicted New York drug dealer Frank Lucas. At age 33, Melvin was shot to death while sitting in his car on Central Park West, when Sean was two years old. Combs graduated from Mount Saint Michael Academy in 1987. He played football for the academy and his team won a division title in 1986. Combs said he was given the nickname "Puff" as a child, because he would "huff and puff" when he was angry. Combs was a business major at Howard University but left after his sophomore year. In 2014, he returned to Howard University to receive an Honorary Doctorate in Humanities and deliver the University's 146th Commencement Address. Career 1990–1996: Career beginnings Combs became an intern at New York's Uptown Records in 1990. While working as a talent director at Uptown, he helped develop Jodeci and Mary J. Blige. In his college days Combs had a reputation for throwing parties, some of which attracted up to a thousand participants. In 1991, Combs promoted an AIDS fundraiser with Heavy D held at the City College of New York (CCNY) gymnasium, following a charity basketball game. The event was oversold, and a stampede occurred in which nine people died. In 1993, after being fired from Uptown, Combs established his new label Bad Boy Entertainment as a joint venture with Arista Records, taking then-newcomer Christopher Wallace, better known as The Notorious B.I.G., with him. Both Wallace and Craig Mack quickly released hit singles, followed by successful LPs, particularly Wallace's Ready to Die. Combs signed more acts to Bad Boy, including Carl Thomas, Faith Evans, 112, Total, and Father MC. The Hitmen, his in-house production team, worked with Jodeci, Mary J. Blige, Usher, Lil' Kim, TLC, Mariah Carey, Boyz II Men, SWV, Aretha Franklin, and others. Mase and the Lox joined Bad Boy just as a widely publicized rivalry with the West Coast's Death Row Records was beginning. Combs and Wallace were criticized and parodied by Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight in songs and interviews during the mid-1990s. During 1994–1995, Combs produced several songs for TLC's CrazySexyCool, which finished the decade as number 25 on Billboard's list of top pop albums of the decade. 1997–1998: "Puff Daddy" and No Way Out In 1997, under the name Puff Daddy, Combs recorded his first commercial vocal work as a rapper. His debut single, "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", spent 28 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, peaking at number one. His debut album, No Way Out, was released on July 22, 1997, through Bad Boy Records. Originally titled Hell up in Harlem, the album underwent several changes after The Notorious B.I.G. was killed on March 9, 1997. Several of the label's artists made guest appearances on the album. No Way Out was a significant success, particularly in the United States, where it reached number one on the Billboard 200 in its first week of release, selling 561,000 copies. The album produced five singles: "I'll Be Missing You", a tribute to The Notorious B.I.G., was the first rap song to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100; it remained at the top of the chart for eleven consecutive weeks and topped several other charts worldwide. Four other singles – "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", "It's All About the Benjamins", "Been Around the World", and "Victory" – were also released. Combs collaborated with Jimmy Page on the song "Come with Me" for the 1998 film Godzilla. The album earned Combs five nominations at the 40th Grammy Awards in 1998, winning the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album. On September 7, 2000, the album was certified septuple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of over 7 million copies. In 1997, Combs was sued for landlord neglect by Inge Bongo. Combs denied the charges. By the late 1990s, he was being criticized for watering down and overly commercializing hip hop, and for using too many guest appearances, samples, and interpolations of past hits in his new songs. 1999–2000: Forever and Club New York In April 1999, Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records. Stoute was the manager for Nas, with whom Combs had filmed a video earlier that year for the song "Hate Me Now". Combs was concerned that the video, which featured a shot of Nas and Combs being crucified, was blasphemous. He asked for his scenes on the cross to be pulled, but after it aired unedited on MTV on April 15, Combs visited Stoute's offices and injured Stoute. Combs was charged with second-degree assault and criminal mischief, and was sentenced to attend a one-day anger management class. Forever, Combs's second solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999, in North America, and in the UK on the following day. It reached number two on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, where it remained for one week before being knocked off by Mary J. Blige's fourth album, Mary. The album received positive to mixed reviews from music critics and spawned three singles that have charted on the Billboard charts. It peaked at number four on the Canadian Albums Chart, Combs's highest-charting album in that country. On December 27, 1999, Combs and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were at Club New York in Manhattan when gunfire broke out. After a police investigation, Combs and fellow rapper Shyne were arrested for weapons violations and other charges. Combs was charged with four weapons-related charges and bribing his driver, Wardel Fenderson, to claim ownership of his gun. With a gag order in place, the highly publicized trial began. Combs's attorneys were Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Benjamin Brafman. Combs was found not guilty on all charges; Shyne was convicted on five of his eight charges and sentenced to ten years in prison. Combs and Lopez broke up shortly after. A lawsuit filed by Fenderson, who said he suffered emotional damage after the shooting, was settled in February 2004. Lawyers for both sides, having agreed to keep the settlement terms secret, said the matter had been "resolved to the satisfaction of all parties". 2001–2004: "P. Diddy" and The Saga Continues Combs changed his stage name from "Puff Daddy" to "P. Diddy" in 2001. The gospel album, Thank You, which had been completed just before the beginning of the weapons trial, was due to be released in March that year, but remains unreleased . He appeared as a drug dealer in the film Made and starred with Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball (both in 2001). He was arrested for driving on a suspended license in Florida. Combs began working with a series of unusual (for him) artists. For a short period of time, he was the manager of Kelis; they have a collaboration titled "Let's Get Ill". He was an opening act for 'N Sync on their Spring 2002 Celebrity Tour, and he signed California-based pop girl group Dream to his record label. Combs was a producer of the soundtrack album for the film Training Day (2001). In June 2001, Combs ended Bad Boy Entertainment's joint venture with Arista Records, gaining full control of Bad Boy, its catalogue, and its roster of artists. The Saga Continues..., released on July 10 in North America, was the last studio album released by the joint venture. The album reached number 2 on the Billboard 200 and the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums charts, and was eventually certified Platinum. It is the only studio album under the P. Diddy name, and the first album by Sean Combs not to feature any guest appearances by Jay-Z or Lil Kim. Combs was executive producer of the reality TV show Making the Band, which appeared on MTV from 2002 to 2009. The show involves interviewing candidates and creating musical acts that would then enter the music business. Acts who got their start this way include Da Band, Danity Kane, Day26, and Donnie Klang. In 2003 Combs ran in the New York City Marathon, raising $2million for the educational system of the city of New York. On March 10, 2004, he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss the marathon, which he finished in four hours and eighteen minutes. In 2004 Combs headed the campaign "Vote or Die" for the 2004 presidential election. On February 1, 2004, Combs (as P. Diddy) performed at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. 2005–2009: "Diddy" and Press Play On August 16, 2005, Combs announced on Today that he was altering his stage name yet again; he would be calling himself "Diddy". Combs said fans didn't know how to address him, which led to confusion. In November 2005, London-based musical artist and DJ Richard Dearlove, who had been performing under the name "Diddy" since 1992 nine years before Combs started using even "P. Diddy" sought an injunction in the High Court of Justice in London. He accepted an out-of-court settlement of £10,000 in damages and more than £100,000 in costs. Combs can no longer use the name Diddy in the UK, where he is still known as P. Diddy. An assault charge against Combs filed by Michigan television host Rogelio Mills was resolved in Combs's favor in 2005. Combs starred in the 2005 film Carlito's Way: Rise to Power. He played Walter Lee Younger in the 2004 Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun and the television adaptation that aired in February 2008. In 2005 Combs sold half of his record company to the Warner Music Group. He hosted the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards and was named one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2005 by Time magazine. He was mentioned in the country song "Play Something Country" by Brooks & Dunn: the lyricist says he "didn't come to hear P. Diddy", which is rhymed with "something thumpin' from the city". In 2006, when Combs refused to release musician Mase from his contractual obligations to allow him to join the group G-Unit, 50 Cent recorded a diss song, "Hip-Hop". The lyrics imply that Combs knew the identity of The Notorious B.I.G.'s murderer. The two later resolved the feud. Combs released his first album in four years, Press Play, on October 17, 2006, on the Bad Boy Records label. The album, featuring guest appearances by many popular artists, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart with sales of over 173,009. Its singles "Come to Me" and "Last Night" both reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100. The album became available to preview on MTV's The Leak on October 10, 2006, a week before being sold in stores. Press Play received mixed to positive reviews from critics, and was certified Gold on the RIAA ratings. On September 18, 2007, Combs teamed up with 50 Cent and Jay-Z for the "Forbes I Get Money Billion Dollar Remix". In March 2008, the Los Angeles Times claimed that The Notorious B.I.G. and Combs orchestrated the 1994 robbery and shooting of Tupac, substantiating the claim with supposed FBI documents; the newspaper later retracted the story, acknowledging that the documents had been fabricated. Dexter Isaac, an associate of record management executive Jimmy Henchman, confessed in 2012 that he had shot Tupac on Henchman's orders. In June 2008, Combs's representative denied rumors of another name change. Combs ventured into reality television in August 2008 with the premiere of his VH1 series I Want to Work for Diddy. He appeared—credited under his real name—in two episodes of Season 7 of CSI: Miami: "Presumed Guilty" and "Sink or Swim", in the role of lawyer Derek Powell. 2010–2013: Dirty Money and acting Combs created a rap supergroup in 2010 known as the Dream Team. The group consists of Combs, Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, Fat Joe, Busta Rhymes, Red Café, and Fabolous. Combs made an appearance at comedian Chris Gethard's live show in January 2010 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City. In June 2010 Combs played a role (credited as Sean Combs) in the comedy film Get Him to the Greek, as Sergio Roma, a record company executive. An Entourage series representative announced that Combs would guest star on an episode during the 2010 season. Last Train to Paris was released by Combs's group Dirty Money on December 13, 2010. The release was preceded by four singles "Angels", "Hello Good Morning", "Loving You No More", and "Coming Home", which experienced mixed success on the Billboard Hot 100. "Coming Home" was the most successful of the songs, peaking at number twelve on the U.S. Hot 100, number four in the UK, and number seven in Canada. On March 10, 2011, Diddy – Dirty Money performed "Coming Home" live on American Idol. On April 18, 2011, Combs appeared in season one of Hawaii Five-0, guest starring as an undercover NYPD detective. In November 2012 Combs appeared in an episode of the eighth season of the American sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. 2014–present: MMM (Money Making Mitch), No Way Out 2, and "Love" On February 26, 2014, Combs premiered "Big Homie", featuring Rick Ross and French Montana, as the first single from his mixtape MMM (Money Making Mitch), which was originally scheduled to be released that year. The song was released for digital download on March 24, and two days later the trailer for the music video was released. The full version of the music video was released on March 31. Combs used his former stage name Puff Daddy for the album. MMM was released as a free mixtape album of 12 tracks on November 4, 2015. In 2014 Combs and Guy Gerber announced that their joint album 11 11 would be available for free download. A new single called "Finna Get Loose" featuring Combs and Pharrell Williams was released on June 29, 2015. In July 2015, Bad Boy Entertainment artist Gizzle told the press that she is collaborating with Combs on what she describes as his last album, titled No Way Out 2, a sequel to his 1997 debut. She describes the music as unique: "The mindset is to just be classic and to be epic. And to really live up to that... we know it's a tall order, but we welcome the challenge." In April 2016, Combs announced that after this last album and tour, he plans to retire from the music industry to focus on acting. On May 20 and 21, 2016, Combs launched a tour of Bad Boy Records' biggest names to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the label. The documentary Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story, covering the two shows at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn as well as behind-the-scenes events, was released on June 23, 2017. The show toured to an additional twenty venues across the United States and Canada. On November 5, 2017, Combs announced that he would be going by the name Love, stating "My new name is Love, aka Brother Love". Two days later, he told the press he had been joking, but on January 3, 2018, he announced on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that he had changed his mind again, and will be using the new name after all. In 2019, Combs announced on Twitter that Making the Band would return to MTV in 2020. Combs executive-produced Nigerian singer Burna Boy's album, Twice as Tall, released on August 14, 2020. Business career Fortune magazine listed Combs at number twelve on their top 40 of entrepreneurs under 40 in 2002. Forbes Magazine estimates that for the year ending May 2017, Combs earned $130 million, ranking him number one among entertainers. In 2019 his estimated net worth was $740 million. Sean John In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John. It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000, and won in 2004. California billionaire Ronald Burkle invested $100 million into the company in 2003. Also in 2003, the National Labor Committee revealed that factories producing the clothing in Honduras were violating Honduran labor laws. Among the accusations were that workers were subjected to body searches and involuntary pregnancy tests. Bathrooms were locked and access tightly controlled. Employees were forced to work overtime and were paid sweatshop wages. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee told The New York Times that "Sean Puff Daddy obviously has a lot of clout, he can literally do a lot overnight to help these workers." Combs responded with an extensive investigation, telling reporters "I'm as pro-worker as they get". On February 14, 2004, Kernaghan announced that improvements had been implemented at the factory, including adding air conditioning and water purification systems, firing the most abusive supervisors, and allowing the formation of a labor union. In late 2006, the department store Macy's removed Sean John jackets from their shelves when they discovered that the clothing was made using raccoon dog fur. Combs had not known the jackets were made with dog fur, but as soon as he was alerted, he had production stopped. In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called "I Am King" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King Jr., featured model Bar Refaeli in its advertisements. In early 2016, Sean John introduced the brand's GIRLS collection. Other ventures Combs is the head of Combs Enterprises, an umbrella company for his portfolio of businesses. In addition to his clothing line, Combs owned two restaurants called Justin's, named after his son. The original New York location closed in September 2007; the Atlanta location closed in June 2012. He is the designer of the Dallas Mavericks alternate jersey. In October 2007 Combs agreed to help develop the Cîroc vodka brand for a 50 percent share of the profits. Combs acquired the Enyce clothing line from Liz Claiborne for $20 million on October 21, 2008. Combs has a major equity stake in Revolt TV, a television network that also has a film production branch. It began broadcasting in 2014. In February 2015, Combs teamed up with actor Mark Wahlberg and businessman Ronald Burkle of Yucaipa Companies to purchase a majority holding in Aquahydrate, a calorie-free beverage for athletes. John Cochran, former president of Fiji Water, is CEO of the company. In 2019 Combs became a major investor in PlayVS, which provides an infrastructure for competitive gaming in US high schools. The company was also backed by Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin. Personal life Family Combs is the father of six children. His first biological child, Justin, was born in 1993 to designer Misa Hylton-Brim. Justin attended UCLA on a football scholarship. Combs had an on-again, off-again relationship with Kimberly Porter (1970–2018), which lasted from 1994 to 2007. He raised and adopted Quincy (born 1991), Porter's son from a previous relationship with singer-producer Al B. Sure! Together they had a son, Christian (born 1998), and twin daughters, D'Lila Star and Jessie James (born 2006). Porter died of pneumonia on November 15, 2018. Five months before the birth of his twins, Combs's daughter, Chance, was born to Sarah Chapman. He took legal responsibility for Chance in October 2007. Combs was in a long-term relationship with Cassie Ventura from 2007 to 2018. Combs's sons Quincy and Justin both appeared on MTV's My Super Sweet 16. Combs threw Quincy a celebrity-studded party and gave him two cars as his 16th birthday present. For Justin's 16th birthday, Combs presented him with a $360,000 Maybach car. Combs owns a home in Alpine, New Jersey, which he purchased for $7million. Charity work and honors Combs founded Daddy's House Social Programs, an organization to help inner city youth, in 1995. Programs include tutoring, life skills classes, and an annual summer camp. Along with Jay-Z, he pledged $1 million to help support victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and donated clothing from his Sean John line to victims. He has donated computers and books to New York schools. In 1998, he received a Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley named October 13, 2006, as "Diddy Day" in honor of Combs's charity work. In 2008, Combs was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the first male rapper to be so honored. In 2014, Combs received an honorary doctorate from Howard University, where he gave the commencement speech for its 146th commencement ceremony. In his speech, Combs acknowledged that his experiences as a Howard student positively influenced his life. In 2016, Combs donated $1 million to Howard University to establish the Sean Combs Scholarship Fund to help students who are unable to pay their tuition. Wardrobe style Combs describes his wardrobe style as "swagger, timeless, diverse". On September 2, 2007, Combs held his ninth annual "White Party", at which guests are limited to an all-white dress code. The White Party, which has also been held in St. Tropez, was held in his home in East Hampton, New York. Combs stated, "This party is up there with the top three that I've thrown. It's a party that has legendary status. It's hard to throw a party that lives up to its legend." Religious views Combs was raised Catholic, and was an altar server as a boy. In 2008 he told The Daily Telegraph that he does not adhere to any specific religious denomination. He said, "I just follow right from wrong, so I could pray in a synagogue or a mosque or a church. I believe that there is only one God." On July 3, 2020, Combs invited his Twitter followers to view a 3-hour YouTube video posted by Louis Farrakhan. In the video Farrakhan made multiple anti-Semitic comments and repeatedly used the phrase "Synagogue of Satan". The video was removed from YouTube for violating its policy against hate speech. In response to comedian Nick Cannon being fired on July 14, 2020, from ViacomCBS for espousing anti-Semitic views, Combs tweeted that Cannon should "come home to RevoltTv" saying "We got your back and love you and what you have done for the culture." Discography Studio albums No Way Out (1997) Forever (1999) The Saga Continues... (2001) Press Play (2006) Awards and nominations NAACP Image Awards \|- \| 2009 \| A Raisin in the Sun \| Outstanding Actor in a Television Movie,Mini-Series or Dramatic Special \| \|- \| 2011 \| Diddy – Dirty Money \| Outstanding Duo or Group \| \|} BET Awards \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2002 \|\| "Bad Boy for Life" \|\| rowspan="2" \| Video of the Year \|\| \|- \| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" \|\| \|- \| 2003 \|\| "Bump, Bump, Bump" \|\| Coca-Cola Viewer's Choice Award \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2007 \|\| "Last Night" \|\| Best Collaboration \|\| \|- \| Diddy \|\| Best Male Hip-Hop Artist \|\| \|- \| 2010 \|\| rowspan="3" \| Diddy – Dirty Money \|\| rowspan="4" \| Best Group \|\| \|- \| 2011 \|\| \|- \| 2012 \|\| \|- \| 2016 \|\| Puff Daddy and the Family \|\| \|} BET Hip Hop Awards \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2008 \|\| "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is)..." \|\| Track of the Year \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| Sean Combs \|\| rowspan="2" \| Hustler of the Year \|\| \|- \| 2009 \|\| \|- \| rowspan="4" \| 2010 \|\| "All I Do Is Win (Remix)" \|\| rowspan="2" \| Reese's Perfect Combo Award \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| "Hello Good Morning (Remix)" \|\| \|- \| Best Club Banger \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| Sean Combs \|\| rowspan="2" \| Hustler of the Year \|\| \|- \| 2011 \|\| \|- \| 2012 \|\| rowspan="2" \| "Same Damn Time (Remix)" \|\| rowspan="2" \| Sweet 16: Best Featured Verse \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2013 \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| Sean Combs \|\| rowspan="2" \| Hustler of the Year \|\| \|- \| 2017 \|\| \|} MTV Europe Music Awards \|- \| rowspan="4" \| 1997 \|\| rowspan="2" \| "I'll Be Missing You" \|\| MTV Select \|\| \|- \| Best Song \|\| \|- \| rowspan="8" \| Sean Combs \|\| Best New Act \|\| \|- \| Best Hip-Hop \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 1998 \|\| Best Male \|\| \|- \| rowspan="5" \| Best Hip-Hop \|\| \|- \| 1999 \|\| \|- \| 2001 \|\| \|- \| 2002 \|\| \|- \| 2006 \|\| \|- \| 2011 \|\| Diddy – Dirty Money \|\| Best World Stage Performance \|\| \|} MTV Movie & TV Awards \|- \| 2018 \|\| Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story \|\| Best Music Documentary \|\| \|} MTV Video Music Awards \|- \| rowspan="2" \| \|\| rowspan="2" \| "I'll Be Missing You" \|\| Best R&B Video \|\| \|- \| Viewer's Choice \|\| \|- \| rowspan="3" \| \|\| rowspan="2" \| "It's All About the Benjamins" (Rock Remix) \|\| Video of the Year \|\| \|- \| Viewer's Choice \|\| \|- \| "Come with Me" \|\| Best Video from a Film \|\| \|- \| \|\| "Bad Boy for Life" \|\| Best Rap Video \|\| \|} Grammy Awards !Ref. \|- \| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="7" \| 1998 \| Puff Daddy \| Best New Artist \| \| rowspan="7"\| \|- \| No Way Out \| rowspan="2"\|Best Rap Album \| \|- \| Life After Death (as producer) \| \|- \| "Honey" (as songwriter) \| Best Rhythm & Blues Song \| \|- \| "I'll Be Missing You" (featuring Faith Evans & 112) \| rowspan="7"\|Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group \| \|- \| "Mo Money Mo Problems" (with The Notorious B.I.G. & Mase) \| \|- \| "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down" (featuring Mase) \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2000 \| "Satisfy You" (featuring R. Kelly) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2002 \| "Bad Boy for Life" (with Black Rob & Mark Curry) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2003 \| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" (with Busta Rhymes & Pharrell) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2004 \| "Shake Ya Tailfeather" (with Nelly & Murphy Lee) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2016 \| "All Day" (as songwriter) \| Best Rap Song \| \| \|} Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time Other awards In 2021, Combs was among the inaugural inductees into the Black Music and Entertainment Walk of Fame. Filmography Made (2001) Monster's Ball (2001) 2005 MTV Video Music Awards (2006) Seamless (2005) Carlito's Way: Rise to Power (2005) A Raisin in the Sun (2008) CSI Miami: episode "Sink or Swim" (2009) Get Him to the Greek (2010) I'm Still Here (2010) Hawaii Five-0: episode "Hoʻopaʻi" (2011) It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (TV series) (2012) Draft Day (2014) Muppets Most Wanted (2014) Black-ish (TV series) (2015) Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story (2017) The Defiant Ones (2017) Mary J. Blige's My Life (2021) Tours No Way Out Tour (1997–1998) Forever Tour (2000) References Sources External links 1969 births 20th-century American businesspeople 20th-century American male musicians 20th-century American rappers 21st-century American businesspeople 21st-century American male actors 21st-century American male musicians 21st-century American rappers Actors from Mount Vernon, New York African-American businesspeople African-American designers African-American fashion designers African-American film producers African-American male actors African-American male rappers African-American record producers American chairpersons of corporations American chief executives in the media industry American chief executives of fashion industry companies American corporate directors American cosmetics businesspeople American dance musicians American drink industry businesspeople American fashion businesspeople American fashion designers American film producers American hip hop record producers American landlords American male film actors American male rappers American male television actors American marketing businesspeople American mass media owners American music industry executives American music publishers (people) American music video directors American philanthropists American restaurateurs American retail chief executives American television company founders American television executives Bad Boy Records artists Businesspeople from New York City East Coast hip hop musicians Former Roman Catholics Grammy Award winners for rap music Howard University alumni Living people Male actors from New York City Music video codirectors Musicians from Mount Vernon, New York Participants in American reality television series People from Harlem Pop rappers Rappers from Manhattan Record producers from New York (state) Remixers	false	[ "Acapulco Gold is a clothing brand founded in New York City in 2006.\n\nCo-owners Augie Galan and Geoff Heath met while working at Supreme (clothing) in 1998. After nearly a decade there, they decided to branch off and start their own line of clothing. The brand began with T-shirts and hats at first, then as popularity grew extended their line to include high quality cut and sew garments.\n\nAcapulco Gold sells its clothing at boutiques in 19 countries and has a global reach through its website.\n\nAcapulco Gold has collaborated with photographer Janette Beckman to produce an ongoing line of T-shirts and hats based on her photographs.\n\nIn 2010, Acapulco Gold teamed with Mark McNairy to create original footwear.\n\nAcapulco Gold also collaborated with Vans in 2010 to put their twist on the Moda Hi sneaker.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nClothing brands of the United States\nClothing companies established in 2006\n2006 establishments in New York City", "\"Why Don't You Want My Love?\" is a single by American singer La Toya Jackson. After recording her sixth studio album Bad Girl, which would be distributed in 1991, Jackson signed a deal with BCM Records in Germany.\n\nThe song was intended to be the lead single for a new album under the BCM label, but the company went bankrupt before the album could be completed. \"Why Don't You Want My Love?\" was originally scheduled for a release in fall 1990 but was delayed several times until its release in January 1991. The single was released in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.\n\nBCM started a huge print campaign for the CD single, advertising the single with the caption \"A fresh new start with BCM\", and there is even a short message for all DJs at the end of the CD single with Jackson's soft voice asking, \"Now DJs, why don't you want my love?\".\n\nThe single was released on 7\", 12\" and CD formats, but failed to reach the charts. In 1993, the song was licensed to the German label \"Legend\", who released a remix of the song along with the 12 tracks from Jackson's Bad Girl album. The compilation was titled Why Don't You Want My Love?.\n\nJackson quickly signed a new record deal with Pump Records in the Netherlands and released a new single and album only 10 months later.\n\nTrack listings\nWhy Don't You Want My Love? (Radio Version) \t \t\nWhy Don't You Want My Love? (Original Version) \t\t\nWhy Don't You Want My Love? (Bruce Forest Remix) \t\t\nWhy Don't You Want My Love? (Instrumental Remix - Hot Mix D.J. Drop In)\n\nReferences \n\nLa Toya Jackson songs\n1990 songs" ]
[ "Sean Combs", "Sean John", "who is sean john?", "In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John.", "why did he want to start a clothing line?", "I don't know." ]	C_07b75bf747f14969bd3b73fb1e58e27a_0	did anyone work with him?	3	Didd anyone work with Combs?	Sean Combs	In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John. It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000, and won in 2004. California billionaire Ronald Burkle invested $100 million into the company in 2003. Also in 2003, the National Labor Committee revealed that factories producing the clothing in Honduras were violating Honduran labor laws. Among the accusations were that workers were subjected to body searches and involuntary pregnancy tests. Bathrooms were locked and access tightly controlled. Employees were forced to work overtime and were paid sweatshop wages. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee told The New York Times that "Sean Puff Daddy obviously has a lot of clout, he can literally do a lot overnight to help these workers." Combs responded with an extensive investigation, telling reporters "I'm as pro-worker as they get". On February 14, 2004, Kernaghan announced that improvements had been implemented at the factory, including adding air conditioning and water purification systems, firing the most abusive supervisors, and allowing the formation of a labor union. In late 2006, the department store Macy's removed Sean John jackets from their shelves when they discovered that the clothing was made using raccoon dog fur. Combs had not known the jackets were made with dog fur, but as soon as he was alerted, he had production stopped. In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called "I Am King" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King, featured model Bar Refaeli in its advertisements. In early 2016, Sean John introduced the brand's GIRLS collection. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER	Sean John Combs (born November 4, 1969), also known by his stage name Puff Daddy (previously known as P. Diddy, Diddy, or Puffy), is an American rapper, actor, songwriter, record executive, record producer, and entrepreneur. Born in New York City and raised in the suburb of Mount Vernon, he worked as a talent director at Uptown Records before founding his own record label, Bad Boy Records in 1993. Combs has produced and cultivated artists such as The Notorious B.I.G., Mary J. Blige, and Usher. Combs' debut album, No Way Out (1997), has been certified seven times platinum. The album was followed by Forever (1999), The Saga Continues..., (2001) and Press Play (2006), all of which were commercially successful. In 2009, Combs formed the musical group Dirty Money; together, they released their highly successful debut album Last Train to Paris (2010). Combs has won three Grammy Awards and two MTV Video Music Awards and is the producer of MTV's Making the Band. In 2019, Forbes estimated his net worth at $740 million. In 1998, he launched his own clothing line Sean John. He was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000 and won in 2004. Early life Sean John Combs was born in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City on November 4, 1969. Raised in Mount Vernon, New York, his mother Janice Combs (née Smalls) was a model and teacher's assistant and his father, Melvin Earl Combs, served in the U.S. Air Force and was an associate of convicted New York drug dealer Frank Lucas. At age 33, Melvin was shot to death while sitting in his car on Central Park West, when Sean was two years old. Combs graduated from Mount Saint Michael Academy in 1987. He played football for the academy and his team won a division title in 1986. Combs said he was given the nickname "Puff" as a child, because he would "huff and puff" when he was angry. Combs was a business major at Howard University but left after his sophomore year. In 2014, he returned to Howard University to receive an Honorary Doctorate in Humanities and deliver the University's 146th Commencement Address. Career 1990–1996: Career beginnings Combs became an intern at New York's Uptown Records in 1990. While working as a talent director at Uptown, he helped develop Jodeci and Mary J. Blige. In his college days Combs had a reputation for throwing parties, some of which attracted up to a thousand participants. In 1991, Combs promoted an AIDS fundraiser with Heavy D held at the City College of New York (CCNY) gymnasium, following a charity basketball game. The event was oversold, and a stampede occurred in which nine people died. In 1993, after being fired from Uptown, Combs established his new label Bad Boy Entertainment as a joint venture with Arista Records, taking then-newcomer Christopher Wallace, better known as The Notorious B.I.G., with him. Both Wallace and Craig Mack quickly released hit singles, followed by successful LPs, particularly Wallace's Ready to Die. Combs signed more acts to Bad Boy, including Carl Thomas, Faith Evans, 112, Total, and Father MC. The Hitmen, his in-house production team, worked with Jodeci, Mary J. Blige, Usher, Lil' Kim, TLC, Mariah Carey, Boyz II Men, SWV, Aretha Franklin, and others. Mase and the Lox joined Bad Boy just as a widely publicized rivalry with the West Coast's Death Row Records was beginning. Combs and Wallace were criticized and parodied by Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight in songs and interviews during the mid-1990s. During 1994–1995, Combs produced several songs for TLC's CrazySexyCool, which finished the decade as number 25 on Billboard's list of top pop albums of the decade. 1997–1998: "Puff Daddy" and No Way Out In 1997, under the name Puff Daddy, Combs recorded his first commercial vocal work as a rapper. His debut single, "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", spent 28 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, peaking at number one. His debut album, No Way Out, was released on July 22, 1997, through Bad Boy Records. Originally titled Hell up in Harlem, the album underwent several changes after The Notorious B.I.G. was killed on March 9, 1997. Several of the label's artists made guest appearances on the album. No Way Out was a significant success, particularly in the United States, where it reached number one on the Billboard 200 in its first week of release, selling 561,000 copies. The album produced five singles: "I'll Be Missing You", a tribute to The Notorious B.I.G., was the first rap song to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100; it remained at the top of the chart for eleven consecutive weeks and topped several other charts worldwide. Four other singles – "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", "It's All About the Benjamins", "Been Around the World", and "Victory" – were also released. Combs collaborated with Jimmy Page on the song "Come with Me" for the 1998 film Godzilla. The album earned Combs five nominations at the 40th Grammy Awards in 1998, winning the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album. On September 7, 2000, the album was certified septuple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of over 7 million copies. In 1997, Combs was sued for landlord neglect by Inge Bongo. Combs denied the charges. By the late 1990s, he was being criticized for watering down and overly commercializing hip hop, and for using too many guest appearances, samples, and interpolations of past hits in his new songs. 1999–2000: Forever and Club New York In April 1999, Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records. Stoute was the manager for Nas, with whom Combs had filmed a video earlier that year for the song "Hate Me Now". Combs was concerned that the video, which featured a shot of Nas and Combs being crucified, was blasphemous. He asked for his scenes on the cross to be pulled, but after it aired unedited on MTV on April 15, Combs visited Stoute's offices and injured Stoute. Combs was charged with second-degree assault and criminal mischief, and was sentenced to attend a one-day anger management class. Forever, Combs's second solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999, in North America, and in the UK on the following day. It reached number two on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, where it remained for one week before being knocked off by Mary J. Blige's fourth album, Mary. The album received positive to mixed reviews from music critics and spawned three singles that have charted on the Billboard charts. It peaked at number four on the Canadian Albums Chart, Combs's highest-charting album in that country. On December 27, 1999, Combs and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were at Club New York in Manhattan when gunfire broke out. After a police investigation, Combs and fellow rapper Shyne were arrested for weapons violations and other charges. Combs was charged with four weapons-related charges and bribing his driver, Wardel Fenderson, to claim ownership of his gun. With a gag order in place, the highly publicized trial began. Combs's attorneys were Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Benjamin Brafman. Combs was found not guilty on all charges; Shyne was convicted on five of his eight charges and sentenced to ten years in prison. Combs and Lopez broke up shortly after. A lawsuit filed by Fenderson, who said he suffered emotional damage after the shooting, was settled in February 2004. Lawyers for both sides, having agreed to keep the settlement terms secret, said the matter had been "resolved to the satisfaction of all parties". 2001–2004: "P. Diddy" and The Saga Continues Combs changed his stage name from "Puff Daddy" to "P. Diddy" in 2001. The gospel album, Thank You, which had been completed just before the beginning of the weapons trial, was due to be released in March that year, but remains unreleased . He appeared as a drug dealer in the film Made and starred with Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball (both in 2001). He was arrested for driving on a suspended license in Florida. Combs began working with a series of unusual (for him) artists. For a short period of time, he was the manager of Kelis; they have a collaboration titled "Let's Get Ill". He was an opening act for 'N Sync on their Spring 2002 Celebrity Tour, and he signed California-based pop girl group Dream to his record label. Combs was a producer of the soundtrack album for the film Training Day (2001). In June 2001, Combs ended Bad Boy Entertainment's joint venture with Arista Records, gaining full control of Bad Boy, its catalogue, and its roster of artists. The Saga Continues..., released on July 10 in North America, was the last studio album released by the joint venture. The album reached number 2 on the Billboard 200 and the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums charts, and was eventually certified Platinum. It is the only studio album under the P. Diddy name, and the first album by Sean Combs not to feature any guest appearances by Jay-Z or Lil Kim. Combs was executive producer of the reality TV show Making the Band, which appeared on MTV from 2002 to 2009. The show involves interviewing candidates and creating musical acts that would then enter the music business. Acts who got their start this way include Da Band, Danity Kane, Day26, and Donnie Klang. In 2003 Combs ran in the New York City Marathon, raising $2million for the educational system of the city of New York. On March 10, 2004, he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss the marathon, which he finished in four hours and eighteen minutes. In 2004 Combs headed the campaign "Vote or Die" for the 2004 presidential election. On February 1, 2004, Combs (as P. Diddy) performed at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. 2005–2009: "Diddy" and Press Play On August 16, 2005, Combs announced on Today that he was altering his stage name yet again; he would be calling himself "Diddy". Combs said fans didn't know how to address him, which led to confusion. In November 2005, London-based musical artist and DJ Richard Dearlove, who had been performing under the name "Diddy" since 1992 nine years before Combs started using even "P. Diddy" sought an injunction in the High Court of Justice in London. He accepted an out-of-court settlement of £10,000 in damages and more than £100,000 in costs. Combs can no longer use the name Diddy in the UK, where he is still known as P. Diddy. An assault charge against Combs filed by Michigan television host Rogelio Mills was resolved in Combs's favor in 2005. Combs starred in the 2005 film Carlito's Way: Rise to Power. He played Walter Lee Younger in the 2004 Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun and the television adaptation that aired in February 2008. In 2005 Combs sold half of his record company to the Warner Music Group. He hosted the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards and was named one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2005 by Time magazine. He was mentioned in the country song "Play Something Country" by Brooks & Dunn: the lyricist says he "didn't come to hear P. Diddy", which is rhymed with "something thumpin' from the city". In 2006, when Combs refused to release musician Mase from his contractual obligations to allow him to join the group G-Unit, 50 Cent recorded a diss song, "Hip-Hop". The lyrics imply that Combs knew the identity of The Notorious B.I.G.'s murderer. The two later resolved the feud. Combs released his first album in four years, Press Play, on October 17, 2006, on the Bad Boy Records label. The album, featuring guest appearances by many popular artists, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart with sales of over 173,009. Its singles "Come to Me" and "Last Night" both reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100. The album became available to preview on MTV's The Leak on October 10, 2006, a week before being sold in stores. Press Play received mixed to positive reviews from critics, and was certified Gold on the RIAA ratings. On September 18, 2007, Combs teamed up with 50 Cent and Jay-Z for the "Forbes I Get Money Billion Dollar Remix". In March 2008, the Los Angeles Times claimed that The Notorious B.I.G. and Combs orchestrated the 1994 robbery and shooting of Tupac, substantiating the claim with supposed FBI documents; the newspaper later retracted the story, acknowledging that the documents had been fabricated. Dexter Isaac, an associate of record management executive Jimmy Henchman, confessed in 2012 that he had shot Tupac on Henchman's orders. In June 2008, Combs's representative denied rumors of another name change. Combs ventured into reality television in August 2008 with the premiere of his VH1 series I Want to Work for Diddy. He appeared—credited under his real name—in two episodes of Season 7 of CSI: Miami: "Presumed Guilty" and "Sink or Swim", in the role of lawyer Derek Powell. 2010–2013: Dirty Money and acting Combs created a rap supergroup in 2010 known as the Dream Team. The group consists of Combs, Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, Fat Joe, Busta Rhymes, Red Café, and Fabolous. Combs made an appearance at comedian Chris Gethard's live show in January 2010 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City. In June 2010 Combs played a role (credited as Sean Combs) in the comedy film Get Him to the Greek, as Sergio Roma, a record company executive. An Entourage series representative announced that Combs would guest star on an episode during the 2010 season. Last Train to Paris was released by Combs's group Dirty Money on December 13, 2010. The release was preceded by four singles "Angels", "Hello Good Morning", "Loving You No More", and "Coming Home", which experienced mixed success on the Billboard Hot 100. "Coming Home" was the most successful of the songs, peaking at number twelve on the U.S. Hot 100, number four in the UK, and number seven in Canada. On March 10, 2011, Diddy – Dirty Money performed "Coming Home" live on American Idol. On April 18, 2011, Combs appeared in season one of Hawaii Five-0, guest starring as an undercover NYPD detective. In November 2012 Combs appeared in an episode of the eighth season of the American sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. 2014–present: MMM (Money Making Mitch), No Way Out 2, and "Love" On February 26, 2014, Combs premiered "Big Homie", featuring Rick Ross and French Montana, as the first single from his mixtape MMM (Money Making Mitch), which was originally scheduled to be released that year. The song was released for digital download on March 24, and two days later the trailer for the music video was released. The full version of the music video was released on March 31. Combs used his former stage name Puff Daddy for the album. MMM was released as a free mixtape album of 12 tracks on November 4, 2015. In 2014 Combs and Guy Gerber announced that their joint album 11 11 would be available for free download. A new single called "Finna Get Loose" featuring Combs and Pharrell Williams was released on June 29, 2015. In July 2015, Bad Boy Entertainment artist Gizzle told the press that she is collaborating with Combs on what she describes as his last album, titled No Way Out 2, a sequel to his 1997 debut. She describes the music as unique: "The mindset is to just be classic and to be epic. And to really live up to that... we know it's a tall order, but we welcome the challenge." In April 2016, Combs announced that after this last album and tour, he plans to retire from the music industry to focus on acting. On May 20 and 21, 2016, Combs launched a tour of Bad Boy Records' biggest names to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the label. The documentary Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story, covering the two shows at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn as well as behind-the-scenes events, was released on June 23, 2017. The show toured to an additional twenty venues across the United States and Canada. On November 5, 2017, Combs announced that he would be going by the name Love, stating "My new name is Love, aka Brother Love". Two days later, he told the press he had been joking, but on January 3, 2018, he announced on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that he had changed his mind again, and will be using the new name after all. In 2019, Combs announced on Twitter that Making the Band would return to MTV in 2020. Combs executive-produced Nigerian singer Burna Boy's album, Twice as Tall, released on August 14, 2020. Business career Fortune magazine listed Combs at number twelve on their top 40 of entrepreneurs under 40 in 2002. Forbes Magazine estimates that for the year ending May 2017, Combs earned $130 million, ranking him number one among entertainers. In 2019 his estimated net worth was $740 million. Sean John In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John. It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000, and won in 2004. California billionaire Ronald Burkle invested $100 million into the company in 2003. Also in 2003, the National Labor Committee revealed that factories producing the clothing in Honduras were violating Honduran labor laws. Among the accusations were that workers were subjected to body searches and involuntary pregnancy tests. Bathrooms were locked and access tightly controlled. Employees were forced to work overtime and were paid sweatshop wages. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee told The New York Times that "Sean Puff Daddy obviously has a lot of clout, he can literally do a lot overnight to help these workers." Combs responded with an extensive investigation, telling reporters "I'm as pro-worker as they get". On February 14, 2004, Kernaghan announced that improvements had been implemented at the factory, including adding air conditioning and water purification systems, firing the most abusive supervisors, and allowing the formation of a labor union. In late 2006, the department store Macy's removed Sean John jackets from their shelves when they discovered that the clothing was made using raccoon dog fur. Combs had not known the jackets were made with dog fur, but as soon as he was alerted, he had production stopped. In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called "I Am King" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King Jr., featured model Bar Refaeli in its advertisements. In early 2016, Sean John introduced the brand's GIRLS collection. Other ventures Combs is the head of Combs Enterprises, an umbrella company for his portfolio of businesses. In addition to his clothing line, Combs owned two restaurants called Justin's, named after his son. The original New York location closed in September 2007; the Atlanta location closed in June 2012. He is the designer of the Dallas Mavericks alternate jersey. In October 2007 Combs agreed to help develop the Cîroc vodka brand for a 50 percent share of the profits. Combs acquired the Enyce clothing line from Liz Claiborne for $20 million on October 21, 2008. Combs has a major equity stake in Revolt TV, a television network that also has a film production branch. It began broadcasting in 2014. In February 2015, Combs teamed up with actor Mark Wahlberg and businessman Ronald Burkle of Yucaipa Companies to purchase a majority holding in Aquahydrate, a calorie-free beverage for athletes. John Cochran, former president of Fiji Water, is CEO of the company. In 2019 Combs became a major investor in PlayVS, which provides an infrastructure for competitive gaming in US high schools. The company was also backed by Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin. Personal life Family Combs is the father of six children. His first biological child, Justin, was born in 1993 to designer Misa Hylton-Brim. Justin attended UCLA on a football scholarship. Combs had an on-again, off-again relationship with Kimberly Porter (1970–2018), which lasted from 1994 to 2007. He raised and adopted Quincy (born 1991), Porter's son from a previous relationship with singer-producer Al B. Sure! Together they had a son, Christian (born 1998), and twin daughters, D'Lila Star and Jessie James (born 2006). Porter died of pneumonia on November 15, 2018. Five months before the birth of his twins, Combs's daughter, Chance, was born to Sarah Chapman. He took legal responsibility for Chance in October 2007. Combs was in a long-term relationship with Cassie Ventura from 2007 to 2018. Combs's sons Quincy and Justin both appeared on MTV's My Super Sweet 16. Combs threw Quincy a celebrity-studded party and gave him two cars as his 16th birthday present. For Justin's 16th birthday, Combs presented him with a $360,000 Maybach car. Combs owns a home in Alpine, New Jersey, which he purchased for $7million. Charity work and honors Combs founded Daddy's House Social Programs, an organization to help inner city youth, in 1995. Programs include tutoring, life skills classes, and an annual summer camp. Along with Jay-Z, he pledged $1 million to help support victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and donated clothing from his Sean John line to victims. He has donated computers and books to New York schools. In 1998, he received a Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley named October 13, 2006, as "Diddy Day" in honor of Combs's charity work. In 2008, Combs was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the first male rapper to be so honored. In 2014, Combs received an honorary doctorate from Howard University, where he gave the commencement speech for its 146th commencement ceremony. In his speech, Combs acknowledged that his experiences as a Howard student positively influenced his life. In 2016, Combs donated $1 million to Howard University to establish the Sean Combs Scholarship Fund to help students who are unable to pay their tuition. Wardrobe style Combs describes his wardrobe style as "swagger, timeless, diverse". On September 2, 2007, Combs held his ninth annual "White Party", at which guests are limited to an all-white dress code. The White Party, which has also been held in St. Tropez, was held in his home in East Hampton, New York. Combs stated, "This party is up there with the top three that I've thrown. It's a party that has legendary status. It's hard to throw a party that lives up to its legend." Religious views Combs was raised Catholic, and was an altar server as a boy. In 2008 he told The Daily Telegraph that he does not adhere to any specific religious denomination. He said, "I just follow right from wrong, so I could pray in a synagogue or a mosque or a church. I believe that there is only one God." On July 3, 2020, Combs invited his Twitter followers to view a 3-hour YouTube video posted by Louis Farrakhan. In the video Farrakhan made multiple anti-Semitic comments and repeatedly used the phrase "Synagogue of Satan". The video was removed from YouTube for violating its policy against hate speech. In response to comedian Nick Cannon being fired on July 14, 2020, from ViacomCBS for espousing anti-Semitic views, Combs tweeted that Cannon should "come home to RevoltTv" saying "We got your back and love you and what you have done for the culture." Discography Studio albums No Way Out (1997) Forever (1999) The Saga Continues... (2001) Press Play (2006) Awards and nominations NAACP Image Awards \|- \| 2009 \| A Raisin in the Sun \| Outstanding Actor in a Television Movie,Mini-Series or Dramatic Special \| \|- \| 2011 \| Diddy – Dirty Money \| Outstanding Duo or Group \| \|} BET Awards \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2002 \|\| "Bad Boy for Life" \|\| rowspan="2" \| Video of the Year \|\| \|- \| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" \|\| \|- \| 2003 \|\| "Bump, Bump, Bump" \|\| Coca-Cola Viewer's Choice Award \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2007 \|\| "Last Night" \|\| Best Collaboration \|\| \|- \| Diddy \|\| Best Male Hip-Hop Artist \|\| \|- \| 2010 \|\| rowspan="3" \| Diddy – Dirty Money \|\| rowspan="4" \| Best Group \|\| \|- \| 2011 \|\| \|- \| 2012 \|\| \|- \| 2016 \|\| Puff Daddy and the Family \|\| \|} BET Hip Hop Awards \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2008 \|\| "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is)..." \|\| Track of the Year \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| Sean Combs \|\| rowspan="2" \| Hustler of the Year \|\| \|- \| 2009 \|\| \|- \| rowspan="4" \| 2010 \|\| "All I Do Is Win (Remix)" \|\| rowspan="2" \| Reese's Perfect Combo Award \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| "Hello Good Morning (Remix)" \|\| \|- \| Best Club Banger \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| Sean Combs \|\| rowspan="2" \| Hustler of the Year \|\| \|- \| 2011 \|\| \|- \| 2012 \|\| rowspan="2" \| "Same Damn Time (Remix)" \|\| rowspan="2" \| Sweet 16: Best Featured Verse \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2013 \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| Sean Combs \|\| rowspan="2" \| Hustler of the Year \|\| \|- \| 2017 \|\| \|} MTV Europe Music Awards \|- \| rowspan="4" \| 1997 \|\| rowspan="2" \| "I'll Be Missing You" \|\| MTV Select \|\| \|- \| Best Song \|\| \|- \| rowspan="8" \| Sean Combs \|\| Best New Act \|\| \|- \| Best Hip-Hop \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 1998 \|\| Best Male \|\| \|- \| rowspan="5" \| Best Hip-Hop \|\| \|- \| 1999 \|\| \|- \| 2001 \|\| \|- \| 2002 \|\| \|- \| 2006 \|\| \|- \| 2011 \|\| Diddy – Dirty Money \|\| Best World Stage Performance \|\| \|} MTV Movie & TV Awards \|- \| 2018 \|\| Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story \|\| Best Music Documentary \|\| \|} MTV Video Music Awards \|- \| rowspan="2" \| \|\| rowspan="2" \| "I'll Be Missing You" \|\| Best R&B Video \|\| \|- \| Viewer's Choice \|\| \|- \| rowspan="3" \| \|\| rowspan="2" \| "It's All About the Benjamins" (Rock Remix) \|\| Video of the Year \|\| \|- \| Viewer's Choice \|\| \|- \| "Come with Me" \|\| Best Video from a Film \|\| \|- \| \|\| "Bad Boy for Life" \|\| Best Rap Video \|\| \|} Grammy Awards !Ref. \|- \| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="7" \| 1998 \| Puff Daddy \| Best New Artist \| \| rowspan="7"\| \|- \| No Way Out \| rowspan="2"\|Best Rap Album \| \|- \| Life After Death (as producer) \| \|- \| "Honey" (as songwriter) \| Best Rhythm & Blues Song \| \|- \| "I'll Be Missing You" (featuring Faith Evans & 112) \| rowspan="7"\|Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group \| \|- \| "Mo Money Mo Problems" (with The Notorious B.I.G. & Mase) \| \|- \| "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down" (featuring Mase) \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2000 \| "Satisfy You" (featuring R. Kelly) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2002 \| "Bad Boy for Life" (with Black Rob & Mark Curry) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2003 \| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" (with Busta Rhymes & Pharrell) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2004 \| "Shake Ya Tailfeather" (with Nelly & Murphy Lee) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2016 \| "All Day" (as songwriter) \| Best Rap Song \| \| \|} Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time Other awards In 2021, Combs was among the inaugural inductees into the Black Music and Entertainment Walk of Fame. Filmography Made (2001) Monster's Ball (2001) 2005 MTV Video Music Awards (2006) Seamless (2005) Carlito's Way: Rise to Power (2005) A Raisin in the Sun (2008) CSI Miami: episode "Sink or Swim" (2009) Get Him to the Greek (2010) I'm Still Here (2010) Hawaii Five-0: episode "Hoʻopaʻi" (2011) It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (TV series) (2012) Draft Day (2014) Muppets Most Wanted (2014) Black-ish (TV series) (2015) Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story (2017) The Defiant Ones (2017) Mary J. Blige's My Life (2021) Tours No Way Out Tour (1997–1998) Forever Tour (2000) References Sources External links 1969 births 20th-century American businesspeople 20th-century American male musicians 20th-century American rappers 21st-century American businesspeople 21st-century American male actors 21st-century American male musicians 21st-century American rappers Actors from Mount Vernon, New York African-American businesspeople African-American designers African-American fashion designers African-American film producers African-American male actors African-American male rappers African-American record producers American chairpersons of corporations American chief executives in the media industry American chief executives of fashion industry companies American corporate directors American cosmetics businesspeople American dance musicians American drink industry businesspeople American fashion businesspeople American fashion designers American film producers American hip hop record producers American landlords American male film actors American male rappers American male television actors American marketing businesspeople American mass media owners American music industry executives American music publishers (people) American music video directors American philanthropists American restaurateurs American retail chief executives American television company founders American television executives Bad Boy Records artists Businesspeople from New York City East Coast hip hop musicians Former Roman Catholics Grammy Award winners for rap music Howard University alumni Living people Male actors from New York City Music video codirectors Musicians from Mount Vernon, New York Participants in American reality television series People from Harlem Pop rappers Rappers from Manhattan Record producers from New York (state) Remixers	false	[ "The phrase \"Anyone for tennis?\" (also given as \"Tennis, anyone?\") is an English language idiom primarily of the 20th century. The phrase is used to invoke a stereotype of shallow, leisured, upper-class toffs (tennis was, particularly before the widespread advent of public courts in the later 20th century, seen as a posh game for the rich, with courts popular at country clubs and private estates). It's a stereotypical entrance or exit line given to a young man of this class in a superficial drawing-room comedy.\n\nA close paraphase of the saying, was used in George Bernard Shaw's 1914 drawing-room comedy Misalliance, in which Johnny Tarleton asks \"Anybody on for a game of tennis?\" (An 1891 story in the satirical magazine Punch put a generally similar notion in the mouth of a similar type of character: \"I’m going to see if there’s anyone on the tennis-court, and get a game if I can. Ta-ta!\".)\n\n\"Anyone for tennis?\" is particularly associated with the early career of Hollywood star Humphrey Bogart, and he is cited as the first person to use the phrase on stage. At the start of his career, in the 1920s and early 1930s, Bogart appeared in many Broadway plays in what Jeffrey Meyers characterized as \"charming and fatuous roles – in [one of] which he is supposed to have said 'Tennis, anyone?'\".\n\nIf Bogart ever did speak the line, it would have presumably been in the 1925 play Hell's Bells, set at the Tanglewood Lodge in New Dauville, Connecticut. Bogart claimed that his line in the play was \"It's forty-love outside. Anyone care to watch?\", and that indeed is what is printed in the script. However, according to Darwin Porter, director John Hayden crossed out that line and replaced it with \"Tennis anyone?\" before opening night. And several observers have asserted that he did say it, reportedly including Louella Parsons and Richard Watts Jr. Erskine Johnson, in a 1948 interview, reports Bogart as saying \"I used to play juveniles on Broadway and came bouncing into drawing rooms with a tennis racket under my arm and the line: 'Tennis anybody?' It was a stage trick to get some of the characters off the set so the plot could continue.\" But Bogart's usual stance was denial of using that precise phrase (\"The lines I had were corny enough, but I swear to you, never once did I have to say 'Tennis, anyone?'\"), although averring that it did characterize generally some of his early roles.\n\nThe phrase continued to drift through media in the 20th century and, to a diminished extent, into the 21st, often at random or just because tennis generally is the subject, rather than specifically to invoke or mock vapid toffs. It appears in the lyric of the \"Beautiful Girl Montage\" in the classic 1952 musical movie Singin' in the Rain,, in the Daffy Duck cartoons Rabbit Fire, Drip-Along Daffy and The Ducksters (1950-1951),, and in the lyric and title of the 1968 song \"Anyone for Tennis\" by the British rock band Cream, which was the theme song of the film The Savage Seven. William Holden's shallow rich playboy character jokes \"tennis, anyone?\" when flirting with Joan Vohs's in the 1954 film Sabrina (in which Bogart plays another character). The television series Anyone for Tennyson? (1976–1978) riffs on the name, as does the 1981 stage play Anyone for Denis? \"Anyone for Tennis\" is the title of the B-side instrumental for Men at Work's 1981 single Who Can It Be Now?. And so forth.\n\nThe phrase also occurs in Monty Python's spoof sketch Sam Peckinpah's \"Salad Days\".\n\nReferences \n\nEnglish phrases\nTennis culture\nQuotations from literature\nMetaphors referring to sport", "Terribilità, the modern Italian spelling, (or terribiltà, as Michelangelo's 16th century contemporaries tended to spell it) is a quality ascribed to his art that provokes terror, awe, or a sense of the sublime in the viewer. It is perhaps especially applied to his sculptures, such as his figures of David or in Moses.\n\nPope Julius II was apparently the first to describe Michelangelo as a uomo terribile (\"terror-inducing man\"), apparently describing his difficult character as much as his art. This terribilità, also references the neoplatonics of humanists such as Marsilio Ficino, who had known Michelangelo in his youth.\n\nMichelangelo's friend and collaborator Sebastiano del Piombo reported in a letter to him of 15 October 1520 on a private audience with Pope Leo X. After praising Michelangelo's work, the pope continued \"But he is terribile, as you see; one cannot deal with him\". Sebastiano responded \"that your terribile character did not harm anyone, and that you appear terribile for love of the great works you carry out.\"\n\nReferences\n\nBibliography \n \n \n\nArt history\nMichelangelo" ]
[ "Sean Combs", "Sean John", "who is sean john?", "In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John.", "why did he want to start a clothing line?", "I don't know.", "did anyone work with him?", "I don't know." ]	C_07b75bf747f14969bd3b73fb1e58e27a_0	did he have any influences?	4	Did Combs have any influences?	Sean Combs	In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John. It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000, and won in 2004. California billionaire Ronald Burkle invested $100 million into the company in 2003. Also in 2003, the National Labor Committee revealed that factories producing the clothing in Honduras were violating Honduran labor laws. Among the accusations were that workers were subjected to body searches and involuntary pregnancy tests. Bathrooms were locked and access tightly controlled. Employees were forced to work overtime and were paid sweatshop wages. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee told The New York Times that "Sean Puff Daddy obviously has a lot of clout, he can literally do a lot overnight to help these workers." Combs responded with an extensive investigation, telling reporters "I'm as pro-worker as they get". On February 14, 2004, Kernaghan announced that improvements had been implemented at the factory, including adding air conditioning and water purification systems, firing the most abusive supervisors, and allowing the formation of a labor union. In late 2006, the department store Macy's removed Sean John jackets from their shelves when they discovered that the clothing was made using raccoon dog fur. Combs had not known the jackets were made with dog fur, but as soon as he was alerted, he had production stopped. In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called "I Am King" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King, featured model Bar Refaeli in its advertisements. In early 2016, Sean John introduced the brand's GIRLS collection. CANNOTANSWER	In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called "I Am King" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama,	Sean John Combs (born November 4, 1969), also known by his stage name Puff Daddy (previously known as P. Diddy, Diddy, or Puffy), is an American rapper, actor, songwriter, record executive, record producer, and entrepreneur. Born in New York City and raised in the suburb of Mount Vernon, he worked as a talent director at Uptown Records before founding his own record label, Bad Boy Records in 1993. Combs has produced and cultivated artists such as The Notorious B.I.G., Mary J. Blige, and Usher. Combs' debut album, No Way Out (1997), has been certified seven times platinum. The album was followed by Forever (1999), The Saga Continues..., (2001) and Press Play (2006), all of which were commercially successful. In 2009, Combs formed the musical group Dirty Money; together, they released their highly successful debut album Last Train to Paris (2010). Combs has won three Grammy Awards and two MTV Video Music Awards and is the producer of MTV's Making the Band. In 2019, Forbes estimated his net worth at $740 million. In 1998, he launched his own clothing line Sean John. He was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000 and won in 2004. Early life Sean John Combs was born in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City on November 4, 1969. Raised in Mount Vernon, New York, his mother Janice Combs (née Smalls) was a model and teacher's assistant and his father, Melvin Earl Combs, served in the U.S. Air Force and was an associate of convicted New York drug dealer Frank Lucas. At age 33, Melvin was shot to death while sitting in his car on Central Park West, when Sean was two years old. Combs graduated from Mount Saint Michael Academy in 1987. He played football for the academy and his team won a division title in 1986. Combs said he was given the nickname "Puff" as a child, because he would "huff and puff" when he was angry. Combs was a business major at Howard University but left after his sophomore year. In 2014, he returned to Howard University to receive an Honorary Doctorate in Humanities and deliver the University's 146th Commencement Address. Career 1990–1996: Career beginnings Combs became an intern at New York's Uptown Records in 1990. While working as a talent director at Uptown, he helped develop Jodeci and Mary J. Blige. In his college days Combs had a reputation for throwing parties, some of which attracted up to a thousand participants. In 1991, Combs promoted an AIDS fundraiser with Heavy D held at the City College of New York (CCNY) gymnasium, following a charity basketball game. The event was oversold, and a stampede occurred in which nine people died. In 1993, after being fired from Uptown, Combs established his new label Bad Boy Entertainment as a joint venture with Arista Records, taking then-newcomer Christopher Wallace, better known as The Notorious B.I.G., with him. Both Wallace and Craig Mack quickly released hit singles, followed by successful LPs, particularly Wallace's Ready to Die. Combs signed more acts to Bad Boy, including Carl Thomas, Faith Evans, 112, Total, and Father MC. The Hitmen, his in-house production team, worked with Jodeci, Mary J. Blige, Usher, Lil' Kim, TLC, Mariah Carey, Boyz II Men, SWV, Aretha Franklin, and others. Mase and the Lox joined Bad Boy just as a widely publicized rivalry with the West Coast's Death Row Records was beginning. Combs and Wallace were criticized and parodied by Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight in songs and interviews during the mid-1990s. During 1994–1995, Combs produced several songs for TLC's CrazySexyCool, which finished the decade as number 25 on Billboard's list of top pop albums of the decade. 1997–1998: "Puff Daddy" and No Way Out In 1997, under the name Puff Daddy, Combs recorded his first commercial vocal work as a rapper. His debut single, "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", spent 28 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, peaking at number one. His debut album, No Way Out, was released on July 22, 1997, through Bad Boy Records. Originally titled Hell up in Harlem, the album underwent several changes after The Notorious B.I.G. was killed on March 9, 1997. Several of the label's artists made guest appearances on the album. No Way Out was a significant success, particularly in the United States, where it reached number one on the Billboard 200 in its first week of release, selling 561,000 copies. The album produced five singles: "I'll Be Missing You", a tribute to The Notorious B.I.G., was the first rap song to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100; it remained at the top of the chart for eleven consecutive weeks and topped several other charts worldwide. Four other singles – "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", "It's All About the Benjamins", "Been Around the World", and "Victory" – were also released. Combs collaborated with Jimmy Page on the song "Come with Me" for the 1998 film Godzilla. The album earned Combs five nominations at the 40th Grammy Awards in 1998, winning the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album. On September 7, 2000, the album was certified septuple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of over 7 million copies. In 1997, Combs was sued for landlord neglect by Inge Bongo. Combs denied the charges. By the late 1990s, he was being criticized for watering down and overly commercializing hip hop, and for using too many guest appearances, samples, and interpolations of past hits in his new songs. 1999–2000: Forever and Club New York In April 1999, Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records. Stoute was the manager for Nas, with whom Combs had filmed a video earlier that year for the song "Hate Me Now". Combs was concerned that the video, which featured a shot of Nas and Combs being crucified, was blasphemous. He asked for his scenes on the cross to be pulled, but after it aired unedited on MTV on April 15, Combs visited Stoute's offices and injured Stoute. Combs was charged with second-degree assault and criminal mischief, and was sentenced to attend a one-day anger management class. Forever, Combs's second solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999, in North America, and in the UK on the following day. It reached number two on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, where it remained for one week before being knocked off by Mary J. Blige's fourth album, Mary. The album received positive to mixed reviews from music critics and spawned three singles that have charted on the Billboard charts. It peaked at number four on the Canadian Albums Chart, Combs's highest-charting album in that country. On December 27, 1999, Combs and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were at Club New York in Manhattan when gunfire broke out. After a police investigation, Combs and fellow rapper Shyne were arrested for weapons violations and other charges. Combs was charged with four weapons-related charges and bribing his driver, Wardel Fenderson, to claim ownership of his gun. With a gag order in place, the highly publicized trial began. Combs's attorneys were Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Benjamin Brafman. Combs was found not guilty on all charges; Shyne was convicted on five of his eight charges and sentenced to ten years in prison. Combs and Lopez broke up shortly after. A lawsuit filed by Fenderson, who said he suffered emotional damage after the shooting, was settled in February 2004. Lawyers for both sides, having agreed to keep the settlement terms secret, said the matter had been "resolved to the satisfaction of all parties". 2001–2004: "P. Diddy" and The Saga Continues Combs changed his stage name from "Puff Daddy" to "P. Diddy" in 2001. The gospel album, Thank You, which had been completed just before the beginning of the weapons trial, was due to be released in March that year, but remains unreleased . He appeared as a drug dealer in the film Made and starred with Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball (both in 2001). He was arrested for driving on a suspended license in Florida. Combs began working with a series of unusual (for him) artists. For a short period of time, he was the manager of Kelis; they have a collaboration titled "Let's Get Ill". He was an opening act for 'N Sync on their Spring 2002 Celebrity Tour, and he signed California-based pop girl group Dream to his record label. Combs was a producer of the soundtrack album for the film Training Day (2001). In June 2001, Combs ended Bad Boy Entertainment's joint venture with Arista Records, gaining full control of Bad Boy, its catalogue, and its roster of artists. The Saga Continues..., released on July 10 in North America, was the last studio album released by the joint venture. The album reached number 2 on the Billboard 200 and the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums charts, and was eventually certified Platinum. It is the only studio album under the P. Diddy name, and the first album by Sean Combs not to feature any guest appearances by Jay-Z or Lil Kim. Combs was executive producer of the reality TV show Making the Band, which appeared on MTV from 2002 to 2009. The show involves interviewing candidates and creating musical acts that would then enter the music business. Acts who got their start this way include Da Band, Danity Kane, Day26, and Donnie Klang. In 2003 Combs ran in the New York City Marathon, raising $2million for the educational system of the city of New York. On March 10, 2004, he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss the marathon, which he finished in four hours and eighteen minutes. In 2004 Combs headed the campaign "Vote or Die" for the 2004 presidential election. On February 1, 2004, Combs (as P. Diddy) performed at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. 2005–2009: "Diddy" and Press Play On August 16, 2005, Combs announced on Today that he was altering his stage name yet again; he would be calling himself "Diddy". Combs said fans didn't know how to address him, which led to confusion. In November 2005, London-based musical artist and DJ Richard Dearlove, who had been performing under the name "Diddy" since 1992 nine years before Combs started using even "P. Diddy" sought an injunction in the High Court of Justice in London. He accepted an out-of-court settlement of £10,000 in damages and more than £100,000 in costs. Combs can no longer use the name Diddy in the UK, where he is still known as P. Diddy. An assault charge against Combs filed by Michigan television host Rogelio Mills was resolved in Combs's favor in 2005. Combs starred in the 2005 film Carlito's Way: Rise to Power. He played Walter Lee Younger in the 2004 Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun and the television adaptation that aired in February 2008. In 2005 Combs sold half of his record company to the Warner Music Group. He hosted the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards and was named one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2005 by Time magazine. He was mentioned in the country song "Play Something Country" by Brooks & Dunn: the lyricist says he "didn't come to hear P. Diddy", which is rhymed with "something thumpin' from the city". In 2006, when Combs refused to release musician Mase from his contractual obligations to allow him to join the group G-Unit, 50 Cent recorded a diss song, "Hip-Hop". The lyrics imply that Combs knew the identity of The Notorious B.I.G.'s murderer. The two later resolved the feud. Combs released his first album in four years, Press Play, on October 17, 2006, on the Bad Boy Records label. The album, featuring guest appearances by many popular artists, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart with sales of over 173,009. Its singles "Come to Me" and "Last Night" both reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100. The album became available to preview on MTV's The Leak on October 10, 2006, a week before being sold in stores. Press Play received mixed to positive reviews from critics, and was certified Gold on the RIAA ratings. On September 18, 2007, Combs teamed up with 50 Cent and Jay-Z for the "Forbes I Get Money Billion Dollar Remix". In March 2008, the Los Angeles Times claimed that The Notorious B.I.G. and Combs orchestrated the 1994 robbery and shooting of Tupac, substantiating the claim with supposed FBI documents; the newspaper later retracted the story, acknowledging that the documents had been fabricated. Dexter Isaac, an associate of record management executive Jimmy Henchman, confessed in 2012 that he had shot Tupac on Henchman's orders. In June 2008, Combs's representative denied rumors of another name change. Combs ventured into reality television in August 2008 with the premiere of his VH1 series I Want to Work for Diddy. He appeared—credited under his real name—in two episodes of Season 7 of CSI: Miami: "Presumed Guilty" and "Sink or Swim", in the role of lawyer Derek Powell. 2010–2013: Dirty Money and acting Combs created a rap supergroup in 2010 known as the Dream Team. The group consists of Combs, Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, Fat Joe, Busta Rhymes, Red Café, and Fabolous. Combs made an appearance at comedian Chris Gethard's live show in January 2010 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City. In June 2010 Combs played a role (credited as Sean Combs) in the comedy film Get Him to the Greek, as Sergio Roma, a record company executive. An Entourage series representative announced that Combs would guest star on an episode during the 2010 season. Last Train to Paris was released by Combs's group Dirty Money on December 13, 2010. The release was preceded by four singles "Angels", "Hello Good Morning", "Loving You No More", and "Coming Home", which experienced mixed success on the Billboard Hot 100. "Coming Home" was the most successful of the songs, peaking at number twelve on the U.S. Hot 100, number four in the UK, and number seven in Canada. On March 10, 2011, Diddy – Dirty Money performed "Coming Home" live on American Idol. On April 18, 2011, Combs appeared in season one of Hawaii Five-0, guest starring as an undercover NYPD detective. In November 2012 Combs appeared in an episode of the eighth season of the American sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. 2014–present: MMM (Money Making Mitch), No Way Out 2, and "Love" On February 26, 2014, Combs premiered "Big Homie", featuring Rick Ross and French Montana, as the first single from his mixtape MMM (Money Making Mitch), which was originally scheduled to be released that year. The song was released for digital download on March 24, and two days later the trailer for the music video was released. The full version of the music video was released on March 31. Combs used his former stage name Puff Daddy for the album. MMM was released as a free mixtape album of 12 tracks on November 4, 2015. In 2014 Combs and Guy Gerber announced that their joint album 11 11 would be available for free download. A new single called "Finna Get Loose" featuring Combs and Pharrell Williams was released on June 29, 2015. In July 2015, Bad Boy Entertainment artist Gizzle told the press that she is collaborating with Combs on what she describes as his last album, titled No Way Out 2, a sequel to his 1997 debut. She describes the music as unique: "The mindset is to just be classic and to be epic. And to really live up to that... we know it's a tall order, but we welcome the challenge." In April 2016, Combs announced that after this last album and tour, he plans to retire from the music industry to focus on acting. On May 20 and 21, 2016, Combs launched a tour of Bad Boy Records' biggest names to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the label. The documentary Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story, covering the two shows at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn as well as behind-the-scenes events, was released on June 23, 2017. The show toured to an additional twenty venues across the United States and Canada. On November 5, 2017, Combs announced that he would be going by the name Love, stating "My new name is Love, aka Brother Love". Two days later, he told the press he had been joking, but on January 3, 2018, he announced on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that he had changed his mind again, and will be using the new name after all. In 2019, Combs announced on Twitter that Making the Band would return to MTV in 2020. Combs executive-produced Nigerian singer Burna Boy's album, Twice as Tall, released on August 14, 2020. Business career Fortune magazine listed Combs at number twelve on their top 40 of entrepreneurs under 40 in 2002. Forbes Magazine estimates that for the year ending May 2017, Combs earned $130 million, ranking him number one among entertainers. In 2019 his estimated net worth was $740 million. Sean John In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John. It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000, and won in 2004. California billionaire Ronald Burkle invested $100 million into the company in 2003. Also in 2003, the National Labor Committee revealed that factories producing the clothing in Honduras were violating Honduran labor laws. Among the accusations were that workers were subjected to body searches and involuntary pregnancy tests. Bathrooms were locked and access tightly controlled. Employees were forced to work overtime and were paid sweatshop wages. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee told The New York Times that "Sean Puff Daddy obviously has a lot of clout, he can literally do a lot overnight to help these workers." Combs responded with an extensive investigation, telling reporters "I'm as pro-worker as they get". On February 14, 2004, Kernaghan announced that improvements had been implemented at the factory, including adding air conditioning and water purification systems, firing the most abusive supervisors, and allowing the formation of a labor union. In late 2006, the department store Macy's removed Sean John jackets from their shelves when they discovered that the clothing was made using raccoon dog fur. Combs had not known the jackets were made with dog fur, but as soon as he was alerted, he had production stopped. In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called "I Am King" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King Jr., featured model Bar Refaeli in its advertisements. In early 2016, Sean John introduced the brand's GIRLS collection. Other ventures Combs is the head of Combs Enterprises, an umbrella company for his portfolio of businesses. In addition to his clothing line, Combs owned two restaurants called Justin's, named after his son. The original New York location closed in September 2007; the Atlanta location closed in June 2012. He is the designer of the Dallas Mavericks alternate jersey. In October 2007 Combs agreed to help develop the Cîroc vodka brand for a 50 percent share of the profits. Combs acquired the Enyce clothing line from Liz Claiborne for $20 million on October 21, 2008. Combs has a major equity stake in Revolt TV, a television network that also has a film production branch. It began broadcasting in 2014. In February 2015, Combs teamed up with actor Mark Wahlberg and businessman Ronald Burkle of Yucaipa Companies to purchase a majority holding in Aquahydrate, a calorie-free beverage for athletes. John Cochran, former president of Fiji Water, is CEO of the company. In 2019 Combs became a major investor in PlayVS, which provides an infrastructure for competitive gaming in US high schools. The company was also backed by Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin. Personal life Family Combs is the father of six children. His first biological child, Justin, was born in 1993 to designer Misa Hylton-Brim. Justin attended UCLA on a football scholarship. Combs had an on-again, off-again relationship with Kimberly Porter (1970–2018), which lasted from 1994 to 2007. He raised and adopted Quincy (born 1991), Porter's son from a previous relationship with singer-producer Al B. Sure! Together they had a son, Christian (born 1998), and twin daughters, D'Lila Star and Jessie James (born 2006). Porter died of pneumonia on November 15, 2018. Five months before the birth of his twins, Combs's daughter, Chance, was born to Sarah Chapman. He took legal responsibility for Chance in October 2007. Combs was in a long-term relationship with Cassie Ventura from 2007 to 2018. Combs's sons Quincy and Justin both appeared on MTV's My Super Sweet 16. Combs threw Quincy a celebrity-studded party and gave him two cars as his 16th birthday present. For Justin's 16th birthday, Combs presented him with a $360,000 Maybach car. Combs owns a home in Alpine, New Jersey, which he purchased for $7million. Charity work and honors Combs founded Daddy's House Social Programs, an organization to help inner city youth, in 1995. Programs include tutoring, life skills classes, and an annual summer camp. Along with Jay-Z, he pledged $1 million to help support victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and donated clothing from his Sean John line to victims. He has donated computers and books to New York schools. In 1998, he received a Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley named October 13, 2006, as "Diddy Day" in honor of Combs's charity work. In 2008, Combs was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the first male rapper to be so honored. In 2014, Combs received an honorary doctorate from Howard University, where he gave the commencement speech for its 146th commencement ceremony. In his speech, Combs acknowledged that his experiences as a Howard student positively influenced his life. In 2016, Combs donated $1 million to Howard University to establish the Sean Combs Scholarship Fund to help students who are unable to pay their tuition. Wardrobe style Combs describes his wardrobe style as "swagger, timeless, diverse". On September 2, 2007, Combs held his ninth annual "White Party", at which guests are limited to an all-white dress code. The White Party, which has also been held in St. Tropez, was held in his home in East Hampton, New York. Combs stated, "This party is up there with the top three that I've thrown. It's a party that has legendary status. It's hard to throw a party that lives up to its legend." Religious views Combs was raised Catholic, and was an altar server as a boy. In 2008 he told The Daily Telegraph that he does not adhere to any specific religious denomination. He said, "I just follow right from wrong, so I could pray in a synagogue or a mosque or a church. I believe that there is only one God." On July 3, 2020, Combs invited his Twitter followers to view a 3-hour YouTube video posted by Louis Farrakhan. In the video Farrakhan made multiple anti-Semitic comments and repeatedly used the phrase "Synagogue of Satan". The video was removed from YouTube for violating its policy against hate speech. In response to comedian Nick Cannon being fired on July 14, 2020, from ViacomCBS for espousing anti-Semitic views, Combs tweeted that Cannon should "come home to RevoltTv" saying "We got your back and love you and what you have done for the culture." Discography Studio albums No Way Out (1997) Forever (1999) The Saga Continues... (2001) Press Play (2006) Awards and nominations NAACP Image Awards \|- \| 2009 \| A Raisin in the Sun \| Outstanding Actor in a Television Movie,Mini-Series or Dramatic Special \| \|- \| 2011 \| Diddy – Dirty Money \| Outstanding Duo or Group \| \|} BET Awards \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2002 \|\| "Bad Boy for Life" \|\| rowspan="2" \| Video of the Year \|\| \|- \| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" \|\| \|- \| 2003 \|\| "Bump, Bump, Bump" \|\| Coca-Cola Viewer's Choice Award \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2007 \|\| "Last Night" \|\| Best Collaboration \|\| \|- \| Diddy \|\| Best Male Hip-Hop Artist \|\| \|- \| 2010 \|\| rowspan="3" \| Diddy – Dirty Money \|\| rowspan="4" \| Best Group \|\| \|- \| 2011 \|\| \|- \| 2012 \|\| \|- \| 2016 \|\| Puff Daddy and the Family \|\| \|} BET Hip Hop Awards \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2008 \|\| "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is)..." \|\| Track of the Year \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| Sean Combs \|\| rowspan="2" \| Hustler of the Year \|\| \|- \| 2009 \|\| \|- \| rowspan="4" \| 2010 \|\| "All I Do Is Win (Remix)" \|\| rowspan="2" \| Reese's Perfect Combo Award \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| "Hello Good Morning (Remix)" \|\| \|- \| Best Club Banger \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| Sean Combs \|\| rowspan="2" \| Hustler of the Year \|\| \|- \| 2011 \|\| \|- \| 2012 \|\| rowspan="2" \| "Same Damn Time (Remix)" \|\| rowspan="2" \| Sweet 16: Best Featured Verse \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2013 \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| Sean Combs \|\| rowspan="2" \| Hustler of the Year \|\| \|- \| 2017 \|\| \|} MTV Europe Music Awards \|- \| rowspan="4" \| 1997 \|\| rowspan="2" \| "I'll Be Missing You" \|\| MTV Select \|\| \|- \| Best Song \|\| \|- \| rowspan="8" \| Sean Combs \|\| Best New Act \|\| \|- \| Best Hip-Hop \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 1998 \|\| Best Male \|\| \|- \| rowspan="5" \| Best Hip-Hop \|\| \|- \| 1999 \|\| \|- \| 2001 \|\| \|- \| 2002 \|\| \|- \| 2006 \|\| \|- \| 2011 \|\| Diddy – Dirty Money \|\| Best World Stage Performance \|\| \|} MTV Movie & TV Awards \|- \| 2018 \|\| Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story \|\| Best Music Documentary \|\| \|} MTV Video Music Awards \|- \| rowspan="2" \| \|\| rowspan="2" \| "I'll Be Missing You" \|\| Best R&B Video \|\| \|- \| Viewer's Choice \|\| \|- \| rowspan="3" \| \|\| rowspan="2" \| "It's All About the Benjamins" (Rock Remix) \|\| Video of the Year \|\| \|- \| Viewer's Choice \|\| \|- \| "Come with Me" \|\| Best Video from a Film \|\| \|- \| \|\| "Bad Boy for Life" \|\| Best Rap Video \|\| \|} Grammy Awards !Ref. \|- \| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="7" \| 1998 \| Puff Daddy \| Best New Artist \| \| rowspan="7"\| \|- \| No Way Out \| rowspan="2"\|Best Rap Album \| \|- \| Life After Death (as producer) \| \|- \| "Honey" (as songwriter) \| Best Rhythm & Blues Song \| \|- \| "I'll Be Missing You" (featuring Faith Evans & 112) \| rowspan="7"\|Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group \| \|- \| "Mo Money Mo Problems" (with The Notorious B.I.G. & Mase) \| \|- \| "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down" (featuring Mase) \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2000 \| "Satisfy You" (featuring R. Kelly) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2002 \| "Bad Boy for Life" (with Black Rob & Mark Curry) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2003 \| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" (with Busta Rhymes & Pharrell) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2004 \| "Shake Ya Tailfeather" (with Nelly & Murphy Lee) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2016 \| "All Day" (as songwriter) \| Best Rap Song \| \| \|} Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time Other awards In 2021, Combs was among the inaugural inductees into the Black Music and Entertainment Walk of Fame. Filmography Made (2001) Monster's Ball (2001) 2005 MTV Video Music Awards (2006) Seamless (2005) Carlito's Way: Rise to Power (2005) A Raisin in the Sun (2008) CSI Miami: episode "Sink or Swim" (2009) Get Him to the Greek (2010) I'm Still Here (2010) Hawaii Five-0: episode "Hoʻopaʻi" (2011) It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (TV series) (2012) Draft Day (2014) Muppets Most Wanted (2014) Black-ish (TV series) (2015) Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story (2017) The Defiant Ones (2017) Mary J. Blige's My Life (2021) Tours No Way Out Tour (1997–1998) Forever Tour (2000) References Sources External links 1969 births 20th-century American businesspeople 20th-century American male musicians 20th-century American rappers 21st-century American businesspeople 21st-century American male actors 21st-century American male musicians 21st-century American rappers Actors from Mount Vernon, New York African-American businesspeople African-American designers African-American fashion designers African-American film producers African-American male actors African-American male rappers African-American record producers American chairpersons of corporations American chief executives in the media industry American chief executives of fashion industry companies American corporate directors American cosmetics businesspeople American dance musicians American drink industry businesspeople American fashion businesspeople American fashion designers American film producers American hip hop record producers American landlords American male film actors American male rappers American male television actors American marketing businesspeople American mass media owners American music industry executives American music publishers (people) American music video directors American philanthropists American restaurateurs American retail chief executives American television company founders American television executives Bad Boy Records artists Businesspeople from New York City East Coast hip hop musicians Former Roman Catholics Grammy Award winners for rap music Howard University alumni Living people Male actors from New York City Music video codirectors Musicians from Mount Vernon, New York Participants in American reality television series People from Harlem Pop rappers Rappers from Manhattan Record producers from New York (state) Remixers	true	[ "John Wesley \"Dick\" Summers (1887-1976) was an old-time fiddler from Indiana. He learned to play from his family, but a Tom Riley of Kentucky was also an influence. Summers did not originally read music, but did learn to do so in his 70s. He was one of the only old-time Midwestern fiddlers to have a commercially distributed album in the post-World War II era. As indicated though his style had Southern, and as mentioned Kentucky, influences.\n\nReferences\n\nOld-time fiddlers\nMusicians from Indiana\n1887 births\n1976 deaths\nPlace of birth missing\n20th-century violinists", "The Gurus were an American psychedelic rock band from the 1960s. They were among the first to incorporate Middle Eastern influences, maybe more than any other band of that era. The band broke up without making a large impact on the music scene of the time, although they did release two singles on United Artists Records in 1966 and 1967. Their album, The Gurus Are Hear, failed to be released in 1967, which was noted as the reason for the band splitting up.\n\nThe album was finally released in 2003.\n\nReferences\n\nAmerican psychedelic rock music groups" ]
[ "Sean Combs", "Sean John", "who is sean john?", "In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John.", "why did he want to start a clothing line?", "I don't know.", "did anyone work with him?", "I don't know.", "did he have any influences?", "In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called \"I Am King\" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama," ]	C_07b75bf747f14969bd3b73fb1e58e27a_0	did his clothing line do well?	5	Did Combs clothing line do well?	Sean Combs	In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John. It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000, and won in 2004. California billionaire Ronald Burkle invested $100 million into the company in 2003. Also in 2003, the National Labor Committee revealed that factories producing the clothing in Honduras were violating Honduran labor laws. Among the accusations were that workers were subjected to body searches and involuntary pregnancy tests. Bathrooms were locked and access tightly controlled. Employees were forced to work overtime and were paid sweatshop wages. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee told The New York Times that "Sean Puff Daddy obviously has a lot of clout, he can literally do a lot overnight to help these workers." Combs responded with an extensive investigation, telling reporters "I'm as pro-worker as they get". On February 14, 2004, Kernaghan announced that improvements had been implemented at the factory, including adding air conditioning and water purification systems, firing the most abusive supervisors, and allowing the formation of a labor union. In late 2006, the department store Macy's removed Sean John jackets from their shelves when they discovered that the clothing was made using raccoon dog fur. Combs had not known the jackets were made with dog fur, but as soon as he was alerted, he had production stopped. In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called "I Am King" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King, featured model Bar Refaeli in its advertisements. In early 2016, Sean John introduced the brand's GIRLS collection. CANNOTANSWER	It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year	Sean John Combs (born November 4, 1969), also known by his stage name Puff Daddy (previously known as P. Diddy, Diddy, or Puffy), is an American rapper, actor, songwriter, record executive, record producer, and entrepreneur. Born in New York City and raised in the suburb of Mount Vernon, he worked as a talent director at Uptown Records before founding his own record label, Bad Boy Records in 1993. Combs has produced and cultivated artists such as The Notorious B.I.G., Mary J. Blige, and Usher. Combs' debut album, No Way Out (1997), has been certified seven times platinum. The album was followed by Forever (1999), The Saga Continues..., (2001) and Press Play (2006), all of which were commercially successful. In 2009, Combs formed the musical group Dirty Money; together, they released their highly successful debut album Last Train to Paris (2010). Combs has won three Grammy Awards and two MTV Video Music Awards and is the producer of MTV's Making the Band. In 2019, Forbes estimated his net worth at $740 million. In 1998, he launched his own clothing line Sean John. He was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000 and won in 2004. Early life Sean John Combs was born in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City on November 4, 1969. Raised in Mount Vernon, New York, his mother Janice Combs (née Smalls) was a model and teacher's assistant and his father, Melvin Earl Combs, served in the U.S. Air Force and was an associate of convicted New York drug dealer Frank Lucas. At age 33, Melvin was shot to death while sitting in his car on Central Park West, when Sean was two years old. Combs graduated from Mount Saint Michael Academy in 1987. He played football for the academy and his team won a division title in 1986. Combs said he was given the nickname "Puff" as a child, because he would "huff and puff" when he was angry. Combs was a business major at Howard University but left after his sophomore year. In 2014, he returned to Howard University to receive an Honorary Doctorate in Humanities and deliver the University's 146th Commencement Address. Career 1990–1996: Career beginnings Combs became an intern at New York's Uptown Records in 1990. While working as a talent director at Uptown, he helped develop Jodeci and Mary J. Blige. In his college days Combs had a reputation for throwing parties, some of which attracted up to a thousand participants. In 1991, Combs promoted an AIDS fundraiser with Heavy D held at the City College of New York (CCNY) gymnasium, following a charity basketball game. The event was oversold, and a stampede occurred in which nine people died. In 1993, after being fired from Uptown, Combs established his new label Bad Boy Entertainment as a joint venture with Arista Records, taking then-newcomer Christopher Wallace, better known as The Notorious B.I.G., with him. Both Wallace and Craig Mack quickly released hit singles, followed by successful LPs, particularly Wallace's Ready to Die. Combs signed more acts to Bad Boy, including Carl Thomas, Faith Evans, 112, Total, and Father MC. The Hitmen, his in-house production team, worked with Jodeci, Mary J. Blige, Usher, Lil' Kim, TLC, Mariah Carey, Boyz II Men, SWV, Aretha Franklin, and others. Mase and the Lox joined Bad Boy just as a widely publicized rivalry with the West Coast's Death Row Records was beginning. Combs and Wallace were criticized and parodied by Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight in songs and interviews during the mid-1990s. During 1994–1995, Combs produced several songs for TLC's CrazySexyCool, which finished the decade as number 25 on Billboard's list of top pop albums of the decade. 1997–1998: "Puff Daddy" and No Way Out In 1997, under the name Puff Daddy, Combs recorded his first commercial vocal work as a rapper. His debut single, "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", spent 28 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, peaking at number one. His debut album, No Way Out, was released on July 22, 1997, through Bad Boy Records. Originally titled Hell up in Harlem, the album underwent several changes after The Notorious B.I.G. was killed on March 9, 1997. Several of the label's artists made guest appearances on the album. No Way Out was a significant success, particularly in the United States, where it reached number one on the Billboard 200 in its first week of release, selling 561,000 copies. The album produced five singles: "I'll Be Missing You", a tribute to The Notorious B.I.G., was the first rap song to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100; it remained at the top of the chart for eleven consecutive weeks and topped several other charts worldwide. Four other singles – "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", "It's All About the Benjamins", "Been Around the World", and "Victory" – were also released. Combs collaborated with Jimmy Page on the song "Come with Me" for the 1998 film Godzilla. The album earned Combs five nominations at the 40th Grammy Awards in 1998, winning the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album. On September 7, 2000, the album was certified septuple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of over 7 million copies. In 1997, Combs was sued for landlord neglect by Inge Bongo. Combs denied the charges. By the late 1990s, he was being criticized for watering down and overly commercializing hip hop, and for using too many guest appearances, samples, and interpolations of past hits in his new songs. 1999–2000: Forever and Club New York In April 1999, Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records. Stoute was the manager for Nas, with whom Combs had filmed a video earlier that year for the song "Hate Me Now". Combs was concerned that the video, which featured a shot of Nas and Combs being crucified, was blasphemous. He asked for his scenes on the cross to be pulled, but after it aired unedited on MTV on April 15, Combs visited Stoute's offices and injured Stoute. Combs was charged with second-degree assault and criminal mischief, and was sentenced to attend a one-day anger management class. Forever, Combs's second solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999, in North America, and in the UK on the following day. It reached number two on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, where it remained for one week before being knocked off by Mary J. Blige's fourth album, Mary. The album received positive to mixed reviews from music critics and spawned three singles that have charted on the Billboard charts. It peaked at number four on the Canadian Albums Chart, Combs's highest-charting album in that country. On December 27, 1999, Combs and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were at Club New York in Manhattan when gunfire broke out. After a police investigation, Combs and fellow rapper Shyne were arrested for weapons violations and other charges. Combs was charged with four weapons-related charges and bribing his driver, Wardel Fenderson, to claim ownership of his gun. With a gag order in place, the highly publicized trial began. Combs's attorneys were Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Benjamin Brafman. Combs was found not guilty on all charges; Shyne was convicted on five of his eight charges and sentenced to ten years in prison. Combs and Lopez broke up shortly after. A lawsuit filed by Fenderson, who said he suffered emotional damage after the shooting, was settled in February 2004. Lawyers for both sides, having agreed to keep the settlement terms secret, said the matter had been "resolved to the satisfaction of all parties". 2001–2004: "P. Diddy" and The Saga Continues Combs changed his stage name from "Puff Daddy" to "P. Diddy" in 2001. The gospel album, Thank You, which had been completed just before the beginning of the weapons trial, was due to be released in March that year, but remains unreleased . He appeared as a drug dealer in the film Made and starred with Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball (both in 2001). He was arrested for driving on a suspended license in Florida. Combs began working with a series of unusual (for him) artists. For a short period of time, he was the manager of Kelis; they have a collaboration titled "Let's Get Ill". He was an opening act for 'N Sync on their Spring 2002 Celebrity Tour, and he signed California-based pop girl group Dream to his record label. Combs was a producer of the soundtrack album for the film Training Day (2001). In June 2001, Combs ended Bad Boy Entertainment's joint venture with Arista Records, gaining full control of Bad Boy, its catalogue, and its roster of artists. The Saga Continues..., released on July 10 in North America, was the last studio album released by the joint venture. The album reached number 2 on the Billboard 200 and the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums charts, and was eventually certified Platinum. It is the only studio album under the P. Diddy name, and the first album by Sean Combs not to feature any guest appearances by Jay-Z or Lil Kim. Combs was executive producer of the reality TV show Making the Band, which appeared on MTV from 2002 to 2009. The show involves interviewing candidates and creating musical acts that would then enter the music business. Acts who got their start this way include Da Band, Danity Kane, Day26, and Donnie Klang. In 2003 Combs ran in the New York City Marathon, raising $2million for the educational system of the city of New York. On March 10, 2004, he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss the marathon, which he finished in four hours and eighteen minutes. In 2004 Combs headed the campaign "Vote or Die" for the 2004 presidential election. On February 1, 2004, Combs (as P. Diddy) performed at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. 2005–2009: "Diddy" and Press Play On August 16, 2005, Combs announced on Today that he was altering his stage name yet again; he would be calling himself "Diddy". Combs said fans didn't know how to address him, which led to confusion. In November 2005, London-based musical artist and DJ Richard Dearlove, who had been performing under the name "Diddy" since 1992 nine years before Combs started using even "P. Diddy" sought an injunction in the High Court of Justice in London. He accepted an out-of-court settlement of £10,000 in damages and more than £100,000 in costs. Combs can no longer use the name Diddy in the UK, where he is still known as P. Diddy. An assault charge against Combs filed by Michigan television host Rogelio Mills was resolved in Combs's favor in 2005. Combs starred in the 2005 film Carlito's Way: Rise to Power. He played Walter Lee Younger in the 2004 Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun and the television adaptation that aired in February 2008. In 2005 Combs sold half of his record company to the Warner Music Group. He hosted the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards and was named one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2005 by Time magazine. He was mentioned in the country song "Play Something Country" by Brooks & Dunn: the lyricist says he "didn't come to hear P. Diddy", which is rhymed with "something thumpin' from the city". In 2006, when Combs refused to release musician Mase from his contractual obligations to allow him to join the group G-Unit, 50 Cent recorded a diss song, "Hip-Hop". The lyrics imply that Combs knew the identity of The Notorious B.I.G.'s murderer. The two later resolved the feud. Combs released his first album in four years, Press Play, on October 17, 2006, on the Bad Boy Records label. The album, featuring guest appearances by many popular artists, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart with sales of over 173,009. Its singles "Come to Me" and "Last Night" both reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100. The album became available to preview on MTV's The Leak on October 10, 2006, a week before being sold in stores. Press Play received mixed to positive reviews from critics, and was certified Gold on the RIAA ratings. On September 18, 2007, Combs teamed up with 50 Cent and Jay-Z for the "Forbes I Get Money Billion Dollar Remix". In March 2008, the Los Angeles Times claimed that The Notorious B.I.G. and Combs orchestrated the 1994 robbery and shooting of Tupac, substantiating the claim with supposed FBI documents; the newspaper later retracted the story, acknowledging that the documents had been fabricated. Dexter Isaac, an associate of record management executive Jimmy Henchman, confessed in 2012 that he had shot Tupac on Henchman's orders. In June 2008, Combs's representative denied rumors of another name change. Combs ventured into reality television in August 2008 with the premiere of his VH1 series I Want to Work for Diddy. He appeared—credited under his real name—in two episodes of Season 7 of CSI: Miami: "Presumed Guilty" and "Sink or Swim", in the role of lawyer Derek Powell. 2010–2013: Dirty Money and acting Combs created a rap supergroup in 2010 known as the Dream Team. The group consists of Combs, Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, Fat Joe, Busta Rhymes, Red Café, and Fabolous. Combs made an appearance at comedian Chris Gethard's live show in January 2010 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City. In June 2010 Combs played a role (credited as Sean Combs) in the comedy film Get Him to the Greek, as Sergio Roma, a record company executive. An Entourage series representative announced that Combs would guest star on an episode during the 2010 season. Last Train to Paris was released by Combs's group Dirty Money on December 13, 2010. The release was preceded by four singles "Angels", "Hello Good Morning", "Loving You No More", and "Coming Home", which experienced mixed success on the Billboard Hot 100. "Coming Home" was the most successful of the songs, peaking at number twelve on the U.S. Hot 100, number four in the UK, and number seven in Canada. On March 10, 2011, Diddy – Dirty Money performed "Coming Home" live on American Idol. On April 18, 2011, Combs appeared in season one of Hawaii Five-0, guest starring as an undercover NYPD detective. In November 2012 Combs appeared in an episode of the eighth season of the American sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. 2014–present: MMM (Money Making Mitch), No Way Out 2, and "Love" On February 26, 2014, Combs premiered "Big Homie", featuring Rick Ross and French Montana, as the first single from his mixtape MMM (Money Making Mitch), which was originally scheduled to be released that year. The song was released for digital download on March 24, and two days later the trailer for the music video was released. The full version of the music video was released on March 31. Combs used his former stage name Puff Daddy for the album. MMM was released as a free mixtape album of 12 tracks on November 4, 2015. In 2014 Combs and Guy Gerber announced that their joint album 11 11 would be available for free download. A new single called "Finna Get Loose" featuring Combs and Pharrell Williams was released on June 29, 2015. In July 2015, Bad Boy Entertainment artist Gizzle told the press that she is collaborating with Combs on what she describes as his last album, titled No Way Out 2, a sequel to his 1997 debut. She describes the music as unique: "The mindset is to just be classic and to be epic. And to really live up to that... we know it's a tall order, but we welcome the challenge." In April 2016, Combs announced that after this last album and tour, he plans to retire from the music industry to focus on acting. On May 20 and 21, 2016, Combs launched a tour of Bad Boy Records' biggest names to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the label. The documentary Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story, covering the two shows at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn as well as behind-the-scenes events, was released on June 23, 2017. The show toured to an additional twenty venues across the United States and Canada. On November 5, 2017, Combs announced that he would be going by the name Love, stating "My new name is Love, aka Brother Love". Two days later, he told the press he had been joking, but on January 3, 2018, he announced on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that he had changed his mind again, and will be using the new name after all. In 2019, Combs announced on Twitter that Making the Band would return to MTV in 2020. Combs executive-produced Nigerian singer Burna Boy's album, Twice as Tall, released on August 14, 2020. Business career Fortune magazine listed Combs at number twelve on their top 40 of entrepreneurs under 40 in 2002. Forbes Magazine estimates that for the year ending May 2017, Combs earned $130 million, ranking him number one among entertainers. In 2019 his estimated net worth was $740 million. Sean John In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John. It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000, and won in 2004. California billionaire Ronald Burkle invested $100 million into the company in 2003. Also in 2003, the National Labor Committee revealed that factories producing the clothing in Honduras were violating Honduran labor laws. Among the accusations were that workers were subjected to body searches and involuntary pregnancy tests. Bathrooms were locked and access tightly controlled. Employees were forced to work overtime and were paid sweatshop wages. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee told The New York Times that "Sean Puff Daddy obviously has a lot of clout, he can literally do a lot overnight to help these workers." Combs responded with an extensive investigation, telling reporters "I'm as pro-worker as they get". On February 14, 2004, Kernaghan announced that improvements had been implemented at the factory, including adding air conditioning and water purification systems, firing the most abusive supervisors, and allowing the formation of a labor union. In late 2006, the department store Macy's removed Sean John jackets from their shelves when they discovered that the clothing was made using raccoon dog fur. Combs had not known the jackets were made with dog fur, but as soon as he was alerted, he had production stopped. In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called "I Am King" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King Jr., featured model Bar Refaeli in its advertisements. In early 2016, Sean John introduced the brand's GIRLS collection. Other ventures Combs is the head of Combs Enterprises, an umbrella company for his portfolio of businesses. In addition to his clothing line, Combs owned two restaurants called Justin's, named after his son. The original New York location closed in September 2007; the Atlanta location closed in June 2012. He is the designer of the Dallas Mavericks alternate jersey. In October 2007 Combs agreed to help develop the Cîroc vodka brand for a 50 percent share of the profits. Combs acquired the Enyce clothing line from Liz Claiborne for $20 million on October 21, 2008. Combs has a major equity stake in Revolt TV, a television network that also has a film production branch. It began broadcasting in 2014. In February 2015, Combs teamed up with actor Mark Wahlberg and businessman Ronald Burkle of Yucaipa Companies to purchase a majority holding in Aquahydrate, a calorie-free beverage for athletes. John Cochran, former president of Fiji Water, is CEO of the company. In 2019 Combs became a major investor in PlayVS, which provides an infrastructure for competitive gaming in US high schools. The company was also backed by Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin. Personal life Family Combs is the father of six children. His first biological child, Justin, was born in 1993 to designer Misa Hylton-Brim. Justin attended UCLA on a football scholarship. Combs had an on-again, off-again relationship with Kimberly Porter (1970–2018), which lasted from 1994 to 2007. He raised and adopted Quincy (born 1991), Porter's son from a previous relationship with singer-producer Al B. Sure! Together they had a son, Christian (born 1998), and twin daughters, D'Lila Star and Jessie James (born 2006). Porter died of pneumonia on November 15, 2018. Five months before the birth of his twins, Combs's daughter, Chance, was born to Sarah Chapman. He took legal responsibility for Chance in October 2007. Combs was in a long-term relationship with Cassie Ventura from 2007 to 2018. Combs's sons Quincy and Justin both appeared on MTV's My Super Sweet 16. Combs threw Quincy a celebrity-studded party and gave him two cars as his 16th birthday present. For Justin's 16th birthday, Combs presented him with a $360,000 Maybach car. Combs owns a home in Alpine, New Jersey, which he purchased for $7million. Charity work and honors Combs founded Daddy's House Social Programs, an organization to help inner city youth, in 1995. Programs include tutoring, life skills classes, and an annual summer camp. Along with Jay-Z, he pledged $1 million to help support victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and donated clothing from his Sean John line to victims. He has donated computers and books to New York schools. In 1998, he received a Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley named October 13, 2006, as "Diddy Day" in honor of Combs's charity work. In 2008, Combs was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the first male rapper to be so honored. In 2014, Combs received an honorary doctorate from Howard University, where he gave the commencement speech for its 146th commencement ceremony. In his speech, Combs acknowledged that his experiences as a Howard student positively influenced his life. In 2016, Combs donated $1 million to Howard University to establish the Sean Combs Scholarship Fund to help students who are unable to pay their tuition. Wardrobe style Combs describes his wardrobe style as "swagger, timeless, diverse". On September 2, 2007, Combs held his ninth annual "White Party", at which guests are limited to an all-white dress code. The White Party, which has also been held in St. Tropez, was held in his home in East Hampton, New York. Combs stated, "This party is up there with the top three that I've thrown. It's a party that has legendary status. It's hard to throw a party that lives up to its legend." Religious views Combs was raised Catholic, and was an altar server as a boy. In 2008 he told The Daily Telegraph that he does not adhere to any specific religious denomination. He said, "I just follow right from wrong, so I could pray in a synagogue or a mosque or a church. I believe that there is only one God." On July 3, 2020, Combs invited his Twitter followers to view a 3-hour YouTube video posted by Louis Farrakhan. In the video Farrakhan made multiple anti-Semitic comments and repeatedly used the phrase "Synagogue of Satan". The video was removed from YouTube for violating its policy against hate speech. In response to comedian Nick Cannon being fired on July 14, 2020, from ViacomCBS for espousing anti-Semitic views, Combs tweeted that Cannon should "come home to RevoltTv" saying "We got your back and love you and what you have done for the culture." Discography Studio albums No Way Out (1997) Forever (1999) The Saga Continues... (2001) Press Play (2006) Awards and nominations NAACP Image Awards \|- \| 2009 \| A Raisin in the Sun \| Outstanding Actor in a Television Movie,Mini-Series or Dramatic Special \| \|- \| 2011 \| Diddy – Dirty Money \| Outstanding Duo or Group \| \|} BET Awards \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2002 \|\| "Bad Boy for Life" \|\| rowspan="2" \| Video of the Year \|\| \|- \| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" \|\| \|- \| 2003 \|\| "Bump, Bump, Bump" \|\| Coca-Cola Viewer's Choice Award \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2007 \|\| "Last Night" \|\| Best Collaboration \|\| \|- \| Diddy \|\| Best Male Hip-Hop Artist \|\| \|- \| 2010 \|\| rowspan="3" \| Diddy – Dirty Money \|\| rowspan="4" \| Best Group \|\| \|- \| 2011 \|\| \|- \| 2012 \|\| \|- \| 2016 \|\| Puff Daddy and the Family \|\| \|} BET Hip Hop Awards \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2008 \|\| "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is)..." \|\| Track of the Year \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| Sean Combs \|\| rowspan="2" \| Hustler of the Year \|\| \|- \| 2009 \|\| \|- \| rowspan="4" \| 2010 \|\| "All I Do Is Win (Remix)" \|\| rowspan="2" \| Reese's Perfect Combo Award \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| "Hello Good Morning (Remix)" \|\| \|- \| Best Club Banger \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| Sean Combs \|\| rowspan="2" \| Hustler of the Year \|\| \|- \| 2011 \|\| \|- \| 2012 \|\| rowspan="2" \| "Same Damn Time (Remix)" \|\| rowspan="2" \| Sweet 16: Best Featured Verse \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2013 \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| Sean Combs \|\| rowspan="2" \| Hustler of the Year \|\| \|- \| 2017 \|\| \|} MTV Europe Music Awards \|- \| rowspan="4" \| 1997 \|\| rowspan="2" \| "I'll Be Missing You" \|\| MTV Select \|\| \|- \| Best Song \|\| \|- \| rowspan="8" \| Sean Combs \|\| Best New Act \|\| \|- \| Best Hip-Hop \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 1998 \|\| Best Male \|\| \|- \| rowspan="5" \| Best Hip-Hop \|\| \|- \| 1999 \|\| \|- \| 2001 \|\| \|- \| 2002 \|\| \|- \| 2006 \|\| \|- \| 2011 \|\| Diddy – Dirty Money \|\| Best World Stage Performance \|\| \|} MTV Movie & TV Awards \|- \| 2018 \|\| Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story \|\| Best Music Documentary \|\| \|} MTV Video Music Awards \|- \| rowspan="2" \| \|\| rowspan="2" \| "I'll Be Missing You" \|\| Best R&B Video \|\| \|- \| Viewer's Choice \|\| \|- \| rowspan="3" \| \|\| rowspan="2" \| "It's All About the Benjamins" (Rock Remix) \|\| Video of the Year \|\| \|- \| Viewer's Choice \|\| \|- \| "Come with Me" \|\| Best Video from a Film \|\| \|- \| \|\| "Bad Boy for Life" \|\| Best Rap Video \|\| \|} Grammy Awards !Ref. \|- \| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="7" \| 1998 \| Puff Daddy \| Best New Artist \| \| rowspan="7"\| \|- \| No Way Out \| rowspan="2"\|Best Rap Album \| \|- \| Life After Death (as producer) \| \|- \| "Honey" (as songwriter) \| Best Rhythm & Blues Song \| \|- \| "I'll Be Missing You" (featuring Faith Evans & 112) \| rowspan="7"\|Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group \| \|- \| "Mo Money Mo Problems" (with The Notorious B.I.G. & Mase) \| \|- \| "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down" (featuring Mase) \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2000 \| "Satisfy You" (featuring R. Kelly) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2002 \| "Bad Boy for Life" (with Black Rob & Mark Curry) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2003 \| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" (with Busta Rhymes & Pharrell) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2004 \| "Shake Ya Tailfeather" (with Nelly & Murphy Lee) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2016 \| "All Day" (as songwriter) \| Best Rap Song \| \| \|} Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time Other awards In 2021, Combs was among the inaugural inductees into the Black Music and Entertainment Walk of Fame. Filmography Made (2001) Monster's Ball (2001) 2005 MTV Video Music Awards (2006) Seamless (2005) Carlito's Way: Rise to Power (2005) A Raisin in the Sun (2008) CSI Miami: episode "Sink or Swim" (2009) Get Him to the Greek (2010) I'm Still Here (2010) Hawaii Five-0: episode "Hoʻopaʻi" (2011) It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (TV series) (2012) Draft Day (2014) Muppets Most Wanted (2014) Black-ish (TV series) (2015) Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story (2017) The Defiant Ones (2017) Mary J. Blige's My Life (2021) Tours No Way Out Tour (1997–1998) Forever Tour (2000) References Sources External links 1969 births 20th-century American businesspeople 20th-century American male musicians 20th-century American rappers 21st-century American businesspeople 21st-century American male actors 21st-century American male musicians 21st-century American rappers Actors from Mount Vernon, New York African-American businesspeople African-American designers African-American fashion designers African-American film producers African-American male actors African-American male rappers African-American record producers American chairpersons of corporations American chief executives in the media industry American chief executives of fashion industry companies American corporate directors American cosmetics businesspeople American dance musicians American drink industry businesspeople American fashion businesspeople American fashion designers American film producers American hip hop record producers American landlords American male film actors American male rappers American male television actors American marketing businesspeople American mass media owners American music industry executives American music publishers (people) American music video directors American philanthropists American restaurateurs American retail chief executives American television company founders American television executives Bad Boy Records artists Businesspeople from New York City East Coast hip hop musicians Former Roman Catholics Grammy Award winners for rap music Howard University alumni Living people Male actors from New York City Music video codirectors Musicians from Mount Vernon, New York Participants in American reality television series People from Harlem Pop rappers Rappers from Manhattan Record producers from New York (state) Remixers	true	[ "A form-fitting garment is an article of clothing that tightly follows the contours of the part of the body being covered. A feature of Western societies is the popularity of form-fitting clothing worn by women, compared to equivalent male garments. These include T-shirts, shorts, and jeans. Some cultures and religious communities disapprove of form-fitting clothing, especially outerwear, which they consider to be immodest.\n\nThere are numerous types of clothing which typically are or which can be made form-fitting. For example, stockings, leggings, tights, and socks are usually form-fitting. Clothing used in dance and in exercise, such as leotards, unitard, and swimsuits, are usually form-fitting. Undergarments or foundation garments such as corsets, girdles, bodysuits, brassieres, and underpants are form-fitting to give a smooth line to the outer clothing.\n\nSkin-tight garments are usually also form-fitting, but are held to the skin by elastic tension. In contrast, non-form-fitting garments are commonly referred to as \"loose\".\n\nThough many materials can be used to make form-fitting garments, the thinner materials, such as synthetic fibers, are the most commonly used, because of the smooth line that can be produced as well as their extra strength when pulled tight. Some fabrics cling to the skin or do so when wet, giving a form-fitting effect.\n\nSee also\n Bodystocking\n Bodysuit\n Catsuit\n Compression garment\n Infant bodysuit\n Romper suit\n Tank suit\n Spandex\n\nReferences\n\nClothing", "Perry Paris Moise (born September 21, 1996), better known by his stage name TheGoodPerry (formerly known as Burberry Perry), is an American record producer and hip hop recording artist. Perry gained recognition for his production in Lil Yachty's hit debut single \"One Night\" from his debut mixtape Lil Boat in 2016. In May 2016, Perry released his debut self-titled EP Burberry Perry. On July 27, 2016, Perry changed his name from Burberry Perry to TheGoodPerry because of a lawsuit filed from the British clothing-line Burberry. Perry frequently collaborates with Lil Yachty, playing a part in Summer Songs 2. On March 16, 2018, Lil Yachty explained on Twitter how he and Perry do not talk anymore, but they do not necessarily have beef.\n\nLegal issues\nOn July 25, 2016, British clothing line Burberry sued Perry for using their name for his own personal profit. The company also sued for his cover artwork on his self-titled EP Burberry Perry, which featured an altered version of the Burberry plaid design and knight logo. In response, Perry changed his name from Burberry Perry to TheGoodPerry.\n\nDiscography\n\nExtended plays\n\nMixtapes\n\nSingles\n\nAs lead artist\n\nGuest appearances\n\nProduction discography\n\n2015 \n\n Wintertime Zi and Lil Yachty - Hey Honey, Let's Spend Wintertime On a Boat\n 01. \"Courtside Choppas\"\n 03. \"Mossed\" (featuring Nessly)\n 04. \"Remember December\"\n\n2016 \n\n Lil Yachty - Lil Boat\n 01. \"Intro / Just Keep Swimming\"\n 02. \"Wanna Be Us\" (featuring TheGoodPerry) [produced with Colby Crump]\n 10. \"One Night\"\n 13. \"I'm Sorry\" (featuring TheGoodPerry)\n 14. \"We Did It (Positivity Song)\"\n\n Lil Yachty - Summer Songs 2\n 01. \"Intro (First Day of Summer)\"\n 10. \"Yeah Yeah\"\n 12. \"Such Ease\" (featuring TheGoodPerry and Tyler Royale)\n\n2017 \n\n Lil Yachty - Teenage Emotions\n 16. \"Running with the Ghost\" (featuring Grace)\n\n2018 \n ELS - What Girls Do — feat. Lil Pump — Single\n 1. \"What Girls Do\" (featuring Lil Pump)\n\nReferences\n\n1996 births\nLiving people\nAmerican hip hop record producers" ]
[ "Sean Combs", "Sean John", "who is sean john?", "In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John.", "why did he want to start a clothing line?", "I don't know.", "did anyone work with him?", "I don't know.", "did he have any influences?", "In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called \"I Am King\" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama,", "did his clothing line do well?", "It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year" ]	C_07b75bf747f14969bd3b73fb1e58e27a_0	how much money did he make?	6	How much money Combs make?	Sean Combs	In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John. It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000, and won in 2004. California billionaire Ronald Burkle invested $100 million into the company in 2003. Also in 2003, the National Labor Committee revealed that factories producing the clothing in Honduras were violating Honduran labor laws. Among the accusations were that workers were subjected to body searches and involuntary pregnancy tests. Bathrooms were locked and access tightly controlled. Employees were forced to work overtime and were paid sweatshop wages. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee told The New York Times that "Sean Puff Daddy obviously has a lot of clout, he can literally do a lot overnight to help these workers." Combs responded with an extensive investigation, telling reporters "I'm as pro-worker as they get". On February 14, 2004, Kernaghan announced that improvements had been implemented at the factory, including adding air conditioning and water purification systems, firing the most abusive supervisors, and allowing the formation of a labor union. In late 2006, the department store Macy's removed Sean John jackets from their shelves when they discovered that the clothing was made using raccoon dog fur. Combs had not known the jackets were made with dog fur, but as soon as he was alerted, he had production stopped. In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called "I Am King" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King, featured model Bar Refaeli in its advertisements. In early 2016, Sean John introduced the brand's GIRLS collection. CANNOTANSWER	California billionaire Ronald Burkle invested $100 million into the company in 2003.	Sean John Combs (born November 4, 1969), also known by his stage name Puff Daddy (previously known as P. Diddy, Diddy, or Puffy), is an American rapper, actor, songwriter, record executive, record producer, and entrepreneur. Born in New York City and raised in the suburb of Mount Vernon, he worked as a talent director at Uptown Records before founding his own record label, Bad Boy Records in 1993. Combs has produced and cultivated artists such as The Notorious B.I.G., Mary J. Blige, and Usher. Combs' debut album, No Way Out (1997), has been certified seven times platinum. The album was followed by Forever (1999), The Saga Continues..., (2001) and Press Play (2006), all of which were commercially successful. In 2009, Combs formed the musical group Dirty Money; together, they released their highly successful debut album Last Train to Paris (2010). Combs has won three Grammy Awards and two MTV Video Music Awards and is the producer of MTV's Making the Band. In 2019, Forbes estimated his net worth at $740 million. In 1998, he launched his own clothing line Sean John. He was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000 and won in 2004. Early life Sean John Combs was born in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City on November 4, 1969. Raised in Mount Vernon, New York, his mother Janice Combs (née Smalls) was a model and teacher's assistant and his father, Melvin Earl Combs, served in the U.S. Air Force and was an associate of convicted New York drug dealer Frank Lucas. At age 33, Melvin was shot to death while sitting in his car on Central Park West, when Sean was two years old. Combs graduated from Mount Saint Michael Academy in 1987. He played football for the academy and his team won a division title in 1986. Combs said he was given the nickname "Puff" as a child, because he would "huff and puff" when he was angry. Combs was a business major at Howard University but left after his sophomore year. In 2014, he returned to Howard University to receive an Honorary Doctorate in Humanities and deliver the University's 146th Commencement Address. Career 1990–1996: Career beginnings Combs became an intern at New York's Uptown Records in 1990. While working as a talent director at Uptown, he helped develop Jodeci and Mary J. Blige. In his college days Combs had a reputation for throwing parties, some of which attracted up to a thousand participants. In 1991, Combs promoted an AIDS fundraiser with Heavy D held at the City College of New York (CCNY) gymnasium, following a charity basketball game. The event was oversold, and a stampede occurred in which nine people died. In 1993, after being fired from Uptown, Combs established his new label Bad Boy Entertainment as a joint venture with Arista Records, taking then-newcomer Christopher Wallace, better known as The Notorious B.I.G., with him. Both Wallace and Craig Mack quickly released hit singles, followed by successful LPs, particularly Wallace's Ready to Die. Combs signed more acts to Bad Boy, including Carl Thomas, Faith Evans, 112, Total, and Father MC. The Hitmen, his in-house production team, worked with Jodeci, Mary J. Blige, Usher, Lil' Kim, TLC, Mariah Carey, Boyz II Men, SWV, Aretha Franklin, and others. Mase and the Lox joined Bad Boy just as a widely publicized rivalry with the West Coast's Death Row Records was beginning. Combs and Wallace were criticized and parodied by Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight in songs and interviews during the mid-1990s. During 1994–1995, Combs produced several songs for TLC's CrazySexyCool, which finished the decade as number 25 on Billboard's list of top pop albums of the decade. 1997–1998: "Puff Daddy" and No Way Out In 1997, under the name Puff Daddy, Combs recorded his first commercial vocal work as a rapper. His debut single, "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", spent 28 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, peaking at number one. His debut album, No Way Out, was released on July 22, 1997, through Bad Boy Records. Originally titled Hell up in Harlem, the album underwent several changes after The Notorious B.I.G. was killed on March 9, 1997. Several of the label's artists made guest appearances on the album. No Way Out was a significant success, particularly in the United States, where it reached number one on the Billboard 200 in its first week of release, selling 561,000 copies. The album produced five singles: "I'll Be Missing You", a tribute to The Notorious B.I.G., was the first rap song to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100; it remained at the top of the chart for eleven consecutive weeks and topped several other charts worldwide. Four other singles – "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", "It's All About the Benjamins", "Been Around the World", and "Victory" – were also released. Combs collaborated with Jimmy Page on the song "Come with Me" for the 1998 film Godzilla. The album earned Combs five nominations at the 40th Grammy Awards in 1998, winning the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album. On September 7, 2000, the album was certified septuple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of over 7 million copies. In 1997, Combs was sued for landlord neglect by Inge Bongo. Combs denied the charges. By the late 1990s, he was being criticized for watering down and overly commercializing hip hop, and for using too many guest appearances, samples, and interpolations of past hits in his new songs. 1999–2000: Forever and Club New York In April 1999, Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records. Stoute was the manager for Nas, with whom Combs had filmed a video earlier that year for the song "Hate Me Now". Combs was concerned that the video, which featured a shot of Nas and Combs being crucified, was blasphemous. He asked for his scenes on the cross to be pulled, but after it aired unedited on MTV on April 15, Combs visited Stoute's offices and injured Stoute. Combs was charged with second-degree assault and criminal mischief, and was sentenced to attend a one-day anger management class. Forever, Combs's second solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999, in North America, and in the UK on the following day. It reached number two on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, where it remained for one week before being knocked off by Mary J. Blige's fourth album, Mary. The album received positive to mixed reviews from music critics and spawned three singles that have charted on the Billboard charts. It peaked at number four on the Canadian Albums Chart, Combs's highest-charting album in that country. On December 27, 1999, Combs and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were at Club New York in Manhattan when gunfire broke out. After a police investigation, Combs and fellow rapper Shyne were arrested for weapons violations and other charges. Combs was charged with four weapons-related charges and bribing his driver, Wardel Fenderson, to claim ownership of his gun. With a gag order in place, the highly publicized trial began. Combs's attorneys were Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Benjamin Brafman. Combs was found not guilty on all charges; Shyne was convicted on five of his eight charges and sentenced to ten years in prison. Combs and Lopez broke up shortly after. A lawsuit filed by Fenderson, who said he suffered emotional damage after the shooting, was settled in February 2004. Lawyers for both sides, having agreed to keep the settlement terms secret, said the matter had been "resolved to the satisfaction of all parties". 2001–2004: "P. Diddy" and The Saga Continues Combs changed his stage name from "Puff Daddy" to "P. Diddy" in 2001. The gospel album, Thank You, which had been completed just before the beginning of the weapons trial, was due to be released in March that year, but remains unreleased . He appeared as a drug dealer in the film Made and starred with Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball (both in 2001). He was arrested for driving on a suspended license in Florida. Combs began working with a series of unusual (for him) artists. For a short period of time, he was the manager of Kelis; they have a collaboration titled "Let's Get Ill". He was an opening act for 'N Sync on their Spring 2002 Celebrity Tour, and he signed California-based pop girl group Dream to his record label. Combs was a producer of the soundtrack album for the film Training Day (2001). In June 2001, Combs ended Bad Boy Entertainment's joint venture with Arista Records, gaining full control of Bad Boy, its catalogue, and its roster of artists. The Saga Continues..., released on July 10 in North America, was the last studio album released by the joint venture. The album reached number 2 on the Billboard 200 and the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums charts, and was eventually certified Platinum. It is the only studio album under the P. Diddy name, and the first album by Sean Combs not to feature any guest appearances by Jay-Z or Lil Kim. Combs was executive producer of the reality TV show Making the Band, which appeared on MTV from 2002 to 2009. The show involves interviewing candidates and creating musical acts that would then enter the music business. Acts who got their start this way include Da Band, Danity Kane, Day26, and Donnie Klang. In 2003 Combs ran in the New York City Marathon, raising $2million for the educational system of the city of New York. On March 10, 2004, he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss the marathon, which he finished in four hours and eighteen minutes. In 2004 Combs headed the campaign "Vote or Die" for the 2004 presidential election. On February 1, 2004, Combs (as P. Diddy) performed at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. 2005–2009: "Diddy" and Press Play On August 16, 2005, Combs announced on Today that he was altering his stage name yet again; he would be calling himself "Diddy". Combs said fans didn't know how to address him, which led to confusion. In November 2005, London-based musical artist and DJ Richard Dearlove, who had been performing under the name "Diddy" since 1992 nine years before Combs started using even "P. Diddy" sought an injunction in the High Court of Justice in London. He accepted an out-of-court settlement of £10,000 in damages and more than £100,000 in costs. Combs can no longer use the name Diddy in the UK, where he is still known as P. Diddy. An assault charge against Combs filed by Michigan television host Rogelio Mills was resolved in Combs's favor in 2005. Combs starred in the 2005 film Carlito's Way: Rise to Power. He played Walter Lee Younger in the 2004 Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun and the television adaptation that aired in February 2008. In 2005 Combs sold half of his record company to the Warner Music Group. He hosted the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards and was named one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2005 by Time magazine. He was mentioned in the country song "Play Something Country" by Brooks & Dunn: the lyricist says he "didn't come to hear P. Diddy", which is rhymed with "something thumpin' from the city". In 2006, when Combs refused to release musician Mase from his contractual obligations to allow him to join the group G-Unit, 50 Cent recorded a diss song, "Hip-Hop". The lyrics imply that Combs knew the identity of The Notorious B.I.G.'s murderer. The two later resolved the feud. Combs released his first album in four years, Press Play, on October 17, 2006, on the Bad Boy Records label. The album, featuring guest appearances by many popular artists, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart with sales of over 173,009. Its singles "Come to Me" and "Last Night" both reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100. The album became available to preview on MTV's The Leak on October 10, 2006, a week before being sold in stores. Press Play received mixed to positive reviews from critics, and was certified Gold on the RIAA ratings. On September 18, 2007, Combs teamed up with 50 Cent and Jay-Z for the "Forbes I Get Money Billion Dollar Remix". In March 2008, the Los Angeles Times claimed that The Notorious B.I.G. and Combs orchestrated the 1994 robbery and shooting of Tupac, substantiating the claim with supposed FBI documents; the newspaper later retracted the story, acknowledging that the documents had been fabricated. Dexter Isaac, an associate of record management executive Jimmy Henchman, confessed in 2012 that he had shot Tupac on Henchman's orders. In June 2008, Combs's representative denied rumors of another name change. Combs ventured into reality television in August 2008 with the premiere of his VH1 series I Want to Work for Diddy. He appeared—credited under his real name—in two episodes of Season 7 of CSI: Miami: "Presumed Guilty" and "Sink or Swim", in the role of lawyer Derek Powell. 2010–2013: Dirty Money and acting Combs created a rap supergroup in 2010 known as the Dream Team. The group consists of Combs, Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, Fat Joe, Busta Rhymes, Red Café, and Fabolous. Combs made an appearance at comedian Chris Gethard's live show in January 2010 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City. In June 2010 Combs played a role (credited as Sean Combs) in the comedy film Get Him to the Greek, as Sergio Roma, a record company executive. An Entourage series representative announced that Combs would guest star on an episode during the 2010 season. Last Train to Paris was released by Combs's group Dirty Money on December 13, 2010. The release was preceded by four singles "Angels", "Hello Good Morning", "Loving You No More", and "Coming Home", which experienced mixed success on the Billboard Hot 100. "Coming Home" was the most successful of the songs, peaking at number twelve on the U.S. Hot 100, number four in the UK, and number seven in Canada. On March 10, 2011, Diddy – Dirty Money performed "Coming Home" live on American Idol. On April 18, 2011, Combs appeared in season one of Hawaii Five-0, guest starring as an undercover NYPD detective. In November 2012 Combs appeared in an episode of the eighth season of the American sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. 2014–present: MMM (Money Making Mitch), No Way Out 2, and "Love" On February 26, 2014, Combs premiered "Big Homie", featuring Rick Ross and French Montana, as the first single from his mixtape MMM (Money Making Mitch), which was originally scheduled to be released that year. The song was released for digital download on March 24, and two days later the trailer for the music video was released. The full version of the music video was released on March 31. Combs used his former stage name Puff Daddy for the album. MMM was released as a free mixtape album of 12 tracks on November 4, 2015. In 2014 Combs and Guy Gerber announced that their joint album 11 11 would be available for free download. A new single called "Finna Get Loose" featuring Combs and Pharrell Williams was released on June 29, 2015. In July 2015, Bad Boy Entertainment artist Gizzle told the press that she is collaborating with Combs on what she describes as his last album, titled No Way Out 2, a sequel to his 1997 debut. She describes the music as unique: "The mindset is to just be classic and to be epic. And to really live up to that... we know it's a tall order, but we welcome the challenge." In April 2016, Combs announced that after this last album and tour, he plans to retire from the music industry to focus on acting. On May 20 and 21, 2016, Combs launched a tour of Bad Boy Records' biggest names to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the label. The documentary Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story, covering the two shows at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn as well as behind-the-scenes events, was released on June 23, 2017. The show toured to an additional twenty venues across the United States and Canada. On November 5, 2017, Combs announced that he would be going by the name Love, stating "My new name is Love, aka Brother Love". Two days later, he told the press he had been joking, but on January 3, 2018, he announced on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that he had changed his mind again, and will be using the new name after all. In 2019, Combs announced on Twitter that Making the Band would return to MTV in 2020. Combs executive-produced Nigerian singer Burna Boy's album, Twice as Tall, released on August 14, 2020. Business career Fortune magazine listed Combs at number twelve on their top 40 of entrepreneurs under 40 in 2002. Forbes Magazine estimates that for the year ending May 2017, Combs earned $130 million, ranking him number one among entertainers. In 2019 his estimated net worth was $740 million. Sean John In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John. It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000, and won in 2004. California billionaire Ronald Burkle invested $100 million into the company in 2003. Also in 2003, the National Labor Committee revealed that factories producing the clothing in Honduras were violating Honduran labor laws. Among the accusations were that workers were subjected to body searches and involuntary pregnancy tests. Bathrooms were locked and access tightly controlled. Employees were forced to work overtime and were paid sweatshop wages. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee told The New York Times that "Sean Puff Daddy obviously has a lot of clout, he can literally do a lot overnight to help these workers." Combs responded with an extensive investigation, telling reporters "I'm as pro-worker as they get". On February 14, 2004, Kernaghan announced that improvements had been implemented at the factory, including adding air conditioning and water purification systems, firing the most abusive supervisors, and allowing the formation of a labor union. In late 2006, the department store Macy's removed Sean John jackets from their shelves when they discovered that the clothing was made using raccoon dog fur. Combs had not known the jackets were made with dog fur, but as soon as he was alerted, he had production stopped. In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called "I Am King" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King Jr., featured model Bar Refaeli in its advertisements. In early 2016, Sean John introduced the brand's GIRLS collection. Other ventures Combs is the head of Combs Enterprises, an umbrella company for his portfolio of businesses. In addition to his clothing line, Combs owned two restaurants called Justin's, named after his son. The original New York location closed in September 2007; the Atlanta location closed in June 2012. He is the designer of the Dallas Mavericks alternate jersey. In October 2007 Combs agreed to help develop the Cîroc vodka brand for a 50 percent share of the profits. Combs acquired the Enyce clothing line from Liz Claiborne for $20 million on October 21, 2008. Combs has a major equity stake in Revolt TV, a television network that also has a film production branch. It began broadcasting in 2014. In February 2015, Combs teamed up with actor Mark Wahlberg and businessman Ronald Burkle of Yucaipa Companies to purchase a majority holding in Aquahydrate, a calorie-free beverage for athletes. John Cochran, former president of Fiji Water, is CEO of the company. In 2019 Combs became a major investor in PlayVS, which provides an infrastructure for competitive gaming in US high schools. The company was also backed by Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin. Personal life Family Combs is the father of six children. His first biological child, Justin, was born in 1993 to designer Misa Hylton-Brim. Justin attended UCLA on a football scholarship. Combs had an on-again, off-again relationship with Kimberly Porter (1970–2018), which lasted from 1994 to 2007. He raised and adopted Quincy (born 1991), Porter's son from a previous relationship with singer-producer Al B. Sure! Together they had a son, Christian (born 1998), and twin daughters, D'Lila Star and Jessie James (born 2006). Porter died of pneumonia on November 15, 2018. Five months before the birth of his twins, Combs's daughter, Chance, was born to Sarah Chapman. He took legal responsibility for Chance in October 2007. Combs was in a long-term relationship with Cassie Ventura from 2007 to 2018. Combs's sons Quincy and Justin both appeared on MTV's My Super Sweet 16. Combs threw Quincy a celebrity-studded party and gave him two cars as his 16th birthday present. For Justin's 16th birthday, Combs presented him with a $360,000 Maybach car. Combs owns a home in Alpine, New Jersey, which he purchased for $7million. Charity work and honors Combs founded Daddy's House Social Programs, an organization to help inner city youth, in 1995. Programs include tutoring, life skills classes, and an annual summer camp. Along with Jay-Z, he pledged $1 million to help support victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and donated clothing from his Sean John line to victims. He has donated computers and books to New York schools. In 1998, he received a Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley named October 13, 2006, as "Diddy Day" in honor of Combs's charity work. In 2008, Combs was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the first male rapper to be so honored. In 2014, Combs received an honorary doctorate from Howard University, where he gave the commencement speech for its 146th commencement ceremony. In his speech, Combs acknowledged that his experiences as a Howard student positively influenced his life. In 2016, Combs donated $1 million to Howard University to establish the Sean Combs Scholarship Fund to help students who are unable to pay their tuition. Wardrobe style Combs describes his wardrobe style as "swagger, timeless, diverse". On September 2, 2007, Combs held his ninth annual "White Party", at which guests are limited to an all-white dress code. The White Party, which has also been held in St. Tropez, was held in his home in East Hampton, New York. Combs stated, "This party is up there with the top three that I've thrown. It's a party that has legendary status. It's hard to throw a party that lives up to its legend." Religious views Combs was raised Catholic, and was an altar server as a boy. In 2008 he told The Daily Telegraph that he does not adhere to any specific religious denomination. He said, "I just follow right from wrong, so I could pray in a synagogue or a mosque or a church. I believe that there is only one God." On July 3, 2020, Combs invited his Twitter followers to view a 3-hour YouTube video posted by Louis Farrakhan. In the video Farrakhan made multiple anti-Semitic comments and repeatedly used the phrase "Synagogue of Satan". The video was removed from YouTube for violating its policy against hate speech. In response to comedian Nick Cannon being fired on July 14, 2020, from ViacomCBS for espousing anti-Semitic views, Combs tweeted that Cannon should "come home to RevoltTv" saying "We got your back and love you and what you have done for the culture." Discography Studio albums No Way Out (1997) Forever (1999) The Saga Continues... (2001) Press Play (2006) Awards and nominations NAACP Image Awards \|- \| 2009 \| A Raisin in the Sun \| Outstanding Actor in a Television Movie,Mini-Series or Dramatic Special \| \|- \| 2011 \| Diddy – Dirty Money \| Outstanding Duo or Group \| \|} BET Awards \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2002 \|\| "Bad Boy for Life" \|\| rowspan="2" \| Video of the Year \|\| \|- \| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" \|\| \|- \| 2003 \|\| "Bump, Bump, Bump" \|\| Coca-Cola Viewer's Choice Award \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2007 \|\| "Last Night" \|\| Best Collaboration \|\| \|- \| Diddy \|\| Best Male Hip-Hop Artist \|\| \|- \| 2010 \|\| rowspan="3" \| Diddy – Dirty Money \|\| rowspan="4" \| Best Group \|\| \|- \| 2011 \|\| \|- \| 2012 \|\| \|- \| 2016 \|\| Puff Daddy and the Family \|\| \|} BET Hip Hop Awards \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2008 \|\| "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is)..." \|\| Track of the Year \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| Sean Combs \|\| rowspan="2" \| Hustler of the Year \|\| \|- \| 2009 \|\| \|- \| rowspan="4" \| 2010 \|\| "All I Do Is Win (Remix)" \|\| rowspan="2" \| Reese's Perfect Combo Award \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| "Hello Good Morning (Remix)" \|\| \|- \| Best Club Banger \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| Sean Combs \|\| rowspan="2" \| Hustler of the Year \|\| \|- \| 2011 \|\| \|- \| 2012 \|\| rowspan="2" \| "Same Damn Time (Remix)" \|\| rowspan="2" \| Sweet 16: Best Featured Verse \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 2013 \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| Sean Combs \|\| rowspan="2" \| Hustler of the Year \|\| \|- \| 2017 \|\| \|} MTV Europe Music Awards \|- \| rowspan="4" \| 1997 \|\| rowspan="2" \| "I'll Be Missing You" \|\| MTV Select \|\| \|- \| Best Song \|\| \|- \| rowspan="8" \| Sean Combs \|\| Best New Act \|\| \|- \| Best Hip-Hop \|\| \|- \| rowspan="2" \| 1998 \|\| Best Male \|\| \|- \| rowspan="5" \| Best Hip-Hop \|\| \|- \| 1999 \|\| \|- \| 2001 \|\| \|- \| 2002 \|\| \|- \| 2006 \|\| \|- \| 2011 \|\| Diddy – Dirty Money \|\| Best World Stage Performance \|\| \|} MTV Movie & TV Awards \|- \| 2018 \|\| Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story \|\| Best Music Documentary \|\| \|} MTV Video Music Awards \|- \| rowspan="2" \| \|\| rowspan="2" \| "I'll Be Missing You" \|\| Best R&B Video \|\| \|- \| Viewer's Choice \|\| \|- \| rowspan="3" \| \|\| rowspan="2" \| "It's All About the Benjamins" (Rock Remix) \|\| Video of the Year \|\| \|- \| Viewer's Choice \|\| \|- \| "Come with Me" \|\| Best Video from a Film \|\| \|- \| \|\| "Bad Boy for Life" \|\| Best Rap Video \|\| \|} Grammy Awards !Ref. \|- \| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="7" \| 1998 \| Puff Daddy \| Best New Artist \| \| rowspan="7"\| \|- \| No Way Out \| rowspan="2"\|Best Rap Album \| \|- \| Life After Death (as producer) \| \|- \| "Honey" (as songwriter) \| Best Rhythm & Blues Song \| \|- \| "I'll Be Missing You" (featuring Faith Evans & 112) \| rowspan="7"\|Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group \| \|- \| "Mo Money Mo Problems" (with The Notorious B.I.G. & Mase) \| \|- \| "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down" (featuring Mase) \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2000 \| "Satisfy You" (featuring R. Kelly) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2002 \| "Bad Boy for Life" (with Black Rob & Mark Curry) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2003 \| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" (with Busta Rhymes & Pharrell) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2004 \| "Shake Ya Tailfeather" (with Nelly & Murphy Lee) \| \| \|- \| style="text-align:center;"\| 2016 \| "All Day" (as songwriter) \| Best Rap Song \| \| \|} Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time Other awards In 2021, Combs was among the inaugural inductees into the Black Music and Entertainment Walk of Fame. Filmography Made (2001) Monster's Ball (2001) 2005 MTV Video Music Awards (2006) Seamless (2005) Carlito's Way: Rise to Power (2005) A Raisin in the Sun (2008) CSI Miami: episode "Sink or Swim" (2009) Get Him to the Greek (2010) I'm Still Here (2010) Hawaii Five-0: episode "Hoʻopaʻi" (2011) It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (TV series) (2012) Draft Day (2014) Muppets Most Wanted (2014) Black-ish (TV series) (2015) Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story (2017) The Defiant Ones (2017) Mary J. Blige's My Life (2021) Tours No Way Out Tour (1997–1998) Forever Tour (2000) References Sources External links 1969 births 20th-century American businesspeople 20th-century American male musicians 20th-century American rappers 21st-century American businesspeople 21st-century American male actors 21st-century American male musicians 21st-century American rappers Actors from Mount Vernon, New York African-American businesspeople African-American designers African-American fashion designers African-American film producers African-American male actors African-American male rappers African-American record producers American chairpersons of corporations American chief executives in the media industry American chief executives of fashion industry companies American corporate directors American cosmetics businesspeople American dance musicians American drink industry businesspeople American fashion businesspeople American fashion designers American film producers American hip hop record producers American landlords American male film actors American male rappers American male television actors American marketing businesspeople American mass media owners American music industry executives American music publishers (people) American music video directors American philanthropists American restaurateurs American retail chief executives American television company founders American television executives Bad Boy Records artists Businesspeople from New York City East Coast hip hop musicians Former Roman Catholics Grammy Award winners for rap music Howard University alumni Living people Male actors from New York City Music video codirectors Musicians from Mount Vernon, New York Participants in American reality television series People from Harlem Pop rappers Rappers from Manhattan Record producers from New York (state) Remixers	true	[ "Finance Smurf (original French title: Le Schtroumpf Financier) is the sixteenth album of the original French-language Smurfs comic series created by Belgian artist Peyo.\n\nPlot\nPapa Smurf's lab explodes while he is making the formula \"Ad Capitis mala et alios dolores sanandos\" (which is how much Brainy Smurf can read because he is unable to translate it properly as he claims), and when the other Smurfs arrive, Papa Smurf is unconscious. A Smurf goes to the home of the good wizard Homnibus to ask for help. Homnibus realizes that Papa Smurf has fallen sick due to using sulfur in the formula. However, Homnibus lacks some ingredients needed for the cure, so he sends his servant Oliver to buy some. The Smurf goes along with Oliver and learns about money and the humans' commerce system.\n\nThe Smurf returns to the Smurf Village with medicine that Papa Smurf must drink three times a day to get better. The Smurf tries to tell Papa Smurf about money, but Papa Smurf is unable to listen to him as Papa Smurf needs rest. So the Smurf decides to put the commerce system into practice as a surprise, thus becoming Finance Smurf.\n\nThe first step is to make coins. Finance Smurf asks Painter Smurf to make a picture of Papa Smurf's face inside a circle, which is then used as a model for Sculptor Smurf to make a mold for the coins. Then Handy Smurf pours molten gold on the mold to make the first Smurf coins.\n\nFinance Smurf arranges a conference to explain to the other Smurfs what money is and how it works. Everybody agrees with Finance Smurf's idea to use money from now on (except for Brainy Smurf). Each Smurf gets a bag of money as a start.\n\nAt first, the inexperienced Smurfs need Finance Smurf's help to know how much they need to spend or ask for given services. The inexperienced Smurfs find the currency system funny. After some time, trouble begins. While Baker Smurf, Farmer Smurf, Handy Smurf and some other Smurfs become richer, most Smurfs become poorer, They need to find ways to get money. They sell unwanted stuff that they previously did for fun (Jokey Smurf's presents, Harmony Smurf's concerts, Poet Smurf's poems, etc.).\n\nFinance Smurf creates and manages a bank to loan money to the poor Smurfs and store the rich Smurfs' money. Farmer Smurf doesn't trust the institution and goes to bury his money in the forest, only to encounter Gargamel there. As Farmer Smurf escapes, he drops a coin, which later is picked up by the evil wizard. The evil wizard now realizes that the Smurfs have money.\n\nFarmer Smurf notices that he has lost a coin. He goes back to get it. When he starts to cross the bridge, it falls apart. Finance Smurf offers to finance the bridge repair cost. From then on, any Smurf who crosses the bridge needs to pay him a toll. Finance Smurf asks Handy Smurf to get the price for the materials. Carpenter Smurf asks 1500 coins for the wood, which Handy Smurf finds too expensive. Another Smurf offers him inferior wood for just 1000 coins, plus a bribe that Handy Smurf accepts.\n\nFarmer Smurf returns to the forest to find his lost coin. Gargamel has placed a yellow-painted lead coin as bait that lures Farmer Smurf into the trap. Gargamel then sends his crow, Corbelius with a message for the Smurfs to give him all their money in exchange for Farmer Smurf. Papa Smurf, who has recovered, sends a Smurf to spy on Gargamel, and the Smurf spy discovers the wizard setting up a trap in order to get both the Smurfs and their money. The Smurfs fix Gargamel's trap to make it fall on him instead of them. Then, while Finance Smurf and Brainy Smurf carry the money back to the Village, other Smurfs go to Gargamel's house to save Farmer Smurf from Azrael. Papa Smurf decides to have a party to celebrate their triumph, but then Finance Smurf asks who will pay for the party. In the end there's no party.\n\nPapa Smurf learns that he will have to pay a large sum of money to Handy Smurf in order for him to rebuild his destroyed laboratory, but before he can do that he has to pay Smurfette for nursing him during his sickness, Baker Smurf for food, and other Smurfs for various other services. Thus he quickly becomes poor. When Finance Smurf suggests that he make the Smurfs pay for any kind of help he gives them, Papa Smurf soundly refuses. Papa Smurf then observes the Village and notes that all the things the Smurfs once did in a cooperative spirit are now done if they are paid only, and there are fights over money as well as stress all around due to the constant work.\n\nOne day, a Smurf gets sick of the aggravating currency-based life and decides to leave the Smurf Village. Other Smurfs agree and leave the Smurf Village with him, including Papa Smurf. Everyone leaves except for Finance Smurf, who tells them that they cannot leave because they owe him money. They responded by throwing him all the money. At first, Finance Smurf refuses to revert to the old ways and even gloats about having the whole Smurf Village for himself. Eventually, he changes his mind. He decides he doesn't want to be alone, so he asks everybody to return to the village and reuse the old system based on cooperation. The coins are converted into golden musical instruments.\n\nIssues\nThe subject of the comic book is the famous system that has been implemented on human society: money. Peyo shows us the social differences that grow between the Smurfs (rich and poor). We can also see how the lifestyle of smurfs changes, revolving around money and bringing misery everywhere.\nAlthough the book was never adapted for the television cartoon series, there is an episode entitled \"The Smurfs and the Money Tree\" which also revolves around money, namely an enchanted money tree created by Gargamel and his mother to trap the Smurfs. But because Greedy Smurf finds the tree first, instead of actual money, it turns out to carry chocolate coins wrapped in gold with Greedy's image on them.\nFinance Smurf is Peyo, Pierre Culliford's last comic book work before his death on December 24, 1992. From that point onwards, his son Thierry Culliford take over in creating all Smurf comic book stories. Thierry Culliford mostly involves in writing the stories while working with various cartoon artists that create the artworks.\n\nSee also \n Characters in The Smurfs\n\nThe Smurfs books\nes:El pitufo financiero\nfr:Le Schtroumpf financier", "Avunanna Kaadanna () is a 2005 Indian Telugu-language romantic drama film directed by Teja. The film stars Uday Kiran and Sadha.\n\nCast \n\nUday Kiran as Ravi\nSadha as Aravinda (credited as Sadaf)\nPilla Prasad as Mangaraju\nDharmavarapu Subramanyam\nSuman Shetty\nRallapalli\nSudha\nDuvvasi Mohan\nSangeeta\nRama Prabha\nShravya\nNirmala Reddy\nRajendra\nRajababu\n\nSoundtrack \nThe music was composed by R. P. Patnaik.\n\"Avunanna\" – R. P. Patnaik\n\"Gudigantala\" – S. P. B. Charan, Usha\n\"Anaganaga\" – KK, Usha\n\"Nelathalli\" – Shankar Mahadevan\n\"Malinam\" – Usha\n\"Suvvi Suvvi\" – K. S. Chithra, Mallikarjun\n\nProduction \nSadha was chosen to make her second collaboration alongside Teja after Jayam. This film marks the third collaboration of Uday Kiran and Teja after Chitram and Nuvvu Nenu. Teja's frequent collaborator, R. P. Patnaik, was roped in to compose the music. The producer spent a good sum of money although he did not make money after Venky and Mr & Mrs Sailaja Krishnamurthy.\n\nRelease \nThe film released to positive reviews. Sify praised the performances of the lead actors and Dharmavarapu and stated how \"On the whole, Teja tries his best with a sugar-coated love story that is fun to watch\". Idlebrain gave the film three and of five stars and praised the performances of much of the cast and the first half of the film.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n\n2000s Telugu-language films\nIndian films\nIndian romantic drama films\n2005 romantic drama films\n2005 films\nFilms directed by Teja (film director)" ]
[ "Big Boss Man (wrestler)", "Final years (2000-2003)" ]	C_3bba6eb691eb4ad19e5ff75dbe17c742_0	where did he wrestle for the final three years	1	where did Big Boss Man wrestle for the final three years?	Big Boss Man (wrestler)	Boss Man entered the 2000 Royal Rumble match, where he eliminated Rikishi (with the help of five other wrestlers), Chyna and Faarooq, before being eliminated by The Rock. On the March 19 episode of Sunday Night Heat, he introduced Bull Buchanan as his protege. They teamed to defeat The Godfather and D'Lo Brown at WrestleMania 2000, and the Acolytes Protection Agency the next month at Backlash. On the June 5 Raw is War, after losing to The Hardy Boyz and subsequently arguing, Boss Man knocked Buchanan out with his nightstick when his back was turned and the team split up. In the summer of 2000, Boss Man disappeared from the WWF's primary television shows, wrestling mainly on Jakked and Heat, where he had a minor feud with Crash Holly until suffering a legit injury in January 2001. When he returned on the December 20, 2001 of SmackDown, he formed a team with Booker T, after Vince McMahon ordered him to be Booker's enforcer. on the December 27 episode of Smackdown, Bossman and Booker T defeated Stone Cold in a handicap match. on the January 7, 2002 episode of Raw, Bossman and Booker T was defeated by Stone Cold & The Rock. on the January 17 episode of Smackdown, Bossman lost to Diamond Dallas Page. at Royal Rumble (2002), Bossman competed in the royal rumble match where he was eliminated by Rikishi. on the January 24 episode of Smackdown, Bossman lost to Rikishi. The team quietly split in late January 2002, and Boss Man returned to Jakked/Metal and Heat. on the February 2 episode of Metal, Bossman defeated The Hurricane. on the February 2 episode of Metal, Bossman defeated Perry Saturn. In April, he formed a short-lived tag team with Mr. Perfect after both were drafted to the Raw brand. on the March 23 episode of WWF Jakked, Bossman and Mr. Perfect lost to The APA. on the April 1 episode of Raw, Bossman and Mr. Perfect lost to The Hardy Boyz. on the April 14 episode of Heat, Bossman lost to Bradshaw, on the April 28 Bossman defeated Crash Holly, on the May 5 episode of Heat. Bossman lost to D'Lo Brown. On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer. Traylor was assigned to train developmental wrestlers in Ohio Valley Wrestling, before being released from WWE in 2003. CANNOTANSWER	On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer.		false	[ "is a Japanese professional wrestler who currently competes as a freelancer, majorly for Pro Wrestling Noah. He's best known for his time in Wrestle-1, where he was a two-time Wrestle-1 Champion, and the winner of the 2019 Wrestle-1 Grand Prix. His nickname is Mad Dog and he currently works as a babyface (hero).\n\nEarly career \nInaba participated in Amateur wrestling and Judo while attending college. After college, he continued his training while working for former New Japan Pro-Wrestling wrestler and medical trainer Takeshi Misawa's osteopathic clinic.\n\nProfessional Wrestling career\n\nAJPW/North American promotions (2012-2013)\nIn January 2012, Inaba successfully passed a public audition for All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW) and began training full-time in their dojo. After training for 17 months, he was sent on an overseas learning excursion and made his professional wrestling debut on May 3, 2013 for an independent Mexican wrestling promotion under the ring name Hiroki Inaba in a match that fellow AJPW wrestler Andy Wu was also involved in. On May 24, Inaba made his debut for Emile Duprée's Atlantic Grand Prix Wrestling (AGPW) in Canada under the ring name Tokyo Inaba. Wrestling mainly in losing efforts against Bobby Sharp and wearing facepaint during his matches, he continued to work for the promotion during their summer tour until June 22. Inaba also teamed with AJPW wrestler Seiya Sanada to take on Sharp and another AJPW wrestler, René Duprée. Inaba briefly returned to Mexico on August 18 to work a tag team match for International Wrestling Revolution Group (IWRG) under the name America VIP. During this time, there was a mass exodus from AJPW, and while abroad, Inaba made the decision to join new promotion Wrestle-1 (W-1) run by one of his AJPW trainers, Keiji Muto.\n\nWrestle-1 (2013–2020)\nInaba returned to Japan and made his debut for Wrestle-1 at the promotion's inaugural event Wrestle-1 Hataage Sen on September 8, 2013. In W-1's first ever match, he teamed with Hiroshi Yamato in a winning effort against Tokyo Gurentai (Mazada and Nosawa Rongai).\n\nOn March 2, 2014, at Kaisen: Outbreak, Inaba teamed with Andy Wu and Hiroshi Yamato in a losing effort against Kazushi Miyamoto and Tokyo Gurentai (Mazada and Nosawa Rongai). On March 15, Inaba competed in a battle royal to determine the number one contender for the TNA X Division Championship, which was won by Seiki Yoshioka.\n\nOn July 29, 2016, Inaba along with Andy Wu and Seiki Yoshioka defeated Kaz Hayashi, Minoru Tanaka and Tajiri to win the UWA World Trios Championships. On August 24, Inaba defeated Kai to become the Wrestle-1 Champion. Three days later, he, along with Andy & Yoshioka successfully defended their UWA World Trios belts against Hiroki Murase, Kai & Shota. He would defend the Wrestle-1 Championship against Kai a month later in Korakuen Hall. On October 2, after again defending the UWA World Trios Championship with Andy & Yoshioka, this time against Koji Doi, Kumagoro & Yusuke Kodama, all six men formed an alliance, it would later be named Newera. On November 2, 2016, Inaba lost the Wrestle-1 Championship to Masayuki Kono during the Wrestle-1 2016 Autumn Tour on the first night of the tour. A month later, he also lost the UWA World Trios Championship to Jun Kasai, Nosawa Rongai & Shuji Kondo, with Kondo pinning Inaba after a King Kong Lariat.\n\nOn February 22, 2017, Inaba again won the UWA World Trios Championship, this time with Kohei Fujimura (who had recently joined Newera) & Yusuke Kodama. The three would hold the belt for 46 days, defending successfully once before losing them to Trigger representatives (Masayuki Kono & Shuji Kondo) & Kaz Hayashi.\n\nIn 2018, Newera broke up after repeated infighting.\n\nOn July 2, 2019, Inaba won the Wrestle-1 Grand Prix, in his third attempt. He defeated Shotaro Ashino in the final and on September 1, 2019 at W-1 Pro-Wrestling Love In Yokohama 2019, Inaba defeated T-Hawk to become a two time Wrestle-1 Champion. He would defend the title successfully against Kuma Arashi before losing it to Katsuhiko Nakajima of Pro Wrestling Noah on January 12, 2020. \n\nOn February 21, 2020, Wrestle-1 announced it would be indefinitely suspended on April 1 and that all wrestlers would be immediately released from their contracts. On March 15, Inaba and Koji Doi became the final Wrestle-1 Tag Team Champions after defeating Shotaro Ashino & Yusuke Kodama. On April 1, Wrestle-1 held its to-date final show, Wrestle-1 Tour 2020 Trans Magic in Korakuen Hall, and Inaba was part of the winning team in an 8-man tag team match opposing Wrestle-1 executives Keiji Muto & Kaz Hayashi. His W-1 Tag Team Championship was retired immediately afterward.\n\nFreelancer (2020-present) \nAfter finishing up with Wrestle-1, Inaba was now a freelancer. He appeared in Pro Wrestling Noah on their Noah New Hope show on May 31, challenging Kaito Kiyomiya after the main event. On July 5, the two had a match, and Kiyomiya was victorious. Afterwards though, Kiyomiya agreed to team with him, and Inaba officially welcomed into Noah's Home Team, while not being a contracted wrestler.\n\nIn February 2021, Inaba suffered an injury. After 5 months, Inaba returned as a surprise tag partner of Kiyomiya & Masa Kitamiya at Noah Up To Emotion 2021 in Korakuen Hall. They were unsuccessful against Kongo (Kenoh, Katsuhiko Nakajima & Manabu Soya), with Inaba being pinned by Soya, who was also a part of Wrestle-1 throughout its entire history, after a Powerbomb. Inaba wished to face Kiyomiya one-on-one again, and he accepted. Their match was scheduled for July 27 at Noah Sanctuary in Kawasaki, and Kiyomiya won with a Tiger Suplex. On August 6, Inaba was announced as a participant in the 2021 N-1 Victory, where he would fight in B Block against Kenoh, Masaaki Mochizuki & Kazunari Murakami.\n\nChampionships and accomplishments\nWrestle-1\nWrestle-1 Championship (2 times)\nWrestle-1 Tag Team Championship (1 time, final) – with Koji Doi\nUWA World Trios Championship (2 times) – with Andy Wu and Seiki Yoshioka (1), Kohei Fujimura and Yusuke Kodama (1)\nWrestle-1 Grand Prix (2019)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nDaiki Inaba on Instagram\n\nPro Wrestling Noah Profile\nWrestle-1 Profile\n\n1988 births\nJapanese male professional wrestlers\nLiving people", "The Wrestle-1 Tag League is a professional wrestling round-robin tag team tournament held by Wrestle-1. It was created in 2014. Originally known as the Tag League Greatest in 2014. The tournament was given its current name in June 2017. The inaugural tournament, was held to determine the first Wrestle-1 Tag Team Champions, which was won by Kaz Hayashi and Shuji Kondo who also became the longest reigning Wrestle-1 Tag Team Champions. The winners of the tournament can choose a title shot of their choosing.\n\nThe Wrestle-1 Tag League is held under a round-robin system, with two points for a win, one for a draw and none for a loss. The teams finishing a top of the points standings in the two blocks advance to the knockout stage, where the winner is determined in a head-to-head match. Matches in the Wrestle-1 Tag League have a 30-minute time limit, which is the same as matches for Wrestle-1 Tag Team Championship.\n\nList of winners\n\n2014\nThe 2014 Tag League Greatest featured two blocks containing five participants each and took place between November 15 and 30, 2014. The winners of the tournament would become the inaugural Wrestle-1 Tag Team Champions. The two blocks containing the ten participating teams were revealed on November 3. The teams were later given official team names on November 14. Held under a points system, with two points for a win, one for a draw and none for a loss. The top two teams from each block would advance to the knockout stage. Matches in the tournament had a 30-minute time limit, which is the same as matches for Wrestle-1. On November 27, Seiki Yoshioka pulled out of the tournament with a knee injury, forcing his team to forfeit their final match in the tournament. On November 30, Team 246 (Kaz Hayashi and Shuji Kondo) defeated the new Wild order (Akira and Manabu Soya) in the finals to win the tournament and become the inaugural Wrestle-1 Tag Team Champions.\n\n2017\nOn June 14, Wrestle-1 announced the creation of the Wrestle-1 Tag League in the fall. On July 31, Wrestle-1 president Kaz Hayashi announced that the Wrestle-1 Tag League would be on September 24 until October 11, covering five shows. All participants and blocks were announced on September 18.\n\n2018\nThe 2018 Wrestle-1 Tag League took place between September 18 and October 24.\n\n2019\nThe 2019 Wrestle-1 Tag League ran from October 23 to November 27.\n\nSee also\nWorld Tag League\nWorld's Strongest Tag Determination League\nGlobal Tag League\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nWrestle-1 tournaments\nTag team tournaments", "is a Japanese professional wrestler who is currently signed to All Japan Pro Wrestling. He was trained by and best known for his time in Wrestle-1, where he was a former two time Wrestle-1 Champion.\n\nEarly life \n\nAshino was an amateur wrestler throughout his youth, competing in the sport throughout high school and university. Ashino graduated from Nippon Sport Science University and after being recommended by Hiroshi Hase, joined the Wrestle-1 dojo in August 2014, where he trained under Keiji Mutoh and Kaz Hayashi.\n\nProfessional wrestling career\n\nWrestle-1\n\nTrigger (2015–2017) \nAfter being trained in the dojo for 6 months, Ashino made his debut for Wrestle-1 on February 13, 2015, defeating Kumagoro. In August, Ashino took part in the 2015 Wrestle-1 Grand Prix, defeating Nosawa Rongai in the first round but losing to Manabu Soya in the quarter-finals. In late 2015, Ashino formed Trigger (stylised as TriggeR) alongside Masayuki Kono, Shuji Kondo and Hiroki Murase after Kondo turned on longtime partner Kaz Hayashi during a match against Ashino and Murase. On November 3, Murase and Ashino unsuccessfully challenged Manabu Soya and Jun Kasai for the Wrestle-1 Tag Team Championship. On June 8, 2016, Ashino received his first shot at the Wrestle-1 Championship, unsuccessfully challenging Kai. In July, Ashino once again participated in the Wrestle-1 Grand Prix, making it to the semi-finals where he faced Manabu Soya, however, the match was quickly brought to an end after Ashino suffered a legitimate injury to his right leg. Ashino took 3 months to recover, and returned in November. In January 2017, after Trigger stablemate Masayuki Kono had successfully defended the Wrestle-1 Championship against Shuji Kondo, Ashino challenged him to a match for the championship. On March 20, Ashino defeated Kono to win the championship for the first time in his career. After successfully defending the championship against Shuji Kondo on April 19, Ashino left Trigger.\n\nEnfants Terribles (2017–2020) \nPrior to leaving Trigger, Ashino regularly teamed with Seigo Tachibana and this continued following the split from Trigger. On July 12, Ashino and Tachibana defeated Ganeski Tanaka after Yusuke Kodama turned on him mid-match. The three men attacked Tanaka and later Daiki Inaba after the match, with Kodama cementing his defection from New Era. The trio of Kodama, Ashino and Tachibana would go on to be known as Enfants Terribles. At Pro Wrestling Love in Yokohama 2017, Ashino defended his Wrestle-1 Championship against Jiro Kuroshio for his fourth successful defence. Following a fifth title defence against Daiki Inaba, a fourth man dubbed Drunk Andy by Ashino joined Enfants Terribles. From September 24 until October 2, Ashino teamed with Kodama to take part in the Wrestle-1 Tag League, missing out on a semi-final berth with only one win. On October 21, Ashino, Kodama and Tachibana defeated New Era's Jiro Kuroshio, Koji Doi and Kumagoro to win the UWA World Trios Championships. The trio made two successful defences before losing the titles to another New Era trio in Doi, Kumagoro and Takanori Ito on December 2. On March 14, 2018, Ashino fell in his eighth Wrestle-1 Championship defence to Manabu Soya. At the time of Wrestle-1's closure, Ashino's first Wrestle-1 Championship reign was the longest in the title's history at 359 days, with Ashino making a record seven title defences.\n\nOn April 18, Kumagoro joined Enfants Terrible after turning on Koji Doi after losing the Wrestle-1 Tag Team Championships. Following the match, Ashino and Kumagoro challenged Akira and Manabu Soya to a title match. On May 6, Ashino and Kumagoro won the Wrestle-1 Tag Team Championships, with Kumagoro changing his name to Kuma Arashi after the match. During the post-match celebration, Drunk Andy revealed himself to be Kenichiro Arai and attacked Tachibana; Ashino would later kick out Tachibana from Enfants Terribles. On June 22, Ashino and Arashi lost the Wrestle-1 Tag Team Titles to Kuroshio and Masato Tanaka. After defeating Kaz Hayashi on July 1 in the opening round of the 2018 Wrestle-1 Grand Prix, Ashino was matched against Manabu Soya, a repeat of 2016's Grand Prix semi-final. On July 18, Ashino defeated Soya and went on to win the Wrestle-1 Grand Prix by defeating Koji Doi in the tournament finals. At Pro Wrestling Love in Yokohama 2018, Ashino reclaimed the Wrestle-1 Championship from Manabu Soya. After two successful title defences, Ashino lost the Wrestle-1 Championship to T-Hawk on January 5, 2019. On July 2, Ashino would once again make it to the Wrestle-1 Grand Prix final but lost to Daiki Inaba.\n\nOn August 8, Ashino and Kodama won the vacant Wrestle-1 Tag Team Championships after defeating Manabu Soya and Shuji Kondo. At Pro Wrestling Love in Yokohama 2019, Ashino and Kodama successfully defended their titles against Strong Hearts’ El Lindaman and Shigehiro Irie. Ashino and Kodama made two further title defences before losing the Wrestle-1 Tag Team Championships to Daiki Inaba and Koji Doi.\n\nOn February 29, 2020, Wrestle-1 announced that they would be holding their final event on April 1, with all members of the roster being released from their contracts the day prior.\n\nAll Japan Pro Wrestling (2020–present) \nOn April 6, Ashino made his debut for All Japan Pro Wrestling where he announced he would make All Japan his \"main battlefield\". On April 30, Ashino made his in-ring debut teaming with a mystery partner, later revealed to be the debuting Yusuke Kodama, against Takao Omori and Hokuto Omori with Ashino and Kodama emerging victorious. The following week, Kuma Arashi also joined All Japan and the trio quickly established Enfants Terribles as a force to be reckoned with; they would later be joined by Hokuto Omori and Koji Doi. On June 25, Ashino defeated Yuma Aoyagi in a number one contendership match for the Triple Crown Heavyweight Championship. Five days later, Ashino received his shot against Suwama but was defeated. In his first Champion Carnival, Ashino earned four points from an available eight through victories over Shuji Ishikawa and Yoshitatsu. Although not enough to progress to the finals, his victory over Ishikawa earned him an opportunity to challenge Ishikawa and Suwama for the World Tag Team Championship. On October 24, Ashino and Arashi were unsuccessful in their challenge. Nevertheless, the duo entered their first Real World Tag League together, finishing the tournament with three wins from seven matches and near the bottom of the tournament table. On January 24, 2021, Ashino unsuccessfully challenged Suwama for the Triple Crown Heavyweight Championship for a second time.\n\nOn February 23, the members of Enfants Terribles turned on Ashino during a six man tag team match. In the post match beatdown, Jake Lee also attacked Ashino and turned on his tag partner Iwamoto with the five men leaving together.\n\nPersonal life \n\nAshino is a fan of the rock band Metallica, and his favourite sports team is Arsenal F.C.\n\nChampionships and accomplishments \nAll Japan Pro Wrestling\nWorld Tag Team Championship (1 time, current) – with Suwama\nPro Wrestling Illustrated\nRanked No. 216 of the top 500 singles wrestlers in the PWI 500 in 2021\nWrestle-1\nWrestle-1 Championship (2 times)\nWrestle-1 Tag Team Championship (2 times) – with Kuma Arashi (1) and Yusuke Kodama (1)\nUWA World Trios Championship (1 time) – with Seigo Tachibana and Yusuke Kodama\nWrestle-1 Grand Prix (2018)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n\n1990 births\nLiving people\nPeople from Tokyo\nJapanese male professional wrestlers" ]
[ "Big Boss Man (wrestler)", "Final years (2000-2003)", "where did he wrestle for the final three years", "On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer." ]	C_3bba6eb691eb4ad19e5ff75dbe17c742_0	did he win any titles	2	did Big Boss Man win any titles?	Big Boss Man (wrestler)	Boss Man entered the 2000 Royal Rumble match, where he eliminated Rikishi (with the help of five other wrestlers), Chyna and Faarooq, before being eliminated by The Rock. On the March 19 episode of Sunday Night Heat, he introduced Bull Buchanan as his protege. They teamed to defeat The Godfather and D'Lo Brown at WrestleMania 2000, and the Acolytes Protection Agency the next month at Backlash. On the June 5 Raw is War, after losing to The Hardy Boyz and subsequently arguing, Boss Man knocked Buchanan out with his nightstick when his back was turned and the team split up. In the summer of 2000, Boss Man disappeared from the WWF's primary television shows, wrestling mainly on Jakked and Heat, where he had a minor feud with Crash Holly until suffering a legit injury in January 2001. When he returned on the December 20, 2001 of SmackDown, he formed a team with Booker T, after Vince McMahon ordered him to be Booker's enforcer. on the December 27 episode of Smackdown, Bossman and Booker T defeated Stone Cold in a handicap match. on the January 7, 2002 episode of Raw, Bossman and Booker T was defeated by Stone Cold & The Rock. on the January 17 episode of Smackdown, Bossman lost to Diamond Dallas Page. at Royal Rumble (2002), Bossman competed in the royal rumble match where he was eliminated by Rikishi. on the January 24 episode of Smackdown, Bossman lost to Rikishi. The team quietly split in late January 2002, and Boss Man returned to Jakked/Metal and Heat. on the February 2 episode of Metal, Bossman defeated The Hurricane. on the February 2 episode of Metal, Bossman defeated Perry Saturn. In April, he formed a short-lived tag team with Mr. Perfect after both were drafted to the Raw brand. on the March 23 episode of WWF Jakked, Bossman and Mr. Perfect lost to The APA. on the April 1 episode of Raw, Bossman and Mr. Perfect lost to The Hardy Boyz. on the April 14 episode of Heat, Bossman lost to Bradshaw, on the April 28 Bossman defeated Crash Holly, on the May 5 episode of Heat. Bossman lost to D'Lo Brown. On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer. Traylor was assigned to train developmental wrestlers in Ohio Valley Wrestling, before being released from WWE in 2003. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER		false	[ "Laura Golarsa (born 27 November 1967) is a former Italian professional tennis player.\n\nGolarsa was born in Milan and played on the WTA Tour from 1985 to 2001. She did not win any senior titles but did reach the quarterfinals of Wimbledon in 1989. Her singles record included victories over Zina Garrison and Jana Novotná. She won six doubles titles on the WTA Tour and reached a career-high doubles ranking of No. 23 in August 1995.\n\nWTA career finals\n\nSingles: 1 (runner-up)\n\nDoubles: 14 (6 titles, 8 runner-ups)\n\nITF Circuit finals\n\nSingles (6–4)\n\nDoubles (3–3)\n\nExternal links\n \n \n\n1967 births\nHopman Cup competitors\nItalian female tennis players\nLiving people\nTennis players from Milan\nMediterranean Games silver medalists for Italy\nMediterranean Games medalists in tennis\nCompetitors at the 1983 Mediterranean Games", "Xavier Daufresne (born 24 December 1968 in Lasne) is a former tennis player from Belgium.\n\nDaufresne turned professional in 1988. He did not win any Grand Prix tennis or ATP Tour titles (in either singles or doubles) during his career. The right-hander reached his highest individual ranking on the ATP Tour on 21 March 1994, when he was ranked World No. 109.\n\nExternal links\n \n \n\n1968 births\nLiving people\nBelgian male tennis players\nPeople from Lasne\nWalloon sportspeople", "Miriam Oremans (born 9 September 1972) is a former professional female tennis player from the Netherlands. On 26 July 1993 she reached her career-high singles ranking of number 25.\n\nShe did not win any singles titles (Oremans did have two Satellite tournament wins in 1989), but did win three titles in doubles. In 1992 she was runner-up together with Jacco Eltingh in the Mixed Doubles finals of Wimbledon.\n\nHer biggest achievement came during the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney where she won the silver medal in doubles, partnering Kristie Boogert, losing the final match to Venus and Serena Williams.\n\nMajor finals\n\nOlympic finals\n\nDoubles: 1 (0–1)\n\nWTA Tour finals\n\nSingles 5\n\nDoubles 12 (3–9)\n\nITF finals\n\nSingles Finals: (2-2)\n\nDoubles Finals: (1-2)\n\nReferences\n ITF site\n\nExternal links\n \n \n\n1972 births\nLiving people\nDutch female tennis players\nOlympic tennis players of the Netherlands\nOlympic silver medalists for the Netherlands\nPeople from Sint-Michielsgestel\nTennis players at the 2000 Summer Olympics\nOlympic medalists in tennis\nHopman Cup competitors\nMedalists at the 2000 Summer Olympics" ]
[ "Big Boss Man (wrestler)", "Final years (2000-2003)", "where did he wrestle for the final three years", "On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer.", "did he win any titles", "I don't know." ]	C_3bba6eb691eb4ad19e5ff75dbe17c742_0	what did he he accomplish	3	what did Big Boss Man accomplish?	Big Boss Man (wrestler)	Boss Man entered the 2000 Royal Rumble match, where he eliminated Rikishi (with the help of five other wrestlers), Chyna and Faarooq, before being eliminated by The Rock. On the March 19 episode of Sunday Night Heat, he introduced Bull Buchanan as his protege. They teamed to defeat The Godfather and D'Lo Brown at WrestleMania 2000, and the Acolytes Protection Agency the next month at Backlash. On the June 5 Raw is War, after losing to The Hardy Boyz and subsequently arguing, Boss Man knocked Buchanan out with his nightstick when his back was turned and the team split up. In the summer of 2000, Boss Man disappeared from the WWF's primary television shows, wrestling mainly on Jakked and Heat, where he had a minor feud with Crash Holly until suffering a legit injury in January 2001. When he returned on the December 20, 2001 of SmackDown, he formed a team with Booker T, after Vince McMahon ordered him to be Booker's enforcer. on the December 27 episode of Smackdown, Bossman and Booker T defeated Stone Cold in a handicap match. on the January 7, 2002 episode of Raw, Bossman and Booker T was defeated by Stone Cold & The Rock. on the January 17 episode of Smackdown, Bossman lost to Diamond Dallas Page. at Royal Rumble (2002), Bossman competed in the royal rumble match where he was eliminated by Rikishi. on the January 24 episode of Smackdown, Bossman lost to Rikishi. The team quietly split in late January 2002, and Boss Man returned to Jakked/Metal and Heat. on the February 2 episode of Metal, Bossman defeated The Hurricane. on the February 2 episode of Metal, Bossman defeated Perry Saturn. In April, he formed a short-lived tag team with Mr. Perfect after both were drafted to the Raw brand. on the March 23 episode of WWF Jakked, Bossman and Mr. Perfect lost to The APA. on the April 1 episode of Raw, Bossman and Mr. Perfect lost to The Hardy Boyz. on the April 14 episode of Heat, Bossman lost to Bradshaw, on the April 28 Bossman defeated Crash Holly, on the May 5 episode of Heat. Bossman lost to D'Lo Brown. On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer. Traylor was assigned to train developmental wrestlers in Ohio Valley Wrestling, before being released from WWE in 2003. CANNOTANSWER	On the March 19 episode of Sunday Night Heat, he introduced Bull Buchanan as his protege.		false	[ "Jose ben Joezer (also spelt Yose ben Yoezer) was a rabbi of the early Maccabean period, possibly a disciple of Antigonus of Soko and member of the ascetic group known as the Hasidæans, though neither is certain. He belonged to a priestly family.\n\nBiography\nWith him and Jose ben Johanan of Jerusalem, his colleague, begins the period known in Jewish history as that of the zugot (duumvirate), which ended with Hillel and Shammai. According to an old tradition, the member of the \"zugot\" mentioned first occupied the office of Nasi (president) of the Sanhedrin, while the one mentioned second served in the capacity of vice-president. \n\nJose belonged to the party of the Ḥasidim, and was a decided adversary of Hellenism. To prevent Jews from settling beyond Judea he declared all pagan countries \"unclean\". He declared also glass utensils \"unclean\", probably because they were manufactured in pagan countries. In other respects, however, he was very liberal, and received the surname \"Sharaya\" (\"one who permits\") for having rendered three liberal decisions on certain ritual questions. The first halakic controversy known in the Talmud was that between Jose ben Joezer and his colleague Jose ben Johanan. It arose over the question whether the laying of hands on the heads of the sacrifices is permitted on feast-days.\n\nJose ben Joezer was distinguished for his piety, and is called \"the most pious in the priesthood\" (\"hasid shebikechunnah\"). He professed great veneration for scholars, one of his sayings being: \"Let thy house be a meeting-place for the wise; powder thyself in the dust of their feet, and drink their words with eagerness\"\n\nDeath\nJose was probably among the sixty pious men who, at the instigation of the high priest Alcimus, the son of his sister, were crucified by the Syrian general Bacchides. The Midrash reports the following dialogue between Alcimus and Jose ben Joezer while the latter was on the way to execution:\n\nAlcimus: \"See the profit and honors that have fallen to my lot in consequence of what I have done, whilst thou, for thy obstinacy, hast the misfortune to die as a criminal.\" \n\nYose, quietly: \"if such is the lot of those who anger God, what shall be the lot of those who accomplish His will?\" \n\nAlcimus: \"Is there any one who accomplished His will more than thou?\" \n\nYose: \"If this is the end of those who accomplish His will, what awaits those who anger Him?\" \n\nOn this Alcimus was seized with remorse and committed suicide: \"He went and subjected himself to all four modes of execution inflicted by the Beth Din: stoning, burning, beheading, and strangulation. What did he do [to accomplish this]? He took a beam and stuck it in the ground, attached a rope to it, set up logs [in front of it], and built a stone wall around it. He then made a bonfire [with the logs] and stuck a sword in the middle. He then hanged himself with the rope, and while he was strangling the rope burnt through and snapped, he fell on the sword, while the wall [of stones] fell upon him and he burned [in the fire].\"Jose ben Joezer left a son, whom he had disinherited for bad conduct.\n\nReferences\n\nMishnah rabbis\nPirkei Avot rabbis\nZugot\n2nd-century BCE rabbis\nSanhedrin", "Henricus Popta (3 May 1635 – 7 November 1712) was a Dutch lawyer.\n\nEarly life \nHe was the second-oldest child. His older brother died before his birth. Born poor, he became rich.\n\nHis father, Tjebbe Jacobs Popta, was an alcoholic.\n\nHe was baptized on August 20, 1654.\n\nCareer \nHe became what in Dutch is called Advocaat bij het hof, a relatively high position.\n\nPoptaslot \nIn 1687, he bought what would later be known as the Poptaslot. He decided that after his death it would never be inhabited again. He intended for it to be kept in the same state as when he died. To accomplish this he appointed four guardians, one of whom was his servant—an unusual choice in the period. The house became a museum. He provided housing for widows.\n\nDeath \nHe died on November 7, 1712 in Leeuwarden.\n\nReferences\n\n1635 births\n1712 deaths\n17th-century Dutch lawyers", "Blood Pact may refer to:\n Blood Pact, a 1993 book by Tanya Huff from the series Blood Books\n Blood Pact, a 2009 book by Dan Abnett from the series Gaunt's Ghosts\n Blood Pact, a 2013 book by Sharon Rose Mayes\n Blood Pact, a 2018 Brazilian crime drama television series.\n\nSee also\n Blood oath (ritual)\n Blood compact, an ancient ritual of the Philippines\n - The blood seal pacts are signed with blood seals what the contractors should accomplish in Japan." ]
[ "Big Boss Man (wrestler)", "Final years (2000-2003)", "where did he wrestle for the final three years", "On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer.", "did he win any titles", "I don't know.", "what did he he accomplish", "On the March 19 episode of Sunday Night Heat, he introduced Bull Buchanan as his protege." ]	C_3bba6eb691eb4ad19e5ff75dbe17c742_0	when was his last match	4	when was Big Boss Man last match??	Big Boss Man (wrestler)	Boss Man entered the 2000 Royal Rumble match, where he eliminated Rikishi (with the help of five other wrestlers), Chyna and Faarooq, before being eliminated by The Rock. On the March 19 episode of Sunday Night Heat, he introduced Bull Buchanan as his protege. They teamed to defeat The Godfather and D'Lo Brown at WrestleMania 2000, and the Acolytes Protection Agency the next month at Backlash. On the June 5 Raw is War, after losing to The Hardy Boyz and subsequently arguing, Boss Man knocked Buchanan out with his nightstick when his back was turned and the team split up. In the summer of 2000, Boss Man disappeared from the WWF's primary television shows, wrestling mainly on Jakked and Heat, where he had a minor feud with Crash Holly until suffering a legit injury in January 2001. When he returned on the December 20, 2001 of SmackDown, he formed a team with Booker T, after Vince McMahon ordered him to be Booker's enforcer. on the December 27 episode of Smackdown, Bossman and Booker T defeated Stone Cold in a handicap match. on the January 7, 2002 episode of Raw, Bossman and Booker T was defeated by Stone Cold & The Rock. on the January 17 episode of Smackdown, Bossman lost to Diamond Dallas Page. at Royal Rumble (2002), Bossman competed in the royal rumble match where he was eliminated by Rikishi. on the January 24 episode of Smackdown, Bossman lost to Rikishi. The team quietly split in late January 2002, and Boss Man returned to Jakked/Metal and Heat. on the February 2 episode of Metal, Bossman defeated The Hurricane. on the February 2 episode of Metal, Bossman defeated Perry Saturn. In April, he formed a short-lived tag team with Mr. Perfect after both were drafted to the Raw brand. on the March 23 episode of WWF Jakked, Bossman and Mr. Perfect lost to The APA. on the April 1 episode of Raw, Bossman and Mr. Perfect lost to The Hardy Boyz. on the April 14 episode of Heat, Bossman lost to Bradshaw, on the April 28 Bossman defeated Crash Holly, on the May 5 episode of Heat. Bossman lost to D'Lo Brown. On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer. Traylor was assigned to train developmental wrestlers in Ohio Valley Wrestling, before being released from WWE in 2003. CANNOTANSWER	On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer.		false	[ "Henry Hilliard (7 November 1826 – 19 March 1914) was an Australian cricketer. He played in New South Wales' first match, in 1856, against Victoria, and was the last surviving player from either side.\n\nLife and career\nHarry Hilliard played in Sydney when he was 12 for the Union Club against the Military. On one occasion in his youth he was jailed for two days for absconding from his cabinet-making apprenticeship in order to play cricket.\n\nA batsman and good fielder who occasionally kept wicket and bowled, Hilliard played in New South Wales' first match, in 1855-56, against Victoria, and in the next four of what became an annual match. His highest score was 20, against Victoria in 1856-57, the fourth-highest score in a low-scoring match. He and William Gilbert Rees, W. G. Grace's cousin, added 32 for the second wicket in New South Wales' first innings, the highest partnership of the match. He top-scored for New South Wales in his last match, scoring 15 in the first innings of a match in which New South Wales made 44 and 42 and Victoria won easily. New South Wales' highest total in these five matches was 86.\n\nA stroke a few months after his last match in 1860 ended his playing career. He was unable to walk for some time afterwards, but by swimming daily he gradually recovered. He kept up his daily swim for 40 years.\n\nHe and his wife had a large family. After his stroke a benefit concert was held for them at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Sydney.\n\nHe remained a keen spectator of interstate cricket for the rest of his life, never missing a match, in Sydney or Melbourne, between New South Wales and Victoria. He also followed the Australians on their tour of England in 1878.\n\nHe spent most of his working life as a maker and repairer of cricket bats. He was the last surviving player from the first match between New South Wales and Victoria.\n\nSee also\n List of New South Wales representative cricketers\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1826 births\n1914 deaths\nCricketers from Sydney\nAustralian cricketers\nNew South Wales cricketers", "Arthur Frank Rapley (born 2 September 1937) is a former New Zealand cricketer who played first-class cricket for Canterbury from 1958 to 1960.\n\nCricket career\nAfter playing his first match for Canterbury at the age of 20 in the last round of the Plunket Shield in 1957-58 and taking four wickets (match figures of 35–15–60–4), Frank Rapley was selected in the trial match for South Island a few days later and took two wickets cheaply.\n\nHe took only eight wickets in five matches in 1958-59. However, he made his highest first-class score of 40 in Canterbury's victory over Central Districts, when he and Graham Dowling added 85 for the last wicket, Dowling finishing on 103 not out.\n\nRapley did not play in Canterbury's first four Plunket Shield matches in 1959-60 but, restored to the team for their final match, he was the leading bowler in Canterbury's victory over Northern Districts, taking 3 for 54 and 6 for 73 (match figures of 78.1–30–127–9). This victory, achieved at the last possible moment of the match, gained Canterbury the Plunket Shield. But it was Rapley's last first-class match.\n\nRapley later played for North Canterbury in the Hawke Cup from 1963 to 1983. In all he played 65 matches for North Canterbury, taking 209 wickets. In a two-day match for West Coast against Buller in 1960-61 he took 8 for 11 and 5 for 33.\n\nLater life\nFrank Rapley has spent most of his life in the North Canterbury region, where he was born. He was assistant town clerk for the Rangiora Borough Council in the 1970s, and was one of the first trustees of the North Canterbury Sport & Recreation Trust after it was established in 1982. He served as a justice of the peace in Rangiora until 2007.\n\nHis grandson Fraser Sheat has played for Canterbury since the 2017-18 season.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1937 births\nLiving people\nNew Zealand cricketers\nCanterbury cricketers\nPeople from Kaiapoi\nSouth Island cricketers", "George Thomas was an Indian cricketer who played first-class cricket for Madras from 1962 to 1969.\n\nPlaying career\nGeorge Thomas was a prominent schoolboy cricketer who represented Madras Schools and South Zone Schools in the national Cooch Behar Trophy in 1957–58, 1958–59 and 1959–60. At first he played as an opening bowler, but in his final season, when South Zone Schools won the trophy, he played as an opening batsman and wicket-keeper.\n\nHe made his first-class debut as a fast bowler and tail-end batsman for Madras in 1962–63 against Kerala in the Ranji Trophy. He took the wicket of the first opening batsman in each innings, and Madras won by an innings, but he was no-balled for throwing. He took one wicket in the next match, which was ruined by rain, and was then omitted. Thomas returned to the team in 1963-64 and opened the bowling in all three of Madras's matches, taking five wickets at an average of 33.80 in an attack based on spinners led by V. V. Kumar.\n\nHe played the first match in 1964–65, taking one wicket, and was left out of the team for the next two matches. He returned for the last match, against Andhra, and took 4 for 30 and 2 for 41 in an innings victory.\n\nHe seldom played thereafter, but returned for the Gopalan Trophy match in 1968–69, making his highest score, 22, and taking 4 for 58, including the wickets of Anura Tennekoon (leg-before) and David Heyn (bowled). His last match came in 1969–70, when, for his last wicket, he bowled the Andhra opening batsman before a run had been scored in the match.\n\nHe was one of the early players for the Jolly Rovers cricket club in Chennai, which began in 1966.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n George Thomas at CricketArchive\n George Thomas at Cricinfo\n\n1940s births\nYear of death uncertain\nIndian cricketers\nTamil Nadu cricketers" ]
[ "Big Boss Man (wrestler)", "Final years (2000-2003)", "where did he wrestle for the final three years", "On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer.", "did he win any titles", "I don't know.", "what did he he accomplish", "On the March 19 episode of Sunday Night Heat, he introduced Bull Buchanan as his protege.", "when was his last match", "On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer." ]	C_3bba6eb691eb4ad19e5ff75dbe17c742_0	what happened to after that	5	what happened to after Big Boss Man last match?	Big Boss Man (wrestler)	Boss Man entered the 2000 Royal Rumble match, where he eliminated Rikishi (with the help of five other wrestlers), Chyna and Faarooq, before being eliminated by The Rock. On the March 19 episode of Sunday Night Heat, he introduced Bull Buchanan as his protege. They teamed to defeat The Godfather and D'Lo Brown at WrestleMania 2000, and the Acolytes Protection Agency the next month at Backlash. On the June 5 Raw is War, after losing to The Hardy Boyz and subsequently arguing, Boss Man knocked Buchanan out with his nightstick when his back was turned and the team split up. In the summer of 2000, Boss Man disappeared from the WWF's primary television shows, wrestling mainly on Jakked and Heat, where he had a minor feud with Crash Holly until suffering a legit injury in January 2001. When he returned on the December 20, 2001 of SmackDown, he formed a team with Booker T, after Vince McMahon ordered him to be Booker's enforcer. on the December 27 episode of Smackdown, Bossman and Booker T defeated Stone Cold in a handicap match. on the January 7, 2002 episode of Raw, Bossman and Booker T was defeated by Stone Cold & The Rock. on the January 17 episode of Smackdown, Bossman lost to Diamond Dallas Page. at Royal Rumble (2002), Bossman competed in the royal rumble match where he was eliminated by Rikishi. on the January 24 episode of Smackdown, Bossman lost to Rikishi. The team quietly split in late January 2002, and Boss Man returned to Jakked/Metal and Heat. on the February 2 episode of Metal, Bossman defeated The Hurricane. on the February 2 episode of Metal, Bossman defeated Perry Saturn. In April, he formed a short-lived tag team with Mr. Perfect after both were drafted to the Raw brand. on the March 23 episode of WWF Jakked, Bossman and Mr. Perfect lost to The APA. on the April 1 episode of Raw, Bossman and Mr. Perfect lost to The Hardy Boyz. on the April 14 episode of Heat, Bossman lost to Bradshaw, on the April 28 Bossman defeated Crash Holly, on the May 5 episode of Heat. Bossman lost to D'Lo Brown. On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer. Traylor was assigned to train developmental wrestlers in Ohio Valley Wrestling, before being released from WWE in 2003. CANNOTANSWER	Traylor was assigned to train developmental wrestlers in Ohio Valley Wrestling, before being released from WWE in 2003.		false	[ "Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor, in Spanish Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio (Book of the Examples of Count Lucanor and of Patronio), also commonly known as El Conde Lucanor, Libro de Patronio, or Libro de los ejemplos (original Old Castilian: Libro de los enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor et de Patronio), is one of the earliest works of prose in Castilian Spanish. It was first written in 1335.\n\nThe book is divided into four parts. The first and most well-known part is a series of 51 short stories (some no more than a page or two) drawn from various sources, such as Aesop and other classical writers, and Arabic folktales.\n\nTales of Count Lucanor was first printed in 1575 when it was published at Seville under the auspices of Argote de Molina. It was again printed at Madrid in 1642, after which it lay forgotten for nearly two centuries.\n\nPurpose and structure\n\nA didactic, moralistic purpose, which would color so much of the Spanish literature to follow (see Novela picaresca), is the mark of this book. Count Lucanor engages in conversation with his advisor Patronio, putting to him a problem (\"Some man has made me a proposition...\" or \"I fear that such and such person intends to...\") and asking for advice. Patronio responds always with the greatest humility, claiming not to wish to offer advice to so illustrious a person as the Count, but offering to tell him a story of which the Count's problem reminds him. (Thus, the stories are \"examples\" [ejemplos] of wise action.) At the end he advises the Count to do as the protagonist of his story did.\n\nEach chapter ends in more or less the same way, with slight variations on: \"And this pleased the Count greatly and he did just so, and found it well. And Don Johán (Juan) saw that this example was very good, and had it written in this book, and composed the following verses.\" A rhymed couplet closes, giving the moral of the story.\n\nOrigin of stories and influence on later literature\nMany of the stories written in the book are the first examples written in a modern European language of various stories, which many other writers would use in the proceeding centuries. Many of the stories he included were themselves derived from other stories, coming from western and Arab sources.\n\nShakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew has the basic elements of Tale 35, \"What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\".\n\nTale 32, \"What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth\" tells the story that Hans Christian Andersen made popular as The Emperor's New Clothes.\n\nStory 7, \"What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana\", a version of Aesop's The Milkmaid and Her Pail, was claimed by Max Müller to originate in the Hindu cycle Panchatantra.\n\nTale 2, \"What happened to a good Man and his Son, leading a beast to market,\" is the familiar fable The miller, his son and the donkey.\n\nIn 2016, Baroque Decay released a game under the name \"The Count Lucanor\". As well as some protagonists' names, certain events from the books inspired past events in the game.\n\nThe stories\n\nThe book opens with a prologue which introduces the characters of the Count and Patronio. The titles in the following list are those given in Keller and Keating's 1977 translation into English. James York's 1868 translation into English gives a significantly different ordering of the stories and omits the fifty-first.\n\n What Happened to a King and His Favorite \n What Happened to a Good Man and His Son \n How King Richard of England Leapt into the Sea against the Moors\n What a Genoese Said to His Soul When He Was about to Die \n What Happened to a Fox and a Crow Who Had a Piece of Cheese in His Beak\n How the Swallow Warned the Other Birds When She Saw Flax Being Sown \n What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana \n What Happened to a Man Whose Liver Had to Be Washed \n What Happened to Two Horses Which Were Thrown to the Lion \n What Happened to a Man Who on Account of Poverty and Lack of Other Food Was Eating Bitter Lentils \n What Happened to a Dean of Santiago de Compostela and Don Yllán, the Grand Master of Toledo\n What Happened to the Fox and the Rooster \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Hunting Partridges \n The Miracle of Saint Dominick When He Preached against the Usurer \n What Happened to Lorenzo Suárez at the Siege of Seville \n The Reply that count Fernán González Gave to His Relative Núño Laynes \n What Happened to a Very Hungry Man Who Was Half-heartedly Invited to Dinner \n What Happened to Pero Meléndez de Valdés When He Broke His Leg \n What Happened to the Crows and the Owls \n What Happened to a King for Whom a Man Promised to Perform Alchemy \n What Happened to a Young King and a Philosopher to Whom his Father Commended Him \n What Happened to the Lion and the Bull \n How the Ants Provide for Themselves \n What Happened to the King Who Wanted to Test His Three Sons \n What Happened to the Count of Provence and How He Was Freed from Prison by the Advice of Saladin\n What Happened to the Tree of Lies \n What Happened to an Emperor and to Don Alvarfáñez Minaya and Their Wives \n What Happened in Granada to Don Lorenzo Suárez Gallinato When He Beheaded the Renegade Chaplain \n What Happened to a Fox Who Lay down in the Street to Play Dead \n What Happened to King Abenabet of Seville and Ramayquía His Wife \n How a Cardinal Judged between the Canons of Paris and the Friars Minor \n What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth \n What Happened to Don Juan Manuel's Saker Falcon and an Eagle and a Heron \n What Happened to a Blind Man Who Was Leading Another \n What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\n What Happened to a Merchant When He Found His Son and His Wife Sleeping Together \n What Happened to Count Fernán González with His Men after He Had Won the Battle of Hacinas \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Loaded down with Precious Stones and Drowned in the River \n What Happened to a Man and a Swallow and a Sparrow \n Why the Seneschal of Carcassonne Lost His Soul \n What Happened to a King of Córdova Named Al-Haquem \n What Happened to a Woman of Sham Piety \n What Happened to Good and Evil and the Wise Man and the Madman \n What Happened to Don Pero Núñez the Loyal, to Don Ruy González de Zavallos, and to Don Gutier Roiz de Blaguiello with Don Rodrigo the Generous \n What Happened to a Man Who Became the Devil's Friend and Vassal \n What Happened to a Philosopher who by Accident Went down a Street Where Prostitutes Lived \n What Befell a Moor and His Sister Who Pretended That She Was Timid \n What Happened to a Man Who Tested His Friends \n What Happened to the Man Whom They Cast out Naked on an Island When They Took away from Him the Kingdom He Ruled \n What Happened to Saladin and a Lady, the Wife of a Knight Who Was His Vassal \n What Happened to a Christian King Who Was Very Powerful and Haughty\n\nReferences\n\nNotes\n\nBibliography\n\n Sturm, Harlan\n\n Wacks, David\n\nExternal links\n\nThe Internet Archive provides free access to the 1868 translation by James York.\nJSTOR has the to the 1977 translation by Keller and Keating.\nSelections in English and Spanish (pedagogical edition) with introduction, notes, and bibliography in Open Iberia/América (open access teaching anthology)\n\n14th-century books\nSpanish literature\n1335 books", "What Happened to Jones may refer to:\n What Happened to Jones (1897 play), a play by George Broadhurst\n What Happened to Jones (1915 film), a lost silent film\n What Happened to Jones (1920 film), a lost silent film\n What Happened to Jones (1926 film), a silent film comedy", "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? may refer to:\n\nWhat Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (novel), a 1960 suspense novel by Henry Farrell\n What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (film), a 1962 American psychological thriller, based on the novel.\n What Ever Happened to..., a 1991 ABC television film, based on the novel" ]
[ "Big Boss Man (wrestler)", "Final years (2000-2003)", "where did he wrestle for the final three years", "On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer.", "did he win any titles", "I don't know.", "what did he he accomplish", "On the March 19 episode of Sunday Night Heat, he introduced Bull Buchanan as his protege.", "when was his last match", "On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer.", "what happened to after that", "Traylor was assigned to train developmental wrestlers in Ohio Valley Wrestling, before being released from WWE in 2003." ]	C_3bba6eb691eb4ad19e5ff75dbe17c742_0	when did he pass away	6	when did Big Boss Man pass away?	Big Boss Man (wrestler)	Boss Man entered the 2000 Royal Rumble match, where he eliminated Rikishi (with the help of five other wrestlers), Chyna and Faarooq, before being eliminated by The Rock. On the March 19 episode of Sunday Night Heat, he introduced Bull Buchanan as his protege. They teamed to defeat The Godfather and D'Lo Brown at WrestleMania 2000, and the Acolytes Protection Agency the next month at Backlash. On the June 5 Raw is War, after losing to The Hardy Boyz and subsequently arguing, Boss Man knocked Buchanan out with his nightstick when his back was turned and the team split up. In the summer of 2000, Boss Man disappeared from the WWF's primary television shows, wrestling mainly on Jakked and Heat, where he had a minor feud with Crash Holly until suffering a legit injury in January 2001. When he returned on the December 20, 2001 of SmackDown, he formed a team with Booker T, after Vince McMahon ordered him to be Booker's enforcer. on the December 27 episode of Smackdown, Bossman and Booker T defeated Stone Cold in a handicap match. on the January 7, 2002 episode of Raw, Bossman and Booker T was defeated by Stone Cold & The Rock. on the January 17 episode of Smackdown, Bossman lost to Diamond Dallas Page. at Royal Rumble (2002), Bossman competed in the royal rumble match where he was eliminated by Rikishi. on the January 24 episode of Smackdown, Bossman lost to Rikishi. The team quietly split in late January 2002, and Boss Man returned to Jakked/Metal and Heat. on the February 2 episode of Metal, Bossman defeated The Hurricane. on the February 2 episode of Metal, Bossman defeated Perry Saturn. In April, he formed a short-lived tag team with Mr. Perfect after both were drafted to the Raw brand. on the March 23 episode of WWF Jakked, Bossman and Mr. Perfect lost to The APA. on the April 1 episode of Raw, Bossman and Mr. Perfect lost to The Hardy Boyz. on the April 14 episode of Heat, Bossman lost to Bradshaw, on the April 28 Bossman defeated Crash Holly, on the May 5 episode of Heat. Bossman lost to D'Lo Brown. On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer. Traylor was assigned to train developmental wrestlers in Ohio Valley Wrestling, before being released from WWE in 2003. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER		false	[ "Ridgewood Summit is a low mountain pass in Mendocino County, California, traversed by U.S. Route 101 at an altitude of . It crosses the Mendocino Range, connecting Ukiah and the watershed of the Russian River, on the south of the pass, to Willits and the watershed of the Eel River on the north. It is the highest pass on U.S. Route 101 in California. Greenough Ridge and Irene Peak rise to the west of the pass. The spur of the Mendocino Range to the east of the pass is called the Laughlin Range.\n\nRidgewood Ranch, the last resting place of racehorse Seabiscuit, lies immediately to the south of the pass, in the Walker Valley.\n\nA large rock near the pass is called Black Bart Rock. However, although Black Bart twice robbed stagecoaches on the road from Willits to Ukiah, in October 1878 and again in June 1882, he did so from a smaller rock near Forsythe Creek, to the south of the pass on its descent to Ukiah, rather than on the pass itself. The rock he used has since been blasted away. Another bandit, John Schneider, held up another stagecoach in the pass in 1896; it was called \"robber's pass\" as a consequence of these frequent robberies.\n\nReferences\n\nMountain passes of California\nGeography of Mendocino County, California\nTransportation in Mendocino County, California\nU.S. Route 101", "A corner route is a pattern run by a receiver in American football, where the receiver runs up the field and then turns at approximately a 45-degree angle, heading away from the quarterback towards the sideline. Usually, the pass is used when the defensive back is playing towards the inside shoulder of the receiver, thus creating a one on one vertical matchup. The corner route is less likely to be intercepted when compared to the slant route, because it is thrown away from the middle of the field. The pass is used frequently in the West Coast offensive scheme, where quick, accurate throwing is key. The pass may also be used closer to the goal line in what is called a \"fade\". The quarterback will lob the ball over a beaten defender to a wide receiver at the back corner of the end zone.\n\nReferences\n\nAmerican football plays", "The Wakhjir Pass, also spelled Vakhjir Pass, is a mountain pass in the Hindu Kush or Pamirs at the eastern end of the Wakhan Corridor, the only potentially navigable pass between Afghanistan and China in the modern era. It links Wakhan in Afghanistan with the Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County in Xinjiang, China, at an altitude of , but the pass is not an official border crossing point. With a difference of 3.5 hours, the Afghanistan–China border has the sharpest official change of clocks of any international frontier (UTC+4:30 in Afghanistan to UTC+8, in China). China refers to the pass as South Wakhjir Pass (), as there is a northern pass on the Chinese side.\n\nOverview\n\nThere is no road across the pass. On the Chinese side, the immediate region is only accessible to military personnel. A - long barbed wire fence was erected on the border, and there is a Chinese border guard outpost at Keketuluke just east of the pass. In the summer of 2009, the Chinese Ministry of National Defense began construction of a new road to within of the border for use by border guards. The road leads through the Taghdumbash Pamir to the Karakoram Highway away. The valley to the east of Wakhjir Pass on the Chinese side is the Chalachigu Valley. It is entirely closed to visitors; however, local residents and herders from the area are permitted access. The Chinese refer to it as the portion of Wakhan Corridor in China.\n\nOn the Afghan side, the nearest road is a rough road to Sarhad-e Wakhan (also known as Sarhad-e Broghil), about from the pass by paths. Just below the pass on the Afghan side is an ice cave, at an altitude of . This is the source of the Wakhjir River, which ultimately flows to the Amu Darya (Oxus). The cave is therefore claimed as a source of the Amu Darya. Dilisang Pass, to Pakistan, is in the same valley about away.\n\nHistory\nTraditionally, the pass is inaccessible for at least five months out of the year and is accessible irregularly for the remainder of the year. The terrain is extremely difficult, although Aurel Stein reported that the immediate approaches to the pass were \"remarkably easy\". There are few records of successful crossings by foreigners. Historically, the pass was a trading route between Badakhshan and Yarkand used by merchants from Bajaor. Wakhjir Pass is part of the Silk Road. It is believed that the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang traveled via this pass on his return trip to China in approximately 649 AD. Marco Polo purportedly crossed the pass when he traveled through the Pamirs, although he did not mention the pass by name. The Jesuit priest Benedict Goëz crossed from the Wakhan to China between 1602 and 1606. The next oldest accounts are from the period of the Great Game in the late 19th century. In 1868, a pundit known as the Mirza, working for the Great Trigonometric Survey of India, crossed the pass. There were further crossings in 1874 by Captain T.E. Gordon of the British Army, in 1891 by Francis Younghusband, and in 1894 by Lord Curzon. In May 1906, Sir Aurel Stein crossed the pass and reported that at that time, the pass was used by only 100 pony loads of goods each way annually. Since then, the only Westerner to have crossed the pass seems to have been H.W. Tilman in 1947.\n\nIn 1895 the pass was established as the border between China and Afghanistan in an agreement between the British and the Russians, although the Chinese and Afghans did not finally agree on the border until 1963.\n\nIt is believed that in more recent times, the pass is sometimes used as a low-intensity drug smuggling route, and is used to transport opium made in Afghanistan to China. Afghanistan has asked China on several occasions to open the border in the Wakhan Corridor for economic reasons or as an alternative supply route for fighting the Taliban insurgency. However, China has resisted, largely due to unrest in its far western province of Xinjiang, which borders the corridor. , it was reported that the United States had asked China to open the corridor.\n\nSee also\n Tegermansu Pass\n Beyik Pass \n Kilik Pass \n Mintaka Pass \n China–Tajikistan border\n China–Pakistan border\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Wakhan & the Afghan Pamir - In the footsteps of Marco Polo - Brochure of the region by Aga Khan Foundation\n\nMountain passes of Afghanistan\nMountain passes of Xinjiang\nWakhan\nAfghanistan–China border\nLandforms of Badakhshan Province\nSites along the Silk Road\nMountain passes of the Pamir" ]
[ "Big Boss Man (wrestler)", "Final years (2000-2003)", "where did he wrestle for the final three years", "On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer.", "did he win any titles", "I don't know.", "what did he he accomplish", "On the March 19 episode of Sunday Night Heat, he introduced Bull Buchanan as his protege.", "when was his last match", "On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer.", "what happened to after that", "Traylor was assigned to train developmental wrestlers in Ohio Valley Wrestling, before being released from WWE in 2003.", "when did he pass away", "I don't know." ]	C_3bba6eb691eb4ad19e5ff75dbe17c742_0	did he win any titles	7	did Big Boss Man win any titles?	Big Boss Man (wrestler)	Boss Man entered the 2000 Royal Rumble match, where he eliminated Rikishi (with the help of five other wrestlers), Chyna and Faarooq, before being eliminated by The Rock. On the March 19 episode of Sunday Night Heat, he introduced Bull Buchanan as his protege. They teamed to defeat The Godfather and D'Lo Brown at WrestleMania 2000, and the Acolytes Protection Agency the next month at Backlash. On the June 5 Raw is War, after losing to The Hardy Boyz and subsequently arguing, Boss Man knocked Buchanan out with his nightstick when his back was turned and the team split up. In the summer of 2000, Boss Man disappeared from the WWF's primary television shows, wrestling mainly on Jakked and Heat, where he had a minor feud with Crash Holly until suffering a legit injury in January 2001. When he returned on the December 20, 2001 of SmackDown, he formed a team with Booker T, after Vince McMahon ordered him to be Booker's enforcer. on the December 27 episode of Smackdown, Bossman and Booker T defeated Stone Cold in a handicap match. on the January 7, 2002 episode of Raw, Bossman and Booker T was defeated by Stone Cold & The Rock. on the January 17 episode of Smackdown, Bossman lost to Diamond Dallas Page. at Royal Rumble (2002), Bossman competed in the royal rumble match where he was eliminated by Rikishi. on the January 24 episode of Smackdown, Bossman lost to Rikishi. The team quietly split in late January 2002, and Boss Man returned to Jakked/Metal and Heat. on the February 2 episode of Metal, Bossman defeated The Hurricane. on the February 2 episode of Metal, Bossman defeated Perry Saturn. In April, he formed a short-lived tag team with Mr. Perfect after both were drafted to the Raw brand. on the March 23 episode of WWF Jakked, Bossman and Mr. Perfect lost to The APA. on the April 1 episode of Raw, Bossman and Mr. Perfect lost to The Hardy Boyz. on the April 14 episode of Heat, Bossman lost to Bradshaw, on the April 28 Bossman defeated Crash Holly, on the May 5 episode of Heat. Bossman lost to D'Lo Brown. On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer. Traylor was assigned to train developmental wrestlers in Ohio Valley Wrestling, before being released from WWE in 2003. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER		false	[ "Laura Golarsa (born 27 November 1967) is a former Italian professional tennis player.\n\nGolarsa was born in Milan and played on the WTA Tour from 1985 to 2001. She did not win any senior titles but did reach the quarterfinals of Wimbledon in 1989. Her singles record included victories over Zina Garrison and Jana Novotná. She won six doubles titles on the WTA Tour and reached a career-high doubles ranking of No. 23 in August 1995.\n\nWTA career finals\n\nSingles: 1 (runner-up)\n\nDoubles: 14 (6 titles, 8 runner-ups)\n\nITF Circuit finals\n\nSingles (6–4)\n\nDoubles (3–3)\n\nExternal links\n \n \n\n1967 births\nHopman Cup competitors\nItalian female tennis players\nLiving people\nTennis players from Milan\nMediterranean Games silver medalists for Italy\nMediterranean Games medalists in tennis\nCompetitors at the 1983 Mediterranean Games", "Xavier Daufresne (born 24 December 1968 in Lasne) is a former tennis player from Belgium.\n\nDaufresne turned professional in 1988. He did not win any Grand Prix tennis or ATP Tour titles (in either singles or doubles) during his career. The right-hander reached his highest individual ranking on the ATP Tour on 21 March 1994, when he was ranked World No. 109.\n\nExternal links\n \n \n\n1968 births\nLiving people\nBelgian male tennis players\nPeople from Lasne\nWalloon sportspeople", "Miriam Oremans (born 9 September 1972) is a former professional female tennis player from the Netherlands. On 26 July 1993 she reached her career-high singles ranking of number 25.\n\nShe did not win any singles titles (Oremans did have two Satellite tournament wins in 1989), but did win three titles in doubles. In 1992 she was runner-up together with Jacco Eltingh in the Mixed Doubles finals of Wimbledon.\n\nHer biggest achievement came during the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney where she won the silver medal in doubles, partnering Kristie Boogert, losing the final match to Venus and Serena Williams.\n\nMajor finals\n\nOlympic finals\n\nDoubles: 1 (0–1)\n\nWTA Tour finals\n\nSingles 5\n\nDoubles 12 (3–9)\n\nITF finals\n\nSingles Finals: (2-2)\n\nDoubles Finals: (1-2)\n\nReferences\n ITF site\n\nExternal links\n \n \n\n1972 births\nLiving people\nDutch female tennis players\nOlympic tennis players of the Netherlands\nOlympic silver medalists for the Netherlands\nPeople from Sint-Michielsgestel\nTennis players at the 2000 Summer Olympics\nOlympic medalists in tennis\nHopman Cup competitors\nMedalists at the 2000 Summer Olympics" ]
[ "Big Boss Man (wrestler)", "Final years (2000-2003)", "where did he wrestle for the final three years", "On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer.", "did he win any titles", "I don't know.", "what did he he accomplish", "On the March 19 episode of Sunday Night Heat, he introduced Bull Buchanan as his protege.", "when was his last match", "On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer.", "what happened to after that", "Traylor was assigned to train developmental wrestlers in Ohio Valley Wrestling, before being released from WWE in 2003.", "when did he pass away", "I don't know.", "did he win any titles", "In the summer of 2000, Boss Man disappeared from the WWF's primary television shows," ]	C_3bba6eb691eb4ad19e5ff75dbe17c742_0	why did he disappear	8	why did Big Boss Man disappear?	Big Boss Man (wrestler)	Boss Man entered the 2000 Royal Rumble match, where he eliminated Rikishi (with the help of five other wrestlers), Chyna and Faarooq, before being eliminated by The Rock. On the March 19 episode of Sunday Night Heat, he introduced Bull Buchanan as his protege. They teamed to defeat The Godfather and D'Lo Brown at WrestleMania 2000, and the Acolytes Protection Agency the next month at Backlash. On the June 5 Raw is War, after losing to The Hardy Boyz and subsequently arguing, Boss Man knocked Buchanan out with his nightstick when his back was turned and the team split up. In the summer of 2000, Boss Man disappeared from the WWF's primary television shows, wrestling mainly on Jakked and Heat, where he had a minor feud with Crash Holly until suffering a legit injury in January 2001. When he returned on the December 20, 2001 of SmackDown, he formed a team with Booker T, after Vince McMahon ordered him to be Booker's enforcer. on the December 27 episode of Smackdown, Bossman and Booker T defeated Stone Cold in a handicap match. on the January 7, 2002 episode of Raw, Bossman and Booker T was defeated by Stone Cold & The Rock. on the January 17 episode of Smackdown, Bossman lost to Diamond Dallas Page. at Royal Rumble (2002), Bossman competed in the royal rumble match where he was eliminated by Rikishi. on the January 24 episode of Smackdown, Bossman lost to Rikishi. The team quietly split in late January 2002, and Boss Man returned to Jakked/Metal and Heat. on the February 2 episode of Metal, Bossman defeated The Hurricane. on the February 2 episode of Metal, Bossman defeated Perry Saturn. In April, he formed a short-lived tag team with Mr. Perfect after both were drafted to the Raw brand. on the March 23 episode of WWF Jakked, Bossman and Mr. Perfect lost to The APA. on the April 1 episode of Raw, Bossman and Mr. Perfect lost to The Hardy Boyz. on the April 14 episode of Heat, Bossman lost to Bradshaw, on the April 28 Bossman defeated Crash Holly, on the May 5 episode of Heat. Bossman lost to D'Lo Brown. On the May 20, 2002 Heat taping, he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer. Traylor was assigned to train developmental wrestlers in Ohio Valley Wrestling, before being released from WWE in 2003. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER		false	[ "Disappear may refer to:\n \"To disappear\" someone (transitive verb), referring to forced disappearance.\n\nMusic\n Disappear (album), or the title song, by T.S.O.L., 2001\n \"Disappear\" (Hoobastank song), 2005\n \"Disappear\" (INXS song), 1990\n \"Disappear\" (Motion City Soundtrack song), 2009\n \"Disappear\" (No Angels song), 2008\n \"Disappear\", by 8stops7 from Birth of a Cynic\n \"Disappear\", by Beyoncé from I Am... Sasha Fierce\n \"Disappear\", by Bullet for My Valentine from Scream Aim Fire\n \"Disappear\", by Dream Theater from Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence\n \"Disappear\", by Evanescence from Evanescence\n \"Disappear\", by Greenwheel from Soma Holiday\n \"Disappear\", by The Haunted from Unseen\n \"Disappear\", by Jars of Clay from The Eleventh Hour\n \"Disappear\", by Letters to Cleo from Go!\n \"Disappear\", by Madness from Absolutely\n \"Disappear\", by Mazzy Star from Among My Swan\n \"Disappear\", by A Perfect Murder from Cease to Suffer\n \"Disappear\", by R.E.M. from Reveal\n \"Disappear\", by Screaming Jets from The Screaming Jets\n \"Disappear\", by The Sound of Arrows from Voyage\n \"Disappear\", by Sunny Day Real Estate from The Rising Tide\n \"Disappear\", by Tonight Alive from Underworld\n\"Disappear\", from the 2015 stage musical Dear Evan Hansen\n\nSee also\n Disappearance (disambiguation)\n Disappeared (disambiguation)\n Disappearing (disambiguation)\n \"Disappearer\", a song by Sonic Youth from Goo\n \"I Disappear\", a song by Metallica", "Maryam Saqer Al Qasimi (Arabic: مريم صقر القاسمي) is an Emirati writer for children and young adult. She published eight children short stories. Her short story \"Where Did the Letters Disappear?\" won the Sharjah Children's Book Award in the category of young readers in English language, 2018. Later, the story was adapted into a musical play.\n\nEducation and career \nMaryam Saqer Al Qasimi was born and raised in the United Arab Emirates. She obtained her bachelor's degree in mass communication from the American University of Sharjah and has master's degree in translation from the same university. Al Qasimi started writing from a young age; yet, she published her first work in 2016 which was \"The Curious Adam\". So far, she published eight short stories including \"Completed Together\", \"Where Did the Letters Disappear?\", \"The Wise Man of the Arabs\", \"Maryam and the Pen\", \"Diversity\" and \"The Water Seller\". In 2018, Al Qasimi's short story \"Where Did the Letters Disappear?\", which was published by Medad Publishing and Distribution, won the Prize for Young Children's Literature at the 10th edition of the Sharjah Children's Reading Festival Award; later, the story was adopted into a musical play. In 2020, her story \"The Water Seller\" was shortlisted for the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the category of Children's Literature. Al Qasimi is also a columnist at Al Roeya Emirati Newspaper.\n\nWorks \n\n The Curious Adam, 2016\n Completed Together (original title: Motakamileen Ma'an), 2017 \n Where Did the Letters Disappear (original title: Ain Ikhtafat Al Houroof?), 2018\n The Wise Man of the Arabs (original title: Hakim Al Arab), 2018\n Maryam and the Pen (original title: Maryam wa Al Qalam), 2019\n The Water Seller (original title: Saqi Al Maa), 2019\n Diversity, 2019\n\nAwards and Honors \n\n 2018: The short story \"Where Did the Letters Disappear?\" won the International Children's Book Award at the 10th edition of the Sharjah Children's Reading Festival.\n 2020: The story \"The Water Seller\" was shortlisted for the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the category of Children's Literature.\n\nReferences \n\nEmirati writers\nLiving people\n21st-century Emirati writers\n21st-century Emirati women writers\nYear of birth missing (living people)", "The discography of Disappear Fear (stylized as disappear fear), a Baltimore, Maryland-based indie folk band consists of ten studio albums, three live albums, one compilation album and two video albums. Their discography spans over a thirty-year career (1987–present).\n\nOverview\nDisappear Fear was formed in 1987 by sisters, Sonia Rutstein (SONiA) and Cindy Frank (CiNDY). Their first album (Echo My Call) was released under their own Disappear Records label in 1988. Their latest album (Get Your Phil) was released in 2011. This discography is inclusive as to the bands following incarnations: Disappear Fear, Sonia (Rutstein's solo career) and Sonia & Disappear Fear.\n\nAlbums\n\nStudio albums\nDisappear Fear\n\nSonia\n\nSonia & Disappear Fear\n\nSONiA disappear fear\n\nLive albums\nDisappear Fear\n\nSonia\n\nSonia & Disappear Fear\n\nSONiA disappear fear\n\nCompilations\nSonia & Disappear Fear\n\nVideos\nSonia\n\nReferences\n\nDiscographies of American artists\nFolk music discographies" ]
[ "The Cult", "The Cult (1994-1995)" ]	C_66bf99c1483943608bfaa88bd0e08d05_0	What were they doing in 1994	1	What was the bang The Cult doing in 1994?	The Cult	With the same line-up still in place, the band released The Cult in October 1994, produced by Bob Rock. The self-titled 'Cult' album is commonly referred to as the 'Black Sheep' album by fans of the group. Astbury referred to the record as "very personal and very revealing" songs about his life, with the subject matter ranging from sexual abuse at the age of 15, to the death of Nigel Preston, to his directionless years spent in Glasgow in the late 1970s. The record achieved little success, only reaching No. 69 in the US and No. 21 in the UK. Duffy remarked that he thought that the record wouldn't sell well due to the offensive lyrics. The record went to number one in Portugal also, but quickly dropped out of sight. The single "Coming Down (Drug Tongue)" was released with the band going on tour in support of the new album. Only one more single, "Star", was officially released with a live appearance on UK TV show The Word. "Star" began life in 1986 as "Tom Petty" and was recorded at the "Sonic Temple" demo sessions as "Starchild", being dropped by the band during rehearsals. In 1993 the song was resurrected and was finally completed for the record in 1994 as, just simply, "Star". When the band began the Beauty's On The Streets tour in winter 1994, they augmented the line up with James Stevenson on rhythm guitar. As with the Ceremony record several years earlier, no other official singles were released, but several other songs were released on a strictly limited basis: "Sacred Life" was released in Spain and the Netherlands, "Be Free" was issued in Canada and France, "Saints Are Down" was issued in Greece, but none of the songs gained much commercial success. During this tour, the Cult made their first ever appearance in Norway. CANNOTANSWER	place, the band released The Cult in October 1994, produced by Bob Rock.	The Cult are an English rock band formed in 1983 in Bradford, West Yorkshire. Before settling on their current name in January 1984, the band performed under the name Death Cult, which was an evolution of the name of lead singer Ian Astbury's previous band Southern Death Cult. They gained a dedicated following in the United Kingdom in the mid-1980s as a post-punk/gothic rock band, with singles such as "She Sells Sanctuary", before breaking into the mainstream in the United States in the late 1980s establishing themselves as a hard rock band with singles such as "Love Removal Machine". Since its initial formation in 1983, the band have had various line-ups; the longest-serving members are Astbury and guitarist Billy Duffy, who are also the band's two songwriters. The Cult's debut studio album Dreamtime was released in 1984 to moderate success, with its lead single "Spiritwalker" reaching No. 1 on the UK Indie Chart. Their second studio album, Love (1985), was even more successful, charting at No. 4 in the UK and including singles such as "She Sells Sanctuary" and "Rain". The band's third album, Electric (1987), launched them new heights of success, also peaking at No. 4 in the UK and charting highly in other territories, and spawned the hit singles "Love Removal Machine", "Lil' Devil" and "Wild Flower". On that album, The Cult supplemented their post-punk sound with hard rock; the polish on this new sound was facilitated by producer Rick Rubin. After moving to Los Angeles, California, where the band has been based for the remainder of their career, The Cult continued the musical experimentation of Electric with its follow-up album Sonic Temple (1989), which marked their first collaboration with Bob Rock, who would produce several of the band's subsequent albums. Sonic Temple was their most successful album to that point, entering the Top 10 on the UK and US charts, and included one of the band's most popular songs "Fire Woman". By the time of their fifth album Ceremony (1991), tensions and creative differences began to surface among the band members. This resulted in the recording sessions for Ceremony being held without a stable lineup, leaving Astbury and Duffy as the only two official members left, and featuring support from session musicians on bass and drums. The ongoing tension had carried over within the next four years, during which they released one more studio album, The Cult (1994), and called it quits in 1995. The Cult reformed in 1999 and released their seventh album Beyond Good and Evil two years later. The commercial failure of the album and resurfaced tensions led to the band going back on hiatus in 2002. They resumed activity in 2006, and have since released three more studio albums: Born into This (2007), Choice of Weapon (2012), and Hidden City (2016). History Early history (1981–1984) The band's origins can be traced to 1981, in Bradford, Yorkshire, where vocalist and songwriter Ian Astbury formed a band called Southern Death Cult. The name was chosen with a double meaning, and was derived from the 14th-century Native American religion, the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex or Southern Death Cult as it was sometimes known, from the Mississippi delta area, but it was also a stab at what the band viewed was the centralisation of power in Southern England (including that of the music industry); there has long been a perceived notion of a North–South divide based on social, historic and economic reasons. Astbury was joined by Buzz Burrows (guitar), Barry Jepson (bass) and Aki Nawaz Qureshi (drums); they performed their first show at the Queen's Hall in their hometown of Bradford on 29 October 1981. The band were at the forefront of an emerging style of music, in the form of post-punk and gothic rock, they achieved critical acclaim from the press and music fans. The band signed to independent record label Situation Two, an offshoot of Beggars Banquet Records, and released a three-track, triple A-side single, Moya, during this period. They toured through England headlining some shows and touring with Bauhaus and Theatre of Hate. The band played their final performance in Manchester during February 1983, meaning after only sixteen months the band was over. A compilation named The Southern Death Cult was released, this being a collection of the single, radio sessions with John Peel for Radio One and live performances - one of which an audience member recorded with a tape recorder. In April 1983, Astbury teamed up with guitarist Billy Duffy and formed the band "Death Cult". Duffy had been in the Nosebleeds (along with Morrissey), Lonesome No More and then Theatre of Hate. In addition to Astbury and Duffy, the band also included Jamie Stewart (bass) and Raymond Taylor Smith (later known as Ray Mondo) (drums), both from the Harrow, London based post-punk band, Ritual. Death Cult made their live debut in Oslo, Norway on 25 July 1983 and also released the Death Cult EP in the same month, then toured through mainland Europe and Scotland. In September 1983, Mondo was deported to his home country of Sierra Leone and replaced by Nigel Preston, formerly of Theatre of Hate. The single "Gods Zoo" was released in October 1983. Another European tour, with UK dates, followed that autumn. To tone down their name's gothic connotations and gain broader appeal, the band changed its name to "the Cult" in January 1984 before appearing on the (UK) Channel 4 television show, The Tube. The Cult's first studio record, Dreamtime, was recorded at Rockfield Studios, in Monmouth, Wales in 1984. The record was to be produced by Joe Julian, but after recording the drum tracks, the band decided to replace him with John Brand. Brand produced the record, but guitarist Duffy has said the drum tracks were produced by Julian, as Preston had become unreliable. The band recorded the songs which later became known as "Butterflies", "(The) Gimmick", "A Flower in the Desert", "Horse Nation", "Spiritwalker", "Bad Medicine (Waltz)", "Dreamtime", "With Love" (later known as "Ship of Fools", and also "Sea and Sky"), "Bone Bag", "Too Young", "83rd Dream", and one untitled outtake. It is unknown what the outtake was, or whether it was developed into a song at a later date. Songs like "Horse Nation" showed Astbury's intense interest in Native American issues, with the lyrics to "Horse Nation", "See them prancing, they come neighing, to a horse nation", taken almost verbatim from the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, while "Spiritwalker" dealt with shamanism, and the record's title and title track are overtly influenced by Australian Aboriginal beliefs. On 4 April 1984, the Cult released the single "Spiritwalker", which reached No. 1 on the independent charts in the UK, and acted as a teaser for their forthcoming album Dreamtime. This was followed that summer by a second single, "Go West (Crazy Spinning Circles)", before the release of Dreamtime in September; the album reached No. 21 in the UK, and sold over 100,000 copies in the UK alone. On 12 July 1984, the band recorded five songs at the BBC Maida Vale 5 studio for a Richard Skinner session. Before and after the album's release, the Cult toured throughout Europe and England before recording another single, "Ressurection Joe" (UK No. 74), released that December. Following a Christmas support slot with Big Country, the Cult toured Europe with support from the Mission (then called the Sisterhood). Dreamtime was released initially only in the UK, but after its success, and as the Cult's popularity grew worldwide, it was issued in approximately 30 countries. Mainstream success (1985–1990) In May 1985, the Cult released their fourth single, "She Sells Sanctuary", which peaked at No. 15 in the UK and spent 23 weeks in the Top 100. The song was recently voted No. 18 in VH1's Indie 100. In June 1985, following his increasingly erratic behaviour, Preston was fired from the band. Big Country's drummer Mark Brzezicki was picked to replace Preston, and was also included in the video for "She Sells Sanctuary". The Cult then finished recording their second album, Love in July and August 1985. The band's music and image shifted from their punk-oriented roots to 1960s psychedelia influences. Love was a chart success, peaking at No. 4 in the UK and selling 100,000 copies there toward a total of 500,000 copies throughout Europe, as well as 100,000 in Australia and 500,000 copies in the United States. Love reached number 20 on the charts in The Netherlands, where it remained for 32 weeks. To date, the record has sold over two and a half million copies worldwide. From late September 1985 to June 1986, the band went on a worldwide tour with new drummer Les Warner (who had played with Julian Lennon and Johnny Thunders). Two more singles from the Love album followed; "Rain" (charting in the UK at No. 17) and "Revolution" (charting in the UK at No. 30). Neither charted in the US. Another single, "Nirvana", was issued only in Poland. The album version of "Rain", as well as the remix "(Here Comes the) Rain", were used in the Italian horror film Dèmoni 2. Once back in England, the band booked themselves into the Manor Studios in Oxfordshire, with producer Steve Brown (who had produced Love), and recorded over a dozen new songs. The band were unhappy with the sound of their new album, titled Peace, and they decided to go to New York so producer Rick Rubin could remix the first single, "Love Removal Machine". Rubin agreed to work with the band, but only if they rerecorded the song. Rubin eventually talked them into rerecording the entire album. The band's record company, Beggars Banquet, was displeased with this, as two months and £250,000 had already been spent on the record. However, after hearing the initial New York recording, Beggars Banquet agreed to proceed. The first single, "Love Removal Machine", was released in February 1987, and the new version of the album appeared in April that year, now renamed as Electric, reaching No. 4 and eventually outselling Love. The band toured with Kid Chaos (also known as "Haggis" and "The Kid") on bass, with Stewart on rhythm guitar. Two more singles, "Lil Devil" and "Wild Flower", were released during 1987. A few tracks from the original Peace album appeared on the single versions of "Love Removal Machine", and "Lil Devil". The full Peace album would not be released until 2000, when it was included as Disc 3 of the Rare Cult box set. In the US, the Cult, now consisting of Astbury, Duffy, Stewart, Warner and Kid Chaos, were supported by the then-unknown Guns N' Roses. The band also appeared at Roskilde Festival in Denmark in June 1987. When the world tour wound through Australia, the band wrecked £30,000 worth of equipment, and as a result they could not tour Japan, as no company would rent them new equipment. At the end of the tour the Electric album had been certified Gold in the UK, and sold roughly 3 million copies worldwide, but the band were barely speaking to each other by then. Haggis left the band at the end of the Electric tour to form the Four Horsemen for Rubin's Def American label. Astbury and Duffy fired Warner and their management team Grant/Edwards, and moved to Los Angeles with original bassist Stewart. Warner sued the band several times for his firing, as well as for what he felt were unpaid royalties due to him for his performance on the Electric album, resulting in lengthy court battles. The Cult signed a new management deal and wrote 21 new songs for their next record. For the next album, Stewart returned to playing bass, and John Webster was brought in to play keyboards. The band used Chris Taylor to play drums during rehearsals and record the demos, with future Kiss drummer Eric Singer performing during the second demo recording sessions. The Cult eventually recruited session-drummer Mickey Curry to fill the drumming role and Aerosmith sound engineer, Bob Rock, to produce. Recorded in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from October to December 1988, the Sonic Temple record went Top 10 in both the UK and the US, where it was certified Gold and Platinum respectively. The band went on tour in support of the new album and new single "Fire Woman" (UK No. 15) (NZ No. 1), with yet another new drummer, Matt Sorum, and Webster as keyboard player. The next single, "Edie (Ciao Baby)" (UK No. 25) has become a regular song at concerts for many years. In Europe, the band toured with Aerosmith, and in the US, after releasing another single "Sun King" (UK No. 42), they spent 1989 touring in support of Metallica before heading out on their own headlining tour later that same year. A fourth single, "Sweet Soul Sister" (UK No. 38), was released in February 1990, with the video having been filmed at Wembley Arena, London, on 25 November 1989. "Sweet Soul Sister" was partially written in Paris and was inspired by the bohemian lifestyle of that city. Released as a single in February 1990, the song was another hit in the UK, and reportedly reached number one on the rock charts in Brazil. After playing a show in Atlanta, Georgia, in February 1990, the band's management told Astbury that his father had just died of cancer. As a result, the remainder of the tour was cancelled after a final leg of shows were performed in April. After the tour ended, the band were on the verge of splitting due to Stewart retiring and moving to Canada to be with his wife, and Sorum leaving to join Guns N' Roses. In 1990, Astbury organized the Gathering of the Tribes festival in Los Angeles and San Francisco with artists such as Soundgarden, Ice-T, Indigo Girls, Queen Latifah, Iggy Pop, the Charlatans, the Cramps and Public Enemy appearing. This two-day festival drew 40,000 people. Also in 1990, a ten CD box set was released in the UK, containing rare songs from the Cult's singles. The CDs in this box set were all issued as picture discs with rice paper covers, housed in a white box called "Singles Collection", or a black box called "E.P. Collection '84 - '90". In 1991, director Oliver Stone offered Astbury the role of Jim Morrison in Stone's film The Doors. He declined the role because he was not happy with the way Morrison was represented in the film, and the role was ultimately played by Val Kilmer. Ceremony and the lawsuit (1991–1993) In 1991, Astbury and Duffy were writing again for their next album. During the demo recordings, Todd Hoffman and James Kottak played bass and drums, respectively. During the actual album recording sessions, Curry was recruited again to play drums, with Charley Drayton on bass, and various other performers. Astbury and Duffy's working relationship had disintegrated by that time, with the two men reportedly rarely even being in the studio together during recording. The resulting album Ceremony was released to mixed responses. The album climbed to US No. 34, but sales were not as impressive as the previous three records, only selling around one million copies worldwide. Only two official singles were released from the record: "Wild Hearted Son" (UK No. 34, Canada No. 41) and "Heart of Soul" (UK No. 50), although "White" was released as a single only in Canada, "Sweet Salvation" was released as a single (as "Dulce Salvación") in Argentina in 1992, and the title track "Ceremony" was released in Spain. The Cult's Ceremonial Stomp tour went through Europe in 1991 and North America in 1992. In 1991 the Cult played a show at the Marquee Club in London, which was recorded and released in February 1993, packaged with some vinyl UK copies of their first greatest hits release. Only a handful of CD copies of it were ever manufactured originally, however it was subsequently reissued on CD in 1999. An incomplete bootleg video of this show is also in circulation. The band were sued by the parents of the Native American boy pictured on the cover of Ceremony, for alleged exploitation and for the unauthorized use of the child's image. The parents stated that the boy felt he had been cursed by the band's burning of his image, and was "emotionally scarred." This image of the boy is also burned in the video for "Wild Hearted Son". This lawsuit delayed the release of Ceremony in many countries including South Korea and Thailand, which did not see the record's release until late 1992, and it was unreleased in Turkey until the Cult played several shows in Istanbul in June 1993. A world tour followed with backing from drummer Michael Lee (Page & Plant, Little Angels), bassist Kinley "Barney" Wolfe (Lord Tracy, Black Oak Arkansas), and keyboardist John Sinclair (Ozzy Osbourne, Uriah Heep) returning one last time, and the Gathering of the Tribes moved to the UK. Here artists such as Pearl Jam performed. The warm-up gig to the show, in a small nightclub, was dedicated to the memory of Nigel Preston, who had died a few weeks earlier at the age of 28. Following the release of the single "The Witch" (#9 in Australia) and the performance of a song for the 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie soundtrack entitled "Zap City", produced by Steve Brown and originally a B-side to "Lil' Devil", two volumes of remixes of "She Sells Sanctuary", called Sanctuary Mixes MCMXCIII, volumes one and two, and in support of Pure Cult: for Rockers, Ravers, Lovers, and Sinners, a greatest hits compilation which debuted at No. 1 on the British charts and later went to number one in Portugal, Astbury and Duffy fired the "backing band" and recruited Craig Adams (the Mission) and Scott Garrett for performances across Europe in 1993, with some shows featuring Mike Dimkich on rhythm guitar. This tour marked the first time the band performed in Turkey, Greece, and the Slovak Republic. The Cult and first breakup (1994–1998) With the same line-up still in place, the band released The Cult in October 1994, produced by Bob Rock. The self-titled album is commonly referred to as the "Black Sheep" album by fans of the group, due to the image of a black sheep on the front cover. Astbury referred to the record as a collection of "very personal and very revealing" songs about his life, with the subject matter ranging from sexual abuse at the age of 15, to the death of Nigel Preston, to his directionless years spent in Glasgow in the late 1970s. The record achieved little success, only reaching No. 69 in the US and No. 21 in the UK. Duffy remarked that he thought that the record wouldn't sell well due to the offensive lyrics. The record went to number one in Portugal also, but quickly dropped out of sight. The single "Coming Down (Drug Tongue)" was released with the band going on tour in support of the new album. Only one more single, "Star", was officially released with a live appearance on UK TV show The Word. "Star" began life in 1986 as "Tom Petty" and was recorded at the "Sonic Temple" demo sessions as "Starchild", being dropped by the band during rehearsals. In 1993 the song was resurrected and was finally completed for the record in 1994 as, just simply, "Star". When the band began the Beauty's On The Streets tour in winter 1994, they augmented the line up with James Stevenson on rhythm guitar. As with the Ceremony record several years earlier, no other official singles were released, but several other songs were released on a strictly limited basis: "Sacred Life" was released in Spain and the Netherlands, "Be Free" was issued in Canada and France, "Saints Are Down" was issued in Greece, but none of the songs gained much commercial success. During this tour, the Cult made their first ever appearance in Norway. During the Black Rain tour of South America in spring of 1995, despite the fact that several more new songs had already been recorded, the tour was cancelled after an appearance in Rio de Janeiro in March, and the band split up citing unspecified problems on a recent South American tour. Astbury started up a garage band called Holy Barbarians a few months later. The band made their debut at the 100 Club in London in February 1996 and released their first (and only) record in May 1996, and toured throughout North America and Europe for the rest of 1996. The band started writing material for a second record in 1997, but the band was dissolved and Astbury began writing and recording a solo record. Throughout 1997 and 1998 Astbury recorded his solo record, originally to be titled Natural Born Guerilla, later called High Time Amplifier. Ultimately the record remained unreleased until June 2000 when it was released under the name Spirit\Light\Speed. Astbury played one solo concert in 1999. In November 1996, a number of CD reissues were released: the band's American record company released High Octane Cult, a slightly updated greatest hits compilation released only in the US and Japan; The Southern Death Cult, a remastered edition of the fifteen-song compilation CD; a ten-song compilation CD by Death Cult called Ghost Dance, consisting of the untitled four-song EP, the single "God's Zoo", and four unreleased songs from a radio broadcast; and a remastered repackaging of the Dreamtime album, containing only the ten original songs from the record in their original playing order and almost completely different but original artwork. Dreamtime Live at the Lyceum was also remastered and issued on video and for the first time on CD, with the one unreleased song from the concert, "Gimmick". First reunion, Beyond Good and Evil and second hiatus (1999–2005) In 1999, Astbury and Duffy reformed the Cult with Matt Sorum and ex-Porno for Pyros bassist Martyn LeNoble. Their first official concert was at the Tibetan Freedom Concert in June 1999, after having rehearsed at shows in the Los Angeles area. The band's 1999 Cult Rising reunion tour resulted in a sold out 30 date tour of the US, ending with 8 consecutive sold out nights at the LA House of Blues. In 2000, the band toured South Africa for the first time, and North and South America, and contributed the song "Painted on My Heart" to the soundtrack of the movie Gone In 60 Seconds. The song was featured prominently and the melody was fused into parts of the score. In June, Astbury's long-delayed solo record was finally released as Spirit\Light\Speed, but it failed to gain much success. In November 2000, another authorised greatest hits compilation was released, Pure Cult: The Singles 1984–1995, along with an accompanying DVD, which was later certified gold in Canada. The Cult, as well as Ian Astbury, performed on separate tracks on the Doors tribute album, Stoned Immaculate: The Music of The Doors, covering "Wild Child" and "Touch Me". In November 2000, Beggars Banquet released 15,000 copies of a six-disc boxset (with a bonus seventh disc of remixes for the first 5000 copies) titled Rare Cult. The box set consists of album out-takes, demos, radio broadcasts, and album B-sides. It is most notable for including the previously unreleased "Peace" album in its entirety. In 2001, the band signed to Atlantic Records and recorded a new album, Beyond Good and Evil, originally being produced by Mick Jones of Foreigner, until Jones bowed out to tour with Foreigner. Astbury and Duffy co-wrote a song with Jones, an odd occurrence, as in the past, neither Astbury or Duffy would co-write their material. Bob Rock was the producer, with Martyn LeNoble and Chris Wyse as recording bassists, as Mike Dimkich played rhythm guitar on tour, and Matt Sorum returning as drummer. Although Sorum has previously toured with the band on the Sonic Temple tour in 1989, this was the first time that he had recorded a studio album with the band. However Beyond Good and Evil was not the comeback record the band had hoped for. Despite reaching No. 37 in the US, No. 22 in Canada, and No. 25 in Spain, sales quickly dropped, only selling roughly 500,000 copies worldwide. The first single "Rise", reached No. 41 in the US, and No. 2 on the mainstream rock charts, but Atlantic Records quickly pulled the song from radio playlists. Astbury would later describe the experience with Atlantic to be "soul destroying", after Atlantic tried to tamper with the lyrics, the record cover, and choice of singles from the record. After the first single from the record, the band's working relationship with Atlantic was on paper only, with Atlantic pulling "Rise" from the radio stations playlists, and stopping all promotion of the record. The second single "Breathe" was only released as a radio station promo, and the final single "True Believers" was only on a compilation sampler disc released in January 2002 (after the Cult's tour had already ended). Despite "True Believers" receiving radio airplay in Australia, both singles went largely unnoticed, and both Astbury and Duffy walked away from the project. LeNoble rejoined the band for the initial dates in early 2001, and Billy Morrison filled in on bass for the majority of the 2001 tour. The European tour of 2001 was canceled, largely due to security concerns after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the band flew back to the US to tour again with Aerosmith. But the eleven-week tour was considered by fans to be a disaster, as the band played only a brief rundown of their greatest hits. In October 2001, a show at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles was filmed for release on DVD. After the tour ended in December 2001, the band took most of 2002 off, apart from a few shows in the US to promote the release of the DVD, with Scott Garrett and Craig Adams rejoining the band. Despite the commercial disappointment of Beyond Good and Evil and the supporting tour, the band was voted "Comeback of the Year" by Metal Edge readers in the magazine's 2001 Readers' Choice Awards. In late 2002, Ian Astbury declared the Cult to be "on ice" indefinitely, after performing a brief series of dates in October 2002 to promote the release of the Music Without Fear DVD. During this second hiatus, Astbury performed as a member of the Doors (later dubbed the Doors of the 21st Century, later still renamed D21c, and most recently known as Riders on the Storm) with two of the original members of that group. D21c was sued numerous times, both by Jim Morrison's family and by drummer John Densmore. Astbury supposedly started work on recording another solo album that later became the backbone for the Cult's Born into This. At the same time, Duffy was part of Coloursound with bassist Craig Adams and ex-Alarm frontman Mike Peters, then Dead Men Walking (again with Peters) and later Cardboard Vampyres. Sorum became a member of the hard rock supergroup Velvet Revolver. In 2003, all of the Cult's records were issued on CD, with several bonus tracks being issued on the Russian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian versions. These eastern European releases had many printing mistakes on the jacket sleeves and lyric inserts. In October 2004, all of the Cult's records were again remastered and issued again on CD, this time in Japan in different cardboard foldout sleeves. "She Sells Sanctuary" appeared in the 2002 video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, playing on rock station V-Rock. Second reunion, Born Into This and Capsule EPs (2006–2010) Despite Astbury's previous statement from 2004 that a reunion would not happen, The Cult announced in January 2006 that they were reuniting for "some limited gigs" throughout the year. A month later, the band made their first live appearance in three-and-a-half years on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Their lineup consisted of Astbury (vocals), Duffy (lead guitar), John Tempesta (drums), Dimkich (rhythm guitar) and Wyse (returning as bassist). Their first stage show was held in March 2006 in San Francisco, California, at The Fillmore. The entire tour was recorded by Instant Live and sold after each show. In May, they did an eight date tour in Canada. Later that summer, they toured central and eastern Europe and played their first concerts in Bulgaria, Poland and Serbia. An eleven-date UK tour followed as well as several more dates in the United States, finishing with a South American tour in December. That year, Duffy began the band Circus Diablo with Billy Morrison, Sorum, Brett Scallions and Ricky Warwick. During these tours, the band occasionally played an extended set, including several songs the band had not performed in decades: "King Contrary Man" and "Hollow Man", neither of which had been performed since 1987; also, "Libertine" was performed approximately three times, for the first time since 2000, and "Brother Wolf, Sister Moon", which was only performed one time since 1986 (for this particular song, the band played an abridged version which has never been performed before or since) Astbury announced in February 2007 that he was leaving Riders on the Storm and returning to the Cult. He stated: "I have decided to move on and focus on my own music and legacy." The Cult was featured on Stuffmagazine.com's list of ultimate air guitar players. On 21 March 2007, it was announced that the band would be touring Europe with the Who. The first confirmed tour date was in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in early June, with at least a dozen shows set to follow. The band played a gig in London's West End at the CC Club on 7 June 2007, along with nearly two dozen shows across continental Europe during summer. The tour also includes the first performance in Romania and Croatia. On 29 May 2007, the band signed a deal with major metal label Roadrunner Records. Their 8th studio album, titled Born into This was released on 16 October, and was produced by Martin "Youth" Glover, bass player for Killing Joke. Born into This was released as regular single disc and limited edition double disc, the second disk being a bonus 5-track CD holding the following tracks: "Stand Alone", "War Pony Destroyer", "I Assassin (Demo)", "Sound of Destruction (Demo)" and "Savages (Extended Version)". Prior to the album's release, the band played festival and headline dates, and supported the Who in Europe through summer 2007, with a US headline tour to follow. The band's appearance at Irving Plaza in New York City in early November 2006 was filmed and was released in 2007. The Cult New York City, issued by Fontana North and is the Cult's first high definition DVD release. Meanwhile, Astbury lent vocals on two tracks of the 2007 Unkle album "War Stories", one of them being the first single from the album, "Burn My Shadow". The band performed a UK and European tour in late-February and early-March 2008. On 24 March, they began their North American tour including a major 13-city tour in Canada. During September 2008, the Cult did a brief series of dates in the northeast United States, and they toured in Brazil as part of the South American tour in October 2008. As of May 2008, according to The Gauntlet, the Cult are currently unsigned and no longer under contract with Roadrunner Records. In October 2008, it was announced that the Cult would headline the inaugural Rock 'n' Roll Marathon in San Antonio, to be run 16 November 2008. The Cult announced plans for a tour showcasing their 1985 Love album across the US and then the UK in October where they will play at the Royal Albert Hall. Coinciding with the remastered Love album and four-disc Omnibus boxed set, the Cult kicked off the long-awaited Love Live Tour in late summer. Performing their classic Love album in its entirety, each show was played with the Love tracks opening with "Nirvana" to "Black Angel". A quick intermission followed, then other Cult hits were played (varying by venue): "Sun King", "Dirty Little Rock Star", "Electric Ocean", "Illuminated". Then followed the favorites "Fire Woman", "Lil Devil", "Wild Flower", and lastly "Love Removal Machine". In the evening of 10 October 2009 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, the band performed a second encore with original Cult bassist Jamie Stewart and drummer Mark Brzezicki, who played drums with the band during the Love album recording sessions in July and August 1985. The band sold Love Live USB flash drives for each show during the tour. The Cult entered 2010 continuing their Love Live Tour and announcing more dates in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. The band finished recording a four-track "Capsule" with producer Chris Goss. Capsule 1 was said to be the first of three or four to be released sometime in summer 2010. Release formats include CD-DVD dualdisc, 12-inch vinyl, and digital downloads. Capsule 1 was released on 14 September 2010. The band officially announced the release of its first new studio recording since 2007, "Every Man And Woman Is A Star". The new single was released through the iTunes Store on 31 July 2010. On 1 August 2010, the band played the sold-out music festival Sonisphere, which marked their first UK performance since the tour for their Love album. During the performance they debuted their new single, "Every Man and Woman is a Star", which was released on 1 August 2010. On 14 September 2010 the band embarked on a new U.S. tour and released Capsule 1 in conjunction with media technology company Aderra Inc. and made it available in multiple formats including a CD-DVD DualDisc, USB flash drive, 12 inch vinyl, FLAC download and MP3 download. The collection includes a short film made by singer Ian Astbury and Rick Rogers. On 26 October 2010 the band and Aderra Inc. announced the release of a new song, "Embers", for 1 November 2010 and Capsule 2 available through their web store on 16 November 2010. Pictures from the Cult's tour stop in Chicago on 28 October 2010 can be seen at a local radio station website. On 17 September 2010, the band performed live at the Fall Frenzy concert at the Tempe Beach Park in Tempe, Arizona. Other bands that played at this concert were Stone Temple Pilots, Shinedown, and Sevendust. On 4 December 2010, the band performed a live set for Guitar Center Sessions on DirecTV. The episode included an interview with the band by program host, Nic Harcourt. Choice of Weapon and Hidden City (2011–2017) During the Cult's concert at the Hammersmith Apollo in London on 21 January 2011 Ian Astbury declared that the Cult would be recording a new album directly after the tour. They also announced that they would be working with Chris Goss, who performed with Masters of Reality as a supporting act the same evening. On 11 May 2011, it was announced that the Cult were signed to Cooking Vinyl Records, who will release the new album in early 2012. Commented guitarist Billy Duffy: "We are very much looking forward to returning to our U.K. roots in many ways working with Cooking Vinyl." Vocalist Ian Astbury added, "We look forward to a long and fruitful relationship with Cooking Vinyl." By May 2011, the band had been writing and recording new demos at its Witch Mountain studio hideaway in the Hollywood Hills, and began recording their new album at Hollywood Recording Studios. In October 2011, bassist Chris Wyse stated the album was almost finished and expected to be released in April 2012. Chris also described it as a "Zep/Stooges mix of energy." On 29 November 2011, it was announced that the album would be produced by Bob Rock, who provided the same role on Sonic Temple, The Cult and Beyond Good and Evil. The album, entitled Choice of Weapon, was released on 22 May 2012. The band partnered with Rolling Stone to premiere the first song from the album titled Lucifer on 30 January. On 5 February 2012, the Cult song "She Sells Sanctuary" was used as the soundtrack for a Budweiser commercial in a mashup with Flo Rida aired during Super Bowl XLVI. In May 2012 the Cult appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and played "For The Animals". On 28 September 2012, it was announced that the band would release Weapon of Choice, a "prequel" album to accompany the band's latest album, Choice of Weapon. The digital-only release, available exclusively on iTunes for two months only beginning 16 October, features the songs that were ultimately included in "Choice Of Weapon" at an earlier stage of development. Explaining the motivations behind the release, singer Ian Astbury said that "These songs were turned over and over, forged in long rehearsals and writing sessions, and emanated from challenges both personal and professional. We put our guts into this; [Producer Chris] Goss was able to create an environment where the songs were born through playing and turning over lyrics, through hard work and intense sessions." Astbury added "These songs have an integrity and rawness of their own. In many ways it's a different album to the one we released and reveals the foundations of 'Choice Of Weapon'. We were able to close the doors and begin to explore spaces we had not been in for a while." The song "Twisted and Bleeding" was made available for free download at the band's website ahead of the full digital release. On 20 June 2013, the band announced the release of Electric-Peace which comprises the entire Electric album plus the Peace album which was previously released on the now discontinued Rare Cult box set in 2000. It is due for release in the US on 30 July. In 2013 Mike Dimkich left the band and joined Bad Religion to cover for guitarist Greg Hetson. James Stevenson, from the Beauty's On The Streets tour in 1994, replaced Dimkich as the Cult's rhythm guitarist. In March 2013, Billy Duffy told the Argentinan journalist Fabrizio Pedrotti that the Cult had begun work on a new album for a 2014 release. The band were expected to begin work on the album after they finish their 2013 world tour, where they played the Electric album in its entirety. In August 2014, Billy added that the next album, which was not expected to be released before 2015 at the earliest, "will be more guitar heavy". On 5 November 2015, it was announced that The Cult would release their new album, entitled Hidden City, on 5 February 2016. The album is said to be the final part of a trilogy that began with Born into This, and marks the fifth time Bob Rock had produced a Cult album. The band also announced that they had hired Australian-born bassist Grant Fitzpatrick (ex-Mink) as the replacement for Chris Wyse. Chris Chaney (Jane's Addiction, Camp Freddy) and producer Bob Rock performed session bass on the album. In support of Hidden City, The Cult opened for Guns N' Roses on the Not in This Lifetime... Tour. In an October 2016 interview with PopMatters journalist J.C. Maçek III, Cult guitarist Billy Duffy spoke of the band's playlist while on tour, saying "Obviously you want to make an impactful [show]," he continues. "There are some practical, pragmatic decisions made. If you're playing to a crowd who are not very familiar with you, there's no point of going too deep but we do always make sure we play a new song. Like on Guns N' Roses' [tour] we had fifty minutes which is ten songs all in. So, you know we just made sure that in those ten songs we played 'Deeply Ordered Chaos' which we’re proud of and it makes a certain statement. And it just alerts people to the fact that, yes, we have made a record in the last 30 years. You know and that's a good thing. Psychologically, that's the blood transfusion that we need. And we're very mindful, we have a very loyal fan base. We don't pander as you well know." Upcoming eleventh studio album (2018–present) In an April 2018 interview with Guitar World, guitarist Billy Duffy was asked if another album from The Cult was in the works. He replied, "Never say never! Ian and I enjoy the process of making new music, and we feel it's vital to keep the band healthy, even if it's pretty much in the law of diminishing returns area now. Who knows if it will be a whole album a series of singles or an EP? I can say new Cult music will be forthcoming, but these days we don't rush it as there's no point. Quality is key. We are past the point of having to release stuff so if we feel it's good enough, then we will release it in some shape or another." On 2 April 2018, a tour of the United States of America called "Revolution 3 Tour" was announced for the summer. They performed as one of the three headliners, along with Stone Temple Pilots and Bush. In April 2019, The Cult announced that they would celebrate the 30th anniversary of the release of their fourth album Sonic Temple with a world tour, which began on 2 May in Houston, Texas and was expected to wrap up in 2020. In a June 2019 interview with LA Weekly, vocalist Ian Astbury stated that The Cult were "long overdue" to release new music. He was quoted as saying: "We do have some stuff we've been working on, but it's yet to see the light of day." Six months later, Astbury told Atlantic City Weekly that the band was going to start working on new music in 2020: "We've got a few pieces lying around in various stages of completion. The intention is to get together in the New Year and take a look at what we've got and decide how we are going to go about moving forward. It's an essential part of any creative lifeblood." On May 6, 2020, The Cult announced on their Twitter page that they had signed to Black Hill Records. On August 15, 2020, Duffy announced on his Twitter that the band were recording their new album with producer Tom Dalgety at Rockfield Studios, where The Cult had recorded their debut album Dreamtime 36 years earlier. In support of their new album, The Cult will embark on a co-headlining six-date UK tour with Alice Cooper in May and June 2022. Influences Duffy and Astbury cited among their influences a lot of different bands "from the Doors to Led Zeppelin. We literally went from the front of our record collections to the back. And then along the way we were drawn in by the likes of Public Image Ltd, Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees. You might not hear it in the music but it's there." They also cited Bauhaus among many other post-punk influences. Duffy also praised Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers for a major performance he attended in 1977 and Siouxsie and the Banshees whom "always had great guitar players with killer riffs." Duffy also hailed AC/DC for "the power of a good three chord riff", Pete Townshend of the Who "in terms of commitment to stage performing" and Brian May of Queen for using "‘echoplex’ tape delays to orchestrate his own solo". Musical style According to music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine, the band fuse a "hardcore punk revivalist" sound with the "pseudo-mysticism ... of the Doors and Uriah Heep and the guitar-orchestrations of Led Zeppelin and The Cure ... while adding touches of post-punk goth rock". In 1985 Astbury said, "Our music is just melodies and guitars. We're like Big Country and U2, only better!". Members Current members Ian Astbury – lead vocals, occasional percussion/guitar Billy Duffy – lead and rhythm guitars, backing vocals John Tempesta – drums, percussion Grant Fitzpatrick – bass, backing vocals Damon Fox – keyboards, rhythm guitar, backing vocals Discography Dreamtime (1984) Love (1985) Electric (1987) Sonic Temple (1989) Ceremony (1991) The Cult (1994) Beyond Good and Evil (2001) Born into This (2007) Choice of Weapon (2012) Hidden City (2016) References External links Official website Billy Duffy official website Musical groups established in 1983 Situation Two artists Beggars Banquet Records artists Sire Records artists Musical groups from Bradford English post-punk music groups English gothic rock groups English hard rock musical groups English heavy metal musical groups English glam metal musical groups	true	[ "Louis Delaprée was a French journalist and war correspondent in Madrid for the newspaper Paris-Soir during the Spanish Civil War.\nParis-Soir had National/Rebel sympathies and Louis Delaprée's articles reporting the horror of the National bombings over the city were not too well received. He eventually renounced to his position in the diary. The last article he wrote, under the title (borrowed from Émile Zola) \"J’accuse…!\", ended with the following sentence:\n\n\"Christ has said: Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. I think, after the Massacre of the Innocents (perpetrated) in Madrid, we should say: Do not forgive them, for they (the National side) do know what they are doing!\"\n\nHe died after resigning, in Spain, during the Spanish Civil War, in unclear circumstances that have given room to speculation.\n\nReferences\n\nFrench journalists\nJournalists killed while covering the Spanish Civil War", "\"Ignorance Is Bliss\" is a song recorded by Australian folk band Tiddas. The song was released in July 1996 as the lead single from the band's second studio album, Tiddas. The song peaked at number 97 on the ARIA Charts. The song is inspired by an argument with Bob Geldof while touring in 1993.\n\nAt the Deadly Awards 1997, the song won Single Release of the Year.\n\nBackground and release\nIn 2013, Lou Bennett told the story of the song to Deadly Magazine. She recalls Tiddas were performing with American group Sweet Honey in the Rock and Bob Geldof in 1993. Bennett said she remembers the tour well and said Gelfod ‘baited’ the girls into thinking about why they were singing and what they were singing about. “He wanted us to articulate what it was that we were doing, why were we singing about these issues, and in our minds we thought we were doing the right thing presenting songs that affected us and affected our families and friends.” Bennett said this made the group angry and they went back to their room and wrote \"Ignorance Is Bliss\" in response.\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences \n\n1993 songs\n1996 singles\nSong recordings produced by Joe Camilleri" ]
[ "The Cult", "The Cult (1994-1995)", "What were they doing in 1994", "place, the band released The Cult in October 1994, produced by Bob Rock." ]	C_66bf99c1483943608bfaa88bd0e08d05_0	Was the cult popular	2	Was the band The Cult popular?	The Cult	With the same line-up still in place, the band released The Cult in October 1994, produced by Bob Rock. The self-titled 'Cult' album is commonly referred to as the 'Black Sheep' album by fans of the group. Astbury referred to the record as "very personal and very revealing" songs about his life, with the subject matter ranging from sexual abuse at the age of 15, to the death of Nigel Preston, to his directionless years spent in Glasgow in the late 1970s. The record achieved little success, only reaching No. 69 in the US and No. 21 in the UK. Duffy remarked that he thought that the record wouldn't sell well due to the offensive lyrics. The record went to number one in Portugal also, but quickly dropped out of sight. The single "Coming Down (Drug Tongue)" was released with the band going on tour in support of the new album. Only one more single, "Star", was officially released with a live appearance on UK TV show The Word. "Star" began life in 1986 as "Tom Petty" and was recorded at the "Sonic Temple" demo sessions as "Starchild", being dropped by the band during rehearsals. In 1993 the song was resurrected and was finally completed for the record in 1994 as, just simply, "Star". When the band began the Beauty's On The Streets tour in winter 1994, they augmented the line up with James Stevenson on rhythm guitar. As with the Ceremony record several years earlier, no other official singles were released, but several other songs were released on a strictly limited basis: "Sacred Life" was released in Spain and the Netherlands, "Be Free" was issued in Canada and France, "Saints Are Down" was issued in Greece, but none of the songs gained much commercial success. During this tour, the Cult made their first ever appearance in Norway. CANNOTANSWER	The self-titled 'Cult' album is commonly referred to as the 'Black Sheep' album by fans of the group.	The Cult are an English rock band formed in 1983 in Bradford, West Yorkshire. Before settling on their current name in January 1984, the band performed under the name Death Cult, which was an evolution of the name of lead singer Ian Astbury's previous band Southern Death Cult. They gained a dedicated following in the United Kingdom in the mid-1980s as a post-punk/gothic rock band, with singles such as "She Sells Sanctuary", before breaking into the mainstream in the United States in the late 1980s establishing themselves as a hard rock band with singles such as "Love Removal Machine". Since its initial formation in 1983, the band have had various line-ups; the longest-serving members are Astbury and guitarist Billy Duffy, who are also the band's two songwriters. The Cult's debut studio album Dreamtime was released in 1984 to moderate success, with its lead single "Spiritwalker" reaching No. 1 on the UK Indie Chart. Their second studio album, Love (1985), was even more successful, charting at No. 4 in the UK and including singles such as "She Sells Sanctuary" and "Rain". The band's third album, Electric (1987), launched them new heights of success, also peaking at No. 4 in the UK and charting highly in other territories, and spawned the hit singles "Love Removal Machine", "Lil' Devil" and "Wild Flower". On that album, The Cult supplemented their post-punk sound with hard rock; the polish on this new sound was facilitated by producer Rick Rubin. After moving to Los Angeles, California, where the band has been based for the remainder of their career, The Cult continued the musical experimentation of Electric with its follow-up album Sonic Temple (1989), which marked their first collaboration with Bob Rock, who would produce several of the band's subsequent albums. Sonic Temple was their most successful album to that point, entering the Top 10 on the UK and US charts, and included one of the band's most popular songs "Fire Woman". By the time of their fifth album Ceremony (1991), tensions and creative differences began to surface among the band members. This resulted in the recording sessions for Ceremony being held without a stable lineup, leaving Astbury and Duffy as the only two official members left, and featuring support from session musicians on bass and drums. The ongoing tension had carried over within the next four years, during which they released one more studio album, The Cult (1994), and called it quits in 1995. The Cult reformed in 1999 and released their seventh album Beyond Good and Evil two years later. The commercial failure of the album and resurfaced tensions led to the band going back on hiatus in 2002. They resumed activity in 2006, and have since released three more studio albums: Born into This (2007), Choice of Weapon (2012), and Hidden City (2016). History Early history (1981–1984) The band's origins can be traced to 1981, in Bradford, Yorkshire, where vocalist and songwriter Ian Astbury formed a band called Southern Death Cult. The name was chosen with a double meaning, and was derived from the 14th-century Native American religion, the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex or Southern Death Cult as it was sometimes known, from the Mississippi delta area, but it was also a stab at what the band viewed was the centralisation of power in Southern England (including that of the music industry); there has long been a perceived notion of a North–South divide based on social, historic and economic reasons. Astbury was joined by Buzz Burrows (guitar), Barry Jepson (bass) and Aki Nawaz Qureshi (drums); they performed their first show at the Queen's Hall in their hometown of Bradford on 29 October 1981. The band were at the forefront of an emerging style of music, in the form of post-punk and gothic rock, they achieved critical acclaim from the press and music fans. The band signed to independent record label Situation Two, an offshoot of Beggars Banquet Records, and released a three-track, triple A-side single, Moya, during this period. They toured through England headlining some shows and touring with Bauhaus and Theatre of Hate. The band played their final performance in Manchester during February 1983, meaning after only sixteen months the band was over. A compilation named The Southern Death Cult was released, this being a collection of the single, radio sessions with John Peel for Radio One and live performances - one of which an audience member recorded with a tape recorder. In April 1983, Astbury teamed up with guitarist Billy Duffy and formed the band "Death Cult". Duffy had been in the Nosebleeds (along with Morrissey), Lonesome No More and then Theatre of Hate. In addition to Astbury and Duffy, the band also included Jamie Stewart (bass) and Raymond Taylor Smith (later known as Ray Mondo) (drums), both from the Harrow, London based post-punk band, Ritual. Death Cult made their live debut in Oslo, Norway on 25 July 1983 and also released the Death Cult EP in the same month, then toured through mainland Europe and Scotland. In September 1983, Mondo was deported to his home country of Sierra Leone and replaced by Nigel Preston, formerly of Theatre of Hate. The single "Gods Zoo" was released in October 1983. Another European tour, with UK dates, followed that autumn. To tone down their name's gothic connotations and gain broader appeal, the band changed its name to "the Cult" in January 1984 before appearing on the (UK) Channel 4 television show, The Tube. The Cult's first studio record, Dreamtime, was recorded at Rockfield Studios, in Monmouth, Wales in 1984. The record was to be produced by Joe Julian, but after recording the drum tracks, the band decided to replace him with John Brand. Brand produced the record, but guitarist Duffy has said the drum tracks were produced by Julian, as Preston had become unreliable. The band recorded the songs which later became known as "Butterflies", "(The) Gimmick", "A Flower in the Desert", "Horse Nation", "Spiritwalker", "Bad Medicine (Waltz)", "Dreamtime", "With Love" (later known as "Ship of Fools", and also "Sea and Sky"), "Bone Bag", "Too Young", "83rd Dream", and one untitled outtake. It is unknown what the outtake was, or whether it was developed into a song at a later date. Songs like "Horse Nation" showed Astbury's intense interest in Native American issues, with the lyrics to "Horse Nation", "See them prancing, they come neighing, to a horse nation", taken almost verbatim from the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, while "Spiritwalker" dealt with shamanism, and the record's title and title track are overtly influenced by Australian Aboriginal beliefs. On 4 April 1984, the Cult released the single "Spiritwalker", which reached No. 1 on the independent charts in the UK, and acted as a teaser for their forthcoming album Dreamtime. This was followed that summer by a second single, "Go West (Crazy Spinning Circles)", before the release of Dreamtime in September; the album reached No. 21 in the UK, and sold over 100,000 copies in the UK alone. On 12 July 1984, the band recorded five songs at the BBC Maida Vale 5 studio for a Richard Skinner session. Before and after the album's release, the Cult toured throughout Europe and England before recording another single, "Ressurection Joe" (UK No. 74), released that December. Following a Christmas support slot with Big Country, the Cult toured Europe with support from the Mission (then called the Sisterhood). Dreamtime was released initially only in the UK, but after its success, and as the Cult's popularity grew worldwide, it was issued in approximately 30 countries. Mainstream success (1985–1990) In May 1985, the Cult released their fourth single, "She Sells Sanctuary", which peaked at No. 15 in the UK and spent 23 weeks in the Top 100. The song was recently voted No. 18 in VH1's Indie 100. In June 1985, following his increasingly erratic behaviour, Preston was fired from the band. Big Country's drummer Mark Brzezicki was picked to replace Preston, and was also included in the video for "She Sells Sanctuary". The Cult then finished recording their second album, Love in July and August 1985. The band's music and image shifted from their punk-oriented roots to 1960s psychedelia influences. Love was a chart success, peaking at No. 4 in the UK and selling 100,000 copies there toward a total of 500,000 copies throughout Europe, as well as 100,000 in Australia and 500,000 copies in the United States. Love reached number 20 on the charts in The Netherlands, where it remained for 32 weeks. To date, the record has sold over two and a half million copies worldwide. From late September 1985 to June 1986, the band went on a worldwide tour with new drummer Les Warner (who had played with Julian Lennon and Johnny Thunders). Two more singles from the Love album followed; "Rain" (charting in the UK at No. 17) and "Revolution" (charting in the UK at No. 30). Neither charted in the US. Another single, "Nirvana", was issued only in Poland. The album version of "Rain", as well as the remix "(Here Comes the) Rain", were used in the Italian horror film Dèmoni 2. Once back in England, the band booked themselves into the Manor Studios in Oxfordshire, with producer Steve Brown (who had produced Love), and recorded over a dozen new songs. The band were unhappy with the sound of their new album, titled Peace, and they decided to go to New York so producer Rick Rubin could remix the first single, "Love Removal Machine". Rubin agreed to work with the band, but only if they rerecorded the song. Rubin eventually talked them into rerecording the entire album. The band's record company, Beggars Banquet, was displeased with this, as two months and £250,000 had already been spent on the record. However, after hearing the initial New York recording, Beggars Banquet agreed to proceed. The first single, "Love Removal Machine", was released in February 1987, and the new version of the album appeared in April that year, now renamed as Electric, reaching No. 4 and eventually outselling Love. The band toured with Kid Chaos (also known as "Haggis" and "The Kid") on bass, with Stewart on rhythm guitar. Two more singles, "Lil Devil" and "Wild Flower", were released during 1987. A few tracks from the original Peace album appeared on the single versions of "Love Removal Machine", and "Lil Devil". The full Peace album would not be released until 2000, when it was included as Disc 3 of the Rare Cult box set. In the US, the Cult, now consisting of Astbury, Duffy, Stewart, Warner and Kid Chaos, were supported by the then-unknown Guns N' Roses. The band also appeared at Roskilde Festival in Denmark in June 1987. When the world tour wound through Australia, the band wrecked £30,000 worth of equipment, and as a result they could not tour Japan, as no company would rent them new equipment. At the end of the tour the Electric album had been certified Gold in the UK, and sold roughly 3 million copies worldwide, but the band were barely speaking to each other by then. Haggis left the band at the end of the Electric tour to form the Four Horsemen for Rubin's Def American label. Astbury and Duffy fired Warner and their management team Grant/Edwards, and moved to Los Angeles with original bassist Stewart. Warner sued the band several times for his firing, as well as for what he felt were unpaid royalties due to him for his performance on the Electric album, resulting in lengthy court battles. The Cult signed a new management deal and wrote 21 new songs for their next record. For the next album, Stewart returned to playing bass, and John Webster was brought in to play keyboards. The band used Chris Taylor to play drums during rehearsals and record the demos, with future Kiss drummer Eric Singer performing during the second demo recording sessions. The Cult eventually recruited session-drummer Mickey Curry to fill the drumming role and Aerosmith sound engineer, Bob Rock, to produce. Recorded in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from October to December 1988, the Sonic Temple record went Top 10 in both the UK and the US, where it was certified Gold and Platinum respectively. The band went on tour in support of the new album and new single "Fire Woman" (UK No. 15) (NZ No. 1), with yet another new drummer, Matt Sorum, and Webster as keyboard player. The next single, "Edie (Ciao Baby)" (UK No. 25) has become a regular song at concerts for many years. In Europe, the band toured with Aerosmith, and in the US, after releasing another single "Sun King" (UK No. 42), they spent 1989 touring in support of Metallica before heading out on their own headlining tour later that same year. A fourth single, "Sweet Soul Sister" (UK No. 38), was released in February 1990, with the video having been filmed at Wembley Arena, London, on 25 November 1989. "Sweet Soul Sister" was partially written in Paris and was inspired by the bohemian lifestyle of that city. Released as a single in February 1990, the song was another hit in the UK, and reportedly reached number one on the rock charts in Brazil. After playing a show in Atlanta, Georgia, in February 1990, the band's management told Astbury that his father had just died of cancer. As a result, the remainder of the tour was cancelled after a final leg of shows were performed in April. After the tour ended, the band were on the verge of splitting due to Stewart retiring and moving to Canada to be with his wife, and Sorum leaving to join Guns N' Roses. In 1990, Astbury organized the Gathering of the Tribes festival in Los Angeles and San Francisco with artists such as Soundgarden, Ice-T, Indigo Girls, Queen Latifah, Iggy Pop, the Charlatans, the Cramps and Public Enemy appearing. This two-day festival drew 40,000 people. Also in 1990, a ten CD box set was released in the UK, containing rare songs from the Cult's singles. The CDs in this box set were all issued as picture discs with rice paper covers, housed in a white box called "Singles Collection", or a black box called "E.P. Collection '84 - '90". In 1991, director Oliver Stone offered Astbury the role of Jim Morrison in Stone's film The Doors. He declined the role because he was not happy with the way Morrison was represented in the film, and the role was ultimately played by Val Kilmer. Ceremony and the lawsuit (1991–1993) In 1991, Astbury and Duffy were writing again for their next album. During the demo recordings, Todd Hoffman and James Kottak played bass and drums, respectively. During the actual album recording sessions, Curry was recruited again to play drums, with Charley Drayton on bass, and various other performers. Astbury and Duffy's working relationship had disintegrated by that time, with the two men reportedly rarely even being in the studio together during recording. The resulting album Ceremony was released to mixed responses. The album climbed to US No. 34, but sales were not as impressive as the previous three records, only selling around one million copies worldwide. Only two official singles were released from the record: "Wild Hearted Son" (UK No. 34, Canada No. 41) and "Heart of Soul" (UK No. 50), although "White" was released as a single only in Canada, "Sweet Salvation" was released as a single (as "Dulce Salvación") in Argentina in 1992, and the title track "Ceremony" was released in Spain. The Cult's Ceremonial Stomp tour went through Europe in 1991 and North America in 1992. In 1991 the Cult played a show at the Marquee Club in London, which was recorded and released in February 1993, packaged with some vinyl UK copies of their first greatest hits release. Only a handful of CD copies of it were ever manufactured originally, however it was subsequently reissued on CD in 1999. An incomplete bootleg video of this show is also in circulation. The band were sued by the parents of the Native American boy pictured on the cover of Ceremony, for alleged exploitation and for the unauthorized use of the child's image. The parents stated that the boy felt he had been cursed by the band's burning of his image, and was "emotionally scarred." This image of the boy is also burned in the video for "Wild Hearted Son". This lawsuit delayed the release of Ceremony in many countries including South Korea and Thailand, which did not see the record's release until late 1992, and it was unreleased in Turkey until the Cult played several shows in Istanbul in June 1993. A world tour followed with backing from drummer Michael Lee (Page & Plant, Little Angels), bassist Kinley "Barney" Wolfe (Lord Tracy, Black Oak Arkansas), and keyboardist John Sinclair (Ozzy Osbourne, Uriah Heep) returning one last time, and the Gathering of the Tribes moved to the UK. Here artists such as Pearl Jam performed. The warm-up gig to the show, in a small nightclub, was dedicated to the memory of Nigel Preston, who had died a few weeks earlier at the age of 28. Following the release of the single "The Witch" (#9 in Australia) and the performance of a song for the 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie soundtrack entitled "Zap City", produced by Steve Brown and originally a B-side to "Lil' Devil", two volumes of remixes of "She Sells Sanctuary", called Sanctuary Mixes MCMXCIII, volumes one and two, and in support of Pure Cult: for Rockers, Ravers, Lovers, and Sinners, a greatest hits compilation which debuted at No. 1 on the British charts and later went to number one in Portugal, Astbury and Duffy fired the "backing band" and recruited Craig Adams (the Mission) and Scott Garrett for performances across Europe in 1993, with some shows featuring Mike Dimkich on rhythm guitar. This tour marked the first time the band performed in Turkey, Greece, and the Slovak Republic. The Cult and first breakup (1994–1998) With the same line-up still in place, the band released The Cult in October 1994, produced by Bob Rock. The self-titled album is commonly referred to as the "Black Sheep" album by fans of the group, due to the image of a black sheep on the front cover. Astbury referred to the record as a collection of "very personal and very revealing" songs about his life, with the subject matter ranging from sexual abuse at the age of 15, to the death of Nigel Preston, to his directionless years spent in Glasgow in the late 1970s. The record achieved little success, only reaching No. 69 in the US and No. 21 in the UK. Duffy remarked that he thought that the record wouldn't sell well due to the offensive lyrics. The record went to number one in Portugal also, but quickly dropped out of sight. The single "Coming Down (Drug Tongue)" was released with the band going on tour in support of the new album. Only one more single, "Star", was officially released with a live appearance on UK TV show The Word. "Star" began life in 1986 as "Tom Petty" and was recorded at the "Sonic Temple" demo sessions as "Starchild", being dropped by the band during rehearsals. In 1993 the song was resurrected and was finally completed for the record in 1994 as, just simply, "Star". When the band began the Beauty's On The Streets tour in winter 1994, they augmented the line up with James Stevenson on rhythm guitar. As with the Ceremony record several years earlier, no other official singles were released, but several other songs were released on a strictly limited basis: "Sacred Life" was released in Spain and the Netherlands, "Be Free" was issued in Canada and France, "Saints Are Down" was issued in Greece, but none of the songs gained much commercial success. During this tour, the Cult made their first ever appearance in Norway. During the Black Rain tour of South America in spring of 1995, despite the fact that several more new songs had already been recorded, the tour was cancelled after an appearance in Rio de Janeiro in March, and the band split up citing unspecified problems on a recent South American tour. Astbury started up a garage band called Holy Barbarians a few months later. The band made their debut at the 100 Club in London in February 1996 and released their first (and only) record in May 1996, and toured throughout North America and Europe for the rest of 1996. The band started writing material for a second record in 1997, but the band was dissolved and Astbury began writing and recording a solo record. Throughout 1997 and 1998 Astbury recorded his solo record, originally to be titled Natural Born Guerilla, later called High Time Amplifier. Ultimately the record remained unreleased until June 2000 when it was released under the name Spirit\Light\Speed. Astbury played one solo concert in 1999. In November 1996, a number of CD reissues were released: the band's American record company released High Octane Cult, a slightly updated greatest hits compilation released only in the US and Japan; The Southern Death Cult, a remastered edition of the fifteen-song compilation CD; a ten-song compilation CD by Death Cult called Ghost Dance, consisting of the untitled four-song EP, the single "God's Zoo", and four unreleased songs from a radio broadcast; and a remastered repackaging of the Dreamtime album, containing only the ten original songs from the record in their original playing order and almost completely different but original artwork. Dreamtime Live at the Lyceum was also remastered and issued on video and for the first time on CD, with the one unreleased song from the concert, "Gimmick". First reunion, Beyond Good and Evil and second hiatus (1999–2005) In 1999, Astbury and Duffy reformed the Cult with Matt Sorum and ex-Porno for Pyros bassist Martyn LeNoble. Their first official concert was at the Tibetan Freedom Concert in June 1999, after having rehearsed at shows in the Los Angeles area. The band's 1999 Cult Rising reunion tour resulted in a sold out 30 date tour of the US, ending with 8 consecutive sold out nights at the LA House of Blues. In 2000, the band toured South Africa for the first time, and North and South America, and contributed the song "Painted on My Heart" to the soundtrack of the movie Gone In 60 Seconds. The song was featured prominently and the melody was fused into parts of the score. In June, Astbury's long-delayed solo record was finally released as Spirit\Light\Speed, but it failed to gain much success. In November 2000, another authorised greatest hits compilation was released, Pure Cult: The Singles 1984–1995, along with an accompanying DVD, which was later certified gold in Canada. The Cult, as well as Ian Astbury, performed on separate tracks on the Doors tribute album, Stoned Immaculate: The Music of The Doors, covering "Wild Child" and "Touch Me". In November 2000, Beggars Banquet released 15,000 copies of a six-disc boxset (with a bonus seventh disc of remixes for the first 5000 copies) titled Rare Cult. The box set consists of album out-takes, demos, radio broadcasts, and album B-sides. It is most notable for including the previously unreleased "Peace" album in its entirety. In 2001, the band signed to Atlantic Records and recorded a new album, Beyond Good and Evil, originally being produced by Mick Jones of Foreigner, until Jones bowed out to tour with Foreigner. Astbury and Duffy co-wrote a song with Jones, an odd occurrence, as in the past, neither Astbury or Duffy would co-write their material. Bob Rock was the producer, with Martyn LeNoble and Chris Wyse as recording bassists, as Mike Dimkich played rhythm guitar on tour, and Matt Sorum returning as drummer. Although Sorum has previously toured with the band on the Sonic Temple tour in 1989, this was the first time that he had recorded a studio album with the band. However Beyond Good and Evil was not the comeback record the band had hoped for. Despite reaching No. 37 in the US, No. 22 in Canada, and No. 25 in Spain, sales quickly dropped, only selling roughly 500,000 copies worldwide. The first single "Rise", reached No. 41 in the US, and No. 2 on the mainstream rock charts, but Atlantic Records quickly pulled the song from radio playlists. Astbury would later describe the experience with Atlantic to be "soul destroying", after Atlantic tried to tamper with the lyrics, the record cover, and choice of singles from the record. After the first single from the record, the band's working relationship with Atlantic was on paper only, with Atlantic pulling "Rise" from the radio stations playlists, and stopping all promotion of the record. The second single "Breathe" was only released as a radio station promo, and the final single "True Believers" was only on a compilation sampler disc released in January 2002 (after the Cult's tour had already ended). Despite "True Believers" receiving radio airplay in Australia, both singles went largely unnoticed, and both Astbury and Duffy walked away from the project. LeNoble rejoined the band for the initial dates in early 2001, and Billy Morrison filled in on bass for the majority of the 2001 tour. The European tour of 2001 was canceled, largely due to security concerns after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the band flew back to the US to tour again with Aerosmith. But the eleven-week tour was considered by fans to be a disaster, as the band played only a brief rundown of their greatest hits. In October 2001, a show at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles was filmed for release on DVD. After the tour ended in December 2001, the band took most of 2002 off, apart from a few shows in the US to promote the release of the DVD, with Scott Garrett and Craig Adams rejoining the band. Despite the commercial disappointment of Beyond Good and Evil and the supporting tour, the band was voted "Comeback of the Year" by Metal Edge readers in the magazine's 2001 Readers' Choice Awards. In late 2002, Ian Astbury declared the Cult to be "on ice" indefinitely, after performing a brief series of dates in October 2002 to promote the release of the Music Without Fear DVD. During this second hiatus, Astbury performed as a member of the Doors (later dubbed the Doors of the 21st Century, later still renamed D21c, and most recently known as Riders on the Storm) with two of the original members of that group. D21c was sued numerous times, both by Jim Morrison's family and by drummer John Densmore. Astbury supposedly started work on recording another solo album that later became the backbone for the Cult's Born into This. At the same time, Duffy was part of Coloursound with bassist Craig Adams and ex-Alarm frontman Mike Peters, then Dead Men Walking (again with Peters) and later Cardboard Vampyres. Sorum became a member of the hard rock supergroup Velvet Revolver. In 2003, all of the Cult's records were issued on CD, with several bonus tracks being issued on the Russian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian versions. These eastern European releases had many printing mistakes on the jacket sleeves and lyric inserts. In October 2004, all of the Cult's records were again remastered and issued again on CD, this time in Japan in different cardboard foldout sleeves. "She Sells Sanctuary" appeared in the 2002 video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, playing on rock station V-Rock. Second reunion, Born Into This and Capsule EPs (2006–2010) Despite Astbury's previous statement from 2004 that a reunion would not happen, The Cult announced in January 2006 that they were reuniting for "some limited gigs" throughout the year. A month later, the band made their first live appearance in three-and-a-half years on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Their lineup consisted of Astbury (vocals), Duffy (lead guitar), John Tempesta (drums), Dimkich (rhythm guitar) and Wyse (returning as bassist). Their first stage show was held in March 2006 in San Francisco, California, at The Fillmore. The entire tour was recorded by Instant Live and sold after each show. In May, they did an eight date tour in Canada. Later that summer, they toured central and eastern Europe and played their first concerts in Bulgaria, Poland and Serbia. An eleven-date UK tour followed as well as several more dates in the United States, finishing with a South American tour in December. That year, Duffy began the band Circus Diablo with Billy Morrison, Sorum, Brett Scallions and Ricky Warwick. During these tours, the band occasionally played an extended set, including several songs the band had not performed in decades: "King Contrary Man" and "Hollow Man", neither of which had been performed since 1987; also, "Libertine" was performed approximately three times, for the first time since 2000, and "Brother Wolf, Sister Moon", which was only performed one time since 1986 (for this particular song, the band played an abridged version which has never been performed before or since) Astbury announced in February 2007 that he was leaving Riders on the Storm and returning to the Cult. He stated: "I have decided to move on and focus on my own music and legacy." The Cult was featured on Stuffmagazine.com's list of ultimate air guitar players. On 21 March 2007, it was announced that the band would be touring Europe with the Who. The first confirmed tour date was in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in early June, with at least a dozen shows set to follow. The band played a gig in London's West End at the CC Club on 7 June 2007, along with nearly two dozen shows across continental Europe during summer. The tour also includes the first performance in Romania and Croatia. On 29 May 2007, the band signed a deal with major metal label Roadrunner Records. Their 8th studio album, titled Born into This was released on 16 October, and was produced by Martin "Youth" Glover, bass player for Killing Joke. Born into This was released as regular single disc and limited edition double disc, the second disk being a bonus 5-track CD holding the following tracks: "Stand Alone", "War Pony Destroyer", "I Assassin (Demo)", "Sound of Destruction (Demo)" and "Savages (Extended Version)". Prior to the album's release, the band played festival and headline dates, and supported the Who in Europe through summer 2007, with a US headline tour to follow. The band's appearance at Irving Plaza in New York City in early November 2006 was filmed and was released in 2007. The Cult New York City, issued by Fontana North and is the Cult's first high definition DVD release. Meanwhile, Astbury lent vocals on two tracks of the 2007 Unkle album "War Stories", one of them being the first single from the album, "Burn My Shadow". The band performed a UK and European tour in late-February and early-March 2008. On 24 March, they began their North American tour including a major 13-city tour in Canada. During September 2008, the Cult did a brief series of dates in the northeast United States, and they toured in Brazil as part of the South American tour in October 2008. As of May 2008, according to The Gauntlet, the Cult are currently unsigned and no longer under contract with Roadrunner Records. In October 2008, it was announced that the Cult would headline the inaugural Rock 'n' Roll Marathon in San Antonio, to be run 16 November 2008. The Cult announced plans for a tour showcasing their 1985 Love album across the US and then the UK in October where they will play at the Royal Albert Hall. Coinciding with the remastered Love album and four-disc Omnibus boxed set, the Cult kicked off the long-awaited Love Live Tour in late summer. Performing their classic Love album in its entirety, each show was played with the Love tracks opening with "Nirvana" to "Black Angel". A quick intermission followed, then other Cult hits were played (varying by venue): "Sun King", "Dirty Little Rock Star", "Electric Ocean", "Illuminated". Then followed the favorites "Fire Woman", "Lil Devil", "Wild Flower", and lastly "Love Removal Machine". In the evening of 10 October 2009 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, the band performed a second encore with original Cult bassist Jamie Stewart and drummer Mark Brzezicki, who played drums with the band during the Love album recording sessions in July and August 1985. The band sold Love Live USB flash drives for each show during the tour. The Cult entered 2010 continuing their Love Live Tour and announcing more dates in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. The band finished recording a four-track "Capsule" with producer Chris Goss. Capsule 1 was said to be the first of three or four to be released sometime in summer 2010. Release formats include CD-DVD dualdisc, 12-inch vinyl, and digital downloads. Capsule 1 was released on 14 September 2010. The band officially announced the release of its first new studio recording since 2007, "Every Man And Woman Is A Star". The new single was released through the iTunes Store on 31 July 2010. On 1 August 2010, the band played the sold-out music festival Sonisphere, which marked their first UK performance since the tour for their Love album. During the performance they debuted their new single, "Every Man and Woman is a Star", which was released on 1 August 2010. On 14 September 2010 the band embarked on a new U.S. tour and released Capsule 1 in conjunction with media technology company Aderra Inc. and made it available in multiple formats including a CD-DVD DualDisc, USB flash drive, 12 inch vinyl, FLAC download and MP3 download. The collection includes a short film made by singer Ian Astbury and Rick Rogers. On 26 October 2010 the band and Aderra Inc. announced the release of a new song, "Embers", for 1 November 2010 and Capsule 2 available through their web store on 16 November 2010. Pictures from the Cult's tour stop in Chicago on 28 October 2010 can be seen at a local radio station website. On 17 September 2010, the band performed live at the Fall Frenzy concert at the Tempe Beach Park in Tempe, Arizona. Other bands that played at this concert were Stone Temple Pilots, Shinedown, and Sevendust. On 4 December 2010, the band performed a live set for Guitar Center Sessions on DirecTV. The episode included an interview with the band by program host, Nic Harcourt. Choice of Weapon and Hidden City (2011–2017) During the Cult's concert at the Hammersmith Apollo in London on 21 January 2011 Ian Astbury declared that the Cult would be recording a new album directly after the tour. They also announced that they would be working with Chris Goss, who performed with Masters of Reality as a supporting act the same evening. On 11 May 2011, it was announced that the Cult were signed to Cooking Vinyl Records, who will release the new album in early 2012. Commented guitarist Billy Duffy: "We are very much looking forward to returning to our U.K. roots in many ways working with Cooking Vinyl." Vocalist Ian Astbury added, "We look forward to a long and fruitful relationship with Cooking Vinyl." By May 2011, the band had been writing and recording new demos at its Witch Mountain studio hideaway in the Hollywood Hills, and began recording their new album at Hollywood Recording Studios. In October 2011, bassist Chris Wyse stated the album was almost finished and expected to be released in April 2012. Chris also described it as a "Zep/Stooges mix of energy." On 29 November 2011, it was announced that the album would be produced by Bob Rock, who provided the same role on Sonic Temple, The Cult and Beyond Good and Evil. The album, entitled Choice of Weapon, was released on 22 May 2012. The band partnered with Rolling Stone to premiere the first song from the album titled Lucifer on 30 January. On 5 February 2012, the Cult song "She Sells Sanctuary" was used as the soundtrack for a Budweiser commercial in a mashup with Flo Rida aired during Super Bowl XLVI. In May 2012 the Cult appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and played "For The Animals". On 28 September 2012, it was announced that the band would release Weapon of Choice, a "prequel" album to accompany the band's latest album, Choice of Weapon. The digital-only release, available exclusively on iTunes for two months only beginning 16 October, features the songs that were ultimately included in "Choice Of Weapon" at an earlier stage of development. Explaining the motivations behind the release, singer Ian Astbury said that "These songs were turned over and over, forged in long rehearsals and writing sessions, and emanated from challenges both personal and professional. We put our guts into this; [Producer Chris] Goss was able to create an environment where the songs were born through playing and turning over lyrics, through hard work and intense sessions." Astbury added "These songs have an integrity and rawness of their own. In many ways it's a different album to the one we released and reveals the foundations of 'Choice Of Weapon'. We were able to close the doors and begin to explore spaces we had not been in for a while." The song "Twisted and Bleeding" was made available for free download at the band's website ahead of the full digital release. On 20 June 2013, the band announced the release of Electric-Peace which comprises the entire Electric album plus the Peace album which was previously released on the now discontinued Rare Cult box set in 2000. It is due for release in the US on 30 July. In 2013 Mike Dimkich left the band and joined Bad Religion to cover for guitarist Greg Hetson. James Stevenson, from the Beauty's On The Streets tour in 1994, replaced Dimkich as the Cult's rhythm guitarist. In March 2013, Billy Duffy told the Argentinan journalist Fabrizio Pedrotti that the Cult had begun work on a new album for a 2014 release. The band were expected to begin work on the album after they finish their 2013 world tour, where they played the Electric album in its entirety. In August 2014, Billy added that the next album, which was not expected to be released before 2015 at the earliest, "will be more guitar heavy". On 5 November 2015, it was announced that The Cult would release their new album, entitled Hidden City, on 5 February 2016. The album is said to be the final part of a trilogy that began with Born into This, and marks the fifth time Bob Rock had produced a Cult album. The band also announced that they had hired Australian-born bassist Grant Fitzpatrick (ex-Mink) as the replacement for Chris Wyse. Chris Chaney (Jane's Addiction, Camp Freddy) and producer Bob Rock performed session bass on the album. In support of Hidden City, The Cult opened for Guns N' Roses on the Not in This Lifetime... Tour. In an October 2016 interview with PopMatters journalist J.C. Maçek III, Cult guitarist Billy Duffy spoke of the band's playlist while on tour, saying "Obviously you want to make an impactful [show]," he continues. "There are some practical, pragmatic decisions made. If you're playing to a crowd who are not very familiar with you, there's no point of going too deep but we do always make sure we play a new song. Like on Guns N' Roses' [tour] we had fifty minutes which is ten songs all in. So, you know we just made sure that in those ten songs we played 'Deeply Ordered Chaos' which we’re proud of and it makes a certain statement. And it just alerts people to the fact that, yes, we have made a record in the last 30 years. You know and that's a good thing. Psychologically, that's the blood transfusion that we need. And we're very mindful, we have a very loyal fan base. We don't pander as you well know." Upcoming eleventh studio album (2018–present) In an April 2018 interview with Guitar World, guitarist Billy Duffy was asked if another album from The Cult was in the works. He replied, "Never say never! Ian and I enjoy the process of making new music, and we feel it's vital to keep the band healthy, even if it's pretty much in the law of diminishing returns area now. Who knows if it will be a whole album a series of singles or an EP? I can say new Cult music will be forthcoming, but these days we don't rush it as there's no point. Quality is key. We are past the point of having to release stuff so if we feel it's good enough, then we will release it in some shape or another." On 2 April 2018, a tour of the United States of America called "Revolution 3 Tour" was announced for the summer. They performed as one of the three headliners, along with Stone Temple Pilots and Bush. In April 2019, The Cult announced that they would celebrate the 30th anniversary of the release of their fourth album Sonic Temple with a world tour, which began on 2 May in Houston, Texas and was expected to wrap up in 2020. In a June 2019 interview with LA Weekly, vocalist Ian Astbury stated that The Cult were "long overdue" to release new music. He was quoted as saying: "We do have some stuff we've been working on, but it's yet to see the light of day." Six months later, Astbury told Atlantic City Weekly that the band was going to start working on new music in 2020: "We've got a few pieces lying around in various stages of completion. The intention is to get together in the New Year and take a look at what we've got and decide how we are going to go about moving forward. It's an essential part of any creative lifeblood." On May 6, 2020, The Cult announced on their Twitter page that they had signed to Black Hill Records. On August 15, 2020, Duffy announced on his Twitter that the band were recording their new album with producer Tom Dalgety at Rockfield Studios, where The Cult had recorded their debut album Dreamtime 36 years earlier. In support of their new album, The Cult will embark on a co-headlining six-date UK tour with Alice Cooper in May and June 2022. Influences Duffy and Astbury cited among their influences a lot of different bands "from the Doors to Led Zeppelin. We literally went from the front of our record collections to the back. And then along the way we were drawn in by the likes of Public Image Ltd, Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees. You might not hear it in the music but it's there." They also cited Bauhaus among many other post-punk influences. Duffy also praised Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers for a major performance he attended in 1977 and Siouxsie and the Banshees whom "always had great guitar players with killer riffs." Duffy also hailed AC/DC for "the power of a good three chord riff", Pete Townshend of the Who "in terms of commitment to stage performing" and Brian May of Queen for using "‘echoplex’ tape delays to orchestrate his own solo". Musical style According to music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine, the band fuse a "hardcore punk revivalist" sound with the "pseudo-mysticism ... of the Doors and Uriah Heep and the guitar-orchestrations of Led Zeppelin and The Cure ... while adding touches of post-punk goth rock". In 1985 Astbury said, "Our music is just melodies and guitars. We're like Big Country and U2, only better!". Members Current members Ian Astbury – lead vocals, occasional percussion/guitar Billy Duffy – lead and rhythm guitars, backing vocals John Tempesta – drums, percussion Grant Fitzpatrick – bass, backing vocals Damon Fox – keyboards, rhythm guitar, backing vocals Discography Dreamtime (1984) Love (1985) Electric (1987) Sonic Temple (1989) Ceremony (1991) The Cult (1994) Beyond Good and Evil (2001) Born into This (2007) Choice of Weapon (2012) Hidden City (2016) References External links Official website Billy Duffy official website Musical groups established in 1983 Situation Two artists Beggars Banquet Records artists Sire Records artists Musical groups from Bradford English post-punk music groups English gothic rock groups English hard rock musical groups English heavy metal musical groups English glam metal musical groups	false	[ "The Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore was a sanctuary in ancient Syracuse in Sicily, dedicated to Demeter and Kore (Persephone).\n\nThe sanctuary was founded on the Ortygia in the Piazza Archimede. Numerous female terracotta figurines from the 8th-century BC has been excavated. The sanctuary was moved to the acropolis of Syracuse in the 5th century BC.\n\nThe cult of Demeter was benefited by Gelon, tyrant of Syracuse, as a way to unite the Greek population during his expansionism on Sicily. Gelon was the hereditary chief priest of Demeter's cult in Gela, a cult that was popular also in Syracuse and Camarina, and he used the Demeter cult as well as the fight against Carthage to unite Syracuse, Gela and Camarina. After his successful war against Carthage, Gelon used the spoils of war to finance the new sanctuary of Demeter in Syracuse.\n\nThe new sanctuary was situated below the Piazza Vittoria in Syracuse. Remains has been found of a large sanctuary including a temple stereobate and the foundations of an altar. A great quantity of votive material has been found on the site. The sanctuary was described by Plato as the location of the city Thesmophoria. The Thesmophoria lasted ten days in Syracuse, in contrast to the three days in Athens.\n\nThe festival has been described by Plutarch, as well as by Athenaeus:\n \"... in Syracuse, on the Day of Consummation at the Thesmophoria, cakes of sesame and honey were moulded in the shape of female pudenda, and called throughout the whole of Sicily mylloi and carried about in honour of the goddesses. \"\nGelon spread the cult to Syracuse's dependencies Aetna, Himera and Acrae, and the cult of Demeter and Persephone was to spread throughout all Sicily and become immensely popular in the entire island.\n\nReferences\n\n Donald White, Demeter's Sicilian cult as a political instrumenf, 1964/65, GRBS 5/6, 26,1,79\n Susan-Marie Cronkite, The Sanctuary of Demeter at Mytilene: A Diachronic and Contextual Study. Volume Two Catalogue, 1997, Institute of Archaeology, University College London\n\nTemples of Demeter\nTemples of Persephone\n5th-century BC religious buildings and structures\nAncient Syracuse", "Cult is an American mystery psychological thriller television series created by Rockne S. O'Bannon that ran on The CW from February 19 to July 12, 2013, and originally aired on Tuesdays at 9:00 pm Eastern/8:00 pm Central. The series centers on a journalist blogger and a production assistant, who investigate a series of mysterious disappearances that are linked to a popular television series named Cult.\n\nOn February 27, 2013, The CW announced that starting March 8 Cult would air on Fridays at 9:00 pm Eastern/8:00 pm Central. On April 10, 2013, Cult was canceled and removed from the schedule. The CW began airing the six remaining episodes on June 28, 2013.\n\nPlot \nThe series follows Jeff (Matthew Davis), a journalist blogger, and Skye (Jessica Lucas), a production researcher on a popular television crime series called Cult, as they investigate the fans of the series, who could be re-creating the crimes committed on the series.\n\nCast and characters\n\nMain cast \n Matthew Davis as Jeffrey Dean \"Jeff\" Sefton, a journalist blogger.\n Jessica Lucas as Skye Yarrow, a production assistant.\n Alona Tal as Marti Gerritsen, an actress playing Kelly Collins on a show called Cult.\n Robert Knepper as Roger Reeves, an actor playing Billy Grimm on a show called Cult.\n\nRecurring cast \n Marie Avgeropoulos as Kirstie\n Christian Cooper as Andy\n Aisha Hinds as Det. Roslyn Sakelik\n Andrew Leeds as Kyle Segal\n Stacey Farber as E.J.\n Ben Hollingsworth as Peter Grey\n\nProduction \nCult was originally supposed to air on the now defunct network, The WB. When The WB was replaced by The CW, the executives of The CW at that time dropped the show, which was supposed to star Matthew Bomer. In January 2012, a revised version of the series was revived on The CW with a pilot order. The series was created by Rockne S. O'Bannon, who also serves as executive producer alongside Josh Schwartz, Stephanie Savage, Len Goldstein and the production companies Warner Bros. Television and Fake Empire Productions.\n\nJessica Lucas was cast in the lead role of Skye Yarrow in February 2012, a young production assistant who teams with a journalist blogger to investigate the fans of a popular television series entitled Cult. Alona Tal was cast next as Marti Gerritsen, the actress playing the role of Kelly Collins in the fictional series Cult. Robert Knepper then followed in the role of Roger Reeves, the actor playing the role of Billy Grimm in the show-within-a-show. Matthew Davis was cast in the lead role of Jeff Sefton, the journalist blogger working with Skye and Andrew Leeds was cast in the recurring role of Kyle Segal, the executive working on the show-within-a-show. Ben Hollingsworth will also have a recurring role, as associate producer Peter Grey. Stacey Farber joined the series in a recurring role as E.J. a tech-savvy girl, who works with Jeff and helps him in the search for his sibling.\n\nThe pilot was officially picked up by The CW on May 11, 2012.\n\nAbout the show's reception, Rockne S. O'Bannon said: \"It was such an unusual piece of material, and for better or for worse, such a singular vision piece that the network and the studio were very respectful of what I wanted to do with it. I'm very proud of this show because, though it went nowhere very quickly, it was very well received.\"\n\nStar Matt Davis blames Cult being canceled on marketing and jokingly express his frustration over the announcement on Twitter:\"Good news Cult fans! Cult has been renewed for the next ten season due to its brilliant marketing campaign! Good job everyone.\" and then added \"It was a wonderful learning experience, and exciting misadventure.\"\n\nAbout the show cancelation, Jessica Lucas said: \"That show was never supposed to be just a thirteen-episode show. It opened up a ton of questions in the first season and you never get to find out what happened. But this is the nature of it and I don’t do things for results, I do things for experience. I really wanted to stay in that role and I really wanted to stay involved in that world and I can’t control whether people see it or how it went. I would have liked to do more of it – it just obviously didn’t turn out that way.\"\n\nEpisodes\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n\n2010s American drama television series\n2010s American horror television series\n2010s American mystery television series\n2013 American television series debuts\n2013 American television series endings\nAmerican thriller television series\nTelevision series about cults\nThe CW original programming\nEnglish-language television shows\nFictional cults\nHorror drama television series\nPsychological thriller television series\nTelevision series about actors\nTelevision series about television\nTelevision series by CBS Studios\nTelevision series by Warner Bros. Television Studios\nTelevision shows filmed in Vancouver\nTelevision shows set in Los Angeles" ]
[ "The Cult", "The Cult (1994-1995)", "What were they doing in 1994", "place, the band released The Cult in October 1994, produced by Bob Rock.", "Was the cult popular", "The self-titled 'Cult' album is commonly referred to as the 'Black Sheep' album by fans of the group." ]	C_66bf99c1483943608bfaa88bd0e08d05_0	Did it win awards	3	Did the album "Cult" by The Cult win awards?	The Cult	With the same line-up still in place, the band released The Cult in October 1994, produced by Bob Rock. The self-titled 'Cult' album is commonly referred to as the 'Black Sheep' album by fans of the group. Astbury referred to the record as "very personal and very revealing" songs about his life, with the subject matter ranging from sexual abuse at the age of 15, to the death of Nigel Preston, to his directionless years spent in Glasgow in the late 1970s. The record achieved little success, only reaching No. 69 in the US and No. 21 in the UK. Duffy remarked that he thought that the record wouldn't sell well due to the offensive lyrics. The record went to number one in Portugal also, but quickly dropped out of sight. The single "Coming Down (Drug Tongue)" was released with the band going on tour in support of the new album. Only one more single, "Star", was officially released with a live appearance on UK TV show The Word. "Star" began life in 1986 as "Tom Petty" and was recorded at the "Sonic Temple" demo sessions as "Starchild", being dropped by the band during rehearsals. In 1993 the song was resurrected and was finally completed for the record in 1994 as, just simply, "Star". When the band began the Beauty's On The Streets tour in winter 1994, they augmented the line up with James Stevenson on rhythm guitar. As with the Ceremony record several years earlier, no other official singles were released, but several other songs were released on a strictly limited basis: "Sacred Life" was released in Spain and the Netherlands, "Be Free" was issued in Canada and France, "Saints Are Down" was issued in Greece, but none of the songs gained much commercial success. During this tour, the Cult made their first ever appearance in Norway. CANNOTANSWER	The record achieved little success, only reaching No. 69 in the US and No. 21 in the UK.	The Cult are an English rock band formed in 1983 in Bradford, West Yorkshire. Before settling on their current name in January 1984, the band performed under the name Death Cult, which was an evolution of the name of lead singer Ian Astbury's previous band Southern Death Cult. They gained a dedicated following in the United Kingdom in the mid-1980s as a post-punk/gothic rock band, with singles such as "She Sells Sanctuary", before breaking into the mainstream in the United States in the late 1980s establishing themselves as a hard rock band with singles such as "Love Removal Machine". Since its initial formation in 1983, the band have had various line-ups; the longest-serving members are Astbury and guitarist Billy Duffy, who are also the band's two songwriters. The Cult's debut studio album Dreamtime was released in 1984 to moderate success, with its lead single "Spiritwalker" reaching No. 1 on the UK Indie Chart. Their second studio album, Love (1985), was even more successful, charting at No. 4 in the UK and including singles such as "She Sells Sanctuary" and "Rain". The band's third album, Electric (1987), launched them new heights of success, also peaking at No. 4 in the UK and charting highly in other territories, and spawned the hit singles "Love Removal Machine", "Lil' Devil" and "Wild Flower". On that album, The Cult supplemented their post-punk sound with hard rock; the polish on this new sound was facilitated by producer Rick Rubin. After moving to Los Angeles, California, where the band has been based for the remainder of their career, The Cult continued the musical experimentation of Electric with its follow-up album Sonic Temple (1989), which marked their first collaboration with Bob Rock, who would produce several of the band's subsequent albums. Sonic Temple was their most successful album to that point, entering the Top 10 on the UK and US charts, and included one of the band's most popular songs "Fire Woman". By the time of their fifth album Ceremony (1991), tensions and creative differences began to surface among the band members. This resulted in the recording sessions for Ceremony being held without a stable lineup, leaving Astbury and Duffy as the only two official members left, and featuring support from session musicians on bass and drums. The ongoing tension had carried over within the next four years, during which they released one more studio album, The Cult (1994), and called it quits in 1995. The Cult reformed in 1999 and released their seventh album Beyond Good and Evil two years later. The commercial failure of the album and resurfaced tensions led to the band going back on hiatus in 2002. They resumed activity in 2006, and have since released three more studio albums: Born into This (2007), Choice of Weapon (2012), and Hidden City (2016). History Early history (1981–1984) The band's origins can be traced to 1981, in Bradford, Yorkshire, where vocalist and songwriter Ian Astbury formed a band called Southern Death Cult. The name was chosen with a double meaning, and was derived from the 14th-century Native American religion, the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex or Southern Death Cult as it was sometimes known, from the Mississippi delta area, but it was also a stab at what the band viewed was the centralisation of power in Southern England (including that of the music industry); there has long been a perceived notion of a North–South divide based on social, historic and economic reasons. Astbury was joined by Buzz Burrows (guitar), Barry Jepson (bass) and Aki Nawaz Qureshi (drums); they performed their first show at the Queen's Hall in their hometown of Bradford on 29 October 1981. The band were at the forefront of an emerging style of music, in the form of post-punk and gothic rock, they achieved critical acclaim from the press and music fans. The band signed to independent record label Situation Two, an offshoot of Beggars Banquet Records, and released a three-track, triple A-side single, Moya, during this period. They toured through England headlining some shows and touring with Bauhaus and Theatre of Hate. The band played their final performance in Manchester during February 1983, meaning after only sixteen months the band was over. A compilation named The Southern Death Cult was released, this being a collection of the single, radio sessions with John Peel for Radio One and live performances - one of which an audience member recorded with a tape recorder. In April 1983, Astbury teamed up with guitarist Billy Duffy and formed the band "Death Cult". Duffy had been in the Nosebleeds (along with Morrissey), Lonesome No More and then Theatre of Hate. In addition to Astbury and Duffy, the band also included Jamie Stewart (bass) and Raymond Taylor Smith (later known as Ray Mondo) (drums), both from the Harrow, London based post-punk band, Ritual. Death Cult made their live debut in Oslo, Norway on 25 July 1983 and also released the Death Cult EP in the same month, then toured through mainland Europe and Scotland. In September 1983, Mondo was deported to his home country of Sierra Leone and replaced by Nigel Preston, formerly of Theatre of Hate. The single "Gods Zoo" was released in October 1983. Another European tour, with UK dates, followed that autumn. To tone down their name's gothic connotations and gain broader appeal, the band changed its name to "the Cult" in January 1984 before appearing on the (UK) Channel 4 television show, The Tube. The Cult's first studio record, Dreamtime, was recorded at Rockfield Studios, in Monmouth, Wales in 1984. The record was to be produced by Joe Julian, but after recording the drum tracks, the band decided to replace him with John Brand. Brand produced the record, but guitarist Duffy has said the drum tracks were produced by Julian, as Preston had become unreliable. The band recorded the songs which later became known as "Butterflies", "(The) Gimmick", "A Flower in the Desert", "Horse Nation", "Spiritwalker", "Bad Medicine (Waltz)", "Dreamtime", "With Love" (later known as "Ship of Fools", and also "Sea and Sky"), "Bone Bag", "Too Young", "83rd Dream", and one untitled outtake. It is unknown what the outtake was, or whether it was developed into a song at a later date. Songs like "Horse Nation" showed Astbury's intense interest in Native American issues, with the lyrics to "Horse Nation", "See them prancing, they come neighing, to a horse nation", taken almost verbatim from the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, while "Spiritwalker" dealt with shamanism, and the record's title and title track are overtly influenced by Australian Aboriginal beliefs. On 4 April 1984, the Cult released the single "Spiritwalker", which reached No. 1 on the independent charts in the UK, and acted as a teaser for their forthcoming album Dreamtime. This was followed that summer by a second single, "Go West (Crazy Spinning Circles)", before the release of Dreamtime in September; the album reached No. 21 in the UK, and sold over 100,000 copies in the UK alone. On 12 July 1984, the band recorded five songs at the BBC Maida Vale 5 studio for a Richard Skinner session. Before and after the album's release, the Cult toured throughout Europe and England before recording another single, "Ressurection Joe" (UK No. 74), released that December. Following a Christmas support slot with Big Country, the Cult toured Europe with support from the Mission (then called the Sisterhood). Dreamtime was released initially only in the UK, but after its success, and as the Cult's popularity grew worldwide, it was issued in approximately 30 countries. Mainstream success (1985–1990) In May 1985, the Cult released their fourth single, "She Sells Sanctuary", which peaked at No. 15 in the UK and spent 23 weeks in the Top 100. The song was recently voted No. 18 in VH1's Indie 100. In June 1985, following his increasingly erratic behaviour, Preston was fired from the band. Big Country's drummer Mark Brzezicki was picked to replace Preston, and was also included in the video for "She Sells Sanctuary". The Cult then finished recording their second album, Love in July and August 1985. The band's music and image shifted from their punk-oriented roots to 1960s psychedelia influences. Love was a chart success, peaking at No. 4 in the UK and selling 100,000 copies there toward a total of 500,000 copies throughout Europe, as well as 100,000 in Australia and 500,000 copies in the United States. Love reached number 20 on the charts in The Netherlands, where it remained for 32 weeks. To date, the record has sold over two and a half million copies worldwide. From late September 1985 to June 1986, the band went on a worldwide tour with new drummer Les Warner (who had played with Julian Lennon and Johnny Thunders). Two more singles from the Love album followed; "Rain" (charting in the UK at No. 17) and "Revolution" (charting in the UK at No. 30). Neither charted in the US. Another single, "Nirvana", was issued only in Poland. The album version of "Rain", as well as the remix "(Here Comes the) Rain", were used in the Italian horror film Dèmoni 2. Once back in England, the band booked themselves into the Manor Studios in Oxfordshire, with producer Steve Brown (who had produced Love), and recorded over a dozen new songs. The band were unhappy with the sound of their new album, titled Peace, and they decided to go to New York so producer Rick Rubin could remix the first single, "Love Removal Machine". Rubin agreed to work with the band, but only if they rerecorded the song. Rubin eventually talked them into rerecording the entire album. The band's record company, Beggars Banquet, was displeased with this, as two months and £250,000 had already been spent on the record. However, after hearing the initial New York recording, Beggars Banquet agreed to proceed. The first single, "Love Removal Machine", was released in February 1987, and the new version of the album appeared in April that year, now renamed as Electric, reaching No. 4 and eventually outselling Love. The band toured with Kid Chaos (also known as "Haggis" and "The Kid") on bass, with Stewart on rhythm guitar. Two more singles, "Lil Devil" and "Wild Flower", were released during 1987. A few tracks from the original Peace album appeared on the single versions of "Love Removal Machine", and "Lil Devil". The full Peace album would not be released until 2000, when it was included as Disc 3 of the Rare Cult box set. In the US, the Cult, now consisting of Astbury, Duffy, Stewart, Warner and Kid Chaos, were supported by the then-unknown Guns N' Roses. The band also appeared at Roskilde Festival in Denmark in June 1987. When the world tour wound through Australia, the band wrecked £30,000 worth of equipment, and as a result they could not tour Japan, as no company would rent them new equipment. At the end of the tour the Electric album had been certified Gold in the UK, and sold roughly 3 million copies worldwide, but the band were barely speaking to each other by then. Haggis left the band at the end of the Electric tour to form the Four Horsemen for Rubin's Def American label. Astbury and Duffy fired Warner and their management team Grant/Edwards, and moved to Los Angeles with original bassist Stewart. Warner sued the band several times for his firing, as well as for what he felt were unpaid royalties due to him for his performance on the Electric album, resulting in lengthy court battles. The Cult signed a new management deal and wrote 21 new songs for their next record. For the next album, Stewart returned to playing bass, and John Webster was brought in to play keyboards. The band used Chris Taylor to play drums during rehearsals and record the demos, with future Kiss drummer Eric Singer performing during the second demo recording sessions. The Cult eventually recruited session-drummer Mickey Curry to fill the drumming role and Aerosmith sound engineer, Bob Rock, to produce. Recorded in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from October to December 1988, the Sonic Temple record went Top 10 in both the UK and the US, where it was certified Gold and Platinum respectively. The band went on tour in support of the new album and new single "Fire Woman" (UK No. 15) (NZ No. 1), with yet another new drummer, Matt Sorum, and Webster as keyboard player. The next single, "Edie (Ciao Baby)" (UK No. 25) has become a regular song at concerts for many years. In Europe, the band toured with Aerosmith, and in the US, after releasing another single "Sun King" (UK No. 42), they spent 1989 touring in support of Metallica before heading out on their own headlining tour later that same year. A fourth single, "Sweet Soul Sister" (UK No. 38), was released in February 1990, with the video having been filmed at Wembley Arena, London, on 25 November 1989. "Sweet Soul Sister" was partially written in Paris and was inspired by the bohemian lifestyle of that city. Released as a single in February 1990, the song was another hit in the UK, and reportedly reached number one on the rock charts in Brazil. After playing a show in Atlanta, Georgia, in February 1990, the band's management told Astbury that his father had just died of cancer. As a result, the remainder of the tour was cancelled after a final leg of shows were performed in April. After the tour ended, the band were on the verge of splitting due to Stewart retiring and moving to Canada to be with his wife, and Sorum leaving to join Guns N' Roses. In 1990, Astbury organized the Gathering of the Tribes festival in Los Angeles and San Francisco with artists such as Soundgarden, Ice-T, Indigo Girls, Queen Latifah, Iggy Pop, the Charlatans, the Cramps and Public Enemy appearing. This two-day festival drew 40,000 people. Also in 1990, a ten CD box set was released in the UK, containing rare songs from the Cult's singles. The CDs in this box set were all issued as picture discs with rice paper covers, housed in a white box called "Singles Collection", or a black box called "E.P. Collection '84 - '90". In 1991, director Oliver Stone offered Astbury the role of Jim Morrison in Stone's film The Doors. He declined the role because he was not happy with the way Morrison was represented in the film, and the role was ultimately played by Val Kilmer. Ceremony and the lawsuit (1991–1993) In 1991, Astbury and Duffy were writing again for their next album. During the demo recordings, Todd Hoffman and James Kottak played bass and drums, respectively. During the actual album recording sessions, Curry was recruited again to play drums, with Charley Drayton on bass, and various other performers. Astbury and Duffy's working relationship had disintegrated by that time, with the two men reportedly rarely even being in the studio together during recording. The resulting album Ceremony was released to mixed responses. The album climbed to US No. 34, but sales were not as impressive as the previous three records, only selling around one million copies worldwide. Only two official singles were released from the record: "Wild Hearted Son" (UK No. 34, Canada No. 41) and "Heart of Soul" (UK No. 50), although "White" was released as a single only in Canada, "Sweet Salvation" was released as a single (as "Dulce Salvación") in Argentina in 1992, and the title track "Ceremony" was released in Spain. The Cult's Ceremonial Stomp tour went through Europe in 1991 and North America in 1992. In 1991 the Cult played a show at the Marquee Club in London, which was recorded and released in February 1993, packaged with some vinyl UK copies of their first greatest hits release. Only a handful of CD copies of it were ever manufactured originally, however it was subsequently reissued on CD in 1999. An incomplete bootleg video of this show is also in circulation. The band were sued by the parents of the Native American boy pictured on the cover of Ceremony, for alleged exploitation and for the unauthorized use of the child's image. The parents stated that the boy felt he had been cursed by the band's burning of his image, and was "emotionally scarred." This image of the boy is also burned in the video for "Wild Hearted Son". This lawsuit delayed the release of Ceremony in many countries including South Korea and Thailand, which did not see the record's release until late 1992, and it was unreleased in Turkey until the Cult played several shows in Istanbul in June 1993. A world tour followed with backing from drummer Michael Lee (Page & Plant, Little Angels), bassist Kinley "Barney" Wolfe (Lord Tracy, Black Oak Arkansas), and keyboardist John Sinclair (Ozzy Osbourne, Uriah Heep) returning one last time, and the Gathering of the Tribes moved to the UK. Here artists such as Pearl Jam performed. The warm-up gig to the show, in a small nightclub, was dedicated to the memory of Nigel Preston, who had died a few weeks earlier at the age of 28. Following the release of the single "The Witch" (#9 in Australia) and the performance of a song for the 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie soundtrack entitled "Zap City", produced by Steve Brown and originally a B-side to "Lil' Devil", two volumes of remixes of "She Sells Sanctuary", called Sanctuary Mixes MCMXCIII, volumes one and two, and in support of Pure Cult: for Rockers, Ravers, Lovers, and Sinners, a greatest hits compilation which debuted at No. 1 on the British charts and later went to number one in Portugal, Astbury and Duffy fired the "backing band" and recruited Craig Adams (the Mission) and Scott Garrett for performances across Europe in 1993, with some shows featuring Mike Dimkich on rhythm guitar. This tour marked the first time the band performed in Turkey, Greece, and the Slovak Republic. The Cult and first breakup (1994–1998) With the same line-up still in place, the band released The Cult in October 1994, produced by Bob Rock. The self-titled album is commonly referred to as the "Black Sheep" album by fans of the group, due to the image of a black sheep on the front cover. Astbury referred to the record as a collection of "very personal and very revealing" songs about his life, with the subject matter ranging from sexual abuse at the age of 15, to the death of Nigel Preston, to his directionless years spent in Glasgow in the late 1970s. The record achieved little success, only reaching No. 69 in the US and No. 21 in the UK. Duffy remarked that he thought that the record wouldn't sell well due to the offensive lyrics. The record went to number one in Portugal also, but quickly dropped out of sight. The single "Coming Down (Drug Tongue)" was released with the band going on tour in support of the new album. Only one more single, "Star", was officially released with a live appearance on UK TV show The Word. "Star" began life in 1986 as "Tom Petty" and was recorded at the "Sonic Temple" demo sessions as "Starchild", being dropped by the band during rehearsals. In 1993 the song was resurrected and was finally completed for the record in 1994 as, just simply, "Star". When the band began the Beauty's On The Streets tour in winter 1994, they augmented the line up with James Stevenson on rhythm guitar. As with the Ceremony record several years earlier, no other official singles were released, but several other songs were released on a strictly limited basis: "Sacred Life" was released in Spain and the Netherlands, "Be Free" was issued in Canada and France, "Saints Are Down" was issued in Greece, but none of the songs gained much commercial success. During this tour, the Cult made their first ever appearance in Norway. During the Black Rain tour of South America in spring of 1995, despite the fact that several more new songs had already been recorded, the tour was cancelled after an appearance in Rio de Janeiro in March, and the band split up citing unspecified problems on a recent South American tour. Astbury started up a garage band called Holy Barbarians a few months later. The band made their debut at the 100 Club in London in February 1996 and released their first (and only) record in May 1996, and toured throughout North America and Europe for the rest of 1996. The band started writing material for a second record in 1997, but the band was dissolved and Astbury began writing and recording a solo record. Throughout 1997 and 1998 Astbury recorded his solo record, originally to be titled Natural Born Guerilla, later called High Time Amplifier. Ultimately the record remained unreleased until June 2000 when it was released under the name Spirit\Light\Speed. Astbury played one solo concert in 1999. In November 1996, a number of CD reissues were released: the band's American record company released High Octane Cult, a slightly updated greatest hits compilation released only in the US and Japan; The Southern Death Cult, a remastered edition of the fifteen-song compilation CD; a ten-song compilation CD by Death Cult called Ghost Dance, consisting of the untitled four-song EP, the single "God's Zoo", and four unreleased songs from a radio broadcast; and a remastered repackaging of the Dreamtime album, containing only the ten original songs from the record in their original playing order and almost completely different but original artwork. Dreamtime Live at the Lyceum was also remastered and issued on video and for the first time on CD, with the one unreleased song from the concert, "Gimmick". First reunion, Beyond Good and Evil and second hiatus (1999–2005) In 1999, Astbury and Duffy reformed the Cult with Matt Sorum and ex-Porno for Pyros bassist Martyn LeNoble. Their first official concert was at the Tibetan Freedom Concert in June 1999, after having rehearsed at shows in the Los Angeles area. The band's 1999 Cult Rising reunion tour resulted in a sold out 30 date tour of the US, ending with 8 consecutive sold out nights at the LA House of Blues. In 2000, the band toured South Africa for the first time, and North and South America, and contributed the song "Painted on My Heart" to the soundtrack of the movie Gone In 60 Seconds. The song was featured prominently and the melody was fused into parts of the score. In June, Astbury's long-delayed solo record was finally released as Spirit\Light\Speed, but it failed to gain much success. In November 2000, another authorised greatest hits compilation was released, Pure Cult: The Singles 1984–1995, along with an accompanying DVD, which was later certified gold in Canada. The Cult, as well as Ian Astbury, performed on separate tracks on the Doors tribute album, Stoned Immaculate: The Music of The Doors, covering "Wild Child" and "Touch Me". In November 2000, Beggars Banquet released 15,000 copies of a six-disc boxset (with a bonus seventh disc of remixes for the first 5000 copies) titled Rare Cult. The box set consists of album out-takes, demos, radio broadcasts, and album B-sides. It is most notable for including the previously unreleased "Peace" album in its entirety. In 2001, the band signed to Atlantic Records and recorded a new album, Beyond Good and Evil, originally being produced by Mick Jones of Foreigner, until Jones bowed out to tour with Foreigner. Astbury and Duffy co-wrote a song with Jones, an odd occurrence, as in the past, neither Astbury or Duffy would co-write their material. Bob Rock was the producer, with Martyn LeNoble and Chris Wyse as recording bassists, as Mike Dimkich played rhythm guitar on tour, and Matt Sorum returning as drummer. Although Sorum has previously toured with the band on the Sonic Temple tour in 1989, this was the first time that he had recorded a studio album with the band. However Beyond Good and Evil was not the comeback record the band had hoped for. Despite reaching No. 37 in the US, No. 22 in Canada, and No. 25 in Spain, sales quickly dropped, only selling roughly 500,000 copies worldwide. The first single "Rise", reached No. 41 in the US, and No. 2 on the mainstream rock charts, but Atlantic Records quickly pulled the song from radio playlists. Astbury would later describe the experience with Atlantic to be "soul destroying", after Atlantic tried to tamper with the lyrics, the record cover, and choice of singles from the record. After the first single from the record, the band's working relationship with Atlantic was on paper only, with Atlantic pulling "Rise" from the radio stations playlists, and stopping all promotion of the record. The second single "Breathe" was only released as a radio station promo, and the final single "True Believers" was only on a compilation sampler disc released in January 2002 (after the Cult's tour had already ended). Despite "True Believers" receiving radio airplay in Australia, both singles went largely unnoticed, and both Astbury and Duffy walked away from the project. LeNoble rejoined the band for the initial dates in early 2001, and Billy Morrison filled in on bass for the majority of the 2001 tour. The European tour of 2001 was canceled, largely due to security concerns after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the band flew back to the US to tour again with Aerosmith. But the eleven-week tour was considered by fans to be a disaster, as the band played only a brief rundown of their greatest hits. In October 2001, a show at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles was filmed for release on DVD. After the tour ended in December 2001, the band took most of 2002 off, apart from a few shows in the US to promote the release of the DVD, with Scott Garrett and Craig Adams rejoining the band. Despite the commercial disappointment of Beyond Good and Evil and the supporting tour, the band was voted "Comeback of the Year" by Metal Edge readers in the magazine's 2001 Readers' Choice Awards. In late 2002, Ian Astbury declared the Cult to be "on ice" indefinitely, after performing a brief series of dates in October 2002 to promote the release of the Music Without Fear DVD. During this second hiatus, Astbury performed as a member of the Doors (later dubbed the Doors of the 21st Century, later still renamed D21c, and most recently known as Riders on the Storm) with two of the original members of that group. D21c was sued numerous times, both by Jim Morrison's family and by drummer John Densmore. Astbury supposedly started work on recording another solo album that later became the backbone for the Cult's Born into This. At the same time, Duffy was part of Coloursound with bassist Craig Adams and ex-Alarm frontman Mike Peters, then Dead Men Walking (again with Peters) and later Cardboard Vampyres. Sorum became a member of the hard rock supergroup Velvet Revolver. In 2003, all of the Cult's records were issued on CD, with several bonus tracks being issued on the Russian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian versions. These eastern European releases had many printing mistakes on the jacket sleeves and lyric inserts. In October 2004, all of the Cult's records were again remastered and issued again on CD, this time in Japan in different cardboard foldout sleeves. "She Sells Sanctuary" appeared in the 2002 video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, playing on rock station V-Rock. Second reunion, Born Into This and Capsule EPs (2006–2010) Despite Astbury's previous statement from 2004 that a reunion would not happen, The Cult announced in January 2006 that they were reuniting for "some limited gigs" throughout the year. A month later, the band made their first live appearance in three-and-a-half years on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Their lineup consisted of Astbury (vocals), Duffy (lead guitar), John Tempesta (drums), Dimkich (rhythm guitar) and Wyse (returning as bassist). Their first stage show was held in March 2006 in San Francisco, California, at The Fillmore. The entire tour was recorded by Instant Live and sold after each show. In May, they did an eight date tour in Canada. Later that summer, they toured central and eastern Europe and played their first concerts in Bulgaria, Poland and Serbia. An eleven-date UK tour followed as well as several more dates in the United States, finishing with a South American tour in December. That year, Duffy began the band Circus Diablo with Billy Morrison, Sorum, Brett Scallions and Ricky Warwick. During these tours, the band occasionally played an extended set, including several songs the band had not performed in decades: "King Contrary Man" and "Hollow Man", neither of which had been performed since 1987; also, "Libertine" was performed approximately three times, for the first time since 2000, and "Brother Wolf, Sister Moon", which was only performed one time since 1986 (for this particular song, the band played an abridged version which has never been performed before or since) Astbury announced in February 2007 that he was leaving Riders on the Storm and returning to the Cult. He stated: "I have decided to move on and focus on my own music and legacy." The Cult was featured on Stuffmagazine.com's list of ultimate air guitar players. On 21 March 2007, it was announced that the band would be touring Europe with the Who. The first confirmed tour date was in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in early June, with at least a dozen shows set to follow. The band played a gig in London's West End at the CC Club on 7 June 2007, along with nearly two dozen shows across continental Europe during summer. The tour also includes the first performance in Romania and Croatia. On 29 May 2007, the band signed a deal with major metal label Roadrunner Records. Their 8th studio album, titled Born into This was released on 16 October, and was produced by Martin "Youth" Glover, bass player for Killing Joke. Born into This was released as regular single disc and limited edition double disc, the second disk being a bonus 5-track CD holding the following tracks: "Stand Alone", "War Pony Destroyer", "I Assassin (Demo)", "Sound of Destruction (Demo)" and "Savages (Extended Version)". Prior to the album's release, the band played festival and headline dates, and supported the Who in Europe through summer 2007, with a US headline tour to follow. The band's appearance at Irving Plaza in New York City in early November 2006 was filmed and was released in 2007. The Cult New York City, issued by Fontana North and is the Cult's first high definition DVD release. Meanwhile, Astbury lent vocals on two tracks of the 2007 Unkle album "War Stories", one of them being the first single from the album, "Burn My Shadow". The band performed a UK and European tour in late-February and early-March 2008. On 24 March, they began their North American tour including a major 13-city tour in Canada. During September 2008, the Cult did a brief series of dates in the northeast United States, and they toured in Brazil as part of the South American tour in October 2008. As of May 2008, according to The Gauntlet, the Cult are currently unsigned and no longer under contract with Roadrunner Records. In October 2008, it was announced that the Cult would headline the inaugural Rock 'n' Roll Marathon in San Antonio, to be run 16 November 2008. The Cult announced plans for a tour showcasing their 1985 Love album across the US and then the UK in October where they will play at the Royal Albert Hall. Coinciding with the remastered Love album and four-disc Omnibus boxed set, the Cult kicked off the long-awaited Love Live Tour in late summer. Performing their classic Love album in its entirety, each show was played with the Love tracks opening with "Nirvana" to "Black Angel". A quick intermission followed, then other Cult hits were played (varying by venue): "Sun King", "Dirty Little Rock Star", "Electric Ocean", "Illuminated". Then followed the favorites "Fire Woman", "Lil Devil", "Wild Flower", and lastly "Love Removal Machine". In the evening of 10 October 2009 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, the band performed a second encore with original Cult bassist Jamie Stewart and drummer Mark Brzezicki, who played drums with the band during the Love album recording sessions in July and August 1985. The band sold Love Live USB flash drives for each show during the tour. The Cult entered 2010 continuing their Love Live Tour and announcing more dates in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. The band finished recording a four-track "Capsule" with producer Chris Goss. Capsule 1 was said to be the first of three or four to be released sometime in summer 2010. Release formats include CD-DVD dualdisc, 12-inch vinyl, and digital downloads. Capsule 1 was released on 14 September 2010. The band officially announced the release of its first new studio recording since 2007, "Every Man And Woman Is A Star". The new single was released through the iTunes Store on 31 July 2010. On 1 August 2010, the band played the sold-out music festival Sonisphere, which marked their first UK performance since the tour for their Love album. During the performance they debuted their new single, "Every Man and Woman is a Star", which was released on 1 August 2010. On 14 September 2010 the band embarked on a new U.S. tour and released Capsule 1 in conjunction with media technology company Aderra Inc. and made it available in multiple formats including a CD-DVD DualDisc, USB flash drive, 12 inch vinyl, FLAC download and MP3 download. The collection includes a short film made by singer Ian Astbury and Rick Rogers. On 26 October 2010 the band and Aderra Inc. announced the release of a new song, "Embers", for 1 November 2010 and Capsule 2 available through their web store on 16 November 2010. Pictures from the Cult's tour stop in Chicago on 28 October 2010 can be seen at a local radio station website. On 17 September 2010, the band performed live at the Fall Frenzy concert at the Tempe Beach Park in Tempe, Arizona. Other bands that played at this concert were Stone Temple Pilots, Shinedown, and Sevendust. On 4 December 2010, the band performed a live set for Guitar Center Sessions on DirecTV. The episode included an interview with the band by program host, Nic Harcourt. Choice of Weapon and Hidden City (2011–2017) During the Cult's concert at the Hammersmith Apollo in London on 21 January 2011 Ian Astbury declared that the Cult would be recording a new album directly after the tour. They also announced that they would be working with Chris Goss, who performed with Masters of Reality as a supporting act the same evening. On 11 May 2011, it was announced that the Cult were signed to Cooking Vinyl Records, who will release the new album in early 2012. Commented guitarist Billy Duffy: "We are very much looking forward to returning to our U.K. roots in many ways working with Cooking Vinyl." Vocalist Ian Astbury added, "We look forward to a long and fruitful relationship with Cooking Vinyl." By May 2011, the band had been writing and recording new demos at its Witch Mountain studio hideaway in the Hollywood Hills, and began recording their new album at Hollywood Recording Studios. In October 2011, bassist Chris Wyse stated the album was almost finished and expected to be released in April 2012. Chris also described it as a "Zep/Stooges mix of energy." On 29 November 2011, it was announced that the album would be produced by Bob Rock, who provided the same role on Sonic Temple, The Cult and Beyond Good and Evil. The album, entitled Choice of Weapon, was released on 22 May 2012. The band partnered with Rolling Stone to premiere the first song from the album titled Lucifer on 30 January. On 5 February 2012, the Cult song "She Sells Sanctuary" was used as the soundtrack for a Budweiser commercial in a mashup with Flo Rida aired during Super Bowl XLVI. In May 2012 the Cult appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and played "For The Animals". On 28 September 2012, it was announced that the band would release Weapon of Choice, a "prequel" album to accompany the band's latest album, Choice of Weapon. The digital-only release, available exclusively on iTunes for two months only beginning 16 October, features the songs that were ultimately included in "Choice Of Weapon" at an earlier stage of development. Explaining the motivations behind the release, singer Ian Astbury said that "These songs were turned over and over, forged in long rehearsals and writing sessions, and emanated from challenges both personal and professional. We put our guts into this; [Producer Chris] Goss was able to create an environment where the songs were born through playing and turning over lyrics, through hard work and intense sessions." Astbury added "These songs have an integrity and rawness of their own. In many ways it's a different album to the one we released and reveals the foundations of 'Choice Of Weapon'. We were able to close the doors and begin to explore spaces we had not been in for a while." The song "Twisted and Bleeding" was made available for free download at the band's website ahead of the full digital release. On 20 June 2013, the band announced the release of Electric-Peace which comprises the entire Electric album plus the Peace album which was previously released on the now discontinued Rare Cult box set in 2000. It is due for release in the US on 30 July. In 2013 Mike Dimkich left the band and joined Bad Religion to cover for guitarist Greg Hetson. James Stevenson, from the Beauty's On The Streets tour in 1994, replaced Dimkich as the Cult's rhythm guitarist. In March 2013, Billy Duffy told the Argentinan journalist Fabrizio Pedrotti that the Cult had begun work on a new album for a 2014 release. The band were expected to begin work on the album after they finish their 2013 world tour, where they played the Electric album in its entirety. In August 2014, Billy added that the next album, which was not expected to be released before 2015 at the earliest, "will be more guitar heavy". On 5 November 2015, it was announced that The Cult would release their new album, entitled Hidden City, on 5 February 2016. The album is said to be the final part of a trilogy that began with Born into This, and marks the fifth time Bob Rock had produced a Cult album. The band also announced that they had hired Australian-born bassist Grant Fitzpatrick (ex-Mink) as the replacement for Chris Wyse. Chris Chaney (Jane's Addiction, Camp Freddy) and producer Bob Rock performed session bass on the album. In support of Hidden City, The Cult opened for Guns N' Roses on the Not in This Lifetime... Tour. In an October 2016 interview with PopMatters journalist J.C. Maçek III, Cult guitarist Billy Duffy spoke of the band's playlist while on tour, saying "Obviously you want to make an impactful [show]," he continues. "There are some practical, pragmatic decisions made. If you're playing to a crowd who are not very familiar with you, there's no point of going too deep but we do always make sure we play a new song. Like on Guns N' Roses' [tour] we had fifty minutes which is ten songs all in. So, you know we just made sure that in those ten songs we played 'Deeply Ordered Chaos' which we’re proud of and it makes a certain statement. And it just alerts people to the fact that, yes, we have made a record in the last 30 years. You know and that's a good thing. Psychologically, that's the blood transfusion that we need. And we're very mindful, we have a very loyal fan base. We don't pander as you well know." Upcoming eleventh studio album (2018–present) In an April 2018 interview with Guitar World, guitarist Billy Duffy was asked if another album from The Cult was in the works. He replied, "Never say never! Ian and I enjoy the process of making new music, and we feel it's vital to keep the band healthy, even if it's pretty much in the law of diminishing returns area now. Who knows if it will be a whole album a series of singles or an EP? I can say new Cult music will be forthcoming, but these days we don't rush it as there's no point. Quality is key. We are past the point of having to release stuff so if we feel it's good enough, then we will release it in some shape or another." On 2 April 2018, a tour of the United States of America called "Revolution 3 Tour" was announced for the summer. They performed as one of the three headliners, along with Stone Temple Pilots and Bush. In April 2019, The Cult announced that they would celebrate the 30th anniversary of the release of their fourth album Sonic Temple with a world tour, which began on 2 May in Houston, Texas and was expected to wrap up in 2020. In a June 2019 interview with LA Weekly, vocalist Ian Astbury stated that The Cult were "long overdue" to release new music. He was quoted as saying: "We do have some stuff we've been working on, but it's yet to see the light of day." Six months later, Astbury told Atlantic City Weekly that the band was going to start working on new music in 2020: "We've got a few pieces lying around in various stages of completion. The intention is to get together in the New Year and take a look at what we've got and decide how we are going to go about moving forward. It's an essential part of any creative lifeblood." On May 6, 2020, The Cult announced on their Twitter page that they had signed to Black Hill Records. On August 15, 2020, Duffy announced on his Twitter that the band were recording their new album with producer Tom Dalgety at Rockfield Studios, where The Cult had recorded their debut album Dreamtime 36 years earlier. In support of their new album, The Cult will embark on a co-headlining six-date UK tour with Alice Cooper in May and June 2022. Influences Duffy and Astbury cited among their influences a lot of different bands "from the Doors to Led Zeppelin. We literally went from the front of our record collections to the back. And then along the way we were drawn in by the likes of Public Image Ltd, Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees. You might not hear it in the music but it's there." They also cited Bauhaus among many other post-punk influences. Duffy also praised Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers for a major performance he attended in 1977 and Siouxsie and the Banshees whom "always had great guitar players with killer riffs." Duffy also hailed AC/DC for "the power of a good three chord riff", Pete Townshend of the Who "in terms of commitment to stage performing" and Brian May of Queen for using "‘echoplex’ tape delays to orchestrate his own solo". Musical style According to music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine, the band fuse a "hardcore punk revivalist" sound with the "pseudo-mysticism ... of the Doors and Uriah Heep and the guitar-orchestrations of Led Zeppelin and The Cure ... while adding touches of post-punk goth rock". In 1985 Astbury said, "Our music is just melodies and guitars. We're like Big Country and U2, only better!". Members Current members Ian Astbury – lead vocals, occasional percussion/guitar Billy Duffy – lead and rhythm guitars, backing vocals John Tempesta – drums, percussion Grant Fitzpatrick – bass, backing vocals Damon Fox – keyboards, rhythm guitar, backing vocals Discography Dreamtime (1984) Love (1985) Electric (1987) Sonic Temple (1989) Ceremony (1991) The Cult (1994) Beyond Good and Evil (2001) Born into This (2007) Choice of Weapon (2012) Hidden City (2016) References External links Official website Billy Duffy official website Musical groups established in 1983 Situation Two artists Beggars Banquet Records artists Sire Records artists Musical groups from Bradford English post-punk music groups English gothic rock groups English hard rock musical groups English heavy metal musical groups English glam metal musical groups	false	[ "American-born Australian actress and producer Nicole Kidman has been honored with numerous accolades throughout her career. Among them, she has won an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, and a BAFTA Award. She is the first Australian to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. In 2003, Kidman received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to the motion picture industry. In addition to her 2003 Academy Award for Best Actress, Kidman has received Best Actress awards from the following critics' associations or award-granting organisations: the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (Golden Globe Award), the Australian Film Institute, Blockbuster Entertainment Awards, Empire Awards, Satellite Awards, Hollywood Film Awards, London Film Critics' Circle, Russian Guild of Film Critics, and the Southeastern Film Critics Association. In 2003, Kidman was given the American Cinematheque Award. She also received recognition from the National Association of Theatre Owners at the ShoWest Convention in 1992 as the Female Star of Tomorrow, and in 2002 for a Distinguished Decade of Achievement in Film Award.\n\nMajor associations\n\nAcademy Awards \n1 win of 5 nominations\n\nBAFTA Awards \n1 win of 5 nominations\n\nGolden Globe Awards \n6 wins of 18 nominations\n\nPrimetime Emmy Awards \n2 wins of 3 nominations\n\nProducers Guild Awards \n0 wins of 3 nominations\n\nScreen Actors Guild Awards \n1 win of 15 nominations\n\nAudience awards\n\nGolden Schmoes awards \n2 wins of 6 nominations\n\nMTV Movie + TV awards \n2 wins of 7 nominations\n\nNickelodeon Kid's Choice awards \n0 wins of 3 nominations\n\nPeople's Choice awards \n0 wins of 3 nominations\n\nTeen Choice awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nCritic association awards\n\nAlliance of Women Film Journalists awards \n0 wins of 8 nominations\n\nAustralian Film Critics Association awards \n3 wins of 4 nominations\n\nAward Circuit Community awards \n2 wins of 10 nominations\n\nBoston Society of Film Critics awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nCentral Ohio Film Critics Association awards \n0 wins of 2 nominations\n\nChicago Film Critics Association awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nCritics' Choice Movie Awards \n1 win of 11 nominations\n\nCritics' Choice Television Awards \n2 wins of 4 nominations\n\nDallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association awards \n0 wins of 6 nominations\n\nDenver Film Critics Society awards \n0 wins of 2 nominations\n\nDetroit Film Critics Society awards \n0 wins of 2 nominations\n\nFilm Critics Circle of Australia awards \n0 wins of 5 nominations\n\nGay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association awards \n1 win of 2 nomination\n\nGeorgia Film Critics Association awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nGreater Western New York Film Critics Association awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nHawaii Film Critics Society \n0 wins of 2 nominations\n\nHollywood Critics Association awards \n0 wins of 2 nominations\n\nHouston Film Critics Society awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nKansas City Film Critics Circle awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nLas Vegas Film Critics Society awards \n1 win of 4 nominations\n\nLondon Critics Circle Film awards \n2 wins of 4 nominations\n\nLos Angeles Online Film Critics Society \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nNevada Film Critics Society \n1 wins of 1 nomination\n\nNew York Film Critics Circle awards \n0 wins of 2 nominations\n\nNorth Carolina Film Critics Association awards \n0 wins of 2 nomination\n\nNorth Texas Film Critics Association awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nOnline Film & Television Association awards \n1 wins of 10 nominations\n\nOnline Film Critics Society awards \n0 wins of 2 nominations\n\nPhoenix Critics Circle \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nPhoenix Film Critics Society awards \n0 wins of 3 nominations\n\nSan Diego Film Critics Society awards \n1 wins of 3 nomination\n\nSeattle Film Critics awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nSoutheastern Film Critics Association awards \n1 win of 2 nominations\n\nSt. Louis Film Critics Association awards \n0 wins of 3 nominations\n\nSunset Film Critics Circle \n0 wins of 2 nominations\n\nTelevision Critics Association awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nUtah Film Critics Association awards \n0 wins of 2 nominations\n\nVancouver Film Critics Circle awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nWashington D. C. Area Film Critics Association awards \n0 wins of 4 nominations\n\nWomen Film Critics Circle awards \n2 wins of 4 nominations\n\nWomen's Image Network awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nFilm festival awards\n\nBaja International Film Festival awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nBerlin International Film Festival awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nCannes Film Festival awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nCapri Hollywood International Film Festival \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nGlobal Non-Violent Film Festival Awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nHeartland Film Festival awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nHollywood Film Festival awards \n3 wins of 3 nominations\n\nMill Valley Film Festival awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nNew York Film Festival awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nNoir in Festival 2018 \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nPalm Springs International Film Festival awards \n3 wins of 3 nominations\n\nSanta Barbara International Film Festival awards \n2 win of 2 nominations\n\nSeattle International Film Festival awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nSESC Film Festival awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nShanghai International Film Festival awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nShoWest Convention awards \n2 wins of 2 nominations\n\nTaormina Film Festival \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nInternational awards\n\nAACTA International awards \n3 wins of 9 nominations\n\nAmerican Cinematheque Gala Tribute awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nAmerican Comedy awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nAACTA Australian Film Academy awards \n4 win of 8 nominations\n\nBodil Awards \n0 win of 1 nomination\n\nBritish Academy Film & Television awards \n1 win of 5 nominations\n\nChlotrudis Awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nCinEuphoria awards \n3 wins of 7 nominations\n\nCriticos de Cinema Online Portugueses awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nEmpire awards \n3 wins of 6 nominations\n\nGolden Camera awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nGoya Awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nHuading Awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nInternational Cinephile Society awards \n0 wins of 3 nominations\n\nInternational Online Cinema awards \n1 win of 7 nominations\n\nIrish Film and Television Awards \n0 win of 1 nomination\n\nItalian Online Movie awards \n1 win of 3 nominations\n\nJupiter awards \n2 wins of 2 nominations\n\nLogie awards \n3 wins of 3 nominations\n\nNational Movie awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nRussian Guild of Film Critics awards \n1 win of 2 nominations\n\nRussian National Movie awards \n0 wins of 2 nominations\n\nSant Jordi awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nYoga awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nMiscellaneous awards\n\nAARP Movies for Grown-Ups Awards \n0 wins of 6 nomination\n\nBlockbuster Entertainment awards \n2 wins of 3 nominations\n\nCinema Bloggers Awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nCinema Writers Circle awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nElle Women in Hollywood awards \n4 wins of 4 nominations\n\nFangoria Chainsaw awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nFright Meter awards \n1 win of 2 nominations\n\nGolden Raspberry awards \n1 win of 2 nominations\n\nGotham awards \n1 win of 2 nominations\n\nBritish GQ Awards \n1 win of 1 nominations\n\nHarper's BAZAAR Women of the Year awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nIF awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nIndependent Spirit awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nSatellite awards \n4 wins of 19 nominations\n\nSaturn awards \n1 win of 7 nominations\n\nSyFy Portal Genre awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nThe Stinkers Bad Movie awards\n0 wins of 3 nominations\n\nVillage Voice Film Poll awards \n0 wins of 1 nomination\n\nWalk of Fame \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nWomen in Film Crystal + Lucy awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nTheatre awards\n\nEvening Standard Theatre Awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nLaurence Olivier Awards \n0 wins of 2 nominations\n\nWhatsOnStage Awards \n1 win of 1 nomination\n\nReferences \n\nList of awards and nominations\nLists of awards received by actor", "The following is a list of awards and nominations received by Welsh actor and director Anthony Hopkins. \n\nHe is an Oscar-winning actor, having received six Academy award nominations winning two of these for Best Actor for his performance as Hannibal Lecter in the Jonathan Demme thriller The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and for his performance as Anthony in Florian Zeller's drama The Father (2020). He also was nominated for his performances as in James Ivory's The Remains of the Day (1993), Richard Nixon in Oliver Stone's drama Nixon (1995), John Quincy Adams in Amistad (1997), and Pope Benedict XVI in the Fernando Meirelles drama The Two Popes (2019). \n\nFor his work on film and television, he has received eight Golden Globe award nominations. In 2006 he was honored with the Cecil B. DeMille award for his lifetime achievement in the entertainment industry. He has received six Primetime Emmy award nominations winning two—one in 1976 for his performance as Richard Hauptmann in The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case and the other in 1981 for his performance as Adolf Hitler in The Bunker, as well as seven Screen Actors Guild award nominations all of which have been respectively lost.\n\nMajor associations\n\nAcademy Awards \n2 wins out of 6 nominations\n\nBAFTA Awards \n4 wins (and one honorary award) out of 9 nominations\n\nEmmy Awards \n2 wins out of 6 nominations\n\nGolden Globe Awards \n0 wins (and one honorary award) out of 8 nominations\n\nOlivier Awards \n1 win out of 2 nominations\n\nScreen Actors Guild Awards \n0 wins out of 7 nominations\n\nAudience awards\n\nMTV Movie + TV awards \n0 wins out of 2 nominations\n\nPeople's Choice awards \n0 wins out of 1 nomination\n\nCritic and association awards\n\nAlliance of Women Film Journalists awards \n1 win out of 2 nominations\n\nBoston Society of Film Critics awards \n1 win out of 1 nomination\n\nCableACE awards \n1 win out of 2 nominations\n\nChicago Film Critics Association awards \n1 win out of 5 nominations\n\nCritics' Choice awards \n1 win out of 4 nominations\n\nDallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association awards \n2 wins out of 2 nominations\n\nKansas City Film Critics Circle awards \n2 wins out of 2 nominations\n\nLondon Critics Circle Film awards \n1 win out of 5 nominations\n\nLos Angeles Film Critics Association awards \n1 win out of 2 nominations\n\nNational Board of Review awards \n2 wins out of 2 nominations\n\nNational Society of Film Critics awards \n0 wins out of 1 nomination\n\nNew York Film Critics Circle awards \n1 win out of 3 nominations\n\nOnline Film & Television Association awards \n1 win out of 3 nominations\n\nOnline Film Critics Society awards \n0 wins out of 1 nomination\n\nPhoenix Film Critics Society awards \n0 wins out of 1 nomination\n\nSoutheastern Film Critics Association awards \n1 win out of 2 nominations\n\nSt. Louis Film Critics Association awards \n1 win out of 2 nomination\n\nWomen's Image Network awards \n0 wins out of 1 nomination\n\nFilm festival awards\n\nHollywood Film Festival awards \n2 wins out of 2 nominations\n\nLocarno International Film Festival awards \n1 win out of 2 nominations\n\nMethod Fest awards \n0 wins out of 1 nomination\n\nMoscow International Film Festival awards \n1 win out of 1 nomination\n\nSan Sebastian International Film Festival awards \n1 win out of 1 nomination\n\nSanta Barbara International Film Festival awards \n1 win out of 1 nomination\n\nShoWest Convention awards \n1 win out of 1 nomination\n\nSitges - Catalonian International Film Festival awards \n0 wins out of 1 nomination\n\nUSA Film Festival awards \n1 win out of 1 nomination\n\nVirginia Film Festival awards \n1 win out of 1 nomination\n\nInternational awards\n\nBAFTA/LA Britannia awards \n1 win out of 1 nominations\n\nDavid di Donatello awards \n1 win out of 2 nominations\n\nEuropean Film Awards \n1 win out of 1 nomination\n\nEvening Standard British Film awards \n1 win out of 1 nomination\n\nJupiter awards \n0 wins out of 1 nomination\n\nNew Zealand Screen awards \n1 win out of 1 nomination\n\nSant Jordi awards \n1 win out of 1 nomination\n\nYoga awards \n1 win out of 1 nomination\n\nMiscellaneous awards\n\n20/20 awards \n1 win out of 3 nominations\n\nAARP Movies for Grownups awards \n1 win out of 4 nominations\n\nFangoria Chainsaw awards \n3 wins out of 4 nominations\n\nGolden Raspberry awards \n0 wins out of 2 nominations\n\nHasty Pudding Theatricals awards \n1 win out of 1 nomination\n\nMovieGuide awards \n0 wins out of 1 nomination\n\nSatellite awards \n0 wins out of 1 nomination\n\nSaturn awards \n1 win out of 5 nominations\n\nWalk of Fame \n1 win out of 1 nomination\n\nWestern Heritage awards \n1 win out of 1 nomination\n\nReferences\n\nHopkins, Anthony" ]
[ "The Cult", "The Cult (1994-1995)", "What were they doing in 1994", "place, the band released The Cult in October 1994, produced by Bob Rock.", "Was the cult popular", "The self-titled 'Cult' album is commonly referred to as the 'Black Sheep' album by fans of the group.", "Did it win awards", "The record achieved little success, only reaching No. 69 in the US and No. 21 in the UK." ]	C_66bf99c1483943608bfaa88bd0e08d05_0	did they tour	4	Did the band The Cult tour?	The Cult	With the same line-up still in place, the band released The Cult in October 1994, produced by Bob Rock. The self-titled 'Cult' album is commonly referred to as the 'Black Sheep' album by fans of the group. Astbury referred to the record as "very personal and very revealing" songs about his life, with the subject matter ranging from sexual abuse at the age of 15, to the death of Nigel Preston, to his directionless years spent in Glasgow in the late 1970s. The record achieved little success, only reaching No. 69 in the US and No. 21 in the UK. Duffy remarked that he thought that the record wouldn't sell well due to the offensive lyrics. The record went to number one in Portugal also, but quickly dropped out of sight. The single "Coming Down (Drug Tongue)" was released with the band going on tour in support of the new album. Only one more single, "Star", was officially released with a live appearance on UK TV show The Word. "Star" began life in 1986 as "Tom Petty" and was recorded at the "Sonic Temple" demo sessions as "Starchild", being dropped by the band during rehearsals. In 1993 the song was resurrected and was finally completed for the record in 1994 as, just simply, "Star". When the band began the Beauty's On The Streets tour in winter 1994, they augmented the line up with James Stevenson on rhythm guitar. As with the Ceremony record several years earlier, no other official singles were released, but several other songs were released on a strictly limited basis: "Sacred Life" was released in Spain and the Netherlands, "Be Free" was issued in Canada and France, "Saints Are Down" was issued in Greece, but none of the songs gained much commercial success. During this tour, the Cult made their first ever appearance in Norway. CANNOTANSWER	The single "Coming Down (Drug Tongue)" was released with the band going on tour in support of the new album.	The Cult are an English rock band formed in 1983 in Bradford, West Yorkshire. Before settling on their current name in January 1984, the band performed under the name Death Cult, which was an evolution of the name of lead singer Ian Astbury's previous band Southern Death Cult. They gained a dedicated following in the United Kingdom in the mid-1980s as a post-punk/gothic rock band, with singles such as "She Sells Sanctuary", before breaking into the mainstream in the United States in the late 1980s establishing themselves as a hard rock band with singles such as "Love Removal Machine". Since its initial formation in 1983, the band have had various line-ups; the longest-serving members are Astbury and guitarist Billy Duffy, who are also the band's two songwriters. The Cult's debut studio album Dreamtime was released in 1984 to moderate success, with its lead single "Spiritwalker" reaching No. 1 on the UK Indie Chart. Their second studio album, Love (1985), was even more successful, charting at No. 4 in the UK and including singles such as "She Sells Sanctuary" and "Rain". The band's third album, Electric (1987), launched them new heights of success, also peaking at No. 4 in the UK and charting highly in other territories, and spawned the hit singles "Love Removal Machine", "Lil' Devil" and "Wild Flower". On that album, The Cult supplemented their post-punk sound with hard rock; the polish on this new sound was facilitated by producer Rick Rubin. After moving to Los Angeles, California, where the band has been based for the remainder of their career, The Cult continued the musical experimentation of Electric with its follow-up album Sonic Temple (1989), which marked their first collaboration with Bob Rock, who would produce several of the band's subsequent albums. Sonic Temple was their most successful album to that point, entering the Top 10 on the UK and US charts, and included one of the band's most popular songs "Fire Woman". By the time of their fifth album Ceremony (1991), tensions and creative differences began to surface among the band members. This resulted in the recording sessions for Ceremony being held without a stable lineup, leaving Astbury and Duffy as the only two official members left, and featuring support from session musicians on bass and drums. The ongoing tension had carried over within the next four years, during which they released one more studio album, The Cult (1994), and called it quits in 1995. The Cult reformed in 1999 and released their seventh album Beyond Good and Evil two years later. The commercial failure of the album and resurfaced tensions led to the band going back on hiatus in 2002. They resumed activity in 2006, and have since released three more studio albums: Born into This (2007), Choice of Weapon (2012), and Hidden City (2016). History Early history (1981–1984) The band's origins can be traced to 1981, in Bradford, Yorkshire, where vocalist and songwriter Ian Astbury formed a band called Southern Death Cult. The name was chosen with a double meaning, and was derived from the 14th-century Native American religion, the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex or Southern Death Cult as it was sometimes known, from the Mississippi delta area, but it was also a stab at what the band viewed was the centralisation of power in Southern England (including that of the music industry); there has long been a perceived notion of a North–South divide based on social, historic and economic reasons. Astbury was joined by Buzz Burrows (guitar), Barry Jepson (bass) and Aki Nawaz Qureshi (drums); they performed their first show at the Queen's Hall in their hometown of Bradford on 29 October 1981. The band were at the forefront of an emerging style of music, in the form of post-punk and gothic rock, they achieved critical acclaim from the press and music fans. The band signed to independent record label Situation Two, an offshoot of Beggars Banquet Records, and released a three-track, triple A-side single, Moya, during this period. They toured through England headlining some shows and touring with Bauhaus and Theatre of Hate. The band played their final performance in Manchester during February 1983, meaning after only sixteen months the band was over. A compilation named The Southern Death Cult was released, this being a collection of the single, radio sessions with John Peel for Radio One and live performances - one of which an audience member recorded with a tape recorder. In April 1983, Astbury teamed up with guitarist Billy Duffy and formed the band "Death Cult". Duffy had been in the Nosebleeds (along with Morrissey), Lonesome No More and then Theatre of Hate. In addition to Astbury and Duffy, the band also included Jamie Stewart (bass) and Raymond Taylor Smith (later known as Ray Mondo) (drums), both from the Harrow, London based post-punk band, Ritual. Death Cult made their live debut in Oslo, Norway on 25 July 1983 and also released the Death Cult EP in the same month, then toured through mainland Europe and Scotland. In September 1983, Mondo was deported to his home country of Sierra Leone and replaced by Nigel Preston, formerly of Theatre of Hate. The single "Gods Zoo" was released in October 1983. Another European tour, with UK dates, followed that autumn. To tone down their name's gothic connotations and gain broader appeal, the band changed its name to "the Cult" in January 1984 before appearing on the (UK) Channel 4 television show, The Tube. The Cult's first studio record, Dreamtime, was recorded at Rockfield Studios, in Monmouth, Wales in 1984. The record was to be produced by Joe Julian, but after recording the drum tracks, the band decided to replace him with John Brand. Brand produced the record, but guitarist Duffy has said the drum tracks were produced by Julian, as Preston had become unreliable. The band recorded the songs which later became known as "Butterflies", "(The) Gimmick", "A Flower in the Desert", "Horse Nation", "Spiritwalker", "Bad Medicine (Waltz)", "Dreamtime", "With Love" (later known as "Ship of Fools", and also "Sea and Sky"), "Bone Bag", "Too Young", "83rd Dream", and one untitled outtake. It is unknown what the outtake was, or whether it was developed into a song at a later date. Songs like "Horse Nation" showed Astbury's intense interest in Native American issues, with the lyrics to "Horse Nation", "See them prancing, they come neighing, to a horse nation", taken almost verbatim from the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, while "Spiritwalker" dealt with shamanism, and the record's title and title track are overtly influenced by Australian Aboriginal beliefs. On 4 April 1984, the Cult released the single "Spiritwalker", which reached No. 1 on the independent charts in the UK, and acted as a teaser for their forthcoming album Dreamtime. This was followed that summer by a second single, "Go West (Crazy Spinning Circles)", before the release of Dreamtime in September; the album reached No. 21 in the UK, and sold over 100,000 copies in the UK alone. On 12 July 1984, the band recorded five songs at the BBC Maida Vale 5 studio for a Richard Skinner session. Before and after the album's release, the Cult toured throughout Europe and England before recording another single, "Ressurection Joe" (UK No. 74), released that December. Following a Christmas support slot with Big Country, the Cult toured Europe with support from the Mission (then called the Sisterhood). Dreamtime was released initially only in the UK, but after its success, and as the Cult's popularity grew worldwide, it was issued in approximately 30 countries. Mainstream success (1985–1990) In May 1985, the Cult released their fourth single, "She Sells Sanctuary", which peaked at No. 15 in the UK and spent 23 weeks in the Top 100. The song was recently voted No. 18 in VH1's Indie 100. In June 1985, following his increasingly erratic behaviour, Preston was fired from the band. Big Country's drummer Mark Brzezicki was picked to replace Preston, and was also included in the video for "She Sells Sanctuary". The Cult then finished recording their second album, Love in July and August 1985. The band's music and image shifted from their punk-oriented roots to 1960s psychedelia influences. Love was a chart success, peaking at No. 4 in the UK and selling 100,000 copies there toward a total of 500,000 copies throughout Europe, as well as 100,000 in Australia and 500,000 copies in the United States. Love reached number 20 on the charts in The Netherlands, where it remained for 32 weeks. To date, the record has sold over two and a half million copies worldwide. From late September 1985 to June 1986, the band went on a worldwide tour with new drummer Les Warner (who had played with Julian Lennon and Johnny Thunders). Two more singles from the Love album followed; "Rain" (charting in the UK at No. 17) and "Revolution" (charting in the UK at No. 30). Neither charted in the US. Another single, "Nirvana", was issued only in Poland. The album version of "Rain", as well as the remix "(Here Comes the) Rain", were used in the Italian horror film Dèmoni 2. Once back in England, the band booked themselves into the Manor Studios in Oxfordshire, with producer Steve Brown (who had produced Love), and recorded over a dozen new songs. The band were unhappy with the sound of their new album, titled Peace, and they decided to go to New York so producer Rick Rubin could remix the first single, "Love Removal Machine". Rubin agreed to work with the band, but only if they rerecorded the song. Rubin eventually talked them into rerecording the entire album. The band's record company, Beggars Banquet, was displeased with this, as two months and £250,000 had already been spent on the record. However, after hearing the initial New York recording, Beggars Banquet agreed to proceed. The first single, "Love Removal Machine", was released in February 1987, and the new version of the album appeared in April that year, now renamed as Electric, reaching No. 4 and eventually outselling Love. The band toured with Kid Chaos (also known as "Haggis" and "The Kid") on bass, with Stewart on rhythm guitar. Two more singles, "Lil Devil" and "Wild Flower", were released during 1987. A few tracks from the original Peace album appeared on the single versions of "Love Removal Machine", and "Lil Devil". The full Peace album would not be released until 2000, when it was included as Disc 3 of the Rare Cult box set. In the US, the Cult, now consisting of Astbury, Duffy, Stewart, Warner and Kid Chaos, were supported by the then-unknown Guns N' Roses. The band also appeared at Roskilde Festival in Denmark in June 1987. When the world tour wound through Australia, the band wrecked £30,000 worth of equipment, and as a result they could not tour Japan, as no company would rent them new equipment. At the end of the tour the Electric album had been certified Gold in the UK, and sold roughly 3 million copies worldwide, but the band were barely speaking to each other by then. Haggis left the band at the end of the Electric tour to form the Four Horsemen for Rubin's Def American label. Astbury and Duffy fired Warner and their management team Grant/Edwards, and moved to Los Angeles with original bassist Stewart. Warner sued the band several times for his firing, as well as for what he felt were unpaid royalties due to him for his performance on the Electric album, resulting in lengthy court battles. The Cult signed a new management deal and wrote 21 new songs for their next record. For the next album, Stewart returned to playing bass, and John Webster was brought in to play keyboards. The band used Chris Taylor to play drums during rehearsals and record the demos, with future Kiss drummer Eric Singer performing during the second demo recording sessions. The Cult eventually recruited session-drummer Mickey Curry to fill the drumming role and Aerosmith sound engineer, Bob Rock, to produce. Recorded in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from October to December 1988, the Sonic Temple record went Top 10 in both the UK and the US, where it was certified Gold and Platinum respectively. The band went on tour in support of the new album and new single "Fire Woman" (UK No. 15) (NZ No. 1), with yet another new drummer, Matt Sorum, and Webster as keyboard player. The next single, "Edie (Ciao Baby)" (UK No. 25) has become a regular song at concerts for many years. In Europe, the band toured with Aerosmith, and in the US, after releasing another single "Sun King" (UK No. 42), they spent 1989 touring in support of Metallica before heading out on their own headlining tour later that same year. A fourth single, "Sweet Soul Sister" (UK No. 38), was released in February 1990, with the video having been filmed at Wembley Arena, London, on 25 November 1989. "Sweet Soul Sister" was partially written in Paris and was inspired by the bohemian lifestyle of that city. Released as a single in February 1990, the song was another hit in the UK, and reportedly reached number one on the rock charts in Brazil. After playing a show in Atlanta, Georgia, in February 1990, the band's management told Astbury that his father had just died of cancer. As a result, the remainder of the tour was cancelled after a final leg of shows were performed in April. After the tour ended, the band were on the verge of splitting due to Stewart retiring and moving to Canada to be with his wife, and Sorum leaving to join Guns N' Roses. In 1990, Astbury organized the Gathering of the Tribes festival in Los Angeles and San Francisco with artists such as Soundgarden, Ice-T, Indigo Girls, Queen Latifah, Iggy Pop, the Charlatans, the Cramps and Public Enemy appearing. This two-day festival drew 40,000 people. Also in 1990, a ten CD box set was released in the UK, containing rare songs from the Cult's singles. The CDs in this box set were all issued as picture discs with rice paper covers, housed in a white box called "Singles Collection", or a black box called "E.P. Collection '84 - '90". In 1991, director Oliver Stone offered Astbury the role of Jim Morrison in Stone's film The Doors. He declined the role because he was not happy with the way Morrison was represented in the film, and the role was ultimately played by Val Kilmer. Ceremony and the lawsuit (1991–1993) In 1991, Astbury and Duffy were writing again for their next album. During the demo recordings, Todd Hoffman and James Kottak played bass and drums, respectively. During the actual album recording sessions, Curry was recruited again to play drums, with Charley Drayton on bass, and various other performers. Astbury and Duffy's working relationship had disintegrated by that time, with the two men reportedly rarely even being in the studio together during recording. The resulting album Ceremony was released to mixed responses. The album climbed to US No. 34, but sales were not as impressive as the previous three records, only selling around one million copies worldwide. Only two official singles were released from the record: "Wild Hearted Son" (UK No. 34, Canada No. 41) and "Heart of Soul" (UK No. 50), although "White" was released as a single only in Canada, "Sweet Salvation" was released as a single (as "Dulce Salvación") in Argentina in 1992, and the title track "Ceremony" was released in Spain. The Cult's Ceremonial Stomp tour went through Europe in 1991 and North America in 1992. In 1991 the Cult played a show at the Marquee Club in London, which was recorded and released in February 1993, packaged with some vinyl UK copies of their first greatest hits release. Only a handful of CD copies of it were ever manufactured originally, however it was subsequently reissued on CD in 1999. An incomplete bootleg video of this show is also in circulation. The band were sued by the parents of the Native American boy pictured on the cover of Ceremony, for alleged exploitation and for the unauthorized use of the child's image. The parents stated that the boy felt he had been cursed by the band's burning of his image, and was "emotionally scarred." This image of the boy is also burned in the video for "Wild Hearted Son". This lawsuit delayed the release of Ceremony in many countries including South Korea and Thailand, which did not see the record's release until late 1992, and it was unreleased in Turkey until the Cult played several shows in Istanbul in June 1993. A world tour followed with backing from drummer Michael Lee (Page & Plant, Little Angels), bassist Kinley "Barney" Wolfe (Lord Tracy, Black Oak Arkansas), and keyboardist John Sinclair (Ozzy Osbourne, Uriah Heep) returning one last time, and the Gathering of the Tribes moved to the UK. Here artists such as Pearl Jam performed. The warm-up gig to the show, in a small nightclub, was dedicated to the memory of Nigel Preston, who had died a few weeks earlier at the age of 28. Following the release of the single "The Witch" (#9 in Australia) and the performance of a song for the 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie soundtrack entitled "Zap City", produced by Steve Brown and originally a B-side to "Lil' Devil", two volumes of remixes of "She Sells Sanctuary", called Sanctuary Mixes MCMXCIII, volumes one and two, and in support of Pure Cult: for Rockers, Ravers, Lovers, and Sinners, a greatest hits compilation which debuted at No. 1 on the British charts and later went to number one in Portugal, Astbury and Duffy fired the "backing band" and recruited Craig Adams (the Mission) and Scott Garrett for performances across Europe in 1993, with some shows featuring Mike Dimkich on rhythm guitar. This tour marked the first time the band performed in Turkey, Greece, and the Slovak Republic. The Cult and first breakup (1994–1998) With the same line-up still in place, the band released The Cult in October 1994, produced by Bob Rock. The self-titled album is commonly referred to as the "Black Sheep" album by fans of the group, due to the image of a black sheep on the front cover. Astbury referred to the record as a collection of "very personal and very revealing" songs about his life, with the subject matter ranging from sexual abuse at the age of 15, to the death of Nigel Preston, to his directionless years spent in Glasgow in the late 1970s. The record achieved little success, only reaching No. 69 in the US and No. 21 in the UK. Duffy remarked that he thought that the record wouldn't sell well due to the offensive lyrics. The record went to number one in Portugal also, but quickly dropped out of sight. The single "Coming Down (Drug Tongue)" was released with the band going on tour in support of the new album. Only one more single, "Star", was officially released with a live appearance on UK TV show The Word. "Star" began life in 1986 as "Tom Petty" and was recorded at the "Sonic Temple" demo sessions as "Starchild", being dropped by the band during rehearsals. In 1993 the song was resurrected and was finally completed for the record in 1994 as, just simply, "Star". When the band began the Beauty's On The Streets tour in winter 1994, they augmented the line up with James Stevenson on rhythm guitar. As with the Ceremony record several years earlier, no other official singles were released, but several other songs were released on a strictly limited basis: "Sacred Life" was released in Spain and the Netherlands, "Be Free" was issued in Canada and France, "Saints Are Down" was issued in Greece, but none of the songs gained much commercial success. During this tour, the Cult made their first ever appearance in Norway. During the Black Rain tour of South America in spring of 1995, despite the fact that several more new songs had already been recorded, the tour was cancelled after an appearance in Rio de Janeiro in March, and the band split up citing unspecified problems on a recent South American tour. Astbury started up a garage band called Holy Barbarians a few months later. The band made their debut at the 100 Club in London in February 1996 and released their first (and only) record in May 1996, and toured throughout North America and Europe for the rest of 1996. The band started writing material for a second record in 1997, but the band was dissolved and Astbury began writing and recording a solo record. Throughout 1997 and 1998 Astbury recorded his solo record, originally to be titled Natural Born Guerilla, later called High Time Amplifier. Ultimately the record remained unreleased until June 2000 when it was released under the name Spirit\Light\Speed. Astbury played one solo concert in 1999. In November 1996, a number of CD reissues were released: the band's American record company released High Octane Cult, a slightly updated greatest hits compilation released only in the US and Japan; The Southern Death Cult, a remastered edition of the fifteen-song compilation CD; a ten-song compilation CD by Death Cult called Ghost Dance, consisting of the untitled four-song EP, the single "God's Zoo", and four unreleased songs from a radio broadcast; and a remastered repackaging of the Dreamtime album, containing only the ten original songs from the record in their original playing order and almost completely different but original artwork. Dreamtime Live at the Lyceum was also remastered and issued on video and for the first time on CD, with the one unreleased song from the concert, "Gimmick". First reunion, Beyond Good and Evil and second hiatus (1999–2005) In 1999, Astbury and Duffy reformed the Cult with Matt Sorum and ex-Porno for Pyros bassist Martyn LeNoble. Their first official concert was at the Tibetan Freedom Concert in June 1999, after having rehearsed at shows in the Los Angeles area. The band's 1999 Cult Rising reunion tour resulted in a sold out 30 date tour of the US, ending with 8 consecutive sold out nights at the LA House of Blues. In 2000, the band toured South Africa for the first time, and North and South America, and contributed the song "Painted on My Heart" to the soundtrack of the movie Gone In 60 Seconds. The song was featured prominently and the melody was fused into parts of the score. In June, Astbury's long-delayed solo record was finally released as Spirit\Light\Speed, but it failed to gain much success. In November 2000, another authorised greatest hits compilation was released, Pure Cult: The Singles 1984–1995, along with an accompanying DVD, which was later certified gold in Canada. The Cult, as well as Ian Astbury, performed on separate tracks on the Doors tribute album, Stoned Immaculate: The Music of The Doors, covering "Wild Child" and "Touch Me". In November 2000, Beggars Banquet released 15,000 copies of a six-disc boxset (with a bonus seventh disc of remixes for the first 5000 copies) titled Rare Cult. The box set consists of album out-takes, demos, radio broadcasts, and album B-sides. It is most notable for including the previously unreleased "Peace" album in its entirety. In 2001, the band signed to Atlantic Records and recorded a new album, Beyond Good and Evil, originally being produced by Mick Jones of Foreigner, until Jones bowed out to tour with Foreigner. Astbury and Duffy co-wrote a song with Jones, an odd occurrence, as in the past, neither Astbury or Duffy would co-write their material. Bob Rock was the producer, with Martyn LeNoble and Chris Wyse as recording bassists, as Mike Dimkich played rhythm guitar on tour, and Matt Sorum returning as drummer. Although Sorum has previously toured with the band on the Sonic Temple tour in 1989, this was the first time that he had recorded a studio album with the band. However Beyond Good and Evil was not the comeback record the band had hoped for. Despite reaching No. 37 in the US, No. 22 in Canada, and No. 25 in Spain, sales quickly dropped, only selling roughly 500,000 copies worldwide. The first single "Rise", reached No. 41 in the US, and No. 2 on the mainstream rock charts, but Atlantic Records quickly pulled the song from radio playlists. Astbury would later describe the experience with Atlantic to be "soul destroying", after Atlantic tried to tamper with the lyrics, the record cover, and choice of singles from the record. After the first single from the record, the band's working relationship with Atlantic was on paper only, with Atlantic pulling "Rise" from the radio stations playlists, and stopping all promotion of the record. The second single "Breathe" was only released as a radio station promo, and the final single "True Believers" was only on a compilation sampler disc released in January 2002 (after the Cult's tour had already ended). Despite "True Believers" receiving radio airplay in Australia, both singles went largely unnoticed, and both Astbury and Duffy walked away from the project. LeNoble rejoined the band for the initial dates in early 2001, and Billy Morrison filled in on bass for the majority of the 2001 tour. The European tour of 2001 was canceled, largely due to security concerns after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the band flew back to the US to tour again with Aerosmith. But the eleven-week tour was considered by fans to be a disaster, as the band played only a brief rundown of their greatest hits. In October 2001, a show at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles was filmed for release on DVD. After the tour ended in December 2001, the band took most of 2002 off, apart from a few shows in the US to promote the release of the DVD, with Scott Garrett and Craig Adams rejoining the band. Despite the commercial disappointment of Beyond Good and Evil and the supporting tour, the band was voted "Comeback of the Year" by Metal Edge readers in the magazine's 2001 Readers' Choice Awards. In late 2002, Ian Astbury declared the Cult to be "on ice" indefinitely, after performing a brief series of dates in October 2002 to promote the release of the Music Without Fear DVD. During this second hiatus, Astbury performed as a member of the Doors (later dubbed the Doors of the 21st Century, later still renamed D21c, and most recently known as Riders on the Storm) with two of the original members of that group. D21c was sued numerous times, both by Jim Morrison's family and by drummer John Densmore. Astbury supposedly started work on recording another solo album that later became the backbone for the Cult's Born into This. At the same time, Duffy was part of Coloursound with bassist Craig Adams and ex-Alarm frontman Mike Peters, then Dead Men Walking (again with Peters) and later Cardboard Vampyres. Sorum became a member of the hard rock supergroup Velvet Revolver. In 2003, all of the Cult's records were issued on CD, with several bonus tracks being issued on the Russian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian versions. These eastern European releases had many printing mistakes on the jacket sleeves and lyric inserts. In October 2004, all of the Cult's records were again remastered and issued again on CD, this time in Japan in different cardboard foldout sleeves. "She Sells Sanctuary" appeared in the 2002 video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, playing on rock station V-Rock. Second reunion, Born Into This and Capsule EPs (2006–2010) Despite Astbury's previous statement from 2004 that a reunion would not happen, The Cult announced in January 2006 that they were reuniting for "some limited gigs" throughout the year. A month later, the band made their first live appearance in three-and-a-half years on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Their lineup consisted of Astbury (vocals), Duffy (lead guitar), John Tempesta (drums), Dimkich (rhythm guitar) and Wyse (returning as bassist). Their first stage show was held in March 2006 in San Francisco, California, at The Fillmore. The entire tour was recorded by Instant Live and sold after each show. In May, they did an eight date tour in Canada. Later that summer, they toured central and eastern Europe and played their first concerts in Bulgaria, Poland and Serbia. An eleven-date UK tour followed as well as several more dates in the United States, finishing with a South American tour in December. That year, Duffy began the band Circus Diablo with Billy Morrison, Sorum, Brett Scallions and Ricky Warwick. During these tours, the band occasionally played an extended set, including several songs the band had not performed in decades: "King Contrary Man" and "Hollow Man", neither of which had been performed since 1987; also, "Libertine" was performed approximately three times, for the first time since 2000, and "Brother Wolf, Sister Moon", which was only performed one time since 1986 (for this particular song, the band played an abridged version which has never been performed before or since) Astbury announced in February 2007 that he was leaving Riders on the Storm and returning to the Cult. He stated: "I have decided to move on and focus on my own music and legacy." The Cult was featured on Stuffmagazine.com's list of ultimate air guitar players. On 21 March 2007, it was announced that the band would be touring Europe with the Who. The first confirmed tour date was in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in early June, with at least a dozen shows set to follow. The band played a gig in London's West End at the CC Club on 7 June 2007, along with nearly two dozen shows across continental Europe during summer. The tour also includes the first performance in Romania and Croatia. On 29 May 2007, the band signed a deal with major metal label Roadrunner Records. Their 8th studio album, titled Born into This was released on 16 October, and was produced by Martin "Youth" Glover, bass player for Killing Joke. Born into This was released as regular single disc and limited edition double disc, the second disk being a bonus 5-track CD holding the following tracks: "Stand Alone", "War Pony Destroyer", "I Assassin (Demo)", "Sound of Destruction (Demo)" and "Savages (Extended Version)". Prior to the album's release, the band played festival and headline dates, and supported the Who in Europe through summer 2007, with a US headline tour to follow. The band's appearance at Irving Plaza in New York City in early November 2006 was filmed and was released in 2007. The Cult New York City, issued by Fontana North and is the Cult's first high definition DVD release. Meanwhile, Astbury lent vocals on two tracks of the 2007 Unkle album "War Stories", one of them being the first single from the album, "Burn My Shadow". The band performed a UK and European tour in late-February and early-March 2008. On 24 March, they began their North American tour including a major 13-city tour in Canada. During September 2008, the Cult did a brief series of dates in the northeast United States, and they toured in Brazil as part of the South American tour in October 2008. As of May 2008, according to The Gauntlet, the Cult are currently unsigned and no longer under contract with Roadrunner Records. In October 2008, it was announced that the Cult would headline the inaugural Rock 'n' Roll Marathon in San Antonio, to be run 16 November 2008. The Cult announced plans for a tour showcasing their 1985 Love album across the US and then the UK in October where they will play at the Royal Albert Hall. Coinciding with the remastered Love album and four-disc Omnibus boxed set, the Cult kicked off the long-awaited Love Live Tour in late summer. Performing their classic Love album in its entirety, each show was played with the Love tracks opening with "Nirvana" to "Black Angel". A quick intermission followed, then other Cult hits were played (varying by venue): "Sun King", "Dirty Little Rock Star", "Electric Ocean", "Illuminated". Then followed the favorites "Fire Woman", "Lil Devil", "Wild Flower", and lastly "Love Removal Machine". In the evening of 10 October 2009 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, the band performed a second encore with original Cult bassist Jamie Stewart and drummer Mark Brzezicki, who played drums with the band during the Love album recording sessions in July and August 1985. The band sold Love Live USB flash drives for each show during the tour. The Cult entered 2010 continuing their Love Live Tour and announcing more dates in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. The band finished recording a four-track "Capsule" with producer Chris Goss. Capsule 1 was said to be the first of three or four to be released sometime in summer 2010. Release formats include CD-DVD dualdisc, 12-inch vinyl, and digital downloads. Capsule 1 was released on 14 September 2010. The band officially announced the release of its first new studio recording since 2007, "Every Man And Woman Is A Star". The new single was released through the iTunes Store on 31 July 2010. On 1 August 2010, the band played the sold-out music festival Sonisphere, which marked their first UK performance since the tour for their Love album. During the performance they debuted their new single, "Every Man and Woman is a Star", which was released on 1 August 2010. On 14 September 2010 the band embarked on a new U.S. tour and released Capsule 1 in conjunction with media technology company Aderra Inc. and made it available in multiple formats including a CD-DVD DualDisc, USB flash drive, 12 inch vinyl, FLAC download and MP3 download. The collection includes a short film made by singer Ian Astbury and Rick Rogers. On 26 October 2010 the band and Aderra Inc. announced the release of a new song, "Embers", for 1 November 2010 and Capsule 2 available through their web store on 16 November 2010. Pictures from the Cult's tour stop in Chicago on 28 October 2010 can be seen at a local radio station website. On 17 September 2010, the band performed live at the Fall Frenzy concert at the Tempe Beach Park in Tempe, Arizona. Other bands that played at this concert were Stone Temple Pilots, Shinedown, and Sevendust. On 4 December 2010, the band performed a live set for Guitar Center Sessions on DirecTV. The episode included an interview with the band by program host, Nic Harcourt. Choice of Weapon and Hidden City (2011–2017) During the Cult's concert at the Hammersmith Apollo in London on 21 January 2011 Ian Astbury declared that the Cult would be recording a new album directly after the tour. They also announced that they would be working with Chris Goss, who performed with Masters of Reality as a supporting act the same evening. On 11 May 2011, it was announced that the Cult were signed to Cooking Vinyl Records, who will release the new album in early 2012. Commented guitarist Billy Duffy: "We are very much looking forward to returning to our U.K. roots in many ways working with Cooking Vinyl." Vocalist Ian Astbury added, "We look forward to a long and fruitful relationship with Cooking Vinyl." By May 2011, the band had been writing and recording new demos at its Witch Mountain studio hideaway in the Hollywood Hills, and began recording their new album at Hollywood Recording Studios. In October 2011, bassist Chris Wyse stated the album was almost finished and expected to be released in April 2012. Chris also described it as a "Zep/Stooges mix of energy." On 29 November 2011, it was announced that the album would be produced by Bob Rock, who provided the same role on Sonic Temple, The Cult and Beyond Good and Evil. The album, entitled Choice of Weapon, was released on 22 May 2012. The band partnered with Rolling Stone to premiere the first song from the album titled Lucifer on 30 January. On 5 February 2012, the Cult song "She Sells Sanctuary" was used as the soundtrack for a Budweiser commercial in a mashup with Flo Rida aired during Super Bowl XLVI. In May 2012 the Cult appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and played "For The Animals". On 28 September 2012, it was announced that the band would release Weapon of Choice, a "prequel" album to accompany the band's latest album, Choice of Weapon. The digital-only release, available exclusively on iTunes for two months only beginning 16 October, features the songs that were ultimately included in "Choice Of Weapon" at an earlier stage of development. Explaining the motivations behind the release, singer Ian Astbury said that "These songs were turned over and over, forged in long rehearsals and writing sessions, and emanated from challenges both personal and professional. We put our guts into this; [Producer Chris] Goss was able to create an environment where the songs were born through playing and turning over lyrics, through hard work and intense sessions." Astbury added "These songs have an integrity and rawness of their own. In many ways it's a different album to the one we released and reveals the foundations of 'Choice Of Weapon'. We were able to close the doors and begin to explore spaces we had not been in for a while." The song "Twisted and Bleeding" was made available for free download at the band's website ahead of the full digital release. On 20 June 2013, the band announced the release of Electric-Peace which comprises the entire Electric album plus the Peace album which was previously released on the now discontinued Rare Cult box set in 2000. It is due for release in the US on 30 July. In 2013 Mike Dimkich left the band and joined Bad Religion to cover for guitarist Greg Hetson. James Stevenson, from the Beauty's On The Streets tour in 1994, replaced Dimkich as the Cult's rhythm guitarist. In March 2013, Billy Duffy told the Argentinan journalist Fabrizio Pedrotti that the Cult had begun work on a new album for a 2014 release. The band were expected to begin work on the album after they finish their 2013 world tour, where they played the Electric album in its entirety. In August 2014, Billy added that the next album, which was not expected to be released before 2015 at the earliest, "will be more guitar heavy". On 5 November 2015, it was announced that The Cult would release their new album, entitled Hidden City, on 5 February 2016. The album is said to be the final part of a trilogy that began with Born into This, and marks the fifth time Bob Rock had produced a Cult album. The band also announced that they had hired Australian-born bassist Grant Fitzpatrick (ex-Mink) as the replacement for Chris Wyse. Chris Chaney (Jane's Addiction, Camp Freddy) and producer Bob Rock performed session bass on the album. In support of Hidden City, The Cult opened for Guns N' Roses on the Not in This Lifetime... Tour. In an October 2016 interview with PopMatters journalist J.C. Maçek III, Cult guitarist Billy Duffy spoke of the band's playlist while on tour, saying "Obviously you want to make an impactful [show]," he continues. "There are some practical, pragmatic decisions made. If you're playing to a crowd who are not very familiar with you, there's no point of going too deep but we do always make sure we play a new song. Like on Guns N' Roses' [tour] we had fifty minutes which is ten songs all in. So, you know we just made sure that in those ten songs we played 'Deeply Ordered Chaos' which we’re proud of and it makes a certain statement. And it just alerts people to the fact that, yes, we have made a record in the last 30 years. You know and that's a good thing. Psychologically, that's the blood transfusion that we need. And we're very mindful, we have a very loyal fan base. We don't pander as you well know." Upcoming eleventh studio album (2018–present) In an April 2018 interview with Guitar World, guitarist Billy Duffy was asked if another album from The Cult was in the works. He replied, "Never say never! Ian and I enjoy the process of making new music, and we feel it's vital to keep the band healthy, even if it's pretty much in the law of diminishing returns area now. Who knows if it will be a whole album a series of singles or an EP? I can say new Cult music will be forthcoming, but these days we don't rush it as there's no point. Quality is key. We are past the point of having to release stuff so if we feel it's good enough, then we will release it in some shape or another." On 2 April 2018, a tour of the United States of America called "Revolution 3 Tour" was announced for the summer. They performed as one of the three headliners, along with Stone Temple Pilots and Bush. In April 2019, The Cult announced that they would celebrate the 30th anniversary of the release of their fourth album Sonic Temple with a world tour, which began on 2 May in Houston, Texas and was expected to wrap up in 2020. In a June 2019 interview with LA Weekly, vocalist Ian Astbury stated that The Cult were "long overdue" to release new music. He was quoted as saying: "We do have some stuff we've been working on, but it's yet to see the light of day." Six months later, Astbury told Atlantic City Weekly that the band was going to start working on new music in 2020: "We've got a few pieces lying around in various stages of completion. The intention is to get together in the New Year and take a look at what we've got and decide how we are going to go about moving forward. It's an essential part of any creative lifeblood." On May 6, 2020, The Cult announced on their Twitter page that they had signed to Black Hill Records. On August 15, 2020, Duffy announced on his Twitter that the band were recording their new album with producer Tom Dalgety at Rockfield Studios, where The Cult had recorded their debut album Dreamtime 36 years earlier. In support of their new album, The Cult will embark on a co-headlining six-date UK tour with Alice Cooper in May and June 2022. Influences Duffy and Astbury cited among their influences a lot of different bands "from the Doors to Led Zeppelin. We literally went from the front of our record collections to the back. And then along the way we were drawn in by the likes of Public Image Ltd, Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees. You might not hear it in the music but it's there." They also cited Bauhaus among many other post-punk influences. Duffy also praised Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers for a major performance he attended in 1977 and Siouxsie and the Banshees whom "always had great guitar players with killer riffs." Duffy also hailed AC/DC for "the power of a good three chord riff", Pete Townshend of the Who "in terms of commitment to stage performing" and Brian May of Queen for using "‘echoplex’ tape delays to orchestrate his own solo". Musical style According to music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine, the band fuse a "hardcore punk revivalist" sound with the "pseudo-mysticism ... of the Doors and Uriah Heep and the guitar-orchestrations of Led Zeppelin and The Cure ... while adding touches of post-punk goth rock". In 1985 Astbury said, "Our music is just melodies and guitars. We're like Big Country and U2, only better!". Members Current members Ian Astbury – lead vocals, occasional percussion/guitar Billy Duffy – lead and rhythm guitars, backing vocals John Tempesta – drums, percussion Grant Fitzpatrick – bass, backing vocals Damon Fox – keyboards, rhythm guitar, backing vocals Discography Dreamtime (1984) Love (1985) Electric (1987) Sonic Temple (1989) Ceremony (1991) The Cult (1994) Beyond Good and Evil (2001) Born into This (2007) Choice of Weapon (2012) Hidden City (2016) References External links Official website Billy Duffy official website Musical groups established in 1983 Situation Two artists Beggars Banquet Records artists Sire Records artists Musical groups from Bradford English post-punk music groups English gothic rock groups English hard rock musical groups English heavy metal musical groups English glam metal musical groups	true	[ "\nThis is a list of the 29 players who earned their 2011 PGA Tour card through Q School in 2010. Note: Michael Putnam and Justin Hicks had already qualified for the PGA Tour by placing in the Top 25 during the 2010 Nationwide Tour season; they did not count among the Top 25 Q school graduates, but Putnam did improve his status.\n\nPlayers in yellow are 2011 PGA Tour rookies.\n\n2011 Results\n\nPGA Tour rookie in 2011\nT = Tied \nGreen background indicates the player retained his PGA Tour card for 2012 (finished inside the top 125). \nYellow background indicates the player did not retain his PGA Tour card for 2012, but retained conditional status (finished between 126-150). \nRed background indicates the player did not retain his PGA Tour card for 2012 (finished outside the top 150).\n\nWinners on the PGA Tour in 2011\n\nRunners-up on the PGA Tour in 2011\n\nSee also\n2010 Nationwide Tour graduates\n\nReferences\nShort bios from pgatour.com\n\nPGA Tour Qualifying School\nPGA Tour Qualifying School Graduates\nPGA Tour Qualifying School Graduates", "\nThis is a list of the 29 players who earned their 2012 PGA Tour card through Q School in 2011. Note: Roberto Castro and Mark Anderson had already qualified for the PGA Tour by placing in the Top 25 during the 2011 Nationwide Tour season; they did not count among the Top 25 Q school graduates.\n\nPlayers in yellow were 2012 PGA Tour rookies.\n\n2012 Results\n\nPGA Tour rookie in 2012\nT = Tied \nGreen background indicates the player retained his PGA Tour card for 2013 (won or finished inside the top 125). \nYellow background indicates the player did not retain his PGA Tour card for 2013, but retained conditional status (finished between 126-150). \nRed background indicates the player did not retain his PGA Tour card for 2013 (finished outside the top 150).\n\nWinners on the PGA Tour in 2012\n\nRunners-up on the PGA Tour in 2012\n\nSee also\n2011 Nationwide Tour graduates\n\nReferences\nResults from pgatour.com\n\nPGA Tour Qualifying School\nPGA Tour Qualifying School Graduates\nPGA Tour Qualifying School Graduates" ]
[ "The Cult", "The Cult (1994-1995)", "What were they doing in 1994", "place, the band released The Cult in October 1994, produced by Bob Rock.", "Was the cult popular", "The self-titled 'Cult' album is commonly referred to as the 'Black Sheep' album by fans of the group.", "Did it win awards", "The record achieved little success, only reaching No. 69 in the US and No. 21 in the UK.", "did they tour", "The single \"Coming Down (Drug Tongue)\" was released with the band going on tour in support of the new album." ]	C_66bf99c1483943608bfaa88bd0e08d05_0	where did they tour	5	Where did the band "The Cult" tour?	The Cult	With the same line-up still in place, the band released The Cult in October 1994, produced by Bob Rock. The self-titled 'Cult' album is commonly referred to as the 'Black Sheep' album by fans of the group. Astbury referred to the record as "very personal and very revealing" songs about his life, with the subject matter ranging from sexual abuse at the age of 15, to the death of Nigel Preston, to his directionless years spent in Glasgow in the late 1970s. The record achieved little success, only reaching No. 69 in the US and No. 21 in the UK. Duffy remarked that he thought that the record wouldn't sell well due to the offensive lyrics. The record went to number one in Portugal also, but quickly dropped out of sight. The single "Coming Down (Drug Tongue)" was released with the band going on tour in support of the new album. Only one more single, "Star", was officially released with a live appearance on UK TV show The Word. "Star" began life in 1986 as "Tom Petty" and was recorded at the "Sonic Temple" demo sessions as "Starchild", being dropped by the band during rehearsals. In 1993 the song was resurrected and was finally completed for the record in 1994 as, just simply, "Star". When the band began the Beauty's On The Streets tour in winter 1994, they augmented the line up with James Stevenson on rhythm guitar. As with the Ceremony record several years earlier, no other official singles were released, but several other songs were released on a strictly limited basis: "Sacred Life" was released in Spain and the Netherlands, "Be Free" was issued in Canada and France, "Saints Are Down" was issued in Greece, but none of the songs gained much commercial success. During this tour, the Cult made their first ever appearance in Norway. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER	The Cult are an English rock band formed in 1983 in Bradford, West Yorkshire. Before settling on their current name in January 1984, the band performed under the name Death Cult, which was an evolution of the name of lead singer Ian Astbury's previous band Southern Death Cult. They gained a dedicated following in the United Kingdom in the mid-1980s as a post-punk/gothic rock band, with singles such as "She Sells Sanctuary", before breaking into the mainstream in the United States in the late 1980s establishing themselves as a hard rock band with singles such as "Love Removal Machine". Since its initial formation in 1983, the band have had various line-ups; the longest-serving members are Astbury and guitarist Billy Duffy, who are also the band's two songwriters. The Cult's debut studio album Dreamtime was released in 1984 to moderate success, with its lead single "Spiritwalker" reaching No. 1 on the UK Indie Chart. Their second studio album, Love (1985), was even more successful, charting at No. 4 in the UK and including singles such as "She Sells Sanctuary" and "Rain". The band's third album, Electric (1987), launched them new heights of success, also peaking at No. 4 in the UK and charting highly in other territories, and spawned the hit singles "Love Removal Machine", "Lil' Devil" and "Wild Flower". On that album, The Cult supplemented their post-punk sound with hard rock; the polish on this new sound was facilitated by producer Rick Rubin. After moving to Los Angeles, California, where the band has been based for the remainder of their career, The Cult continued the musical experimentation of Electric with its follow-up album Sonic Temple (1989), which marked their first collaboration with Bob Rock, who would produce several of the band's subsequent albums. Sonic Temple was their most successful album to that point, entering the Top 10 on the UK and US charts, and included one of the band's most popular songs "Fire Woman". By the time of their fifth album Ceremony (1991), tensions and creative differences began to surface among the band members. This resulted in the recording sessions for Ceremony being held without a stable lineup, leaving Astbury and Duffy as the only two official members left, and featuring support from session musicians on bass and drums. The ongoing tension had carried over within the next four years, during which they released one more studio album, The Cult (1994), and called it quits in 1995. The Cult reformed in 1999 and released their seventh album Beyond Good and Evil two years later. The commercial failure of the album and resurfaced tensions led to the band going back on hiatus in 2002. They resumed activity in 2006, and have since released three more studio albums: Born into This (2007), Choice of Weapon (2012), and Hidden City (2016). History Early history (1981–1984) The band's origins can be traced to 1981, in Bradford, Yorkshire, where vocalist and songwriter Ian Astbury formed a band called Southern Death Cult. The name was chosen with a double meaning, and was derived from the 14th-century Native American religion, the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex or Southern Death Cult as it was sometimes known, from the Mississippi delta area, but it was also a stab at what the band viewed was the centralisation of power in Southern England (including that of the music industry); there has long been a perceived notion of a North–South divide based on social, historic and economic reasons. Astbury was joined by Buzz Burrows (guitar), Barry Jepson (bass) and Aki Nawaz Qureshi (drums); they performed their first show at the Queen's Hall in their hometown of Bradford on 29 October 1981. The band were at the forefront of an emerging style of music, in the form of post-punk and gothic rock, they achieved critical acclaim from the press and music fans. The band signed to independent record label Situation Two, an offshoot of Beggars Banquet Records, and released a three-track, triple A-side single, Moya, during this period. They toured through England headlining some shows and touring with Bauhaus and Theatre of Hate. The band played their final performance in Manchester during February 1983, meaning after only sixteen months the band was over. A compilation named The Southern Death Cult was released, this being a collection of the single, radio sessions with John Peel for Radio One and live performances - one of which an audience member recorded with a tape recorder. In April 1983, Astbury teamed up with guitarist Billy Duffy and formed the band "Death Cult". Duffy had been in the Nosebleeds (along with Morrissey), Lonesome No More and then Theatre of Hate. In addition to Astbury and Duffy, the band also included Jamie Stewart (bass) and Raymond Taylor Smith (later known as Ray Mondo) (drums), both from the Harrow, London based post-punk band, Ritual. Death Cult made their live debut in Oslo, Norway on 25 July 1983 and also released the Death Cult EP in the same month, then toured through mainland Europe and Scotland. In September 1983, Mondo was deported to his home country of Sierra Leone and replaced by Nigel Preston, formerly of Theatre of Hate. The single "Gods Zoo" was released in October 1983. Another European tour, with UK dates, followed that autumn. To tone down their name's gothic connotations and gain broader appeal, the band changed its name to "the Cult" in January 1984 before appearing on the (UK) Channel 4 television show, The Tube. The Cult's first studio record, Dreamtime, was recorded at Rockfield Studios, in Monmouth, Wales in 1984. The record was to be produced by Joe Julian, but after recording the drum tracks, the band decided to replace him with John Brand. Brand produced the record, but guitarist Duffy has said the drum tracks were produced by Julian, as Preston had become unreliable. The band recorded the songs which later became known as "Butterflies", "(The) Gimmick", "A Flower in the Desert", "Horse Nation", "Spiritwalker", "Bad Medicine (Waltz)", "Dreamtime", "With Love" (later known as "Ship of Fools", and also "Sea and Sky"), "Bone Bag", "Too Young", "83rd Dream", and one untitled outtake. It is unknown what the outtake was, or whether it was developed into a song at a later date. Songs like "Horse Nation" showed Astbury's intense interest in Native American issues, with the lyrics to "Horse Nation", "See them prancing, they come neighing, to a horse nation", taken almost verbatim from the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, while "Spiritwalker" dealt with shamanism, and the record's title and title track are overtly influenced by Australian Aboriginal beliefs. On 4 April 1984, the Cult released the single "Spiritwalker", which reached No. 1 on the independent charts in the UK, and acted as a teaser for their forthcoming album Dreamtime. This was followed that summer by a second single, "Go West (Crazy Spinning Circles)", before the release of Dreamtime in September; the album reached No. 21 in the UK, and sold over 100,000 copies in the UK alone. On 12 July 1984, the band recorded five songs at the BBC Maida Vale 5 studio for a Richard Skinner session. Before and after the album's release, the Cult toured throughout Europe and England before recording another single, "Ressurection Joe" (UK No. 74), released that December. Following a Christmas support slot with Big Country, the Cult toured Europe with support from the Mission (then called the Sisterhood). Dreamtime was released initially only in the UK, but after its success, and as the Cult's popularity grew worldwide, it was issued in approximately 30 countries. Mainstream success (1985–1990) In May 1985, the Cult released their fourth single, "She Sells Sanctuary", which peaked at No. 15 in the UK and spent 23 weeks in the Top 100. The song was recently voted No. 18 in VH1's Indie 100. In June 1985, following his increasingly erratic behaviour, Preston was fired from the band. Big Country's drummer Mark Brzezicki was picked to replace Preston, and was also included in the video for "She Sells Sanctuary". The Cult then finished recording their second album, Love in July and August 1985. The band's music and image shifted from their punk-oriented roots to 1960s psychedelia influences. Love was a chart success, peaking at No. 4 in the UK and selling 100,000 copies there toward a total of 500,000 copies throughout Europe, as well as 100,000 in Australia and 500,000 copies in the United States. Love reached number 20 on the charts in The Netherlands, where it remained for 32 weeks. To date, the record has sold over two and a half million copies worldwide. From late September 1985 to June 1986, the band went on a worldwide tour with new drummer Les Warner (who had played with Julian Lennon and Johnny Thunders). Two more singles from the Love album followed; "Rain" (charting in the UK at No. 17) and "Revolution" (charting in the UK at No. 30). Neither charted in the US. Another single, "Nirvana", was issued only in Poland. The album version of "Rain", as well as the remix "(Here Comes the) Rain", were used in the Italian horror film Dèmoni 2. Once back in England, the band booked themselves into the Manor Studios in Oxfordshire, with producer Steve Brown (who had produced Love), and recorded over a dozen new songs. The band were unhappy with the sound of their new album, titled Peace, and they decided to go to New York so producer Rick Rubin could remix the first single, "Love Removal Machine". Rubin agreed to work with the band, but only if they rerecorded the song. Rubin eventually talked them into rerecording the entire album. The band's record company, Beggars Banquet, was displeased with this, as two months and £250,000 had already been spent on the record. However, after hearing the initial New York recording, Beggars Banquet agreed to proceed. The first single, "Love Removal Machine", was released in February 1987, and the new version of the album appeared in April that year, now renamed as Electric, reaching No. 4 and eventually outselling Love. The band toured with Kid Chaos (also known as "Haggis" and "The Kid") on bass, with Stewart on rhythm guitar. Two more singles, "Lil Devil" and "Wild Flower", were released during 1987. A few tracks from the original Peace album appeared on the single versions of "Love Removal Machine", and "Lil Devil". The full Peace album would not be released until 2000, when it was included as Disc 3 of the Rare Cult box set. In the US, the Cult, now consisting of Astbury, Duffy, Stewart, Warner and Kid Chaos, were supported by the then-unknown Guns N' Roses. The band also appeared at Roskilde Festival in Denmark in June 1987. When the world tour wound through Australia, the band wrecked £30,000 worth of equipment, and as a result they could not tour Japan, as no company would rent them new equipment. At the end of the tour the Electric album had been certified Gold in the UK, and sold roughly 3 million copies worldwide, but the band were barely speaking to each other by then. Haggis left the band at the end of the Electric tour to form the Four Horsemen for Rubin's Def American label. Astbury and Duffy fired Warner and their management team Grant/Edwards, and moved to Los Angeles with original bassist Stewart. Warner sued the band several times for his firing, as well as for what he felt were unpaid royalties due to him for his performance on the Electric album, resulting in lengthy court battles. The Cult signed a new management deal and wrote 21 new songs for their next record. For the next album, Stewart returned to playing bass, and John Webster was brought in to play keyboards. The band used Chris Taylor to play drums during rehearsals and record the demos, with future Kiss drummer Eric Singer performing during the second demo recording sessions. The Cult eventually recruited session-drummer Mickey Curry to fill the drumming role and Aerosmith sound engineer, Bob Rock, to produce. Recorded in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from October to December 1988, the Sonic Temple record went Top 10 in both the UK and the US, where it was certified Gold and Platinum respectively. The band went on tour in support of the new album and new single "Fire Woman" (UK No. 15) (NZ No. 1), with yet another new drummer, Matt Sorum, and Webster as keyboard player. The next single, "Edie (Ciao Baby)" (UK No. 25) has become a regular song at concerts for many years. In Europe, the band toured with Aerosmith, and in the US, after releasing another single "Sun King" (UK No. 42), they spent 1989 touring in support of Metallica before heading out on their own headlining tour later that same year. A fourth single, "Sweet Soul Sister" (UK No. 38), was released in February 1990, with the video having been filmed at Wembley Arena, London, on 25 November 1989. "Sweet Soul Sister" was partially written in Paris and was inspired by the bohemian lifestyle of that city. Released as a single in February 1990, the song was another hit in the UK, and reportedly reached number one on the rock charts in Brazil. After playing a show in Atlanta, Georgia, in February 1990, the band's management told Astbury that his father had just died of cancer. As a result, the remainder of the tour was cancelled after a final leg of shows were performed in April. After the tour ended, the band were on the verge of splitting due to Stewart retiring and moving to Canada to be with his wife, and Sorum leaving to join Guns N' Roses. In 1990, Astbury organized the Gathering of the Tribes festival in Los Angeles and San Francisco with artists such as Soundgarden, Ice-T, Indigo Girls, Queen Latifah, Iggy Pop, the Charlatans, the Cramps and Public Enemy appearing. This two-day festival drew 40,000 people. Also in 1990, a ten CD box set was released in the UK, containing rare songs from the Cult's singles. The CDs in this box set were all issued as picture discs with rice paper covers, housed in a white box called "Singles Collection", or a black box called "E.P. Collection '84 - '90". In 1991, director Oliver Stone offered Astbury the role of Jim Morrison in Stone's film The Doors. He declined the role because he was not happy with the way Morrison was represented in the film, and the role was ultimately played by Val Kilmer. Ceremony and the lawsuit (1991–1993) In 1991, Astbury and Duffy were writing again for their next album. During the demo recordings, Todd Hoffman and James Kottak played bass and drums, respectively. During the actual album recording sessions, Curry was recruited again to play drums, with Charley Drayton on bass, and various other performers. Astbury and Duffy's working relationship had disintegrated by that time, with the two men reportedly rarely even being in the studio together during recording. The resulting album Ceremony was released to mixed responses. The album climbed to US No. 34, but sales were not as impressive as the previous three records, only selling around one million copies worldwide. Only two official singles were released from the record: "Wild Hearted Son" (UK No. 34, Canada No. 41) and "Heart of Soul" (UK No. 50), although "White" was released as a single only in Canada, "Sweet Salvation" was released as a single (as "Dulce Salvación") in Argentina in 1992, and the title track "Ceremony" was released in Spain. The Cult's Ceremonial Stomp tour went through Europe in 1991 and North America in 1992. In 1991 the Cult played a show at the Marquee Club in London, which was recorded and released in February 1993, packaged with some vinyl UK copies of their first greatest hits release. Only a handful of CD copies of it were ever manufactured originally, however it was subsequently reissued on CD in 1999. An incomplete bootleg video of this show is also in circulation. The band were sued by the parents of the Native American boy pictured on the cover of Ceremony, for alleged exploitation and for the unauthorized use of the child's image. The parents stated that the boy felt he had been cursed by the band's burning of his image, and was "emotionally scarred." This image of the boy is also burned in the video for "Wild Hearted Son". This lawsuit delayed the release of Ceremony in many countries including South Korea and Thailand, which did not see the record's release until late 1992, and it was unreleased in Turkey until the Cult played several shows in Istanbul in June 1993. A world tour followed with backing from drummer Michael Lee (Page & Plant, Little Angels), bassist Kinley "Barney" Wolfe (Lord Tracy, Black Oak Arkansas), and keyboardist John Sinclair (Ozzy Osbourne, Uriah Heep) returning one last time, and the Gathering of the Tribes moved to the UK. Here artists such as Pearl Jam performed. The warm-up gig to the show, in a small nightclub, was dedicated to the memory of Nigel Preston, who had died a few weeks earlier at the age of 28. Following the release of the single "The Witch" (#9 in Australia) and the performance of a song for the 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie soundtrack entitled "Zap City", produced by Steve Brown and originally a B-side to "Lil' Devil", two volumes of remixes of "She Sells Sanctuary", called Sanctuary Mixes MCMXCIII, volumes one and two, and in support of Pure Cult: for Rockers, Ravers, Lovers, and Sinners, a greatest hits compilation which debuted at No. 1 on the British charts and later went to number one in Portugal, Astbury and Duffy fired the "backing band" and recruited Craig Adams (the Mission) and Scott Garrett for performances across Europe in 1993, with some shows featuring Mike Dimkich on rhythm guitar. This tour marked the first time the band performed in Turkey, Greece, and the Slovak Republic. The Cult and first breakup (1994–1998) With the same line-up still in place, the band released The Cult in October 1994, produced by Bob Rock. The self-titled album is commonly referred to as the "Black Sheep" album by fans of the group, due to the image of a black sheep on the front cover. Astbury referred to the record as a collection of "very personal and very revealing" songs about his life, with the subject matter ranging from sexual abuse at the age of 15, to the death of Nigel Preston, to his directionless years spent in Glasgow in the late 1970s. The record achieved little success, only reaching No. 69 in the US and No. 21 in the UK. Duffy remarked that he thought that the record wouldn't sell well due to the offensive lyrics. The record went to number one in Portugal also, but quickly dropped out of sight. The single "Coming Down (Drug Tongue)" was released with the band going on tour in support of the new album. Only one more single, "Star", was officially released with a live appearance on UK TV show The Word. "Star" began life in 1986 as "Tom Petty" and was recorded at the "Sonic Temple" demo sessions as "Starchild", being dropped by the band during rehearsals. In 1993 the song was resurrected and was finally completed for the record in 1994 as, just simply, "Star". When the band began the Beauty's On The Streets tour in winter 1994, they augmented the line up with James Stevenson on rhythm guitar. As with the Ceremony record several years earlier, no other official singles were released, but several other songs were released on a strictly limited basis: "Sacred Life" was released in Spain and the Netherlands, "Be Free" was issued in Canada and France, "Saints Are Down" was issued in Greece, but none of the songs gained much commercial success. During this tour, the Cult made their first ever appearance in Norway. During the Black Rain tour of South America in spring of 1995, despite the fact that several more new songs had already been recorded, the tour was cancelled after an appearance in Rio de Janeiro in March, and the band split up citing unspecified problems on a recent South American tour. Astbury started up a garage band called Holy Barbarians a few months later. The band made their debut at the 100 Club in London in February 1996 and released their first (and only) record in May 1996, and toured throughout North America and Europe for the rest of 1996. The band started writing material for a second record in 1997, but the band was dissolved and Astbury began writing and recording a solo record. Throughout 1997 and 1998 Astbury recorded his solo record, originally to be titled Natural Born Guerilla, later called High Time Amplifier. Ultimately the record remained unreleased until June 2000 when it was released under the name Spirit\Light\Speed. Astbury played one solo concert in 1999. In November 1996, a number of CD reissues were released: the band's American record company released High Octane Cult, a slightly updated greatest hits compilation released only in the US and Japan; The Southern Death Cult, a remastered edition of the fifteen-song compilation CD; a ten-song compilation CD by Death Cult called Ghost Dance, consisting of the untitled four-song EP, the single "God's Zoo", and four unreleased songs from a radio broadcast; and a remastered repackaging of the Dreamtime album, containing only the ten original songs from the record in their original playing order and almost completely different but original artwork. Dreamtime Live at the Lyceum was also remastered and issued on video and for the first time on CD, with the one unreleased song from the concert, "Gimmick". First reunion, Beyond Good and Evil and second hiatus (1999–2005) In 1999, Astbury and Duffy reformed the Cult with Matt Sorum and ex-Porno for Pyros bassist Martyn LeNoble. Their first official concert was at the Tibetan Freedom Concert in June 1999, after having rehearsed at shows in the Los Angeles area. The band's 1999 Cult Rising reunion tour resulted in a sold out 30 date tour of the US, ending with 8 consecutive sold out nights at the LA House of Blues. In 2000, the band toured South Africa for the first time, and North and South America, and contributed the song "Painted on My Heart" to the soundtrack of the movie Gone In 60 Seconds. The song was featured prominently and the melody was fused into parts of the score. In June, Astbury's long-delayed solo record was finally released as Spirit\Light\Speed, but it failed to gain much success. In November 2000, another authorised greatest hits compilation was released, Pure Cult: The Singles 1984–1995, along with an accompanying DVD, which was later certified gold in Canada. The Cult, as well as Ian Astbury, performed on separate tracks on the Doors tribute album, Stoned Immaculate: The Music of The Doors, covering "Wild Child" and "Touch Me". In November 2000, Beggars Banquet released 15,000 copies of a six-disc boxset (with a bonus seventh disc of remixes for the first 5000 copies) titled Rare Cult. The box set consists of album out-takes, demos, radio broadcasts, and album B-sides. It is most notable for including the previously unreleased "Peace" album in its entirety. In 2001, the band signed to Atlantic Records and recorded a new album, Beyond Good and Evil, originally being produced by Mick Jones of Foreigner, until Jones bowed out to tour with Foreigner. Astbury and Duffy co-wrote a song with Jones, an odd occurrence, as in the past, neither Astbury or Duffy would co-write their material. Bob Rock was the producer, with Martyn LeNoble and Chris Wyse as recording bassists, as Mike Dimkich played rhythm guitar on tour, and Matt Sorum returning as drummer. Although Sorum has previously toured with the band on the Sonic Temple tour in 1989, this was the first time that he had recorded a studio album with the band. However Beyond Good and Evil was not the comeback record the band had hoped for. Despite reaching No. 37 in the US, No. 22 in Canada, and No. 25 in Spain, sales quickly dropped, only selling roughly 500,000 copies worldwide. The first single "Rise", reached No. 41 in the US, and No. 2 on the mainstream rock charts, but Atlantic Records quickly pulled the song from radio playlists. Astbury would later describe the experience with Atlantic to be "soul destroying", after Atlantic tried to tamper with the lyrics, the record cover, and choice of singles from the record. After the first single from the record, the band's working relationship with Atlantic was on paper only, with Atlantic pulling "Rise" from the radio stations playlists, and stopping all promotion of the record. The second single "Breathe" was only released as a radio station promo, and the final single "True Believers" was only on a compilation sampler disc released in January 2002 (after the Cult's tour had already ended). Despite "True Believers" receiving radio airplay in Australia, both singles went largely unnoticed, and both Astbury and Duffy walked away from the project. LeNoble rejoined the band for the initial dates in early 2001, and Billy Morrison filled in on bass for the majority of the 2001 tour. The European tour of 2001 was canceled, largely due to security concerns after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the band flew back to the US to tour again with Aerosmith. But the eleven-week tour was considered by fans to be a disaster, as the band played only a brief rundown of their greatest hits. In October 2001, a show at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles was filmed for release on DVD. After the tour ended in December 2001, the band took most of 2002 off, apart from a few shows in the US to promote the release of the DVD, with Scott Garrett and Craig Adams rejoining the band. Despite the commercial disappointment of Beyond Good and Evil and the supporting tour, the band was voted "Comeback of the Year" by Metal Edge readers in the magazine's 2001 Readers' Choice Awards. In late 2002, Ian Astbury declared the Cult to be "on ice" indefinitely, after performing a brief series of dates in October 2002 to promote the release of the Music Without Fear DVD. During this second hiatus, Astbury performed as a member of the Doors (later dubbed the Doors of the 21st Century, later still renamed D21c, and most recently known as Riders on the Storm) with two of the original members of that group. D21c was sued numerous times, both by Jim Morrison's family and by drummer John Densmore. Astbury supposedly started work on recording another solo album that later became the backbone for the Cult's Born into This. At the same time, Duffy was part of Coloursound with bassist Craig Adams and ex-Alarm frontman Mike Peters, then Dead Men Walking (again with Peters) and later Cardboard Vampyres. Sorum became a member of the hard rock supergroup Velvet Revolver. In 2003, all of the Cult's records were issued on CD, with several bonus tracks being issued on the Russian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian versions. These eastern European releases had many printing mistakes on the jacket sleeves and lyric inserts. In October 2004, all of the Cult's records were again remastered and issued again on CD, this time in Japan in different cardboard foldout sleeves. "She Sells Sanctuary" appeared in the 2002 video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, playing on rock station V-Rock. Second reunion, Born Into This and Capsule EPs (2006–2010) Despite Astbury's previous statement from 2004 that a reunion would not happen, The Cult announced in January 2006 that they were reuniting for "some limited gigs" throughout the year. A month later, the band made their first live appearance in three-and-a-half years on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Their lineup consisted of Astbury (vocals), Duffy (lead guitar), John Tempesta (drums), Dimkich (rhythm guitar) and Wyse (returning as bassist). Their first stage show was held in March 2006 in San Francisco, California, at The Fillmore. The entire tour was recorded by Instant Live and sold after each show. In May, they did an eight date tour in Canada. Later that summer, they toured central and eastern Europe and played their first concerts in Bulgaria, Poland and Serbia. An eleven-date UK tour followed as well as several more dates in the United States, finishing with a South American tour in December. That year, Duffy began the band Circus Diablo with Billy Morrison, Sorum, Brett Scallions and Ricky Warwick. During these tours, the band occasionally played an extended set, including several songs the band had not performed in decades: "King Contrary Man" and "Hollow Man", neither of which had been performed since 1987; also, "Libertine" was performed approximately three times, for the first time since 2000, and "Brother Wolf, Sister Moon", which was only performed one time since 1986 (for this particular song, the band played an abridged version which has never been performed before or since) Astbury announced in February 2007 that he was leaving Riders on the Storm and returning to the Cult. He stated: "I have decided to move on and focus on my own music and legacy." The Cult was featured on Stuffmagazine.com's list of ultimate air guitar players. On 21 March 2007, it was announced that the band would be touring Europe with the Who. The first confirmed tour date was in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in early June, with at least a dozen shows set to follow. The band played a gig in London's West End at the CC Club on 7 June 2007, along with nearly two dozen shows across continental Europe during summer. The tour also includes the first performance in Romania and Croatia. On 29 May 2007, the band signed a deal with major metal label Roadrunner Records. Their 8th studio album, titled Born into This was released on 16 October, and was produced by Martin "Youth" Glover, bass player for Killing Joke. Born into This was released as regular single disc and limited edition double disc, the second disk being a bonus 5-track CD holding the following tracks: "Stand Alone", "War Pony Destroyer", "I Assassin (Demo)", "Sound of Destruction (Demo)" and "Savages (Extended Version)". Prior to the album's release, the band played festival and headline dates, and supported the Who in Europe through summer 2007, with a US headline tour to follow. The band's appearance at Irving Plaza in New York City in early November 2006 was filmed and was released in 2007. The Cult New York City, issued by Fontana North and is the Cult's first high definition DVD release. Meanwhile, Astbury lent vocals on two tracks of the 2007 Unkle album "War Stories", one of them being the first single from the album, "Burn My Shadow". The band performed a UK and European tour in late-February and early-March 2008. On 24 March, they began their North American tour including a major 13-city tour in Canada. During September 2008, the Cult did a brief series of dates in the northeast United States, and they toured in Brazil as part of the South American tour in October 2008. As of May 2008, according to The Gauntlet, the Cult are currently unsigned and no longer under contract with Roadrunner Records. In October 2008, it was announced that the Cult would headline the inaugural Rock 'n' Roll Marathon in San Antonio, to be run 16 November 2008. The Cult announced plans for a tour showcasing their 1985 Love album across the US and then the UK in October where they will play at the Royal Albert Hall. Coinciding with the remastered Love album and four-disc Omnibus boxed set, the Cult kicked off the long-awaited Love Live Tour in late summer. Performing their classic Love album in its entirety, each show was played with the Love tracks opening with "Nirvana" to "Black Angel". A quick intermission followed, then other Cult hits were played (varying by venue): "Sun King", "Dirty Little Rock Star", "Electric Ocean", "Illuminated". Then followed the favorites "Fire Woman", "Lil Devil", "Wild Flower", and lastly "Love Removal Machine". In the evening of 10 October 2009 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, the band performed a second encore with original Cult bassist Jamie Stewart and drummer Mark Brzezicki, who played drums with the band during the Love album recording sessions in July and August 1985. The band sold Love Live USB flash drives for each show during the tour. The Cult entered 2010 continuing their Love Live Tour and announcing more dates in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. The band finished recording a four-track "Capsule" with producer Chris Goss. Capsule 1 was said to be the first of three or four to be released sometime in summer 2010. Release formats include CD-DVD dualdisc, 12-inch vinyl, and digital downloads. Capsule 1 was released on 14 September 2010. The band officially announced the release of its first new studio recording since 2007, "Every Man And Woman Is A Star". The new single was released through the iTunes Store on 31 July 2010. On 1 August 2010, the band played the sold-out music festival Sonisphere, which marked their first UK performance since the tour for their Love album. During the performance they debuted their new single, "Every Man and Woman is a Star", which was released on 1 August 2010. On 14 September 2010 the band embarked on a new U.S. tour and released Capsule 1 in conjunction with media technology company Aderra Inc. and made it available in multiple formats including a CD-DVD DualDisc, USB flash drive, 12 inch vinyl, FLAC download and MP3 download. The collection includes a short film made by singer Ian Astbury and Rick Rogers. On 26 October 2010 the band and Aderra Inc. announced the release of a new song, "Embers", for 1 November 2010 and Capsule 2 available through their web store on 16 November 2010. Pictures from the Cult's tour stop in Chicago on 28 October 2010 can be seen at a local radio station website. On 17 September 2010, the band performed live at the Fall Frenzy concert at the Tempe Beach Park in Tempe, Arizona. Other bands that played at this concert were Stone Temple Pilots, Shinedown, and Sevendust. On 4 December 2010, the band performed a live set for Guitar Center Sessions on DirecTV. The episode included an interview with the band by program host, Nic Harcourt. Choice of Weapon and Hidden City (2011–2017) During the Cult's concert at the Hammersmith Apollo in London on 21 January 2011 Ian Astbury declared that the Cult would be recording a new album directly after the tour. They also announced that they would be working with Chris Goss, who performed with Masters of Reality as a supporting act the same evening. On 11 May 2011, it was announced that the Cult were signed to Cooking Vinyl Records, who will release the new album in early 2012. Commented guitarist Billy Duffy: "We are very much looking forward to returning to our U.K. roots in many ways working with Cooking Vinyl." Vocalist Ian Astbury added, "We look forward to a long and fruitful relationship with Cooking Vinyl." By May 2011, the band had been writing and recording new demos at its Witch Mountain studio hideaway in the Hollywood Hills, and began recording their new album at Hollywood Recording Studios. In October 2011, bassist Chris Wyse stated the album was almost finished and expected to be released in April 2012. Chris also described it as a "Zep/Stooges mix of energy." On 29 November 2011, it was announced that the album would be produced by Bob Rock, who provided the same role on Sonic Temple, The Cult and Beyond Good and Evil. The album, entitled Choice of Weapon, was released on 22 May 2012. The band partnered with Rolling Stone to premiere the first song from the album titled Lucifer on 30 January. On 5 February 2012, the Cult song "She Sells Sanctuary" was used as the soundtrack for a Budweiser commercial in a mashup with Flo Rida aired during Super Bowl XLVI. In May 2012 the Cult appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and played "For The Animals". On 28 September 2012, it was announced that the band would release Weapon of Choice, a "prequel" album to accompany the band's latest album, Choice of Weapon. The digital-only release, available exclusively on iTunes for two months only beginning 16 October, features the songs that were ultimately included in "Choice Of Weapon" at an earlier stage of development. Explaining the motivations behind the release, singer Ian Astbury said that "These songs were turned over and over, forged in long rehearsals and writing sessions, and emanated from challenges both personal and professional. We put our guts into this; [Producer Chris] Goss was able to create an environment where the songs were born through playing and turning over lyrics, through hard work and intense sessions." Astbury added "These songs have an integrity and rawness of their own. In many ways it's a different album to the one we released and reveals the foundations of 'Choice Of Weapon'. We were able to close the doors and begin to explore spaces we had not been in for a while." The song "Twisted and Bleeding" was made available for free download at the band's website ahead of the full digital release. On 20 June 2013, the band announced the release of Electric-Peace which comprises the entire Electric album plus the Peace album which was previously released on the now discontinued Rare Cult box set in 2000. It is due for release in the US on 30 July. In 2013 Mike Dimkich left the band and joined Bad Religion to cover for guitarist Greg Hetson. James Stevenson, from the Beauty's On The Streets tour in 1994, replaced Dimkich as the Cult's rhythm guitarist. In March 2013, Billy Duffy told the Argentinan journalist Fabrizio Pedrotti that the Cult had begun work on a new album for a 2014 release. The band were expected to begin work on the album after they finish their 2013 world tour, where they played the Electric album in its entirety. In August 2014, Billy added that the next album, which was not expected to be released before 2015 at the earliest, "will be more guitar heavy". On 5 November 2015, it was announced that The Cult would release their new album, entitled Hidden City, on 5 February 2016. The album is said to be the final part of a trilogy that began with Born into This, and marks the fifth time Bob Rock had produced a Cult album. The band also announced that they had hired Australian-born bassist Grant Fitzpatrick (ex-Mink) as the replacement for Chris Wyse. Chris Chaney (Jane's Addiction, Camp Freddy) and producer Bob Rock performed session bass on the album. In support of Hidden City, The Cult opened for Guns N' Roses on the Not in This Lifetime... Tour. In an October 2016 interview with PopMatters journalist J.C. Maçek III, Cult guitarist Billy Duffy spoke of the band's playlist while on tour, saying "Obviously you want to make an impactful [show]," he continues. "There are some practical, pragmatic decisions made. If you're playing to a crowd who are not very familiar with you, there's no point of going too deep but we do always make sure we play a new song. Like on Guns N' Roses' [tour] we had fifty minutes which is ten songs all in. So, you know we just made sure that in those ten songs we played 'Deeply Ordered Chaos' which we’re proud of and it makes a certain statement. And it just alerts people to the fact that, yes, we have made a record in the last 30 years. You know and that's a good thing. Psychologically, that's the blood transfusion that we need. And we're very mindful, we have a very loyal fan base. We don't pander as you well know." Upcoming eleventh studio album (2018–present) In an April 2018 interview with Guitar World, guitarist Billy Duffy was asked if another album from The Cult was in the works. He replied, "Never say never! Ian and I enjoy the process of making new music, and we feel it's vital to keep the band healthy, even if it's pretty much in the law of diminishing returns area now. Who knows if it will be a whole album a series of singles or an EP? I can say new Cult music will be forthcoming, but these days we don't rush it as there's no point. Quality is key. We are past the point of having to release stuff so if we feel it's good enough, then we will release it in some shape or another." On 2 April 2018, a tour of the United States of America called "Revolution 3 Tour" was announced for the summer. They performed as one of the three headliners, along with Stone Temple Pilots and Bush. In April 2019, The Cult announced that they would celebrate the 30th anniversary of the release of their fourth album Sonic Temple with a world tour, which began on 2 May in Houston, Texas and was expected to wrap up in 2020. In a June 2019 interview with LA Weekly, vocalist Ian Astbury stated that The Cult were "long overdue" to release new music. He was quoted as saying: "We do have some stuff we've been working on, but it's yet to see the light of day." Six months later, Astbury told Atlantic City Weekly that the band was going to start working on new music in 2020: "We've got a few pieces lying around in various stages of completion. The intention is to get together in the New Year and take a look at what we've got and decide how we are going to go about moving forward. It's an essential part of any creative lifeblood." On May 6, 2020, The Cult announced on their Twitter page that they had signed to Black Hill Records. On August 15, 2020, Duffy announced on his Twitter that the band were recording their new album with producer Tom Dalgety at Rockfield Studios, where The Cult had recorded their debut album Dreamtime 36 years earlier. In support of their new album, The Cult will embark on a co-headlining six-date UK tour with Alice Cooper in May and June 2022. Influences Duffy and Astbury cited among their influences a lot of different bands "from the Doors to Led Zeppelin. We literally went from the front of our record collections to the back. And then along the way we were drawn in by the likes of Public Image Ltd, Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees. You might not hear it in the music but it's there." They also cited Bauhaus among many other post-punk influences. Duffy also praised Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers for a major performance he attended in 1977 and Siouxsie and the Banshees whom "always had great guitar players with killer riffs." Duffy also hailed AC/DC for "the power of a good three chord riff", Pete Townshend of the Who "in terms of commitment to stage performing" and Brian May of Queen for using "‘echoplex’ tape delays to orchestrate his own solo". Musical style According to music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine, the band fuse a "hardcore punk revivalist" sound with the "pseudo-mysticism ... of the Doors and Uriah Heep and the guitar-orchestrations of Led Zeppelin and The Cure ... while adding touches of post-punk goth rock". In 1985 Astbury said, "Our music is just melodies and guitars. We're like Big Country and U2, only better!". Members Current members Ian Astbury – lead vocals, occasional percussion/guitar Billy Duffy – lead and rhythm guitars, backing vocals John Tempesta – drums, percussion Grant Fitzpatrick – bass, backing vocals Damon Fox – keyboards, rhythm guitar, backing vocals Discography Dreamtime (1984) Love (1985) Electric (1987) Sonic Temple (1989) Ceremony (1991) The Cult (1994) Beyond Good and Evil (2001) Born into This (2007) Choice of Weapon (2012) Hidden City (2016) References External links Official website Billy Duffy official website Musical groups established in 1983 Situation Two artists Beggars Banquet Records artists Sire Records artists Musical groups from Bradford English post-punk music groups English gothic rock groups English hard rock musical groups English heavy metal musical groups English glam metal musical groups	false	[ "\nThis is a list of the 29 players who earned their 2011 PGA Tour card through Q School in 2010. Note: Michael Putnam and Justin Hicks had already qualified for the PGA Tour by placing in the Top 25 during the 2010 Nationwide Tour season; they did not count among the Top 25 Q school graduates, but Putnam did improve his status.\n\nPlayers in yellow are 2011 PGA Tour rookies.\n\n2011 Results\n\nPGA Tour rookie in 2011\nT = Tied \nGreen background indicates the player retained his PGA Tour card for 2012 (finished inside the top 125). \nYellow background indicates the player did not retain his PGA Tour card for 2012, but retained conditional status (finished between 126-150). \nRed background indicates the player did not retain his PGA Tour card for 2012 (finished outside the top 150).\n\nWinners on the PGA Tour in 2011\n\nRunners-up on the PGA Tour in 2011\n\nSee also\n2010 Nationwide Tour graduates\n\nReferences\nShort bios from pgatour.com\n\nPGA Tour Qualifying School\nPGA Tour Qualifying School Graduates\nPGA Tour Qualifying School Graduates", "\nThis is a list of the 29 players who earned their 2012 PGA Tour card through Q School in 2011. Note: Roberto Castro and Mark Anderson had already qualified for the PGA Tour by placing in the Top 25 during the 2011 Nationwide Tour season; they did not count among the Top 25 Q school graduates.\n\nPlayers in yellow were 2012 PGA Tour rookies.\n\n2012 Results\n\nPGA Tour rookie in 2012\nT = Tied \nGreen background indicates the player retained his PGA Tour card for 2013 (won or finished inside the top 125). \nYellow background indicates the player did not retain his PGA Tour card for 2013, but retained conditional status (finished between 126-150). \nRed background indicates the player did not retain his PGA Tour card for 2013 (finished outside the top 150).\n\nWinners on the PGA Tour in 2012\n\nRunners-up on the PGA Tour in 2012\n\nSee also\n2011 Nationwide Tour graduates\n\nReferences\nResults from pgatour.com\n\nPGA Tour Qualifying School\nPGA Tour Qualifying School Graduates\nPGA Tour Qualifying School Graduates" ]
[ "Travis Tritt", "1991-1992: It's All About to Change" ]	C_11462bedee39492fafd80e4368975ea1_1	Is It's All About to Change an album or a single?	1	Is It's All About to Change an album or a single by Travis Tritt?	Travis Tritt	In 1991, Tritt received a second Horizon Award nomination, which he won that year. He also released his second album, It's All About to Change. The album went on to become his best-selling, with a triple-platinum certification from the RIAA for shipments of three million copies. All four of its singles reached the top five on the country music charts. "Here's a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)" and the Marty Stuart duet "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'," respectively the first and third singles, both reached number two, with the number-one "Anymore" in between. "Nothing Short of Dying" was the fourth single, with a peak at number four on Billboard; both it and "The Whiskey Ain't Working" went to Number One on Radio & Records. "Bible Belt," another cut from the album (recorded in collaboration with Little Feat), appeared in the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny (the lyrics for the song, however, were changed for the version played in the movie to match the story line). Although not released as a single, it peaked at number 72 country based on unsolicited airplay and was the b-side to "Nothing Short of Dying." "Bible Belt" was inspired by a youth pastor whom Tritt knew in his childhood. Stuart offered "The Whiskey Ain't Workin' Anymore" to Tritt backstage at the CMA awards show, and they recorded it as a duet through the suggestion of Tritt's record producer, Gregg Brown. The duet won both artists the next year's Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. Tritt and Stuart charted a second duet, "This One's Gonna Hurt You (For a Long, Long Time)," which went to number seven in mid-1992 and appeared on Stuart's album This One's Gonna Hurt You. This song won the 1992 CMA award for Vocal Event of the Year. In June 1992, Tritt received media attention when he criticized Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart" at a Fan Fair interview, saying that he did not think that Cyrus' song made a "statement". The following January, Cyrus responded at the American Music Awards by making reference to Tritt's "Here's a Quarter". Tritt later apologized to Cyrus, but said that he defended his opinion on the song. CANNOTANSWER	He also released his second album, It's All About to Change.	James Travis Tritt (born February 9, 1963) is an American country music singer, songwriter, and actor. He signed to Warner Bros. Records in 1989, releasing seven studio albums and a greatest hits package for the label between then and 1999. In the 2000s, he released three studio albums on Columbia Records and one for the now-defunct Category 5 Records. Seven of his albums (counting the Greatest Hits) are certified platinum or higher by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA); the highest-certified is 1991's It's All About to Change, which is certified triple-platinum. Tritt has also charted more than 40 times on the Hot Country Songs charts, including five number ones—"Help Me Hold On", "Anymore", "Can I Trust You with My Heart", "Foolish Pride", and "Best of Intentions"—and 15 additional top ten singles. Tritt's musical style is defined by mainstream country and Southern rock influences. He has received two Grammy Awards, both for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals: in 1992 for "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'", a duet with Marty Stuart, and again in 1998 for "Same Old Train", a collaboration with Stuart and nine other artists. He has received four awards from the Country Music Association and has been a member of the Grand Ole Opry since 1992. Early life James Travis Tritt was born on February 9, 1963, in Marietta, Georgia, to James and Gwen Tritt. He first took interest in singing after his church's Sunday school choir performed "Everything Is Beautiful". He received his first guitar at age 8 and taught himself how to play it; in the fourth grade, he performed "Annie's Song" and "King of the Road" for his class, and later got invited to play for other classrooms in his school. At age 14, his parents bought him another guitar, and he learned more songs from his uncle, Sam Lockhart. Later on, Tritt joined his church band, which occasionally performed at other churches nearby. Tritt began writing music while he was attending Sprayberry High School; his first song composition, entitled "Spend a Little Time", was written about a girlfriend whom he had broken up with. He performed the song for his friends, one of whom complimented him on his songwriting skills. He also founded a bluegrass group with some of his friends and won second place in a local tournament for playing "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys". During his teenage years, Tritt worked at a furniture store, and later as a supermarket clerk. He lived with his mother after she and his father divorced; they remarried when he was 18. He worked at an air conditioning company while playing in clubs, but gave up the air conditioning job at the suggestion of one of his bandmates. Tritt's father thought that he would not find success as a musician, while his mother thought that he should perform Christian music instead of country. Through the assistance of Warner Bros. Records executive Danny Davenport, Tritt began recording demos. The two worked together for the next several years, eventually putting together a demo album called Proud of the Country. Davenport sent the demo to Warner Bros. representatives in Los Angeles, who in turn sent the demo to their Nashville division, which signed Tritt in 1987. Davenport also helped Tritt find a talent manager, Ken Kragen. At first, Kragen was not interested in taking an "entry-level act", but decided to sign on as Tritt's manager after Kragen's wife convinced him. Musical career 1989–1991: Country Club Tritt's contract with Warner Bros. meant that he was signed to record six songs, and three of them would be released as singles. According to the contract, he would not be signed on for a full album unless one of the three singles became a hit. His first single was "Country Club". Recorded in late 1988 and released on August 7, 1989, the song spent 26 weeks on the Hot Country Singles & Tracks charts, peaking at number nine. It was the title track to his 1990 debut album Country Club, produced by Gregg Brown. The month of its release, Tritt burst a blood vessel on his vocal cords, and had to take vocal rest for a month. Second single "Help Me Hold On" became his first number one single in 1990. The album's third and fifth singles, "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" and "Drift Off to Dream", respectively peaked at numbers two and three on the Hot Country Singles & Tracks charts, and number one on the Canadian RPM country charts; "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" also went to number one on the U.S. country singles charts published by Radio & Records. "Put Some Drive in Your Country", which was released fourth, peaked at 28 on Hot Country Songs. Country Club was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in July 1991 for shipments of one million copies, and no medals since in 1996. In 1990, he won the Top New Male Artist award from Billboard. The Country Music Association (CMA) also nominated him for the Horizon Award (now known as the New Artist Award), which is given to new artists who show have shown the most significant artistic and commercial development from a first or second album. Brian Mansfield of AllMusic gave the album a positive review, saying that "Put Some Drive in Your Country" paid homage to Tritt's influences, but that the other singles were more radio-friendly. Giving the album a B-minus, Alanna Nash of Entertainment Weekly compared Tritt's music to that of Hank Williams, Jr. and Joe Stampley. 1991–1992: It's All About to Change In 1991, Tritt received a second Horizon Award nomination, which he won that year. He also released his second album, It's All About to Change. The album went on to become his best-selling, with a triple-platinum certification from the RIAA for shipments of three million copies. All four of its singles reached the top five on the country music charts. "Here's a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)" and the Marty Stuart duet "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'", respectively the first and third singles, both reached number two, with the number-one "Anymore" in between. "Nothing Short of Dying" was the fourth single, with a peak at number four on Billboard; both it and "The Whiskey Ain't Working" went to Number One on Radio & Records. "Bible Belt", another cut from the album (recorded in collaboration with Little Feat), appeared in the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny (the lyrics for the song, however, were changed for the version played in the movie to match the story line). Although not released as a single, it peaked at number 72 country based on unsolicited airplay and was the b-side to "Nothing Short of Dying". "Bible Belt" was inspired by a youth pastor whom Tritt knew in his childhood. Stuart offered "The Whiskey Ain't Workin' Anymore" to Tritt backstage at the CMA awards show, and they recorded it as a duet through the suggestion of Tritt's record producer, Gregg Brown. The duet won both artists the next year's Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. Tritt and Stuart charted a second duet, "This One's Gonna Hurt You (For a Long, Long Time)", which went to number seven in mid-1992 and appeared on Stuart's album This One's Gonna Hurt You. This song won the 1992 CMA award for Vocal Event of the Year. In June 1992, Tritt received media attention when he criticized Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart" at a Fan Fair interview, saying that he did not think that Cyrus' song made a "statement". The following January, Cyrus responded at the American Music Awards by referring to Tritt's "Here's a Quarter". Tritt later apologized to Cyrus, but said that he defended his opinion on the song. 1992–1993: T-R-O-U-B-L-E and A Travis Tritt Christmas Tritt and Stuart began a "No Hats Tour" in 1992. In August of that same year, Tritt released the album T-R-O-U-B-L-E. Its first single was "Lord Have Mercy on the Working Man", a song written by Kostas. This song, which featured backing vocals from Brooks & Dunn, T. Graham Brown, George Jones, Little Texas, Dana McVicker (who also sang backup on Tritt's first two albums), Tanya Tucker and Porter Wagoner on the final chorus, peaked at number five. Its follow-up, "Can I Trust You with My Heart", became Tritt's third Billboard number one in early 1993. The album's next three singles did not perform as well on the charts: the title track (a cover of an Elvis Presley song), peaked at 13, followed by "Looking Out for Number One" at number 11 and "Worth Every Mile" at number 30. T-R-O-U-B-L-E became the second album of his career to achieve double-platinum certification. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic thought that T-R-O-U-B-L-E followed too closely the formula of It's All About to Change, but said that the songs showed Tritt's personality. Nash gave the album a similar criticism, but praised the rock influences of "Looking Out for Number One" and the vocals on "Can I Trust You with My Heart". One month after the release of T-R-O-U-B-L-E, Tritt issued a Christmas album titled A Travis Tritt Christmas: Loving Time of the Year, for which he wrote the title track. He also joined the Grand Ole Opry, a weekly stage show and radio broadcast specializing in country music performances, and filled in for Garth Brooks at a performance on the American Music Awards. By year's end, Tritt and several other artists appeared on George Jones's "I Don't Need Your Rockin' Chair", which won all artists involved the next year's CMA Vocal Event of the Year award. 1994–1995: Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof and Greatest Hits In early 1994, after "Worth Every Mile" fell from the charts, Tritt charted at number 21 with a cover of the Eagles' "Take It Easy". He recorded this song for the tribute album Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles (released through Warner Bros.' Giant Records division), which featured country music artists' renditions of Eagles songs. When filming the music video for this song, Tritt requested that the band, which had been on hiatus for over 13 years, appear in it. This reunion inspired the Eagles' Hell Freezes Over Tour, which began that year. His fourth album, Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof, was released that May. Its lead-off single, "Foolish Pride", went to number one, and the fourth single, "Tell Me I Was Dreaming", reached number two. In between these songs were the title track at number 22 and "Between an Old Memory and Me" (originally recorded by Keith Whitley) at number 11. The album included two co-writes with Gary Rossington of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and guest vocals from Waylon Jennings and Hank Williams, Jr. on the cut "Outlaws Like Us". The album achieved platinum certification in December of that year, and later became his third double-platinum album. AllMusic reviewer Brian Mansfield said that Tritt was "most comfortable with his Southern rock/outlaw mantle" on it, comparing "Foolish Pride" favorably to "Anymore" and the work of Bob Seger. Alanna Nash praised the title track and "Tell Me I Was Dreaming" in her review for Entertainment Weekly, but thought that the other songs were still too similar in sound to his previous works. 1995's Greatest Hits: From the Beginning included most of his singles to that point, as well as two new cuts: the Steve Earle composition "Sometimes She Forgets" and a cover of the pop standard "Only You (And You Alone)". The former was a top ten hit at number seven, while the latter spent only eight weeks on the country charts and peaked at number 51. Greatest Hits was certified platinum. 1996–1997: The Restless Kind In April 1996, Tritt and Stuart charted a third duet, "Honky Tonkin's What I Do Best", which appeared on Stuart's album of the same name and peaked at 23 on the country charts. The song won both artists that year's Country Music Association award for Vocal Event, Tritt's third win in this category. The two began a second tour, the Double Trouble Tour, that year. Tritt charted at number three in mid-1996 with "More Than You'll Ever Know", the first single from his fifth album, The Restless Kind. The album accounted for one more top ten hit, a cover of Waylon Jennings's "Where Corn Don't Grow", which Tritt took to number six in late 1996. This song's chart run overlapped with that of "Here's Your Sign (Get the Picture)", a novelty release combining snippets of comedian Bill Engvall's "Here are Your Sign" routines with a chorus sung by Tritt. "Here's Your Sign (Get the Picture)" peaked at 29 on the country charts and 43 on the Billboard Hot 100, accounting for Tritt's first entry on the latter chart. The other singles from The Restless Kind all failed to make Top Ten upon their 1997 release. "She's Going Home with Me" and "Still in Love with You" (previously the respective B-sides to "Where Corn Don't Grow" and "More Than You'll Ever Know") were the third and fifth releases, peaking at 24 and 23 on Hot Country Singles & Tracks. In between was the number 18 "Helping Me Get Over You", a duet with Lari White which the two co-wrote. Unlike his previous albums, all of which were produced by Gregg Brown, Tritt produced The Restless Kind with Don Was. Tritt told Billboard that the album showed a greater level of personal involvement than his previous efforts, as it was his first co-production credit. He also noted that he sang most of the vocal harmony by himself, played guitar on "She's Going Home with Me", and helped with the album's art direction. It received positive reviews from Thom Owens of AllMusic, who said that it was the most country-sounding album of his career. Don Yates of Country Standard Time also praised it for having a more "organic" sound than Tritt's other albums. 1998–1999: No More Looking over My Shoulder In 1998, he and several other artists contributed to Stuart's "Same Old Train", a cut from the collaborative album Tribute to Tradition; this song charted at number 59 on Hot Country Songs and won Tritt his second Grammy for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. He also performed on Frank Wildhorn's concept album of the musical The Civil War, singing the song "The Day the Sun Stood Still". By year's end, Tritt also released his final Warner Bros. album, No More Looking over My Shoulder. It was his first of four consecutive albums which he produced with Billy Joe Walker, Jr., who is a session guitarist, producer, and New Age musician. The album was led off by the ballad "If I Lost You", which peaked at number 29 on the country charts and number 86 on the Hot 100. Michael Peterson (who recorded for Warner Bros.' Reprise label at the time) co-wrote and sang backing vocals on the title track, which went to number 38 country in early 1999. The album's third and final single was a cover of Jude Cole's "Start the Car" (previously the B-side to "If I Lost You"), which peaked at number 52. Late in 1999, Tritt recorded a cover of Hank Williams's "Move It On Over" with George Thorogood for the soundtrack to the cartoon King of the Hill. This cut peaked at number 66 on the country charts from unsolicited airplay. 2000–2002: Down the Road I Go Soon after leaving Warner Bros. Records, Tritt signed to Columbia Records and released the album Down the Road I Go in 2000. The album's first release was "Best of Intentions", his fifth and final number one hit on Billboard. It was also his most successful entry on the Hot 100, where it reached number 27. The next two singles, "It's a Great Day to Be Alive" and "Love of a Woman", both peaked at number two on the country charts in 2001, followed by "Modern Day Bonnie and Clyde" at number eight. All three songs also crossed over to the Hot 100, respectively reaching peaks of 33, 39 and 55. Tritt wrote or co-wrote seven of the album's songs, including "Best of Intentions", and collaborated with Charlie Daniels on two of them. "It's a Great Day to Be Alive" was originally recorded by Jon Randall, whose version was to have been included on an unreleased album for BNA Records in the late 1990s. Maria Konicki Dinoia gave the album a positive review on AllMusic, saying that Tritt "hasn't lost his touch". Country Standard Time also gave a positive review, saying that it showed Tritt's balance of country and rock influences. An uncredited review in Billboard magazine called "Best of Intentions" a "gorgeous ballad", comparing it favorably to his early Warner Bros. releases. 2002–2005: Strong Enough and My Honky Tonk History In September 2002, Tritt released his second album on Columbia Records, Strong Enough. Its first single was "Strong Enough to Be Your Man" (an answer song to Sheryl Crow's 1994 single "Strong Enough") which reached number 13. The only other release was "Country Ain't Country", which peaked at 26 on the country charts. William Ruhlmann gave the album a generally positive review on AllMusic, saying that he considered its sound closer to mainstream country than Tritt's previous albums. Also in 2002, Tritt performed on an episode of Crossroads, a program on Country Music Television which pairs country acts with musicians from other genres for collaborative performances. He performed with Ray Charles. Tritt contributed guest vocals to Charlie Daniels' 2003 single "Southern Boy", and recorded a cover of Waylon Jennings' "Lonesome, On'ry and Mean" to the RCA Records tribute album I've Always Been Crazy. Respectively, these songs reached 51 and 50 on the country charts. Tritt's tenth studio album, My Honky Tonk History, was released in 2004. This album included three charting singles: "The Girl's Gone Wild" at 28, followed by the John Mellencamp duet "What Say You" at number 21 and "I See Me" at number 32. Other songs on the album included a cover of Philip Claypool's "Circus Leaving Town" and songs written by Gretchen Wilson, Benmont Tench and Delbert McClinton. Thom Jurek rated this album favorably, saying that it was a "solid, sure-voiced outing"; he also thought that "What Say You" was the best song on it. 2007–present: The Storm and The Calm After... Tritt exited Columbia in July 2005, citing creative differences over My Honky Tonk History. He signed to the independent Category 5 Records in February 2006, and served as the label's flagship artist. In March 2007, a concert promoter in the Pittsburgh area sued Tritt, claiming he had committed to play a show, but then backed out and signed to play a competing venue. Tritt's manager denied he had ever signed a contract with the promoter. Tritt released his first single for Category 5 in May 2007: a cover of the Richard Marx song "You Never Take Me Dancing". It was included on his only album for Category 5, The Storm, which American Idol judge Randy Jackson produced. The album featured a more rhythm and blues influence than Tritt's previous works. "You Never Take Me Dancing" peaked at number 27 on the country charts; a second single, "Something Stronger Than Me", was released in October, but it did not chart. Category 5 closed in November 2007 after allegations that the label's chief executive officer, Raymond Termini, had illegally used Medicaid funds to finance it. A month later, Tritt filed a $10 million lawsuit against Category 5, because the label had failed to pay royalties on the album, and failed to give him creative control on The Storm. In October 2008, Tritt began an 11-date tour with Marty Stuart. On this tour, they performed acoustic renditions of their duets; Tritt also performed five solo shows. Tritt signed a management deal with Parallel Entertainment in December 2010. He continued to tour through to 2012 and into 2013, with most of his shows being solo acoustic performances. Tritt acquired the rights to the songs on The Storm and re-issued it via his own Post Oak label in July 2013 under the title The Calm After... The re-release included two covers: the Patty Smyth and Don Henley duet "Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough", which he recorded as a duet with his daughter Tyler Reese, and Faces' 1971 hit "Stay with Me". In 2019, Tritt was featured on the country rock hit "Outlaws & Outsiders" by Cory Marks. Acting career Tritt's first acting role was in the 1993 made-for-television movie Rio Diablo. In 1994, Tritt made a special appearance as a bull rider in the movie The Cowboy Way, which starred Woody Harrelson and Kiefer Sutherland. In 1995, he appeared in season 6 of the horror anthology series Tales from the Crypt in the episode called Doctor of Horror. He also starred in a guest role on Yes, Dear as a rehabilitating criminal and in Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman as a gun slinger. The following year, Tritt appeared as himself in Sgt. Bilko, which starred Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd and Phil Hartman; Tritt's cover of "Only You (And You Alone)" appeared in the film's soundtrack. He also made an appearance in the 1997 film Fire Down Below, starring Steven Seagal and Kris Kristofferson. In 1999 Tritt appeared in Outlaw Justice with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson. Tritt appeared in the film Blues Brothers 2000 as one of the Louisiana Gator Boys. In 2001 he guest starred in Elmo's World The Wild Wild West. In September 2010, filming began on a movie called Fishers of Men, a Christian film. Musical styles Although he had been singing since childhood, Tritt said that he began to put "a little more soul" in his voice after his church band performed at an African-American church. He said that he took interest in how African-American singers put "all these bends and sweeps and curls" in their voices, and began emulating that sound. While performing at these churches, he also took interest in gospel singers such as Andraé Crouch. Later on, he began listening to Southern rock acts such as Lynyrd Skynyrd through the recommendation of a friend, as well as the bluegrass music that his uncle exposed him to. Tritt said that he found his songwriting began to develop during the creation of his demo tape, when he had written a song called "Gambler's Blues" that "felt a lot more connected to Southern rock" than his previous writings. He cites country, rock and folk as his influences. Stephen Thomas Erlewine contrasts him with contemporaries Clint Black and Alan Jackson, saying that Tritt was "the only one not to wear a [cowboy] hat and the only one to dip into bluesy Southern rock. Consequently, he developed a gutsy, outlaw image that distinguished him from the pack." Zell Miller, in the book They Heard Georgia Singing, said that Tritt has an "unerring ability to walk the narrow path between his country heritage and his rock leanings to the acclaim of the devotees of both." Regarding his songwriting style and single choices, Tritt said that he writes "strictly from personal experiences" and does not follow a particular formula. He described "Here's a Quarter" as "one of the simplest three-chord waltzes I've ever written", and said that label executives were reluctant to release it because they thought that it was a novelty song. Also, he was told that "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" would not be a hit because it did not contain any rhymes, and fought the release of the song "Country Club" because he did not think that it fit his style. He also said that, despite their low peaks, the more rock-influenced "Put Some Drive in Your Country" and "T-R-O-U-B-L-E" helped generate sales for their respective albums more so than the top ten hits from those albums. Personal life Tritt married his high school sweetheart, Karen Ryon, in September 1982. They were married two years before divorcing. After going to court, Tritt was ordered to pay alimony to Karen for six months. When he was 21, he married Jodi Barnett, who was 33 at the time. He divorced her shortly after signing with Warner Bros. in 1989; the divorce finalized one month before "Country Club" was released. Tritt wrote the song "Here's a Quarter" the night he received his divorce papers. He married Theresa Nelson on April 12, 1997. They have one daughter, Tyler Reese (born February 18, 1998) and two sons: Tristan James (born June 16, 1999) and Tarian Nathaniel (born November 20, 2003). On May 18, 2019, he was in his tour bus when it was involved in a motor vehicle accident which took the lives of two people driving the wrong way on Veteran's Highway leaving Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Political views and advocacy Tritt is a member of the Republican Party and supported George W. Bush for president in 2000. The two met in 1996 at the Republican National Convention in San Diego, California, where Tritt sang the national anthem. Tritt told Insight on the News that he is a strong supporter of Second Amendment rights and believes the answer to crime is not gun control but criminal control. "I'm a pro-gun guy. I'm an NRA (National Rifle Association) member, a life member as a matter of fact. I'm more for the belief of making the punishment tougher for the criminals to start with. I think that sends much more of an incentive for people to not commit crimes of any type than taking away guns. Because you take away guns, and the next thing you know, stabbing murders are going to increase." He adds that he is "definitely pro-death penalty". In September 2020, Tritt gained notoriety for joining fellow Republican James Woods in blocking random Twitter users for using pro-Black Lives Matter and other anti-Trump tags in their posts, under the belief that it would counteract anti-Republican sentiment on Twitter. On October 18, 2021, Tritt made a cameo appearance on conservative commentator Steven Crowder's show Louder with Crowder. Alleged paranormal encounters In October 2015, Tritt appeared on Lifetime network's The Haunting of... program to discuss his experiences with the paranormal. Tritt stated that beginning in 1993, he was awakened "regularly" by disembodied voices in a vacation cabin that he owned – the voices spoke in an unknown dialect. His wife, Theresa, eventually heard them as well. According to Tritt, "Over the years, these voices started happening on such a frequent basis that we were afraid to come up here." He also asserted that footprints once appeared in the carpet of the cabin, and imprints in the bedspread, that belonged to neither him nor his wife. The show's host, Kim Russo, concluded that an African-American medicine man had been stabbed and beaten to death on the property, and the voices that Tritt was hearing belonged to the murderers' angry spirits. A title card in the program notes that "On August 14, 1875, a group of men killed a 'hoodoo doctor' close to the land where Travis' cabin was built." Russo believed that the hoodoo doctor's spirit also lingered on the property because it found a "kindred spirit" in Tritt. Discography Studio albums Proud of the Country (1987) Country Club (1990) It's All About to Change (1991) T-R-O-U-B-L-E (1992) Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof (1994) The Restless Kind (1996)No More Looking over My Shoulder (1998)Down the Road I Go (2000)Strong Enough (2002)My Honky Tonk History (2004)The Storm (2007) The Calm After... (2013)Set in Stone (2021)'Billboard number-one singles''' "Help Me Hold On" (1990) "Anymore" (1991) "Can I Trust You with My Heart" (19921993) "Foolish Pride" (1994) "Best of Intentions" (2000) Awards and nominations Filmography Notes See also Travis (chimpanzee), named after Tritt References External links 1963 births American male singer-songwriters American country singer-songwriters Columbia Records artists Grammy Award winners Grand Ole Opry members Living people Musicians from Marietta, Georgia People from Cobb County, Georgia Warner Records artists Georgia (U.S. state) Republicans Country musicians from Georgia (U.S. state) Singer-songwriters from Georgia (U.S. state)	true	[ "Life is the debut studio album by Australian singer songwriter Conrad Sewell. The album was written and recorded in Los Angeles over four years, and features collaborations with Grammy-nominated artists Jamie Hartman, Busbee and Stuart Crichton. Life was released on 17 May 2019.\n\nThe album was supported by an Australian national Life tour throughout May and June 2019.\n\nUpon the album's announcement in February 2019, Sewell said \"This album pretty much sums up my life to date. A lot of the album was inspired by my battles with addiction, regrets I have as a result of those battles, and the people I've hurt along the way. These were hard truths that I've had to come to terms with.\" He added \"Although the underlying message in most of the songs is one of redemption and hope that people can change... I suppose that's what the journey of life is all about. I wanted to make a classic timeless album with songs that will hopefully be played 50 years from now. No bells and whistles, just my truth and my voice singing with every ounce of pain and love that I have.\"\n\nAt the Queensland Music Awards of 2020, Life won Highest Selling Album.\n\nSingles\n\"Changing\" is the album's lead single, released on 5 September 2018 and peaked at number 91 in Australia. The song is an apology to an ex-girlfriend, with Sewell telling her never to change for anyone.\n\n\"Love Me Anyway\" is the album's second single and released on 14 February 2019 as an album pre-order track. Sewell said the song is one of his favourites on the album and is about loving someone for who they are. Hit FM said the song is a \"...wedding song, proposal song, basically anything romantic because this song is a sure-fire love tune.\"\n\nThe title track \"Life\" was sent to radio in May as the album's third single.\n\n\"Big World\" was sent to radio on 13 September as the album's fourth single.\n\nThe album includes \"Start Again\" from Sewell's 2015 All I Know EP and the songs \"Healing Hands\" and \"Come Clean\" from his 2018 Ghosts & Heartaches EP.\n\nReception\n\nDavid from auspOp gave the album 5 out of 5 saying \"I am really impressed with the honesty and realness Conrad has brought to his debut album. He's been able to live and translate those experiences into brilliant songs we get to hear... Life is about living it, respecting it and finding your place in the world. And find it he has\".\n\nRhys McKenzie from Beat magazine said \"You could guess from the album title, Sewell gives us, over the course of fifteen tracks, a slice of life; his life in fact. He ponders over his past regrets with such tracks as 'Come Clean', 'City of Angels' and 'Changing'... he contemplates his hopes and dreams, adding sweetness and plenty of perspective to the album. Largely a piano-driven record, you get the feeling that you may be listening to the same song over and over again, but that doesn't take away from the sentiment. His debut LP, it's remarkable how quickly Sewell has found his voice\".\n\nJeff Jenkins from Stack Magazine said \"Conrad Sewell has certainly packed a lot of living into his 31 years, and it's all here on his aptly titled and eagerly awaited debut album\" adding \"Sewell's precocious talent prevails. What a voice!\"\n\nAmy Campbell from GQ Magazine said \"Life is lyrically brave, musically stripped back and, vocally, it's a masterpiece.\"\n\nTrack listing\nAll credits and track listing adapted from Apple Music metadata.\n\nNote\n \"Life\" is stylised in all caps\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nSee also\n List of number-one albums of 2019 (Australia)\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences\n\n2019 debut albums\nConrad Sewell albums\nSony Music Australia albums", "\"Powershifter\" is a Fear Factory single released in fall 2009. The song is the fourth track and first single from the band's seventh album Mechanize. The official music video for the song was directed by Myles Dyer and released on YouTube in late June 2011.\n\nLyrics \nThe lyrics deal about forcing war to change the world in order to live. The lyrics were written by Burton C. Bell and Dino Cazares. Bell explained the lyrics to illustrate that: \"Change is an inevitable course in nature and humanity. This world has seen much change as of late, and it is true globally, nationally, and personally. This is a true story of a personal struggle against a controlling and ineffectual organization. There is always a choice, and the choice is never easy.\"\n\nReferences \n\nFear Factory songs\n2009 singles\nSongs written by Burton C. Bell\n2009 songs\nSongs written by Dino Cazares" ]
[ "Travis Tritt", "1991-1992: It's All About to Change", "Is It's All About to Change an album or a single?", "He also released his second album, It's All About to Change." ]	C_11462bedee39492fafd80e4368975ea1_1	Was the album a success?	2	Was the album It's All About to Change by Travis Tritt a success?	Travis Tritt	In 1991, Tritt received a second Horizon Award nomination, which he won that year. He also released his second album, It's All About to Change. The album went on to become his best-selling, with a triple-platinum certification from the RIAA for shipments of three million copies. All four of its singles reached the top five on the country music charts. "Here's a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)" and the Marty Stuart duet "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'," respectively the first and third singles, both reached number two, with the number-one "Anymore" in between. "Nothing Short of Dying" was the fourth single, with a peak at number four on Billboard; both it and "The Whiskey Ain't Working" went to Number One on Radio & Records. "Bible Belt," another cut from the album (recorded in collaboration with Little Feat), appeared in the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny (the lyrics for the song, however, were changed for the version played in the movie to match the story line). Although not released as a single, it peaked at number 72 country based on unsolicited airplay and was the b-side to "Nothing Short of Dying." "Bible Belt" was inspired by a youth pastor whom Tritt knew in his childhood. Stuart offered "The Whiskey Ain't Workin' Anymore" to Tritt backstage at the CMA awards show, and they recorded it as a duet through the suggestion of Tritt's record producer, Gregg Brown. The duet won both artists the next year's Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. Tritt and Stuart charted a second duet, "This One's Gonna Hurt You (For a Long, Long Time)," which went to number seven in mid-1992 and appeared on Stuart's album This One's Gonna Hurt You. This song won the 1992 CMA award for Vocal Event of the Year. In June 1992, Tritt received media attention when he criticized Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart" at a Fan Fair interview, saying that he did not think that Cyrus' song made a "statement". The following January, Cyrus responded at the American Music Awards by making reference to Tritt's "Here's a Quarter". Tritt later apologized to Cyrus, but said that he defended his opinion on the song. CANNOTANSWER	The album went on to become his best-selling, with a triple-platinum certification from the RIAA for shipments of three million copies.	James Travis Tritt (born February 9, 1963) is an American country music singer, songwriter, and actor. He signed to Warner Bros. Records in 1989, releasing seven studio albums and a greatest hits package for the label between then and 1999. In the 2000s, he released three studio albums on Columbia Records and one for the now-defunct Category 5 Records. Seven of his albums (counting the Greatest Hits) are certified platinum or higher by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA); the highest-certified is 1991's It's All About to Change, which is certified triple-platinum. Tritt has also charted more than 40 times on the Hot Country Songs charts, including five number ones—"Help Me Hold On", "Anymore", "Can I Trust You with My Heart", "Foolish Pride", and "Best of Intentions"—and 15 additional top ten singles. Tritt's musical style is defined by mainstream country and Southern rock influences. He has received two Grammy Awards, both for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals: in 1992 for "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'", a duet with Marty Stuart, and again in 1998 for "Same Old Train", a collaboration with Stuart and nine other artists. He has received four awards from the Country Music Association and has been a member of the Grand Ole Opry since 1992. Early life James Travis Tritt was born on February 9, 1963, in Marietta, Georgia, to James and Gwen Tritt. He first took interest in singing after his church's Sunday school choir performed "Everything Is Beautiful". He received his first guitar at age 8 and taught himself how to play it; in the fourth grade, he performed "Annie's Song" and "King of the Road" for his class, and later got invited to play for other classrooms in his school. At age 14, his parents bought him another guitar, and he learned more songs from his uncle, Sam Lockhart. Later on, Tritt joined his church band, which occasionally performed at other churches nearby. Tritt began writing music while he was attending Sprayberry High School; his first song composition, entitled "Spend a Little Time", was written about a girlfriend whom he had broken up with. He performed the song for his friends, one of whom complimented him on his songwriting skills. He also founded a bluegrass group with some of his friends and won second place in a local tournament for playing "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys". During his teenage years, Tritt worked at a furniture store, and later as a supermarket clerk. He lived with his mother after she and his father divorced; they remarried when he was 18. He worked at an air conditioning company while playing in clubs, but gave up the air conditioning job at the suggestion of one of his bandmates. Tritt's father thought that he would not find success as a musician, while his mother thought that he should perform Christian music instead of country. Through the assistance of Warner Bros. Records executive Danny Davenport, Tritt began recording demos. The two worked together for the next several years, eventually putting together a demo album called Proud of the Country. Davenport sent the demo to Warner Bros. representatives in Los Angeles, who in turn sent the demo to their Nashville division, which signed Tritt in 1987. Davenport also helped Tritt find a talent manager, Ken Kragen. At first, Kragen was not interested in taking an "entry-level act", but decided to sign on as Tritt's manager after Kragen's wife convinced him. Musical career 1989–1991: Country Club Tritt's contract with Warner Bros. meant that he was signed to record six songs, and three of them would be released as singles. According to the contract, he would not be signed on for a full album unless one of the three singles became a hit. His first single was "Country Club". Recorded in late 1988 and released on August 7, 1989, the song spent 26 weeks on the Hot Country Singles & Tracks charts, peaking at number nine. It was the title track to his 1990 debut album Country Club, produced by Gregg Brown. The month of its release, Tritt burst a blood vessel on his vocal cords, and had to take vocal rest for a month. Second single "Help Me Hold On" became his first number one single in 1990. The album's third and fifth singles, "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" and "Drift Off to Dream", respectively peaked at numbers two and three on the Hot Country Singles & Tracks charts, and number one on the Canadian RPM country charts; "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" also went to number one on the U.S. country singles charts published by Radio & Records. "Put Some Drive in Your Country", which was released fourth, peaked at 28 on Hot Country Songs. Country Club was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in July 1991 for shipments of one million copies, and no medals since in 1996. In 1990, he won the Top New Male Artist award from Billboard. The Country Music Association (CMA) also nominated him for the Horizon Award (now known as the New Artist Award), which is given to new artists who show have shown the most significant artistic and commercial development from a first or second album. Brian Mansfield of AllMusic gave the album a positive review, saying that "Put Some Drive in Your Country" paid homage to Tritt's influences, but that the other singles were more radio-friendly. Giving the album a B-minus, Alanna Nash of Entertainment Weekly compared Tritt's music to that of Hank Williams, Jr. and Joe Stampley. 1991–1992: It's All About to Change In 1991, Tritt received a second Horizon Award nomination, which he won that year. He also released his second album, It's All About to Change. The album went on to become his best-selling, with a triple-platinum certification from the RIAA for shipments of three million copies. All four of its singles reached the top five on the country music charts. "Here's a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)" and the Marty Stuart duet "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'", respectively the first and third singles, both reached number two, with the number-one "Anymore" in between. "Nothing Short of Dying" was the fourth single, with a peak at number four on Billboard; both it and "The Whiskey Ain't Working" went to Number One on Radio & Records. "Bible Belt", another cut from the album (recorded in collaboration with Little Feat), appeared in the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny (the lyrics for the song, however, were changed for the version played in the movie to match the story line). Although not released as a single, it peaked at number 72 country based on unsolicited airplay and was the b-side to "Nothing Short of Dying". "Bible Belt" was inspired by a youth pastor whom Tritt knew in his childhood. Stuart offered "The Whiskey Ain't Workin' Anymore" to Tritt backstage at the CMA awards show, and they recorded it as a duet through the suggestion of Tritt's record producer, Gregg Brown. The duet won both artists the next year's Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. Tritt and Stuart charted a second duet, "This One's Gonna Hurt You (For a Long, Long Time)", which went to number seven in mid-1992 and appeared on Stuart's album This One's Gonna Hurt You. This song won the 1992 CMA award for Vocal Event of the Year. In June 1992, Tritt received media attention when he criticized Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart" at a Fan Fair interview, saying that he did not think that Cyrus' song made a "statement". The following January, Cyrus responded at the American Music Awards by referring to Tritt's "Here's a Quarter". Tritt later apologized to Cyrus, but said that he defended his opinion on the song. 1992–1993: T-R-O-U-B-L-E and A Travis Tritt Christmas Tritt and Stuart began a "No Hats Tour" in 1992. In August of that same year, Tritt released the album T-R-O-U-B-L-E. Its first single was "Lord Have Mercy on the Working Man", a song written by Kostas. This song, which featured backing vocals from Brooks & Dunn, T. Graham Brown, George Jones, Little Texas, Dana McVicker (who also sang backup on Tritt's first two albums), Tanya Tucker and Porter Wagoner on the final chorus, peaked at number five. Its follow-up, "Can I Trust You with My Heart", became Tritt's third Billboard number one in early 1993. The album's next three singles did not perform as well on the charts: the title track (a cover of an Elvis Presley song), peaked at 13, followed by "Looking Out for Number One" at number 11 and "Worth Every Mile" at number 30. T-R-O-U-B-L-E became the second album of his career to achieve double-platinum certification. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic thought that T-R-O-U-B-L-E followed too closely the formula of It's All About to Change, but said that the songs showed Tritt's personality. Nash gave the album a similar criticism, but praised the rock influences of "Looking Out for Number One" and the vocals on "Can I Trust You with My Heart". One month after the release of T-R-O-U-B-L-E, Tritt issued a Christmas album titled A Travis Tritt Christmas: Loving Time of the Year, for which he wrote the title track. He also joined the Grand Ole Opry, a weekly stage show and radio broadcast specializing in country music performances, and filled in for Garth Brooks at a performance on the American Music Awards. By year's end, Tritt and several other artists appeared on George Jones's "I Don't Need Your Rockin' Chair", which won all artists involved the next year's CMA Vocal Event of the Year award. 1994–1995: Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof and Greatest Hits In early 1994, after "Worth Every Mile" fell from the charts, Tritt charted at number 21 with a cover of the Eagles' "Take It Easy". He recorded this song for the tribute album Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles (released through Warner Bros.' Giant Records division), which featured country music artists' renditions of Eagles songs. When filming the music video for this song, Tritt requested that the band, which had been on hiatus for over 13 years, appear in it. This reunion inspired the Eagles' Hell Freezes Over Tour, which began that year. His fourth album, Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof, was released that May. Its lead-off single, "Foolish Pride", went to number one, and the fourth single, "Tell Me I Was Dreaming", reached number two. In between these songs were the title track at number 22 and "Between an Old Memory and Me" (originally recorded by Keith Whitley) at number 11. The album included two co-writes with Gary Rossington of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and guest vocals from Waylon Jennings and Hank Williams, Jr. on the cut "Outlaws Like Us". The album achieved platinum certification in December of that year, and later became his third double-platinum album. AllMusic reviewer Brian Mansfield said that Tritt was "most comfortable with his Southern rock/outlaw mantle" on it, comparing "Foolish Pride" favorably to "Anymore" and the work of Bob Seger. Alanna Nash praised the title track and "Tell Me I Was Dreaming" in her review for Entertainment Weekly, but thought that the other songs were still too similar in sound to his previous works. 1995's Greatest Hits: From the Beginning included most of his singles to that point, as well as two new cuts: the Steve Earle composition "Sometimes She Forgets" and a cover of the pop standard "Only You (And You Alone)". The former was a top ten hit at number seven, while the latter spent only eight weeks on the country charts and peaked at number 51. Greatest Hits was certified platinum. 1996–1997: The Restless Kind In April 1996, Tritt and Stuart charted a third duet, "Honky Tonkin's What I Do Best", which appeared on Stuart's album of the same name and peaked at 23 on the country charts. The song won both artists that year's Country Music Association award for Vocal Event, Tritt's third win in this category. The two began a second tour, the Double Trouble Tour, that year. Tritt charted at number three in mid-1996 with "More Than You'll Ever Know", the first single from his fifth album, The Restless Kind. The album accounted for one more top ten hit, a cover of Waylon Jennings's "Where Corn Don't Grow", which Tritt took to number six in late 1996. This song's chart run overlapped with that of "Here's Your Sign (Get the Picture)", a novelty release combining snippets of comedian Bill Engvall's "Here are Your Sign" routines with a chorus sung by Tritt. "Here's Your Sign (Get the Picture)" peaked at 29 on the country charts and 43 on the Billboard Hot 100, accounting for Tritt's first entry on the latter chart. The other singles from The Restless Kind all failed to make Top Ten upon their 1997 release. "She's Going Home with Me" and "Still in Love with You" (previously the respective B-sides to "Where Corn Don't Grow" and "More Than You'll Ever Know") were the third and fifth releases, peaking at 24 and 23 on Hot Country Singles & Tracks. In between was the number 18 "Helping Me Get Over You", a duet with Lari White which the two co-wrote. Unlike his previous albums, all of which were produced by Gregg Brown, Tritt produced The Restless Kind with Don Was. Tritt told Billboard that the album showed a greater level of personal involvement than his previous efforts, as it was his first co-production credit. He also noted that he sang most of the vocal harmony by himself, played guitar on "She's Going Home with Me", and helped with the album's art direction. It received positive reviews from Thom Owens of AllMusic, who said that it was the most country-sounding album of his career. Don Yates of Country Standard Time also praised it for having a more "organic" sound than Tritt's other albums. 1998–1999: No More Looking over My Shoulder In 1998, he and several other artists contributed to Stuart's "Same Old Train", a cut from the collaborative album Tribute to Tradition; this song charted at number 59 on Hot Country Songs and won Tritt his second Grammy for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. He also performed on Frank Wildhorn's concept album of the musical The Civil War, singing the song "The Day the Sun Stood Still". By year's end, Tritt also released his final Warner Bros. album, No More Looking over My Shoulder. It was his first of four consecutive albums which he produced with Billy Joe Walker, Jr., who is a session guitarist, producer, and New Age musician. The album was led off by the ballad "If I Lost You", which peaked at number 29 on the country charts and number 86 on the Hot 100. Michael Peterson (who recorded for Warner Bros.' Reprise label at the time) co-wrote and sang backing vocals on the title track, which went to number 38 country in early 1999. The album's third and final single was a cover of Jude Cole's "Start the Car" (previously the B-side to "If I Lost You"), which peaked at number 52. Late in 1999, Tritt recorded a cover of Hank Williams's "Move It On Over" with George Thorogood for the soundtrack to the cartoon King of the Hill. This cut peaked at number 66 on the country charts from unsolicited airplay. 2000–2002: Down the Road I Go Soon after leaving Warner Bros. Records, Tritt signed to Columbia Records and released the album Down the Road I Go in 2000. The album's first release was "Best of Intentions", his fifth and final number one hit on Billboard. It was also his most successful entry on the Hot 100, where it reached number 27. The next two singles, "It's a Great Day to Be Alive" and "Love of a Woman", both peaked at number two on the country charts in 2001, followed by "Modern Day Bonnie and Clyde" at number eight. All three songs also crossed over to the Hot 100, respectively reaching peaks of 33, 39 and 55. Tritt wrote or co-wrote seven of the album's songs, including "Best of Intentions", and collaborated with Charlie Daniels on two of them. "It's a Great Day to Be Alive" was originally recorded by Jon Randall, whose version was to have been included on an unreleased album for BNA Records in the late 1990s. Maria Konicki Dinoia gave the album a positive review on AllMusic, saying that Tritt "hasn't lost his touch". Country Standard Time also gave a positive review, saying that it showed Tritt's balance of country and rock influences. An uncredited review in Billboard magazine called "Best of Intentions" a "gorgeous ballad", comparing it favorably to his early Warner Bros. releases. 2002–2005: Strong Enough and My Honky Tonk History In September 2002, Tritt released his second album on Columbia Records, Strong Enough. Its first single was "Strong Enough to Be Your Man" (an answer song to Sheryl Crow's 1994 single "Strong Enough") which reached number 13. The only other release was "Country Ain't Country", which peaked at 26 on the country charts. William Ruhlmann gave the album a generally positive review on AllMusic, saying that he considered its sound closer to mainstream country than Tritt's previous albums. Also in 2002, Tritt performed on an episode of Crossroads, a program on Country Music Television which pairs country acts with musicians from other genres for collaborative performances. He performed with Ray Charles. Tritt contributed guest vocals to Charlie Daniels' 2003 single "Southern Boy", and recorded a cover of Waylon Jennings' "Lonesome, On'ry and Mean" to the RCA Records tribute album I've Always Been Crazy. Respectively, these songs reached 51 and 50 on the country charts. Tritt's tenth studio album, My Honky Tonk History, was released in 2004. This album included three charting singles: "The Girl's Gone Wild" at 28, followed by the John Mellencamp duet "What Say You" at number 21 and "I See Me" at number 32. Other songs on the album included a cover of Philip Claypool's "Circus Leaving Town" and songs written by Gretchen Wilson, Benmont Tench and Delbert McClinton. Thom Jurek rated this album favorably, saying that it was a "solid, sure-voiced outing"; he also thought that "What Say You" was the best song on it. 2007–present: The Storm and The Calm After... Tritt exited Columbia in July 2005, citing creative differences over My Honky Tonk History. He signed to the independent Category 5 Records in February 2006, and served as the label's flagship artist. In March 2007, a concert promoter in the Pittsburgh area sued Tritt, claiming he had committed to play a show, but then backed out and signed to play a competing venue. Tritt's manager denied he had ever signed a contract with the promoter. Tritt released his first single for Category 5 in May 2007: a cover of the Richard Marx song "You Never Take Me Dancing". It was included on his only album for Category 5, The Storm, which American Idol judge Randy Jackson produced. The album featured a more rhythm and blues influence than Tritt's previous works. "You Never Take Me Dancing" peaked at number 27 on the country charts; a second single, "Something Stronger Than Me", was released in October, but it did not chart. Category 5 closed in November 2007 after allegations that the label's chief executive officer, Raymond Termini, had illegally used Medicaid funds to finance it. A month later, Tritt filed a $10 million lawsuit against Category 5, because the label had failed to pay royalties on the album, and failed to give him creative control on The Storm. In October 2008, Tritt began an 11-date tour with Marty Stuart. On this tour, they performed acoustic renditions of their duets; Tritt also performed five solo shows. Tritt signed a management deal with Parallel Entertainment in December 2010. He continued to tour through to 2012 and into 2013, with most of his shows being solo acoustic performances. Tritt acquired the rights to the songs on The Storm and re-issued it via his own Post Oak label in July 2013 under the title The Calm After... The re-release included two covers: the Patty Smyth and Don Henley duet "Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough", which he recorded as a duet with his daughter Tyler Reese, and Faces' 1971 hit "Stay with Me". In 2019, Tritt was featured on the country rock hit "Outlaws & Outsiders" by Cory Marks. Acting career Tritt's first acting role was in the 1993 made-for-television movie Rio Diablo. In 1994, Tritt made a special appearance as a bull rider in the movie The Cowboy Way, which starred Woody Harrelson and Kiefer Sutherland. In 1995, he appeared in season 6 of the horror anthology series Tales from the Crypt in the episode called Doctor of Horror. He also starred in a guest role on Yes, Dear as a rehabilitating criminal and in Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman as a gun slinger. The following year, Tritt appeared as himself in Sgt. Bilko, which starred Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd and Phil Hartman; Tritt's cover of "Only You (And You Alone)" appeared in the film's soundtrack. He also made an appearance in the 1997 film Fire Down Below, starring Steven Seagal and Kris Kristofferson. In 1999 Tritt appeared in Outlaw Justice with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson. Tritt appeared in the film Blues Brothers 2000 as one of the Louisiana Gator Boys. In 2001 he guest starred in Elmo's World The Wild Wild West. In September 2010, filming began on a movie called Fishers of Men, a Christian film. Musical styles Although he had been singing since childhood, Tritt said that he began to put "a little more soul" in his voice after his church band performed at an African-American church. He said that he took interest in how African-American singers put "all these bends and sweeps and curls" in their voices, and began emulating that sound. While performing at these churches, he also took interest in gospel singers such as Andraé Crouch. Later on, he began listening to Southern rock acts such as Lynyrd Skynyrd through the recommendation of a friend, as well as the bluegrass music that his uncle exposed him to. Tritt said that he found his songwriting began to develop during the creation of his demo tape, when he had written a song called "Gambler's Blues" that "felt a lot more connected to Southern rock" than his previous writings. He cites country, rock and folk as his influences. Stephen Thomas Erlewine contrasts him with contemporaries Clint Black and Alan Jackson, saying that Tritt was "the only one not to wear a [cowboy] hat and the only one to dip into bluesy Southern rock. Consequently, he developed a gutsy, outlaw image that distinguished him from the pack." Zell Miller, in the book They Heard Georgia Singing, said that Tritt has an "unerring ability to walk the narrow path between his country heritage and his rock leanings to the acclaim of the devotees of both." Regarding his songwriting style and single choices, Tritt said that he writes "strictly from personal experiences" and does not follow a particular formula. He described "Here's a Quarter" as "one of the simplest three-chord waltzes I've ever written", and said that label executives were reluctant to release it because they thought that it was a novelty song. Also, he was told that "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" would not be a hit because it did not contain any rhymes, and fought the release of the song "Country Club" because he did not think that it fit his style. He also said that, despite their low peaks, the more rock-influenced "Put Some Drive in Your Country" and "T-R-O-U-B-L-E" helped generate sales for their respective albums more so than the top ten hits from those albums. Personal life Tritt married his high school sweetheart, Karen Ryon, in September 1982. They were married two years before divorcing. After going to court, Tritt was ordered to pay alimony to Karen for six months. When he was 21, he married Jodi Barnett, who was 33 at the time. He divorced her shortly after signing with Warner Bros. in 1989; the divorce finalized one month before "Country Club" was released. Tritt wrote the song "Here's a Quarter" the night he received his divorce papers. He married Theresa Nelson on April 12, 1997. They have one daughter, Tyler Reese (born February 18, 1998) and two sons: Tristan James (born June 16, 1999) and Tarian Nathaniel (born November 20, 2003). On May 18, 2019, he was in his tour bus when it was involved in a motor vehicle accident which took the lives of two people driving the wrong way on Veteran's Highway leaving Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Political views and advocacy Tritt is a member of the Republican Party and supported George W. Bush for president in 2000. The two met in 1996 at the Republican National Convention in San Diego, California, where Tritt sang the national anthem. Tritt told Insight on the News that he is a strong supporter of Second Amendment rights and believes the answer to crime is not gun control but criminal control. "I'm a pro-gun guy. I'm an NRA (National Rifle Association) member, a life member as a matter of fact. I'm more for the belief of making the punishment tougher for the criminals to start with. I think that sends much more of an incentive for people to not commit crimes of any type than taking away guns. Because you take away guns, and the next thing you know, stabbing murders are going to increase." He adds that he is "definitely pro-death penalty". In September 2020, Tritt gained notoriety for joining fellow Republican James Woods in blocking random Twitter users for using pro-Black Lives Matter and other anti-Trump tags in their posts, under the belief that it would counteract anti-Republican sentiment on Twitter. On October 18, 2021, Tritt made a cameo appearance on conservative commentator Steven Crowder's show Louder with Crowder. Alleged paranormal encounters In October 2015, Tritt appeared on Lifetime network's The Haunting of... program to discuss his experiences with the paranormal. Tritt stated that beginning in 1993, he was awakened "regularly" by disembodied voices in a vacation cabin that he owned – the voices spoke in an unknown dialect. His wife, Theresa, eventually heard them as well. According to Tritt, "Over the years, these voices started happening on such a frequent basis that we were afraid to come up here." He also asserted that footprints once appeared in the carpet of the cabin, and imprints in the bedspread, that belonged to neither him nor his wife. The show's host, Kim Russo, concluded that an African-American medicine man had been stabbed and beaten to death on the property, and the voices that Tritt was hearing belonged to the murderers' angry spirits. A title card in the program notes that "On August 14, 1875, a group of men killed a 'hoodoo doctor' close to the land where Travis' cabin was built." Russo believed that the hoodoo doctor's spirit also lingered on the property because it found a "kindred spirit" in Tritt. Discography Studio albums Proud of the Country (1987) Country Club (1990) It's All About to Change (1991) T-R-O-U-B-L-E (1992) Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof (1994) The Restless Kind (1996)No More Looking over My Shoulder (1998)Down the Road I Go (2000)Strong Enough (2002)My Honky Tonk History (2004)The Storm (2007) The Calm After... (2013)Set in Stone (2021)'Billboard number-one singles''' "Help Me Hold On" (1990) "Anymore" (1991) "Can I Trust You with My Heart" (19921993) "Foolish Pride" (1994) "Best of Intentions" (2000) Awards and nominations Filmography Notes See also Travis (chimpanzee), named after Tritt References External links 1963 births American male singer-songwriters American country singer-songwriters Columbia Records artists Grammy Award winners Grand Ole Opry members Living people Musicians from Marietta, Georgia People from Cobb County, Georgia Warner Records artists Georgia (U.S. state) Republicans Country musicians from Georgia (U.S. state) Singer-songwriters from Georgia (U.S. state)	true	[ "Collaborations 2 is the tenth studio album by Punjabi singer Sukshinder Shinda, released on 26 February 2009 worldwide making his second collaborated album. The album was also released internationally to USA, Canada, and U.K.\n\nThe album was preceded by the lead single, Ghum Shum Ghum Shum which featured Rahat Fateh Ali Khan. The song was also Shinda's first with Rahat. Following the success of his first single, Yarrian Banai Rakhi Yaarian featuring Jazzy B, was released which was another success. Despite success with two singles from the album, the album received positive reviews.\n\nTrack listing\n\nReferences\n\n2009 albums", "Myriam is the second studio album by Myriam. On her website it is also called \"Myriam: Lo que Soy, lo que Pretendo y lo que Fui\" (Myriam: What I Am, What I Pretend and What I Was) making reference to the lyrics of the album's first single \"Hasta El Limite\". It includes eleven songs with the collaboration of Tiziano Ferro, Leonel (ex Sin Bandera). Again Myriam co-wrote a song along with Estrella. In this album Myriam brought a more fresh concept, almost 100% pop genre with a little touches of flamenco. It was released in July, 2004.\n\nAlbum information\nIt was recorded in Argentina and the producer was Cachorro López who had also worked with Julieta Venegas. Myriam's career was at a low point, as she was being criticized for her third place in Desafio de Estrellas, but all that was eclipsed by the success of this album. \"Hasta el Limite\" was the first single from the album; it was Myriam's first song with a promotional video, and stayed in the charts for more than 6 months. The second single was \"Porque Soy Mujer\" which was written by Myriam and her ex-classmate Estrella.\n\nThe album was a commercial success. Within two weeks of the launch date it reached gold status in Mexico, and sold more than 200,000 copies certificating 2× Platinum. The album was a Latin success in USA selling gold status, 50,000 copies.\n\nTrack listing\n\nReferences\n\n2003 albums\nMyriam Montemayor Cruz albums" ]
[ "Travis Tritt", "1991-1992: It's All About to Change", "Is It's All About to Change an album or a single?", "He also released his second album, It's All About to Change.", "Was the album a success?", "The album went on to become his best-selling, with a triple-platinum certification from the RIAA for shipments of three million copies." ]	C_11462bedee39492fafd80e4368975ea1_1	Did he win any awards for that album?	3	Did Travis Tritt win any awards for It's All About to Change?	Travis Tritt	In 1991, Tritt received a second Horizon Award nomination, which he won that year. He also released his second album, It's All About to Change. The album went on to become his best-selling, with a triple-platinum certification from the RIAA for shipments of three million copies. All four of its singles reached the top five on the country music charts. "Here's a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)" and the Marty Stuart duet "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'," respectively the first and third singles, both reached number two, with the number-one "Anymore" in between. "Nothing Short of Dying" was the fourth single, with a peak at number four on Billboard; both it and "The Whiskey Ain't Working" went to Number One on Radio & Records. "Bible Belt," another cut from the album (recorded in collaboration with Little Feat), appeared in the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny (the lyrics for the song, however, were changed for the version played in the movie to match the story line). Although not released as a single, it peaked at number 72 country based on unsolicited airplay and was the b-side to "Nothing Short of Dying." "Bible Belt" was inspired by a youth pastor whom Tritt knew in his childhood. Stuart offered "The Whiskey Ain't Workin' Anymore" to Tritt backstage at the CMA awards show, and they recorded it as a duet through the suggestion of Tritt's record producer, Gregg Brown. The duet won both artists the next year's Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. Tritt and Stuart charted a second duet, "This One's Gonna Hurt You (For a Long, Long Time)," which went to number seven in mid-1992 and appeared on Stuart's album This One's Gonna Hurt You. This song won the 1992 CMA award for Vocal Event of the Year. In June 1992, Tritt received media attention when he criticized Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart" at a Fan Fair interview, saying that he did not think that Cyrus' song made a "statement". The following January, Cyrus responded at the American Music Awards by making reference to Tritt's "Here's a Quarter". Tritt later apologized to Cyrus, but said that he defended his opinion on the song. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER	James Travis Tritt (born February 9, 1963) is an American country music singer, songwriter, and actor. He signed to Warner Bros. Records in 1989, releasing seven studio albums and a greatest hits package for the label between then and 1999. In the 2000s, he released three studio albums on Columbia Records and one for the now-defunct Category 5 Records. Seven of his albums (counting the Greatest Hits) are certified platinum or higher by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA); the highest-certified is 1991's It's All About to Change, which is certified triple-platinum. Tritt has also charted more than 40 times on the Hot Country Songs charts, including five number ones—"Help Me Hold On", "Anymore", "Can I Trust You with My Heart", "Foolish Pride", and "Best of Intentions"—and 15 additional top ten singles. Tritt's musical style is defined by mainstream country and Southern rock influences. He has received two Grammy Awards, both for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals: in 1992 for "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'", a duet with Marty Stuart, and again in 1998 for "Same Old Train", a collaboration with Stuart and nine other artists. He has received four awards from the Country Music Association and has been a member of the Grand Ole Opry since 1992. Early life James Travis Tritt was born on February 9, 1963, in Marietta, Georgia, to James and Gwen Tritt. He first took interest in singing after his church's Sunday school choir performed "Everything Is Beautiful". He received his first guitar at age 8 and taught himself how to play it; in the fourth grade, he performed "Annie's Song" and "King of the Road" for his class, and later got invited to play for other classrooms in his school. At age 14, his parents bought him another guitar, and he learned more songs from his uncle, Sam Lockhart. Later on, Tritt joined his church band, which occasionally performed at other churches nearby. Tritt began writing music while he was attending Sprayberry High School; his first song composition, entitled "Spend a Little Time", was written about a girlfriend whom he had broken up with. He performed the song for his friends, one of whom complimented him on his songwriting skills. He also founded a bluegrass group with some of his friends and won second place in a local tournament for playing "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys". During his teenage years, Tritt worked at a furniture store, and later as a supermarket clerk. He lived with his mother after she and his father divorced; they remarried when he was 18. He worked at an air conditioning company while playing in clubs, but gave up the air conditioning job at the suggestion of one of his bandmates. Tritt's father thought that he would not find success as a musician, while his mother thought that he should perform Christian music instead of country. Through the assistance of Warner Bros. Records executive Danny Davenport, Tritt began recording demos. The two worked together for the next several years, eventually putting together a demo album called Proud of the Country. Davenport sent the demo to Warner Bros. representatives in Los Angeles, who in turn sent the demo to their Nashville division, which signed Tritt in 1987. Davenport also helped Tritt find a talent manager, Ken Kragen. At first, Kragen was not interested in taking an "entry-level act", but decided to sign on as Tritt's manager after Kragen's wife convinced him. Musical career 1989–1991: Country Club Tritt's contract with Warner Bros. meant that he was signed to record six songs, and three of them would be released as singles. According to the contract, he would not be signed on for a full album unless one of the three singles became a hit. His first single was "Country Club". Recorded in late 1988 and released on August 7, 1989, the song spent 26 weeks on the Hot Country Singles & Tracks charts, peaking at number nine. It was the title track to his 1990 debut album Country Club, produced by Gregg Brown. The month of its release, Tritt burst a blood vessel on his vocal cords, and had to take vocal rest for a month. Second single "Help Me Hold On" became his first number one single in 1990. The album's third and fifth singles, "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" and "Drift Off to Dream", respectively peaked at numbers two and three on the Hot Country Singles & Tracks charts, and number one on the Canadian RPM country charts; "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" also went to number one on the U.S. country singles charts published by Radio & Records. "Put Some Drive in Your Country", which was released fourth, peaked at 28 on Hot Country Songs. Country Club was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in July 1991 for shipments of one million copies, and no medals since in 1996. In 1990, he won the Top New Male Artist award from Billboard. The Country Music Association (CMA) also nominated him for the Horizon Award (now known as the New Artist Award), which is given to new artists who show have shown the most significant artistic and commercial development from a first or second album. Brian Mansfield of AllMusic gave the album a positive review, saying that "Put Some Drive in Your Country" paid homage to Tritt's influences, but that the other singles were more radio-friendly. Giving the album a B-minus, Alanna Nash of Entertainment Weekly compared Tritt's music to that of Hank Williams, Jr. and Joe Stampley. 1991–1992: It's All About to Change In 1991, Tritt received a second Horizon Award nomination, which he won that year. He also released his second album, It's All About to Change. The album went on to become his best-selling, with a triple-platinum certification from the RIAA for shipments of three million copies. All four of its singles reached the top five on the country music charts. "Here's a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)" and the Marty Stuart duet "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'", respectively the first and third singles, both reached number two, with the number-one "Anymore" in between. "Nothing Short of Dying" was the fourth single, with a peak at number four on Billboard; both it and "The Whiskey Ain't Working" went to Number One on Radio & Records. "Bible Belt", another cut from the album (recorded in collaboration with Little Feat), appeared in the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny (the lyrics for the song, however, were changed for the version played in the movie to match the story line). Although not released as a single, it peaked at number 72 country based on unsolicited airplay and was the b-side to "Nothing Short of Dying". "Bible Belt" was inspired by a youth pastor whom Tritt knew in his childhood. Stuart offered "The Whiskey Ain't Workin' Anymore" to Tritt backstage at the CMA awards show, and they recorded it as a duet through the suggestion of Tritt's record producer, Gregg Brown. The duet won both artists the next year's Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. Tritt and Stuart charted a second duet, "This One's Gonna Hurt You (For a Long, Long Time)", which went to number seven in mid-1992 and appeared on Stuart's album This One's Gonna Hurt You. This song won the 1992 CMA award for Vocal Event of the Year. In June 1992, Tritt received media attention when he criticized Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart" at a Fan Fair interview, saying that he did not think that Cyrus' song made a "statement". The following January, Cyrus responded at the American Music Awards by referring to Tritt's "Here's a Quarter". Tritt later apologized to Cyrus, but said that he defended his opinion on the song. 1992–1993: T-R-O-U-B-L-E and A Travis Tritt Christmas Tritt and Stuart began a "No Hats Tour" in 1992. In August of that same year, Tritt released the album T-R-O-U-B-L-E. Its first single was "Lord Have Mercy on the Working Man", a song written by Kostas. This song, which featured backing vocals from Brooks & Dunn, T. Graham Brown, George Jones, Little Texas, Dana McVicker (who also sang backup on Tritt's first two albums), Tanya Tucker and Porter Wagoner on the final chorus, peaked at number five. Its follow-up, "Can I Trust You with My Heart", became Tritt's third Billboard number one in early 1993. The album's next three singles did not perform as well on the charts: the title track (a cover of an Elvis Presley song), peaked at 13, followed by "Looking Out for Number One" at number 11 and "Worth Every Mile" at number 30. T-R-O-U-B-L-E became the second album of his career to achieve double-platinum certification. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic thought that T-R-O-U-B-L-E followed too closely the formula of It's All About to Change, but said that the songs showed Tritt's personality. Nash gave the album a similar criticism, but praised the rock influences of "Looking Out for Number One" and the vocals on "Can I Trust You with My Heart". One month after the release of T-R-O-U-B-L-E, Tritt issued a Christmas album titled A Travis Tritt Christmas: Loving Time of the Year, for which he wrote the title track. He also joined the Grand Ole Opry, a weekly stage show and radio broadcast specializing in country music performances, and filled in for Garth Brooks at a performance on the American Music Awards. By year's end, Tritt and several other artists appeared on George Jones's "I Don't Need Your Rockin' Chair", which won all artists involved the next year's CMA Vocal Event of the Year award. 1994–1995: Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof and Greatest Hits In early 1994, after "Worth Every Mile" fell from the charts, Tritt charted at number 21 with a cover of the Eagles' "Take It Easy". He recorded this song for the tribute album Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles (released through Warner Bros.' Giant Records division), which featured country music artists' renditions of Eagles songs. When filming the music video for this song, Tritt requested that the band, which had been on hiatus for over 13 years, appear in it. This reunion inspired the Eagles' Hell Freezes Over Tour, which began that year. His fourth album, Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof, was released that May. Its lead-off single, "Foolish Pride", went to number one, and the fourth single, "Tell Me I Was Dreaming", reached number two. In between these songs were the title track at number 22 and "Between an Old Memory and Me" (originally recorded by Keith Whitley) at number 11. The album included two co-writes with Gary Rossington of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and guest vocals from Waylon Jennings and Hank Williams, Jr. on the cut "Outlaws Like Us". The album achieved platinum certification in December of that year, and later became his third double-platinum album. AllMusic reviewer Brian Mansfield said that Tritt was "most comfortable with his Southern rock/outlaw mantle" on it, comparing "Foolish Pride" favorably to "Anymore" and the work of Bob Seger. Alanna Nash praised the title track and "Tell Me I Was Dreaming" in her review for Entertainment Weekly, but thought that the other songs were still too similar in sound to his previous works. 1995's Greatest Hits: From the Beginning included most of his singles to that point, as well as two new cuts: the Steve Earle composition "Sometimes She Forgets" and a cover of the pop standard "Only You (And You Alone)". The former was a top ten hit at number seven, while the latter spent only eight weeks on the country charts and peaked at number 51. Greatest Hits was certified platinum. 1996–1997: The Restless Kind In April 1996, Tritt and Stuart charted a third duet, "Honky Tonkin's What I Do Best", which appeared on Stuart's album of the same name and peaked at 23 on the country charts. The song won both artists that year's Country Music Association award for Vocal Event, Tritt's third win in this category. The two began a second tour, the Double Trouble Tour, that year. Tritt charted at number three in mid-1996 with "More Than You'll Ever Know", the first single from his fifth album, The Restless Kind. The album accounted for one more top ten hit, a cover of Waylon Jennings's "Where Corn Don't Grow", which Tritt took to number six in late 1996. This song's chart run overlapped with that of "Here's Your Sign (Get the Picture)", a novelty release combining snippets of comedian Bill Engvall's "Here are Your Sign" routines with a chorus sung by Tritt. "Here's Your Sign (Get the Picture)" peaked at 29 on the country charts and 43 on the Billboard Hot 100, accounting for Tritt's first entry on the latter chart. The other singles from The Restless Kind all failed to make Top Ten upon their 1997 release. "She's Going Home with Me" and "Still in Love with You" (previously the respective B-sides to "Where Corn Don't Grow" and "More Than You'll Ever Know") were the third and fifth releases, peaking at 24 and 23 on Hot Country Singles & Tracks. In between was the number 18 "Helping Me Get Over You", a duet with Lari White which the two co-wrote. Unlike his previous albums, all of which were produced by Gregg Brown, Tritt produced The Restless Kind with Don Was. Tritt told Billboard that the album showed a greater level of personal involvement than his previous efforts, as it was his first co-production credit. He also noted that he sang most of the vocal harmony by himself, played guitar on "She's Going Home with Me", and helped with the album's art direction. It received positive reviews from Thom Owens of AllMusic, who said that it was the most country-sounding album of his career. Don Yates of Country Standard Time also praised it for having a more "organic" sound than Tritt's other albums. 1998–1999: No More Looking over My Shoulder In 1998, he and several other artists contributed to Stuart's "Same Old Train", a cut from the collaborative album Tribute to Tradition; this song charted at number 59 on Hot Country Songs and won Tritt his second Grammy for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. He also performed on Frank Wildhorn's concept album of the musical The Civil War, singing the song "The Day the Sun Stood Still". By year's end, Tritt also released his final Warner Bros. album, No More Looking over My Shoulder. It was his first of four consecutive albums which he produced with Billy Joe Walker, Jr., who is a session guitarist, producer, and New Age musician. The album was led off by the ballad "If I Lost You", which peaked at number 29 on the country charts and number 86 on the Hot 100. Michael Peterson (who recorded for Warner Bros.' Reprise label at the time) co-wrote and sang backing vocals on the title track, which went to number 38 country in early 1999. The album's third and final single was a cover of Jude Cole's "Start the Car" (previously the B-side to "If I Lost You"), which peaked at number 52. Late in 1999, Tritt recorded a cover of Hank Williams's "Move It On Over" with George Thorogood for the soundtrack to the cartoon King of the Hill. This cut peaked at number 66 on the country charts from unsolicited airplay. 2000–2002: Down the Road I Go Soon after leaving Warner Bros. Records, Tritt signed to Columbia Records and released the album Down the Road I Go in 2000. The album's first release was "Best of Intentions", his fifth and final number one hit on Billboard. It was also his most successful entry on the Hot 100, where it reached number 27. The next two singles, "It's a Great Day to Be Alive" and "Love of a Woman", both peaked at number two on the country charts in 2001, followed by "Modern Day Bonnie and Clyde" at number eight. All three songs also crossed over to the Hot 100, respectively reaching peaks of 33, 39 and 55. Tritt wrote or co-wrote seven of the album's songs, including "Best of Intentions", and collaborated with Charlie Daniels on two of them. "It's a Great Day to Be Alive" was originally recorded by Jon Randall, whose version was to have been included on an unreleased album for BNA Records in the late 1990s. Maria Konicki Dinoia gave the album a positive review on AllMusic, saying that Tritt "hasn't lost his touch". Country Standard Time also gave a positive review, saying that it showed Tritt's balance of country and rock influences. An uncredited review in Billboard magazine called "Best of Intentions" a "gorgeous ballad", comparing it favorably to his early Warner Bros. releases. 2002–2005: Strong Enough and My Honky Tonk History In September 2002, Tritt released his second album on Columbia Records, Strong Enough. Its first single was "Strong Enough to Be Your Man" (an answer song to Sheryl Crow's 1994 single "Strong Enough") which reached number 13. The only other release was "Country Ain't Country", which peaked at 26 on the country charts. William Ruhlmann gave the album a generally positive review on AllMusic, saying that he considered its sound closer to mainstream country than Tritt's previous albums. Also in 2002, Tritt performed on an episode of Crossroads, a program on Country Music Television which pairs country acts with musicians from other genres for collaborative performances. He performed with Ray Charles. Tritt contributed guest vocals to Charlie Daniels' 2003 single "Southern Boy", and recorded a cover of Waylon Jennings' "Lonesome, On'ry and Mean" to the RCA Records tribute album I've Always Been Crazy. Respectively, these songs reached 51 and 50 on the country charts. Tritt's tenth studio album, My Honky Tonk History, was released in 2004. This album included three charting singles: "The Girl's Gone Wild" at 28, followed by the John Mellencamp duet "What Say You" at number 21 and "I See Me" at number 32. Other songs on the album included a cover of Philip Claypool's "Circus Leaving Town" and songs written by Gretchen Wilson, Benmont Tench and Delbert McClinton. Thom Jurek rated this album favorably, saying that it was a "solid, sure-voiced outing"; he also thought that "What Say You" was the best song on it. 2007–present: The Storm and The Calm After... Tritt exited Columbia in July 2005, citing creative differences over My Honky Tonk History. He signed to the independent Category 5 Records in February 2006, and served as the label's flagship artist. In March 2007, a concert promoter in the Pittsburgh area sued Tritt, claiming he had committed to play a show, but then backed out and signed to play a competing venue. Tritt's manager denied he had ever signed a contract with the promoter. Tritt released his first single for Category 5 in May 2007: a cover of the Richard Marx song "You Never Take Me Dancing". It was included on his only album for Category 5, The Storm, which American Idol judge Randy Jackson produced. The album featured a more rhythm and blues influence than Tritt's previous works. "You Never Take Me Dancing" peaked at number 27 on the country charts; a second single, "Something Stronger Than Me", was released in October, but it did not chart. Category 5 closed in November 2007 after allegations that the label's chief executive officer, Raymond Termini, had illegally used Medicaid funds to finance it. A month later, Tritt filed a $10 million lawsuit against Category 5, because the label had failed to pay royalties on the album, and failed to give him creative control on The Storm. In October 2008, Tritt began an 11-date tour with Marty Stuart. On this tour, they performed acoustic renditions of their duets; Tritt also performed five solo shows. Tritt signed a management deal with Parallel Entertainment in December 2010. He continued to tour through to 2012 and into 2013, with most of his shows being solo acoustic performances. Tritt acquired the rights to the songs on The Storm and re-issued it via his own Post Oak label in July 2013 under the title The Calm After... The re-release included two covers: the Patty Smyth and Don Henley duet "Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough", which he recorded as a duet with his daughter Tyler Reese, and Faces' 1971 hit "Stay with Me". In 2019, Tritt was featured on the country rock hit "Outlaws & Outsiders" by Cory Marks. Acting career Tritt's first acting role was in the 1993 made-for-television movie Rio Diablo. In 1994, Tritt made a special appearance as a bull rider in the movie The Cowboy Way, which starred Woody Harrelson and Kiefer Sutherland. In 1995, he appeared in season 6 of the horror anthology series Tales from the Crypt in the episode called Doctor of Horror. He also starred in a guest role on Yes, Dear as a rehabilitating criminal and in Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman as a gun slinger. The following year, Tritt appeared as himself in Sgt. Bilko, which starred Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd and Phil Hartman; Tritt's cover of "Only You (And You Alone)" appeared in the film's soundtrack. He also made an appearance in the 1997 film Fire Down Below, starring Steven Seagal and Kris Kristofferson. In 1999 Tritt appeared in Outlaw Justice with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson. Tritt appeared in the film Blues Brothers 2000 as one of the Louisiana Gator Boys. In 2001 he guest starred in Elmo's World The Wild Wild West. In September 2010, filming began on a movie called Fishers of Men, a Christian film. Musical styles Although he had been singing since childhood, Tritt said that he began to put "a little more soul" in his voice after his church band performed at an African-American church. He said that he took interest in how African-American singers put "all these bends and sweeps and curls" in their voices, and began emulating that sound. While performing at these churches, he also took interest in gospel singers such as Andraé Crouch. Later on, he began listening to Southern rock acts such as Lynyrd Skynyrd through the recommendation of a friend, as well as the bluegrass music that his uncle exposed him to. Tritt said that he found his songwriting began to develop during the creation of his demo tape, when he had written a song called "Gambler's Blues" that "felt a lot more connected to Southern rock" than his previous writings. He cites country, rock and folk as his influences. Stephen Thomas Erlewine contrasts him with contemporaries Clint Black and Alan Jackson, saying that Tritt was "the only one not to wear a [cowboy] hat and the only one to dip into bluesy Southern rock. Consequently, he developed a gutsy, outlaw image that distinguished him from the pack." Zell Miller, in the book They Heard Georgia Singing, said that Tritt has an "unerring ability to walk the narrow path between his country heritage and his rock leanings to the acclaim of the devotees of both." Regarding his songwriting style and single choices, Tritt said that he writes "strictly from personal experiences" and does not follow a particular formula. He described "Here's a Quarter" as "one of the simplest three-chord waltzes I've ever written", and said that label executives were reluctant to release it because they thought that it was a novelty song. Also, he was told that "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" would not be a hit because it did not contain any rhymes, and fought the release of the song "Country Club" because he did not think that it fit his style. He also said that, despite their low peaks, the more rock-influenced "Put Some Drive in Your Country" and "T-R-O-U-B-L-E" helped generate sales for their respective albums more so than the top ten hits from those albums. Personal life Tritt married his high school sweetheart, Karen Ryon, in September 1982. They were married two years before divorcing. After going to court, Tritt was ordered to pay alimony to Karen for six months. When he was 21, he married Jodi Barnett, who was 33 at the time. He divorced her shortly after signing with Warner Bros. in 1989; the divorce finalized one month before "Country Club" was released. Tritt wrote the song "Here's a Quarter" the night he received his divorce papers. He married Theresa Nelson on April 12, 1997. They have one daughter, Tyler Reese (born February 18, 1998) and two sons: Tristan James (born June 16, 1999) and Tarian Nathaniel (born November 20, 2003). On May 18, 2019, he was in his tour bus when it was involved in a motor vehicle accident which took the lives of two people driving the wrong way on Veteran's Highway leaving Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Political views and advocacy Tritt is a member of the Republican Party and supported George W. Bush for president in 2000. The two met in 1996 at the Republican National Convention in San Diego, California, where Tritt sang the national anthem. Tritt told Insight on the News that he is a strong supporter of Second Amendment rights and believes the answer to crime is not gun control but criminal control. "I'm a pro-gun guy. I'm an NRA (National Rifle Association) member, a life member as a matter of fact. I'm more for the belief of making the punishment tougher for the criminals to start with. I think that sends much more of an incentive for people to not commit crimes of any type than taking away guns. Because you take away guns, and the next thing you know, stabbing murders are going to increase." He adds that he is "definitely pro-death penalty". In September 2020, Tritt gained notoriety for joining fellow Republican James Woods in blocking random Twitter users for using pro-Black Lives Matter and other anti-Trump tags in their posts, under the belief that it would counteract anti-Republican sentiment on Twitter. On October 18, 2021, Tritt made a cameo appearance on conservative commentator Steven Crowder's show Louder with Crowder. Alleged paranormal encounters In October 2015, Tritt appeared on Lifetime network's The Haunting of... program to discuss his experiences with the paranormal. Tritt stated that beginning in 1993, he was awakened "regularly" by disembodied voices in a vacation cabin that he owned – the voices spoke in an unknown dialect. His wife, Theresa, eventually heard them as well. According to Tritt, "Over the years, these voices started happening on such a frequent basis that we were afraid to come up here." He also asserted that footprints once appeared in the carpet of the cabin, and imprints in the bedspread, that belonged to neither him nor his wife. The show's host, Kim Russo, concluded that an African-American medicine man had been stabbed and beaten to death on the property, and the voices that Tritt was hearing belonged to the murderers' angry spirits. A title card in the program notes that "On August 14, 1875, a group of men killed a 'hoodoo doctor' close to the land where Travis' cabin was built." Russo believed that the hoodoo doctor's spirit also lingered on the property because it found a "kindred spirit" in Tritt. Discography Studio albums Proud of the Country (1987) Country Club (1990) It's All About to Change (1991) T-R-O-U-B-L-E (1992) Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof (1994) The Restless Kind (1996)No More Looking over My Shoulder (1998)Down the Road I Go (2000)Strong Enough (2002)My Honky Tonk History (2004)The Storm (2007) The Calm After... (2013)Set in Stone (2021)'Billboard number-one singles''' "Help Me Hold On" (1990) "Anymore" (1991) "Can I Trust You with My Heart" (19921993) "Foolish Pride" (1994) "Best of Intentions" (2000) Awards and nominations Filmography Notes See also Travis (chimpanzee), named after Tritt References External links 1963 births American male singer-songwriters American country singer-songwriters Columbia Records artists Grammy Award winners Grand Ole Opry members Living people Musicians from Marietta, Georgia People from Cobb County, Georgia Warner Records artists Georgia (U.S. state) Republicans Country musicians from Georgia (U.S. state) Singer-songwriters from Georgia (U.S. state)	false	[ "The Latin Grammy Award for Best Salsa Album is an honor presented annually by the Latin Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences at the Latin Grammy Awards, a ceremony that recognizes excellence and promotes a wider awareness of cultural diversity and contributions of Latin recording artists in the United States and internationally. According to the category description guide for the 2012 Latin Grammy Awards, the award is for vocal or instrumental salsa albums containing at least 51 percent of newly recorded material. It is awarded to solo artists, duos or groups.\n\nThe accolade for Best Salsa Album was first presented to Cuban singer Celia Cruz at the 1st Latin Grammy Awards ceremony in 2000 for her album Celia Cruz and Friends: A Night of Salsa (1999). She also holds the record for the most wins in the category, with three. Gilberto Santa Rosa holds the record for most nominations, with nine. Puerto Rican musician Victor Manuelle holds the record for most nominations without a win, with six. Puerto Rican artists have received this award more than any other nationality.\n\nWinners and nominees\n\n2000s\n\n2010s\n\n2020s\n\nNotes \n Each year is linked to the article about the Latin Grammy Awards held that year.\n The name of the performer and the nominated album\n\nSee also\nGrammy Award for Best Salsa Album\nGrammy Award for Best Salsa/Merengue Album\n\nReferences \nGeneral\n\nSpecific\n\nExternal links\nOfficial site of the Latin Grammy Awards\n\n \nAwards established in 2000\nSalsa Album", "The 54th Academy of Country Music Awards was held at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada on April 7, 2019. Nominations were announced on February 20, 2019 by Reba McEntire during CBS This Morning, with Chris Stapleton and Dan + Shay leading with six nominations each. McEntire returned to host the awards for the sixteenth time.\n\nJason Aldean was presented with the ACM's rare honor \"Artist of the Decade\" by previous holder George Strait.\n\nWinners and Nominees \nThe winners are shown in bold.\n\nPerformances\n\nPresenters\n\nReception \nIn its review of the event, Rolling Stone Country praised that the ACMs took the opportunity to bring seasoned musicians Amanda Shires and Charlie Worsham \"into the fold\" by having them appear alongside Luke Combs and Keith Urban respectively but criticised that the ACMs did not introduce either of them or even feature them on screen. Worsham, who the reviewer believed should have been nominated for his own awards, performed \"mostly in the shadows\" and Shires, who \"helped transform [Combs' performance] with her lyrical playing\" was barely seen. Rolling Stone also praised Reba McEntire's hosting and the performances by Dierks Bentley and Brandi Carlile, Little Big Town, Miranda Lambert and Ashley McBryde but stated that it was \"baffling\" that Kacey Musgraves, who had five nominations and won the CMA Award for Album of the Year and four Grammy Awards including Best Country Album and the all-genre Album of the Year for Golden Hour, did not perform. Musgraves' win made her only the third artist (after Taylor Swift and the artists that appeared on Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?) to win the ACM, CMA and Grammy Awards for Best Country Album as well as the all-genre Grammy for Album of the Year.\n\nSee also\nAcademy of Country Music Awards\n\nReferences\n\nAcademy of Country Music Awards\nAcademy of Country Music Awards\nAcademy of Country Music Awards\nAcademy of Country Music Awards\nAcademy of Country Music Awards\nAcademy of Country Music Awards\nAcademy of Country Music Awards" ]
[ "Travis Tritt", "1991-1992: It's All About to Change", "Is It's All About to Change an album or a single?", "He also released his second album, It's All About to Change.", "Was the album a success?", "The album went on to become his best-selling, with a triple-platinum certification from the RIAA for shipments of three million copies.", "Did he win any awards for that album?", "I don't know." ]	C_11462bedee39492fafd80e4368975ea1_1	Were there any hit singles from the album?	4	Were there any hit singles from the album It's All About to Change by Travis Tritt?	Travis Tritt	In 1991, Tritt received a second Horizon Award nomination, which he won that year. He also released his second album, It's All About to Change. The album went on to become his best-selling, with a triple-platinum certification from the RIAA for shipments of three million copies. All four of its singles reached the top five on the country music charts. "Here's a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)" and the Marty Stuart duet "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'," respectively the first and third singles, both reached number two, with the number-one "Anymore" in between. "Nothing Short of Dying" was the fourth single, with a peak at number four on Billboard; both it and "The Whiskey Ain't Working" went to Number One on Radio & Records. "Bible Belt," another cut from the album (recorded in collaboration with Little Feat), appeared in the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny (the lyrics for the song, however, were changed for the version played in the movie to match the story line). Although not released as a single, it peaked at number 72 country based on unsolicited airplay and was the b-side to "Nothing Short of Dying." "Bible Belt" was inspired by a youth pastor whom Tritt knew in his childhood. Stuart offered "The Whiskey Ain't Workin' Anymore" to Tritt backstage at the CMA awards show, and they recorded it as a duet through the suggestion of Tritt's record producer, Gregg Brown. The duet won both artists the next year's Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. Tritt and Stuart charted a second duet, "This One's Gonna Hurt You (For a Long, Long Time)," which went to number seven in mid-1992 and appeared on Stuart's album This One's Gonna Hurt You. This song won the 1992 CMA award for Vocal Event of the Year. In June 1992, Tritt received media attention when he criticized Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart" at a Fan Fair interview, saying that he did not think that Cyrus' song made a "statement". The following January, Cyrus responded at the American Music Awards by making reference to Tritt's "Here's a Quarter". Tritt later apologized to Cyrus, but said that he defended his opinion on the song. CANNOTANSWER	All four of its singles reached the top five on the country music charts.	James Travis Tritt (born February 9, 1963) is an American country music singer, songwriter, and actor. He signed to Warner Bros. Records in 1989, releasing seven studio albums and a greatest hits package for the label between then and 1999. In the 2000s, he released three studio albums on Columbia Records and one for the now-defunct Category 5 Records. Seven of his albums (counting the Greatest Hits) are certified platinum or higher by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA); the highest-certified is 1991's It's All About to Change, which is certified triple-platinum. Tritt has also charted more than 40 times on the Hot Country Songs charts, including five number ones—"Help Me Hold On", "Anymore", "Can I Trust You with My Heart", "Foolish Pride", and "Best of Intentions"—and 15 additional top ten singles. Tritt's musical style is defined by mainstream country and Southern rock influences. He has received two Grammy Awards, both for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals: in 1992 for "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'", a duet with Marty Stuart, and again in 1998 for "Same Old Train", a collaboration with Stuart and nine other artists. He has received four awards from the Country Music Association and has been a member of the Grand Ole Opry since 1992. Early life James Travis Tritt was born on February 9, 1963, in Marietta, Georgia, to James and Gwen Tritt. He first took interest in singing after his church's Sunday school choir performed "Everything Is Beautiful". He received his first guitar at age 8 and taught himself how to play it; in the fourth grade, he performed "Annie's Song" and "King of the Road" for his class, and later got invited to play for other classrooms in his school. At age 14, his parents bought him another guitar, and he learned more songs from his uncle, Sam Lockhart. Later on, Tritt joined his church band, which occasionally performed at other churches nearby. Tritt began writing music while he was attending Sprayberry High School; his first song composition, entitled "Spend a Little Time", was written about a girlfriend whom he had broken up with. He performed the song for his friends, one of whom complimented him on his songwriting skills. He also founded a bluegrass group with some of his friends and won second place in a local tournament for playing "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys". During his teenage years, Tritt worked at a furniture store, and later as a supermarket clerk. He lived with his mother after she and his father divorced; they remarried when he was 18. He worked at an air conditioning company while playing in clubs, but gave up the air conditioning job at the suggestion of one of his bandmates. Tritt's father thought that he would not find success as a musician, while his mother thought that he should perform Christian music instead of country. Through the assistance of Warner Bros. Records executive Danny Davenport, Tritt began recording demos. The two worked together for the next several years, eventually putting together a demo album called Proud of the Country. Davenport sent the demo to Warner Bros. representatives in Los Angeles, who in turn sent the demo to their Nashville division, which signed Tritt in 1987. Davenport also helped Tritt find a talent manager, Ken Kragen. At first, Kragen was not interested in taking an "entry-level act", but decided to sign on as Tritt's manager after Kragen's wife convinced him. Musical career 1989–1991: Country Club Tritt's contract with Warner Bros. meant that he was signed to record six songs, and three of them would be released as singles. According to the contract, he would not be signed on for a full album unless one of the three singles became a hit. His first single was "Country Club". Recorded in late 1988 and released on August 7, 1989, the song spent 26 weeks on the Hot Country Singles & Tracks charts, peaking at number nine. It was the title track to his 1990 debut album Country Club, produced by Gregg Brown. The month of its release, Tritt burst a blood vessel on his vocal cords, and had to take vocal rest for a month. Second single "Help Me Hold On" became his first number one single in 1990. The album's third and fifth singles, "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" and "Drift Off to Dream", respectively peaked at numbers two and three on the Hot Country Singles & Tracks charts, and number one on the Canadian RPM country charts; "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" also went to number one on the U.S. country singles charts published by Radio & Records. "Put Some Drive in Your Country", which was released fourth, peaked at 28 on Hot Country Songs. Country Club was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in July 1991 for shipments of one million copies, and no medals since in 1996. In 1990, he won the Top New Male Artist award from Billboard. The Country Music Association (CMA) also nominated him for the Horizon Award (now known as the New Artist Award), which is given to new artists who show have shown the most significant artistic and commercial development from a first or second album. Brian Mansfield of AllMusic gave the album a positive review, saying that "Put Some Drive in Your Country" paid homage to Tritt's influences, but that the other singles were more radio-friendly. Giving the album a B-minus, Alanna Nash of Entertainment Weekly compared Tritt's music to that of Hank Williams, Jr. and Joe Stampley. 1991–1992: It's All About to Change In 1991, Tritt received a second Horizon Award nomination, which he won that year. He also released his second album, It's All About to Change. The album went on to become his best-selling, with a triple-platinum certification from the RIAA for shipments of three million copies. All four of its singles reached the top five on the country music charts. "Here's a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)" and the Marty Stuart duet "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'", respectively the first and third singles, both reached number two, with the number-one "Anymore" in between. "Nothing Short of Dying" was the fourth single, with a peak at number four on Billboard; both it and "The Whiskey Ain't Working" went to Number One on Radio & Records. "Bible Belt", another cut from the album (recorded in collaboration with Little Feat), appeared in the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny (the lyrics for the song, however, were changed for the version played in the movie to match the story line). Although not released as a single, it peaked at number 72 country based on unsolicited airplay and was the b-side to "Nothing Short of Dying". "Bible Belt" was inspired by a youth pastor whom Tritt knew in his childhood. Stuart offered "The Whiskey Ain't Workin' Anymore" to Tritt backstage at the CMA awards show, and they recorded it as a duet through the suggestion of Tritt's record producer, Gregg Brown. The duet won both artists the next year's Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. Tritt and Stuart charted a second duet, "This One's Gonna Hurt You (For a Long, Long Time)", which went to number seven in mid-1992 and appeared on Stuart's album This One's Gonna Hurt You. This song won the 1992 CMA award for Vocal Event of the Year. In June 1992, Tritt received media attention when he criticized Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart" at a Fan Fair interview, saying that he did not think that Cyrus' song made a "statement". The following January, Cyrus responded at the American Music Awards by referring to Tritt's "Here's a Quarter". Tritt later apologized to Cyrus, but said that he defended his opinion on the song. 1992–1993: T-R-O-U-B-L-E and A Travis Tritt Christmas Tritt and Stuart began a "No Hats Tour" in 1992. In August of that same year, Tritt released the album T-R-O-U-B-L-E. Its first single was "Lord Have Mercy on the Working Man", a song written by Kostas. This song, which featured backing vocals from Brooks & Dunn, T. Graham Brown, George Jones, Little Texas, Dana McVicker (who also sang backup on Tritt's first two albums), Tanya Tucker and Porter Wagoner on the final chorus, peaked at number five. Its follow-up, "Can I Trust You with My Heart", became Tritt's third Billboard number one in early 1993. The album's next three singles did not perform as well on the charts: the title track (a cover of an Elvis Presley song), peaked at 13, followed by "Looking Out for Number One" at number 11 and "Worth Every Mile" at number 30. T-R-O-U-B-L-E became the second album of his career to achieve double-platinum certification. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic thought that T-R-O-U-B-L-E followed too closely the formula of It's All About to Change, but said that the songs showed Tritt's personality. Nash gave the album a similar criticism, but praised the rock influences of "Looking Out for Number One" and the vocals on "Can I Trust You with My Heart". One month after the release of T-R-O-U-B-L-E, Tritt issued a Christmas album titled A Travis Tritt Christmas: Loving Time of the Year, for which he wrote the title track. He also joined the Grand Ole Opry, a weekly stage show and radio broadcast specializing in country music performances, and filled in for Garth Brooks at a performance on the American Music Awards. By year's end, Tritt and several other artists appeared on George Jones's "I Don't Need Your Rockin' Chair", which won all artists involved the next year's CMA Vocal Event of the Year award. 1994–1995: Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof and Greatest Hits In early 1994, after "Worth Every Mile" fell from the charts, Tritt charted at number 21 with a cover of the Eagles' "Take It Easy". He recorded this song for the tribute album Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles (released through Warner Bros.' Giant Records division), which featured country music artists' renditions of Eagles songs. When filming the music video for this song, Tritt requested that the band, which had been on hiatus for over 13 years, appear in it. This reunion inspired the Eagles' Hell Freezes Over Tour, which began that year. His fourth album, Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof, was released that May. Its lead-off single, "Foolish Pride", went to number one, and the fourth single, "Tell Me I Was Dreaming", reached number two. In between these songs were the title track at number 22 and "Between an Old Memory and Me" (originally recorded by Keith Whitley) at number 11. The album included two co-writes with Gary Rossington of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and guest vocals from Waylon Jennings and Hank Williams, Jr. on the cut "Outlaws Like Us". The album achieved platinum certification in December of that year, and later became his third double-platinum album. AllMusic reviewer Brian Mansfield said that Tritt was "most comfortable with his Southern rock/outlaw mantle" on it, comparing "Foolish Pride" favorably to "Anymore" and the work of Bob Seger. Alanna Nash praised the title track and "Tell Me I Was Dreaming" in her review for Entertainment Weekly, but thought that the other songs were still too similar in sound to his previous works. 1995's Greatest Hits: From the Beginning included most of his singles to that point, as well as two new cuts: the Steve Earle composition "Sometimes She Forgets" and a cover of the pop standard "Only You (And You Alone)". The former was a top ten hit at number seven, while the latter spent only eight weeks on the country charts and peaked at number 51. Greatest Hits was certified platinum. 1996–1997: The Restless Kind In April 1996, Tritt and Stuart charted a third duet, "Honky Tonkin's What I Do Best", which appeared on Stuart's album of the same name and peaked at 23 on the country charts. The song won both artists that year's Country Music Association award for Vocal Event, Tritt's third win in this category. The two began a second tour, the Double Trouble Tour, that year. Tritt charted at number three in mid-1996 with "More Than You'll Ever Know", the first single from his fifth album, The Restless Kind. The album accounted for one more top ten hit, a cover of Waylon Jennings's "Where Corn Don't Grow", which Tritt took to number six in late 1996. This song's chart run overlapped with that of "Here's Your Sign (Get the Picture)", a novelty release combining snippets of comedian Bill Engvall's "Here are Your Sign" routines with a chorus sung by Tritt. "Here's Your Sign (Get the Picture)" peaked at 29 on the country charts and 43 on the Billboard Hot 100, accounting for Tritt's first entry on the latter chart. The other singles from The Restless Kind all failed to make Top Ten upon their 1997 release. "She's Going Home with Me" and "Still in Love with You" (previously the respective B-sides to "Where Corn Don't Grow" and "More Than You'll Ever Know") were the third and fifth releases, peaking at 24 and 23 on Hot Country Singles & Tracks. In between was the number 18 "Helping Me Get Over You", a duet with Lari White which the two co-wrote. Unlike his previous albums, all of which were produced by Gregg Brown, Tritt produced The Restless Kind with Don Was. Tritt told Billboard that the album showed a greater level of personal involvement than his previous efforts, as it was his first co-production credit. He also noted that he sang most of the vocal harmony by himself, played guitar on "She's Going Home with Me", and helped with the album's art direction. It received positive reviews from Thom Owens of AllMusic, who said that it was the most country-sounding album of his career. Don Yates of Country Standard Time also praised it for having a more "organic" sound than Tritt's other albums. 1998–1999: No More Looking over My Shoulder In 1998, he and several other artists contributed to Stuart's "Same Old Train", a cut from the collaborative album Tribute to Tradition; this song charted at number 59 on Hot Country Songs and won Tritt his second Grammy for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. He also performed on Frank Wildhorn's concept album of the musical The Civil War, singing the song "The Day the Sun Stood Still". By year's end, Tritt also released his final Warner Bros. album, No More Looking over My Shoulder. It was his first of four consecutive albums which he produced with Billy Joe Walker, Jr., who is a session guitarist, producer, and New Age musician. The album was led off by the ballad "If I Lost You", which peaked at number 29 on the country charts and number 86 on the Hot 100. Michael Peterson (who recorded for Warner Bros.' Reprise label at the time) co-wrote and sang backing vocals on the title track, which went to number 38 country in early 1999. The album's third and final single was a cover of Jude Cole's "Start the Car" (previously the B-side to "If I Lost You"), which peaked at number 52. Late in 1999, Tritt recorded a cover of Hank Williams's "Move It On Over" with George Thorogood for the soundtrack to the cartoon King of the Hill. This cut peaked at number 66 on the country charts from unsolicited airplay. 2000–2002: Down the Road I Go Soon after leaving Warner Bros. Records, Tritt signed to Columbia Records and released the album Down the Road I Go in 2000. The album's first release was "Best of Intentions", his fifth and final number one hit on Billboard. It was also his most successful entry on the Hot 100, where it reached number 27. The next two singles, "It's a Great Day to Be Alive" and "Love of a Woman", both peaked at number two on the country charts in 2001, followed by "Modern Day Bonnie and Clyde" at number eight. All three songs also crossed over to the Hot 100, respectively reaching peaks of 33, 39 and 55. Tritt wrote or co-wrote seven of the album's songs, including "Best of Intentions", and collaborated with Charlie Daniels on two of them. "It's a Great Day to Be Alive" was originally recorded by Jon Randall, whose version was to have been included on an unreleased album for BNA Records in the late 1990s. Maria Konicki Dinoia gave the album a positive review on AllMusic, saying that Tritt "hasn't lost his touch". Country Standard Time also gave a positive review, saying that it showed Tritt's balance of country and rock influences. An uncredited review in Billboard magazine called "Best of Intentions" a "gorgeous ballad", comparing it favorably to his early Warner Bros. releases. 2002–2005: Strong Enough and My Honky Tonk History In September 2002, Tritt released his second album on Columbia Records, Strong Enough. Its first single was "Strong Enough to Be Your Man" (an answer song to Sheryl Crow's 1994 single "Strong Enough") which reached number 13. The only other release was "Country Ain't Country", which peaked at 26 on the country charts. William Ruhlmann gave the album a generally positive review on AllMusic, saying that he considered its sound closer to mainstream country than Tritt's previous albums. Also in 2002, Tritt performed on an episode of Crossroads, a program on Country Music Television which pairs country acts with musicians from other genres for collaborative performances. He performed with Ray Charles. Tritt contributed guest vocals to Charlie Daniels' 2003 single "Southern Boy", and recorded a cover of Waylon Jennings' "Lonesome, On'ry and Mean" to the RCA Records tribute album I've Always Been Crazy. Respectively, these songs reached 51 and 50 on the country charts. Tritt's tenth studio album, My Honky Tonk History, was released in 2004. This album included three charting singles: "The Girl's Gone Wild" at 28, followed by the John Mellencamp duet "What Say You" at number 21 and "I See Me" at number 32. Other songs on the album included a cover of Philip Claypool's "Circus Leaving Town" and songs written by Gretchen Wilson, Benmont Tench and Delbert McClinton. Thom Jurek rated this album favorably, saying that it was a "solid, sure-voiced outing"; he also thought that "What Say You" was the best song on it. 2007–present: The Storm and The Calm After... Tritt exited Columbia in July 2005, citing creative differences over My Honky Tonk History. He signed to the independent Category 5 Records in February 2006, and served as the label's flagship artist. In March 2007, a concert promoter in the Pittsburgh area sued Tritt, claiming he had committed to play a show, but then backed out and signed to play a competing venue. Tritt's manager denied he had ever signed a contract with the promoter. Tritt released his first single for Category 5 in May 2007: a cover of the Richard Marx song "You Never Take Me Dancing". It was included on his only album for Category 5, The Storm, which American Idol judge Randy Jackson produced. The album featured a more rhythm and blues influence than Tritt's previous works. "You Never Take Me Dancing" peaked at number 27 on the country charts; a second single, "Something Stronger Than Me", was released in October, but it did not chart. Category 5 closed in November 2007 after allegations that the label's chief executive officer, Raymond Termini, had illegally used Medicaid funds to finance it. A month later, Tritt filed a $10 million lawsuit against Category 5, because the label had failed to pay royalties on the album, and failed to give him creative control on The Storm. In October 2008, Tritt began an 11-date tour with Marty Stuart. On this tour, they performed acoustic renditions of their duets; Tritt also performed five solo shows. Tritt signed a management deal with Parallel Entertainment in December 2010. He continued to tour through to 2012 and into 2013, with most of his shows being solo acoustic performances. Tritt acquired the rights to the songs on The Storm and re-issued it via his own Post Oak label in July 2013 under the title The Calm After... The re-release included two covers: the Patty Smyth and Don Henley duet "Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough", which he recorded as a duet with his daughter Tyler Reese, and Faces' 1971 hit "Stay with Me". In 2019, Tritt was featured on the country rock hit "Outlaws & Outsiders" by Cory Marks. Acting career Tritt's first acting role was in the 1993 made-for-television movie Rio Diablo. In 1994, Tritt made a special appearance as a bull rider in the movie The Cowboy Way, which starred Woody Harrelson and Kiefer Sutherland. In 1995, he appeared in season 6 of the horror anthology series Tales from the Crypt in the episode called Doctor of Horror. He also starred in a guest role on Yes, Dear as a rehabilitating criminal and in Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman as a gun slinger. The following year, Tritt appeared as himself in Sgt. Bilko, which starred Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd and Phil Hartman; Tritt's cover of "Only You (And You Alone)" appeared in the film's soundtrack. He also made an appearance in the 1997 film Fire Down Below, starring Steven Seagal and Kris Kristofferson. In 1999 Tritt appeared in Outlaw Justice with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson. Tritt appeared in the film Blues Brothers 2000 as one of the Louisiana Gator Boys. In 2001 he guest starred in Elmo's World The Wild Wild West. In September 2010, filming began on a movie called Fishers of Men, a Christian film. Musical styles Although he had been singing since childhood, Tritt said that he began to put "a little more soul" in his voice after his church band performed at an African-American church. He said that he took interest in how African-American singers put "all these bends and sweeps and curls" in their voices, and began emulating that sound. While performing at these churches, he also took interest in gospel singers such as Andraé Crouch. Later on, he began listening to Southern rock acts such as Lynyrd Skynyrd through the recommendation of a friend, as well as the bluegrass music that his uncle exposed him to. Tritt said that he found his songwriting began to develop during the creation of his demo tape, when he had written a song called "Gambler's Blues" that "felt a lot more connected to Southern rock" than his previous writings. He cites country, rock and folk as his influences. Stephen Thomas Erlewine contrasts him with contemporaries Clint Black and Alan Jackson, saying that Tritt was "the only one not to wear a [cowboy] hat and the only one to dip into bluesy Southern rock. Consequently, he developed a gutsy, outlaw image that distinguished him from the pack." Zell Miller, in the book They Heard Georgia Singing, said that Tritt has an "unerring ability to walk the narrow path between his country heritage and his rock leanings to the acclaim of the devotees of both." Regarding his songwriting style and single choices, Tritt said that he writes "strictly from personal experiences" and does not follow a particular formula. He described "Here's a Quarter" as "one of the simplest three-chord waltzes I've ever written", and said that label executives were reluctant to release it because they thought that it was a novelty song. Also, he was told that "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" would not be a hit because it did not contain any rhymes, and fought the release of the song "Country Club" because he did not think that it fit his style. He also said that, despite their low peaks, the more rock-influenced "Put Some Drive in Your Country" and "T-R-O-U-B-L-E" helped generate sales for their respective albums more so than the top ten hits from those albums. Personal life Tritt married his high school sweetheart, Karen Ryon, in September 1982. They were married two years before divorcing. After going to court, Tritt was ordered to pay alimony to Karen for six months. When he was 21, he married Jodi Barnett, who was 33 at the time. He divorced her shortly after signing with Warner Bros. in 1989; the divorce finalized one month before "Country Club" was released. Tritt wrote the song "Here's a Quarter" the night he received his divorce papers. He married Theresa Nelson on April 12, 1997. They have one daughter, Tyler Reese (born February 18, 1998) and two sons: Tristan James (born June 16, 1999) and Tarian Nathaniel (born November 20, 2003). On May 18, 2019, he was in his tour bus when it was involved in a motor vehicle accident which took the lives of two people driving the wrong way on Veteran's Highway leaving Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Political views and advocacy Tritt is a member of the Republican Party and supported George W. Bush for president in 2000. The two met in 1996 at the Republican National Convention in San Diego, California, where Tritt sang the national anthem. Tritt told Insight on the News that he is a strong supporter of Second Amendment rights and believes the answer to crime is not gun control but criminal control. "I'm a pro-gun guy. I'm an NRA (National Rifle Association) member, a life member as a matter of fact. I'm more for the belief of making the punishment tougher for the criminals to start with. I think that sends much more of an incentive for people to not commit crimes of any type than taking away guns. Because you take away guns, and the next thing you know, stabbing murders are going to increase." He adds that he is "definitely pro-death penalty". In September 2020, Tritt gained notoriety for joining fellow Republican James Woods in blocking random Twitter users for using pro-Black Lives Matter and other anti-Trump tags in their posts, under the belief that it would counteract anti-Republican sentiment on Twitter. On October 18, 2021, Tritt made a cameo appearance on conservative commentator Steven Crowder's show Louder with Crowder. Alleged paranormal encounters In October 2015, Tritt appeared on Lifetime network's The Haunting of... program to discuss his experiences with the paranormal. Tritt stated that beginning in 1993, he was awakened "regularly" by disembodied voices in a vacation cabin that he owned – the voices spoke in an unknown dialect. His wife, Theresa, eventually heard them as well. According to Tritt, "Over the years, these voices started happening on such a frequent basis that we were afraid to come up here." He also asserted that footprints once appeared in the carpet of the cabin, and imprints in the bedspread, that belonged to neither him nor his wife. The show's host, Kim Russo, concluded that an African-American medicine man had been stabbed and beaten to death on the property, and the voices that Tritt was hearing belonged to the murderers' angry spirits. A title card in the program notes that "On August 14, 1875, a group of men killed a 'hoodoo doctor' close to the land where Travis' cabin was built." Russo believed that the hoodoo doctor's spirit also lingered on the property because it found a "kindred spirit" in Tritt. Discography Studio albums Proud of the Country (1987) Country Club (1990) It's All About to Change (1991) T-R-O-U-B-L-E (1992) Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof (1994) The Restless Kind (1996)No More Looking over My Shoulder (1998)Down the Road I Go (2000)Strong Enough (2002)My Honky Tonk History (2004)The Storm (2007) The Calm After... (2013)Set in Stone (2021)'Billboard number-one singles''' "Help Me Hold On" (1990) "Anymore" (1991) "Can I Trust You with My Heart" (19921993) "Foolish Pride" (1994) "Best of Intentions" (2000) Awards and nominations Filmography Notes See also Travis (chimpanzee), named after Tritt References External links 1963 births American male singer-songwriters American country singer-songwriters Columbia Records artists Grammy Award winners Grand Ole Opry members Living people Musicians from Marietta, Georgia People from Cobb County, Georgia Warner Records artists Georgia (U.S. state) Republicans Country musicians from Georgia (U.S. state) Singer-songwriters from Georgia (U.S. state)	true	[ "Pure Soul was an American R&B girl group who were signed to Interscope Records in the mid 1990s. They are perhaps best known for their hit single We Must Be in Love, the debut single from their self-titled debut album. The \"Pure Soul\" album (the group's only album) scored three top forty hits on the US Billboard R&B chart. Their music videos were some of the most frequently played videos on BET, VH-1 and The Box at the time of their release. After the singles ran their course and faded from regular rotation, the group mysteriously disappeared from the music scene without any explanation.\n\nDiscography\n\nAlbums\n Pure Soul (1995)\nSingles\n\nExternal links\n[] Album and singles info, chart info and music video links.\n\nReferences\n\nAmerican girl groups\nAfrican-American girl groups", "Blow Monkeys The Masters is a compilation album from British new wave band The Blow Monkeys, released in 1997 by the Eagle label, for its well-known \"Eagle Series\", presenting many UK group's master collections.\n\nThe second greatest hits album, following Choices - The Singles Collection, it was released in 1989, and contained all their most popular singles (including all four singles taken from the band's best-selling album, She Was Only a Grocer's Daughter, which also featured their best-selling single, the UK No. 5 hit \"It Doesn't Have to Be This Way\", and \"Wicked Ways\", and The Blow Monkeys' first hit single, \"Digging Your Scene\"). Also on the album is the three most popular singles from their debut album, Limping for a Generation, the two previously unreleased tracks on the previous collection, that is the duets with Sylvia Tella (the big hit \"Choice?\" and the minor hit \"Slaves No More\"), and the last single released by the band before they split up, \"La Passionara\".\n\nOn Blow Monkeys The Masters was the hard to find cover version of \"Superfly\" by Curtis Mayfield, whom vocalist and leader Dr. Robert has always pointed to as his main musical inspiration. The song was originally a B-side of the 1986 single, \"Don't Be Scared of Me\". From their 1988 album Whoops! There Goes the Neighbourhood was the only two songs here which never appeared in single format, \"No Woman Is An Island\" and \"Squaresville\". The album did not feature the second best-charting single from the band, \"Wait\", which got to No. 7 in early 1989.\n\nTrack listing\n \"Digging Your Scene\" (from Animal Magic, 1986) \n \"Wicked Ways\" (from Animal Magic, 1986) \n \"It Doesn't Have to Be This Way\" (from She Was Only a Grocer's Daughter, 1987) \n \"Out with Her\" (from She Was Only a Grocer's Daughter, 1987) \n \"Celebrate (The Day After You)\" (with Curtis Mayfield) (from She Was Only a Grocer's Daughter, 1987) \n \"Some Kind of Wonderful\" (from She Was Only a Grocer's Daughter, 1987) \n \"This Is Your Life\" (1989, from Whoops! There Goes the Neighbourhood, 1988)\n \"Choice?\" (with Sylvia Tella) (from Choices - The Singles Collection, 1989)\n \"Slaves No More\" (with Sylvia Tella) (from Choices - The Singles Collection, 1989) \n \"La Passionara\" (from Springtime for the World, 1990)\n \"Superfly\" (from the B-Side to the \"Don't be Scared of Me\" single, 1986) \n \"Atomic Lullaby\" (from Limping for a Generation, 1984)\n \"It Pays to Belong\" (from Whoops! There Goes the Neighbourhood, 1988) \n \"Man from Russia\" (from Limping for a Generation, 1984) \n \"Wildflower\" (from Limping for a Generation, 1984) \n \"Forbidden Fruit\" (1985, from Animal Magic, 1986) \n \"No Woman Is an Island\" (from Whoops! There Goes the Neighbourhood, 1988) \n \"Squareville\" (from Whoops! There Goes the Neighbourhood, 1988)\n\nPersonnel\nDr Robert: lyrics, vocals, guitar, piano\nMick Anker: bass guitar\nNeville Henry: saxophone\nTony Kiley: drums, percussion\n\nExternal links\nFencat Online: Dr. Robert's Official Website.\n\nThe Blow Monkeys albums\nAlbums produced by Stephen Hague\n1997 compilation albums\nAlbums produced by Adam Moseley" ]
[ "Travis Tritt", "1991-1992: It's All About to Change", "Is It's All About to Change an album or a single?", "He also released his second album, It's All About to Change.", "Was the album a success?", "The album went on to become his best-selling, with a triple-platinum certification from the RIAA for shipments of three million copies.", "Did he win any awards for that album?", "I don't know.", "Were there any hit singles from the album?", "All four of its singles reached the top five on the country music charts." ]	C_11462bedee39492fafd80e4368975ea1_1	Did the album win any awards?	5	Did the album It's All About To Change by Travis Tritt win any awards?	Travis Tritt	In 1991, Tritt received a second Horizon Award nomination, which he won that year. He also released his second album, It's All About to Change. The album went on to become his best-selling, with a triple-platinum certification from the RIAA for shipments of three million copies. All four of its singles reached the top five on the country music charts. "Here's a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)" and the Marty Stuart duet "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'," respectively the first and third singles, both reached number two, with the number-one "Anymore" in between. "Nothing Short of Dying" was the fourth single, with a peak at number four on Billboard; both it and "The Whiskey Ain't Working" went to Number One on Radio & Records. "Bible Belt," another cut from the album (recorded in collaboration with Little Feat), appeared in the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny (the lyrics for the song, however, were changed for the version played in the movie to match the story line). Although not released as a single, it peaked at number 72 country based on unsolicited airplay and was the b-side to "Nothing Short of Dying." "Bible Belt" was inspired by a youth pastor whom Tritt knew in his childhood. Stuart offered "The Whiskey Ain't Workin' Anymore" to Tritt backstage at the CMA awards show, and they recorded it as a duet through the suggestion of Tritt's record producer, Gregg Brown. The duet won both artists the next year's Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. Tritt and Stuart charted a second duet, "This One's Gonna Hurt You (For a Long, Long Time)," which went to number seven in mid-1992 and appeared on Stuart's album This One's Gonna Hurt You. This song won the 1992 CMA award for Vocal Event of the Year. In June 1992, Tritt received media attention when he criticized Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart" at a Fan Fair interview, saying that he did not think that Cyrus' song made a "statement". The following January, Cyrus responded at the American Music Awards by making reference to Tritt's "Here's a Quarter". Tritt later apologized to Cyrus, but said that he defended his opinion on the song. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER	James Travis Tritt (born February 9, 1963) is an American country music singer, songwriter, and actor. He signed to Warner Bros. Records in 1989, releasing seven studio albums and a greatest hits package for the label between then and 1999. In the 2000s, he released three studio albums on Columbia Records and one for the now-defunct Category 5 Records. Seven of his albums (counting the Greatest Hits) are certified platinum or higher by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA); the highest-certified is 1991's It's All About to Change, which is certified triple-platinum. Tritt has also charted more than 40 times on the Hot Country Songs charts, including five number ones—"Help Me Hold On", "Anymore", "Can I Trust You with My Heart", "Foolish Pride", and "Best of Intentions"—and 15 additional top ten singles. Tritt's musical style is defined by mainstream country and Southern rock influences. He has received two Grammy Awards, both for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals: in 1992 for "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'", a duet with Marty Stuart, and again in 1998 for "Same Old Train", a collaboration with Stuart and nine other artists. He has received four awards from the Country Music Association and has been a member of the Grand Ole Opry since 1992. Early life James Travis Tritt was born on February 9, 1963, in Marietta, Georgia, to James and Gwen Tritt. He first took interest in singing after his church's Sunday school choir performed "Everything Is Beautiful". He received his first guitar at age 8 and taught himself how to play it; in the fourth grade, he performed "Annie's Song" and "King of the Road" for his class, and later got invited to play for other classrooms in his school. At age 14, his parents bought him another guitar, and he learned more songs from his uncle, Sam Lockhart. Later on, Tritt joined his church band, which occasionally performed at other churches nearby. Tritt began writing music while he was attending Sprayberry High School; his first song composition, entitled "Spend a Little Time", was written about a girlfriend whom he had broken up with. He performed the song for his friends, one of whom complimented him on his songwriting skills. He also founded a bluegrass group with some of his friends and won second place in a local tournament for playing "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys". During his teenage years, Tritt worked at a furniture store, and later as a supermarket clerk. He lived with his mother after she and his father divorced; they remarried when he was 18. He worked at an air conditioning company while playing in clubs, but gave up the air conditioning job at the suggestion of one of his bandmates. Tritt's father thought that he would not find success as a musician, while his mother thought that he should perform Christian music instead of country. Through the assistance of Warner Bros. Records executive Danny Davenport, Tritt began recording demos. The two worked together for the next several years, eventually putting together a demo album called Proud of the Country. Davenport sent the demo to Warner Bros. representatives in Los Angeles, who in turn sent the demo to their Nashville division, which signed Tritt in 1987. Davenport also helped Tritt find a talent manager, Ken Kragen. At first, Kragen was not interested in taking an "entry-level act", but decided to sign on as Tritt's manager after Kragen's wife convinced him. Musical career 1989–1991: Country Club Tritt's contract with Warner Bros. meant that he was signed to record six songs, and three of them would be released as singles. According to the contract, he would not be signed on for a full album unless one of the three singles became a hit. His first single was "Country Club". Recorded in late 1988 and released on August 7, 1989, the song spent 26 weeks on the Hot Country Singles & Tracks charts, peaking at number nine. It was the title track to his 1990 debut album Country Club, produced by Gregg Brown. The month of its release, Tritt burst a blood vessel on his vocal cords, and had to take vocal rest for a month. Second single "Help Me Hold On" became his first number one single in 1990. The album's third and fifth singles, "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" and "Drift Off to Dream", respectively peaked at numbers two and three on the Hot Country Singles & Tracks charts, and number one on the Canadian RPM country charts; "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" also went to number one on the U.S. country singles charts published by Radio & Records. "Put Some Drive in Your Country", which was released fourth, peaked at 28 on Hot Country Songs. Country Club was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in July 1991 for shipments of one million copies, and no medals since in 1996. In 1990, he won the Top New Male Artist award from Billboard. The Country Music Association (CMA) also nominated him for the Horizon Award (now known as the New Artist Award), which is given to new artists who show have shown the most significant artistic and commercial development from a first or second album. Brian Mansfield of AllMusic gave the album a positive review, saying that "Put Some Drive in Your Country" paid homage to Tritt's influences, but that the other singles were more radio-friendly. Giving the album a B-minus, Alanna Nash of Entertainment Weekly compared Tritt's music to that of Hank Williams, Jr. and Joe Stampley. 1991–1992: It's All About to Change In 1991, Tritt received a second Horizon Award nomination, which he won that year. He also released his second album, It's All About to Change. The album went on to become his best-selling, with a triple-platinum certification from the RIAA for shipments of three million copies. All four of its singles reached the top five on the country music charts. "Here's a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)" and the Marty Stuart duet "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'", respectively the first and third singles, both reached number two, with the number-one "Anymore" in between. "Nothing Short of Dying" was the fourth single, with a peak at number four on Billboard; both it and "The Whiskey Ain't Working" went to Number One on Radio & Records. "Bible Belt", another cut from the album (recorded in collaboration with Little Feat), appeared in the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny (the lyrics for the song, however, were changed for the version played in the movie to match the story line). Although not released as a single, it peaked at number 72 country based on unsolicited airplay and was the b-side to "Nothing Short of Dying". "Bible Belt" was inspired by a youth pastor whom Tritt knew in his childhood. Stuart offered "The Whiskey Ain't Workin' Anymore" to Tritt backstage at the CMA awards show, and they recorded it as a duet through the suggestion of Tritt's record producer, Gregg Brown. The duet won both artists the next year's Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. Tritt and Stuart charted a second duet, "This One's Gonna Hurt You (For a Long, Long Time)", which went to number seven in mid-1992 and appeared on Stuart's album This One's Gonna Hurt You. This song won the 1992 CMA award for Vocal Event of the Year. In June 1992, Tritt received media attention when he criticized Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart" at a Fan Fair interview, saying that he did not think that Cyrus' song made a "statement". The following January, Cyrus responded at the American Music Awards by referring to Tritt's "Here's a Quarter". Tritt later apologized to Cyrus, but said that he defended his opinion on the song. 1992–1993: T-R-O-U-B-L-E and A Travis Tritt Christmas Tritt and Stuart began a "No Hats Tour" in 1992. In August of that same year, Tritt released the album T-R-O-U-B-L-E. Its first single was "Lord Have Mercy on the Working Man", a song written by Kostas. This song, which featured backing vocals from Brooks & Dunn, T. Graham Brown, George Jones, Little Texas, Dana McVicker (who also sang backup on Tritt's first two albums), Tanya Tucker and Porter Wagoner on the final chorus, peaked at number five. Its follow-up, "Can I Trust You with My Heart", became Tritt's third Billboard number one in early 1993. The album's next three singles did not perform as well on the charts: the title track (a cover of an Elvis Presley song), peaked at 13, followed by "Looking Out for Number One" at number 11 and "Worth Every Mile" at number 30. T-R-O-U-B-L-E became the second album of his career to achieve double-platinum certification. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic thought that T-R-O-U-B-L-E followed too closely the formula of It's All About to Change, but said that the songs showed Tritt's personality. Nash gave the album a similar criticism, but praised the rock influences of "Looking Out for Number One" and the vocals on "Can I Trust You with My Heart". One month after the release of T-R-O-U-B-L-E, Tritt issued a Christmas album titled A Travis Tritt Christmas: Loving Time of the Year, for which he wrote the title track. He also joined the Grand Ole Opry, a weekly stage show and radio broadcast specializing in country music performances, and filled in for Garth Brooks at a performance on the American Music Awards. By year's end, Tritt and several other artists appeared on George Jones's "I Don't Need Your Rockin' Chair", which won all artists involved the next year's CMA Vocal Event of the Year award. 1994–1995: Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof and Greatest Hits In early 1994, after "Worth Every Mile" fell from the charts, Tritt charted at number 21 with a cover of the Eagles' "Take It Easy". He recorded this song for the tribute album Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles (released through Warner Bros.' Giant Records division), which featured country music artists' renditions of Eagles songs. When filming the music video for this song, Tritt requested that the band, which had been on hiatus for over 13 years, appear in it. This reunion inspired the Eagles' Hell Freezes Over Tour, which began that year. His fourth album, Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof, was released that May. Its lead-off single, "Foolish Pride", went to number one, and the fourth single, "Tell Me I Was Dreaming", reached number two. In between these songs were the title track at number 22 and "Between an Old Memory and Me" (originally recorded by Keith Whitley) at number 11. The album included two co-writes with Gary Rossington of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and guest vocals from Waylon Jennings and Hank Williams, Jr. on the cut "Outlaws Like Us". The album achieved platinum certification in December of that year, and later became his third double-platinum album. AllMusic reviewer Brian Mansfield said that Tritt was "most comfortable with his Southern rock/outlaw mantle" on it, comparing "Foolish Pride" favorably to "Anymore" and the work of Bob Seger. Alanna Nash praised the title track and "Tell Me I Was Dreaming" in her review for Entertainment Weekly, but thought that the other songs were still too similar in sound to his previous works. 1995's Greatest Hits: From the Beginning included most of his singles to that point, as well as two new cuts: the Steve Earle composition "Sometimes She Forgets" and a cover of the pop standard "Only You (And You Alone)". The former was a top ten hit at number seven, while the latter spent only eight weeks on the country charts and peaked at number 51. Greatest Hits was certified platinum. 1996–1997: The Restless Kind In April 1996, Tritt and Stuart charted a third duet, "Honky Tonkin's What I Do Best", which appeared on Stuart's album of the same name and peaked at 23 on the country charts. The song won both artists that year's Country Music Association award for Vocal Event, Tritt's third win in this category. The two began a second tour, the Double Trouble Tour, that year. Tritt charted at number three in mid-1996 with "More Than You'll Ever Know", the first single from his fifth album, The Restless Kind. The album accounted for one more top ten hit, a cover of Waylon Jennings's "Where Corn Don't Grow", which Tritt took to number six in late 1996. This song's chart run overlapped with that of "Here's Your Sign (Get the Picture)", a novelty release combining snippets of comedian Bill Engvall's "Here are Your Sign" routines with a chorus sung by Tritt. "Here's Your Sign (Get the Picture)" peaked at 29 on the country charts and 43 on the Billboard Hot 100, accounting for Tritt's first entry on the latter chart. The other singles from The Restless Kind all failed to make Top Ten upon their 1997 release. "She's Going Home with Me" and "Still in Love with You" (previously the respective B-sides to "Where Corn Don't Grow" and "More Than You'll Ever Know") were the third and fifth releases, peaking at 24 and 23 on Hot Country Singles & Tracks. In between was the number 18 "Helping Me Get Over You", a duet with Lari White which the two co-wrote. Unlike his previous albums, all of which were produced by Gregg Brown, Tritt produced The Restless Kind with Don Was. Tritt told Billboard that the album showed a greater level of personal involvement than his previous efforts, as it was his first co-production credit. He also noted that he sang most of the vocal harmony by himself, played guitar on "She's Going Home with Me", and helped with the album's art direction. It received positive reviews from Thom Owens of AllMusic, who said that it was the most country-sounding album of his career. Don Yates of Country Standard Time also praised it for having a more "organic" sound than Tritt's other albums. 1998–1999: No More Looking over My Shoulder In 1998, he and several other artists contributed to Stuart's "Same Old Train", a cut from the collaborative album Tribute to Tradition; this song charted at number 59 on Hot Country Songs and won Tritt his second Grammy for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. He also performed on Frank Wildhorn's concept album of the musical The Civil War, singing the song "The Day the Sun Stood Still". By year's end, Tritt also released his final Warner Bros. album, No More Looking over My Shoulder. It was his first of four consecutive albums which he produced with Billy Joe Walker, Jr., who is a session guitarist, producer, and New Age musician. The album was led off by the ballad "If I Lost You", which peaked at number 29 on the country charts and number 86 on the Hot 100. Michael Peterson (who recorded for Warner Bros.' Reprise label at the time) co-wrote and sang backing vocals on the title track, which went to number 38 country in early 1999. The album's third and final single was a cover of Jude Cole's "Start the Car" (previously the B-side to "If I Lost You"), which peaked at number 52. Late in 1999, Tritt recorded a cover of Hank Williams's "Move It On Over" with George Thorogood for the soundtrack to the cartoon King of the Hill. This cut peaked at number 66 on the country charts from unsolicited airplay. 2000–2002: Down the Road I Go Soon after leaving Warner Bros. Records, Tritt signed to Columbia Records and released the album Down the Road I Go in 2000. The album's first release was "Best of Intentions", his fifth and final number one hit on Billboard. It was also his most successful entry on the Hot 100, where it reached number 27. The next two singles, "It's a Great Day to Be Alive" and "Love of a Woman", both peaked at number two on the country charts in 2001, followed by "Modern Day Bonnie and Clyde" at number eight. All three songs also crossed over to the Hot 100, respectively reaching peaks of 33, 39 and 55. Tritt wrote or co-wrote seven of the album's songs, including "Best of Intentions", and collaborated with Charlie Daniels on two of them. "It's a Great Day to Be Alive" was originally recorded by Jon Randall, whose version was to have been included on an unreleased album for BNA Records in the late 1990s. Maria Konicki Dinoia gave the album a positive review on AllMusic, saying that Tritt "hasn't lost his touch". Country Standard Time also gave a positive review, saying that it showed Tritt's balance of country and rock influences. An uncredited review in Billboard magazine called "Best of Intentions" a "gorgeous ballad", comparing it favorably to his early Warner Bros. releases. 2002–2005: Strong Enough and My Honky Tonk History In September 2002, Tritt released his second album on Columbia Records, Strong Enough. Its first single was "Strong Enough to Be Your Man" (an answer song to Sheryl Crow's 1994 single "Strong Enough") which reached number 13. The only other release was "Country Ain't Country", which peaked at 26 on the country charts. William Ruhlmann gave the album a generally positive review on AllMusic, saying that he considered its sound closer to mainstream country than Tritt's previous albums. Also in 2002, Tritt performed on an episode of Crossroads, a program on Country Music Television which pairs country acts with musicians from other genres for collaborative performances. He performed with Ray Charles. Tritt contributed guest vocals to Charlie Daniels' 2003 single "Southern Boy", and recorded a cover of Waylon Jennings' "Lonesome, On'ry and Mean" to the RCA Records tribute album I've Always Been Crazy. Respectively, these songs reached 51 and 50 on the country charts. Tritt's tenth studio album, My Honky Tonk History, was released in 2004. This album included three charting singles: "The Girl's Gone Wild" at 28, followed by the John Mellencamp duet "What Say You" at number 21 and "I See Me" at number 32. Other songs on the album included a cover of Philip Claypool's "Circus Leaving Town" and songs written by Gretchen Wilson, Benmont Tench and Delbert McClinton. Thom Jurek rated this album favorably, saying that it was a "solid, sure-voiced outing"; he also thought that "What Say You" was the best song on it. 2007–present: The Storm and The Calm After... Tritt exited Columbia in July 2005, citing creative differences over My Honky Tonk History. He signed to the independent Category 5 Records in February 2006, and served as the label's flagship artist. In March 2007, a concert promoter in the Pittsburgh area sued Tritt, claiming he had committed to play a show, but then backed out and signed to play a competing venue. Tritt's manager denied he had ever signed a contract with the promoter. Tritt released his first single for Category 5 in May 2007: a cover of the Richard Marx song "You Never Take Me Dancing". It was included on his only album for Category 5, The Storm, which American Idol judge Randy Jackson produced. The album featured a more rhythm and blues influence than Tritt's previous works. "You Never Take Me Dancing" peaked at number 27 on the country charts; a second single, "Something Stronger Than Me", was released in October, but it did not chart. Category 5 closed in November 2007 after allegations that the label's chief executive officer, Raymond Termini, had illegally used Medicaid funds to finance it. A month later, Tritt filed a $10 million lawsuit against Category 5, because the label had failed to pay royalties on the album, and failed to give him creative control on The Storm. In October 2008, Tritt began an 11-date tour with Marty Stuart. On this tour, they performed acoustic renditions of their duets; Tritt also performed five solo shows. Tritt signed a management deal with Parallel Entertainment in December 2010. He continued to tour through to 2012 and into 2013, with most of his shows being solo acoustic performances. Tritt acquired the rights to the songs on The Storm and re-issued it via his own Post Oak label in July 2013 under the title The Calm After... The re-release included two covers: the Patty Smyth and Don Henley duet "Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough", which he recorded as a duet with his daughter Tyler Reese, and Faces' 1971 hit "Stay with Me". In 2019, Tritt was featured on the country rock hit "Outlaws & Outsiders" by Cory Marks. Acting career Tritt's first acting role was in the 1993 made-for-television movie Rio Diablo. In 1994, Tritt made a special appearance as a bull rider in the movie The Cowboy Way, which starred Woody Harrelson and Kiefer Sutherland. In 1995, he appeared in season 6 of the horror anthology series Tales from the Crypt in the episode called Doctor of Horror. He also starred in a guest role on Yes, Dear as a rehabilitating criminal and in Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman as a gun slinger. The following year, Tritt appeared as himself in Sgt. Bilko, which starred Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd and Phil Hartman; Tritt's cover of "Only You (And You Alone)" appeared in the film's soundtrack. He also made an appearance in the 1997 film Fire Down Below, starring Steven Seagal and Kris Kristofferson. In 1999 Tritt appeared in Outlaw Justice with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson. Tritt appeared in the film Blues Brothers 2000 as one of the Louisiana Gator Boys. In 2001 he guest starred in Elmo's World The Wild Wild West. In September 2010, filming began on a movie called Fishers of Men, a Christian film. Musical styles Although he had been singing since childhood, Tritt said that he began to put "a little more soul" in his voice after his church band performed at an African-American church. He said that he took interest in how African-American singers put "all these bends and sweeps and curls" in their voices, and began emulating that sound. While performing at these churches, he also took interest in gospel singers such as Andraé Crouch. Later on, he began listening to Southern rock acts such as Lynyrd Skynyrd through the recommendation of a friend, as well as the bluegrass music that his uncle exposed him to. Tritt said that he found his songwriting began to develop during the creation of his demo tape, when he had written a song called "Gambler's Blues" that "felt a lot more connected to Southern rock" than his previous writings. He cites country, rock and folk as his influences. Stephen Thomas Erlewine contrasts him with contemporaries Clint Black and Alan Jackson, saying that Tritt was "the only one not to wear a [cowboy] hat and the only one to dip into bluesy Southern rock. Consequently, he developed a gutsy, outlaw image that distinguished him from the pack." Zell Miller, in the book They Heard Georgia Singing, said that Tritt has an "unerring ability to walk the narrow path between his country heritage and his rock leanings to the acclaim of the devotees of both." Regarding his songwriting style and single choices, Tritt said that he writes "strictly from personal experiences" and does not follow a particular formula. He described "Here's a Quarter" as "one of the simplest three-chord waltzes I've ever written", and said that label executives were reluctant to release it because they thought that it was a novelty song. Also, he was told that "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" would not be a hit because it did not contain any rhymes, and fought the release of the song "Country Club" because he did not think that it fit his style. He also said that, despite their low peaks, the more rock-influenced "Put Some Drive in Your Country" and "T-R-O-U-B-L-E" helped generate sales for their respective albums more so than the top ten hits from those albums. Personal life Tritt married his high school sweetheart, Karen Ryon, in September 1982. They were married two years before divorcing. After going to court, Tritt was ordered to pay alimony to Karen for six months. When he was 21, he married Jodi Barnett, who was 33 at the time. He divorced her shortly after signing with Warner Bros. in 1989; the divorce finalized one month before "Country Club" was released. Tritt wrote the song "Here's a Quarter" the night he received his divorce papers. He married Theresa Nelson on April 12, 1997. They have one daughter, Tyler Reese (born February 18, 1998) and two sons: Tristan James (born June 16, 1999) and Tarian Nathaniel (born November 20, 2003). On May 18, 2019, he was in his tour bus when it was involved in a motor vehicle accident which took the lives of two people driving the wrong way on Veteran's Highway leaving Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Political views and advocacy Tritt is a member of the Republican Party and supported George W. Bush for president in 2000. The two met in 1996 at the Republican National Convention in San Diego, California, where Tritt sang the national anthem. Tritt told Insight on the News that he is a strong supporter of Second Amendment rights and believes the answer to crime is not gun control but criminal control. "I'm a pro-gun guy. I'm an NRA (National Rifle Association) member, a life member as a matter of fact. I'm more for the belief of making the punishment tougher for the criminals to start with. I think that sends much more of an incentive for people to not commit crimes of any type than taking away guns. Because you take away guns, and the next thing you know, stabbing murders are going to increase." He adds that he is "definitely pro-death penalty". In September 2020, Tritt gained notoriety for joining fellow Republican James Woods in blocking random Twitter users for using pro-Black Lives Matter and other anti-Trump tags in their posts, under the belief that it would counteract anti-Republican sentiment on Twitter. On October 18, 2021, Tritt made a cameo appearance on conservative commentator Steven Crowder's show Louder with Crowder. Alleged paranormal encounters In October 2015, Tritt appeared on Lifetime network's The Haunting of... program to discuss his experiences with the paranormal. Tritt stated that beginning in 1993, he was awakened "regularly" by disembodied voices in a vacation cabin that he owned – the voices spoke in an unknown dialect. His wife, Theresa, eventually heard them as well. According to Tritt, "Over the years, these voices started happening on such a frequent basis that we were afraid to come up here." He also asserted that footprints once appeared in the carpet of the cabin, and imprints in the bedspread, that belonged to neither him nor his wife. The show's host, Kim Russo, concluded that an African-American medicine man had been stabbed and beaten to death on the property, and the voices that Tritt was hearing belonged to the murderers' angry spirits. A title card in the program notes that "On August 14, 1875, a group of men killed a 'hoodoo doctor' close to the land where Travis' cabin was built." Russo believed that the hoodoo doctor's spirit also lingered on the property because it found a "kindred spirit" in Tritt. Discography Studio albums Proud of the Country (1987) Country Club (1990) It's All About to Change (1991) T-R-O-U-B-L-E (1992) Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof (1994) The Restless Kind (1996)No More Looking over My Shoulder (1998)Down the Road I Go (2000)Strong Enough (2002)My Honky Tonk History (2004)The Storm (2007) The Calm After... (2013)Set in Stone (2021)'Billboard number-one singles''' "Help Me Hold On" (1990) "Anymore" (1991) "Can I Trust You with My Heart" (19921993) "Foolish Pride" (1994) "Best of Intentions" (2000) Awards and nominations Filmography Notes See also Travis (chimpanzee), named after Tritt References External links 1963 births American male singer-songwriters American country singer-songwriters Columbia Records artists Grammy Award winners Grand Ole Opry members Living people Musicians from Marietta, Georgia People from Cobb County, Georgia Warner Records artists Georgia (U.S. state) Republicans Country musicians from Georgia (U.S. state) Singer-songwriters from Georgia (U.S. state)	false	[ "IzOne was a twelve-member South Korean and Japanese girl group formed in 2018 through Produce 48, a music competition reality show. The group achieved significant commercial success with its debut extended play ColorIz (2018), released under Off the Record Entertainment, and won several new artist awards, including Best New Artist at the 20th Mnet Asian Music Awards, Rookie of the Year at the 33rd Golden Disc Awards, and the New Artist Award at the 28th Seoul Music Awards. The group's second EP, HeartIz (2019), was released to greater commercial success than its predecessor, and received Disc Bonsang nominations at the 34th Golden Disc Awards and the 29th Seoul Music Awards respectively. The EP's lead single, \"Violeta\", received a nomination for Song of the Year at the 21st Mnet Asian Music Awards.\n\nThe group earned its first ever daesang award nominations for its first studio album BloomIz, released in February 2020. The album was nominated for Album of the Year at both the 12th Melon Music Awards and the 10th Gaon Chart Music Awards, while its lead single \"Fiesta\" was also nominated at both ceremonies for Best Dance – Female and Song of the Year – February respectively. IzOne did not win any of the nominations but the group received its second Artist of the Year bonsang at the Melon Music Awards. BloomIz garnered an additional Bonsang Award nomination at the 30th Seoul Music Awards. The group's follow-up EP, Oneiric Diary, released in June 2020, was also nominated alongside its predecessor at the Gaon Awards, for Album of the Year – 3rd Quarter. The group won its third Artist of the Year bonsang at the 3rd Fact Music Awards in December 2020.\n\nAwards and nominations\n\nNotes\n\nReferences \n\nIz*One\nAwards", "The 54th Academy of Country Music Awards was held at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada on April 7, 2019. Nominations were announced on February 20, 2019 by Reba McEntire during CBS This Morning, with Chris Stapleton and Dan + Shay leading with six nominations each. McEntire returned to host the awards for the sixteenth time.\n\nJason Aldean was presented with the ACM's rare honor \"Artist of the Decade\" by previous holder George Strait.\n\nWinners and Nominees \nThe winners are shown in bold.\n\nPerformances\n\nPresenters\n\nReception \nIn its review of the event, Rolling Stone Country praised that the ACMs took the opportunity to bring seasoned musicians Amanda Shires and Charlie Worsham \"into the fold\" by having them appear alongside Luke Combs and Keith Urban respectively but criticised that the ACMs did not introduce either of them or even feature them on screen. Worsham, who the reviewer believed should have been nominated for his own awards, performed \"mostly in the shadows\" and Shires, who \"helped transform [Combs' performance] with her lyrical playing\" was barely seen. Rolling Stone also praised Reba McEntire's hosting and the performances by Dierks Bentley and Brandi Carlile, Little Big Town, Miranda Lambert and Ashley McBryde but stated that it was \"baffling\" that Kacey Musgraves, who had five nominations and won the CMA Award for Album of the Year and four Grammy Awards including Best Country Album and the all-genre Album of the Year for Golden Hour, did not perform. Musgraves' win made her only the third artist (after Taylor Swift and the artists that appeared on Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?) to win the ACM, CMA and Grammy Awards for Best Country Album as well as the all-genre Grammy for Album of the Year.\n\nSee also\nAcademy of Country Music Awards\n\nReferences\n\nAcademy of Country Music Awards\nAcademy of Country Music Awards\nAcademy of Country Music Awards\nAcademy of Country Music Awards\nAcademy of Country Music Awards\nAcademy of Country Music Awards\nAcademy of Country Music Awards" ]
[ "R. Kelly", "2009: Untitled and Africa" ]	C_11f296c5dc0b4f43ad0d6184b5715ed2_0	Can you tell me about the Untitled and Africa?	1	Can you tell me about R. Kelly, Untitled and Africa?	R. Kelly	January 2009, after separating in fall of 2005, Kelly finalized divorce to ex-wife Andrea Kelly. The couple had been married for 11 years. On June 3, 2009, Kelly released his first ever mixtape, The Demo Tape (Gangsta Grillz) presented by DJ Skee and DJ Drama as a way to reintroduce himself to fans. While at the Velvet Room in Atlanta in February 2009, Kelly announced that he was out there working on the album and that it would be called Untitled. The album was given a September 29, 2009 release date, but was delayed until October 13, 2009. The album release was again delayed and was released under Jive Records on December 1, 2009. It got mixed to positive reviews from critics. The single "Number One", which features Keri Hilson, peaked at #8 on the US R&B Chart. Kelly performed for the first time in Africa headlining the Arise African Fashion Awards in Johannesburg, South Africa on June 20, 2009. Kelly scheduled to perform in Cape Town before heading to Nigeria as part of the annual ThisDay music and fashion festival in July. Kelly also performed in Kampala, Uganda in January 2010. He also scheduled to perform in London as part of his first international tour in eight years, but he did not make his London concert. "I'm very excited about my first visit to Africa, I've dreamed about this for a long time and it's finally here," Kelly said in a statement. "It will be one of the highlights of not only my career but my life. I can't wait to perform in front of my fans in Africa -- who have been some of the best in the world." In December 2009, Kelly teamed up with biographer David Ritz and Tavis Smiley's SmileyBooks publications to write his memoirs entitled Soulacoaster. SmileyBooks publisher and founder, Tavis Smiley stated that the memoir's main focus won't be on Kelly's trials and tribulations. Smiley was quoted saying "If anyone thinks this bookis going to fixate on [R. Kelly's trials], they are going to be sadly mistaken. It is going to be a holistic look at his life thus far and the life and legacy that he's building." CANNOTANSWER	in February 2009, Kelly announced that he was out there working on the album and that it would be called Untitled.	Robert Sylvester Kelly (born January 8, 1967) is an American singer, songwriter, record producer and convicted sex offender. He has been credited with helping to redefine R&B and hip hop, earning nicknames such as "the King of R&B", "the King of Pop-Soul", and the "Pied Piper of R&B". Kelly is known for songs including "I Believe I Can Fly", "Bump N' Grind", "Your Body's Callin', "Gotham City", "Ignition (Remix)", "If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time", "The World's Greatest", "I'm a Flirt (Remix)", and the hip hopera "Trapped in the Closet". In 1998, Kelly won three Grammy Awards for "I Believe I Can Fly". Although Kelly is primarily a singer and songwriter, he has written, produced, and remixed songs, singles, and albums for other artists. In 1996, he was nominated for a Grammy Award for writing Michael Jackson's song "You Are Not Alone". Kelly has sold over 75 million records worldwide, making him the most successful R&B male artist of the 1990s and one of the world's best-selling music artists. In 2010, Billboard magazine considered Kelly the most successful R&B artist in history and listed him as the Top R&B/Hip Hop Artist for the time period between 1985 and 2010. In 2012, he was listed as the 55th best-selling music artist in the United States, with over 32 million album sales. Since the 1990s, Kelly has been repeatedly accused of sexual abuse, often with underage girls. He has faced multiple civil suits and has been charged by criminal courts in Chicago, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota. He repeatedly denied the charges. In June 2002, he was indicted on 21 counts of making child pornography. He was acquitted six years later in 2008. In January 2019, a widely viewed Lifetime docuseries titled Surviving R. Kelly detailed allegations of sexual abuse by multiple women, allegations that Kelly continued to deny. Facing pressure from the public using the Mute R. Kelly hashtag, RCA Records dropped Kelly. In 2019, Kelly was indicted by a Cook County grand jury in Chicago on 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse in February, followed by an additional 11 counts of sexual assault and abuse filed by the same court in May. On July 11, 2019, he was arrested on federal charges alleging sex crimes, human trafficking, child pornography, racketeering, and obstruction of justice. Kelly faced a total of 22 federal criminal charges as of January 29, 2021. A federal judge ordered Kelly jailed pending trial on the charges. On September 27, 2021, a federal jury in New York found Kelly guilty on nine counts including racketeering, sexual exploitation of a child, kidnapping, bribery, sex trafficking, and a violation of the Mann Act. The judge ordered that he remain in custody pending sentencing, set for May 4, 2022. Kelly faces a second trial for producing child pornography set for August 2022. Early life Robert Sylvester Kelly was born at Chicago Lying-in Hospital in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, on January 8, 1967. He has three half-siblings, an older sister and brother, along with a younger brother. His mother, Joanne Kelly, was a schoolteacher and devout Baptist. She was born in Arkansas. The identity of his father, who was absent from Kelly's life, is not known. His family lived in the Ida B. Wells Homes public housing project in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood. Around the time he was five years old, Kelly's mother married his stepfather, Lucious, who reportedly worked for an airline. Kelly began singing in the church choir at age eight. Kelly described having a girlfriend, Lulu, at age eight, in his autobiography. He stated that their last play date turned tragic when, after fighting with older children over a play area by a creek, she was pushed into the water, swept downstream by a fast-moving current, and drowned. Kelly called Lulu his first musical inspiration. Kelly said members of his household would act differently when his mother and grandparents were not home. From age eight to 14, he was sexually abused by an older female family member. Kelly's younger brother Carey stated that he suffered from years of sexual abuse at the hands of his older sister, Theresa, who was entrusted with babysitting her siblings. Carey stated that although their older brother was spared and allowed to play outside, both he and Kelly were punished at separate times indoors by Theresa, who refused to acknowledge the abuse when confronted years later. Explaining why he never told anyone, Kelly wrote in his 2012 autobiography Soulacoaster that he was "too afraid and too ashamed". Around age 10, Kelly was also sexually abused by an older male who was a friend of the family. In his autobiography, Kelly described being shot in the shoulder, at age 11, by boys who were attempting to steal his bike, although a family friend later stated that Kelly had shot himself while attempting suicide. In September 1980, Kelly entered Kenwood Academy in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, where he met music teacher Lena McLin, who encouraged Kelly to perform the Stevie Wonder classic "Ribbon in the Sky" in the high school talent show. A shy Kelly put on sunglasses, was escorted onto the stage, sang the song and won first prize. McLin encouraged Kelly to leave the high school basketball team and concentrate on music. She said he was furious at first, but after his performance in the talent show, he changed his mind.Kelly was diagnosed with the learning disability dyslexia, which left him unable to read or write. Kelly dropped out of high school after attending Kenwood Academy for one year. He began performing in the subway under the Chicago "L" tracks. He regularly busked at the "L" stop on the Red Line's Jackson station in the Loop. In his youth, Kelly played basketball with Illinois state champion basketball player Ben Wilson and later sang "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday" at Wilson's funeral. Career 1990–1996: Born into the 90's, 12 Play and R. Kelly MGM (Musically Gifted Men or Mentally Gifted Men) was formed in 1989 with Robert Kelly, Marc McWilliams, Vincent Walker and Shawn Brooks. In 1990, MGM recorded and released one single, "Why You Wanna Play Me"; after its release, the group disbanded. Kelly gained national recognition in 1989 when MGM participated on the talent TV show Big Break, hosted by Natalie Cole. After MGM performed “All My Love”, which would become a demo for Kelly's song “She's Got That Vibe” the group went on to win the $100,000 grand prize. In 1991, Kelly signed with Jive Records. Kelly's debut album Born into the 90's was released in early 1992 (credited as R. Kelly and Public Announcement). The album, released during the new jack swing period of the early 1990s, yielded the R&B hits "She's Got That Vibe", "Honey Love", "Dedicated", and "Slow Dance (Hey Mr. DJ)", with Kelly singing lead vocals. During late 1992, Kelly and Public Announcement embarked on a tour entitled "60653" after the zip code of their Chicago neighborhood. This would be the only album co-credited with Public Announcement. Kelly separated from the group in January 1993. Kelly's first solo album, 12 Play, was released on November 9, 1993, and yielded the singer's first number-one hit, "Bump N' Grind", which spent a record-breaking 12 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot R&B Singles chart. Subsequent hit singles: "Your Body's Callin'" (U.S. Hot 100: #13, U.S. R&B: #2) and "Sex Me" (U.S. Hot 100: #20, U.S. R&B: #8). Both singles sold 500,000 copies in the United States and were certified Gold by the RIAA. In 1994, 12 Play was certified Gold by the RIAA, eventually going six times platinum. In 1995, Kelly garnered his first Grammy nominations; two for writing, producing and composing Michael Jackson's last number one hit "You Are Not Alone". Kelly's success continued with the November 14, 1995 release of R. Kelly, his eponymous second studio album. Critics praised him for his departure from salacious bedroom songs to embracing vulnerability. New York Times contributor Stephen Holden described Kelly as "The reigning king of pop-soul sex talks a lot tougher than Barry White, the father of such fluffed-up pillow talk and along with Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway, [both] major influences for Kelly." Also in December 1995, Professor Michael Eric Dyson critiqued Kelly's self-titled album "R. Kelly" for VIBE. Dyson described Kelly's growth from the 12 Play album: "Kelly reshapes his personal turmoil to artistic benefit" and noted that Kelly is "reborn before our very own ears." The album reached number one on the Billboard 200 chart, becoming Kelly's first number one album on the chart, and reached number one on the R&B album charts; his second. The R. Kelly album spawned three platinum hit singles: "You Remind Me of Something" (U.S. Hot 100: #4, U.S. R&B: #1), "I Can't Sleep Baby (If I)" (U.S. Hot 100: #5, U.S. R&B: #1), and "Down Low (Nobody Has To Know)" (U.S. Hot 100: #4, U.S. R&B: #1); a duet with Ronald Isley. Kelly's self-titled album sold four million copies, receiving 4× platinum certification from the RIAA. He promoted the album with a 50-city "Down Low Top Secret Tour" with LL Cool J, Xscape, and Solo. On November 26, 1996, Kelly released "I Believe I Can Fly", an inspirational song originally released on the soundtrack for the film Space Jam. "I Believe I Can Fly" reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and No. 1 on the UK charts for three weeks and won three Grammy Awards in 1998. In that same year, he contributed Freak Tonight for the A Thin Line Between Love and Hate soundtrack. 1997–2001: Basketball, R., TP-2.COM, and Rockland Records In 1997, Kelly signed a contract to play professional basketball with the Atlantic City Seagulls of the USBL. He wore the number 12 in honor of his album 12 Play. Kelly said "I love basketball enough to not totally let go of my music, but just put it to the side for a minute and fulfill some dreams of mine that I've had for a long time." Kelly's USBL contract contained a clause that would allow him to fulfill a music obligation when necessary. "If Whitney Houston needs a song written", said Ken Gross, the Seagulls owner who signed Kelly, "he would be able to leave the team to do that and come back". "It wasn't a gimmick", Gross continued, "he's a ballplayer. He can play." Kelly is the first music artist to play professional basketball. In 1998, Kelly wrote and produced the debut album of another protégé Sparkle, which was released under his Rockland label and distributed through Interscope. In 2000, Sparkle went platinum due in part to the success of the first single, "Be Careful", a duet with Kelly. On November 17, 1998, Kelly released his fourth studio and first double album, R. Musically, the album spans different genres from pop (Celine Dion), street rap (Nas and Jay-Z) to Blues ("Suicide"). Dave Hoekstra of the Los Angeles Times described the album as "easily the most ambitious project of his career." As the year 2000 commenced, Kelly racked up a slew of new awards reflecting his status as an established R&B superstar. In January 2000, he had won Favorite Male Soul/R&B Artist at the American Music Awards and, in February, was nominated for several Grammy Awards, including Best Male R&B Vocal Performance ("When a Woman's Fed Up"), Best R&B Album (R.), and Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group ("Satisfy You") with P. Diddy. On November 7, 2000, Kelly released his fifth studio album, TP-2.com, a project aligned with his breakthrough album, 12 Play. Unlike R., all songs on TP-2.com were written, arranged, and produced by Kelly. AllMusic's Jason Birchmeier gave TP-2.com 4 stars and stated: "Kelly knows how to take proven formulas and funnel them through his own stylistic aesthetic, which usually means slowing down the tempo, laying on lush choruses of strings and background vocals, taming down the lyrics for radio, and catering his pitch primarily to wistful women. In 2001, Kelly won the Outstanding Achievement Award at the Music of Black Origin or MOBO Awards and Billboard magazine ranked TP-2.com number 94 on the magazine's Top 200 Albums of the Decade. Kelly's song "The World's Greatest", from the soundtrack to the 2001 Ali film, was a hit. Rockland Records In 1998 Kelly launched his own label, the Interscope Records-distributed Rockland Records. The label's roster included artists Sparkle, Boo & Gotti, Talent, Vegas Cats, Lady, Frankie, Secret Weapon, and Rebecca F. Also in 1998, the label's first artist, Sparkle released her debut self-titled album, Sparkle. In addition to producing and writing the project, Kelly made vocal contribution to the hit duet "Be Careful", which contributed largely to the album's success. The album was certified platinum in December 2000. In 1999, he wrote and produced the soundtrack to the Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy movie Life, which features tracks from K-Ci & JoJo, Maxwell, Mýa, and Destiny's Child. The soundtrack was released on the Rockland label. 2002–2003: The Best of Both Worlds and Chocolate Factory On January 24, 2002, at a press conference announcing The Best of Both Worlds completion, celebrities such as Johnnie Cochran, Russell Simmons, Luther Vandross, and Sean Combs praised the album, with Jay-Z stating that he hoped the collaboration represents "more unity for black people on a whole." MTV's Shaheem Reid wrote: "And if Jay and Kelly can put their egos to the side long enough to wrap up and promote their album, then their labels—Def Jam and Jive, respectively—can surely figure out a way to join forces and make cheddar together." On February 8, 2002, Kelly performed at the closing ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics at the same time a news scandal broke of a sex tape that appeared to show Kelly with an underage girl. When the joint album leaked on February 22, 2002, it caused the label, Roc-A-Fella, to modify the album's release date in March. Jay-Z expressed frustration about the album leak to MTV News: "It's the gift and the curse. It's an honor that everybody wants your music fast, but on the other hand, it's another thing when the music gets out before you [want it to]. Because that's your art. You feel attached to it. You feel a certain way and you want people to go out and support it. The time that you take, it's like a piece of your life. You take parts of your life and you put it on these records and then for it to just be traded and moved around [is frustrating]. The Best of Both Worlds album sold 285,000 copies in its opening week and debuted at number two on the Billboard 200. It was a critical and commercial disappointment. In May 2002, Kelly's initial sixth studio album, Loveland, leaked and was delayed to release in November. Eventually, a second thought caused Kelly to restructure the entirety of the album, including its title; Loveland would later be packaged as a deluxe edition bonus disc of the now-renamed Chocolate Factory. In October of that year, Kelly released the remix to its single, "Ignition". It had since charted at number two on the Billboard Hot 100. On February 18, 2003, the album, Chocolate Factory was released to highly critical fanfare. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, ending the first two-week run of rapper 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Tryin'. It sold 532,000 copies in its first week. The album was also supported by its follow-up singles, "Snake" and the remix of "Step in the Name of Love"; the latter of which peaked at number nine on the Hot 100. Later that year, in September, Kelly released his first greatest hits album, The R. in R&B Collection, Vol. 1, including three unreleased songs; one of which being "Thoia Thoing". 2004–2005: Unfinished Business, Happy People/U Saved Me and TP.3 Reloaded Between mid-2003 and early 2004, Kelly began work on another double CD album, one with "happy" tracks and another with "inspirational" tracks. The double album, Happy People/U Saved Me, was released on August 24, 2004. It debuted at number two on the Billboard 200, with first week sales of 264,000 copies. Both of the album's titled tracks respectively performed underwhelmingly; "Happy People" charted at number twenty-nine on the Adult R&B song chart while "U Saved Me" peaked at number fifty-two on the Billboard Hot 100. Two months later, Kelly and Jay-Z reunited to release their second collaborative album, Unfinished Business. The album received criticism and like its predecessor, was also a commercial failure, despite debuting at number one on the Billboard 200. The promotion of the album and its Best of Both Worlds tour were both plagued by tension between the stars, with Kelly reportedly showing up late or not at all to gigs. Kelly complained that the touring lights were not directed towards him and allegedly assaulted the tour's lighting director. Jay-Z eventually removed Kelly halfway through the tour, after a member of Jay-Z's entourage pepper sprayed Kelly on October 29, 2004. Tyran (Ty-Ty) Smith was charged with assault, but took a plea deal for disorderly conduct. Kelly launched a $75-million lawsuit against Jay-Z for removing him from the tour; Jay-Z's counter suit was dismissed by a judge. Kelly redeemed himself commercially after appearing on Ja Rule's single, "Wonderful" alongside Ashanti. The song charted at number five on the Billboard Hot 100, topped the UK Singles Chart and went platinum in the summer of 2005. After finishing Happy People/U Saved Me and Unfinished Business in 2004, Kelly released TP.3 Reloaded in July 2005. It became Kelly's fifth consecutive number-one album in his career. TP.3 Reloaded was heavily cross-promoted by the first five chapters of the hip-hopera, Trapped in the Closet, which would later expand to other chapters for years to come. 2006–2009: Double Up and Untitled, Africa In December 2006, Kelly built momentum for his eighth solo studio album, Double Up, after guest-appearing on Bow Wow's "I'm a Flirt". Three months later, Kelly's remix of "I'm a Flirt" was released, but instead of Bow Wow, it features T.I. and T-Pain. On May 29, 2007, the album was released. It became Kelly's sixth and final album in his career to be number one on the Billboard 200. Kelly's other singles from Double Up titled "Same Girl" was a duet of Kelly and Usher, while "Rise Up" was a tribute to the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting that occurred earlier that year in April, a month before the album was released. The song was previously released as a digital download on May 15, 2007. Proceeds were donated to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund to help family members of the victims of the shootings. Kelly began his Double Up tour with Ne-Yo, Keyshia Cole and J. Holiday opening for him. After two shows, promoter Leonard Rowe had Ne-Yo removed from the tour because of a contract dispute. However, Ne-Yo alleges that the reason for the dropout was because Ne-Yo believes he received a better response from critics and fans, even though he performed at just two shows. Ne-Yo filed a lawsuit against Rowe Entertainment. Kelly was not mentioned in the lawsuit. In December 2007, Kelly failed to appear at another preliminary court hearing on his case due to his tour bus being held up in Utah. The judge threatened to revoke Kelly's bond, but eventually decided against it. In 2008, Kelly released a rap track titled "I'm a Beast" in which he coarsely attacked his detractors, yet did not name the subjects of the song. In 2008, before and after being acquitted on child pornography charges, Billboard reported that Kelly had plans to release his newest album titled 12 Play: Fourth Quarter in the summer of that year but the album was postponed. Billboard named Kelly among the most successful artists ever for its 50th Anniversary List. In the spring, the promotional single "Hair Braider", peaked at No. 56 on Billboard's R&B chart. On July 28, the entire album leaked online, causing the title to be scrapped. In February 2009, Kelly announced that he was working on a new album called Untitled with a projected release date of September 29, but it had been delayed to December. In June 2009, he released his first mixtape, The "Demo" Tape, presented by DJ Skee and DJ Drama. Kelly headlined the Arise African Fashion Awards in Johannesburg, South Africa, on June 20, 2009. He performed in Cape Town, followed by Nigeria as part of the annual ThisDay music and fashion festival in July. That same month, he released "Number One", featuring singer-songwriter Keri Hilson. Then, on December 1, Kelly's untitled ninth solo album was released. It charted on the Billboard 200 at number four. More singles from the album include "Echo", "Supaman High" and "Be My #1". In January 2010, Kelly performed in Kampala, Uganda. "I'm very excited about my first visit to Africa, I've dreamed about this for a long time and it's finally here", Kelly said in a statement. "It will be one of the highlights of not only my career but my life. I can't wait to perform in front of my fans in Africa—who have been some of the best in the world." 2010–2012: Epic, Love Letter, throat surgery, and Write Me Back Kelly performed at the 2010 FIFA World Cup opening ceremony on June 11, 2010. In an interview in the September 2010 issue of XXL magazine, Kelly said he was working on three new albums (Epic, Love Letter, and Zodiac) which he described as "remixing himself". Epic, a compilation filled with powerful ballads including "The World's Greatest" and "Sign of a Victory", only saw a European release on September 21, 2010. However, it is also available for streaming worldwide. In November 2010, Kelly collaborated with several African musicians forming a supergroup known as One8. The group featured 2Face from Nigeria, Ali Kiba from Tanzania, Congolese singer Fally Ipupa, 4X4 from Ghana, hip-hop artist Movaizhaleine from Gabon, Zambia's JK, Ugandan hip-hop star Navio and Kenya's Amani, the only female in the group. The first release from the group was "Hands Across the World" written and produced by Kelly. Kelly's tenth album Love Letter, released on December 14, 2010, included 15 songs, one of which was Kelly singing "You Are Not Alone", a track Kelly originally wrote for Michael Jackson. The first single "When a Woman Loves" was nominated for a Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards. At the 2011 Pre-Grammy Gala in Los Angeles, Kelly performed a medley of hits and in March 2011, Kelly was named the #1 R&B artist of the last 25 years by Billboard. On July 19, 2011, Kelly was admitted to the Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago to undergo emergency throat surgery to drain an abscess on one of his tonsils, and was released on July 21, 2011. He cancelled his performance at the Reggae Sumfest in Jamaica that was scheduled for the following Friday. Johnny Gourzong, Sumfest Productions executive director, commented, "We are truly going to miss his presence on the festival." On September 23, 2011, Variety confirmed that Kelly had signed on to write original music for the Sparkle soundtrack. In 2011, Kelly worked with writer David Ritz on an autobiography entitled Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me, which was later released in the summer of 2012. On October 7, 2011, after Sony's RCA Music Group announced the consolidation of Jive, Arista and J Records into RCA Records, Kelly was set to release music under the RCA brand. Following his throat surgery, Kelly released "Shut Up" to generally favorable reviews: Spin magazine said, "Kelly taking aim at the haters who said "he's washed up, he's lost it." He hasn't. Dude's voice is in prime smooth R&B form". On December 21, 2011, Kelly made a live appearance on The X Factor and gave his first performance after the surgery. Kelly revealed to Rolling Stone that he felt like he was "just starting out" and how the performance was a "wake up call" for him. In 2012, Kelly made a series of announcements including a follow-up to the Love Letter album titled Write Me Back, which was released on June 26 to little fanfare, as well as a third installment of the Trapped in the Closet and The Single Ladies Tour featuring R&B singer, Tamia. In February 2012, Kelly performed "I Look to You", a song he wrote for Whitney Houston, at Houston's homegoing. 2013–2016: Black Panties, The Buffet, and 12 Nights of Christmas During 2013, Kelly continued his "The Single Ladies Tour". He performed at music festivals across North America, including Bonnaroo, Pitchfork, and Macy's Music Festival. On June 30, 2013, R. Kelly performed live at BET Awards Show singing hits as well as his new track "My Story" featuring Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz. The song was the lead single for Kelly's twelfth studio album Black Panties. released on December 10, 2013. Writing for New York magazine, David Marchese stated that Black Panties "was like a dare to the world: After all that he’d been accused of, after avoiding conviction, could R. Kelly still get away with making sex-obsessed music?" In 2013, Kelly collaborated with several artists including Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, and Jennifer Hudson. In an interview with Global Grind in November, he described follow up work with Celine Dion after their number one single "I'm Your Angel" from 1998. Kelly worked with singer Mariah Carey for her album "The Art of Letting Go". Kelly co-wrote and sang on Lady Gaga's song "Do What U Want" from her 2013 album Artpop, performing the duet with her on Saturday Night Live on November 16, 2013, and at the 2013 American Music Awards. "Do What U Want" had since been removed from streaming services and re-releases of Gaga's Artpop album following sexual misconduct allegations against Kelly in early 2019. He also collaborated with Birdman and Lil Wayne on "We Been On", a single from the Cash Money Records compilation, Rich Gang. He also appeared on Twista's first single on his new album "Dark Horse". On November 17, 2013, Kelly and Justin Bieber debuted a collaboration entitled "PYD". Kelly was featured on the soundtrack album of the film The Best Man Holiday with his song "Christmas, I'll Be Steppin'". Kelly stated his intention to tour with R&B singer Mary J. Blige on "The King & Queen Tour" prior to the Black Panties Tour while continuing to create segments of the hip hopera Trapped in the Closet. In July 2014, Kelly announced that he was working on a house music album. In November 2015, Kelly released "Switch Up" featuring fellow Chicagoan Jeremih and Lil Wayne, followed by "Wake Up Everybody", "Marching Band" and "Backyard Party". The following month, the album containing those singles, The Buffet, was released. It charted poorly on the Billboard 200 at number sixteen with first-week sales of 39,000 album-equivalent copies. The following year, after a two-and-a-half-year delay, Kelly presented his only Christmas album, also his fourteenth and final studio album in his career, 12 Nights of Christmas, which was released on October 21, 2016. In 2019, Kelly was dropped from RCA Records following the airing of Surviving R. Kelly, which detailed numerous sexual assault allegations against the singer for decades. As of October 2021, following his New York conviction, Kelly's YouTube channel was terminated, but his catalogue remains available on YouTube Music. Artistry Musical style and influences Kelly's music took root in R&B, hip hop and soul. He was influenced by listening to his mother, Joanne Kelly, sing. She played records by Donny Hathaway and Marvin Gaye, inspirations for Kelly. In reference to Hathaway, Kelly stated: "A guy like Donny Hathaway had a focused, sexual texture in his voice that I always wanted in mine. He had smooth, soulful tones, but he was spiritual at the same time." In his autobiography, Kelly stated that he was heavily influenced by Marvin Gaye's R&B Lothario image. "I had to make a 'baby-makin' album. If Marvin Gaye did it, I wanted to do it", Kelly said. While Kelly created a smooth, professional mixture of hip-hop beats, soulman crooning and funk, the most distinctive element of his music is its explicit sensuality. "Sex Me", "Bump n' Grind", "Your Body's Callin'", and "Feelin' on Yo Booty" are considered to be examples, as their productions were seductive enough to sell such blatant come-ons. Kelly's crossover appeal was also sustained by his development of a flair for pop balladry. Vocal style and lyrical themes Writing for the New York Daily News in 1997, Nunyo Demasio stated "With a voice that easily shifts from booming baritone to seductive alto, Kelly has gained international celebrity by combining streetwise rhythms with sexually explicit lyrics." Love and sex are the topics of the majority of Kelly's lyrical content, although he has written about a wide variety of themes such as inspiration and spirituality. Chicago Sun-Times reporters Jim DeRogatis and Abdon Pallasch observed about the contrasting themes: "... the image he liked to project was that of the "R&B Thug"... bringing the streetwise persona of the gangsta rapper into the more polite world of R&B." Kelly expressed that he writes from everyday experiences and prides himself on being versatile. Larry Khan, senior vice president of Jive's urban marketing and promotion, said that Kelly's musical compass is second to none. DeRogatis and Pallasch reported that at concerts where Kelly would go from singing "Like a Real Freak" to "I Wish": "Many fans found these abrupt shifts between the transcendent and the venal, the inspirational and the X-rated jarring." Sexual abuse allegations Kelly has repeatedly faced allegations of sexual abuse that have resulted in multiple civil suits and criminal trials. Early reports of sexual abuse (1990s) In December 2000, the Chicago Sun-Times first reported that police had made two investigations that Kelly was having sex with an underage female but had to drop the investigations due to lack of cooperation by the girls accusing him. A civil suit filed in 1996 by Tiffany Hawkins detailed allegations that, starting in 1991 when she was age 15, Kelly had sex with her as an underage high school student, encouraged her to recruit her schools friends, and pressured her into engaging in group sex with other underage girls. In 1998, Kelly settled the lawsuit with Hawkins for $250,000. Illegal marriage (1994) Kelly had been introduced to a promising young singer from Detroit named Aaliyah by her uncle, Barry Hankerson, when she was 12 years old. During Kelly's 2021 criminal trial for sex trafficking and racketeering, a witness testified that Kelly had sexual contact with Aaliyah starting when she was 13 or 14 years old. Kelly wrote and produced Aaliyah's first album, Age Ain't Nothing but a Number, in 1994. On August 31, 1994, Kelly, then 27, illegally married Aaliyah, then 15, in a secret ceremony in Cook County, Illinois. Kelly's tour manager, Demetrius Smith, admitted he facilitated the wedding by obtaining falsified identification for Aaliyah which listed her as 18 years old. In 2019, a contemporaneous video surfaced showing Kelly stating—less than a year before the marriage took place—that Aaliyah was 14 years old. The marriage was annulled in February 1995 at the behest of Aaliyah's family by a Michigan judge. Kelly and Aaliyah, however, both denied that the marriage occurred and even denied that their relationship had ever moved beyond friendship. In May 1997, Aaliyah filed a lawsuit in Cook County to have the marriage record expunged, stating that she was underage at the time of marriage, had lied by signing the marriage certificate as an 18-year-old, and that she could not legally enter into marriage without parental consent. The expungement request was included in a lawsuit filed by Tiffany Hawkins, who sought to use the marriage documents in her case against Kelly. Hawkins later accepted a settlement of $250,000 from Kelly, subject to a confidentiality agreement, in 1998. In 2019, federal prosecutors in New York charged Kelly with bribery related to the 1994 purchase of a fake ID for Aaliyah in order to obtain a marriage license. Kelly, through his lawyers, admitted in 2021 to having had 'underage sexual contact' with Aaliyah. Sex tape circulates (2002) On February 3, 2002, a video circulated that allegedly showed Kelly engaging in sex with, and urinating on, an underage girl. After the video was released by an unknown source and sent to the Chicago Sun-Times, the publisher broke the story on February 8, 2002, the same day Kelly performed at the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Kelly said in interviews that he was not the man in the video. First criminal indictment (2002) In June 2002, Kelly was indicted in Chicago on 21 counts of child pornography. That same month on June 6, 2002, Kelly was arrested by the Miami Police Department on a Chicago arrest warrant at his Florida vacation home. He was released after one night in jail, the following day after posting bail of $750,000. The alleged victim refused to testify at the trial, and a Chicago jury found Kelly not guilty on all 14 counts of child pornography in June 2008. While investigating the photographs reported in the Chicago Sun-Times, Polk County Sheriff's Office conducted a search of Kelly's residence in Davenport, Florida. During the search, officers recovered 12 images of an alleged underage girl on a digital camera – wrapped in a towel in a duffel bag – which allegedly depicted Kelly "involved in sexual conduct with the female minor." According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the girl in the images obtained from Kelly's Florida home also appears in the videotape which got Kelly indicted in Chicago. Kelly was arrested on January 22, 2003, by Police investigators from Polk County and Miami-Dade County, at Miami's Wyndham Grand Bay Hotel on those charges of 12 counts of possession of child pornography. Kelly was later released from Miami-Dade county jail hours after on a bond posted of $12,000. In March 2004, these charges were dropped due to a lack of probable cause for the search warrants. Allegations of preteen girl molestation (2009) In a divorce court filing unsealed in 2020, R. Kelly's former wife Andrea claims that R. Kelly was accused of molesting a preteen girl in 2009. Huffington Post Live Interview (2015) In December 2015, Kelly appeared on Huffington Post Live in an interview with journalist Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani. The interview was so he could promote the release of his latest album The Buffet. However, during the interview, Modarressy-Tehrani quizzed Kelly about the sexual abuse allegations being levelled against him and wanted to gauge his reaction. This resulted in Kelly growing angry and defensive. He continually shouted over Modarressy-Tehrani, asked her whether she drank and threatened to leave and go to McDonalds. Kelly ultimately stormed out of the interview before it ended. This was one of the first occasions where Kelly was concretely asked about the allegations against him on a public platform. After Kelly's 2021 conviction, Modarressy-Tehrani tweeted: "Now, with this verdict, hopefully, his survivors get some peace and feel this justice. Alleged sex cult (2010s) Jim DeRogatis reported for BuzzFeed News on July 17, 2017, that Kelly was accused by three sets of parents of holding their daughters in an "abusive cult". Kelly and the alleged victims deny the allegations. In March 2018, BBC World Service aired a documentary entitled R Kelly: Sex, Girls and Videotapes presented by reporter Ben Zand that explored the 2017 allegations. This was followed up in May with the BBC Three documentary R Kelly: The Sex Scandal Continues which included interviews with the parents of the Savage daughters. Kelly was again accused of misconduct on April 17, 2018, by a former partner of his who claimed that Kelly "intentionally" infected her with a sexually transmitted disease. A representative for Kelly stated that he "categorically denies all claims and allegations". In a January 2019 BBC News article, a woman named Asante McGee whom Kelly had met in 2014 and taken to live with him some months later, said that she lived with not only Kelly alone, but with other women. She said: "He controlled every aspect of my life, while I lived with him." McGee later moved out on her own accord. Boycott and industry response In May 2018, the Women of Color branch of the Time's Up movement called for a boycott of Kelly's music and performances over the many allegations against him. The boycott was accompanied by a social media campaign called Mute R. Kelly. In response, his management said that Kelly supports the movement in principle, but targeting him was "the attempted lynching of a black man who has made extraordinary contributions to our culture". The music streaming service Spotify announced on May 10, 2018, that it was going to stop promoting or recommending music by both R. Kelly and XXXTentacion. Spotify stated, "We don't censor content because of an artist's or creator's behavior, but we want our editorial decisions—what we choose to program—to reflect our values." Two days later, Apple Music and Pandora also announced that they will no longer be featuring or promoting R. Kelly's music. Spotify received criticism from members of the music industry who expressed worries of a "slippery slope" of muting artists, since R. Kelly had not ever actually been convicted of any crime. Spotify ultimately reversed this decision. Allegations of music industry complicity The Washington Post ran a lengthy article in May 2018, alleging that music industry executives had been aware of Kelly's sexually abusive behavior toward young women for years but did little or nothing about them due to his success as a performer and songwriter. As early as 1994, the newspaper reported, his tour manager had urged Jive Records' founder Clive Calder to tell Kelly he would not release the singer's records if he continued to have "incidents" with women after every concert he gave. Calder told the Post that he regretted not having done more at the time, saying "Clearly, we missed something." Former Jive president Barry Weiss told the newspaper that during 20 years with the label he never concerned himself with Kelly's private life and was unaware of two lawsuits filed against Kelly and the label by women alleging sexual misconduct, suits in which the label had successfully argued it was not liable. Larry Khan, another Jive executive who worked closely with the singer even after viewing the sex tape, likewise implied it was not the label's responsibility, and pointed to Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis as musicians whose labels continued to release and promote their records despite public awareness that they were involved with underage girls. Executives at Epic Records also took a similarly relaxed attitude towards allegations of Kelly's sexual misconduct, the Post claimed. In 2002, after he signed with the label, executive David McPherson allegedly avoided viewing a copy of a tape purportedly showing the singer having sex with an underage girl, even as he had warned Kelly's assistant that if it turned out to be Kelly on that tape, the label would drop him. McPherson did not respond to the Posts requests for comment. An intern with the label whose work suffered after she began a relationship with Kelly, ultimately costing her the position, settled with Epic for $250,000; Cathy Carroll, the executive she worked for, regularly rebuked her former subordinate for having an affair with a married man whenever the two met at social functions for years afterwards, and the damage to the woman's reputation led her to abandon her career in the music industry. Carroll told the newspaper the woman was "starstruck ... A lot of times it's not really the men." The Washington Post also suggested the labels were complicit in the sex-cult allegations from the previous summer's BuzzFeed piece. Employees at the studios where Kelly recorded were required to sign non-disclosure agreements and not enter certain rooms, which they said they believed were where Kelly made the women stay while he worked. Despite the agreements, the newspaper was able to publish screenshots of text exchanges where women in the rooms asked Kelly's assistants to let them out so they could go to the bathroom or get food. The newspaper also published pictures taken after Kelly had concluded a six-week session at a Los Angeles studio, paid for by his then-current label, RCA Records, showing a cup of urine sitting on a piano and urine stains on the wooden floor of another room. Musical response to allegations Kelly released the 19-minute long "I Admit" on SoundCloud on July 23, 2018, as a response to his accusers. The song does not contain any criminal admissions despite its title and chorus, which repeats the lyric "I admit it, I did it". In "I Admit", Kelly denies allegations of domestic violence and pedophilia, asserting that they are matters of opinion. Kelly also denounces Jim DeRogatis and repudiates his investigative report's claim of Kelly operating a "sex cult". Addressing the Mute R. Kelly social media campaign, Kelly sings, "only God can mute me". The song was criticized by reviewers, who described it as an act of trolling. Andrea Kelly and Carey Killa Kelly, R. Kelly's ex-wife and brother, responded to "I Admit" with a remix and a diss track. Surviving R. Kelly (2019–2020) In January 2019, Lifetime began airing a six-part documentary series titled Surviving R. Kelly detailing sexual abuse and misconduct allegations against Kelly. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Loraine Ali observed that the series covered a range of in-depth interviews that "paint a picture of a predator whose behavior was consistently overlooked by the industry, his peers and the public while his spiritual hit was sung in churches and schools." Within two weeks, Kelly launched a Facebook page where he sought to discredit the accusers who appeared in the docuseries. Facebook removed the page for violating their standards as it appeared to contain personal contact information for his accusers. The second season titled Surviving R. Kelly Part II: The Reckoning premiered on January 2, 2020. Following airing of the Surviving R. Kelly documentary, Kelly was listed in Guinness World Records as the most searched for male musician on Google in 2019. He ranked 8th overall on Google's list of the 10 most search for people for the year. Second series of criminal charges (2019–2021) On February 22, 2019, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office in Illinois charged Kelly with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. The charges allege that from 1998 to 2010, Kelly sexually abused four females, three of whom were teen minors at the time, with evidence including a video provided by Michael Avenatti of an alleged new crime. After Kelly turned himself in the day the charges were announced, he was arrested by the Chicago Police Department and taken into custody. The judge set bond at $1 million and ordered Kelly to have no contact with any minor under 18 or alleged victim. Kelly pleaded not guilty to all charges, which he called lies. He was released on bail after three nights in jail at Cook County. On March 6, 2019, Gayle King interviewed Kelly on CBS This Morning, where he insisted on his innocence and blamed social media for the allegations. During the interview, Kelly had an emotional outburst where he stood up, pounded his chest, and yelled. Two women who described themselves as a Kelly's girlfriends and whose parents say are brainwashed captives, declared their love for Kelly and defended him during the broadcast. On July 11, 2019, Kelly was arrested on federal charges alleging sex crimes and obstruction of justice by U.S. Homeland Security investigators and NYPD detectives in Chicago. On July 12, 2019, federal prosecutors from New York and Chicago indicted Kelly on 18 charges, including child sexual exploitation, child pornography production, sex trafficking, kidnapping, forced labor, racketeering, and obstruction of justice. He was first denied bail in October 2019 and denied bail release again in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Superseding indictments were filed in Chicago on February 13, 2020, and in New York on March 13, 2020, raising the total number of charges to 22. He was incarcerated at Metropolitan Correctional Center, Chicago from July 11, 2019, to June 23, 2021. On June 23, 2021, Kelly was transferred to Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn. On August 5, 2019, the State's Attorney Office in Hennepin County, Minnesota charged Kelly with soliciting a minor and prostitution; prosecutors alleged that in July 2001, following a concert in Minneapolis, Kelly had invited a girl up to his hotel room and paid her $200 to remove her clothing and dance with him. In July 2021, Federal prosecutors asked the court to include alleged evidence of bribes, recordings of threats and more allegations of sexual abuse of minors, including an underaged boy he met at McDonald's, as pattern evidence in his trial. Criminal conviction (2021) The federal trial began on August 18, 2021. After weeks of testimony and two days of deliberations, on September 27, 2021, the jury found Kelly guilty on nine counts including racketeering, sexual exploitation of a child, kidnapping, bribery, sex trafficking, and a violation of the Mann Act. The judge ordered that Kelly remain in custody pending sentencing, which was set for May 4, 2022. After the jury delivered their verdict, women's rights attorney Gloria Allred, who represented several victims, stated that Kelly was the worst sexual predator she had pursued in her 47-year career of practicing law. Other legal issues After a July 1996 brawl at a Lafayette, Louisiana health club involving Kelly and his entourage, Kelly was placed on a year's unsupervised probation starting August 13, 1997, after being found guilty of battery. One of the victims needed 110 facial stitches. Also that year, a 20-year-old accused Kelly in civil court of having sexual relations with her when he was 24 and she was 15. Kelly settled the lawsuit in 1998 for $250,000, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. On April 8, 1998, Kelly was arrested on three misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct, including one charge on violating noise ordinance for playing his music extremely loud from his car. Prosecutors from the district attorney's office dropped the first two charges on May 7 and the noise charge on July 22 that year. On March 6, 2019, Kelly was taken back to the Cook County Jail after failing to pay $161,633 in child support. On March 9, 2019, he was released after someone, who did not want to be identified, paid off the child support. His lawyer says he could not discuss the payment due to a gag order. Influence Kelly is considered to be one of the most successful R&B artists since the mid-1980s. He is also one of the best-selling music artists in the United States, with over 30 million albums sold, as well as only the fifth black artist to enter the top 50 of the same list. Rolling Stone magazine called him "arguably the most important R&B figure of the 1990s and 2000s." Music executive Barry Weiss described Kelly as "the modern-day Prince, although there's a bit of Marvin Gaye in him, and a bit of Irving Berlin." In addition to his solo and collaboration success, Kelly has also written and produced several hit songs, such as "Fortunate" for Maxwell, "You Are Not Alone" for Michael Jackson, "G.H.E.T.T.O.U.T." for Changing Faces, "Bump, Bump, Bump" for B2K, and many more. R. Kelly has been compared to artists like Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye. Personal life Kelly's mother, Joanne, died from cancer in 1993. He has given conflicting accounts of where he was during his mother's passing. In 1996, Kelly married Andrea Kelly, his former backup dancer and mother of his three children. Andrea filed a restraining order against Kelly in September 2005 after a physical altercation, ultimately filing for divorce in 2006. In January 2009, after separating in the fall of 2005, Kelly and his wife Andrea Kelly finalized their divorce after 11 years of marriage. Charity and donations In 2007, Kelly released the song "Rise Up" for Virginia Tech after the 2007 school shooting, and donated the net proceeds to the families of the victims. In 2010, Kelly penned the song "Sign of a Victory" for the FIFA World Cup, with all proceeds benefiting African charities. In 2011, he performed at a charity event in Chicago benefiting Clara's House, a now-shuttered (Jan 2018) facility designed to build employment, housing, health care, and education in the projects of Chicago. In 2016, Kelly donated cases of water to the Flint water crisis. Honors and awards Kelly has been awarded and nominated for multiple awards during his career, as a songwriter, producer, and singer. He was granted three Grammy Awards for his song "I Believe I Can Fly": Best Male R&B Vocal Performance, Best Rhythm and Blues Song, and Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or for Television. Discography Studio albums Born into the 90's (1992) (with Public Announcement) 12 Play (1993) R. Kelly (1995) R. (1998) TP-2.com (2000) The Best of Both Worlds (2002) (with Jay-Z) Chocolate Factory (2003) Happy People/U Saved Me (2004) Unfinished Business (2004) (with Jay-Z) TP.3 Reloaded (2005) Double Up (2007) Untitled (2009) Love Letter (2010) Write Me Back (2012) Black Panties (2013) The Buffet (2015) 12 Nights of Christmas (2016) Filmography Books Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me (2012, autobiography) Tours 60653 Tour (w/ Public Announcement) (1993) The 12 Play Very Necessary Tour (with Salt-N-Pepa) (1994) The Down Low Top Secret Tour (with LL Cool J, Xscape, and Solo) (1996) The Get Up on a Room Tour (with Kelly Price, Nas, Foxy Brown, and Deborah Cox) (1999) The TP-2.com Tour (with Sunshine Anderson & Syleena Johnson) (2001) The Key in the Ignition Tour (with Ashanti) (2003) The Best Of Both Worlds Tour (w/ Jay-Z) (2004) The Light It Up Tour (2006) The Double Up Tour (with J. Holiday & Keyshia Cole) (2007) The Ladies Make Some Noise Tour (with K. Michelle) (2009) Love Letter Tour (with Keyshia Cole & Marsha Ambrosius) (2011) The Single Ladies Tour (with Tamia) (2012–13) Black Panties Tour (2014–16) The Buffet Tour (2016) See also Honorific nicknames in popular music List of artists who reached number one in the United States List of Billboard number-one singles List of highest-certified music artists in the United States List of songs recorded by R. Kelly List of songs written and produced by R. Kelly List of unreleased songs recorded by R. Kelly Shaggy defense References External links R. Kelly: Sex, Girls and Videotapes, BBC documentary, March 28, 2018 1967 births Living people 20th-century American criminals 21st-century American criminals African-American basketball players African-American Christians African-American male actors 20th-century African-American male singers African-American record producers African-American male singer-songwriters American contemporary R&B singers American gospel singers American hip hop record producers American hip hop singers American male criminals American male film actors American men's basketball players American music arrangers American music industry executives American music video directors American people convicted of child sexual abuse American people convicted of kidnapping American prisoners and detainees American soul musicians American soul singers American sportspeople convicted of crimes American tenors Atlantic City Seagulls players Basketball players from Illinois Child marriage in the United States Criminals from Chicago Grammy Award winners Guards (basketball) Jive Records artists Male actors from Chicago Music video codirectors People acquitted of sex crimes People convicted of racketeering People convicted of sex trafficking People convicted of violating the Mann Act People from Olympia Fields, Illinois Prisoners and detainees of the United States Record producers from Illinois Shooting guards Singers from Chicago Small forwards Sportspeople from Cook County, Illinois Writers from Chicago Singer-songwriters from Illinois 21st-century African-American male singers LGBT singers	false	[ "The Colors in the Wheel is an album by Venus Hum. It was released in 2006 on the Nettwerk recording label subsidiary, Mono-Fi Records. The release party was held at Grimey's New and Pre-loved Music in the band's hometown of Nashville, Tennessee.\n\nCritical reception\nThe A.V. Club wrote that the album \"peaks in the classically sinewy synth-pop wonder 'You Break Me Down,' where [Annette] Strean sings about exhaustion in a voice that keeps pushing to the edge of cracking, then coming back stronger.\" IGN wrote that \"the deft blend of electronic and acoustic elements turn The Colors In The Wheel into a killer sonic landscape, full of incredible riches.\"\n\nTrack listing\n\"Turn Me Around\"\n\"Untitled\"\n\"Yes and No\"\n\"Untitled\"\n\"Birds and Fishes\"\n\"Do You Want to Fight Me?\"\n\"Genevieve's Wheel\"\n\"You Break Me Down\"\n\"Untitled\"\n\"Surgery in the Sky\"\n\"Pink Champagne\"\n\"72 Degrees\"\n\"Untitled\"\n\"Go to Sleep\"\n\nReferences\n\nVenus Hum albums\n2006 albums", "Lead Me On is the third studio album by British singer Maxine Nightingale. It peaked at number 45 on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart and at number 35 on the R&B albums chart. In the UK, the album had a different track listing and was titled Love Lines.\n\nTrack listing\nSide one\n\"Hideaway\" (R. Ellison, P. Brown) – 5:55\n\"(Bringing Out) The Girl in Me\" (Ray Parker Jr.) – 3:30\n\"Darlin' Dear\" (Pam Sawyer, Marilyn McLeod) – 3:06\n\"Love Me Like You Mean It\" (Parker Jr.) – 3:02\n\nSide two\n\"Lead Me On\" (Allee Willis, David Lasley) – 2:45\n\"You Got to Me\" (Len Boone) – 3:08\n\"Ask Billy (They Tell Me)\" (Leroy Bell, Casey James) – 2:59\n\"You Are the Most Important Person in Your Life\" (Sawyer, McLeod) – 3:09\n untitled hidden track – 4:07\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n1978 albums\nMaxine Nightingale albums" ]
[ "R. Kelly", "2009: Untitled and Africa", "Can you tell me about the Untitled and Africa?", "in February 2009, Kelly announced that he was out there working on the album and that it would be called Untitled." ]	C_11f296c5dc0b4f43ad0d6184b5715ed2_0	How long did it take for him to work on it?	2	How long did it take R. Kelly to work on Untitled and Africa?	R. Kelly	January 2009, after separating in fall of 2005, Kelly finalized divorce to ex-wife Andrea Kelly. The couple had been married for 11 years. On June 3, 2009, Kelly released his first ever mixtape, The Demo Tape (Gangsta Grillz) presented by DJ Skee and DJ Drama as a way to reintroduce himself to fans. While at the Velvet Room in Atlanta in February 2009, Kelly announced that he was out there working on the album and that it would be called Untitled. The album was given a September 29, 2009 release date, but was delayed until October 13, 2009. The album release was again delayed and was released under Jive Records on December 1, 2009. It got mixed to positive reviews from critics. The single "Number One", which features Keri Hilson, peaked at #8 on the US R&B Chart. Kelly performed for the first time in Africa headlining the Arise African Fashion Awards in Johannesburg, South Africa on June 20, 2009. Kelly scheduled to perform in Cape Town before heading to Nigeria as part of the annual ThisDay music and fashion festival in July. Kelly also performed in Kampala, Uganda in January 2010. He also scheduled to perform in London as part of his first international tour in eight years, but he did not make his London concert. "I'm very excited about my first visit to Africa, I've dreamed about this for a long time and it's finally here," Kelly said in a statement. "It will be one of the highlights of not only my career but my life. I can't wait to perform in front of my fans in Africa -- who have been some of the best in the world." In December 2009, Kelly teamed up with biographer David Ritz and Tavis Smiley's SmileyBooks publications to write his memoirs entitled Soulacoaster. SmileyBooks publisher and founder, Tavis Smiley stated that the memoir's main focus won't be on Kelly's trials and tribulations. Smiley was quoted saying "If anyone thinks this bookis going to fixate on [R. Kelly's trials], they are going to be sadly mistaken. It is going to be a holistic look at his life thus far and the life and legacy that he's building." CANNOTANSWER	was released under Jive Records on December 1, 2009.	Robert Sylvester Kelly (born January 8, 1967) is an American singer, songwriter, record producer and convicted sex offender. He has been credited with helping to redefine R&B and hip hop, earning nicknames such as "the King of R&B", "the King of Pop-Soul", and the "Pied Piper of R&B". Kelly is known for songs including "I Believe I Can Fly", "Bump N' Grind", "Your Body's Callin', "Gotham City", "Ignition (Remix)", "If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time", "The World's Greatest", "I'm a Flirt (Remix)", and the hip hopera "Trapped in the Closet". In 1998, Kelly won three Grammy Awards for "I Believe I Can Fly". Although Kelly is primarily a singer and songwriter, he has written, produced, and remixed songs, singles, and albums for other artists. In 1996, he was nominated for a Grammy Award for writing Michael Jackson's song "You Are Not Alone". Kelly has sold over 75 million records worldwide, making him the most successful R&B male artist of the 1990s and one of the world's best-selling music artists. In 2010, Billboard magazine considered Kelly the most successful R&B artist in history and listed him as the Top R&B/Hip Hop Artist for the time period between 1985 and 2010. In 2012, he was listed as the 55th best-selling music artist in the United States, with over 32 million album sales. Since the 1990s, Kelly has been repeatedly accused of sexual abuse, often with underage girls. He has faced multiple civil suits and has been charged by criminal courts in Chicago, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota. He repeatedly denied the charges. In June 2002, he was indicted on 21 counts of making child pornography. He was acquitted six years later in 2008. In January 2019, a widely viewed Lifetime docuseries titled Surviving R. Kelly detailed allegations of sexual abuse by multiple women, allegations that Kelly continued to deny. Facing pressure from the public using the Mute R. Kelly hashtag, RCA Records dropped Kelly. In 2019, Kelly was indicted by a Cook County grand jury in Chicago on 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse in February, followed by an additional 11 counts of sexual assault and abuse filed by the same court in May. On July 11, 2019, he was arrested on federal charges alleging sex crimes, human trafficking, child pornography, racketeering, and obstruction of justice. Kelly faced a total of 22 federal criminal charges as of January 29, 2021. A federal judge ordered Kelly jailed pending trial on the charges. On September 27, 2021, a federal jury in New York found Kelly guilty on nine counts including racketeering, sexual exploitation of a child, kidnapping, bribery, sex trafficking, and a violation of the Mann Act. The judge ordered that he remain in custody pending sentencing, set for May 4, 2022. Kelly faces a second trial for producing child pornography set for August 2022. Early life Robert Sylvester Kelly was born at Chicago Lying-in Hospital in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, on January 8, 1967. He has three half-siblings, an older sister and brother, along with a younger brother. His mother, Joanne Kelly, was a schoolteacher and devout Baptist. She was born in Arkansas. The identity of his father, who was absent from Kelly's life, is not known. His family lived in the Ida B. Wells Homes public housing project in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood. Around the time he was five years old, Kelly's mother married his stepfather, Lucious, who reportedly worked for an airline. Kelly began singing in the church choir at age eight. Kelly described having a girlfriend, Lulu, at age eight, in his autobiography. He stated that their last play date turned tragic when, after fighting with older children over a play area by a creek, she was pushed into the water, swept downstream by a fast-moving current, and drowned. Kelly called Lulu his first musical inspiration. Kelly said members of his household would act differently when his mother and grandparents were not home. From age eight to 14, he was sexually abused by an older female family member. Kelly's younger brother Carey stated that he suffered from years of sexual abuse at the hands of his older sister, Theresa, who was entrusted with babysitting her siblings. Carey stated that although their older brother was spared and allowed to play outside, both he and Kelly were punished at separate times indoors by Theresa, who refused to acknowledge the abuse when confronted years later. Explaining why he never told anyone, Kelly wrote in his 2012 autobiography Soulacoaster that he was "too afraid and too ashamed". Around age 10, Kelly was also sexually abused by an older male who was a friend of the family. In his autobiography, Kelly described being shot in the shoulder, at age 11, by boys who were attempting to steal his bike, although a family friend later stated that Kelly had shot himself while attempting suicide. In September 1980, Kelly entered Kenwood Academy in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, where he met music teacher Lena McLin, who encouraged Kelly to perform the Stevie Wonder classic "Ribbon in the Sky" in the high school talent show. A shy Kelly put on sunglasses, was escorted onto the stage, sang the song and won first prize. McLin encouraged Kelly to leave the high school basketball team and concentrate on music. She said he was furious at first, but after his performance in the talent show, he changed his mind.Kelly was diagnosed with the learning disability dyslexia, which left him unable to read or write. Kelly dropped out of high school after attending Kenwood Academy for one year. He began performing in the subway under the Chicago "L" tracks. He regularly busked at the "L" stop on the Red Line's Jackson station in the Loop. In his youth, Kelly played basketball with Illinois state champion basketball player Ben Wilson and later sang "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday" at Wilson's funeral. Career 1990–1996: Born into the 90's, 12 Play and R. Kelly MGM (Musically Gifted Men or Mentally Gifted Men) was formed in 1989 with Robert Kelly, Marc McWilliams, Vincent Walker and Shawn Brooks. In 1990, MGM recorded and released one single, "Why You Wanna Play Me"; after its release, the group disbanded. Kelly gained national recognition in 1989 when MGM participated on the talent TV show Big Break, hosted by Natalie Cole. After MGM performed “All My Love”, which would become a demo for Kelly's song “She's Got That Vibe” the group went on to win the $100,000 grand prize. In 1991, Kelly signed with Jive Records. Kelly's debut album Born into the 90's was released in early 1992 (credited as R. Kelly and Public Announcement). The album, released during the new jack swing period of the early 1990s, yielded the R&B hits "She's Got That Vibe", "Honey Love", "Dedicated", and "Slow Dance (Hey Mr. DJ)", with Kelly singing lead vocals. During late 1992, Kelly and Public Announcement embarked on a tour entitled "60653" after the zip code of their Chicago neighborhood. This would be the only album co-credited with Public Announcement. Kelly separated from the group in January 1993. Kelly's first solo album, 12 Play, was released on November 9, 1993, and yielded the singer's first number-one hit, "Bump N' Grind", which spent a record-breaking 12 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot R&B Singles chart. Subsequent hit singles: "Your Body's Callin'" (U.S. Hot 100: #13, U.S. R&B: #2) and "Sex Me" (U.S. Hot 100: #20, U.S. R&B: #8). Both singles sold 500,000 copies in the United States and were certified Gold by the RIAA. In 1994, 12 Play was certified Gold by the RIAA, eventually going six times platinum. In 1995, Kelly garnered his first Grammy nominations; two for writing, producing and composing Michael Jackson's last number one hit "You Are Not Alone". Kelly's success continued with the November 14, 1995 release of R. Kelly, his eponymous second studio album. Critics praised him for his departure from salacious bedroom songs to embracing vulnerability. New York Times contributor Stephen Holden described Kelly as "The reigning king of pop-soul sex talks a lot tougher than Barry White, the father of such fluffed-up pillow talk and along with Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway, [both] major influences for Kelly." Also in December 1995, Professor Michael Eric Dyson critiqued Kelly's self-titled album "R. Kelly" for VIBE. Dyson described Kelly's growth from the 12 Play album: "Kelly reshapes his personal turmoil to artistic benefit" and noted that Kelly is "reborn before our very own ears." The album reached number one on the Billboard 200 chart, becoming Kelly's first number one album on the chart, and reached number one on the R&B album charts; his second. The R. Kelly album spawned three platinum hit singles: "You Remind Me of Something" (U.S. Hot 100: #4, U.S. R&B: #1), "I Can't Sleep Baby (If I)" (U.S. Hot 100: #5, U.S. R&B: #1), and "Down Low (Nobody Has To Know)" (U.S. Hot 100: #4, U.S. R&B: #1); a duet with Ronald Isley. Kelly's self-titled album sold four million copies, receiving 4× platinum certification from the RIAA. He promoted the album with a 50-city "Down Low Top Secret Tour" with LL Cool J, Xscape, and Solo. On November 26, 1996, Kelly released "I Believe I Can Fly", an inspirational song originally released on the soundtrack for the film Space Jam. "I Believe I Can Fly" reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and No. 1 on the UK charts for three weeks and won three Grammy Awards in 1998. In that same year, he contributed Freak Tonight for the A Thin Line Between Love and Hate soundtrack. 1997–2001: Basketball, R., TP-2.COM, and Rockland Records In 1997, Kelly signed a contract to play professional basketball with the Atlantic City Seagulls of the USBL. He wore the number 12 in honor of his album 12 Play. Kelly said "I love basketball enough to not totally let go of my music, but just put it to the side for a minute and fulfill some dreams of mine that I've had for a long time." Kelly's USBL contract contained a clause that would allow him to fulfill a music obligation when necessary. "If Whitney Houston needs a song written", said Ken Gross, the Seagulls owner who signed Kelly, "he would be able to leave the team to do that and come back". "It wasn't a gimmick", Gross continued, "he's a ballplayer. He can play." Kelly is the first music artist to play professional basketball. In 1998, Kelly wrote and produced the debut album of another protégé Sparkle, which was released under his Rockland label and distributed through Interscope. In 2000, Sparkle went platinum due in part to the success of the first single, "Be Careful", a duet with Kelly. On November 17, 1998, Kelly released his fourth studio and first double album, R. Musically, the album spans different genres from pop (Celine Dion), street rap (Nas and Jay-Z) to Blues ("Suicide"). Dave Hoekstra of the Los Angeles Times described the album as "easily the most ambitious project of his career." As the year 2000 commenced, Kelly racked up a slew of new awards reflecting his status as an established R&B superstar. In January 2000, he had won Favorite Male Soul/R&B Artist at the American Music Awards and, in February, was nominated for several Grammy Awards, including Best Male R&B Vocal Performance ("When a Woman's Fed Up"), Best R&B Album (R.), and Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group ("Satisfy You") with P. Diddy. On November 7, 2000, Kelly released his fifth studio album, TP-2.com, a project aligned with his breakthrough album, 12 Play. Unlike R., all songs on TP-2.com were written, arranged, and produced by Kelly. AllMusic's Jason Birchmeier gave TP-2.com 4 stars and stated: "Kelly knows how to take proven formulas and funnel them through his own stylistic aesthetic, which usually means slowing down the tempo, laying on lush choruses of strings and background vocals, taming down the lyrics for radio, and catering his pitch primarily to wistful women. In 2001, Kelly won the Outstanding Achievement Award at the Music of Black Origin or MOBO Awards and Billboard magazine ranked TP-2.com number 94 on the magazine's Top 200 Albums of the Decade. Kelly's song "The World's Greatest", from the soundtrack to the 2001 Ali film, was a hit. Rockland Records In 1998 Kelly launched his own label, the Interscope Records-distributed Rockland Records. The label's roster included artists Sparkle, Boo & Gotti, Talent, Vegas Cats, Lady, Frankie, Secret Weapon, and Rebecca F. Also in 1998, the label's first artist, Sparkle released her debut self-titled album, Sparkle. In addition to producing and writing the project, Kelly made vocal contribution to the hit duet "Be Careful", which contributed largely to the album's success. The album was certified platinum in December 2000. In 1999, he wrote and produced the soundtrack to the Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy movie Life, which features tracks from K-Ci & JoJo, Maxwell, Mýa, and Destiny's Child. The soundtrack was released on the Rockland label. 2002–2003: The Best of Both Worlds and Chocolate Factory On January 24, 2002, at a press conference announcing The Best of Both Worlds completion, celebrities such as Johnnie Cochran, Russell Simmons, Luther Vandross, and Sean Combs praised the album, with Jay-Z stating that he hoped the collaboration represents "more unity for black people on a whole." MTV's Shaheem Reid wrote: "And if Jay and Kelly can put their egos to the side long enough to wrap up and promote their album, then their labels—Def Jam and Jive, respectively—can surely figure out a way to join forces and make cheddar together." On February 8, 2002, Kelly performed at the closing ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics at the same time a news scandal broke of a sex tape that appeared to show Kelly with an underage girl. When the joint album leaked on February 22, 2002, it caused the label, Roc-A-Fella, to modify the album's release date in March. Jay-Z expressed frustration about the album leak to MTV News: "It's the gift and the curse. It's an honor that everybody wants your music fast, but on the other hand, it's another thing when the music gets out before you [want it to]. Because that's your art. You feel attached to it. You feel a certain way and you want people to go out and support it. The time that you take, it's like a piece of your life. You take parts of your life and you put it on these records and then for it to just be traded and moved around [is frustrating]. The Best of Both Worlds album sold 285,000 copies in its opening week and debuted at number two on the Billboard 200. It was a critical and commercial disappointment. In May 2002, Kelly's initial sixth studio album, Loveland, leaked and was delayed to release in November. Eventually, a second thought caused Kelly to restructure the entirety of the album, including its title; Loveland would later be packaged as a deluxe edition bonus disc of the now-renamed Chocolate Factory. In October of that year, Kelly released the remix to its single, "Ignition". It had since charted at number two on the Billboard Hot 100. On February 18, 2003, the album, Chocolate Factory was released to highly critical fanfare. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, ending the first two-week run of rapper 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Tryin'. It sold 532,000 copies in its first week. The album was also supported by its follow-up singles, "Snake" and the remix of "Step in the Name of Love"; the latter of which peaked at number nine on the Hot 100. Later that year, in September, Kelly released his first greatest hits album, The R. in R&B Collection, Vol. 1, including three unreleased songs; one of which being "Thoia Thoing". 2004–2005: Unfinished Business, Happy People/U Saved Me and TP.3 Reloaded Between mid-2003 and early 2004, Kelly began work on another double CD album, one with "happy" tracks and another with "inspirational" tracks. The double album, Happy People/U Saved Me, was released on August 24, 2004. It debuted at number two on the Billboard 200, with first week sales of 264,000 copies. Both of the album's titled tracks respectively performed underwhelmingly; "Happy People" charted at number twenty-nine on the Adult R&B song chart while "U Saved Me" peaked at number fifty-two on the Billboard Hot 100. Two months later, Kelly and Jay-Z reunited to release their second collaborative album, Unfinished Business. The album received criticism and like its predecessor, was also a commercial failure, despite debuting at number one on the Billboard 200. The promotion of the album and its Best of Both Worlds tour were both plagued by tension between the stars, with Kelly reportedly showing up late or not at all to gigs. Kelly complained that the touring lights were not directed towards him and allegedly assaulted the tour's lighting director. Jay-Z eventually removed Kelly halfway through the tour, after a member of Jay-Z's entourage pepper sprayed Kelly on October 29, 2004. Tyran (Ty-Ty) Smith was charged with assault, but took a plea deal for disorderly conduct. Kelly launched a $75-million lawsuit against Jay-Z for removing him from the tour; Jay-Z's counter suit was dismissed by a judge. Kelly redeemed himself commercially after appearing on Ja Rule's single, "Wonderful" alongside Ashanti. The song charted at number five on the Billboard Hot 100, topped the UK Singles Chart and went platinum in the summer of 2005. After finishing Happy People/U Saved Me and Unfinished Business in 2004, Kelly released TP.3 Reloaded in July 2005. It became Kelly's fifth consecutive number-one album in his career. TP.3 Reloaded was heavily cross-promoted by the first five chapters of the hip-hopera, Trapped in the Closet, which would later expand to other chapters for years to come. 2006–2009: Double Up and Untitled, Africa In December 2006, Kelly built momentum for his eighth solo studio album, Double Up, after guest-appearing on Bow Wow's "I'm a Flirt". Three months later, Kelly's remix of "I'm a Flirt" was released, but instead of Bow Wow, it features T.I. and T-Pain. On May 29, 2007, the album was released. It became Kelly's sixth and final album in his career to be number one on the Billboard 200. Kelly's other singles from Double Up titled "Same Girl" was a duet of Kelly and Usher, while "Rise Up" was a tribute to the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting that occurred earlier that year in April, a month before the album was released. The song was previously released as a digital download on May 15, 2007. Proceeds were donated to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund to help family members of the victims of the shootings. Kelly began his Double Up tour with Ne-Yo, Keyshia Cole and J. Holiday opening for him. After two shows, promoter Leonard Rowe had Ne-Yo removed from the tour because of a contract dispute. However, Ne-Yo alleges that the reason for the dropout was because Ne-Yo believes he received a better response from critics and fans, even though he performed at just two shows. Ne-Yo filed a lawsuit against Rowe Entertainment. Kelly was not mentioned in the lawsuit. In December 2007, Kelly failed to appear at another preliminary court hearing on his case due to his tour bus being held up in Utah. The judge threatened to revoke Kelly's bond, but eventually decided against it. In 2008, Kelly released a rap track titled "I'm a Beast" in which he coarsely attacked his detractors, yet did not name the subjects of the song. In 2008, before and after being acquitted on child pornography charges, Billboard reported that Kelly had plans to release his newest album titled 12 Play: Fourth Quarter in the summer of that year but the album was postponed. Billboard named Kelly among the most successful artists ever for its 50th Anniversary List. In the spring, the promotional single "Hair Braider", peaked at No. 56 on Billboard's R&B chart. On July 28, the entire album leaked online, causing the title to be scrapped. In February 2009, Kelly announced that he was working on a new album called Untitled with a projected release date of September 29, but it had been delayed to December. In June 2009, he released his first mixtape, The "Demo" Tape, presented by DJ Skee and DJ Drama. Kelly headlined the Arise African Fashion Awards in Johannesburg, South Africa, on June 20, 2009. He performed in Cape Town, followed by Nigeria as part of the annual ThisDay music and fashion festival in July. That same month, he released "Number One", featuring singer-songwriter Keri Hilson. Then, on December 1, Kelly's untitled ninth solo album was released. It charted on the Billboard 200 at number four. More singles from the album include "Echo", "Supaman High" and "Be My #1". In January 2010, Kelly performed in Kampala, Uganda. "I'm very excited about my first visit to Africa, I've dreamed about this for a long time and it's finally here", Kelly said in a statement. "It will be one of the highlights of not only my career but my life. I can't wait to perform in front of my fans in Africa—who have been some of the best in the world." 2010–2012: Epic, Love Letter, throat surgery, and Write Me Back Kelly performed at the 2010 FIFA World Cup opening ceremony on June 11, 2010. In an interview in the September 2010 issue of XXL magazine, Kelly said he was working on three new albums (Epic, Love Letter, and Zodiac) which he described as "remixing himself". Epic, a compilation filled with powerful ballads including "The World's Greatest" and "Sign of a Victory", only saw a European release on September 21, 2010. However, it is also available for streaming worldwide. In November 2010, Kelly collaborated with several African musicians forming a supergroup known as One8. The group featured 2Face from Nigeria, Ali Kiba from Tanzania, Congolese singer Fally Ipupa, 4X4 from Ghana, hip-hop artist Movaizhaleine from Gabon, Zambia's JK, Ugandan hip-hop star Navio and Kenya's Amani, the only female in the group. The first release from the group was "Hands Across the World" written and produced by Kelly. Kelly's tenth album Love Letter, released on December 14, 2010, included 15 songs, one of which was Kelly singing "You Are Not Alone", a track Kelly originally wrote for Michael Jackson. The first single "When a Woman Loves" was nominated for a Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards. At the 2011 Pre-Grammy Gala in Los Angeles, Kelly performed a medley of hits and in March 2011, Kelly was named the #1 R&B artist of the last 25 years by Billboard. On July 19, 2011, Kelly was admitted to the Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago to undergo emergency throat surgery to drain an abscess on one of his tonsils, and was released on July 21, 2011. He cancelled his performance at the Reggae Sumfest in Jamaica that was scheduled for the following Friday. Johnny Gourzong, Sumfest Productions executive director, commented, "We are truly going to miss his presence on the festival." On September 23, 2011, Variety confirmed that Kelly had signed on to write original music for the Sparkle soundtrack. In 2011, Kelly worked with writer David Ritz on an autobiography entitled Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me, which was later released in the summer of 2012. On October 7, 2011, after Sony's RCA Music Group announced the consolidation of Jive, Arista and J Records into RCA Records, Kelly was set to release music under the RCA brand. Following his throat surgery, Kelly released "Shut Up" to generally favorable reviews: Spin magazine said, "Kelly taking aim at the haters who said "he's washed up, he's lost it." He hasn't. Dude's voice is in prime smooth R&B form". On December 21, 2011, Kelly made a live appearance on The X Factor and gave his first performance after the surgery. Kelly revealed to Rolling Stone that he felt like he was "just starting out" and how the performance was a "wake up call" for him. In 2012, Kelly made a series of announcements including a follow-up to the Love Letter album titled Write Me Back, which was released on June 26 to little fanfare, as well as a third installment of the Trapped in the Closet and The Single Ladies Tour featuring R&B singer, Tamia. In February 2012, Kelly performed "I Look to You", a song he wrote for Whitney Houston, at Houston's homegoing. 2013–2016: Black Panties, The Buffet, and 12 Nights of Christmas During 2013, Kelly continued his "The Single Ladies Tour". He performed at music festivals across North America, including Bonnaroo, Pitchfork, and Macy's Music Festival. On June 30, 2013, R. Kelly performed live at BET Awards Show singing hits as well as his new track "My Story" featuring Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz. The song was the lead single for Kelly's twelfth studio album Black Panties. released on December 10, 2013. Writing for New York magazine, David Marchese stated that Black Panties "was like a dare to the world: After all that he’d been accused of, after avoiding conviction, could R. Kelly still get away with making sex-obsessed music?" In 2013, Kelly collaborated with several artists including Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, and Jennifer Hudson. In an interview with Global Grind in November, he described follow up work with Celine Dion after their number one single "I'm Your Angel" from 1998. Kelly worked with singer Mariah Carey for her album "The Art of Letting Go". Kelly co-wrote and sang on Lady Gaga's song "Do What U Want" from her 2013 album Artpop, performing the duet with her on Saturday Night Live on November 16, 2013, and at the 2013 American Music Awards. "Do What U Want" had since been removed from streaming services and re-releases of Gaga's Artpop album following sexual misconduct allegations against Kelly in early 2019. He also collaborated with Birdman and Lil Wayne on "We Been On", a single from the Cash Money Records compilation, Rich Gang. He also appeared on Twista's first single on his new album "Dark Horse". On November 17, 2013, Kelly and Justin Bieber debuted a collaboration entitled "PYD". Kelly was featured on the soundtrack album of the film The Best Man Holiday with his song "Christmas, I'll Be Steppin'". Kelly stated his intention to tour with R&B singer Mary J. Blige on "The King & Queen Tour" prior to the Black Panties Tour while continuing to create segments of the hip hopera Trapped in the Closet. In July 2014, Kelly announced that he was working on a house music album. In November 2015, Kelly released "Switch Up" featuring fellow Chicagoan Jeremih and Lil Wayne, followed by "Wake Up Everybody", "Marching Band" and "Backyard Party". The following month, the album containing those singles, The Buffet, was released. It charted poorly on the Billboard 200 at number sixteen with first-week sales of 39,000 album-equivalent copies. The following year, after a two-and-a-half-year delay, Kelly presented his only Christmas album, also his fourteenth and final studio album in his career, 12 Nights of Christmas, which was released on October 21, 2016. In 2019, Kelly was dropped from RCA Records following the airing of Surviving R. Kelly, which detailed numerous sexual assault allegations against the singer for decades. As of October 2021, following his New York conviction, Kelly's YouTube channel was terminated, but his catalogue remains available on YouTube Music. Artistry Musical style and influences Kelly's music took root in R&B, hip hop and soul. He was influenced by listening to his mother, Joanne Kelly, sing. She played records by Donny Hathaway and Marvin Gaye, inspirations for Kelly. In reference to Hathaway, Kelly stated: "A guy like Donny Hathaway had a focused, sexual texture in his voice that I always wanted in mine. He had smooth, soulful tones, but he was spiritual at the same time." In his autobiography, Kelly stated that he was heavily influenced by Marvin Gaye's R&B Lothario image. "I had to make a 'baby-makin' album. If Marvin Gaye did it, I wanted to do it", Kelly said. While Kelly created a smooth, professional mixture of hip-hop beats, soulman crooning and funk, the most distinctive element of his music is its explicit sensuality. "Sex Me", "Bump n' Grind", "Your Body's Callin'", and "Feelin' on Yo Booty" are considered to be examples, as their productions were seductive enough to sell such blatant come-ons. Kelly's crossover appeal was also sustained by his development of a flair for pop balladry. Vocal style and lyrical themes Writing for the New York Daily News in 1997, Nunyo Demasio stated "With a voice that easily shifts from booming baritone to seductive alto, Kelly has gained international celebrity by combining streetwise rhythms with sexually explicit lyrics." Love and sex are the topics of the majority of Kelly's lyrical content, although he has written about a wide variety of themes such as inspiration and spirituality. Chicago Sun-Times reporters Jim DeRogatis and Abdon Pallasch observed about the contrasting themes: "... the image he liked to project was that of the "R&B Thug"... bringing the streetwise persona of the gangsta rapper into the more polite world of R&B." Kelly expressed that he writes from everyday experiences and prides himself on being versatile. Larry Khan, senior vice president of Jive's urban marketing and promotion, said that Kelly's musical compass is second to none. DeRogatis and Pallasch reported that at concerts where Kelly would go from singing "Like a Real Freak" to "I Wish": "Many fans found these abrupt shifts between the transcendent and the venal, the inspirational and the X-rated jarring." Sexual abuse allegations Kelly has repeatedly faced allegations of sexual abuse that have resulted in multiple civil suits and criminal trials. Early reports of sexual abuse (1990s) In December 2000, the Chicago Sun-Times first reported that police had made two investigations that Kelly was having sex with an underage female but had to drop the investigations due to lack of cooperation by the girls accusing him. A civil suit filed in 1996 by Tiffany Hawkins detailed allegations that, starting in 1991 when she was age 15, Kelly had sex with her as an underage high school student, encouraged her to recruit her schools friends, and pressured her into engaging in group sex with other underage girls. In 1998, Kelly settled the lawsuit with Hawkins for $250,000. Illegal marriage (1994) Kelly had been introduced to a promising young singer from Detroit named Aaliyah by her uncle, Barry Hankerson, when she was 12 years old. During Kelly's 2021 criminal trial for sex trafficking and racketeering, a witness testified that Kelly had sexual contact with Aaliyah starting when she was 13 or 14 years old. Kelly wrote and produced Aaliyah's first album, Age Ain't Nothing but a Number, in 1994. On August 31, 1994, Kelly, then 27, illegally married Aaliyah, then 15, in a secret ceremony in Cook County, Illinois. Kelly's tour manager, Demetrius Smith, admitted he facilitated the wedding by obtaining falsified identification for Aaliyah which listed her as 18 years old. In 2019, a contemporaneous video surfaced showing Kelly stating—less than a year before the marriage took place—that Aaliyah was 14 years old. The marriage was annulled in February 1995 at the behest of Aaliyah's family by a Michigan judge. Kelly and Aaliyah, however, both denied that the marriage occurred and even denied that their relationship had ever moved beyond friendship. In May 1997, Aaliyah filed a lawsuit in Cook County to have the marriage record expunged, stating that she was underage at the time of marriage, had lied by signing the marriage certificate as an 18-year-old, and that she could not legally enter into marriage without parental consent. The expungement request was included in a lawsuit filed by Tiffany Hawkins, who sought to use the marriage documents in her case against Kelly. Hawkins later accepted a settlement of $250,000 from Kelly, subject to a confidentiality agreement, in 1998. In 2019, federal prosecutors in New York charged Kelly with bribery related to the 1994 purchase of a fake ID for Aaliyah in order to obtain a marriage license. Kelly, through his lawyers, admitted in 2021 to having had 'underage sexual contact' with Aaliyah. Sex tape circulates (2002) On February 3, 2002, a video circulated that allegedly showed Kelly engaging in sex with, and urinating on, an underage girl. After the video was released by an unknown source and sent to the Chicago Sun-Times, the publisher broke the story on February 8, 2002, the same day Kelly performed at the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Kelly said in interviews that he was not the man in the video. First criminal indictment (2002) In June 2002, Kelly was indicted in Chicago on 21 counts of child pornography. That same month on June 6, 2002, Kelly was arrested by the Miami Police Department on a Chicago arrest warrant at his Florida vacation home. He was released after one night in jail, the following day after posting bail of $750,000. The alleged victim refused to testify at the trial, and a Chicago jury found Kelly not guilty on all 14 counts of child pornography in June 2008. While investigating the photographs reported in the Chicago Sun-Times, Polk County Sheriff's Office conducted a search of Kelly's residence in Davenport, Florida. During the search, officers recovered 12 images of an alleged underage girl on a digital camera – wrapped in a towel in a duffel bag – which allegedly depicted Kelly "involved in sexual conduct with the female minor." According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the girl in the images obtained from Kelly's Florida home also appears in the videotape which got Kelly indicted in Chicago. Kelly was arrested on January 22, 2003, by Police investigators from Polk County and Miami-Dade County, at Miami's Wyndham Grand Bay Hotel on those charges of 12 counts of possession of child pornography. Kelly was later released from Miami-Dade county jail hours after on a bond posted of $12,000. In March 2004, these charges were dropped due to a lack of probable cause for the search warrants. Allegations of preteen girl molestation (2009) In a divorce court filing unsealed in 2020, R. Kelly's former wife Andrea claims that R. Kelly was accused of molesting a preteen girl in 2009. Huffington Post Live Interview (2015) In December 2015, Kelly appeared on Huffington Post Live in an interview with journalist Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani. The interview was so he could promote the release of his latest album The Buffet. However, during the interview, Modarressy-Tehrani quizzed Kelly about the sexual abuse allegations being levelled against him and wanted to gauge his reaction. This resulted in Kelly growing angry and defensive. He continually shouted over Modarressy-Tehrani, asked her whether she drank and threatened to leave and go to McDonalds. Kelly ultimately stormed out of the interview before it ended. This was one of the first occasions where Kelly was concretely asked about the allegations against him on a public platform. After Kelly's 2021 conviction, Modarressy-Tehrani tweeted: "Now, with this verdict, hopefully, his survivors get some peace and feel this justice. Alleged sex cult (2010s) Jim DeRogatis reported for BuzzFeed News on July 17, 2017, that Kelly was accused by three sets of parents of holding their daughters in an "abusive cult". Kelly and the alleged victims deny the allegations. In March 2018, BBC World Service aired a documentary entitled R Kelly: Sex, Girls and Videotapes presented by reporter Ben Zand that explored the 2017 allegations. This was followed up in May with the BBC Three documentary R Kelly: The Sex Scandal Continues which included interviews with the parents of the Savage daughters. Kelly was again accused of misconduct on April 17, 2018, by a former partner of his who claimed that Kelly "intentionally" infected her with a sexually transmitted disease. A representative for Kelly stated that he "categorically denies all claims and allegations". In a January 2019 BBC News article, a woman named Asante McGee whom Kelly had met in 2014 and taken to live with him some months later, said that she lived with not only Kelly alone, but with other women. She said: "He controlled every aspect of my life, while I lived with him." McGee later moved out on her own accord. Boycott and industry response In May 2018, the Women of Color branch of the Time's Up movement called for a boycott of Kelly's music and performances over the many allegations against him. The boycott was accompanied by a social media campaign called Mute R. Kelly. In response, his management said that Kelly supports the movement in principle, but targeting him was "the attempted lynching of a black man who has made extraordinary contributions to our culture". The music streaming service Spotify announced on May 10, 2018, that it was going to stop promoting or recommending music by both R. Kelly and XXXTentacion. Spotify stated, "We don't censor content because of an artist's or creator's behavior, but we want our editorial decisions—what we choose to program—to reflect our values." Two days later, Apple Music and Pandora also announced that they will no longer be featuring or promoting R. Kelly's music. Spotify received criticism from members of the music industry who expressed worries of a "slippery slope" of muting artists, since R. Kelly had not ever actually been convicted of any crime. Spotify ultimately reversed this decision. Allegations of music industry complicity The Washington Post ran a lengthy article in May 2018, alleging that music industry executives had been aware of Kelly's sexually abusive behavior toward young women for years but did little or nothing about them due to his success as a performer and songwriter. As early as 1994, the newspaper reported, his tour manager had urged Jive Records' founder Clive Calder to tell Kelly he would not release the singer's records if he continued to have "incidents" with women after every concert he gave. Calder told the Post that he regretted not having done more at the time, saying "Clearly, we missed something." Former Jive president Barry Weiss told the newspaper that during 20 years with the label he never concerned himself with Kelly's private life and was unaware of two lawsuits filed against Kelly and the label by women alleging sexual misconduct, suits in which the label had successfully argued it was not liable. Larry Khan, another Jive executive who worked closely with the singer even after viewing the sex tape, likewise implied it was not the label's responsibility, and pointed to Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis as musicians whose labels continued to release and promote their records despite public awareness that they were involved with underage girls. Executives at Epic Records also took a similarly relaxed attitude towards allegations of Kelly's sexual misconduct, the Post claimed. In 2002, after he signed with the label, executive David McPherson allegedly avoided viewing a copy of a tape purportedly showing the singer having sex with an underage girl, even as he had warned Kelly's assistant that if it turned out to be Kelly on that tape, the label would drop him. McPherson did not respond to the Posts requests for comment. An intern with the label whose work suffered after she began a relationship with Kelly, ultimately costing her the position, settled with Epic for $250,000; Cathy Carroll, the executive she worked for, regularly rebuked her former subordinate for having an affair with a married man whenever the two met at social functions for years afterwards, and the damage to the woman's reputation led her to abandon her career in the music industry. Carroll told the newspaper the woman was "starstruck ... A lot of times it's not really the men." The Washington Post also suggested the labels were complicit in the sex-cult allegations from the previous summer's BuzzFeed piece. Employees at the studios where Kelly recorded were required to sign non-disclosure agreements and not enter certain rooms, which they said they believed were where Kelly made the women stay while he worked. Despite the agreements, the newspaper was able to publish screenshots of text exchanges where women in the rooms asked Kelly's assistants to let them out so they could go to the bathroom or get food. The newspaper also published pictures taken after Kelly had concluded a six-week session at a Los Angeles studio, paid for by his then-current label, RCA Records, showing a cup of urine sitting on a piano and urine stains on the wooden floor of another room. Musical response to allegations Kelly released the 19-minute long "I Admit" on SoundCloud on July 23, 2018, as a response to his accusers. The song does not contain any criminal admissions despite its title and chorus, which repeats the lyric "I admit it, I did it". In "I Admit", Kelly denies allegations of domestic violence and pedophilia, asserting that they are matters of opinion. Kelly also denounces Jim DeRogatis and repudiates his investigative report's claim of Kelly operating a "sex cult". Addressing the Mute R. Kelly social media campaign, Kelly sings, "only God can mute me". The song was criticized by reviewers, who described it as an act of trolling. Andrea Kelly and Carey Killa Kelly, R. Kelly's ex-wife and brother, responded to "I Admit" with a remix and a diss track. Surviving R. Kelly (2019–2020) In January 2019, Lifetime began airing a six-part documentary series titled Surviving R. Kelly detailing sexual abuse and misconduct allegations against Kelly. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Loraine Ali observed that the series covered a range of in-depth interviews that "paint a picture of a predator whose behavior was consistently overlooked by the industry, his peers and the public while his spiritual hit was sung in churches and schools." Within two weeks, Kelly launched a Facebook page where he sought to discredit the accusers who appeared in the docuseries. Facebook removed the page for violating their standards as it appeared to contain personal contact information for his accusers. The second season titled Surviving R. Kelly Part II: The Reckoning premiered on January 2, 2020. Following airing of the Surviving R. Kelly documentary, Kelly was listed in Guinness World Records as the most searched for male musician on Google in 2019. He ranked 8th overall on Google's list of the 10 most search for people for the year. Second series of criminal charges (2019–2021) On February 22, 2019, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office in Illinois charged Kelly with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. The charges allege that from 1998 to 2010, Kelly sexually abused four females, three of whom were teen minors at the time, with evidence including a video provided by Michael Avenatti of an alleged new crime. After Kelly turned himself in the day the charges were announced, he was arrested by the Chicago Police Department and taken into custody. The judge set bond at $1 million and ordered Kelly to have no contact with any minor under 18 or alleged victim. Kelly pleaded not guilty to all charges, which he called lies. He was released on bail after three nights in jail at Cook County. On March 6, 2019, Gayle King interviewed Kelly on CBS This Morning, where he insisted on his innocence and blamed social media for the allegations. During the interview, Kelly had an emotional outburst where he stood up, pounded his chest, and yelled. Two women who described themselves as a Kelly's girlfriends and whose parents say are brainwashed captives, declared their love for Kelly and defended him during the broadcast. On July 11, 2019, Kelly was arrested on federal charges alleging sex crimes and obstruction of justice by U.S. Homeland Security investigators and NYPD detectives in Chicago. On July 12, 2019, federal prosecutors from New York and Chicago indicted Kelly on 18 charges, including child sexual exploitation, child pornography production, sex trafficking, kidnapping, forced labor, racketeering, and obstruction of justice. He was first denied bail in October 2019 and denied bail release again in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Superseding indictments were filed in Chicago on February 13, 2020, and in New York on March 13, 2020, raising the total number of charges to 22. He was incarcerated at Metropolitan Correctional Center, Chicago from July 11, 2019, to June 23, 2021. On June 23, 2021, Kelly was transferred to Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn. On August 5, 2019, the State's Attorney Office in Hennepin County, Minnesota charged Kelly with soliciting a minor and prostitution; prosecutors alleged that in July 2001, following a concert in Minneapolis, Kelly had invited a girl up to his hotel room and paid her $200 to remove her clothing and dance with him. In July 2021, Federal prosecutors asked the court to include alleged evidence of bribes, recordings of threats and more allegations of sexual abuse of minors, including an underaged boy he met at McDonald's, as pattern evidence in his trial. Criminal conviction (2021) The federal trial began on August 18, 2021. After weeks of testimony and two days of deliberations, on September 27, 2021, the jury found Kelly guilty on nine counts including racketeering, sexual exploitation of a child, kidnapping, bribery, sex trafficking, and a violation of the Mann Act. The judge ordered that Kelly remain in custody pending sentencing, which was set for May 4, 2022. After the jury delivered their verdict, women's rights attorney Gloria Allred, who represented several victims, stated that Kelly was the worst sexual predator she had pursued in her 47-year career of practicing law. Other legal issues After a July 1996 brawl at a Lafayette, Louisiana health club involving Kelly and his entourage, Kelly was placed on a year's unsupervised probation starting August 13, 1997, after being found guilty of battery. One of the victims needed 110 facial stitches. Also that year, a 20-year-old accused Kelly in civil court of having sexual relations with her when he was 24 and she was 15. Kelly settled the lawsuit in 1998 for $250,000, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. On April 8, 1998, Kelly was arrested on three misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct, including one charge on violating noise ordinance for playing his music extremely loud from his car. Prosecutors from the district attorney's office dropped the first two charges on May 7 and the noise charge on July 22 that year. On March 6, 2019, Kelly was taken back to the Cook County Jail after failing to pay $161,633 in child support. On March 9, 2019, he was released after someone, who did not want to be identified, paid off the child support. His lawyer says he could not discuss the payment due to a gag order. Influence Kelly is considered to be one of the most successful R&B artists since the mid-1980s. He is also one of the best-selling music artists in the United States, with over 30 million albums sold, as well as only the fifth black artist to enter the top 50 of the same list. Rolling Stone magazine called him "arguably the most important R&B figure of the 1990s and 2000s." Music executive Barry Weiss described Kelly as "the modern-day Prince, although there's a bit of Marvin Gaye in him, and a bit of Irving Berlin." In addition to his solo and collaboration success, Kelly has also written and produced several hit songs, such as "Fortunate" for Maxwell, "You Are Not Alone" for Michael Jackson, "G.H.E.T.T.O.U.T." for Changing Faces, "Bump, Bump, Bump" for B2K, and many more. R. Kelly has been compared to artists like Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye. Personal life Kelly's mother, Joanne, died from cancer in 1993. He has given conflicting accounts of where he was during his mother's passing. In 1996, Kelly married Andrea Kelly, his former backup dancer and mother of his three children. Andrea filed a restraining order against Kelly in September 2005 after a physical altercation, ultimately filing for divorce in 2006. In January 2009, after separating in the fall of 2005, Kelly and his wife Andrea Kelly finalized their divorce after 11 years of marriage. Charity and donations In 2007, Kelly released the song "Rise Up" for Virginia Tech after the 2007 school shooting, and donated the net proceeds to the families of the victims. In 2010, Kelly penned the song "Sign of a Victory" for the FIFA World Cup, with all proceeds benefiting African charities. In 2011, he performed at a charity event in Chicago benefiting Clara's House, a now-shuttered (Jan 2018) facility designed to build employment, housing, health care, and education in the projects of Chicago. In 2016, Kelly donated cases of water to the Flint water crisis. Honors and awards Kelly has been awarded and nominated for multiple awards during his career, as a songwriter, producer, and singer. He was granted three Grammy Awards for his song "I Believe I Can Fly": Best Male R&B Vocal Performance, Best Rhythm and Blues Song, and Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or for Television. Discography Studio albums Born into the 90's (1992) (with Public Announcement) 12 Play (1993) R. Kelly (1995) R. (1998) TP-2.com (2000) The Best of Both Worlds (2002) (with Jay-Z) Chocolate Factory (2003) Happy People/U Saved Me (2004) Unfinished Business (2004) (with Jay-Z) TP.3 Reloaded (2005) Double Up (2007) Untitled (2009) Love Letter (2010) Write Me Back (2012) Black Panties (2013) The Buffet (2015) 12 Nights of Christmas (2016) Filmography Books Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me (2012, autobiography) Tours 60653 Tour (w/ Public Announcement) (1993) The 12 Play Very Necessary Tour (with Salt-N-Pepa) (1994) The Down Low Top Secret Tour (with LL Cool J, Xscape, and Solo) (1996) The Get Up on a Room Tour (with Kelly Price, Nas, Foxy Brown, and Deborah Cox) (1999) The TP-2.com Tour (with Sunshine Anderson & Syleena Johnson) (2001) The Key in the Ignition Tour (with Ashanti) (2003) The Best Of Both Worlds Tour (w/ Jay-Z) (2004) The Light It Up Tour (2006) The Double Up Tour (with J. Holiday & Keyshia Cole) (2007) The Ladies Make Some Noise Tour (with K. Michelle) (2009) Love Letter Tour (with Keyshia Cole & Marsha Ambrosius) (2011) The Single Ladies Tour (with Tamia) (2012–13) Black Panties Tour (2014–16) The Buffet Tour (2016) See also Honorific nicknames in popular music List of artists who reached number one in the United States List of Billboard number-one singles List of highest-certified music artists in the United States List of songs recorded by R. Kelly List of songs written and produced by R. Kelly List of unreleased songs recorded by R. Kelly Shaggy defense References External links R. Kelly: Sex, Girls and Videotapes, BBC documentary, March 28, 2018 1967 births Living people 20th-century American criminals 21st-century American criminals African-American basketball players African-American Christians African-American male actors 20th-century African-American male singers African-American record producers African-American male singer-songwriters American contemporary R&B singers American gospel singers American hip hop record producers American hip hop singers American male criminals American male film actors American men's basketball players American music arrangers American music industry executives American music video directors American people convicted of child sexual abuse American people convicted of kidnapping American prisoners and detainees American soul musicians American soul singers American sportspeople convicted of crimes American tenors Atlantic City Seagulls players Basketball players from Illinois Child marriage in the United States Criminals from Chicago Grammy Award winners Guards (basketball) Jive Records artists Male actors from Chicago Music video codirectors People acquitted of sex crimes People convicted of racketeering People convicted of sex trafficking People convicted of violating the Mann Act People from Olympia Fields, Illinois Prisoners and detainees of the United States Record producers from Illinois Shooting guards Singers from Chicago Small forwards Sportspeople from Cook County, Illinois Writers from Chicago Singer-songwriters from Illinois 21st-century African-American male singers LGBT singers	false	[ "\"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\" is a single by British pop rock group the Beautiful South from their sixth album, Quench (1998). It was written by Paul Heaton and Dave Rotheray. The lyrics, which take the form of a conversation between two reconciling lovers, are noted for a reference to the TARDIS from Doctor Who. According to the book Last Orders at the Liars Bar: the Official Story of the Beautiful South, \"How Long's a Tear Take To Dry?\" was originally to be called \"She Bangs the Buns\" due to its chord structure reminiscent of Manchester's the Stone Roses. The song reached number 12 on the UK Singles Chart, becoming the band's twelfth and final top-twenty hit.\n\nSingle release\n\"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\" reached number 12 in the UK Singles Chart in March 1999. Although not released on vinyl, it was given a dual-CD release in the UK. B-sides included a remix of \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\" as well as acoustic versions of three other songs: \"Perfect 10\", \"Big Coin\", and \"Rotterdam\". On 18 March 1999, the band performed \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\" live on the BBC music programme Top of the Pops.\n\nMusic video\nThe music video, available on The Beautiful South's compilation DVD Munch, is a humorous account of The Beautiful South on a world tour in order to pay for drinks at the local bar. The band is portrayed by cartoon versions of themselves, in a style reminiscent of 1960s-era Hanna-Barbera cartoons, and Scooby-Doo in particular. In the commentary track on the Munch DVD, Paul Heaton explains that the video was actually produced by Hanna-Barbera.\n\nTrack listings\n\nUK CD1\n \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\"\n \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\" (remix)\n \"Perfect 10\" (acoustic)\n\nUK CD2\n \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\"\n \"Big Coin\" (acoustic)\n \"Rotterdam\" (acoustic)\n\nUK cassette single\n \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\"\n \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\" (remix)\n\nEuropean CD single\n \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\" (radio edit)\n \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\" (remix)\n \"Perfect 10\" (acoustic)\n \"Rotterdam\" (acoustic)\n\nGerman CD single\n \"How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?\"\n \"Dumb\"\n \"I Sold My Heart to the Junkman\"\n \"Suck Harder\"\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n Pattenden, Mike - Last Orders at the Liars Bar: the Official Story of the Beautiful South ()\n\n1999 singles\n1998 songs\nThe Beautiful South songs\nGo! Discs singles\nHanna-Barbera\nMercury Records singles\nSongs written by David Rotheray\nSongs written by Paul Heaton", "AH574 was a Bell Airacobra I used by the Royal Navy for test work during and after the Second World War\n\nInitial history \nAH574 was initially ordered in 1940 for the Royal Air Force (RAF) as part of the Airacobra I serial number block AH570–AH739 (No. 601 Squadron RAF). When the Airacobra type was rejected by the RAF, AH574 was transferred to the Royal Navy for test work.\n\nTest work \nOn 4 April 1945, AH574 became part of aviation history when test pilot Captain Eric \"Winkle\" Brown landed it on the flight deck of HMS Pretoria Castle—the first carrier landing made by an aircraft with retractable tricycle gear—due to a declared emergency during initial trials for landings on rubber decks planned for future carriers.\n\nIn his autobiography, Captain Brown described the circumstances thus:I had already collected a few 'firsts' in aviation, and I rather wanted to be the first pilot to put a tricycle aircraft down on a flight deck. The Airacobra was not officially cleared for such a landing, but the boffins had told me privately that it would probably take the strain.This was not on the official programme at all, but I hoped that I could persuade Captain Caspar John of the Pretoria Castle to turn a blind eye to what I had in mind. I wrote to him beforehand and asked him if he would be prepared to take me aboard in the event of sudden engine trouble. He at once saw what I was after, of course, and was good sport enough to go along with it. He suggested that it might be a good idea if my engine trouble occurred on my last approach.Strangely enough it did. I began my approach, then, just for the record, called up the ship and complained that my engine was running rough. Would they accept me? Back came Captain John's instant 'affirmative'. I put the hook down, and caught the wire with no trouble at all. The trouble started when the time came to take off, as the Airacobra had a long take-off run—which was one of the reasons behind the type's rejection by the RAF—and 'Winkle' only managed to get airborne because Pretoria Castle was steaming full speed ahead at the time.\n\nFate\nIn March 1946, a visiting Bell Test pilot visited the Test establishment to oversee Laminar Flow experiments being conducted with Bell P-63 Kingcobras.Just for a laugh I asked him to test my old Bell Airacobra, which I had been using for so many hops around the country. He took off, did one very quick circuit, and came back ashed-faced. 'I have never,' he said, 'flown in an aeroplane in such an advanced state of decay. This machine should be scrapped forthwith.' So, on 28th March, I went up for a last aerobatic session in her, then bade a sentimental farewell. The last laugh was on me. AH574 was duly scrapped shortly afterward, and Brown was later given a Fieseler Storch as a replacement.\n\nReferences\nNotes\n\nBibliography\n\n Brown, Eric. Wings On My Sleeve: The World's Greatest Test Pilot tells his Story. London: Orion Books. 2006. .\n\nIndividual aircraft\n1940s British experimental aircraft" ]
[ "R. Kelly", "2009: Untitled and Africa", "Can you tell me about the Untitled and Africa?", "in February 2009, Kelly announced that he was out there working on the album and that it would be called Untitled.", "How long did it take for him to work on it?", "was released under Jive Records on December 1, 2009." ]	C_11f296c5dc0b4f43ad0d6184b5715ed2_0	Was this a popular album?	3	Was Untitled and Africa a popular album?	R. Kelly	January 2009, after separating in fall of 2005, Kelly finalized divorce to ex-wife Andrea Kelly. The couple had been married for 11 years. On June 3, 2009, Kelly released his first ever mixtape, The Demo Tape (Gangsta Grillz) presented by DJ Skee and DJ Drama as a way to reintroduce himself to fans. While at the Velvet Room in Atlanta in February 2009, Kelly announced that he was out there working on the album and that it would be called Untitled. The album was given a September 29, 2009 release date, but was delayed until October 13, 2009. The album release was again delayed and was released under Jive Records on December 1, 2009. It got mixed to positive reviews from critics. The single "Number One", which features Keri Hilson, peaked at #8 on the US R&B Chart. Kelly performed for the first time in Africa headlining the Arise African Fashion Awards in Johannesburg, South Africa on June 20, 2009. Kelly scheduled to perform in Cape Town before heading to Nigeria as part of the annual ThisDay music and fashion festival in July. Kelly also performed in Kampala, Uganda in January 2010. He also scheduled to perform in London as part of his first international tour in eight years, but he did not make his London concert. "I'm very excited about my first visit to Africa, I've dreamed about this for a long time and it's finally here," Kelly said in a statement. "It will be one of the highlights of not only my career but my life. I can't wait to perform in front of my fans in Africa -- who have been some of the best in the world." In December 2009, Kelly teamed up with biographer David Ritz and Tavis Smiley's SmileyBooks publications to write his memoirs entitled Soulacoaster. SmileyBooks publisher and founder, Tavis Smiley stated that the memoir's main focus won't be on Kelly's trials and tribulations. Smiley was quoted saying "If anyone thinks this bookis going to fixate on [R. Kelly's trials], they are going to be sadly mistaken. It is going to be a holistic look at his life thus far and the life and legacy that he's building." CANNOTANSWER	The single "Number One", which features Keri Hilson, peaked at #8 on the US R&B Chart.	Robert Sylvester Kelly (born January 8, 1967) is an American singer, songwriter, record producer and convicted sex offender. He has been credited with helping to redefine R&B and hip hop, earning nicknames such as "the King of R&B", "the King of Pop-Soul", and the "Pied Piper of R&B". Kelly is known for songs including "I Believe I Can Fly", "Bump N' Grind", "Your Body's Callin', "Gotham City", "Ignition (Remix)", "If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time", "The World's Greatest", "I'm a Flirt (Remix)", and the hip hopera "Trapped in the Closet". In 1998, Kelly won three Grammy Awards for "I Believe I Can Fly". Although Kelly is primarily a singer and songwriter, he has written, produced, and remixed songs, singles, and albums for other artists. In 1996, he was nominated for a Grammy Award for writing Michael Jackson's song "You Are Not Alone". Kelly has sold over 75 million records worldwide, making him the most successful R&B male artist of the 1990s and one of the world's best-selling music artists. In 2010, Billboard magazine considered Kelly the most successful R&B artist in history and listed him as the Top R&B/Hip Hop Artist for the time period between 1985 and 2010. In 2012, he was listed as the 55th best-selling music artist in the United States, with over 32 million album sales. Since the 1990s, Kelly has been repeatedly accused of sexual abuse, often with underage girls. He has faced multiple civil suits and has been charged by criminal courts in Chicago, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota. He repeatedly denied the charges. In June 2002, he was indicted on 21 counts of making child pornography. He was acquitted six years later in 2008. In January 2019, a widely viewed Lifetime docuseries titled Surviving R. Kelly detailed allegations of sexual abuse by multiple women, allegations that Kelly continued to deny. Facing pressure from the public using the Mute R. Kelly hashtag, RCA Records dropped Kelly. In 2019, Kelly was indicted by a Cook County grand jury in Chicago on 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse in February, followed by an additional 11 counts of sexual assault and abuse filed by the same court in May. On July 11, 2019, he was arrested on federal charges alleging sex crimes, human trafficking, child pornography, racketeering, and obstruction of justice. Kelly faced a total of 22 federal criminal charges as of January 29, 2021. A federal judge ordered Kelly jailed pending trial on the charges. On September 27, 2021, a federal jury in New York found Kelly guilty on nine counts including racketeering, sexual exploitation of a child, kidnapping, bribery, sex trafficking, and a violation of the Mann Act. The judge ordered that he remain in custody pending sentencing, set for May 4, 2022. Kelly faces a second trial for producing child pornography set for August 2022. Early life Robert Sylvester Kelly was born at Chicago Lying-in Hospital in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, on January 8, 1967. He has three half-siblings, an older sister and brother, along with a younger brother. His mother, Joanne Kelly, was a schoolteacher and devout Baptist. She was born in Arkansas. The identity of his father, who was absent from Kelly's life, is not known. His family lived in the Ida B. Wells Homes public housing project in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood. Around the time he was five years old, Kelly's mother married his stepfather, Lucious, who reportedly worked for an airline. Kelly began singing in the church choir at age eight. Kelly described having a girlfriend, Lulu, at age eight, in his autobiography. He stated that their last play date turned tragic when, after fighting with older children over a play area by a creek, she was pushed into the water, swept downstream by a fast-moving current, and drowned. Kelly called Lulu his first musical inspiration. Kelly said members of his household would act differently when his mother and grandparents were not home. From age eight to 14, he was sexually abused by an older female family member. Kelly's younger brother Carey stated that he suffered from years of sexual abuse at the hands of his older sister, Theresa, who was entrusted with babysitting her siblings. Carey stated that although their older brother was spared and allowed to play outside, both he and Kelly were punished at separate times indoors by Theresa, who refused to acknowledge the abuse when confronted years later. Explaining why he never told anyone, Kelly wrote in his 2012 autobiography Soulacoaster that he was "too afraid and too ashamed". Around age 10, Kelly was also sexually abused by an older male who was a friend of the family. In his autobiography, Kelly described being shot in the shoulder, at age 11, by boys who were attempting to steal his bike, although a family friend later stated that Kelly had shot himself while attempting suicide. In September 1980, Kelly entered Kenwood Academy in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, where he met music teacher Lena McLin, who encouraged Kelly to perform the Stevie Wonder classic "Ribbon in the Sky" in the high school talent show. A shy Kelly put on sunglasses, was escorted onto the stage, sang the song and won first prize. McLin encouraged Kelly to leave the high school basketball team and concentrate on music. She said he was furious at first, but after his performance in the talent show, he changed his mind.Kelly was diagnosed with the learning disability dyslexia, which left him unable to read or write. Kelly dropped out of high school after attending Kenwood Academy for one year. He began performing in the subway under the Chicago "L" tracks. He regularly busked at the "L" stop on the Red Line's Jackson station in the Loop. In his youth, Kelly played basketball with Illinois state champion basketball player Ben Wilson and later sang "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday" at Wilson's funeral. Career 1990–1996: Born into the 90's, 12 Play and R. Kelly MGM (Musically Gifted Men or Mentally Gifted Men) was formed in 1989 with Robert Kelly, Marc McWilliams, Vincent Walker and Shawn Brooks. In 1990, MGM recorded and released one single, "Why You Wanna Play Me"; after its release, the group disbanded. Kelly gained national recognition in 1989 when MGM participated on the talent TV show Big Break, hosted by Natalie Cole. After MGM performed “All My Love”, which would become a demo for Kelly's song “She's Got That Vibe” the group went on to win the $100,000 grand prize. In 1991, Kelly signed with Jive Records. Kelly's debut album Born into the 90's was released in early 1992 (credited as R. Kelly and Public Announcement). The album, released during the new jack swing period of the early 1990s, yielded the R&B hits "She's Got That Vibe", "Honey Love", "Dedicated", and "Slow Dance (Hey Mr. DJ)", with Kelly singing lead vocals. During late 1992, Kelly and Public Announcement embarked on a tour entitled "60653" after the zip code of their Chicago neighborhood. This would be the only album co-credited with Public Announcement. Kelly separated from the group in January 1993. Kelly's first solo album, 12 Play, was released on November 9, 1993, and yielded the singer's first number-one hit, "Bump N' Grind", which spent a record-breaking 12 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot R&B Singles chart. Subsequent hit singles: "Your Body's Callin'" (U.S. Hot 100: #13, U.S. R&B: #2) and "Sex Me" (U.S. Hot 100: #20, U.S. R&B: #8). Both singles sold 500,000 copies in the United States and were certified Gold by the RIAA. In 1994, 12 Play was certified Gold by the RIAA, eventually going six times platinum. In 1995, Kelly garnered his first Grammy nominations; two for writing, producing and composing Michael Jackson's last number one hit "You Are Not Alone". Kelly's success continued with the November 14, 1995 release of R. Kelly, his eponymous second studio album. Critics praised him for his departure from salacious bedroom songs to embracing vulnerability. New York Times contributor Stephen Holden described Kelly as "The reigning king of pop-soul sex talks a lot tougher than Barry White, the father of such fluffed-up pillow talk and along with Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway, [both] major influences for Kelly." Also in December 1995, Professor Michael Eric Dyson critiqued Kelly's self-titled album "R. Kelly" for VIBE. Dyson described Kelly's growth from the 12 Play album: "Kelly reshapes his personal turmoil to artistic benefit" and noted that Kelly is "reborn before our very own ears." The album reached number one on the Billboard 200 chart, becoming Kelly's first number one album on the chart, and reached number one on the R&B album charts; his second. The R. Kelly album spawned three platinum hit singles: "You Remind Me of Something" (U.S. Hot 100: #4, U.S. R&B: #1), "I Can't Sleep Baby (If I)" (U.S. Hot 100: #5, U.S. R&B: #1), and "Down Low (Nobody Has To Know)" (U.S. Hot 100: #4, U.S. R&B: #1); a duet with Ronald Isley. Kelly's self-titled album sold four million copies, receiving 4× platinum certification from the RIAA. He promoted the album with a 50-city "Down Low Top Secret Tour" with LL Cool J, Xscape, and Solo. On November 26, 1996, Kelly released "I Believe I Can Fly", an inspirational song originally released on the soundtrack for the film Space Jam. "I Believe I Can Fly" reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and No. 1 on the UK charts for three weeks and won three Grammy Awards in 1998. In that same year, he contributed Freak Tonight for the A Thin Line Between Love and Hate soundtrack. 1997–2001: Basketball, R., TP-2.COM, and Rockland Records In 1997, Kelly signed a contract to play professional basketball with the Atlantic City Seagulls of the USBL. He wore the number 12 in honor of his album 12 Play. Kelly said "I love basketball enough to not totally let go of my music, but just put it to the side for a minute and fulfill some dreams of mine that I've had for a long time." Kelly's USBL contract contained a clause that would allow him to fulfill a music obligation when necessary. "If Whitney Houston needs a song written", said Ken Gross, the Seagulls owner who signed Kelly, "he would be able to leave the team to do that and come back". "It wasn't a gimmick", Gross continued, "he's a ballplayer. He can play." Kelly is the first music artist to play professional basketball. In 1998, Kelly wrote and produced the debut album of another protégé Sparkle, which was released under his Rockland label and distributed through Interscope. In 2000, Sparkle went platinum due in part to the success of the first single, "Be Careful", a duet with Kelly. On November 17, 1998, Kelly released his fourth studio and first double album, R. Musically, the album spans different genres from pop (Celine Dion), street rap (Nas and Jay-Z) to Blues ("Suicide"). Dave Hoekstra of the Los Angeles Times described the album as "easily the most ambitious project of his career." As the year 2000 commenced, Kelly racked up a slew of new awards reflecting his status as an established R&B superstar. In January 2000, he had won Favorite Male Soul/R&B Artist at the American Music Awards and, in February, was nominated for several Grammy Awards, including Best Male R&B Vocal Performance ("When a Woman's Fed Up"), Best R&B Album (R.), and Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group ("Satisfy You") with P. Diddy. On November 7, 2000, Kelly released his fifth studio album, TP-2.com, a project aligned with his breakthrough album, 12 Play. Unlike R., all songs on TP-2.com were written, arranged, and produced by Kelly. AllMusic's Jason Birchmeier gave TP-2.com 4 stars and stated: "Kelly knows how to take proven formulas and funnel them through his own stylistic aesthetic, which usually means slowing down the tempo, laying on lush choruses of strings and background vocals, taming down the lyrics for radio, and catering his pitch primarily to wistful women. In 2001, Kelly won the Outstanding Achievement Award at the Music of Black Origin or MOBO Awards and Billboard magazine ranked TP-2.com number 94 on the magazine's Top 200 Albums of the Decade. Kelly's song "The World's Greatest", from the soundtrack to the 2001 Ali film, was a hit. Rockland Records In 1998 Kelly launched his own label, the Interscope Records-distributed Rockland Records. The label's roster included artists Sparkle, Boo & Gotti, Talent, Vegas Cats, Lady, Frankie, Secret Weapon, and Rebecca F. Also in 1998, the label's first artist, Sparkle released her debut self-titled album, Sparkle. In addition to producing and writing the project, Kelly made vocal contribution to the hit duet "Be Careful", which contributed largely to the album's success. The album was certified platinum in December 2000. In 1999, he wrote and produced the soundtrack to the Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy movie Life, which features tracks from K-Ci & JoJo, Maxwell, Mýa, and Destiny's Child. The soundtrack was released on the Rockland label. 2002–2003: The Best of Both Worlds and Chocolate Factory On January 24, 2002, at a press conference announcing The Best of Both Worlds completion, celebrities such as Johnnie Cochran, Russell Simmons, Luther Vandross, and Sean Combs praised the album, with Jay-Z stating that he hoped the collaboration represents "more unity for black people on a whole." MTV's Shaheem Reid wrote: "And if Jay and Kelly can put their egos to the side long enough to wrap up and promote their album, then their labels—Def Jam and Jive, respectively—can surely figure out a way to join forces and make cheddar together." On February 8, 2002, Kelly performed at the closing ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics at the same time a news scandal broke of a sex tape that appeared to show Kelly with an underage girl. When the joint album leaked on February 22, 2002, it caused the label, Roc-A-Fella, to modify the album's release date in March. Jay-Z expressed frustration about the album leak to MTV News: "It's the gift and the curse. It's an honor that everybody wants your music fast, but on the other hand, it's another thing when the music gets out before you [want it to]. Because that's your art. You feel attached to it. You feel a certain way and you want people to go out and support it. The time that you take, it's like a piece of your life. You take parts of your life and you put it on these records and then for it to just be traded and moved around [is frustrating]. The Best of Both Worlds album sold 285,000 copies in its opening week and debuted at number two on the Billboard 200. It was a critical and commercial disappointment. In May 2002, Kelly's initial sixth studio album, Loveland, leaked and was delayed to release in November. Eventually, a second thought caused Kelly to restructure the entirety of the album, including its title; Loveland would later be packaged as a deluxe edition bonus disc of the now-renamed Chocolate Factory. In October of that year, Kelly released the remix to its single, "Ignition". It had since charted at number two on the Billboard Hot 100. On February 18, 2003, the album, Chocolate Factory was released to highly critical fanfare. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, ending the first two-week run of rapper 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Tryin'. It sold 532,000 copies in its first week. The album was also supported by its follow-up singles, "Snake" and the remix of "Step in the Name of Love"; the latter of which peaked at number nine on the Hot 100. Later that year, in September, Kelly released his first greatest hits album, The R. in R&B Collection, Vol. 1, including three unreleased songs; one of which being "Thoia Thoing". 2004–2005: Unfinished Business, Happy People/U Saved Me and TP.3 Reloaded Between mid-2003 and early 2004, Kelly began work on another double CD album, one with "happy" tracks and another with "inspirational" tracks. The double album, Happy People/U Saved Me, was released on August 24, 2004. It debuted at number two on the Billboard 200, with first week sales of 264,000 copies. Both of the album's titled tracks respectively performed underwhelmingly; "Happy People" charted at number twenty-nine on the Adult R&B song chart while "U Saved Me" peaked at number fifty-two on the Billboard Hot 100. Two months later, Kelly and Jay-Z reunited to release their second collaborative album, Unfinished Business. The album received criticism and like its predecessor, was also a commercial failure, despite debuting at number one on the Billboard 200. The promotion of the album and its Best of Both Worlds tour were both plagued by tension between the stars, with Kelly reportedly showing up late or not at all to gigs. Kelly complained that the touring lights were not directed towards him and allegedly assaulted the tour's lighting director. Jay-Z eventually removed Kelly halfway through the tour, after a member of Jay-Z's entourage pepper sprayed Kelly on October 29, 2004. Tyran (Ty-Ty) Smith was charged with assault, but took a plea deal for disorderly conduct. Kelly launched a $75-million lawsuit against Jay-Z for removing him from the tour; Jay-Z's counter suit was dismissed by a judge. Kelly redeemed himself commercially after appearing on Ja Rule's single, "Wonderful" alongside Ashanti. The song charted at number five on the Billboard Hot 100, topped the UK Singles Chart and went platinum in the summer of 2005. After finishing Happy People/U Saved Me and Unfinished Business in 2004, Kelly released TP.3 Reloaded in July 2005. It became Kelly's fifth consecutive number-one album in his career. TP.3 Reloaded was heavily cross-promoted by the first five chapters of the hip-hopera, Trapped in the Closet, which would later expand to other chapters for years to come. 2006–2009: Double Up and Untitled, Africa In December 2006, Kelly built momentum for his eighth solo studio album, Double Up, after guest-appearing on Bow Wow's "I'm a Flirt". Three months later, Kelly's remix of "I'm a Flirt" was released, but instead of Bow Wow, it features T.I. and T-Pain. On May 29, 2007, the album was released. It became Kelly's sixth and final album in his career to be number one on the Billboard 200. Kelly's other singles from Double Up titled "Same Girl" was a duet of Kelly and Usher, while "Rise Up" was a tribute to the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting that occurred earlier that year in April, a month before the album was released. The song was previously released as a digital download on May 15, 2007. Proceeds were donated to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund to help family members of the victims of the shootings. Kelly began his Double Up tour with Ne-Yo, Keyshia Cole and J. Holiday opening for him. After two shows, promoter Leonard Rowe had Ne-Yo removed from the tour because of a contract dispute. However, Ne-Yo alleges that the reason for the dropout was because Ne-Yo believes he received a better response from critics and fans, even though he performed at just two shows. Ne-Yo filed a lawsuit against Rowe Entertainment. Kelly was not mentioned in the lawsuit. In December 2007, Kelly failed to appear at another preliminary court hearing on his case due to his tour bus being held up in Utah. The judge threatened to revoke Kelly's bond, but eventually decided against it. In 2008, Kelly released a rap track titled "I'm a Beast" in which he coarsely attacked his detractors, yet did not name the subjects of the song. In 2008, before and after being acquitted on child pornography charges, Billboard reported that Kelly had plans to release his newest album titled 12 Play: Fourth Quarter in the summer of that year but the album was postponed. Billboard named Kelly among the most successful artists ever for its 50th Anniversary List. In the spring, the promotional single "Hair Braider", peaked at No. 56 on Billboard's R&B chart. On July 28, the entire album leaked online, causing the title to be scrapped. In February 2009, Kelly announced that he was working on a new album called Untitled with a projected release date of September 29, but it had been delayed to December. In June 2009, he released his first mixtape, The "Demo" Tape, presented by DJ Skee and DJ Drama. Kelly headlined the Arise African Fashion Awards in Johannesburg, South Africa, on June 20, 2009. He performed in Cape Town, followed by Nigeria as part of the annual ThisDay music and fashion festival in July. That same month, he released "Number One", featuring singer-songwriter Keri Hilson. Then, on December 1, Kelly's untitled ninth solo album was released. It charted on the Billboard 200 at number four. More singles from the album include "Echo", "Supaman High" and "Be My #1". In January 2010, Kelly performed in Kampala, Uganda. "I'm very excited about my first visit to Africa, I've dreamed about this for a long time and it's finally here", Kelly said in a statement. "It will be one of the highlights of not only my career but my life. I can't wait to perform in front of my fans in Africa—who have been some of the best in the world." 2010–2012: Epic, Love Letter, throat surgery, and Write Me Back Kelly performed at the 2010 FIFA World Cup opening ceremony on June 11, 2010. In an interview in the September 2010 issue of XXL magazine, Kelly said he was working on three new albums (Epic, Love Letter, and Zodiac) which he described as "remixing himself". Epic, a compilation filled with powerful ballads including "The World's Greatest" and "Sign of a Victory", only saw a European release on September 21, 2010. However, it is also available for streaming worldwide. In November 2010, Kelly collaborated with several African musicians forming a supergroup known as One8. The group featured 2Face from Nigeria, Ali Kiba from Tanzania, Congolese singer Fally Ipupa, 4X4 from Ghana, hip-hop artist Movaizhaleine from Gabon, Zambia's JK, Ugandan hip-hop star Navio and Kenya's Amani, the only female in the group. The first release from the group was "Hands Across the World" written and produced by Kelly. Kelly's tenth album Love Letter, released on December 14, 2010, included 15 songs, one of which was Kelly singing "You Are Not Alone", a track Kelly originally wrote for Michael Jackson. The first single "When a Woman Loves" was nominated for a Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards. At the 2011 Pre-Grammy Gala in Los Angeles, Kelly performed a medley of hits and in March 2011, Kelly was named the #1 R&B artist of the last 25 years by Billboard. On July 19, 2011, Kelly was admitted to the Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago to undergo emergency throat surgery to drain an abscess on one of his tonsils, and was released on July 21, 2011. He cancelled his performance at the Reggae Sumfest in Jamaica that was scheduled for the following Friday. Johnny Gourzong, Sumfest Productions executive director, commented, "We are truly going to miss his presence on the festival." On September 23, 2011, Variety confirmed that Kelly had signed on to write original music for the Sparkle soundtrack. In 2011, Kelly worked with writer David Ritz on an autobiography entitled Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me, which was later released in the summer of 2012. On October 7, 2011, after Sony's RCA Music Group announced the consolidation of Jive, Arista and J Records into RCA Records, Kelly was set to release music under the RCA brand. Following his throat surgery, Kelly released "Shut Up" to generally favorable reviews: Spin magazine said, "Kelly taking aim at the haters who said "he's washed up, he's lost it." He hasn't. Dude's voice is in prime smooth R&B form". On December 21, 2011, Kelly made a live appearance on The X Factor and gave his first performance after the surgery. Kelly revealed to Rolling Stone that he felt like he was "just starting out" and how the performance was a "wake up call" for him. In 2012, Kelly made a series of announcements including a follow-up to the Love Letter album titled Write Me Back, which was released on June 26 to little fanfare, as well as a third installment of the Trapped in the Closet and The Single Ladies Tour featuring R&B singer, Tamia. In February 2012, Kelly performed "I Look to You", a song he wrote for Whitney Houston, at Houston's homegoing. 2013–2016: Black Panties, The Buffet, and 12 Nights of Christmas During 2013, Kelly continued his "The Single Ladies Tour". He performed at music festivals across North America, including Bonnaroo, Pitchfork, and Macy's Music Festival. On June 30, 2013, R. Kelly performed live at BET Awards Show singing hits as well as his new track "My Story" featuring Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz. The song was the lead single for Kelly's twelfth studio album Black Panties. released on December 10, 2013. Writing for New York magazine, David Marchese stated that Black Panties "was like a dare to the world: After all that he’d been accused of, after avoiding conviction, could R. Kelly still get away with making sex-obsessed music?" In 2013, Kelly collaborated with several artists including Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, and Jennifer Hudson. In an interview with Global Grind in November, he described follow up work with Celine Dion after their number one single "I'm Your Angel" from 1998. Kelly worked with singer Mariah Carey for her album "The Art of Letting Go". Kelly co-wrote and sang on Lady Gaga's song "Do What U Want" from her 2013 album Artpop, performing the duet with her on Saturday Night Live on November 16, 2013, and at the 2013 American Music Awards. "Do What U Want" had since been removed from streaming services and re-releases of Gaga's Artpop album following sexual misconduct allegations against Kelly in early 2019. He also collaborated with Birdman and Lil Wayne on "We Been On", a single from the Cash Money Records compilation, Rich Gang. He also appeared on Twista's first single on his new album "Dark Horse". On November 17, 2013, Kelly and Justin Bieber debuted a collaboration entitled "PYD". Kelly was featured on the soundtrack album of the film The Best Man Holiday with his song "Christmas, I'll Be Steppin'". Kelly stated his intention to tour with R&B singer Mary J. Blige on "The King & Queen Tour" prior to the Black Panties Tour while continuing to create segments of the hip hopera Trapped in the Closet. In July 2014, Kelly announced that he was working on a house music album. In November 2015, Kelly released "Switch Up" featuring fellow Chicagoan Jeremih and Lil Wayne, followed by "Wake Up Everybody", "Marching Band" and "Backyard Party". The following month, the album containing those singles, The Buffet, was released. It charted poorly on the Billboard 200 at number sixteen with first-week sales of 39,000 album-equivalent copies. The following year, after a two-and-a-half-year delay, Kelly presented his only Christmas album, also his fourteenth and final studio album in his career, 12 Nights of Christmas, which was released on October 21, 2016. In 2019, Kelly was dropped from RCA Records following the airing of Surviving R. Kelly, which detailed numerous sexual assault allegations against the singer for decades. As of October 2021, following his New York conviction, Kelly's YouTube channel was terminated, but his catalogue remains available on YouTube Music. Artistry Musical style and influences Kelly's music took root in R&B, hip hop and soul. He was influenced by listening to his mother, Joanne Kelly, sing. She played records by Donny Hathaway and Marvin Gaye, inspirations for Kelly. In reference to Hathaway, Kelly stated: "A guy like Donny Hathaway had a focused, sexual texture in his voice that I always wanted in mine. He had smooth, soulful tones, but he was spiritual at the same time." In his autobiography, Kelly stated that he was heavily influenced by Marvin Gaye's R&B Lothario image. "I had to make a 'baby-makin' album. If Marvin Gaye did it, I wanted to do it", Kelly said. While Kelly created a smooth, professional mixture of hip-hop beats, soulman crooning and funk, the most distinctive element of his music is its explicit sensuality. "Sex Me", "Bump n' Grind", "Your Body's Callin'", and "Feelin' on Yo Booty" are considered to be examples, as their productions were seductive enough to sell such blatant come-ons. Kelly's crossover appeal was also sustained by his development of a flair for pop balladry. Vocal style and lyrical themes Writing for the New York Daily News in 1997, Nunyo Demasio stated "With a voice that easily shifts from booming baritone to seductive alto, Kelly has gained international celebrity by combining streetwise rhythms with sexually explicit lyrics." Love and sex are the topics of the majority of Kelly's lyrical content, although he has written about a wide variety of themes such as inspiration and spirituality. Chicago Sun-Times reporters Jim DeRogatis and Abdon Pallasch observed about the contrasting themes: "... the image he liked to project was that of the "R&B Thug"... bringing the streetwise persona of the gangsta rapper into the more polite world of R&B." Kelly expressed that he writes from everyday experiences and prides himself on being versatile. Larry Khan, senior vice president of Jive's urban marketing and promotion, said that Kelly's musical compass is second to none. DeRogatis and Pallasch reported that at concerts where Kelly would go from singing "Like a Real Freak" to "I Wish": "Many fans found these abrupt shifts between the transcendent and the venal, the inspirational and the X-rated jarring." Sexual abuse allegations Kelly has repeatedly faced allegations of sexual abuse that have resulted in multiple civil suits and criminal trials. Early reports of sexual abuse (1990s) In December 2000, the Chicago Sun-Times first reported that police had made two investigations that Kelly was having sex with an underage female but had to drop the investigations due to lack of cooperation by the girls accusing him. A civil suit filed in 1996 by Tiffany Hawkins detailed allegations that, starting in 1991 when she was age 15, Kelly had sex with her as an underage high school student, encouraged her to recruit her schools friends, and pressured her into engaging in group sex with other underage girls. In 1998, Kelly settled the lawsuit with Hawkins for $250,000. Illegal marriage (1994) Kelly had been introduced to a promising young singer from Detroit named Aaliyah by her uncle, Barry Hankerson, when she was 12 years old. During Kelly's 2021 criminal trial for sex trafficking and racketeering, a witness testified that Kelly had sexual contact with Aaliyah starting when she was 13 or 14 years old. Kelly wrote and produced Aaliyah's first album, Age Ain't Nothing but a Number, in 1994. On August 31, 1994, Kelly, then 27, illegally married Aaliyah, then 15, in a secret ceremony in Cook County, Illinois. Kelly's tour manager, Demetrius Smith, admitted he facilitated the wedding by obtaining falsified identification for Aaliyah which listed her as 18 years old. In 2019, a contemporaneous video surfaced showing Kelly stating—less than a year before the marriage took place—that Aaliyah was 14 years old. The marriage was annulled in February 1995 at the behest of Aaliyah's family by a Michigan judge. Kelly and Aaliyah, however, both denied that the marriage occurred and even denied that their relationship had ever moved beyond friendship. In May 1997, Aaliyah filed a lawsuit in Cook County to have the marriage record expunged, stating that she was underage at the time of marriage, had lied by signing the marriage certificate as an 18-year-old, and that she could not legally enter into marriage without parental consent. The expungement request was included in a lawsuit filed by Tiffany Hawkins, who sought to use the marriage documents in her case against Kelly. Hawkins later accepted a settlement of $250,000 from Kelly, subject to a confidentiality agreement, in 1998. In 2019, federal prosecutors in New York charged Kelly with bribery related to the 1994 purchase of a fake ID for Aaliyah in order to obtain a marriage license. Kelly, through his lawyers, admitted in 2021 to having had 'underage sexual contact' with Aaliyah. Sex tape circulates (2002) On February 3, 2002, a video circulated that allegedly showed Kelly engaging in sex with, and urinating on, an underage girl. After the video was released by an unknown source and sent to the Chicago Sun-Times, the publisher broke the story on February 8, 2002, the same day Kelly performed at the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Kelly said in interviews that he was not the man in the video. First criminal indictment (2002) In June 2002, Kelly was indicted in Chicago on 21 counts of child pornography. That same month on June 6, 2002, Kelly was arrested by the Miami Police Department on a Chicago arrest warrant at his Florida vacation home. He was released after one night in jail, the following day after posting bail of $750,000. The alleged victim refused to testify at the trial, and a Chicago jury found Kelly not guilty on all 14 counts of child pornography in June 2008. While investigating the photographs reported in the Chicago Sun-Times, Polk County Sheriff's Office conducted a search of Kelly's residence in Davenport, Florida. During the search, officers recovered 12 images of an alleged underage girl on a digital camera – wrapped in a towel in a duffel bag – which allegedly depicted Kelly "involved in sexual conduct with the female minor." According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the girl in the images obtained from Kelly's Florida home also appears in the videotape which got Kelly indicted in Chicago. Kelly was arrested on January 22, 2003, by Police investigators from Polk County and Miami-Dade County, at Miami's Wyndham Grand Bay Hotel on those charges of 12 counts of possession of child pornography. Kelly was later released from Miami-Dade county jail hours after on a bond posted of $12,000. In March 2004, these charges were dropped due to a lack of probable cause for the search warrants. Allegations of preteen girl molestation (2009) In a divorce court filing unsealed in 2020, R. Kelly's former wife Andrea claims that R. Kelly was accused of molesting a preteen girl in 2009. Huffington Post Live Interview (2015) In December 2015, Kelly appeared on Huffington Post Live in an interview with journalist Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani. The interview was so he could promote the release of his latest album The Buffet. However, during the interview, Modarressy-Tehrani quizzed Kelly about the sexual abuse allegations being levelled against him and wanted to gauge his reaction. This resulted in Kelly growing angry and defensive. He continually shouted over Modarressy-Tehrani, asked her whether she drank and threatened to leave and go to McDonalds. Kelly ultimately stormed out of the interview before it ended. This was one of the first occasions where Kelly was concretely asked about the allegations against him on a public platform. After Kelly's 2021 conviction, Modarressy-Tehrani tweeted: "Now, with this verdict, hopefully, his survivors get some peace and feel this justice. Alleged sex cult (2010s) Jim DeRogatis reported for BuzzFeed News on July 17, 2017, that Kelly was accused by three sets of parents of holding their daughters in an "abusive cult". Kelly and the alleged victims deny the allegations. In March 2018, BBC World Service aired a documentary entitled R Kelly: Sex, Girls and Videotapes presented by reporter Ben Zand that explored the 2017 allegations. This was followed up in May with the BBC Three documentary R Kelly: The Sex Scandal Continues which included interviews with the parents of the Savage daughters. Kelly was again accused of misconduct on April 17, 2018, by a former partner of his who claimed that Kelly "intentionally" infected her with a sexually transmitted disease. A representative for Kelly stated that he "categorically denies all claims and allegations". In a January 2019 BBC News article, a woman named Asante McGee whom Kelly had met in 2014 and taken to live with him some months later, said that she lived with not only Kelly alone, but with other women. She said: "He controlled every aspect of my life, while I lived with him." McGee later moved out on her own accord. Boycott and industry response In May 2018, the Women of Color branch of the Time's Up movement called for a boycott of Kelly's music and performances over the many allegations against him. The boycott was accompanied by a social media campaign called Mute R. Kelly. In response, his management said that Kelly supports the movement in principle, but targeting him was "the attempted lynching of a black man who has made extraordinary contributions to our culture". The music streaming service Spotify announced on May 10, 2018, that it was going to stop promoting or recommending music by both R. Kelly and XXXTentacion. Spotify stated, "We don't censor content because of an artist's or creator's behavior, but we want our editorial decisions—what we choose to program—to reflect our values." Two days later, Apple Music and Pandora also announced that they will no longer be featuring or promoting R. Kelly's music. Spotify received criticism from members of the music industry who expressed worries of a "slippery slope" of muting artists, since R. Kelly had not ever actually been convicted of any crime. Spotify ultimately reversed this decision. Allegations of music industry complicity The Washington Post ran a lengthy article in May 2018, alleging that music industry executives had been aware of Kelly's sexually abusive behavior toward young women for years but did little or nothing about them due to his success as a performer and songwriter. As early as 1994, the newspaper reported, his tour manager had urged Jive Records' founder Clive Calder to tell Kelly he would not release the singer's records if he continued to have "incidents" with women after every concert he gave. Calder told the Post that he regretted not having done more at the time, saying "Clearly, we missed something." Former Jive president Barry Weiss told the newspaper that during 20 years with the label he never concerned himself with Kelly's private life and was unaware of two lawsuits filed against Kelly and the label by women alleging sexual misconduct, suits in which the label had successfully argued it was not liable. Larry Khan, another Jive executive who worked closely with the singer even after viewing the sex tape, likewise implied it was not the label's responsibility, and pointed to Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis as musicians whose labels continued to release and promote their records despite public awareness that they were involved with underage girls. Executives at Epic Records also took a similarly relaxed attitude towards allegations of Kelly's sexual misconduct, the Post claimed. In 2002, after he signed with the label, executive David McPherson allegedly avoided viewing a copy of a tape purportedly showing the singer having sex with an underage girl, even as he had warned Kelly's assistant that if it turned out to be Kelly on that tape, the label would drop him. McPherson did not respond to the Posts requests for comment. An intern with the label whose work suffered after she began a relationship with Kelly, ultimately costing her the position, settled with Epic for $250,000; Cathy Carroll, the executive she worked for, regularly rebuked her former subordinate for having an affair with a married man whenever the two met at social functions for years afterwards, and the damage to the woman's reputation led her to abandon her career in the music industry. Carroll told the newspaper the woman was "starstruck ... A lot of times it's not really the men." The Washington Post also suggested the labels were complicit in the sex-cult allegations from the previous summer's BuzzFeed piece. Employees at the studios where Kelly recorded were required to sign non-disclosure agreements and not enter certain rooms, which they said they believed were where Kelly made the women stay while he worked. Despite the agreements, the newspaper was able to publish screenshots of text exchanges where women in the rooms asked Kelly's assistants to let them out so they could go to the bathroom or get food. The newspaper also published pictures taken after Kelly had concluded a six-week session at a Los Angeles studio, paid for by his then-current label, RCA Records, showing a cup of urine sitting on a piano and urine stains on the wooden floor of another room. Musical response to allegations Kelly released the 19-minute long "I Admit" on SoundCloud on July 23, 2018, as a response to his accusers. The song does not contain any criminal admissions despite its title and chorus, which repeats the lyric "I admit it, I did it". In "I Admit", Kelly denies allegations of domestic violence and pedophilia, asserting that they are matters of opinion. Kelly also denounces Jim DeRogatis and repudiates his investigative report's claim of Kelly operating a "sex cult". Addressing the Mute R. Kelly social media campaign, Kelly sings, "only God can mute me". The song was criticized by reviewers, who described it as an act of trolling. Andrea Kelly and Carey Killa Kelly, R. Kelly's ex-wife and brother, responded to "I Admit" with a remix and a diss track. Surviving R. Kelly (2019–2020) In January 2019, Lifetime began airing a six-part documentary series titled Surviving R. Kelly detailing sexual abuse and misconduct allegations against Kelly. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Loraine Ali observed that the series covered a range of in-depth interviews that "paint a picture of a predator whose behavior was consistently overlooked by the industry, his peers and the public while his spiritual hit was sung in churches and schools." Within two weeks, Kelly launched a Facebook page where he sought to discredit the accusers who appeared in the docuseries. Facebook removed the page for violating their standards as it appeared to contain personal contact information for his accusers. The second season titled Surviving R. Kelly Part II: The Reckoning premiered on January 2, 2020. Following airing of the Surviving R. Kelly documentary, Kelly was listed in Guinness World Records as the most searched for male musician on Google in 2019. He ranked 8th overall on Google's list of the 10 most search for people for the year. Second series of criminal charges (2019–2021) On February 22, 2019, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office in Illinois charged Kelly with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. The charges allege that from 1998 to 2010, Kelly sexually abused four females, three of whom were teen minors at the time, with evidence including a video provided by Michael Avenatti of an alleged new crime. After Kelly turned himself in the day the charges were announced, he was arrested by the Chicago Police Department and taken into custody. The judge set bond at $1 million and ordered Kelly to have no contact with any minor under 18 or alleged victim. Kelly pleaded not guilty to all charges, which he called lies. He was released on bail after three nights in jail at Cook County. On March 6, 2019, Gayle King interviewed Kelly on CBS This Morning, where he insisted on his innocence and blamed social media for the allegations. During the interview, Kelly had an emotional outburst where he stood up, pounded his chest, and yelled. Two women who described themselves as a Kelly's girlfriends and whose parents say are brainwashed captives, declared their love for Kelly and defended him during the broadcast. On July 11, 2019, Kelly was arrested on federal charges alleging sex crimes and obstruction of justice by U.S. Homeland Security investigators and NYPD detectives in Chicago. On July 12, 2019, federal prosecutors from New York and Chicago indicted Kelly on 18 charges, including child sexual exploitation, child pornography production, sex trafficking, kidnapping, forced labor, racketeering, and obstruction of justice. He was first denied bail in October 2019 and denied bail release again in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Superseding indictments were filed in Chicago on February 13, 2020, and in New York on March 13, 2020, raising the total number of charges to 22. He was incarcerated at Metropolitan Correctional Center, Chicago from July 11, 2019, to June 23, 2021. On June 23, 2021, Kelly was transferred to Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn. On August 5, 2019, the State's Attorney Office in Hennepin County, Minnesota charged Kelly with soliciting a minor and prostitution; prosecutors alleged that in July 2001, following a concert in Minneapolis, Kelly had invited a girl up to his hotel room and paid her $200 to remove her clothing and dance with him. In July 2021, Federal prosecutors asked the court to include alleged evidence of bribes, recordings of threats and more allegations of sexual abuse of minors, including an underaged boy he met at McDonald's, as pattern evidence in his trial. Criminal conviction (2021) The federal trial began on August 18, 2021. After weeks of testimony and two days of deliberations, on September 27, 2021, the jury found Kelly guilty on nine counts including racketeering, sexual exploitation of a child, kidnapping, bribery, sex trafficking, and a violation of the Mann Act. The judge ordered that Kelly remain in custody pending sentencing, which was set for May 4, 2022. After the jury delivered their verdict, women's rights attorney Gloria Allred, who represented several victims, stated that Kelly was the worst sexual predator she had pursued in her 47-year career of practicing law. Other legal issues After a July 1996 brawl at a Lafayette, Louisiana health club involving Kelly and his entourage, Kelly was placed on a year's unsupervised probation starting August 13, 1997, after being found guilty of battery. One of the victims needed 110 facial stitches. Also that year, a 20-year-old accused Kelly in civil court of having sexual relations with her when he was 24 and she was 15. Kelly settled the lawsuit in 1998 for $250,000, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. On April 8, 1998, Kelly was arrested on three misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct, including one charge on violating noise ordinance for playing his music extremely loud from his car. Prosecutors from the district attorney's office dropped the first two charges on May 7 and the noise charge on July 22 that year. On March 6, 2019, Kelly was taken back to the Cook County Jail after failing to pay $161,633 in child support. On March 9, 2019, he was released after someone, who did not want to be identified, paid off the child support. His lawyer says he could not discuss the payment due to a gag order. Influence Kelly is considered to be one of the most successful R&B artists since the mid-1980s. He is also one of the best-selling music artists in the United States, with over 30 million albums sold, as well as only the fifth black artist to enter the top 50 of the same list. Rolling Stone magazine called him "arguably the most important R&B figure of the 1990s and 2000s." Music executive Barry Weiss described Kelly as "the modern-day Prince, although there's a bit of Marvin Gaye in him, and a bit of Irving Berlin." In addition to his solo and collaboration success, Kelly has also written and produced several hit songs, such as "Fortunate" for Maxwell, "You Are Not Alone" for Michael Jackson, "G.H.E.T.T.O.U.T." for Changing Faces, "Bump, Bump, Bump" for B2K, and many more. R. Kelly has been compared to artists like Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye. Personal life Kelly's mother, Joanne, died from cancer in 1993. He has given conflicting accounts of where he was during his mother's passing. In 1996, Kelly married Andrea Kelly, his former backup dancer and mother of his three children. Andrea filed a restraining order against Kelly in September 2005 after a physical altercation, ultimately filing for divorce in 2006. In January 2009, after separating in the fall of 2005, Kelly and his wife Andrea Kelly finalized their divorce after 11 years of marriage. Charity and donations In 2007, Kelly released the song "Rise Up" for Virginia Tech after the 2007 school shooting, and donated the net proceeds to the families of the victims. In 2010, Kelly penned the song "Sign of a Victory" for the FIFA World Cup, with all proceeds benefiting African charities. In 2011, he performed at a charity event in Chicago benefiting Clara's House, a now-shuttered (Jan 2018) facility designed to build employment, housing, health care, and education in the projects of Chicago. In 2016, Kelly donated cases of water to the Flint water crisis. Honors and awards Kelly has been awarded and nominated for multiple awards during his career, as a songwriter, producer, and singer. He was granted three Grammy Awards for his song "I Believe I Can Fly": Best Male R&B Vocal Performance, Best Rhythm and Blues Song, and Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or for Television. Discography Studio albums Born into the 90's (1992) (with Public Announcement) 12 Play (1993) R. Kelly (1995) R. (1998) TP-2.com (2000) The Best of Both Worlds (2002) (with Jay-Z) Chocolate Factory (2003) Happy People/U Saved Me (2004) Unfinished Business (2004) (with Jay-Z) TP.3 Reloaded (2005) Double Up (2007) Untitled (2009) Love Letter (2010) Write Me Back (2012) Black Panties (2013) The Buffet (2015) 12 Nights of Christmas (2016) Filmography Books Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me (2012, autobiography) Tours 60653 Tour (w/ Public Announcement) (1993) The 12 Play Very Necessary Tour (with Salt-N-Pepa) (1994) The Down Low Top Secret Tour (with LL Cool J, Xscape, and Solo) (1996) The Get Up on a Room Tour (with Kelly Price, Nas, Foxy Brown, and Deborah Cox) (1999) The TP-2.com Tour (with Sunshine Anderson & Syleena Johnson) (2001) The Key in the Ignition Tour (with Ashanti) (2003) The Best Of Both Worlds Tour (w/ Jay-Z) (2004) The Light It Up Tour (2006) The Double Up Tour (with J. Holiday & Keyshia Cole) (2007) The Ladies Make Some Noise Tour (with K. Michelle) (2009) Love Letter Tour (with Keyshia Cole & Marsha Ambrosius) (2011) The Single Ladies Tour (with Tamia) (2012–13) Black Panties Tour (2014–16) The Buffet Tour (2016) See also Honorific nicknames in popular music List of artists who reached number one in the United States List of Billboard number-one singles List of highest-certified music artists in the United States List of songs recorded by R. Kelly List of songs written and produced by R. Kelly List of unreleased songs recorded by R. Kelly Shaggy defense References External links R. Kelly: Sex, Girls and Videotapes, BBC documentary, March 28, 2018 1967 births Living people 20th-century American criminals 21st-century American criminals African-American basketball players African-American Christians African-American male actors 20th-century African-American male singers African-American record producers African-American male singer-songwriters American contemporary R&B singers American gospel singers American hip hop record producers American hip hop singers American male criminals American male film actors American men's basketball players American music arrangers American music industry executives American music video directors American people convicted of child sexual abuse American people convicted of kidnapping American prisoners and detainees American soul musicians American soul singers American sportspeople convicted of crimes American tenors Atlantic City Seagulls players Basketball players from Illinois Child marriage in the United States Criminals from Chicago Grammy Award winners Guards (basketball) Jive Records artists Male actors from Chicago Music video codirectors People acquitted of sex crimes People convicted of racketeering People convicted of sex trafficking People convicted of violating the Mann Act People from Olympia Fields, Illinois Prisoners and detainees of the United States Record producers from Illinois Shooting guards Singers from Chicago Small forwards Sportspeople from Cook County, Illinois Writers from Chicago Singer-songwriters from Illinois 21st-century African-American male singers LGBT singers	false	[ "DIVA () was a South Korean hip-hop girl group that debuted in 1997 with members Chae Ri-na, Vicky, and Ji Ni. After the release of the group's first two albums, Funky Diva (1997) and Snappy Diva (1998), Ji Ni left the group and was replaced by new member Lee Min Kyoung. After the release of the group's third album Millennium (1999), Chae Ri-na left the group and Ji Ni re-joined. DIVA went on to release the albums Naughty Diva (2000), Perfect (2001), Luxury Diva (2002), Renaissance (2004), and Only Diva (2005) before disbanding in 2005.\n\nHistory\n\n1997-1999: - Debut with Funky Diva, Snappy Diva, Millenium, Dream and line-up changes \nDIVA debuted with their first album titled Funky Diva in 1997 and their singles there was Yeah and Drama of December. Their single Yeah was popular in Korea peaking at number 5 at music charts. Their album sold about 270,000 copies. \n\nDIVA released their second album titled Snappy Diva in the summer of 1998 with singles titled Why (do you call me)? and Joy. Their single Why (do you call me)? was very popular, peaking at number 1 at music charts and was later remade by the girl group C.I.V.A, in 2016. Their single Joy was also popular. Their second album sold over 240,000 copies.\n\nDIVA released their third album titled Millenium with singles Yo Yo and Feel It in 1999. Their single Yo Yo peaked at number 3 in music charts and was also popular. Their third album sold over 100,000 copies. After the promotions, they released their English Album titled Dream in Taiwan with the single I'll Get Your Love and was popular in Taiwan selling over 30,000 copies. However, after their promotions in Taiwan, leader Chae Rina left and Lee Min Kyoung was added.\n\n2000-2002 - Naughty Diva, Perfect! and Luxury Diva \nDIVA released their fourth album titled Naughty Diva in 2000, with the singles Up & Down and In This Winter. DIVA still remained popular even though popular member and leader Chae Rina left the group. Their album sold 112,788 copies.\n\nDIVA released their fifth album titled Perfect! in 2001 with singles Perfect! and DVD. Perfect! peaked at #6 in music charts. The album sold 69,069+ copies in 2001.\n\nDIVA released their sixth album, a feat achieved by few girl groups in Korea, titled Luxury Diva which saw DIVA change their styles with luxurious and dark concepts. Their singles where Lust in the Wind and Action. Their album was less popular than their last 5 albums with Action peaking only at number 14 in music charts. The album sold about 46,840 copies.\n\n2003-2005 - Best, Renaissance, Only Diva and disbandment \nDIVA released their first compilation album in 2003 titled Best compiling their popular singles during their active times in Korea from 1997 to 2002. The album sold about 20,000 copies.\n\nDIVA released their seventh album titled Renaissance with singles Hey Boy and Amoremio. Their single Hey Boy peaked at number 11 and their seventh album sold about 17,797 copies.\n\nDIVA released their eight and last album before disbandment titled Only Diva with singles Smile and My Style. Their music video for Smile was filmed in China. This album sold 20,000 copies in Korea. After their promotions, DIVA announced their disbandment to focus on solo activities.\n\nArtistry\n\nDIVA's artistry and genre was different from the other girl groups out there at their active time. S.E.S & Fin.K.L have both a poppy genre, Baby V.O.X have a dance genre. But DIVA have a hip-hop genre that loved by many people in South Korea. DIVA was also popular in some Asian Countries like China and Taiwan. DIVA was known for having energetic and groovy music and videos that was peculiar at the height of their career.\n\nDiscography\n\nStudio albums\n\nEnglish albums\nDream (1999)\n\nCompilation albums\nBest World (2003)\n\nAwards and nominations\n\nReferences\n\nSouth Korean girl groups\nSouth Korean dance music groups\nMusical groups established in 1997\nMusical groups disestablished in 2005\nK-pop music groups\n1997 establishments in South Korea", "Wyne Su Khine Thein (; born 24 December 1986) is a Burmese singer and actress. She is best known for her pleasant voice. Her debut album Mat Lout Sayar was released in 2009 and it was popular among audiences.\n\nEarly life and education\nWyne Su was born on 24 December 1986 in Yangon, Myanmar to parents Thein Htay and May Yee Aung. She attended high school at Basic Education High School No. 1 Dagon. She graduated with a degree B.A English from Dagon University.\n\nCareer\nWyne began her art work career in 2004. She has acted in over 130 films. Her debut album Mat Lout Sayar was released in 2009 and it was popular among audiences. Her second album Myet Hlae was released in 2011 and it also gained popularity. Then she became one of the most popular female singers in Myanmar. Her third album Ar Bwar was released in 2013. Her fourth album Khar Cha Nay Ya Tal was released in 2015. Her fifth album Gar was released in 2016. Her sixth album Mal Thida was released in 2017. Her seventh album Nwar Kyaung Thu was released in 2019.\n\nDiscography\n\nSolo Album\nMat Lout Sayar (မက်လောက်စရာ) (2009)\nMyet Hlae (မျက်လှည့်) (2011)\nAr Bwar (အာဘွား) (2013)\nGar (ဂါ) (2016)\nMal Thida (မယ်သီတာ-EP) (2017)\nNwar Kyaung Thu (နွားကျောင်းသူ) (2019)\n\nDuo Album\nKhar Cha Nay Ya Tal (ခါချနေရတယ်) (2015)\n\nFilmography\n\nKaba Sone Hti (2005)\nYadana (2006)\n\nConcerts\n\nList of awards and nominations received by Wine Su Khaing Thein\n\nCity FM awards \n\n\|-\n\| 2010\n\| rowspan= \"5\"\| Wine Su Khaing Thein\n\| Best Selling Studio Music Album Female Vocalist of the Year \n\| \n\|-\n\| rowspan= \"2\"\| 2013\n\| Most Popular Female Vocalist of the Year\n\| \n\|-\n\| The Best Selling Studio Music Album Female Vocalist of the Year\n\| \n\|-\n\| 2014\n\| The Best Selling Studio Music Album Female Vocalist of the Year\n\| \n\|-\n\| 2015\n\| The Best Selling Studio Music Album Female Vocalist of the Year \n\| \n\|-\n\| 2016\n\| H&M Production\n\| The Best Selling Studio Music Album Production of the Year\n\| \n\|-\n\| 2020\n\| Wine Su Khaing Thein \n\| Most Popular Female Vocalist of the Year\n\|\n\nShwe FM awards\n\n\|-\n\| rowspan= \"2\"\| 2011\n\| rowspan= \"5\"\| Wine Su Khaing Thein\n\| Best Couple song award\n\| \n\|-\n\| Best Vocalist award\n\| \n\|-\n\| 2013\n\| Best Dress award\n\| \n\|-\n\| 2016\n\| Best Best Couple Song award \n\| \n\|-\n\| 2020\n\| Most Popular Song award\n\| \n\|-\n\nPadamyar FM awards\n\n\|-\n\| 2011\n\| Herself\n\| Artist of the Year\n\| \n\|-\n\nMyanmar Music awards\n\n\|-\n\| 2014\n\| Herself\n\| I Love Artist Award of Monsoon\n\| \n\|-\n\nJoox Myanmar Music awards\n\n\|-\n\| 2020\n\| Herself\n\| Joox Top 10 Artists of the Year \n\| \n\|-\n\nPersonal life\nWyne was married to Oakar Myint Kyu in 2014 and divorced in 2016.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nLiving people\n1986 births\n21st-century Burmese actresses\n21st-century Burmese women singers\nBurmese pop singers\nPeople from Yangon" ]
[ "R. Kelly", "2009: Untitled and Africa", "Can you tell me about the Untitled and Africa?", "in February 2009, Kelly announced that he was out there working on the album and that it would be called Untitled.", "How long did it take for him to work on it?", "was released under Jive Records on December 1, 2009.", "Was this a popular album?", "The single \"Number One\", which features Keri Hilson, peaked at #8 on the US R&B Chart." ]	C_11f296c5dc0b4f43ad0d6184b5715ed2_0	For how long did it stay on the charts?	4	For how long did Untitled and Africa stay on the charts?	R. Kelly	January 2009, after separating in fall of 2005, Kelly finalized divorce to ex-wife Andrea Kelly. The couple had been married for 11 years. On June 3, 2009, Kelly released his first ever mixtape, The Demo Tape (Gangsta Grillz) presented by DJ Skee and DJ Drama as a way to reintroduce himself to fans. While at the Velvet Room in Atlanta in February 2009, Kelly announced that he was out there working on the album and that it would be called Untitled. The album was given a September 29, 2009 release date, but was delayed until October 13, 2009. The album release was again delayed and was released under Jive Records on December 1, 2009. It got mixed to positive reviews from critics. The single "Number One", which features Keri Hilson, peaked at #8 on the US R&B Chart. Kelly performed for the first time in Africa headlining the Arise African Fashion Awards in Johannesburg, South Africa on June 20, 2009. Kelly scheduled to perform in Cape Town before heading to Nigeria as part of the annual ThisDay music and fashion festival in July. Kelly also performed in Kampala, Uganda in January 2010. He also scheduled to perform in London as part of his first international tour in eight years, but he did not make his London concert. "I'm very excited about my first visit to Africa, I've dreamed about this for a long time and it's finally here," Kelly said in a statement. "It will be one of the highlights of not only my career but my life. I can't wait to perform in front of my fans in Africa -- who have been some of the best in the world." In December 2009, Kelly teamed up with biographer David Ritz and Tavis Smiley's SmileyBooks publications to write his memoirs entitled Soulacoaster. SmileyBooks publisher and founder, Tavis Smiley stated that the memoir's main focus won't be on Kelly's trials and tribulations. Smiley was quoted saying "If anyone thinks this bookis going to fixate on [R. Kelly's trials], they are going to be sadly mistaken. It is going to be a holistic look at his life thus far and the life and legacy that he's building." CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER	Robert Sylvester Kelly (born January 8, 1967) is an American singer, songwriter, record producer and convicted sex offender. He has been credited with helping to redefine R&B and hip hop, earning nicknames such as "the King of R&B", "the King of Pop-Soul", and the "Pied Piper of R&B". Kelly is known for songs including "I Believe I Can Fly", "Bump N' Grind", "Your Body's Callin', "Gotham City", "Ignition (Remix)", "If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time", "The World's Greatest", "I'm a Flirt (Remix)", and the hip hopera "Trapped in the Closet". In 1998, Kelly won three Grammy Awards for "I Believe I Can Fly". Although Kelly is primarily a singer and songwriter, he has written, produced, and remixed songs, singles, and albums for other artists. In 1996, he was nominated for a Grammy Award for writing Michael Jackson's song "You Are Not Alone". Kelly has sold over 75 million records worldwide, making him the most successful R&B male artist of the 1990s and one of the world's best-selling music artists. In 2010, Billboard magazine considered Kelly the most successful R&B artist in history and listed him as the Top R&B/Hip Hop Artist for the time period between 1985 and 2010. In 2012, he was listed as the 55th best-selling music artist in the United States, with over 32 million album sales. Since the 1990s, Kelly has been repeatedly accused of sexual abuse, often with underage girls. He has faced multiple civil suits and has been charged by criminal courts in Chicago, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota. He repeatedly denied the charges. In June 2002, he was indicted on 21 counts of making child pornography. He was acquitted six years later in 2008. In January 2019, a widely viewed Lifetime docuseries titled Surviving R. Kelly detailed allegations of sexual abuse by multiple women, allegations that Kelly continued to deny. Facing pressure from the public using the Mute R. Kelly hashtag, RCA Records dropped Kelly. In 2019, Kelly was indicted by a Cook County grand jury in Chicago on 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse in February, followed by an additional 11 counts of sexual assault and abuse filed by the same court in May. On July 11, 2019, he was arrested on federal charges alleging sex crimes, human trafficking, child pornography, racketeering, and obstruction of justice. Kelly faced a total of 22 federal criminal charges as of January 29, 2021. A federal judge ordered Kelly jailed pending trial on the charges. On September 27, 2021, a federal jury in New York found Kelly guilty on nine counts including racketeering, sexual exploitation of a child, kidnapping, bribery, sex trafficking, and a violation of the Mann Act. The judge ordered that he remain in custody pending sentencing, set for May 4, 2022. Kelly faces a second trial for producing child pornography set for August 2022. Early life Robert Sylvester Kelly was born at Chicago Lying-in Hospital in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, on January 8, 1967. He has three half-siblings, an older sister and brother, along with a younger brother. His mother, Joanne Kelly, was a schoolteacher and devout Baptist. She was born in Arkansas. The identity of his father, who was absent from Kelly's life, is not known. His family lived in the Ida B. Wells Homes public housing project in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood. Around the time he was five years old, Kelly's mother married his stepfather, Lucious, who reportedly worked for an airline. Kelly began singing in the church choir at age eight. Kelly described having a girlfriend, Lulu, at age eight, in his autobiography. He stated that their last play date turned tragic when, after fighting with older children over a play area by a creek, she was pushed into the water, swept downstream by a fast-moving current, and drowned. Kelly called Lulu his first musical inspiration. Kelly said members of his household would act differently when his mother and grandparents were not home. From age eight to 14, he was sexually abused by an older female family member. Kelly's younger brother Carey stated that he suffered from years of sexual abuse at the hands of his older sister, Theresa, who was entrusted with babysitting her siblings. Carey stated that although their older brother was spared and allowed to play outside, both he and Kelly were punished at separate times indoors by Theresa, who refused to acknowledge the abuse when confronted years later. Explaining why he never told anyone, Kelly wrote in his 2012 autobiography Soulacoaster that he was "too afraid and too ashamed". Around age 10, Kelly was also sexually abused by an older male who was a friend of the family. In his autobiography, Kelly described being shot in the shoulder, at age 11, by boys who were attempting to steal his bike, although a family friend later stated that Kelly had shot himself while attempting suicide. In September 1980, Kelly entered Kenwood Academy in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, where he met music teacher Lena McLin, who encouraged Kelly to perform the Stevie Wonder classic "Ribbon in the Sky" in the high school talent show. A shy Kelly put on sunglasses, was escorted onto the stage, sang the song and won first prize. McLin encouraged Kelly to leave the high school basketball team and concentrate on music. She said he was furious at first, but after his performance in the talent show, he changed his mind.Kelly was diagnosed with the learning disability dyslexia, which left him unable to read or write. Kelly dropped out of high school after attending Kenwood Academy for one year. He began performing in the subway under the Chicago "L" tracks. He regularly busked at the "L" stop on the Red Line's Jackson station in the Loop. In his youth, Kelly played basketball with Illinois state champion basketball player Ben Wilson and later sang "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday" at Wilson's funeral. Career 1990–1996: Born into the 90's, 12 Play and R. Kelly MGM (Musically Gifted Men or Mentally Gifted Men) was formed in 1989 with Robert Kelly, Marc McWilliams, Vincent Walker and Shawn Brooks. In 1990, MGM recorded and released one single, "Why You Wanna Play Me"; after its release, the group disbanded. Kelly gained national recognition in 1989 when MGM participated on the talent TV show Big Break, hosted by Natalie Cole. After MGM performed “All My Love”, which would become a demo for Kelly's song “She's Got That Vibe” the group went on to win the $100,000 grand prize. In 1991, Kelly signed with Jive Records. Kelly's debut album Born into the 90's was released in early 1992 (credited as R. Kelly and Public Announcement). The album, released during the new jack swing period of the early 1990s, yielded the R&B hits "She's Got That Vibe", "Honey Love", "Dedicated", and "Slow Dance (Hey Mr. DJ)", with Kelly singing lead vocals. During late 1992, Kelly and Public Announcement embarked on a tour entitled "60653" after the zip code of their Chicago neighborhood. This would be the only album co-credited with Public Announcement. Kelly separated from the group in January 1993. Kelly's first solo album, 12 Play, was released on November 9, 1993, and yielded the singer's first number-one hit, "Bump N' Grind", which spent a record-breaking 12 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot R&B Singles chart. Subsequent hit singles: "Your Body's Callin'" (U.S. Hot 100: #13, U.S. R&B: #2) and "Sex Me" (U.S. Hot 100: #20, U.S. R&B: #8). Both singles sold 500,000 copies in the United States and were certified Gold by the RIAA. In 1994, 12 Play was certified Gold by the RIAA, eventually going six times platinum. In 1995, Kelly garnered his first Grammy nominations; two for writing, producing and composing Michael Jackson's last number one hit "You Are Not Alone". Kelly's success continued with the November 14, 1995 release of R. Kelly, his eponymous second studio album. Critics praised him for his departure from salacious bedroom songs to embracing vulnerability. New York Times contributor Stephen Holden described Kelly as "The reigning king of pop-soul sex talks a lot tougher than Barry White, the father of such fluffed-up pillow talk and along with Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway, [both] major influences for Kelly." Also in December 1995, Professor Michael Eric Dyson critiqued Kelly's self-titled album "R. Kelly" for VIBE. Dyson described Kelly's growth from the 12 Play album: "Kelly reshapes his personal turmoil to artistic benefit" and noted that Kelly is "reborn before our very own ears." The album reached number one on the Billboard 200 chart, becoming Kelly's first number one album on the chart, and reached number one on the R&B album charts; his second. The R. Kelly album spawned three platinum hit singles: "You Remind Me of Something" (U.S. Hot 100: #4, U.S. R&B: #1), "I Can't Sleep Baby (If I)" (U.S. Hot 100: #5, U.S. R&B: #1), and "Down Low (Nobody Has To Know)" (U.S. Hot 100: #4, U.S. R&B: #1); a duet with Ronald Isley. Kelly's self-titled album sold four million copies, receiving 4× platinum certification from the RIAA. He promoted the album with a 50-city "Down Low Top Secret Tour" with LL Cool J, Xscape, and Solo. On November 26, 1996, Kelly released "I Believe I Can Fly", an inspirational song originally released on the soundtrack for the film Space Jam. "I Believe I Can Fly" reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and No. 1 on the UK charts for three weeks and won three Grammy Awards in 1998. In that same year, he contributed Freak Tonight for the A Thin Line Between Love and Hate soundtrack. 1997–2001: Basketball, R., TP-2.COM, and Rockland Records In 1997, Kelly signed a contract to play professional basketball with the Atlantic City Seagulls of the USBL. He wore the number 12 in honor of his album 12 Play. Kelly said "I love basketball enough to not totally let go of my music, but just put it to the side for a minute and fulfill some dreams of mine that I've had for a long time." Kelly's USBL contract contained a clause that would allow him to fulfill a music obligation when necessary. "If Whitney Houston needs a song written", said Ken Gross, the Seagulls owner who signed Kelly, "he would be able to leave the team to do that and come back". "It wasn't a gimmick", Gross continued, "he's a ballplayer. He can play." Kelly is the first music artist to play professional basketball. In 1998, Kelly wrote and produced the debut album of another protégé Sparkle, which was released under his Rockland label and distributed through Interscope. In 2000, Sparkle went platinum due in part to the success of the first single, "Be Careful", a duet with Kelly. On November 17, 1998, Kelly released his fourth studio and first double album, R. Musically, the album spans different genres from pop (Celine Dion), street rap (Nas and Jay-Z) to Blues ("Suicide"). Dave Hoekstra of the Los Angeles Times described the album as "easily the most ambitious project of his career." As the year 2000 commenced, Kelly racked up a slew of new awards reflecting his status as an established R&B superstar. In January 2000, he had won Favorite Male Soul/R&B Artist at the American Music Awards and, in February, was nominated for several Grammy Awards, including Best Male R&B Vocal Performance ("When a Woman's Fed Up"), Best R&B Album (R.), and Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group ("Satisfy You") with P. Diddy. On November 7, 2000, Kelly released his fifth studio album, TP-2.com, a project aligned with his breakthrough album, 12 Play. Unlike R., all songs on TP-2.com were written, arranged, and produced by Kelly. AllMusic's Jason Birchmeier gave TP-2.com 4 stars and stated: "Kelly knows how to take proven formulas and funnel them through his own stylistic aesthetic, which usually means slowing down the tempo, laying on lush choruses of strings and background vocals, taming down the lyrics for radio, and catering his pitch primarily to wistful women. In 2001, Kelly won the Outstanding Achievement Award at the Music of Black Origin or MOBO Awards and Billboard magazine ranked TP-2.com number 94 on the magazine's Top 200 Albums of the Decade. Kelly's song "The World's Greatest", from the soundtrack to the 2001 Ali film, was a hit. Rockland Records In 1998 Kelly launched his own label, the Interscope Records-distributed Rockland Records. The label's roster included artists Sparkle, Boo & Gotti, Talent, Vegas Cats, Lady, Frankie, Secret Weapon, and Rebecca F. Also in 1998, the label's first artist, Sparkle released her debut self-titled album, Sparkle. In addition to producing and writing the project, Kelly made vocal contribution to the hit duet "Be Careful", which contributed largely to the album's success. The album was certified platinum in December 2000. In 1999, he wrote and produced the soundtrack to the Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy movie Life, which features tracks from K-Ci & JoJo, Maxwell, Mýa, and Destiny's Child. The soundtrack was released on the Rockland label. 2002–2003: The Best of Both Worlds and Chocolate Factory On January 24, 2002, at a press conference announcing The Best of Both Worlds completion, celebrities such as Johnnie Cochran, Russell Simmons, Luther Vandross, and Sean Combs praised the album, with Jay-Z stating that he hoped the collaboration represents "more unity for black people on a whole." MTV's Shaheem Reid wrote: "And if Jay and Kelly can put their egos to the side long enough to wrap up and promote their album, then their labels—Def Jam and Jive, respectively—can surely figure out a way to join forces and make cheddar together." On February 8, 2002, Kelly performed at the closing ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics at the same time a news scandal broke of a sex tape that appeared to show Kelly with an underage girl. When the joint album leaked on February 22, 2002, it caused the label, Roc-A-Fella, to modify the album's release date in March. Jay-Z expressed frustration about the album leak to MTV News: "It's the gift and the curse. It's an honor that everybody wants your music fast, but on the other hand, it's another thing when the music gets out before you [want it to]. Because that's your art. You feel attached to it. You feel a certain way and you want people to go out and support it. The time that you take, it's like a piece of your life. You take parts of your life and you put it on these records and then for it to just be traded and moved around [is frustrating]. The Best of Both Worlds album sold 285,000 copies in its opening week and debuted at number two on the Billboard 200. It was a critical and commercial disappointment. In May 2002, Kelly's initial sixth studio album, Loveland, leaked and was delayed to release in November. Eventually, a second thought caused Kelly to restructure the entirety of the album, including its title; Loveland would later be packaged as a deluxe edition bonus disc of the now-renamed Chocolate Factory. In October of that year, Kelly released the remix to its single, "Ignition". It had since charted at number two on the Billboard Hot 100. On February 18, 2003, the album, Chocolate Factory was released to highly critical fanfare. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, ending the first two-week run of rapper 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Tryin'. It sold 532,000 copies in its first week. The album was also supported by its follow-up singles, "Snake" and the remix of "Step in the Name of Love"; the latter of which peaked at number nine on the Hot 100. Later that year, in September, Kelly released his first greatest hits album, The R. in R&B Collection, Vol. 1, including three unreleased songs; one of which being "Thoia Thoing". 2004–2005: Unfinished Business, Happy People/U Saved Me and TP.3 Reloaded Between mid-2003 and early 2004, Kelly began work on another double CD album, one with "happy" tracks and another with "inspirational" tracks. The double album, Happy People/U Saved Me, was released on August 24, 2004. It debuted at number two on the Billboard 200, with first week sales of 264,000 copies. Both of the album's titled tracks respectively performed underwhelmingly; "Happy People" charted at number twenty-nine on the Adult R&B song chart while "U Saved Me" peaked at number fifty-two on the Billboard Hot 100. Two months later, Kelly and Jay-Z reunited to release their second collaborative album, Unfinished Business. The album received criticism and like its predecessor, was also a commercial failure, despite debuting at number one on the Billboard 200. The promotion of the album and its Best of Both Worlds tour were both plagued by tension between the stars, with Kelly reportedly showing up late or not at all to gigs. Kelly complained that the touring lights were not directed towards him and allegedly assaulted the tour's lighting director. Jay-Z eventually removed Kelly halfway through the tour, after a member of Jay-Z's entourage pepper sprayed Kelly on October 29, 2004. Tyran (Ty-Ty) Smith was charged with assault, but took a plea deal for disorderly conduct. Kelly launched a $75-million lawsuit against Jay-Z for removing him from the tour; Jay-Z's counter suit was dismissed by a judge. Kelly redeemed himself commercially after appearing on Ja Rule's single, "Wonderful" alongside Ashanti. The song charted at number five on the Billboard Hot 100, topped the UK Singles Chart and went platinum in the summer of 2005. After finishing Happy People/U Saved Me and Unfinished Business in 2004, Kelly released TP.3 Reloaded in July 2005. It became Kelly's fifth consecutive number-one album in his career. TP.3 Reloaded was heavily cross-promoted by the first five chapters of the hip-hopera, Trapped in the Closet, which would later expand to other chapters for years to come. 2006–2009: Double Up and Untitled, Africa In December 2006, Kelly built momentum for his eighth solo studio album, Double Up, after guest-appearing on Bow Wow's "I'm a Flirt". Three months later, Kelly's remix of "I'm a Flirt" was released, but instead of Bow Wow, it features T.I. and T-Pain. On May 29, 2007, the album was released. It became Kelly's sixth and final album in his career to be number one on the Billboard 200. Kelly's other singles from Double Up titled "Same Girl" was a duet of Kelly and Usher, while "Rise Up" was a tribute to the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting that occurred earlier that year in April, a month before the album was released. The song was previously released as a digital download on May 15, 2007. Proceeds were donated to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund to help family members of the victims of the shootings. Kelly began his Double Up tour with Ne-Yo, Keyshia Cole and J. Holiday opening for him. After two shows, promoter Leonard Rowe had Ne-Yo removed from the tour because of a contract dispute. However, Ne-Yo alleges that the reason for the dropout was because Ne-Yo believes he received a better response from critics and fans, even though he performed at just two shows. Ne-Yo filed a lawsuit against Rowe Entertainment. Kelly was not mentioned in the lawsuit. In December 2007, Kelly failed to appear at another preliminary court hearing on his case due to his tour bus being held up in Utah. The judge threatened to revoke Kelly's bond, but eventually decided against it. In 2008, Kelly released a rap track titled "I'm a Beast" in which he coarsely attacked his detractors, yet did not name the subjects of the song. In 2008, before and after being acquitted on child pornography charges, Billboard reported that Kelly had plans to release his newest album titled 12 Play: Fourth Quarter in the summer of that year but the album was postponed. Billboard named Kelly among the most successful artists ever for its 50th Anniversary List. In the spring, the promotional single "Hair Braider", peaked at No. 56 on Billboard's R&B chart. On July 28, the entire album leaked online, causing the title to be scrapped. In February 2009, Kelly announced that he was working on a new album called Untitled with a projected release date of September 29, but it had been delayed to December. In June 2009, he released his first mixtape, The "Demo" Tape, presented by DJ Skee and DJ Drama. Kelly headlined the Arise African Fashion Awards in Johannesburg, South Africa, on June 20, 2009. He performed in Cape Town, followed by Nigeria as part of the annual ThisDay music and fashion festival in July. That same month, he released "Number One", featuring singer-songwriter Keri Hilson. Then, on December 1, Kelly's untitled ninth solo album was released. It charted on the Billboard 200 at number four. More singles from the album include "Echo", "Supaman High" and "Be My #1". In January 2010, Kelly performed in Kampala, Uganda. "I'm very excited about my first visit to Africa, I've dreamed about this for a long time and it's finally here", Kelly said in a statement. "It will be one of the highlights of not only my career but my life. I can't wait to perform in front of my fans in Africa—who have been some of the best in the world." 2010–2012: Epic, Love Letter, throat surgery, and Write Me Back Kelly performed at the 2010 FIFA World Cup opening ceremony on June 11, 2010. In an interview in the September 2010 issue of XXL magazine, Kelly said he was working on three new albums (Epic, Love Letter, and Zodiac) which he described as "remixing himself". Epic, a compilation filled with powerful ballads including "The World's Greatest" and "Sign of a Victory", only saw a European release on September 21, 2010. However, it is also available for streaming worldwide. In November 2010, Kelly collaborated with several African musicians forming a supergroup known as One8. The group featured 2Face from Nigeria, Ali Kiba from Tanzania, Congolese singer Fally Ipupa, 4X4 from Ghana, hip-hop artist Movaizhaleine from Gabon, Zambia's JK, Ugandan hip-hop star Navio and Kenya's Amani, the only female in the group. The first release from the group was "Hands Across the World" written and produced by Kelly. Kelly's tenth album Love Letter, released on December 14, 2010, included 15 songs, one of which was Kelly singing "You Are Not Alone", a track Kelly originally wrote for Michael Jackson. The first single "When a Woman Loves" was nominated for a Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards. At the 2011 Pre-Grammy Gala in Los Angeles, Kelly performed a medley of hits and in March 2011, Kelly was named the #1 R&B artist of the last 25 years by Billboard. On July 19, 2011, Kelly was admitted to the Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago to undergo emergency throat surgery to drain an abscess on one of his tonsils, and was released on July 21, 2011. He cancelled his performance at the Reggae Sumfest in Jamaica that was scheduled for the following Friday. Johnny Gourzong, Sumfest Productions executive director, commented, "We are truly going to miss his presence on the festival." On September 23, 2011, Variety confirmed that Kelly had signed on to write original music for the Sparkle soundtrack. In 2011, Kelly worked with writer David Ritz on an autobiography entitled Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me, which was later released in the summer of 2012. On October 7, 2011, after Sony's RCA Music Group announced the consolidation of Jive, Arista and J Records into RCA Records, Kelly was set to release music under the RCA brand. Following his throat surgery, Kelly released "Shut Up" to generally favorable reviews: Spin magazine said, "Kelly taking aim at the haters who said "he's washed up, he's lost it." He hasn't. Dude's voice is in prime smooth R&B form". On December 21, 2011, Kelly made a live appearance on The X Factor and gave his first performance after the surgery. Kelly revealed to Rolling Stone that he felt like he was "just starting out" and how the performance was a "wake up call" for him. In 2012, Kelly made a series of announcements including a follow-up to the Love Letter album titled Write Me Back, which was released on June 26 to little fanfare, as well as a third installment of the Trapped in the Closet and The Single Ladies Tour featuring R&B singer, Tamia. In February 2012, Kelly performed "I Look to You", a song he wrote for Whitney Houston, at Houston's homegoing. 2013–2016: Black Panties, The Buffet, and 12 Nights of Christmas During 2013, Kelly continued his "The Single Ladies Tour". He performed at music festivals across North America, including Bonnaroo, Pitchfork, and Macy's Music Festival. On June 30, 2013, R. Kelly performed live at BET Awards Show singing hits as well as his new track "My Story" featuring Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz. The song was the lead single for Kelly's twelfth studio album Black Panties. released on December 10, 2013. Writing for New York magazine, David Marchese stated that Black Panties "was like a dare to the world: After all that he’d been accused of, after avoiding conviction, could R. Kelly still get away with making sex-obsessed music?" In 2013, Kelly collaborated with several artists including Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, and Jennifer Hudson. In an interview with Global Grind in November, he described follow up work with Celine Dion after their number one single "I'm Your Angel" from 1998. Kelly worked with singer Mariah Carey for her album "The Art of Letting Go". Kelly co-wrote and sang on Lady Gaga's song "Do What U Want" from her 2013 album Artpop, performing the duet with her on Saturday Night Live on November 16, 2013, and at the 2013 American Music Awards. "Do What U Want" had since been removed from streaming services and re-releases of Gaga's Artpop album following sexual misconduct allegations against Kelly in early 2019. He also collaborated with Birdman and Lil Wayne on "We Been On", a single from the Cash Money Records compilation, Rich Gang. He also appeared on Twista's first single on his new album "Dark Horse". On November 17, 2013, Kelly and Justin Bieber debuted a collaboration entitled "PYD". Kelly was featured on the soundtrack album of the film The Best Man Holiday with his song "Christmas, I'll Be Steppin'". Kelly stated his intention to tour with R&B singer Mary J. Blige on "The King & Queen Tour" prior to the Black Panties Tour while continuing to create segments of the hip hopera Trapped in the Closet. In July 2014, Kelly announced that he was working on a house music album. In November 2015, Kelly released "Switch Up" featuring fellow Chicagoan Jeremih and Lil Wayne, followed by "Wake Up Everybody", "Marching Band" and "Backyard Party". The following month, the album containing those singles, The Buffet, was released. It charted poorly on the Billboard 200 at number sixteen with first-week sales of 39,000 album-equivalent copies. The following year, after a two-and-a-half-year delay, Kelly presented his only Christmas album, also his fourteenth and final studio album in his career, 12 Nights of Christmas, which was released on October 21, 2016. In 2019, Kelly was dropped from RCA Records following the airing of Surviving R. Kelly, which detailed numerous sexual assault allegations against the singer for decades. As of October 2021, following his New York conviction, Kelly's YouTube channel was terminated, but his catalogue remains available on YouTube Music. Artistry Musical style and influences Kelly's music took root in R&B, hip hop and soul. He was influenced by listening to his mother, Joanne Kelly, sing. She played records by Donny Hathaway and Marvin Gaye, inspirations for Kelly. In reference to Hathaway, Kelly stated: "A guy like Donny Hathaway had a focused, sexual texture in his voice that I always wanted in mine. He had smooth, soulful tones, but he was spiritual at the same time." In his autobiography, Kelly stated that he was heavily influenced by Marvin Gaye's R&B Lothario image. "I had to make a 'baby-makin' album. If Marvin Gaye did it, I wanted to do it", Kelly said. While Kelly created a smooth, professional mixture of hip-hop beats, soulman crooning and funk, the most distinctive element of his music is its explicit sensuality. "Sex Me", "Bump n' Grind", "Your Body's Callin'", and "Feelin' on Yo Booty" are considered to be examples, as their productions were seductive enough to sell such blatant come-ons. Kelly's crossover appeal was also sustained by his development of a flair for pop balladry. Vocal style and lyrical themes Writing for the New York Daily News in 1997, Nunyo Demasio stated "With a voice that easily shifts from booming baritone to seductive alto, Kelly has gained international celebrity by combining streetwise rhythms with sexually explicit lyrics." Love and sex are the topics of the majority of Kelly's lyrical content, although he has written about a wide variety of themes such as inspiration and spirituality. Chicago Sun-Times reporters Jim DeRogatis and Abdon Pallasch observed about the contrasting themes: "... the image he liked to project was that of the "R&B Thug"... bringing the streetwise persona of the gangsta rapper into the more polite world of R&B." Kelly expressed that he writes from everyday experiences and prides himself on being versatile. Larry Khan, senior vice president of Jive's urban marketing and promotion, said that Kelly's musical compass is second to none. DeRogatis and Pallasch reported that at concerts where Kelly would go from singing "Like a Real Freak" to "I Wish": "Many fans found these abrupt shifts between the transcendent and the venal, the inspirational and the X-rated jarring." Sexual abuse allegations Kelly has repeatedly faced allegations of sexual abuse that have resulted in multiple civil suits and criminal trials. Early reports of sexual abuse (1990s) In December 2000, the Chicago Sun-Times first reported that police had made two investigations that Kelly was having sex with an underage female but had to drop the investigations due to lack of cooperation by the girls accusing him. A civil suit filed in 1996 by Tiffany Hawkins detailed allegations that, starting in 1991 when she was age 15, Kelly had sex with her as an underage high school student, encouraged her to recruit her schools friends, and pressured her into engaging in group sex with other underage girls. In 1998, Kelly settled the lawsuit with Hawkins for $250,000. Illegal marriage (1994) Kelly had been introduced to a promising young singer from Detroit named Aaliyah by her uncle, Barry Hankerson, when she was 12 years old. During Kelly's 2021 criminal trial for sex trafficking and racketeering, a witness testified that Kelly had sexual contact with Aaliyah starting when she was 13 or 14 years old. Kelly wrote and produced Aaliyah's first album, Age Ain't Nothing but a Number, in 1994. On August 31, 1994, Kelly, then 27, illegally married Aaliyah, then 15, in a secret ceremony in Cook County, Illinois. Kelly's tour manager, Demetrius Smith, admitted he facilitated the wedding by obtaining falsified identification for Aaliyah which listed her as 18 years old. In 2019, a contemporaneous video surfaced showing Kelly stating—less than a year before the marriage took place—that Aaliyah was 14 years old. The marriage was annulled in February 1995 at the behest of Aaliyah's family by a Michigan judge. Kelly and Aaliyah, however, both denied that the marriage occurred and even denied that their relationship had ever moved beyond friendship. In May 1997, Aaliyah filed a lawsuit in Cook County to have the marriage record expunged, stating that she was underage at the time of marriage, had lied by signing the marriage certificate as an 18-year-old, and that she could not legally enter into marriage without parental consent. The expungement request was included in a lawsuit filed by Tiffany Hawkins, who sought to use the marriage documents in her case against Kelly. Hawkins later accepted a settlement of $250,000 from Kelly, subject to a confidentiality agreement, in 1998. In 2019, federal prosecutors in New York charged Kelly with bribery related to the 1994 purchase of a fake ID for Aaliyah in order to obtain a marriage license. Kelly, through his lawyers, admitted in 2021 to having had 'underage sexual contact' with Aaliyah. Sex tape circulates (2002) On February 3, 2002, a video circulated that allegedly showed Kelly engaging in sex with, and urinating on, an underage girl. After the video was released by an unknown source and sent to the Chicago Sun-Times, the publisher broke the story on February 8, 2002, the same day Kelly performed at the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Kelly said in interviews that he was not the man in the video. First criminal indictment (2002) In June 2002, Kelly was indicted in Chicago on 21 counts of child pornography. That same month on June 6, 2002, Kelly was arrested by the Miami Police Department on a Chicago arrest warrant at his Florida vacation home. He was released after one night in jail, the following day after posting bail of $750,000. The alleged victim refused to testify at the trial, and a Chicago jury found Kelly not guilty on all 14 counts of child pornography in June 2008. While investigating the photographs reported in the Chicago Sun-Times, Polk County Sheriff's Office conducted a search of Kelly's residence in Davenport, Florida. During the search, officers recovered 12 images of an alleged underage girl on a digital camera – wrapped in a towel in a duffel bag – which allegedly depicted Kelly "involved in sexual conduct with the female minor." According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the girl in the images obtained from Kelly's Florida home also appears in the videotape which got Kelly indicted in Chicago. Kelly was arrested on January 22, 2003, by Police investigators from Polk County and Miami-Dade County, at Miami's Wyndham Grand Bay Hotel on those charges of 12 counts of possession of child pornography. Kelly was later released from Miami-Dade county jail hours after on a bond posted of $12,000. In March 2004, these charges were dropped due to a lack of probable cause for the search warrants. Allegations of preteen girl molestation (2009) In a divorce court filing unsealed in 2020, R. Kelly's former wife Andrea claims that R. Kelly was accused of molesting a preteen girl in 2009. Huffington Post Live Interview (2015) In December 2015, Kelly appeared on Huffington Post Live in an interview with journalist Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani. The interview was so he could promote the release of his latest album The Buffet. However, during the interview, Modarressy-Tehrani quizzed Kelly about the sexual abuse allegations being levelled against him and wanted to gauge his reaction. This resulted in Kelly growing angry and defensive. He continually shouted over Modarressy-Tehrani, asked her whether she drank and threatened to leave and go to McDonalds. Kelly ultimately stormed out of the interview before it ended. This was one of the first occasions where Kelly was concretely asked about the allegations against him on a public platform. After Kelly's 2021 conviction, Modarressy-Tehrani tweeted: "Now, with this verdict, hopefully, his survivors get some peace and feel this justice. Alleged sex cult (2010s) Jim DeRogatis reported for BuzzFeed News on July 17, 2017, that Kelly was accused by three sets of parents of holding their daughters in an "abusive cult". Kelly and the alleged victims deny the allegations. In March 2018, BBC World Service aired a documentary entitled R Kelly: Sex, Girls and Videotapes presented by reporter Ben Zand that explored the 2017 allegations. This was followed up in May with the BBC Three documentary R Kelly: The Sex Scandal Continues which included interviews with the parents of the Savage daughters. Kelly was again accused of misconduct on April 17, 2018, by a former partner of his who claimed that Kelly "intentionally" infected her with a sexually transmitted disease. A representative for Kelly stated that he "categorically denies all claims and allegations". In a January 2019 BBC News article, a woman named Asante McGee whom Kelly had met in 2014 and taken to live with him some months later, said that she lived with not only Kelly alone, but with other women. She said: "He controlled every aspect of my life, while I lived with him." McGee later moved out on her own accord. Boycott and industry response In May 2018, the Women of Color branch of the Time's Up movement called for a boycott of Kelly's music and performances over the many allegations against him. The boycott was accompanied by a social media campaign called Mute R. Kelly. In response, his management said that Kelly supports the movement in principle, but targeting him was "the attempted lynching of a black man who has made extraordinary contributions to our culture". The music streaming service Spotify announced on May 10, 2018, that it was going to stop promoting or recommending music by both R. Kelly and XXXTentacion. Spotify stated, "We don't censor content because of an artist's or creator's behavior, but we want our editorial decisions—what we choose to program—to reflect our values." Two days later, Apple Music and Pandora also announced that they will no longer be featuring or promoting R. Kelly's music. Spotify received criticism from members of the music industry who expressed worries of a "slippery slope" of muting artists, since R. Kelly had not ever actually been convicted of any crime. Spotify ultimately reversed this decision. Allegations of music industry complicity The Washington Post ran a lengthy article in May 2018, alleging that music industry executives had been aware of Kelly's sexually abusive behavior toward young women for years but did little or nothing about them due to his success as a performer and songwriter. As early as 1994, the newspaper reported, his tour manager had urged Jive Records' founder Clive Calder to tell Kelly he would not release the singer's records if he continued to have "incidents" with women after every concert he gave. Calder told the Post that he regretted not having done more at the time, saying "Clearly, we missed something." Former Jive president Barry Weiss told the newspaper that during 20 years with the label he never concerned himself with Kelly's private life and was unaware of two lawsuits filed against Kelly and the label by women alleging sexual misconduct, suits in which the label had successfully argued it was not liable. Larry Khan, another Jive executive who worked closely with the singer even after viewing the sex tape, likewise implied it was not the label's responsibility, and pointed to Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis as musicians whose labels continued to release and promote their records despite public awareness that they were involved with underage girls. Executives at Epic Records also took a similarly relaxed attitude towards allegations of Kelly's sexual misconduct, the Post claimed. In 2002, after he signed with the label, executive David McPherson allegedly avoided viewing a copy of a tape purportedly showing the singer having sex with an underage girl, even as he had warned Kelly's assistant that if it turned out to be Kelly on that tape, the label would drop him. McPherson did not respond to the Posts requests for comment. An intern with the label whose work suffered after she began a relationship with Kelly, ultimately costing her the position, settled with Epic for $250,000; Cathy Carroll, the executive she worked for, regularly rebuked her former subordinate for having an affair with a married man whenever the two met at social functions for years afterwards, and the damage to the woman's reputation led her to abandon her career in the music industry. Carroll told the newspaper the woman was "starstruck ... A lot of times it's not really the men." The Washington Post also suggested the labels were complicit in the sex-cult allegations from the previous summer's BuzzFeed piece. Employees at the studios where Kelly recorded were required to sign non-disclosure agreements and not enter certain rooms, which they said they believed were where Kelly made the women stay while he worked. Despite the agreements, the newspaper was able to publish screenshots of text exchanges where women in the rooms asked Kelly's assistants to let them out so they could go to the bathroom or get food. The newspaper also published pictures taken after Kelly had concluded a six-week session at a Los Angeles studio, paid for by his then-current label, RCA Records, showing a cup of urine sitting on a piano and urine stains on the wooden floor of another room. Musical response to allegations Kelly released the 19-minute long "I Admit" on SoundCloud on July 23, 2018, as a response to his accusers. The song does not contain any criminal admissions despite its title and chorus, which repeats the lyric "I admit it, I did it". In "I Admit", Kelly denies allegations of domestic violence and pedophilia, asserting that they are matters of opinion. Kelly also denounces Jim DeRogatis and repudiates his investigative report's claim of Kelly operating a "sex cult". Addressing the Mute R. Kelly social media campaign, Kelly sings, "only God can mute me". The song was criticized by reviewers, who described it as an act of trolling. Andrea Kelly and Carey Killa Kelly, R. Kelly's ex-wife and brother, responded to "I Admit" with a remix and a diss track. Surviving R. Kelly (2019–2020) In January 2019, Lifetime began airing a six-part documentary series titled Surviving R. Kelly detailing sexual abuse and misconduct allegations against Kelly. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Loraine Ali observed that the series covered a range of in-depth interviews that "paint a picture of a predator whose behavior was consistently overlooked by the industry, his peers and the public while his spiritual hit was sung in churches and schools." Within two weeks, Kelly launched a Facebook page where he sought to discredit the accusers who appeared in the docuseries. Facebook removed the page for violating their standards as it appeared to contain personal contact information for his accusers. The second season titled Surviving R. Kelly Part II: The Reckoning premiered on January 2, 2020. Following airing of the Surviving R. Kelly documentary, Kelly was listed in Guinness World Records as the most searched for male musician on Google in 2019. He ranked 8th overall on Google's list of the 10 most search for people for the year. Second series of criminal charges (2019–2021) On February 22, 2019, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office in Illinois charged Kelly with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. The charges allege that from 1998 to 2010, Kelly sexually abused four females, three of whom were teen minors at the time, with evidence including a video provided by Michael Avenatti of an alleged new crime. After Kelly turned himself in the day the charges were announced, he was arrested by the Chicago Police Department and taken into custody. The judge set bond at $1 million and ordered Kelly to have no contact with any minor under 18 or alleged victim. Kelly pleaded not guilty to all charges, which he called lies. He was released on bail after three nights in jail at Cook County. On March 6, 2019, Gayle King interviewed Kelly on CBS This Morning, where he insisted on his innocence and blamed social media for the allegations. During the interview, Kelly had an emotional outburst where he stood up, pounded his chest, and yelled. Two women who described themselves as a Kelly's girlfriends and whose parents say are brainwashed captives, declared their love for Kelly and defended him during the broadcast. On July 11, 2019, Kelly was arrested on federal charges alleging sex crimes and obstruction of justice by U.S. Homeland Security investigators and NYPD detectives in Chicago. On July 12, 2019, federal prosecutors from New York and Chicago indicted Kelly on 18 charges, including child sexual exploitation, child pornography production, sex trafficking, kidnapping, forced labor, racketeering, and obstruction of justice. He was first denied bail in October 2019 and denied bail release again in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Superseding indictments were filed in Chicago on February 13, 2020, and in New York on March 13, 2020, raising the total number of charges to 22. He was incarcerated at Metropolitan Correctional Center, Chicago from July 11, 2019, to June 23, 2021. On June 23, 2021, Kelly was transferred to Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn. On August 5, 2019, the State's Attorney Office in Hennepin County, Minnesota charged Kelly with soliciting a minor and prostitution; prosecutors alleged that in July 2001, following a concert in Minneapolis, Kelly had invited a girl up to his hotel room and paid her $200 to remove her clothing and dance with him. In July 2021, Federal prosecutors asked the court to include alleged evidence of bribes, recordings of threats and more allegations of sexual abuse of minors, including an underaged boy he met at McDonald's, as pattern evidence in his trial. Criminal conviction (2021) The federal trial began on August 18, 2021. After weeks of testimony and two days of deliberations, on September 27, 2021, the jury found Kelly guilty on nine counts including racketeering, sexual exploitation of a child, kidnapping, bribery, sex trafficking, and a violation of the Mann Act. The judge ordered that Kelly remain in custody pending sentencing, which was set for May 4, 2022. After the jury delivered their verdict, women's rights attorney Gloria Allred, who represented several victims, stated that Kelly was the worst sexual predator she had pursued in her 47-year career of practicing law. Other legal issues After a July 1996 brawl at a Lafayette, Louisiana health club involving Kelly and his entourage, Kelly was placed on a year's unsupervised probation starting August 13, 1997, after being found guilty of battery. One of the victims needed 110 facial stitches. Also that year, a 20-year-old accused Kelly in civil court of having sexual relations with her when he was 24 and she was 15. Kelly settled the lawsuit in 1998 for $250,000, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. On April 8, 1998, Kelly was arrested on three misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct, including one charge on violating noise ordinance for playing his music extremely loud from his car. Prosecutors from the district attorney's office dropped the first two charges on May 7 and the noise charge on July 22 that year. On March 6, 2019, Kelly was taken back to the Cook County Jail after failing to pay $161,633 in child support. On March 9, 2019, he was released after someone, who did not want to be identified, paid off the child support. His lawyer says he could not discuss the payment due to a gag order. Influence Kelly is considered to be one of the most successful R&B artists since the mid-1980s. He is also one of the best-selling music artists in the United States, with over 30 million albums sold, as well as only the fifth black artist to enter the top 50 of the same list. Rolling Stone magazine called him "arguably the most important R&B figure of the 1990s and 2000s." Music executive Barry Weiss described Kelly as "the modern-day Prince, although there's a bit of Marvin Gaye in him, and a bit of Irving Berlin." In addition to his solo and collaboration success, Kelly has also written and produced several hit songs, such as "Fortunate" for Maxwell, "You Are Not Alone" for Michael Jackson, "G.H.E.T.T.O.U.T." for Changing Faces, "Bump, Bump, Bump" for B2K, and many more. R. Kelly has been compared to artists like Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye. Personal life Kelly's mother, Joanne, died from cancer in 1993. He has given conflicting accounts of where he was during his mother's passing. In 1996, Kelly married Andrea Kelly, his former backup dancer and mother of his three children. Andrea filed a restraining order against Kelly in September 2005 after a physical altercation, ultimately filing for divorce in 2006. In January 2009, after separating in the fall of 2005, Kelly and his wife Andrea Kelly finalized their divorce after 11 years of marriage. Charity and donations In 2007, Kelly released the song "Rise Up" for Virginia Tech after the 2007 school shooting, and donated the net proceeds to the families of the victims. In 2010, Kelly penned the song "Sign of a Victory" for the FIFA World Cup, with all proceeds benefiting African charities. In 2011, he performed at a charity event in Chicago benefiting Clara's House, a now-shuttered (Jan 2018) facility designed to build employment, housing, health care, and education in the projects of Chicago. In 2016, Kelly donated cases of water to the Flint water crisis. Honors and awards Kelly has been awarded and nominated for multiple awards during his career, as a songwriter, producer, and singer. He was granted three Grammy Awards for his song "I Believe I Can Fly": Best Male R&B Vocal Performance, Best Rhythm and Blues Song, and Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or for Television. Discography Studio albums Born into the 90's (1992) (with Public Announcement) 12 Play (1993) R. Kelly (1995) R. (1998) TP-2.com (2000) The Best of Both Worlds (2002) (with Jay-Z) Chocolate Factory (2003) Happy People/U Saved Me (2004) Unfinished Business (2004) (with Jay-Z) TP.3 Reloaded (2005) Double Up (2007) Untitled (2009) Love Letter (2010) Write Me Back (2012) Black Panties (2013) The Buffet (2015) 12 Nights of Christmas (2016) Filmography Books Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me (2012, autobiography) Tours 60653 Tour (w/ Public Announcement) (1993) The 12 Play Very Necessary Tour (with Salt-N-Pepa) (1994) The Down Low Top Secret Tour (with LL Cool J, Xscape, and Solo) (1996) The Get Up on a Room Tour (with Kelly Price, Nas, Foxy Brown, and Deborah Cox) (1999) The TP-2.com Tour (with Sunshine Anderson & Syleena Johnson) (2001) The Key in the Ignition Tour (with Ashanti) (2003) The Best Of Both Worlds Tour (w/ Jay-Z) (2004) The Light It Up Tour (2006) The Double Up Tour (with J. Holiday & Keyshia Cole) (2007) The Ladies Make Some Noise Tour (with K. Michelle) (2009) Love Letter Tour (with Keyshia Cole & Marsha Ambrosius) (2011) The Single Ladies Tour (with Tamia) (2012–13) Black Panties Tour (2014–16) The Buffet Tour (2016) See also Honorific nicknames in popular music List of artists who reached number one in the United States List of Billboard number-one singles List of highest-certified music artists in the United States List of songs recorded by R. Kelly List of songs written and produced by R. Kelly List of unreleased songs recorded by R. Kelly Shaggy defense References External links R. Kelly: Sex, Girls and Videotapes, BBC documentary, March 28, 2018 1967 births Living people 20th-century American criminals 21st-century American criminals African-American basketball players African-American Christians African-American male actors 20th-century African-American male singers African-American record producers African-American male singer-songwriters American contemporary R&B singers American gospel singers American hip hop record producers American hip hop singers American male criminals American male film actors American men's basketball players American music arrangers American music industry executives American music video directors American people convicted of child sexual abuse American people convicted of kidnapping American prisoners and detainees American soul musicians American soul singers American sportspeople convicted of crimes American tenors Atlantic City Seagulls players Basketball players from Illinois Child marriage in the United States Criminals from Chicago Grammy Award winners Guards (basketball) Jive Records artists Male actors from Chicago Music video codirectors People acquitted of sex crimes People convicted of racketeering People convicted of sex trafficking People convicted of violating the Mann Act People from Olympia Fields, Illinois Prisoners and detainees of the United States Record producers from Illinois Shooting guards Singers from Chicago Small forwards Sportspeople from Cook County, Illinois Writers from Chicago Singer-songwriters from Illinois 21st-century African-American male singers LGBT singers	false	[ "Phoenix Rising is a 1998 album by the Temptations for the Motown label, featuring the debut of new Temptations Barrington \"Bo\" Henderson, Terry Weeks, and Harry McGilberry, following the departure of Ali-Ollie Woodson, who ended his tenure with the group (following the release of the 1995 album For Lovers Only); as well as the final Temptations album for Theo Peoples, who Henderson replaced. The album, the Temptations' first million-selling album in over twenty years, features the hit single \"Stay\", which samples the group's 1965 hit \"My Girl\". Although not commercially released as a single, \"Stay\" was a Top 30 R&B Hit, peaking at #28. The Temptations' Phoenix Rising was certified Platinum by the RIAA on November 15, 1999, later reaching Double Platinum status. \"Stay\" also peaked at #1 on the Urban Adult Contemporary charts. Later singles \"This Is My Promise\" and \"How Could He Hurt You\" reached #3 and #5 respectively on the Urban AC charts as well.\n\nTrack listing\n\nPersonnel\nThe Temptations\nTerry Weeks - tenor/baritone vocals\nBarrington \"Bo\" Henderson - tenor vocals on \"How Could He Hurt You\"\nTheo Peoples - tenor/baritone vocals\nOtis Williams - tenor/baritone vocals\nRon Tyson - tenor/falsetto vocals\nHarry McGilberry - bass vocals\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nReferences\n\n1998 albums\nThe Temptations albums\nAlbums produced by Narada Michael Walden\nMotown albums", "A Time for Us is the debut studio album by Australian recording artist Luke Kennedy, who finished second on the second season of The Voice Australia. The album was released on 12 July 2013, through Universal Music Australia. It features eight songs Kennedy performed on The Voice, two original songs, as well as two newly recorded covers.\n\nSingles\n \"Stay for a Minute\" – Released on 5 July 2013. It did not reach the Aria Charts top 100.\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences\n\n2013 debut albums" ]
[ "R. Kelly", "2009: Untitled and Africa", "Can you tell me about the Untitled and Africa?", "in February 2009, Kelly announced that he was out there working on the album and that it would be called Untitled.", "How long did it take for him to work on it?", "was released under Jive Records on December 1, 2009.", "Was this a popular album?", "The single \"Number One\", which features Keri Hilson, peaked at #8 on the US R&B Chart.", "For how long did it stay on the charts?", "I don't know." ]	C_11f296c5dc0b4f43ad0d6184b5715ed2_0	How many copies of the album was sold once released?	5	How many copies of the album Untitled and Africa was sold once released?	R. Kelly	January 2009, after separating in fall of 2005, Kelly finalized divorce to ex-wife Andrea Kelly. The couple had been married for 11 years. On June 3, 2009, Kelly released his first ever mixtape, The Demo Tape (Gangsta Grillz) presented by DJ Skee and DJ Drama as a way to reintroduce himself to fans. While at the Velvet Room in Atlanta in February 2009, Kelly announced that he was out there working on the album and that it would be called Untitled. The album was given a September 29, 2009 release date, but was delayed until October 13, 2009. The album release was again delayed and was released under Jive Records on December 1, 2009. It got mixed to positive reviews from critics. The single "Number One", which features Keri Hilson, peaked at #8 on the US R&B Chart. Kelly performed for the first time in Africa headlining the Arise African Fashion Awards in Johannesburg, South Africa on June 20, 2009. Kelly scheduled to perform in Cape Town before heading to Nigeria as part of the annual ThisDay music and fashion festival in July. Kelly also performed in Kampala, Uganda in January 2010. He also scheduled to perform in London as part of his first international tour in eight years, but he did not make his London concert. "I'm very excited about my first visit to Africa, I've dreamed about this for a long time and it's finally here," Kelly said in a statement. "It will be one of the highlights of not only my career but my life. I can't wait to perform in front of my fans in Africa -- who have been some of the best in the world." In December 2009, Kelly teamed up with biographer David Ritz and Tavis Smiley's SmileyBooks publications to write his memoirs entitled Soulacoaster. SmileyBooks publisher and founder, Tavis Smiley stated that the memoir's main focus won't be on Kelly's trials and tribulations. Smiley was quoted saying "If anyone thinks this bookis going to fixate on [R. Kelly's trials], they are going to be sadly mistaken. It is going to be a holistic look at his life thus far and the life and legacy that he's building." CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER	Robert Sylvester Kelly (born January 8, 1967) is an American singer, songwriter, record producer and convicted sex offender. He has been credited with helping to redefine R&B and hip hop, earning nicknames such as "the King of R&B", "the King of Pop-Soul", and the "Pied Piper of R&B". Kelly is known for songs including "I Believe I Can Fly", "Bump N' Grind", "Your Body's Callin', "Gotham City", "Ignition (Remix)", "If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time", "The World's Greatest", "I'm a Flirt (Remix)", and the hip hopera "Trapped in the Closet". In 1998, Kelly won three Grammy Awards for "I Believe I Can Fly". Although Kelly is primarily a singer and songwriter, he has written, produced, and remixed songs, singles, and albums for other artists. In 1996, he was nominated for a Grammy Award for writing Michael Jackson's song "You Are Not Alone". Kelly has sold over 75 million records worldwide, making him the most successful R&B male artist of the 1990s and one of the world's best-selling music artists. In 2010, Billboard magazine considered Kelly the most successful R&B artist in history and listed him as the Top R&B/Hip Hop Artist for the time period between 1985 and 2010. In 2012, he was listed as the 55th best-selling music artist in the United States, with over 32 million album sales. Since the 1990s, Kelly has been repeatedly accused of sexual abuse, often with underage girls. He has faced multiple civil suits and has been charged by criminal courts in Chicago, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota. He repeatedly denied the charges. In June 2002, he was indicted on 21 counts of making child pornography. He was acquitted six years later in 2008. In January 2019, a widely viewed Lifetime docuseries titled Surviving R. Kelly detailed allegations of sexual abuse by multiple women, allegations that Kelly continued to deny. Facing pressure from the public using the Mute R. Kelly hashtag, RCA Records dropped Kelly. In 2019, Kelly was indicted by a Cook County grand jury in Chicago on 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse in February, followed by an additional 11 counts of sexual assault and abuse filed by the same court in May. On July 11, 2019, he was arrested on federal charges alleging sex crimes, human trafficking, child pornography, racketeering, and obstruction of justice. Kelly faced a total of 22 federal criminal charges as of January 29, 2021. A federal judge ordered Kelly jailed pending trial on the charges. On September 27, 2021, a federal jury in New York found Kelly guilty on nine counts including racketeering, sexual exploitation of a child, kidnapping, bribery, sex trafficking, and a violation of the Mann Act. The judge ordered that he remain in custody pending sentencing, set for May 4, 2022. Kelly faces a second trial for producing child pornography set for August 2022. Early life Robert Sylvester Kelly was born at Chicago Lying-in Hospital in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, on January 8, 1967. He has three half-siblings, an older sister and brother, along with a younger brother. His mother, Joanne Kelly, was a schoolteacher and devout Baptist. She was born in Arkansas. The identity of his father, who was absent from Kelly's life, is not known. His family lived in the Ida B. Wells Homes public housing project in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood. Around the time he was five years old, Kelly's mother married his stepfather, Lucious, who reportedly worked for an airline. Kelly began singing in the church choir at age eight. Kelly described having a girlfriend, Lulu, at age eight, in his autobiography. He stated that their last play date turned tragic when, after fighting with older children over a play area by a creek, she was pushed into the water, swept downstream by a fast-moving current, and drowned. Kelly called Lulu his first musical inspiration. Kelly said members of his household would act differently when his mother and grandparents were not home. From age eight to 14, he was sexually abused by an older female family member. Kelly's younger brother Carey stated that he suffered from years of sexual abuse at the hands of his older sister, Theresa, who was entrusted with babysitting her siblings. Carey stated that although their older brother was spared and allowed to play outside, both he and Kelly were punished at separate times indoors by Theresa, who refused to acknowledge the abuse when confronted years later. Explaining why he never told anyone, Kelly wrote in his 2012 autobiography Soulacoaster that he was "too afraid and too ashamed". Around age 10, Kelly was also sexually abused by an older male who was a friend of the family. In his autobiography, Kelly described being shot in the shoulder, at age 11, by boys who were attempting to steal his bike, although a family friend later stated that Kelly had shot himself while attempting suicide. In September 1980, Kelly entered Kenwood Academy in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, where he met music teacher Lena McLin, who encouraged Kelly to perform the Stevie Wonder classic "Ribbon in the Sky" in the high school talent show. A shy Kelly put on sunglasses, was escorted onto the stage, sang the song and won first prize. McLin encouraged Kelly to leave the high school basketball team and concentrate on music. She said he was furious at first, but after his performance in the talent show, he changed his mind.Kelly was diagnosed with the learning disability dyslexia, which left him unable to read or write. Kelly dropped out of high school after attending Kenwood Academy for one year. He began performing in the subway under the Chicago "L" tracks. He regularly busked at the "L" stop on the Red Line's Jackson station in the Loop. In his youth, Kelly played basketball with Illinois state champion basketball player Ben Wilson and later sang "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday" at Wilson's funeral. Career 1990–1996: Born into the 90's, 12 Play and R. Kelly MGM (Musically Gifted Men or Mentally Gifted Men) was formed in 1989 with Robert Kelly, Marc McWilliams, Vincent Walker and Shawn Brooks. In 1990, MGM recorded and released one single, "Why You Wanna Play Me"; after its release, the group disbanded. Kelly gained national recognition in 1989 when MGM participated on the talent TV show Big Break, hosted by Natalie Cole. After MGM performed “All My Love”, which would become a demo for Kelly's song “She's Got That Vibe” the group went on to win the $100,000 grand prize. In 1991, Kelly signed with Jive Records. Kelly's debut album Born into the 90's was released in early 1992 (credited as R. Kelly and Public Announcement). The album, released during the new jack swing period of the early 1990s, yielded the R&B hits "She's Got That Vibe", "Honey Love", "Dedicated", and "Slow Dance (Hey Mr. DJ)", with Kelly singing lead vocals. During late 1992, Kelly and Public Announcement embarked on a tour entitled "60653" after the zip code of their Chicago neighborhood. This would be the only album co-credited with Public Announcement. Kelly separated from the group in January 1993. Kelly's first solo album, 12 Play, was released on November 9, 1993, and yielded the singer's first number-one hit, "Bump N' Grind", which spent a record-breaking 12 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot R&B Singles chart. Subsequent hit singles: "Your Body's Callin'" (U.S. Hot 100: #13, U.S. R&B: #2) and "Sex Me" (U.S. Hot 100: #20, U.S. R&B: #8). Both singles sold 500,000 copies in the United States and were certified Gold by the RIAA. In 1994, 12 Play was certified Gold by the RIAA, eventually going six times platinum. In 1995, Kelly garnered his first Grammy nominations; two for writing, producing and composing Michael Jackson's last number one hit "You Are Not Alone". Kelly's success continued with the November 14, 1995 release of R. Kelly, his eponymous second studio album. Critics praised him for his departure from salacious bedroom songs to embracing vulnerability. New York Times contributor Stephen Holden described Kelly as "The reigning king of pop-soul sex talks a lot tougher than Barry White, the father of such fluffed-up pillow talk and along with Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway, [both] major influences for Kelly." Also in December 1995, Professor Michael Eric Dyson critiqued Kelly's self-titled album "R. Kelly" for VIBE. Dyson described Kelly's growth from the 12 Play album: "Kelly reshapes his personal turmoil to artistic benefit" and noted that Kelly is "reborn before our very own ears." The album reached number one on the Billboard 200 chart, becoming Kelly's first number one album on the chart, and reached number one on the R&B album charts; his second. The R. Kelly album spawned three platinum hit singles: "You Remind Me of Something" (U.S. Hot 100: #4, U.S. R&B: #1), "I Can't Sleep Baby (If I)" (U.S. Hot 100: #5, U.S. R&B: #1), and "Down Low (Nobody Has To Know)" (U.S. Hot 100: #4, U.S. R&B: #1); a duet with Ronald Isley. Kelly's self-titled album sold four million copies, receiving 4× platinum certification from the RIAA. He promoted the album with a 50-city "Down Low Top Secret Tour" with LL Cool J, Xscape, and Solo. On November 26, 1996, Kelly released "I Believe I Can Fly", an inspirational song originally released on the soundtrack for the film Space Jam. "I Believe I Can Fly" reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and No. 1 on the UK charts for three weeks and won three Grammy Awards in 1998. In that same year, he contributed Freak Tonight for the A Thin Line Between Love and Hate soundtrack. 1997–2001: Basketball, R., TP-2.COM, and Rockland Records In 1997, Kelly signed a contract to play professional basketball with the Atlantic City Seagulls of the USBL. He wore the number 12 in honor of his album 12 Play. Kelly said "I love basketball enough to not totally let go of my music, but just put it to the side for a minute and fulfill some dreams of mine that I've had for a long time." Kelly's USBL contract contained a clause that would allow him to fulfill a music obligation when necessary. "If Whitney Houston needs a song written", said Ken Gross, the Seagulls owner who signed Kelly, "he would be able to leave the team to do that and come back". "It wasn't a gimmick", Gross continued, "he's a ballplayer. He can play." Kelly is the first music artist to play professional basketball. In 1998, Kelly wrote and produced the debut album of another protégé Sparkle, which was released under his Rockland label and distributed through Interscope. In 2000, Sparkle went platinum due in part to the success of the first single, "Be Careful", a duet with Kelly. On November 17, 1998, Kelly released his fourth studio and first double album, R. Musically, the album spans different genres from pop (Celine Dion), street rap (Nas and Jay-Z) to Blues ("Suicide"). Dave Hoekstra of the Los Angeles Times described the album as "easily the most ambitious project of his career." As the year 2000 commenced, Kelly racked up a slew of new awards reflecting his status as an established R&B superstar. In January 2000, he had won Favorite Male Soul/R&B Artist at the American Music Awards and, in February, was nominated for several Grammy Awards, including Best Male R&B Vocal Performance ("When a Woman's Fed Up"), Best R&B Album (R.), and Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group ("Satisfy You") with P. Diddy. On November 7, 2000, Kelly released his fifth studio album, TP-2.com, a project aligned with his breakthrough album, 12 Play. Unlike R., all songs on TP-2.com were written, arranged, and produced by Kelly. AllMusic's Jason Birchmeier gave TP-2.com 4 stars and stated: "Kelly knows how to take proven formulas and funnel them through his own stylistic aesthetic, which usually means slowing down the tempo, laying on lush choruses of strings and background vocals, taming down the lyrics for radio, and catering his pitch primarily to wistful women. In 2001, Kelly won the Outstanding Achievement Award at the Music of Black Origin or MOBO Awards and Billboard magazine ranked TP-2.com number 94 on the magazine's Top 200 Albums of the Decade. Kelly's song "The World's Greatest", from the soundtrack to the 2001 Ali film, was a hit. Rockland Records In 1998 Kelly launched his own label, the Interscope Records-distributed Rockland Records. The label's roster included artists Sparkle, Boo & Gotti, Talent, Vegas Cats, Lady, Frankie, Secret Weapon, and Rebecca F. Also in 1998, the label's first artist, Sparkle released her debut self-titled album, Sparkle. In addition to producing and writing the project, Kelly made vocal contribution to the hit duet "Be Careful", which contributed largely to the album's success. The album was certified platinum in December 2000. In 1999, he wrote and produced the soundtrack to the Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy movie Life, which features tracks from K-Ci & JoJo, Maxwell, Mýa, and Destiny's Child. The soundtrack was released on the Rockland label. 2002–2003: The Best of Both Worlds and Chocolate Factory On January 24, 2002, at a press conference announcing The Best of Both Worlds completion, celebrities such as Johnnie Cochran, Russell Simmons, Luther Vandross, and Sean Combs praised the album, with Jay-Z stating that he hoped the collaboration represents "more unity for black people on a whole." MTV's Shaheem Reid wrote: "And if Jay and Kelly can put their egos to the side long enough to wrap up and promote their album, then their labels—Def Jam and Jive, respectively—can surely figure out a way to join forces and make cheddar together." On February 8, 2002, Kelly performed at the closing ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics at the same time a news scandal broke of a sex tape that appeared to show Kelly with an underage girl. When the joint album leaked on February 22, 2002, it caused the label, Roc-A-Fella, to modify the album's release date in March. Jay-Z expressed frustration about the album leak to MTV News: "It's the gift and the curse. It's an honor that everybody wants your music fast, but on the other hand, it's another thing when the music gets out before you [want it to]. Because that's your art. You feel attached to it. You feel a certain way and you want people to go out and support it. The time that you take, it's like a piece of your life. You take parts of your life and you put it on these records and then for it to just be traded and moved around [is frustrating]. The Best of Both Worlds album sold 285,000 copies in its opening week and debuted at number two on the Billboard 200. It was a critical and commercial disappointment. In May 2002, Kelly's initial sixth studio album, Loveland, leaked and was delayed to release in November. Eventually, a second thought caused Kelly to restructure the entirety of the album, including its title; Loveland would later be packaged as a deluxe edition bonus disc of the now-renamed Chocolate Factory. In October of that year, Kelly released the remix to its single, "Ignition". It had since charted at number two on the Billboard Hot 100. On February 18, 2003, the album, Chocolate Factory was released to highly critical fanfare. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, ending the first two-week run of rapper 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Tryin'. It sold 532,000 copies in its first week. The album was also supported by its follow-up singles, "Snake" and the remix of "Step in the Name of Love"; the latter of which peaked at number nine on the Hot 100. Later that year, in September, Kelly released his first greatest hits album, The R. in R&B Collection, Vol. 1, including three unreleased songs; one of which being "Thoia Thoing". 2004–2005: Unfinished Business, Happy People/U Saved Me and TP.3 Reloaded Between mid-2003 and early 2004, Kelly began work on another double CD album, one with "happy" tracks and another with "inspirational" tracks. The double album, Happy People/U Saved Me, was released on August 24, 2004. It debuted at number two on the Billboard 200, with first week sales of 264,000 copies. Both of the album's titled tracks respectively performed underwhelmingly; "Happy People" charted at number twenty-nine on the Adult R&B song chart while "U Saved Me" peaked at number fifty-two on the Billboard Hot 100. Two months later, Kelly and Jay-Z reunited to release their second collaborative album, Unfinished Business. The album received criticism and like its predecessor, was also a commercial failure, despite debuting at number one on the Billboard 200. The promotion of the album and its Best of Both Worlds tour were both plagued by tension between the stars, with Kelly reportedly showing up late or not at all to gigs. Kelly complained that the touring lights were not directed towards him and allegedly assaulted the tour's lighting director. Jay-Z eventually removed Kelly halfway through the tour, after a member of Jay-Z's entourage pepper sprayed Kelly on October 29, 2004. Tyran (Ty-Ty) Smith was charged with assault, but took a plea deal for disorderly conduct. Kelly launched a $75-million lawsuit against Jay-Z for removing him from the tour; Jay-Z's counter suit was dismissed by a judge. Kelly redeemed himself commercially after appearing on Ja Rule's single, "Wonderful" alongside Ashanti. The song charted at number five on the Billboard Hot 100, topped the UK Singles Chart and went platinum in the summer of 2005. After finishing Happy People/U Saved Me and Unfinished Business in 2004, Kelly released TP.3 Reloaded in July 2005. It became Kelly's fifth consecutive number-one album in his career. TP.3 Reloaded was heavily cross-promoted by the first five chapters of the hip-hopera, Trapped in the Closet, which would later expand to other chapters for years to come. 2006–2009: Double Up and Untitled, Africa In December 2006, Kelly built momentum for his eighth solo studio album, Double Up, after guest-appearing on Bow Wow's "I'm a Flirt". Three months later, Kelly's remix of "I'm a Flirt" was released, but instead of Bow Wow, it features T.I. and T-Pain. On May 29, 2007, the album was released. It became Kelly's sixth and final album in his career to be number one on the Billboard 200. Kelly's other singles from Double Up titled "Same Girl" was a duet of Kelly and Usher, while "Rise Up" was a tribute to the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting that occurred earlier that year in April, a month before the album was released. The song was previously released as a digital download on May 15, 2007. Proceeds were donated to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund to help family members of the victims of the shootings. Kelly began his Double Up tour with Ne-Yo, Keyshia Cole and J. Holiday opening for him. After two shows, promoter Leonard Rowe had Ne-Yo removed from the tour because of a contract dispute. However, Ne-Yo alleges that the reason for the dropout was because Ne-Yo believes he received a better response from critics and fans, even though he performed at just two shows. Ne-Yo filed a lawsuit against Rowe Entertainment. Kelly was not mentioned in the lawsuit. In December 2007, Kelly failed to appear at another preliminary court hearing on his case due to his tour bus being held up in Utah. The judge threatened to revoke Kelly's bond, but eventually decided against it. In 2008, Kelly released a rap track titled "I'm a Beast" in which he coarsely attacked his detractors, yet did not name the subjects of the song. In 2008, before and after being acquitted on child pornography charges, Billboard reported that Kelly had plans to release his newest album titled 12 Play: Fourth Quarter in the summer of that year but the album was postponed. Billboard named Kelly among the most successful artists ever for its 50th Anniversary List. In the spring, the promotional single "Hair Braider", peaked at No. 56 on Billboard's R&B chart. On July 28, the entire album leaked online, causing the title to be scrapped. In February 2009, Kelly announced that he was working on a new album called Untitled with a projected release date of September 29, but it had been delayed to December. In June 2009, he released his first mixtape, The "Demo" Tape, presented by DJ Skee and DJ Drama. Kelly headlined the Arise African Fashion Awards in Johannesburg, South Africa, on June 20, 2009. He performed in Cape Town, followed by Nigeria as part of the annual ThisDay music and fashion festival in July. That same month, he released "Number One", featuring singer-songwriter Keri Hilson. Then, on December 1, Kelly's untitled ninth solo album was released. It charted on the Billboard 200 at number four. More singles from the album include "Echo", "Supaman High" and "Be My #1". In January 2010, Kelly performed in Kampala, Uganda. "I'm very excited about my first visit to Africa, I've dreamed about this for a long time and it's finally here", Kelly said in a statement. "It will be one of the highlights of not only my career but my life. I can't wait to perform in front of my fans in Africa—who have been some of the best in the world." 2010–2012: Epic, Love Letter, throat surgery, and Write Me Back Kelly performed at the 2010 FIFA World Cup opening ceremony on June 11, 2010. In an interview in the September 2010 issue of XXL magazine, Kelly said he was working on three new albums (Epic, Love Letter, and Zodiac) which he described as "remixing himself". Epic, a compilation filled with powerful ballads including "The World's Greatest" and "Sign of a Victory", only saw a European release on September 21, 2010. However, it is also available for streaming worldwide. In November 2010, Kelly collaborated with several African musicians forming a supergroup known as One8. The group featured 2Face from Nigeria, Ali Kiba from Tanzania, Congolese singer Fally Ipupa, 4X4 from Ghana, hip-hop artist Movaizhaleine from Gabon, Zambia's JK, Ugandan hip-hop star Navio and Kenya's Amani, the only female in the group. The first release from the group was "Hands Across the World" written and produced by Kelly. Kelly's tenth album Love Letter, released on December 14, 2010, included 15 songs, one of which was Kelly singing "You Are Not Alone", a track Kelly originally wrote for Michael Jackson. The first single "When a Woman Loves" was nominated for a Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards. At the 2011 Pre-Grammy Gala in Los Angeles, Kelly performed a medley of hits and in March 2011, Kelly was named the #1 R&B artist of the last 25 years by Billboard. On July 19, 2011, Kelly was admitted to the Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago to undergo emergency throat surgery to drain an abscess on one of his tonsils, and was released on July 21, 2011. He cancelled his performance at the Reggae Sumfest in Jamaica that was scheduled for the following Friday. Johnny Gourzong, Sumfest Productions executive director, commented, "We are truly going to miss his presence on the festival." On September 23, 2011, Variety confirmed that Kelly had signed on to write original music for the Sparkle soundtrack. In 2011, Kelly worked with writer David Ritz on an autobiography entitled Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me, which was later released in the summer of 2012. On October 7, 2011, after Sony's RCA Music Group announced the consolidation of Jive, Arista and J Records into RCA Records, Kelly was set to release music under the RCA brand. Following his throat surgery, Kelly released "Shut Up" to generally favorable reviews: Spin magazine said, "Kelly taking aim at the haters who said "he's washed up, he's lost it." He hasn't. Dude's voice is in prime smooth R&B form". On December 21, 2011, Kelly made a live appearance on The X Factor and gave his first performance after the surgery. Kelly revealed to Rolling Stone that he felt like he was "just starting out" and how the performance was a "wake up call" for him. In 2012, Kelly made a series of announcements including a follow-up to the Love Letter album titled Write Me Back, which was released on June 26 to little fanfare, as well as a third installment of the Trapped in the Closet and The Single Ladies Tour featuring R&B singer, Tamia. In February 2012, Kelly performed "I Look to You", a song he wrote for Whitney Houston, at Houston's homegoing. 2013–2016: Black Panties, The Buffet, and 12 Nights of Christmas During 2013, Kelly continued his "The Single Ladies Tour". He performed at music festivals across North America, including Bonnaroo, Pitchfork, and Macy's Music Festival. On June 30, 2013, R. Kelly performed live at BET Awards Show singing hits as well as his new track "My Story" featuring Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz. The song was the lead single for Kelly's twelfth studio album Black Panties. released on December 10, 2013. Writing for New York magazine, David Marchese stated that Black Panties "was like a dare to the world: After all that he’d been accused of, after avoiding conviction, could R. Kelly still get away with making sex-obsessed music?" In 2013, Kelly collaborated with several artists including Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, and Jennifer Hudson. In an interview with Global Grind in November, he described follow up work with Celine Dion after their number one single "I'm Your Angel" from 1998. Kelly worked with singer Mariah Carey for her album "The Art of Letting Go". Kelly co-wrote and sang on Lady Gaga's song "Do What U Want" from her 2013 album Artpop, performing the duet with her on Saturday Night Live on November 16, 2013, and at the 2013 American Music Awards. "Do What U Want" had since been removed from streaming services and re-releases of Gaga's Artpop album following sexual misconduct allegations against Kelly in early 2019. He also collaborated with Birdman and Lil Wayne on "We Been On", a single from the Cash Money Records compilation, Rich Gang. He also appeared on Twista's first single on his new album "Dark Horse". On November 17, 2013, Kelly and Justin Bieber debuted a collaboration entitled "PYD". Kelly was featured on the soundtrack album of the film The Best Man Holiday with his song "Christmas, I'll Be Steppin'". Kelly stated his intention to tour with R&B singer Mary J. Blige on "The King & Queen Tour" prior to the Black Panties Tour while continuing to create segments of the hip hopera Trapped in the Closet. In July 2014, Kelly announced that he was working on a house music album. In November 2015, Kelly released "Switch Up" featuring fellow Chicagoan Jeremih and Lil Wayne, followed by "Wake Up Everybody", "Marching Band" and "Backyard Party". The following month, the album containing those singles, The Buffet, was released. It charted poorly on the Billboard 200 at number sixteen with first-week sales of 39,000 album-equivalent copies. The following year, after a two-and-a-half-year delay, Kelly presented his only Christmas album, also his fourteenth and final studio album in his career, 12 Nights of Christmas, which was released on October 21, 2016. In 2019, Kelly was dropped from RCA Records following the airing of Surviving R. Kelly, which detailed numerous sexual assault allegations against the singer for decades. As of October 2021, following his New York conviction, Kelly's YouTube channel was terminated, but his catalogue remains available on YouTube Music. Artistry Musical style and influences Kelly's music took root in R&B, hip hop and soul. He was influenced by listening to his mother, Joanne Kelly, sing. She played records by Donny Hathaway and Marvin Gaye, inspirations for Kelly. In reference to Hathaway, Kelly stated: "A guy like Donny Hathaway had a focused, sexual texture in his voice that I always wanted in mine. He had smooth, soulful tones, but he was spiritual at the same time." In his autobiography, Kelly stated that he was heavily influenced by Marvin Gaye's R&B Lothario image. "I had to make a 'baby-makin' album. If Marvin Gaye did it, I wanted to do it", Kelly said. While Kelly created a smooth, professional mixture of hip-hop beats, soulman crooning and funk, the most distinctive element of his music is its explicit sensuality. "Sex Me", "Bump n' Grind", "Your Body's Callin'", and "Feelin' on Yo Booty" are considered to be examples, as their productions were seductive enough to sell such blatant come-ons. Kelly's crossover appeal was also sustained by his development of a flair for pop balladry. Vocal style and lyrical themes Writing for the New York Daily News in 1997, Nunyo Demasio stated "With a voice that easily shifts from booming baritone to seductive alto, Kelly has gained international celebrity by combining streetwise rhythms with sexually explicit lyrics." Love and sex are the topics of the majority of Kelly's lyrical content, although he has written about a wide variety of themes such as inspiration and spirituality. Chicago Sun-Times reporters Jim DeRogatis and Abdon Pallasch observed about the contrasting themes: "... the image he liked to project was that of the "R&B Thug"... bringing the streetwise persona of the gangsta rapper into the more polite world of R&B." Kelly expressed that he writes from everyday experiences and prides himself on being versatile. Larry Khan, senior vice president of Jive's urban marketing and promotion, said that Kelly's musical compass is second to none. DeRogatis and Pallasch reported that at concerts where Kelly would go from singing "Like a Real Freak" to "I Wish": "Many fans found these abrupt shifts between the transcendent and the venal, the inspirational and the X-rated jarring." Sexual abuse allegations Kelly has repeatedly faced allegations of sexual abuse that have resulted in multiple civil suits and criminal trials. Early reports of sexual abuse (1990s) In December 2000, the Chicago Sun-Times first reported that police had made two investigations that Kelly was having sex with an underage female but had to drop the investigations due to lack of cooperation by the girls accusing him. A civil suit filed in 1996 by Tiffany Hawkins detailed allegations that, starting in 1991 when she was age 15, Kelly had sex with her as an underage high school student, encouraged her to recruit her schools friends, and pressured her into engaging in group sex with other underage girls. In 1998, Kelly settled the lawsuit with Hawkins for $250,000. Illegal marriage (1994) Kelly had been introduced to a promising young singer from Detroit named Aaliyah by her uncle, Barry Hankerson, when she was 12 years old. During Kelly's 2021 criminal trial for sex trafficking and racketeering, a witness testified that Kelly had sexual contact with Aaliyah starting when she was 13 or 14 years old. Kelly wrote and produced Aaliyah's first album, Age Ain't Nothing but a Number, in 1994. On August 31, 1994, Kelly, then 27, illegally married Aaliyah, then 15, in a secret ceremony in Cook County, Illinois. Kelly's tour manager, Demetrius Smith, admitted he facilitated the wedding by obtaining falsified identification for Aaliyah which listed her as 18 years old. In 2019, a contemporaneous video surfaced showing Kelly stating—less than a year before the marriage took place—that Aaliyah was 14 years old. The marriage was annulled in February 1995 at the behest of Aaliyah's family by a Michigan judge. Kelly and Aaliyah, however, both denied that the marriage occurred and even denied that their relationship had ever moved beyond friendship. In May 1997, Aaliyah filed a lawsuit in Cook County to have the marriage record expunged, stating that she was underage at the time of marriage, had lied by signing the marriage certificate as an 18-year-old, and that she could not legally enter into marriage without parental consent. The expungement request was included in a lawsuit filed by Tiffany Hawkins, who sought to use the marriage documents in her case against Kelly. Hawkins later accepted a settlement of $250,000 from Kelly, subject to a confidentiality agreement, in 1998. In 2019, federal prosecutors in New York charged Kelly with bribery related to the 1994 purchase of a fake ID for Aaliyah in order to obtain a marriage license. Kelly, through his lawyers, admitted in 2021 to having had 'underage sexual contact' with Aaliyah. Sex tape circulates (2002) On February 3, 2002, a video circulated that allegedly showed Kelly engaging in sex with, and urinating on, an underage girl. After the video was released by an unknown source and sent to the Chicago Sun-Times, the publisher broke the story on February 8, 2002, the same day Kelly performed at the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Kelly said in interviews that he was not the man in the video. First criminal indictment (2002) In June 2002, Kelly was indicted in Chicago on 21 counts of child pornography. That same month on June 6, 2002, Kelly was arrested by the Miami Police Department on a Chicago arrest warrant at his Florida vacation home. He was released after one night in jail, the following day after posting bail of $750,000. The alleged victim refused to testify at the trial, and a Chicago jury found Kelly not guilty on all 14 counts of child pornography in June 2008. While investigating the photographs reported in the Chicago Sun-Times, Polk County Sheriff's Office conducted a search of Kelly's residence in Davenport, Florida. During the search, officers recovered 12 images of an alleged underage girl on a digital camera – wrapped in a towel in a duffel bag – which allegedly depicted Kelly "involved in sexual conduct with the female minor." According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the girl in the images obtained from Kelly's Florida home also appears in the videotape which got Kelly indicted in Chicago. Kelly was arrested on January 22, 2003, by Police investigators from Polk County and Miami-Dade County, at Miami's Wyndham Grand Bay Hotel on those charges of 12 counts of possession of child pornography. Kelly was later released from Miami-Dade county jail hours after on a bond posted of $12,000. In March 2004, these charges were dropped due to a lack of probable cause for the search warrants. Allegations of preteen girl molestation (2009) In a divorce court filing unsealed in 2020, R. Kelly's former wife Andrea claims that R. Kelly was accused of molesting a preteen girl in 2009. Huffington Post Live Interview (2015) In December 2015, Kelly appeared on Huffington Post Live in an interview with journalist Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani. The interview was so he could promote the release of his latest album The Buffet. However, during the interview, Modarressy-Tehrani quizzed Kelly about the sexual abuse allegations being levelled against him and wanted to gauge his reaction. This resulted in Kelly growing angry and defensive. He continually shouted over Modarressy-Tehrani, asked her whether she drank and threatened to leave and go to McDonalds. Kelly ultimately stormed out of the interview before it ended. This was one of the first occasions where Kelly was concretely asked about the allegations against him on a public platform. After Kelly's 2021 conviction, Modarressy-Tehrani tweeted: "Now, with this verdict, hopefully, his survivors get some peace and feel this justice. Alleged sex cult (2010s) Jim DeRogatis reported for BuzzFeed News on July 17, 2017, that Kelly was accused by three sets of parents of holding their daughters in an "abusive cult". Kelly and the alleged victims deny the allegations. In March 2018, BBC World Service aired a documentary entitled R Kelly: Sex, Girls and Videotapes presented by reporter Ben Zand that explored the 2017 allegations. This was followed up in May with the BBC Three documentary R Kelly: The Sex Scandal Continues which included interviews with the parents of the Savage daughters. Kelly was again accused of misconduct on April 17, 2018, by a former partner of his who claimed that Kelly "intentionally" infected her with a sexually transmitted disease. A representative for Kelly stated that he "categorically denies all claims and allegations". In a January 2019 BBC News article, a woman named Asante McGee whom Kelly had met in 2014 and taken to live with him some months later, said that she lived with not only Kelly alone, but with other women. She said: "He controlled every aspect of my life, while I lived with him." McGee later moved out on her own accord. Boycott and industry response In May 2018, the Women of Color branch of the Time's Up movement called for a boycott of Kelly's music and performances over the many allegations against him. The boycott was accompanied by a social media campaign called Mute R. Kelly. In response, his management said that Kelly supports the movement in principle, but targeting him was "the attempted lynching of a black man who has made extraordinary contributions to our culture". The music streaming service Spotify announced on May 10, 2018, that it was going to stop promoting or recommending music by both R. Kelly and XXXTentacion. Spotify stated, "We don't censor content because of an artist's or creator's behavior, but we want our editorial decisions—what we choose to program—to reflect our values." Two days later, Apple Music and Pandora also announced that they will no longer be featuring or promoting R. Kelly's music. Spotify received criticism from members of the music industry who expressed worries of a "slippery slope" of muting artists, since R. Kelly had not ever actually been convicted of any crime. Spotify ultimately reversed this decision. Allegations of music industry complicity The Washington Post ran a lengthy article in May 2018, alleging that music industry executives had been aware of Kelly's sexually abusive behavior toward young women for years but did little or nothing about them due to his success as a performer and songwriter. As early as 1994, the newspaper reported, his tour manager had urged Jive Records' founder Clive Calder to tell Kelly he would not release the singer's records if he continued to have "incidents" with women after every concert he gave. Calder told the Post that he regretted not having done more at the time, saying "Clearly, we missed something." Former Jive president Barry Weiss told the newspaper that during 20 years with the label he never concerned himself with Kelly's private life and was unaware of two lawsuits filed against Kelly and the label by women alleging sexual misconduct, suits in which the label had successfully argued it was not liable. Larry Khan, another Jive executive who worked closely with the singer even after viewing the sex tape, likewise implied it was not the label's responsibility, and pointed to Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis as musicians whose labels continued to release and promote their records despite public awareness that they were involved with underage girls. Executives at Epic Records also took a similarly relaxed attitude towards allegations of Kelly's sexual misconduct, the Post claimed. In 2002, after he signed with the label, executive David McPherson allegedly avoided viewing a copy of a tape purportedly showing the singer having sex with an underage girl, even as he had warned Kelly's assistant that if it turned out to be Kelly on that tape, the label would drop him. McPherson did not respond to the Posts requests for comment. An intern with the label whose work suffered after she began a relationship with Kelly, ultimately costing her the position, settled with Epic for $250,000; Cathy Carroll, the executive she worked for, regularly rebuked her former subordinate for having an affair with a married man whenever the two met at social functions for years afterwards, and the damage to the woman's reputation led her to abandon her career in the music industry. Carroll told the newspaper the woman was "starstruck ... A lot of times it's not really the men." The Washington Post also suggested the labels were complicit in the sex-cult allegations from the previous summer's BuzzFeed piece. Employees at the studios where Kelly recorded were required to sign non-disclosure agreements and not enter certain rooms, which they said they believed were where Kelly made the women stay while he worked. Despite the agreements, the newspaper was able to publish screenshots of text exchanges where women in the rooms asked Kelly's assistants to let them out so they could go to the bathroom or get food. The newspaper also published pictures taken after Kelly had concluded a six-week session at a Los Angeles studio, paid for by his then-current label, RCA Records, showing a cup of urine sitting on a piano and urine stains on the wooden floor of another room. Musical response to allegations Kelly released the 19-minute long "I Admit" on SoundCloud on July 23, 2018, as a response to his accusers. The song does not contain any criminal admissions despite its title and chorus, which repeats the lyric "I admit it, I did it". In "I Admit", Kelly denies allegations of domestic violence and pedophilia, asserting that they are matters of opinion. Kelly also denounces Jim DeRogatis and repudiates his investigative report's claim of Kelly operating a "sex cult". Addressing the Mute R. Kelly social media campaign, Kelly sings, "only God can mute me". The song was criticized by reviewers, who described it as an act of trolling. Andrea Kelly and Carey Killa Kelly, R. Kelly's ex-wife and brother, responded to "I Admit" with a remix and a diss track. Surviving R. Kelly (2019–2020) In January 2019, Lifetime began airing a six-part documentary series titled Surviving R. Kelly detailing sexual abuse and misconduct allegations against Kelly. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Loraine Ali observed that the series covered a range of in-depth interviews that "paint a picture of a predator whose behavior was consistently overlooked by the industry, his peers and the public while his spiritual hit was sung in churches and schools." Within two weeks, Kelly launched a Facebook page where he sought to discredit the accusers who appeared in the docuseries. Facebook removed the page for violating their standards as it appeared to contain personal contact information for his accusers. The second season titled Surviving R. Kelly Part II: The Reckoning premiered on January 2, 2020. Following airing of the Surviving R. Kelly documentary, Kelly was listed in Guinness World Records as the most searched for male musician on Google in 2019. He ranked 8th overall on Google's list of the 10 most search for people for the year. Second series of criminal charges (2019–2021) On February 22, 2019, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office in Illinois charged Kelly with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. The charges allege that from 1998 to 2010, Kelly sexually abused four females, three of whom were teen minors at the time, with evidence including a video provided by Michael Avenatti of an alleged new crime. After Kelly turned himself in the day the charges were announced, he was arrested by the Chicago Police Department and taken into custody. The judge set bond at $1 million and ordered Kelly to have no contact with any minor under 18 or alleged victim. Kelly pleaded not guilty to all charges, which he called lies. He was released on bail after three nights in jail at Cook County. On March 6, 2019, Gayle King interviewed Kelly on CBS This Morning, where he insisted on his innocence and blamed social media for the allegations. During the interview, Kelly had an emotional outburst where he stood up, pounded his chest, and yelled. Two women who described themselves as a Kelly's girlfriends and whose parents say are brainwashed captives, declared their love for Kelly and defended him during the broadcast. On July 11, 2019, Kelly was arrested on federal charges alleging sex crimes and obstruction of justice by U.S. Homeland Security investigators and NYPD detectives in Chicago. On July 12, 2019, federal prosecutors from New York and Chicago indicted Kelly on 18 charges, including child sexual exploitation, child pornography production, sex trafficking, kidnapping, forced labor, racketeering, and obstruction of justice. He was first denied bail in October 2019 and denied bail release again in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Superseding indictments were filed in Chicago on February 13, 2020, and in New York on March 13, 2020, raising the total number of charges to 22. He was incarcerated at Metropolitan Correctional Center, Chicago from July 11, 2019, to June 23, 2021. On June 23, 2021, Kelly was transferred to Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn. On August 5, 2019, the State's Attorney Office in Hennepin County, Minnesota charged Kelly with soliciting a minor and prostitution; prosecutors alleged that in July 2001, following a concert in Minneapolis, Kelly had invited a girl up to his hotel room and paid her $200 to remove her clothing and dance with him. In July 2021, Federal prosecutors asked the court to include alleged evidence of bribes, recordings of threats and more allegations of sexual abuse of minors, including an underaged boy he met at McDonald's, as pattern evidence in his trial. Criminal conviction (2021) The federal trial began on August 18, 2021. After weeks of testimony and two days of deliberations, on September 27, 2021, the jury found Kelly guilty on nine counts including racketeering, sexual exploitation of a child, kidnapping, bribery, sex trafficking, and a violation of the Mann Act. The judge ordered that Kelly remain in custody pending sentencing, which was set for May 4, 2022. After the jury delivered their verdict, women's rights attorney Gloria Allred, who represented several victims, stated that Kelly was the worst sexual predator she had pursued in her 47-year career of practicing law. Other legal issues After a July 1996 brawl at a Lafayette, Louisiana health club involving Kelly and his entourage, Kelly was placed on a year's unsupervised probation starting August 13, 1997, after being found guilty of battery. One of the victims needed 110 facial stitches. Also that year, a 20-year-old accused Kelly in civil court of having sexual relations with her when he was 24 and she was 15. Kelly settled the lawsuit in 1998 for $250,000, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. On April 8, 1998, Kelly was arrested on three misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct, including one charge on violating noise ordinance for playing his music extremely loud from his car. Prosecutors from the district attorney's office dropped the first two charges on May 7 and the noise charge on July 22 that year. On March 6, 2019, Kelly was taken back to the Cook County Jail after failing to pay $161,633 in child support. On March 9, 2019, he was released after someone, who did not want to be identified, paid off the child support. His lawyer says he could not discuss the payment due to a gag order. Influence Kelly is considered to be one of the most successful R&B artists since the mid-1980s. He is also one of the best-selling music artists in the United States, with over 30 million albums sold, as well as only the fifth black artist to enter the top 50 of the same list. Rolling Stone magazine called him "arguably the most important R&B figure of the 1990s and 2000s." Music executive Barry Weiss described Kelly as "the modern-day Prince, although there's a bit of Marvin Gaye in him, and a bit of Irving Berlin." In addition to his solo and collaboration success, Kelly has also written and produced several hit songs, such as "Fortunate" for Maxwell, "You Are Not Alone" for Michael Jackson, "G.H.E.T.T.O.U.T." for Changing Faces, "Bump, Bump, Bump" for B2K, and many more. R. Kelly has been compared to artists like Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye. Personal life Kelly's mother, Joanne, died from cancer in 1993. He has given conflicting accounts of where he was during his mother's passing. In 1996, Kelly married Andrea Kelly, his former backup dancer and mother of his three children. Andrea filed a restraining order against Kelly in September 2005 after a physical altercation, ultimately filing for divorce in 2006. In January 2009, after separating in the fall of 2005, Kelly and his wife Andrea Kelly finalized their divorce after 11 years of marriage. Charity and donations In 2007, Kelly released the song "Rise Up" for Virginia Tech after the 2007 school shooting, and donated the net proceeds to the families of the victims. In 2010, Kelly penned the song "Sign of a Victory" for the FIFA World Cup, with all proceeds benefiting African charities. In 2011, he performed at a charity event in Chicago benefiting Clara's House, a now-shuttered (Jan 2018) facility designed to build employment, housing, health care, and education in the projects of Chicago. In 2016, Kelly donated cases of water to the Flint water crisis. Honors and awards Kelly has been awarded and nominated for multiple awards during his career, as a songwriter, producer, and singer. He was granted three Grammy Awards for his song "I Believe I Can Fly": Best Male R&B Vocal Performance, Best Rhythm and Blues Song, and Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or for Television. Discography Studio albums Born into the 90's (1992) (with Public Announcement) 12 Play (1993) R. Kelly (1995) R. (1998) TP-2.com (2000) The Best of Both Worlds (2002) (with Jay-Z) Chocolate Factory (2003) Happy People/U Saved Me (2004) Unfinished Business (2004) (with Jay-Z) TP.3 Reloaded (2005) Double Up (2007) Untitled (2009) Love Letter (2010) Write Me Back (2012) Black Panties (2013) The Buffet (2015) 12 Nights of Christmas (2016) Filmography Books Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me (2012, autobiography) Tours 60653 Tour (w/ Public Announcement) (1993) The 12 Play Very Necessary Tour (with Salt-N-Pepa) (1994) The Down Low Top Secret Tour (with LL Cool J, Xscape, and Solo) (1996) The Get Up on a Room Tour (with Kelly Price, Nas, Foxy Brown, and Deborah Cox) (1999) The TP-2.com Tour (with Sunshine Anderson & Syleena Johnson) (2001) The Key in the Ignition Tour (with Ashanti) (2003) The Best Of Both Worlds Tour (w/ Jay-Z) (2004) The Light It Up Tour (2006) The Double Up Tour (with J. Holiday & Keyshia Cole) (2007) The Ladies Make Some Noise Tour (with K. Michelle) (2009) Love Letter Tour (with Keyshia Cole & Marsha Ambrosius) (2011) The Single Ladies Tour (with Tamia) (2012–13) Black Panties Tour (2014–16) The Buffet Tour (2016) See also Honorific nicknames in popular music List of artists who reached number one in the United States List of Billboard number-one singles List of highest-certified music artists in the United States List of songs recorded by R. Kelly List of songs written and produced by R. Kelly List of unreleased songs recorded by R. Kelly Shaggy defense References External links R. Kelly: Sex, Girls and Videotapes, BBC documentary, March 28, 2018 1967 births Living people 20th-century American criminals 21st-century American criminals African-American basketball players African-American Christians African-American male actors 20th-century African-American male singers African-American record producers African-American male singer-songwriters American contemporary R&B singers American gospel singers American hip hop record producers American hip hop singers American male criminals American male film actors American men's basketball players American music arrangers American music industry executives American music video directors American people convicted of child sexual abuse American people convicted of kidnapping American prisoners and detainees American soul musicians American soul singers American sportspeople convicted of crimes American tenors Atlantic City Seagulls players Basketball players from Illinois Child marriage in the United States Criminals from Chicago Grammy Award winners Guards (basketball) Jive Records artists Male actors from Chicago Music video codirectors People acquitted of sex crimes People convicted of racketeering People convicted of sex trafficking People convicted of violating the Mann Act People from Olympia Fields, Illinois Prisoners and detainees of the United States Record producers from Illinois Shooting guards Singers from Chicago Small forwards Sportspeople from Cook County, Illinois Writers from Chicago Singer-songwriters from Illinois 21st-century African-American male singers LGBT singers	false	[ "Concentration 20 is the third studio album by Japanese singer Namie Amuro, released July 24, 1997 by Avex Trax. The album's genre is a fusion of styles including pop, dance and rock. Unlike Amuro's previous effort, Sweet 19 Blues, which primarily had lyrics written by Tetsuya Komuro, Concentration 20s lyrics were mostly written by Marc Panther. Komuro did, however, compose and arrange most of the album's songs and wrote the lyrics to three of them.\n\nAfter Amuro's 1996 album Sweet 19 Blues sold in excess of three million copies in Japan and for a brief period was even the best-selling Japanese album of all time, recording for a follow-up album began. Much of the recording of Concentration 20 was done in the United States, primarily in Los Angeles, California.\n\n\"A Walk in the Park\" was released as the album's lead single on November 27, 1996. It was very successful, becoming Amuro's fourth number one single and fourth million-seller. The second single, \"Can You Celebrate?\", was released on February 19, 1997. Used as the theme song for the TV drama Virgin Road, it was an unprecedented commercial success: It sold over 2.7 million physical copies and remains the best-selling physical single by a female soloist in Japanese history, becoming Amuro's fifth number one single and fifth million-seller. It charted for forty-nine weeks and was certified double Million by the RIAJ, her first and only single to receive such a certification. A re-release for Christmas 1997 sold over 400,000 copies itself. The rock-infused third single, \"How to Be a Girl\", reached number one and sold over 770,000 copies, becoming Amuro's sixth number one single.\n\nThe album was a big commercial success. The album entered the Oricon albums chart at number one with first-week sales of 824,980 copies. It charted for 28 weeks, and was the seventh best-selling album of the year, selling nearly two million copies. Combined with the sales of its singles, Concentration 20 has sold around 4.5 million copies.\n\n Background \nTwo months earlier, Amuro had been touring Japan on the Namie Amuro tour 1997 A Walk in the Park. Her previous album, Sweet 19 Blues became the biggest selling album of all time when it was released.\n\nThe same month that the album was released, Amuro toured Japan's four domes in support of it. A few months after the tour, she would announce her pregnancy and pending maternity leave.\n\n Style \nThe album embodies an array of styles including pop, rock and even some reggae. Unlike her previous album which was heavy on the pseudo-R&B side, this album was practically void of it. Concentration 20 took on a more electronic style similar to that of her producer's group, globe. Some argue that the album isn't really a reflection of Amuro, but just goes to demonstrate the talent of Tetsuya Komuro.\n\nOpening the album is the industrial rock influenced, \"Concentration 20 (make you alright).\" The song was unlike anything she had previously released and really embodies the diversity within this project. \"Me Love Peace!!\" was Amuro's first attempt at reggae style music. She would not attempt a similar style again until Queen of Hip-Pop (2005) was released featuring some songs in dancehall and reggaeton fashion. Two of the singles from the album, \"A Walk in the Park\" and \"Can You Celebrate?\" appear on the album subtly remixed. Perhaps the one song that does demonstrate how much of this album was Komuro is \"I Know...\" The song is an instrumental track performed solely by him.\n\n Singles \nThe singles from this album were very successful, two were million sellers and they reached the top spot of the charts.\n\n A Walk in the Park \nReleased four months after the massive success of her first studio album Sweet 19 Blues, it became her fourth number one and million selling single. The single spent 7 weeks into the top 5 and 8 weeks in Top 10 totally.Oricon Weekly Singles Chart of December 16th, 1996Oricon Weekly Singles Chart of December 30th, 1996Oricon Weekly Singles Chart of January 20th, 1997 She performed the song at the Japan Cable Awards in December 1996 and at the Japan Gold Disc Awards in February 1997. A Walk in the Park was the 13th best selling single of the year 1997.\n\n Can You Celebrate? \nAmuro began the year 1997 with her defining single and biggest success to date. The song, a gospel influenced ballad, was released as the second single from the album. It opened at the top spot with over 800,000 copies sold in its first week, the highest first week sales for a single at that time and the 8th highest opening sales of all times for a single in Japan. It spent two consecutive weeks at #1,7 weeks in the top 5 and 8 weeks in Top 10 totally. It was charted for 40 weeks. Can You Celebrate? was the biggest selling single of 1997 and is the 14th best selling single in Japanese music history with sales of over 2.5 million copies. A remix single of the song was also released to commemorate Namie's wedding with Sam and was also successful with about 500,000 units sold. In December 1997, the song helped her to win the Best Single Award at the 39th Japan Record Awards.\n\n How to Be a Girl \nThe third and last single from the album was released in May 1997. How to Be a Girl is Namie's first attempt at rock music. The single still managed to be a commercial success, spending two consecutive weeks at #1 and selling over 770,000 copies, included over 300,000 copies purchased in its opening week. How to Be a Girl was also the 23rd best selling single of 1997.\n\n Tie-ups and theme songs \n\"A Walk in the Park\" and \"Can You Celebrate?\" were both theme songs for Maxell UD commercials and \"Whisper\" was used as the background music for the Maxell MD74 commercial.\n\n\"Can You Celebrate?\" was also the theme song of the Japanese dorama Virgin Road.\n\n\"How to Be a Girl\" was used as background music in four commercials for Sea Breeze products. The first CM was promoting a sun lotion, the second a shampoo, the third a deodorant and the last a moisturizer.\n\n\"No Communication\" was used as background music in a commercial for the DyDo Mistio drinks.\n\n Commercial performance \nConcentration 20 debut at #1 with 824,980 copies sold (Namie's 3rd best first week sales for an album). It was again at the top spot in its 2nd week with 362,440 copies sold. The album stayed in the top 10 for 7 weeks and in the top 20 for 9 weeks. It sold over 1.9 million copies during its chart run and more than 2 million copies in total.\n\n Track listing \n\n Personnel \n Namie Amuro - vocals, background vocals\n Lynn Mabry - background vocals\n Valerie Mayo - background vocals\n Akio Togashi - background vocals, keyboard\n Will Wheaton Jr. - background vocals\n Cozy Kubo - keyboard\n Tetsuya Komuro - backing vocals, guitar, keyboard, synthesizer\n Kazuhiro Matsuo - bass, guitar\n Kenji Sano - bass\n Ataru Sumiyoshi - bass\n Michael Thompson - guitar\n\n Production \n Producers - Tetsuya Komuro\n Mixing - Eddie Delena\n Vocal Direction - Tetsuya Komuro, Kenji Sano\n Photography - Itaru Hirama\n Art Direction - Tycoon Graphics\n\n References \n\n Charts Album' - Oricon Sales Chart (Japan)\n\nNamie Amuro albums\n1997 albums\nAvex Group albums\nAlbums produced by Tetsuya Komuro", "Played on Pepper is the third studio album by the Danish soft rock band Michael Learns to Rock. It was released on 28 August 1995 by Medley Records in Europe. The first single from the album was \"Someday\" (1995), followed by \"That's Why (You Go Away)\" (1995), \"How Many Hours\" (1996), \"Love Will Never Lie\" (1996).\n\nAs of May 1996, the album had sold 1 million copies worldwide, with 120,000 of them being sold in Denmark.\n\nTrack listing\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nOfficial website\n\n1995 albums\nMichael Learns to Rock albums" ]
[ "R. Kelly", "2009: Untitled and Africa", "Can you tell me about the Untitled and Africa?", "in February 2009, Kelly announced that he was out there working on the album and that it would be called Untitled.", "How long did it take for him to work on it?", "was released under Jive Records on December 1, 2009.", "Was this a popular album?", "The single \"Number One\", which features Keri Hilson, peaked at #8 on the US R&B Chart.", "For how long did it stay on the charts?", "I don't know.", "How many copies of the album was sold once released?", "I don't know." ]	C_11f296c5dc0b4f43ad0d6184b5715ed2_0	What stands out about this album?	6	What stands out about R. Kelly Untitled and Africa album?	R. Kelly	January 2009, after separating in fall of 2005, Kelly finalized divorce to ex-wife Andrea Kelly. The couple had been married for 11 years. On June 3, 2009, Kelly released his first ever mixtape, The Demo Tape (Gangsta Grillz) presented by DJ Skee and DJ Drama as a way to reintroduce himself to fans. While at the Velvet Room in Atlanta in February 2009, Kelly announced that he was out there working on the album and that it would be called Untitled. The album was given a September 29, 2009 release date, but was delayed until October 13, 2009. The album release was again delayed and was released under Jive Records on December 1, 2009. It got mixed to positive reviews from critics. The single "Number One", which features Keri Hilson, peaked at #8 on the US R&B Chart. Kelly performed for the first time in Africa headlining the Arise African Fashion Awards in Johannesburg, South Africa on June 20, 2009. Kelly scheduled to perform in Cape Town before heading to Nigeria as part of the annual ThisDay music and fashion festival in July. Kelly also performed in Kampala, Uganda in January 2010. He also scheduled to perform in London as part of his first international tour in eight years, but he did not make his London concert. "I'm very excited about my first visit to Africa, I've dreamed about this for a long time and it's finally here," Kelly said in a statement. "It will be one of the highlights of not only my career but my life. I can't wait to perform in front of my fans in Africa -- who have been some of the best in the world." In December 2009, Kelly teamed up with biographer David Ritz and Tavis Smiley's SmileyBooks publications to write his memoirs entitled Soulacoaster. SmileyBooks publisher and founder, Tavis Smiley stated that the memoir's main focus won't be on Kelly's trials and tribulations. Smiley was quoted saying "If anyone thinks this bookis going to fixate on [R. Kelly's trials], they are going to be sadly mistaken. It is going to be a holistic look at his life thus far and the life and legacy that he's building." CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER	Robert Sylvester Kelly (born January 8, 1967) is an American singer, songwriter, record producer and convicted sex offender. He has been credited with helping to redefine R&B and hip hop, earning nicknames such as "the King of R&B", "the King of Pop-Soul", and the "Pied Piper of R&B". Kelly is known for songs including "I Believe I Can Fly", "Bump N' Grind", "Your Body's Callin', "Gotham City", "Ignition (Remix)", "If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time", "The World's Greatest", "I'm a Flirt (Remix)", and the hip hopera "Trapped in the Closet". In 1998, Kelly won three Grammy Awards for "I Believe I Can Fly". Although Kelly is primarily a singer and songwriter, he has written, produced, and remixed songs, singles, and albums for other artists. In 1996, he was nominated for a Grammy Award for writing Michael Jackson's song "You Are Not Alone". Kelly has sold over 75 million records worldwide, making him the most successful R&B male artist of the 1990s and one of the world's best-selling music artists. In 2010, Billboard magazine considered Kelly the most successful R&B artist in history and listed him as the Top R&B/Hip Hop Artist for the time period between 1985 and 2010. In 2012, he was listed as the 55th best-selling music artist in the United States, with over 32 million album sales. Since the 1990s, Kelly has been repeatedly accused of sexual abuse, often with underage girls. He has faced multiple civil suits and has been charged by criminal courts in Chicago, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota. He repeatedly denied the charges. In June 2002, he was indicted on 21 counts of making child pornography. He was acquitted six years later in 2008. In January 2019, a widely viewed Lifetime docuseries titled Surviving R. Kelly detailed allegations of sexual abuse by multiple women, allegations that Kelly continued to deny. Facing pressure from the public using the Mute R. Kelly hashtag, RCA Records dropped Kelly. In 2019, Kelly was indicted by a Cook County grand jury in Chicago on 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse in February, followed by an additional 11 counts of sexual assault and abuse filed by the same court in May. On July 11, 2019, he was arrested on federal charges alleging sex crimes, human trafficking, child pornography, racketeering, and obstruction of justice. Kelly faced a total of 22 federal criminal charges as of January 29, 2021. A federal judge ordered Kelly jailed pending trial on the charges. On September 27, 2021, a federal jury in New York found Kelly guilty on nine counts including racketeering, sexual exploitation of a child, kidnapping, bribery, sex trafficking, and a violation of the Mann Act. The judge ordered that he remain in custody pending sentencing, set for May 4, 2022. Kelly faces a second trial for producing child pornography set for August 2022. Early life Robert Sylvester Kelly was born at Chicago Lying-in Hospital in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, on January 8, 1967. He has three half-siblings, an older sister and brother, along with a younger brother. His mother, Joanne Kelly, was a schoolteacher and devout Baptist. She was born in Arkansas. The identity of his father, who was absent from Kelly's life, is not known. His family lived in the Ida B. Wells Homes public housing project in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood. Around the time he was five years old, Kelly's mother married his stepfather, Lucious, who reportedly worked for an airline. Kelly began singing in the church choir at age eight. Kelly described having a girlfriend, Lulu, at age eight, in his autobiography. He stated that their last play date turned tragic when, after fighting with older children over a play area by a creek, she was pushed into the water, swept downstream by a fast-moving current, and drowned. Kelly called Lulu his first musical inspiration. Kelly said members of his household would act differently when his mother and grandparents were not home. From age eight to 14, he was sexually abused by an older female family member. Kelly's younger brother Carey stated that he suffered from years of sexual abuse at the hands of his older sister, Theresa, who was entrusted with babysitting her siblings. Carey stated that although their older brother was spared and allowed to play outside, both he and Kelly were punished at separate times indoors by Theresa, who refused to acknowledge the abuse when confronted years later. Explaining why he never told anyone, Kelly wrote in his 2012 autobiography Soulacoaster that he was "too afraid and too ashamed". Around age 10, Kelly was also sexually abused by an older male who was a friend of the family. In his autobiography, Kelly described being shot in the shoulder, at age 11, by boys who were attempting to steal his bike, although a family friend later stated that Kelly had shot himself while attempting suicide. In September 1980, Kelly entered Kenwood Academy in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, where he met music teacher Lena McLin, who encouraged Kelly to perform the Stevie Wonder classic "Ribbon in the Sky" in the high school talent show. A shy Kelly put on sunglasses, was escorted onto the stage, sang the song and won first prize. McLin encouraged Kelly to leave the high school basketball team and concentrate on music. She said he was furious at first, but after his performance in the talent show, he changed his mind.Kelly was diagnosed with the learning disability dyslexia, which left him unable to read or write. Kelly dropped out of high school after attending Kenwood Academy for one year. He began performing in the subway under the Chicago "L" tracks. He regularly busked at the "L" stop on the Red Line's Jackson station in the Loop. In his youth, Kelly played basketball with Illinois state champion basketball player Ben Wilson and later sang "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday" at Wilson's funeral. Career 1990–1996: Born into the 90's, 12 Play and R. Kelly MGM (Musically Gifted Men or Mentally Gifted Men) was formed in 1989 with Robert Kelly, Marc McWilliams, Vincent Walker and Shawn Brooks. In 1990, MGM recorded and released one single, "Why You Wanna Play Me"; after its release, the group disbanded. Kelly gained national recognition in 1989 when MGM participated on the talent TV show Big Break, hosted by Natalie Cole. After MGM performed “All My Love”, which would become a demo for Kelly's song “She's Got That Vibe” the group went on to win the $100,000 grand prize. In 1991, Kelly signed with Jive Records. Kelly's debut album Born into the 90's was released in early 1992 (credited as R. Kelly and Public Announcement). The album, released during the new jack swing period of the early 1990s, yielded the R&B hits "She's Got That Vibe", "Honey Love", "Dedicated", and "Slow Dance (Hey Mr. DJ)", with Kelly singing lead vocals. During late 1992, Kelly and Public Announcement embarked on a tour entitled "60653" after the zip code of their Chicago neighborhood. This would be the only album co-credited with Public Announcement. Kelly separated from the group in January 1993. Kelly's first solo album, 12 Play, was released on November 9, 1993, and yielded the singer's first number-one hit, "Bump N' Grind", which spent a record-breaking 12 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot R&B Singles chart. Subsequent hit singles: "Your Body's Callin'" (U.S. Hot 100: #13, U.S. R&B: #2) and "Sex Me" (U.S. Hot 100: #20, U.S. R&B: #8). Both singles sold 500,000 copies in the United States and were certified Gold by the RIAA. In 1994, 12 Play was certified Gold by the RIAA, eventually going six times platinum. In 1995, Kelly garnered his first Grammy nominations; two for writing, producing and composing Michael Jackson's last number one hit "You Are Not Alone". Kelly's success continued with the November 14, 1995 release of R. Kelly, his eponymous second studio album. Critics praised him for his departure from salacious bedroom songs to embracing vulnerability. New York Times contributor Stephen Holden described Kelly as "The reigning king of pop-soul sex talks a lot tougher than Barry White, the father of such fluffed-up pillow talk and along with Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway, [both] major influences for Kelly." Also in December 1995, Professor Michael Eric Dyson critiqued Kelly's self-titled album "R. Kelly" for VIBE. Dyson described Kelly's growth from the 12 Play album: "Kelly reshapes his personal turmoil to artistic benefit" and noted that Kelly is "reborn before our very own ears." The album reached number one on the Billboard 200 chart, becoming Kelly's first number one album on the chart, and reached number one on the R&B album charts; his second. The R. Kelly album spawned three platinum hit singles: "You Remind Me of Something" (U.S. Hot 100: #4, U.S. R&B: #1), "I Can't Sleep Baby (If I)" (U.S. Hot 100: #5, U.S. R&B: #1), and "Down Low (Nobody Has To Know)" (U.S. Hot 100: #4, U.S. R&B: #1); a duet with Ronald Isley. Kelly's self-titled album sold four million copies, receiving 4× platinum certification from the RIAA. He promoted the album with a 50-city "Down Low Top Secret Tour" with LL Cool J, Xscape, and Solo. On November 26, 1996, Kelly released "I Believe I Can Fly", an inspirational song originally released on the soundtrack for the film Space Jam. "I Believe I Can Fly" reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and No. 1 on the UK charts for three weeks and won three Grammy Awards in 1998. In that same year, he contributed Freak Tonight for the A Thin Line Between Love and Hate soundtrack. 1997–2001: Basketball, R., TP-2.COM, and Rockland Records In 1997, Kelly signed a contract to play professional basketball with the Atlantic City Seagulls of the USBL. He wore the number 12 in honor of his album 12 Play. Kelly said "I love basketball enough to not totally let go of my music, but just put it to the side for a minute and fulfill some dreams of mine that I've had for a long time." Kelly's USBL contract contained a clause that would allow him to fulfill a music obligation when necessary. "If Whitney Houston needs a song written", said Ken Gross, the Seagulls owner who signed Kelly, "he would be able to leave the team to do that and come back". "It wasn't a gimmick", Gross continued, "he's a ballplayer. He can play." Kelly is the first music artist to play professional basketball. In 1998, Kelly wrote and produced the debut album of another protégé Sparkle, which was released under his Rockland label and distributed through Interscope. In 2000, Sparkle went platinum due in part to the success of the first single, "Be Careful", a duet with Kelly. On November 17, 1998, Kelly released his fourth studio and first double album, R. Musically, the album spans different genres from pop (Celine Dion), street rap (Nas and Jay-Z) to Blues ("Suicide"). Dave Hoekstra of the Los Angeles Times described the album as "easily the most ambitious project of his career." As the year 2000 commenced, Kelly racked up a slew of new awards reflecting his status as an established R&B superstar. In January 2000, he had won Favorite Male Soul/R&B Artist at the American Music Awards and, in February, was nominated for several Grammy Awards, including Best Male R&B Vocal Performance ("When a Woman's Fed Up"), Best R&B Album (R.), and Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group ("Satisfy You") with P. Diddy. On November 7, 2000, Kelly released his fifth studio album, TP-2.com, a project aligned with his breakthrough album, 12 Play. Unlike R., all songs on TP-2.com were written, arranged, and produced by Kelly. AllMusic's Jason Birchmeier gave TP-2.com 4 stars and stated: "Kelly knows how to take proven formulas and funnel them through his own stylistic aesthetic, which usually means slowing down the tempo, laying on lush choruses of strings and background vocals, taming down the lyrics for radio, and catering his pitch primarily to wistful women. In 2001, Kelly won the Outstanding Achievement Award at the Music of Black Origin or MOBO Awards and Billboard magazine ranked TP-2.com number 94 on the magazine's Top 200 Albums of the Decade. Kelly's song "The World's Greatest", from the soundtrack to the 2001 Ali film, was a hit. Rockland Records In 1998 Kelly launched his own label, the Interscope Records-distributed Rockland Records. The label's roster included artists Sparkle, Boo & Gotti, Talent, Vegas Cats, Lady, Frankie, Secret Weapon, and Rebecca F. Also in 1998, the label's first artist, Sparkle released her debut self-titled album, Sparkle. In addition to producing and writing the project, Kelly made vocal contribution to the hit duet "Be Careful", which contributed largely to the album's success. The album was certified platinum in December 2000. In 1999, he wrote and produced the soundtrack to the Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy movie Life, which features tracks from K-Ci & JoJo, Maxwell, Mýa, and Destiny's Child. The soundtrack was released on the Rockland label. 2002–2003: The Best of Both Worlds and Chocolate Factory On January 24, 2002, at a press conference announcing The Best of Both Worlds completion, celebrities such as Johnnie Cochran, Russell Simmons, Luther Vandross, and Sean Combs praised the album, with Jay-Z stating that he hoped the collaboration represents "more unity for black people on a whole." MTV's Shaheem Reid wrote: "And if Jay and Kelly can put their egos to the side long enough to wrap up and promote their album, then their labels—Def Jam and Jive, respectively—can surely figure out a way to join forces and make cheddar together." On February 8, 2002, Kelly performed at the closing ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics at the same time a news scandal broke of a sex tape that appeared to show Kelly with an underage girl. When the joint album leaked on February 22, 2002, it caused the label, Roc-A-Fella, to modify the album's release date in March. Jay-Z expressed frustration about the album leak to MTV News: "It's the gift and the curse. It's an honor that everybody wants your music fast, but on the other hand, it's another thing when the music gets out before you [want it to]. Because that's your art. You feel attached to it. You feel a certain way and you want people to go out and support it. The time that you take, it's like a piece of your life. You take parts of your life and you put it on these records and then for it to just be traded and moved around [is frustrating]. The Best of Both Worlds album sold 285,000 copies in its opening week and debuted at number two on the Billboard 200. It was a critical and commercial disappointment. In May 2002, Kelly's initial sixth studio album, Loveland, leaked and was delayed to release in November. Eventually, a second thought caused Kelly to restructure the entirety of the album, including its title; Loveland would later be packaged as a deluxe edition bonus disc of the now-renamed Chocolate Factory. In October of that year, Kelly released the remix to its single, "Ignition". It had since charted at number two on the Billboard Hot 100. On February 18, 2003, the album, Chocolate Factory was released to highly critical fanfare. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, ending the first two-week run of rapper 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Tryin'. It sold 532,000 copies in its first week. The album was also supported by its follow-up singles, "Snake" and the remix of "Step in the Name of Love"; the latter of which peaked at number nine on the Hot 100. Later that year, in September, Kelly released his first greatest hits album, The R. in R&B Collection, Vol. 1, including three unreleased songs; one of which being "Thoia Thoing". 2004–2005: Unfinished Business, Happy People/U Saved Me and TP.3 Reloaded Between mid-2003 and early 2004, Kelly began work on another double CD album, one with "happy" tracks and another with "inspirational" tracks. The double album, Happy People/U Saved Me, was released on August 24, 2004. It debuted at number two on the Billboard 200, with first week sales of 264,000 copies. Both of the album's titled tracks respectively performed underwhelmingly; "Happy People" charted at number twenty-nine on the Adult R&B song chart while "U Saved Me" peaked at number fifty-two on the Billboard Hot 100. Two months later, Kelly and Jay-Z reunited to release their second collaborative album, Unfinished Business. The album received criticism and like its predecessor, was also a commercial failure, despite debuting at number one on the Billboard 200. The promotion of the album and its Best of Both Worlds tour were both plagued by tension between the stars, with Kelly reportedly showing up late or not at all to gigs. Kelly complained that the touring lights were not directed towards him and allegedly assaulted the tour's lighting director. Jay-Z eventually removed Kelly halfway through the tour, after a member of Jay-Z's entourage pepper sprayed Kelly on October 29, 2004. Tyran (Ty-Ty) Smith was charged with assault, but took a plea deal for disorderly conduct. Kelly launched a $75-million lawsuit against Jay-Z for removing him from the tour; Jay-Z's counter suit was dismissed by a judge. Kelly redeemed himself commercially after appearing on Ja Rule's single, "Wonderful" alongside Ashanti. The song charted at number five on the Billboard Hot 100, topped the UK Singles Chart and went platinum in the summer of 2005. After finishing Happy People/U Saved Me and Unfinished Business in 2004, Kelly released TP.3 Reloaded in July 2005. It became Kelly's fifth consecutive number-one album in his career. TP.3 Reloaded was heavily cross-promoted by the first five chapters of the hip-hopera, Trapped in the Closet, which would later expand to other chapters for years to come. 2006–2009: Double Up and Untitled, Africa In December 2006, Kelly built momentum for his eighth solo studio album, Double Up, after guest-appearing on Bow Wow's "I'm a Flirt". Three months later, Kelly's remix of "I'm a Flirt" was released, but instead of Bow Wow, it features T.I. and T-Pain. On May 29, 2007, the album was released. It became Kelly's sixth and final album in his career to be number one on the Billboard 200. Kelly's other singles from Double Up titled "Same Girl" was a duet of Kelly and Usher, while "Rise Up" was a tribute to the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting that occurred earlier that year in April, a month before the album was released. The song was previously released as a digital download on May 15, 2007. Proceeds were donated to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund to help family members of the victims of the shootings. Kelly began his Double Up tour with Ne-Yo, Keyshia Cole and J. Holiday opening for him. After two shows, promoter Leonard Rowe had Ne-Yo removed from the tour because of a contract dispute. However, Ne-Yo alleges that the reason for the dropout was because Ne-Yo believes he received a better response from critics and fans, even though he performed at just two shows. Ne-Yo filed a lawsuit against Rowe Entertainment. Kelly was not mentioned in the lawsuit. In December 2007, Kelly failed to appear at another preliminary court hearing on his case due to his tour bus being held up in Utah. The judge threatened to revoke Kelly's bond, but eventually decided against it. In 2008, Kelly released a rap track titled "I'm a Beast" in which he coarsely attacked his detractors, yet did not name the subjects of the song. In 2008, before and after being acquitted on child pornography charges, Billboard reported that Kelly had plans to release his newest album titled 12 Play: Fourth Quarter in the summer of that year but the album was postponed. Billboard named Kelly among the most successful artists ever for its 50th Anniversary List. In the spring, the promotional single "Hair Braider", peaked at No. 56 on Billboard's R&B chart. On July 28, the entire album leaked online, causing the title to be scrapped. In February 2009, Kelly announced that he was working on a new album called Untitled with a projected release date of September 29, but it had been delayed to December. In June 2009, he released his first mixtape, The "Demo" Tape, presented by DJ Skee and DJ Drama. Kelly headlined the Arise African Fashion Awards in Johannesburg, South Africa, on June 20, 2009. He performed in Cape Town, followed by Nigeria as part of the annual ThisDay music and fashion festival in July. That same month, he released "Number One", featuring singer-songwriter Keri Hilson. Then, on December 1, Kelly's untitled ninth solo album was released. It charted on the Billboard 200 at number four. More singles from the album include "Echo", "Supaman High" and "Be My #1". In January 2010, Kelly performed in Kampala, Uganda. "I'm very excited about my first visit to Africa, I've dreamed about this for a long time and it's finally here", Kelly said in a statement. "It will be one of the highlights of not only my career but my life. I can't wait to perform in front of my fans in Africa—who have been some of the best in the world." 2010–2012: Epic, Love Letter, throat surgery, and Write Me Back Kelly performed at the 2010 FIFA World Cup opening ceremony on June 11, 2010. In an interview in the September 2010 issue of XXL magazine, Kelly said he was working on three new albums (Epic, Love Letter, and Zodiac) which he described as "remixing himself". Epic, a compilation filled with powerful ballads including "The World's Greatest" and "Sign of a Victory", only saw a European release on September 21, 2010. However, it is also available for streaming worldwide. In November 2010, Kelly collaborated with several African musicians forming a supergroup known as One8. The group featured 2Face from Nigeria, Ali Kiba from Tanzania, Congolese singer Fally Ipupa, 4X4 from Ghana, hip-hop artist Movaizhaleine from Gabon, Zambia's JK, Ugandan hip-hop star Navio and Kenya's Amani, the only female in the group. The first release from the group was "Hands Across the World" written and produced by Kelly. Kelly's tenth album Love Letter, released on December 14, 2010, included 15 songs, one of which was Kelly singing "You Are Not Alone", a track Kelly originally wrote for Michael Jackson. The first single "When a Woman Loves" was nominated for a Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards. At the 2011 Pre-Grammy Gala in Los Angeles, Kelly performed a medley of hits and in March 2011, Kelly was named the #1 R&B artist of the last 25 years by Billboard. On July 19, 2011, Kelly was admitted to the Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago to undergo emergency throat surgery to drain an abscess on one of his tonsils, and was released on July 21, 2011. He cancelled his performance at the Reggae Sumfest in Jamaica that was scheduled for the following Friday. Johnny Gourzong, Sumfest Productions executive director, commented, "We are truly going to miss his presence on the festival." On September 23, 2011, Variety confirmed that Kelly had signed on to write original music for the Sparkle soundtrack. In 2011, Kelly worked with writer David Ritz on an autobiography entitled Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me, which was later released in the summer of 2012. On October 7, 2011, after Sony's RCA Music Group announced the consolidation of Jive, Arista and J Records into RCA Records, Kelly was set to release music under the RCA brand. Following his throat surgery, Kelly released "Shut Up" to generally favorable reviews: Spin magazine said, "Kelly taking aim at the haters who said "he's washed up, he's lost it." He hasn't. Dude's voice is in prime smooth R&B form". On December 21, 2011, Kelly made a live appearance on The X Factor and gave his first performance after the surgery. Kelly revealed to Rolling Stone that he felt like he was "just starting out" and how the performance was a "wake up call" for him. In 2012, Kelly made a series of announcements including a follow-up to the Love Letter album titled Write Me Back, which was released on June 26 to little fanfare, as well as a third installment of the Trapped in the Closet and The Single Ladies Tour featuring R&B singer, Tamia. In February 2012, Kelly performed "I Look to You", a song he wrote for Whitney Houston, at Houston's homegoing. 2013–2016: Black Panties, The Buffet, and 12 Nights of Christmas During 2013, Kelly continued his "The Single Ladies Tour". He performed at music festivals across North America, including Bonnaroo, Pitchfork, and Macy's Music Festival. On June 30, 2013, R. Kelly performed live at BET Awards Show singing hits as well as his new track "My Story" featuring Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz. The song was the lead single for Kelly's twelfth studio album Black Panties. released on December 10, 2013. Writing for New York magazine, David Marchese stated that Black Panties "was like a dare to the world: After all that he’d been accused of, after avoiding conviction, could R. Kelly still get away with making sex-obsessed music?" In 2013, Kelly collaborated with several artists including Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, and Jennifer Hudson. In an interview with Global Grind in November, he described follow up work with Celine Dion after their number one single "I'm Your Angel" from 1998. Kelly worked with singer Mariah Carey for her album "The Art of Letting Go". Kelly co-wrote and sang on Lady Gaga's song "Do What U Want" from her 2013 album Artpop, performing the duet with her on Saturday Night Live on November 16, 2013, and at the 2013 American Music Awards. "Do What U Want" had since been removed from streaming services and re-releases of Gaga's Artpop album following sexual misconduct allegations against Kelly in early 2019. He also collaborated with Birdman and Lil Wayne on "We Been On", a single from the Cash Money Records compilation, Rich Gang. He also appeared on Twista's first single on his new album "Dark Horse". On November 17, 2013, Kelly and Justin Bieber debuted a collaboration entitled "PYD". Kelly was featured on the soundtrack album of the film The Best Man Holiday with his song "Christmas, I'll Be Steppin'". Kelly stated his intention to tour with R&B singer Mary J. Blige on "The King & Queen Tour" prior to the Black Panties Tour while continuing to create segments of the hip hopera Trapped in the Closet. In July 2014, Kelly announced that he was working on a house music album. In November 2015, Kelly released "Switch Up" featuring fellow Chicagoan Jeremih and Lil Wayne, followed by "Wake Up Everybody", "Marching Band" and "Backyard Party". The following month, the album containing those singles, The Buffet, was released. It charted poorly on the Billboard 200 at number sixteen with first-week sales of 39,000 album-equivalent copies. The following year, after a two-and-a-half-year delay, Kelly presented his only Christmas album, also his fourteenth and final studio album in his career, 12 Nights of Christmas, which was released on October 21, 2016. In 2019, Kelly was dropped from RCA Records following the airing of Surviving R. Kelly, which detailed numerous sexual assault allegations against the singer for decades. As of October 2021, following his New York conviction, Kelly's YouTube channel was terminated, but his catalogue remains available on YouTube Music. Artistry Musical style and influences Kelly's music took root in R&B, hip hop and soul. He was influenced by listening to his mother, Joanne Kelly, sing. She played records by Donny Hathaway and Marvin Gaye, inspirations for Kelly. In reference to Hathaway, Kelly stated: "A guy like Donny Hathaway had a focused, sexual texture in his voice that I always wanted in mine. He had smooth, soulful tones, but he was spiritual at the same time." In his autobiography, Kelly stated that he was heavily influenced by Marvin Gaye's R&B Lothario image. "I had to make a 'baby-makin' album. If Marvin Gaye did it, I wanted to do it", Kelly said. While Kelly created a smooth, professional mixture of hip-hop beats, soulman crooning and funk, the most distinctive element of his music is its explicit sensuality. "Sex Me", "Bump n' Grind", "Your Body's Callin'", and "Feelin' on Yo Booty" are considered to be examples, as their productions were seductive enough to sell such blatant come-ons. Kelly's crossover appeal was also sustained by his development of a flair for pop balladry. Vocal style and lyrical themes Writing for the New York Daily News in 1997, Nunyo Demasio stated "With a voice that easily shifts from booming baritone to seductive alto, Kelly has gained international celebrity by combining streetwise rhythms with sexually explicit lyrics." Love and sex are the topics of the majority of Kelly's lyrical content, although he has written about a wide variety of themes such as inspiration and spirituality. Chicago Sun-Times reporters Jim DeRogatis and Abdon Pallasch observed about the contrasting themes: "... the image he liked to project was that of the "R&B Thug"... bringing the streetwise persona of the gangsta rapper into the more polite world of R&B." Kelly expressed that he writes from everyday experiences and prides himself on being versatile. Larry Khan, senior vice president of Jive's urban marketing and promotion, said that Kelly's musical compass is second to none. DeRogatis and Pallasch reported that at concerts where Kelly would go from singing "Like a Real Freak" to "I Wish": "Many fans found these abrupt shifts between the transcendent and the venal, the inspirational and the X-rated jarring." Sexual abuse allegations Kelly has repeatedly faced allegations of sexual abuse that have resulted in multiple civil suits and criminal trials. Early reports of sexual abuse (1990s) In December 2000, the Chicago Sun-Times first reported that police had made two investigations that Kelly was having sex with an underage female but had to drop the investigations due to lack of cooperation by the girls accusing him. A civil suit filed in 1996 by Tiffany Hawkins detailed allegations that, starting in 1991 when she was age 15, Kelly had sex with her as an underage high school student, encouraged her to recruit her schools friends, and pressured her into engaging in group sex with other underage girls. In 1998, Kelly settled the lawsuit with Hawkins for $250,000. Illegal marriage (1994) Kelly had been introduced to a promising young singer from Detroit named Aaliyah by her uncle, Barry Hankerson, when she was 12 years old. During Kelly's 2021 criminal trial for sex trafficking and racketeering, a witness testified that Kelly had sexual contact with Aaliyah starting when she was 13 or 14 years old. Kelly wrote and produced Aaliyah's first album, Age Ain't Nothing but a Number, in 1994. On August 31, 1994, Kelly, then 27, illegally married Aaliyah, then 15, in a secret ceremony in Cook County, Illinois. Kelly's tour manager, Demetrius Smith, admitted he facilitated the wedding by obtaining falsified identification for Aaliyah which listed her as 18 years old. In 2019, a contemporaneous video surfaced showing Kelly stating—less than a year before the marriage took place—that Aaliyah was 14 years old. The marriage was annulled in February 1995 at the behest of Aaliyah's family by a Michigan judge. Kelly and Aaliyah, however, both denied that the marriage occurred and even denied that their relationship had ever moved beyond friendship. In May 1997, Aaliyah filed a lawsuit in Cook County to have the marriage record expunged, stating that she was underage at the time of marriage, had lied by signing the marriage certificate as an 18-year-old, and that she could not legally enter into marriage without parental consent. The expungement request was included in a lawsuit filed by Tiffany Hawkins, who sought to use the marriage documents in her case against Kelly. Hawkins later accepted a settlement of $250,000 from Kelly, subject to a confidentiality agreement, in 1998. In 2019, federal prosecutors in New York charged Kelly with bribery related to the 1994 purchase of a fake ID for Aaliyah in order to obtain a marriage license. Kelly, through his lawyers, admitted in 2021 to having had 'underage sexual contact' with Aaliyah. Sex tape circulates (2002) On February 3, 2002, a video circulated that allegedly showed Kelly engaging in sex with, and urinating on, an underage girl. After the video was released by an unknown source and sent to the Chicago Sun-Times, the publisher broke the story on February 8, 2002, the same day Kelly performed at the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Kelly said in interviews that he was not the man in the video. First criminal indictment (2002) In June 2002, Kelly was indicted in Chicago on 21 counts of child pornography. That same month on June 6, 2002, Kelly was arrested by the Miami Police Department on a Chicago arrest warrant at his Florida vacation home. He was released after one night in jail, the following day after posting bail of $750,000. The alleged victim refused to testify at the trial, and a Chicago jury found Kelly not guilty on all 14 counts of child pornography in June 2008. While investigating the photographs reported in the Chicago Sun-Times, Polk County Sheriff's Office conducted a search of Kelly's residence in Davenport, Florida. During the search, officers recovered 12 images of an alleged underage girl on a digital camera – wrapped in a towel in a duffel bag – which allegedly depicted Kelly "involved in sexual conduct with the female minor." According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the girl in the images obtained from Kelly's Florida home also appears in the videotape which got Kelly indicted in Chicago. Kelly was arrested on January 22, 2003, by Police investigators from Polk County and Miami-Dade County, at Miami's Wyndham Grand Bay Hotel on those charges of 12 counts of possession of child pornography. Kelly was later released from Miami-Dade county jail hours after on a bond posted of $12,000. In March 2004, these charges were dropped due to a lack of probable cause for the search warrants. Allegations of preteen girl molestation (2009) In a divorce court filing unsealed in 2020, R. Kelly's former wife Andrea claims that R. Kelly was accused of molesting a preteen girl in 2009. Huffington Post Live Interview (2015) In December 2015, Kelly appeared on Huffington Post Live in an interview with journalist Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani. The interview was so he could promote the release of his latest album The Buffet. However, during the interview, Modarressy-Tehrani quizzed Kelly about the sexual abuse allegations being levelled against him and wanted to gauge his reaction. This resulted in Kelly growing angry and defensive. He continually shouted over Modarressy-Tehrani, asked her whether she drank and threatened to leave and go to McDonalds. Kelly ultimately stormed out of the interview before it ended. This was one of the first occasions where Kelly was concretely asked about the allegations against him on a public platform. After Kelly's 2021 conviction, Modarressy-Tehrani tweeted: "Now, with this verdict, hopefully, his survivors get some peace and feel this justice. Alleged sex cult (2010s) Jim DeRogatis reported for BuzzFeed News on July 17, 2017, that Kelly was accused by three sets of parents of holding their daughters in an "abusive cult". Kelly and the alleged victims deny the allegations. In March 2018, BBC World Service aired a documentary entitled R Kelly: Sex, Girls and Videotapes presented by reporter Ben Zand that explored the 2017 allegations. This was followed up in May with the BBC Three documentary R Kelly: The Sex Scandal Continues which included interviews with the parents of the Savage daughters. Kelly was again accused of misconduct on April 17, 2018, by a former partner of his who claimed that Kelly "intentionally" infected her with a sexually transmitted disease. A representative for Kelly stated that he "categorically denies all claims and allegations". In a January 2019 BBC News article, a woman named Asante McGee whom Kelly had met in 2014 and taken to live with him some months later, said that she lived with not only Kelly alone, but with other women. She said: "He controlled every aspect of my life, while I lived with him." McGee later moved out on her own accord. Boycott and industry response In May 2018, the Women of Color branch of the Time's Up movement called for a boycott of Kelly's music and performances over the many allegations against him. The boycott was accompanied by a social media campaign called Mute R. Kelly. In response, his management said that Kelly supports the movement in principle, but targeting him was "the attempted lynching of a black man who has made extraordinary contributions to our culture". The music streaming service Spotify announced on May 10, 2018, that it was going to stop promoting or recommending music by both R. Kelly and XXXTentacion. Spotify stated, "We don't censor content because of an artist's or creator's behavior, but we want our editorial decisions—what we choose to program—to reflect our values." Two days later, Apple Music and Pandora also announced that they will no longer be featuring or promoting R. Kelly's music. Spotify received criticism from members of the music industry who expressed worries of a "slippery slope" of muting artists, since R. Kelly had not ever actually been convicted of any crime. Spotify ultimately reversed this decision. Allegations of music industry complicity The Washington Post ran a lengthy article in May 2018, alleging that music industry executives had been aware of Kelly's sexually abusive behavior toward young women for years but did little or nothing about them due to his success as a performer and songwriter. As early as 1994, the newspaper reported, his tour manager had urged Jive Records' founder Clive Calder to tell Kelly he would not release the singer's records if he continued to have "incidents" with women after every concert he gave. Calder told the Post that he regretted not having done more at the time, saying "Clearly, we missed something." Former Jive president Barry Weiss told the newspaper that during 20 years with the label he never concerned himself with Kelly's private life and was unaware of two lawsuits filed against Kelly and the label by women alleging sexual misconduct, suits in which the label had successfully argued it was not liable. Larry Khan, another Jive executive who worked closely with the singer even after viewing the sex tape, likewise implied it was not the label's responsibility, and pointed to Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis as musicians whose labels continued to release and promote their records despite public awareness that they were involved with underage girls. Executives at Epic Records also took a similarly relaxed attitude towards allegations of Kelly's sexual misconduct, the Post claimed. In 2002, after he signed with the label, executive David McPherson allegedly avoided viewing a copy of a tape purportedly showing the singer having sex with an underage girl, even as he had warned Kelly's assistant that if it turned out to be Kelly on that tape, the label would drop him. McPherson did not respond to the Posts requests for comment. An intern with the label whose work suffered after she began a relationship with Kelly, ultimately costing her the position, settled with Epic for $250,000; Cathy Carroll, the executive she worked for, regularly rebuked her former subordinate for having an affair with a married man whenever the two met at social functions for years afterwards, and the damage to the woman's reputation led her to abandon her career in the music industry. Carroll told the newspaper the woman was "starstruck ... A lot of times it's not really the men." The Washington Post also suggested the labels were complicit in the sex-cult allegations from the previous summer's BuzzFeed piece. Employees at the studios where Kelly recorded were required to sign non-disclosure agreements and not enter certain rooms, which they said they believed were where Kelly made the women stay while he worked. Despite the agreements, the newspaper was able to publish screenshots of text exchanges where women in the rooms asked Kelly's assistants to let them out so they could go to the bathroom or get food. The newspaper also published pictures taken after Kelly had concluded a six-week session at a Los Angeles studio, paid for by his then-current label, RCA Records, showing a cup of urine sitting on a piano and urine stains on the wooden floor of another room. Musical response to allegations Kelly released the 19-minute long "I Admit" on SoundCloud on July 23, 2018, as a response to his accusers. The song does not contain any criminal admissions despite its title and chorus, which repeats the lyric "I admit it, I did it". In "I Admit", Kelly denies allegations of domestic violence and pedophilia, asserting that they are matters of opinion. Kelly also denounces Jim DeRogatis and repudiates his investigative report's claim of Kelly operating a "sex cult". Addressing the Mute R. Kelly social media campaign, Kelly sings, "only God can mute me". The song was criticized by reviewers, who described it as an act of trolling. Andrea Kelly and Carey Killa Kelly, R. Kelly's ex-wife and brother, responded to "I Admit" with a remix and a diss track. Surviving R. Kelly (2019–2020) In January 2019, Lifetime began airing a six-part documentary series titled Surviving R. Kelly detailing sexual abuse and misconduct allegations against Kelly. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Loraine Ali observed that the series covered a range of in-depth interviews that "paint a picture of a predator whose behavior was consistently overlooked by the industry, his peers and the public while his spiritual hit was sung in churches and schools." Within two weeks, Kelly launched a Facebook page where he sought to discredit the accusers who appeared in the docuseries. Facebook removed the page for violating their standards as it appeared to contain personal contact information for his accusers. The second season titled Surviving R. Kelly Part II: The Reckoning premiered on January 2, 2020. Following airing of the Surviving R. Kelly documentary, Kelly was listed in Guinness World Records as the most searched for male musician on Google in 2019. He ranked 8th overall on Google's list of the 10 most search for people for the year. Second series of criminal charges (2019–2021) On February 22, 2019, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office in Illinois charged Kelly with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. The charges allege that from 1998 to 2010, Kelly sexually abused four females, three of whom were teen minors at the time, with evidence including a video provided by Michael Avenatti of an alleged new crime. After Kelly turned himself in the day the charges were announced, he was arrested by the Chicago Police Department and taken into custody. The judge set bond at $1 million and ordered Kelly to have no contact with any minor under 18 or alleged victim. Kelly pleaded not guilty to all charges, which he called lies. He was released on bail after three nights in jail at Cook County. On March 6, 2019, Gayle King interviewed Kelly on CBS This Morning, where he insisted on his innocence and blamed social media for the allegations. During the interview, Kelly had an emotional outburst where he stood up, pounded his chest, and yelled. Two women who described themselves as a Kelly's girlfriends and whose parents say are brainwashed captives, declared their love for Kelly and defended him during the broadcast. On July 11, 2019, Kelly was arrested on federal charges alleging sex crimes and obstruction of justice by U.S. Homeland Security investigators and NYPD detectives in Chicago. On July 12, 2019, federal prosecutors from New York and Chicago indicted Kelly on 18 charges, including child sexual exploitation, child pornography production, sex trafficking, kidnapping, forced labor, racketeering, and obstruction of justice. He was first denied bail in October 2019 and denied bail release again in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Superseding indictments were filed in Chicago on February 13, 2020, and in New York on March 13, 2020, raising the total number of charges to 22. He was incarcerated at Metropolitan Correctional Center, Chicago from July 11, 2019, to June 23, 2021. On June 23, 2021, Kelly was transferred to Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn. On August 5, 2019, the State's Attorney Office in Hennepin County, Minnesota charged Kelly with soliciting a minor and prostitution; prosecutors alleged that in July 2001, following a concert in Minneapolis, Kelly had invited a girl up to his hotel room and paid her $200 to remove her clothing and dance with him. In July 2021, Federal prosecutors asked the court to include alleged evidence of bribes, recordings of threats and more allegations of sexual abuse of minors, including an underaged boy he met at McDonald's, as pattern evidence in his trial. Criminal conviction (2021) The federal trial began on August 18, 2021. After weeks of testimony and two days of deliberations, on September 27, 2021, the jury found Kelly guilty on nine counts including racketeering, sexual exploitation of a child, kidnapping, bribery, sex trafficking, and a violation of the Mann Act. The judge ordered that Kelly remain in custody pending sentencing, which was set for May 4, 2022. After the jury delivered their verdict, women's rights attorney Gloria Allred, who represented several victims, stated that Kelly was the worst sexual predator she had pursued in her 47-year career of practicing law. Other legal issues After a July 1996 brawl at a Lafayette, Louisiana health club involving Kelly and his entourage, Kelly was placed on a year's unsupervised probation starting August 13, 1997, after being found guilty of battery. One of the victims needed 110 facial stitches. Also that year, a 20-year-old accused Kelly in civil court of having sexual relations with her when he was 24 and she was 15. Kelly settled the lawsuit in 1998 for $250,000, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. On April 8, 1998, Kelly was arrested on three misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct, including one charge on violating noise ordinance for playing his music extremely loud from his car. Prosecutors from the district attorney's office dropped the first two charges on May 7 and the noise charge on July 22 that year. On March 6, 2019, Kelly was taken back to the Cook County Jail after failing to pay $161,633 in child support. On March 9, 2019, he was released after someone, who did not want to be identified, paid off the child support. His lawyer says he could not discuss the payment due to a gag order. Influence Kelly is considered to be one of the most successful R&B artists since the mid-1980s. He is also one of the best-selling music artists in the United States, with over 30 million albums sold, as well as only the fifth black artist to enter the top 50 of the same list. Rolling Stone magazine called him "arguably the most important R&B figure of the 1990s and 2000s." Music executive Barry Weiss described Kelly as "the modern-day Prince, although there's a bit of Marvin Gaye in him, and a bit of Irving Berlin." In addition to his solo and collaboration success, Kelly has also written and produced several hit songs, such as "Fortunate" for Maxwell, "You Are Not Alone" for Michael Jackson, "G.H.E.T.T.O.U.T." for Changing Faces, "Bump, Bump, Bump" for B2K, and many more. R. Kelly has been compared to artists like Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye. Personal life Kelly's mother, Joanne, died from cancer in 1993. He has given conflicting accounts of where he was during his mother's passing. In 1996, Kelly married Andrea Kelly, his former backup dancer and mother of his three children. Andrea filed a restraining order against Kelly in September 2005 after a physical altercation, ultimately filing for divorce in 2006. In January 2009, after separating in the fall of 2005, Kelly and his wife Andrea Kelly finalized their divorce after 11 years of marriage. Charity and donations In 2007, Kelly released the song "Rise Up" for Virginia Tech after the 2007 school shooting, and donated the net proceeds to the families of the victims. In 2010, Kelly penned the song "Sign of a Victory" for the FIFA World Cup, with all proceeds benefiting African charities. In 2011, he performed at a charity event in Chicago benefiting Clara's House, a now-shuttered (Jan 2018) facility designed to build employment, housing, health care, and education in the projects of Chicago. In 2016, Kelly donated cases of water to the Flint water crisis. Honors and awards Kelly has been awarded and nominated for multiple awards during his career, as a songwriter, producer, and singer. He was granted three Grammy Awards for his song "I Believe I Can Fly": Best Male R&B Vocal Performance, Best Rhythm and Blues Song, and Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or for Television. Discography Studio albums Born into the 90's (1992) (with Public Announcement) 12 Play (1993) R. Kelly (1995) R. (1998) TP-2.com (2000) The Best of Both Worlds (2002) (with Jay-Z) Chocolate Factory (2003) Happy People/U Saved Me (2004) Unfinished Business (2004) (with Jay-Z) TP.3 Reloaded (2005) Double Up (2007) Untitled (2009) Love Letter (2010) Write Me Back (2012) Black Panties (2013) The Buffet (2015) 12 Nights of Christmas (2016) Filmography Books Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me (2012, autobiography) Tours 60653 Tour (w/ Public Announcement) (1993) The 12 Play Very Necessary Tour (with Salt-N-Pepa) (1994) The Down Low Top Secret Tour (with LL Cool J, Xscape, and Solo) (1996) The Get Up on a Room Tour (with Kelly Price, Nas, Foxy Brown, and Deborah Cox) (1999) The TP-2.com Tour (with Sunshine Anderson & Syleena Johnson) (2001) The Key in the Ignition Tour (with Ashanti) (2003) The Best Of Both Worlds Tour (w/ Jay-Z) (2004) The Light It Up Tour (2006) The Double Up Tour (with J. Holiday & Keyshia Cole) (2007) The Ladies Make Some Noise Tour (with K. Michelle) (2009) Love Letter Tour (with Keyshia Cole & Marsha Ambrosius) (2011) The Single Ladies Tour (with Tamia) (2012–13) Black Panties Tour (2014–16) The Buffet Tour (2016) See also Honorific nicknames in popular music List of artists who reached number one in the United States List of Billboard number-one singles List of highest-certified music artists in the United States List of songs recorded by R. Kelly List of songs written and produced by R. Kelly List of unreleased songs recorded by R. Kelly Shaggy defense References External links R. Kelly: Sex, Girls and Videotapes, BBC documentary, March 28, 2018 1967 births Living people 20th-century American criminals 21st-century American criminals African-American basketball players African-American Christians African-American male actors 20th-century African-American male singers African-American record producers African-American male singer-songwriters American contemporary R&B singers American gospel singers American hip hop record producers American hip hop singers American male criminals American male film actors American men's basketball players American music arrangers American music industry executives American music video directors American people convicted of child sexual abuse American people convicted of kidnapping American prisoners and detainees American soul musicians American soul singers American sportspeople convicted of crimes American tenors Atlantic City Seagulls players Basketball players from Illinois Child marriage in the United States Criminals from Chicago Grammy Award winners Guards (basketball) Jive Records artists Male actors from Chicago Music video codirectors People acquitted of sex crimes People convicted of racketeering People convicted of sex trafficking People convicted of violating the Mann Act People from Olympia Fields, Illinois Prisoners and detainees of the United States Record producers from Illinois Shooting guards Singers from Chicago Small forwards Sportspeople from Cook County, Illinois Writers from Chicago Singer-songwriters from Illinois 21st-century African-American male singers LGBT singers	false	[ "The Reason is the second studio album by Eleven22. They released the album on May 15, 2012.\n\nCritical reception\n\nAwarding the album three and a half stars at New Release Today, Kevin Davis writes, \"[the listener will be] refreshed, nourished, encouraged, and turn to God for your strength.\" Tony Cummings, rating the album a perfect ten for Cross Rhythms, describes, \"...this is one of the finest albums of modern worship\". Indicating in a three and a half review from The Phantom Tollbooth, Derek Walker says, \"Extremely well-executed praise music that pays tribute to a life that impacted many, and benefits orphanages around the world.\" Andrew Funderburk, giving the album three and a half stars by CM Addict, states, \"Despite what may seem like flaws in my eyes, this project sends out a deeper strain of beauty because of what The Reason stands for.\"\n\nTrack listing\n\nReferences\n\n2012 albums", "\"What Do Ya Think About That\" is a song written by Anthony Smith and Brett Jones, and recorded by American country music duo Montgomery Gentry. It was released in July 2007 as the third single from their album Some People Change.\n\nContent\nThe song is an up-tempo in which the narrator states that he stands by his beliefs, and will not let himself be persuaded by the comments made by his peers (\"I don't give a durn what other people think / What do ya think about that?\").\n\nCritical reception\nChris Willman described the song negatively in his review, saying that its \"defense of the American right to piss off your neighbors\" conflicted with the message of the album's title track.\n\nOfficial versions\n \"What Do Ya Think About That\" (Album Version) – 3:40\n\nChart performance\n\nYear-end charts\n\nReferences\n\n2007 singles\nMontgomery Gentry songs\nSongs written by Anthony Smith (singer)\nColumbia Records singles\nSong recordings produced by Mark Wright (record producer)\n2006 songs\nSongs written by Brett Jones (songwriter)" ]
[ "Fred Rogers", "VCR" ]	C_633c016260e9440c9c51f1d94034cc41_0	What did Rogers have to do with the VCR?	1	What did Rogers have to do with the VCR?	Fred Rogers	During the controversy surrounding the introduction of the household VCR, Rogers was involved in supporting the manufacturers of VCRs in court. His 1979 testimony, in the case Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., noted that he did not object to home recordings of his television programs, for instance, by families in order to watch them together at a later time. This testimony contrasted with the views of others in the television industry who objected to home recordings or believed that devices to facilitate it should be taxed or regulated. When the case reached the Supreme Court in 1983, the majority decision considered the testimony of Rogers when it held that the Betamax video recorder did not infringe copyright. The Court stated that his views were a notable piece of evidence "that many [television] producers are willing to allow private time-shifting to continue" and even quoted his testimony in a footnote: Some public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the Neighborhood at hours when some children cannot use it ... I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the Neighborhood off-the-air, and I'm speaking for the Neighborhood because that's what I produce, that they then become much more active in the programming of their family's television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been "You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions." Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important. CANNOTANSWER	Rogers was involved in supporting the manufacturers of VCRs in court.	Fred McFeely Rogers (March 20, 1928 – February 27, 2003), also known as Mister Rogers, was an American television host, author, producer, and Presbyterian minister. He was the creator, showrunner, and host of the preschool television series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which ran from 1968 to 2001. Born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, Rogers earned a bachelor's degree in music from Rollins College in 1951. He began his television career at NBC in New York, returning to Pittsburgh in 1953 to work for children's programming at NET (later PBS) television station WQED. He graduated from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary with a bachelor's degree in divinity in 1962 and became a Presbyterian minister in 1963. He attended the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Child Development, where he began his 30-year collaboration with child psychologist Margaret McFarland. He also helped develop the children's shows The Children's Corner (1955) for WQED in Pittsburgh and Misterogers (1963) in Canada for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1968, he returned to Pittsburgh and adapted the format of his Canadian series to create Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which ran for 33 years. The program was critically acclaimed for focusing on children's emotional and physical concerns, such as death, sibling rivalry, school enrollment, and divorce. Rogers died of stomach cancer on February 27, 2003, at age 74. His work in children's television has been widely lauded, and he received more than 40 honorary degrees and several awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002 and a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1997. He was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999. Rogers influenced many writers and producers of children's television shows, and his broadcasts have served as a source of comfort during tragic events, even after his death. Early life Rogers was born on March 20, 1928, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, about outside of Pittsburgh, at 705 Main Street to James and Nancy Rogers. James was "a very successful businessman" who was president of the McFeely Brick Company, one of Latrobe's largest businesses. Nancy's father, Fred Brooks McFeely, after whom Rogers was named, was an entrepreneur. Nancy knitted sweaters for American soldiers from western Pennsylvania who were fighting in Europe and regularly volunteered at the Latrobe Hospital. Initially, dreaming of becoming a doctor, she settled for a life of hospital volunteer work. Rogers grew up in a three-story brick mansion at 737 Weldon Street in Latrobe. He had a sister, Elaine, whom the Rogerses adopted when he was 11 years old. Rogers spent much of his childhood alone, playing with puppets, and also spent time with his grandfather. He began to play the piano when he was five years old. Through an ancestor who immigrated from Germany to the U.S., Johannes Meffert (born 1732), Rogers is the sixth cousin of American actor Tom Hanks, who portrays him in the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019). Rogers had a difficult childhood. He was shy, introverted, and overweight, and was frequently homebound after suffering bouts of asthma. He was bullied and taunted as a child for his weight, and called "Fat Freddy". According to Morgan Neville, director of the 2018 documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor?, Rogers had a "lonely childhood... I think he made friends with himself as much as he could. He had a ventriloquist dummy, he had [stuffed] animals, and he would create his own worlds in his childhood bedroom". Rogers attended Latrobe High School, where he overcame his shyness. "It was tough for me at the beginning," Rogers told NPR's Terry Gross in 1984. "And then I made a couple friends who found out that the core of me was okay. And one of them was... the head of the football team". Rogers served as president of the student council, was a member of the National Honor Society, and was editor-in-chief of the school yearbook. He registered for the draft in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1948 at age 20, where he was classified as “1-A”, available for military service. However, his status was changed to “4-F”, unfit for military service, following an Armed Forces physical on October 12, 1950. Rogers attended Dartmouth College for one year before transferring to Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida; he graduated magna cum laude in 1951 with a Bachelor of Music. Rogers graduated magna cum laude from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1962 with a Bachelor of Divinity. He was ordained a minister by the Pittsburgh Presbytery of the United Presbyterian Church in 1963. His mission as an ordained minister, instead of being a pastor of a church, was to minister to children and their families through television. He regularly appeared before church officials to keep up his ordination. Career Early work Rogers wanted to enter seminary after college, but instead chose to go into the nascent medium of television after encountering a TV at his parents' home in 1951 during his senior year at Rollins College. In a CNN interview, he said, "I went into television because I hated it so, and I thought there's some way of using this fabulous instrument to nurture those who would watch and listen". After graduating in 1951, he worked at NBC in New York City as floor director of Your Hit Parade, The Kate Smith Hour, and Gabby Hayes's children's show, and as an assistant producer of The Voice of Firestone. In 1953, Rogers returned to Pittsburgh to work as a program developer at public television station WQED. Josie Carey worked with him to develop the children's show The Children's Corner, which Carey hosted. Rogers worked off-camera to develop puppets, characters, and music for the show. He used many of the puppet characters developed during this time, such as Daniel the Striped Tiger (named after WQED's station manager, Dorothy Daniel, who gave Rogers a tiger puppet before the show's premiere), King Friday XIII, Queen Sara Saturday (named after Rogers's wife), X the Owl, Henrietta, and Lady Elaine, in his later work. Children's television entertainer Ernie Coombs was an assistant puppeteer. The Children's Corner won a Sylvania Award for best locally produced children's programming in 1955 and was broadcast nationally on NBC. While working on The Children's Corner, Rogers attended Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1963. He also attended the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Child Development, where he began working with child psychologist Margaret McFarland, who according to Rogers's biographer Maxwell King became his "key advisor and collaborator" and "child-education guru". Much of Rogers's "thinking about and appreciation for children was shaped and informed" by McFarland. She was his consultant for most of Mister Rogers' Neighborhoods scripts and songs for 30 years. In 1963, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Toronto contracted Rogers to develop and host the 15-minute black-and-white children's program Misterogers; it lasted from 1963 to 1967. It was the first time Rogers appeared on camera. CBC's children's programming head Fred Rainsberry insisted on it, telling Rogers, "Fred, I've seen you talk with kids. Let's put you yourself on the air". Coombs joined Rogers in Toronto as an assistant puppeteer. Rogers also worked with Coombs on the children's show Butternut Square from 1964 to 1967. He acquired the rights to Misterogers in 1967 and returned to Pittsburgh with his wife, two young sons, and the sets he developed, despite a potentially promising career with CBC and no job prospects in Pittsburgh. On Rogers' recommendation, Coombs remained in Toronto and became Rogers' Canadian equivalent of an iconic television personality, creating the long-running children's program, Mr. Dressup, which ran from 1967 to 1996. Rogers's work for CBC "helped shape and develop the concept and style of his later program for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the U.S." Mister Rogers' Neighborhood Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (also called the Neighborhood), a half-hour educational children's program starring Rogers, began airing nationally in 1968 and ran for 895 episodes. The program was videotaped at WQED in Pittsburgh and was broadcast by National Educational Television (NET), which later became the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Its first season had 180 black-and-white episodes. Each subsequent season, filmed in color and funded by PBS, the Sears-Roebuck Foundation, and other charities, consisted of 65 episodes. By the time the program ended production in December 2000, its average rating was about 0.7 percent of television households, or 680,000 homes, and it aired on 384 PBS stations. At its peak in 1985–1986, its ratings were at 2.1 percent, or 1.8 million homes. Production of the Neighborhood ended in December 2000, and the last original episode aired in 2001, but PBS continued to air reruns; by 2016 it was the third-longest running program in PBS history. Many of the sets and props in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, like the trolley, the sneakers, and the castle, were created for Rogers's show in Toronto by CBC designers and producers. The program also "incorporated most of the highly imaginative elements that later became famous", such as its slow pace and its host's quiet manner. The format of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood "remained virtually unchanged" for the entire run of the program. Every episode begins with a camera's-eye view of a model of a neighborhood, then panning in closer to a representation of a house while a piano instrumental of the theme song, "Won't You be My Neighbor?", performed by music director Johnny Costa and inspired by a Beethoven sonata, is played. The camera zooms in to a model representing Mr. Rogers's house, then cuts to the house's interior and pans across the room to the front door, which Rogers opens as he sings the theme song to greet his visitors while changing his suit jacket to a cardigan (knitted by his mother) and his dress shoes to sneakers, "complete with a shoe tossed from one hand to another". The episode's theme is introduced, and Mr. Rogers leaves his home to visit another location, the camera panning back to the neighborhood model and zooming in to the new location as he enters it. Once this segment ends, Mr. Rogers leaves and returns to his home, indicating that it is time to visit the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Mr. Rogers proceeds to the window seat by the trolley track and sets up the action there as the Trolley comes out. The camera follows it down a tunnel in the back wall of the house as it enters the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. The stories and lessons told take place over a series of a week's worth of episodes and involve puppet and human characters. The end of the visit occurs when the Trolley returns to the same tunnel from which it emerged, reappearing in Mr. Rogers's home. He then talks to the viewers before concluding the episode. He often feeds his fish, cleans up any props he has used, and returns to the front room, where he sings the closing song while changing back into his dress shoes and jacket. He exits the front door as he ends the song, and the camera zooms out of his home and pans across the neighborhood model as the episode ends. Mister Rogers' Neighborhood emphasized young children's social and emotional needs, and unlike another PBS show, Sesame Street, which premiered in 1969, did not focus on cognitive learning. Writer Kathy Merlock Jackson said, "While both shows target the same preschool audience and prepare children for kindergarten, Sesame Street concentrates on school-readiness skills while Mister Rogers Neighborhood focuses on the child's developing psyche and feelings and sense of moral and ethical reasoning". The Neighborhood also spent fewer resources on research than Sesame Street, but Rogers used early childhood education concepts taught by his mentor Margaret McFarland, Benjamin Spock, Erik Erikson, and T. Berry Brazelton in his lessons. As the Washington Post noted, Rogers taught young children about civility, tolerance, sharing, and self-worth "in a reassuring tone and leisurely cadence". He tackled difficult topics such as the death of a family pet, sibling rivalry, the addition of a newborn into a family, moving and enrolling in a new school, and divorce. For example, he wrote a special segment that dealt with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy that aired on June 7, 1968, days after the assassination occurred. According to King, the process of putting each episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood together was "painstaking" and Rogers's contribution to the program was "astounding". Rogers wrote and edited all the episodes, played the piano and sang for most of the songs, wrote 200 songs and 13 operas, created all the characters (both puppet and human), played most of the major puppet roles, hosted every episode, and produced and approved every detail of the program. The puppets created for the Neighborhood of Make-Believe "included an extraordinary variety of personalities". They were simple puppets but "complex, complicated, and utterly honest beings". In 1971, Rogers formed Family Communications, Inc. (FCI, now The Fred Rogers Company), to produce the Neighborhood, other programs, and non-broadcast materials. In 1975, Rogers stopped producing Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood to focus on adult programming. Reruns of the Neighborhood continued to air on PBS. King reports that the decision caught many of his coworkers and supporters "off guard". Rogers continued to confer with McFarland about child development and early childhood education, however. In 1979, after an almost five-year hiatus, Rogers returned to producing the Neighborhood; King calls the new version "stronger and more sophisticated than ever". King writes that by the program's second run in the 1980s, it was "such a cultural touchstone that it had inspired numerous parodies", most notably Eddie Murphy's parody on Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s. Rogers retired from producing the Neighborhood in 2001 at age 73, although reruns continued to air. He and FCI had been making about two or three weeks of new programs per year for many years, "filling the rest of his time slots from a library of about 300 shows made since 1979". The final original episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood aired on August 31, 2001. Other work and appearances In 1969, Rogers testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications, which was chaired by Democratic Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island. U.S. President Lyndon Johnson had proposed a $20 million bill for the creation of PBS before he left office, but his successor, Richard Nixon, wanted to cut the funding to $10 million. Even though Rogers was not yet nationally known, he was chosen to testify because of his ability to make persuasive arguments and to connect emotionally with his audience. The clip of Rogers's testimony, which was televised and has since been viewed by millions of people on the internet, helped to secure funding for PBS for many years afterwards. According to King, Rogers's testimony was "considered one of the most powerful pieces of testimony ever offered before Congress, and one of the most powerful pieces of video presentation ever filmed". It brought Pastore to tears and also, according to King, has been studied by public relations experts and academics. Congressional funding for PBS increased from $9 million to $22 million. In 1970, Nixon appointed Rogers as chair of the White House Conference on Children and Youth. In 1978, while on hiatus from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Rogers wrote, produced, and hosted a 30-minute interview program for adults on PBS called Old Friends... New Friends. It lasted 20 episodes. Rogers's guests included Hoagy Carmichael, Helen Hayes, Milton Berle, Lorin Hollander, poet Robert Frost's daughter Lesley, and Willie Stargell. In September 1987, Rogers visited Moscow to appear as the first guest on the long-running Soviet children's TV show Good Night, Little Ones! with host Tatiana Vedeneyeva. The appearance was broadcast in the Soviet Union on December 7, coinciding with the Washington Summit meeting between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan in Washington D.C. Vedeneyeva visited the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in November. Her visit was taped and later aired in March 1988 as part of Rogers's program. In 1994, Rogers wrote, produced, and hosted a special for PBS called Fred Rogers' Heroes, which featured interviews and portraits of four people from across the country who were having a positive impact on children and education. The first time Rogers appeared on television as an actor, and not himself, was in a 1996 episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, playing a preacher. Rogers gave "scores of interviews". Though reluctant to appear on television talk shows, he would usually "charm the host with his quick wit and ability to ad-lib on a moment's notice". Rogers was "one of the country's most sought-after commencement speakers", making over 150 speeches. His friend and colleague David Newell reported that Rogers would "agonize over a speech", and King reported that Rogers was at his least guarded during his speeches, which were about children, television, education, his view of the world, how to make the world a better place, and his quest for self-knowledge. His tone was quiet and informal but "commanded attention". In many speeches, including the ones he made accepting a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1997, for his induction into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999, and his final commencement speech at Dartmouth College in 2002, he instructed his audiences to remain silent and think for a moment about someone who had a good influence on them. Personal life Rogers met Sara Joanne Byrd (called "Joanne") from Jacksonville, Florida, while attending Rollins College. They were married from 1952 until his death in 2003. They had two sons, James and John. Joanne was "an accomplished pianist", who like Fred earned a Bachelor of Music from Rollins, and went on to earn a Master of Music from Florida State University. She performed publicly with her college classmate, Jeannine Morrison, from 1976 to 2008. According to biographer Maxwell King, Rogers's close associates said he was "absolutely faithful to his marriage vows". Rogers was red-green color-blind. He became a pescatarian in 1970, after the death of his father, and a vegetarian in the early 1980s, saying he "couldn't eat anything that had a mother". He became a co-owner of Vegetarian Times in the mid-1980s and said in one issue, "I love tofu burgers and beets". He told Vegetarian Times that he became a vegetarian for both ethical and health reasons. According to his biographer Maxwell King, Rogers also signed his name to a statement protesting wearing animal furs. Rogers was a registered Republican, but according to Joanne Rogers, he was "very independent in the way he voted", choosing not to talk about politics because he wanted to be impartial. Rogers was a Presbyterian, and many of the messages he expressed in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood were inspired by the core tenets of Christianity. Rogers rarely spoke about his faith on air; he believed that teaching through example was as powerful as preaching. He said, "You don't need to speak overtly about religion in order to get a message across". According to writer Shea Tuttle, Rogers considered his faith a fundamental part of his personality and "called the space between the viewer and the television set 'holy ground'". But despite his strong faith, Rogers struggled with anger, conflict, and self-doubt, especially at the end of his life. He also studied Catholic mysticism, Judaism, Buddhism, and other faiths and cultures. King called him "that unique television star with a real spiritual life", emphasizing the values of patience, reflection, and "silence in a noisy world". King reported that despite Rogers's family's wealth, he cared little about making money, and lived frugally, especially as he and his wife grew older. King reported that Rogers's relationship with his young audience was important to him. For example, since hosting Misterogers in Canada, he answered every letter sent to him by hand. After Mister Rogers' Neighborhood began airing in the U.S., the letters increased in volume and he hired staff member and producer Hedda Sharapan to answer them, but he read, edited, and signed each one. King wrote that Rogers saw responding to his viewers' letters as "a pastoral duty of sorts". The New York Times called Rogers "a dedicated lap-swimmer", and Tom Junod, author of "Can You Say... Hero?", the 1998 Esquire profile of Rogers, said, "Nearly every morning of his life, Mister Rogers has gone swimming". Rogers began swimming when he was a child at his family's vacation home outside Latrobe, where they owned a pool, and during their winter trips to Florida. King wrote that swimming and playing the piano were "lifelong passions" and that "both gave him a chance to feel capable and in charge of his destiny", and that swimming became "an important part of the strong sense of self-discipline he cultivated". Rogers swam daily at the Pittsburgh Athletic Association, after waking every morning between 4:30 and 5:30 A.M. to pray and to "read the Bible and prepare himself for the day". He did not smoke or drink. According to Junod, he did nothing to change his weight from the he weighed for most of his adult life; by 1998, this also included napping daily, going to bed at 9:30 P.M., and sleeping eight hours per night without interruption. Junod said Rogers saw his weight "as a destiny fulfilled", telling Junod, "the number 143 means 'I love you.' It takes one letter to say 'I' and four letters to say 'love' and three letters to say 'you'". Death and memorials After Rogers's retirement in 2001, he remained busy working with FCI, studying religion and spirituality, making public appearances, traveling, and working on a children's media center named after him at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe with Archabbot Douglas Nowicki, chancellor of the college. By the summer of 2002, his chronic stomach pain became severe enough for him to see a doctor about it, and in October 2002, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He delayed treatment until after he served as Grand Marshal of the 2003 Rose Parade, with Art Linkletter and Bill Cosby in January. On January 6, Rogers underwent stomach surgery. He died less than two months later, on February 27, 2003, one month before his 75th birthday, at his home in Pittsburgh, with his wife of 50 years, Joanne, at his side. While comatose shortly before his death, he received the last rites of the Catholic Church from Archabbot Nowicki. The following day, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covered Rogers's death on the front page and dedicated an entire section to his death and impact. The newspaper also reported that by noon, the internet "was already full of appreciative pieces" by parents, viewers, producers, and writers. Rogers's death was widely lamented. Most U.S. metropolitan newspapers ran his obituary on their front page, and some dedicated entire sections to coverage of his death. WQED aired programs about Rogers the evening he died; the Post-Gazette reported that the ratings for their coverage were three times higher than their normal ratings. That same evening, Nightline on ABC broadcast a rerun of a recent interview with Rogers; the program got the highest ratings of the day, beating the February average ratings of Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. On March 4, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution honoring Rogers sponsored by Representative Mike Doyle from Pennsylvania. On March 1, 2003, a private funeral was held for Rogers in Unity Chapel, which was restored by Rogers's father, at Unity Cemetery in Latrobe. About 80 relatives, co-workers, and close friends attended the service, which "was planned in great secrecy so that those closest to him could grieve in private". Reverend John McCall, pastor of the Rogers family's church, Sixth Presbyterian Church in Squirrel Hill, gave the homily, and Reverend William Barker, a retired Presbyterian minister who was a "close friend of Mr. Rogers and the voice of Mr. Platypus on his show", read Rogers's favorite Bible passages. Rogers was interred at Unity Cemetery in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in a mausoleum owned by his mother's family. On May 3, 2003, a public memorial was held at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh. According to the Post-Gazette, 2,700 people attended. Violinist Itzhak Perlman, cellist Yo-Yo Ma (via video), and organist Alan Morrison performed in honor of Rogers. Barker officiated the service; also in attendance were Pittsburgh philanthropist Elsie Hillman, former Good Morning America host David Hartman, The Very Hungry Caterpillar author Eric Carle, and Arthur creator Marc Brown. Businesswoman and philanthropist Teresa Heinz, PBS President Pat Mitchell, and executive director of The Pittsburgh Project Saleem Ghubril gave remarks. Jeff Erlanger, who at age 10 appeared on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 1981 to explain his electric wheelchair, also spoke. The memorial was broadcast several times on Pittsburgh television stations and websites throughout the day. Legacy Marc Brown, creator of another PBS children's show, Arthur, considered Rogers both a friend and "a terrific role model for how to use television and the media to be helpful to kids and families". Josh Selig, creator of Wonder Pets, credits Rogers with influencing his use of structure and predictability, and his use of music, opera, and originality. Rogers inspired Angela Santomero, co-creator of the children's television show Blue's Clues, to earn a degree in developmental psychology and go into educational television. She and the other producers of Blue's Clues used many of Rogers's techniques, such as using child developmental and educational research, and having the host speak directly to the camera and transition to a make-believe world. In 2006, three years after Rogers's death and the end of production of Blue's Clues, the Fred Rogers Company contacted Santomero to create a show that would promote Rogers's legacy. In 2012, Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, with characters from and based upon Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, premiered on PBS. Rogers's style and approach to children's television and early childhood education also "begged to be parodied". Comedian Eddie Murphy parodied Mister Rogers' Neighborhood on Saturday Night Live during the 1980s. Rogers told interviewer David Letterman in 1982 that he believed parodies like Murphy's were done "with kindness in their hearts". Video of Rogers's 1969 testimony in defense of public programming has experienced a resurgence since 2012, going viral at least twice. It first resurfaced after then presidential candidate Mitt Romney suggested cutting funding for PBS. In 2017, video of the testimony again went viral after President Donald Trump proposed defunding several arts-related government programs including PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts. A roadside Pennsylvania Historical Marker dedicated to Rogers to be installed in Latrobe was approved by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission on March 4, 2014. It was installed on June 11, 2016, with the title "Fred McFeely Rogers (1928–2003)". In 2018, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, director Morgan Neville's documentary about Rogers's life, grossed over $22 million and became the top-grossing biographical documentary ever produced, the highest-grossing documentary in five years, and the 12th largest-grossing documentary ever produced. The 2019 drama film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood tells the story of Rogers and his television series, with Tom Hanks portraying Rogers. According to Caitlin Gibson of The Washington Post, Rogers became a source for parenting advice; she called him "a timeless oracle against a backdrop of ever-shifting parenting philosophies and cultural trends". Robert Thompson of Syracuse University noted that Rogers "took American childhood—and I think Americans in general—through some very turbulent and trying times", from the Vietnam War and the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. According to Asia Simone Burns of National Public Radio, in the years following the end of production on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 2001, and his death in 2003, Rogers became "a source of comfort, sometimes in the wake of tragedy". Burns has said Rogers's words of comfort "began circulating on social media" following tragedies such as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, the Manchester Arena bombing in Manchester, England, in 2017, and the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. Awards and honors Museum exhibits Smithsonian Institution permanent collection. In 1984, Rogers donated one of his sweaters to the Smithsonian. Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. Exhibit created by Rogers and FCI in 1998. It attracted hundreds of thousand of visitors over 10 years, and included, from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, one of his sweaters, a pair of his sneakers, original puppets from the program, and photographs of Rogers. The exhibit traveled to children's museums throughout the country for eight years until it was given to the Louisiana Children's Museum in New Orleans as a permanent exhibit, to help them recover from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In 2007, the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh created a traveling exhibit based on the factory tours featured in episodes of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Heinz History Center permanent collection (2018). In honor of the 50th anniversary of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and what would have been Rogers's 90th birthday. Louisiana Children's Museum. The museum contains an exhibit of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which debuted in 2007. The exhibit was donated by the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. Fred Rogers Exhibit. The Exhibit displays the life, career and legacy of Rogers and includes photos, artifacts from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and clips of the program and interviews featuring Rogers. It is located at the Fred Rogers Center. Art pieces There are several pieces of art dedicated to Rogers throughout Pittsburgh, including a 7,000-pound, 11-foot high bronze statue of him in the North Shore neighborhood. In the Oakland neighborhood, his portrait is included in the Martin Luther King Jr. and "Interpretations of Oakland" murals. A statue of a dinosaur titled "Fredasaurus Rex Friday XIII" originally stood in front of the WQED building and as of 2014 stands in front of the building that contains the Fred Rogers Company offices. There is a "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood of Make-Believe" in Idlewild Park and a kiosk of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood artifacts at Pittsburgh International Airport. The Carnegie Science Center's Miniature Railroad and Village debuted a miniature recreation of Rogers's house from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 2005. Honorary degrees Rogers has received honorary degrees from over 43 colleges and universities. After 1973, two commemorative quilts, created by two of Rogers's friends and archived at the Fred Rogers Center at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, were made out of the academic hoods he received during the graduation ceremonies. Note: Much of the below list is taken from "Honorary Degrees Awarded to Fred Rogers", unless otherwise stated. Thiel College, 1969. Thiel also awards a yearly scholarship named for Rogers. Eastern Michigan University, 1973 Saint Vincent College, 1973 Christian Theological Seminary, 1973 Rollins College, 1974 Yale University, 1974 Chatham College, 1975 Carnegie Mellon University, 1976 Lafayette College, 1977 Waynesburg College, 1978 Linfield College, 1982 Slippery Rock State College, 1982 Duquesne University, 1982 Washington & Jefferson College, 1984 University of South Carolina, 1985 Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 1985 Drury College, 1986 MacMurray College, 1986 Bowling Green State University, 1987 Westminster College (Pennsylvania), 1987 University of Indianapolis, 1988 University of Connecticut, 1991 Boston University, 1992 Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1992 Moravian College, 1992 Goucher College, 1993 University of Pittsburgh, 1993 West Virginia University, 1995 North Carolina State University, 1996 Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, 1998 Marist College, 1999 Westminster Choir College, 1999 Old Dominion University, 2000 Marquette University, 2001 Middlebury College, 2001 Dartmouth College, 2002 Seton Hill University, 2003 (posthumous) Union College, 2003 (posthumous) Roanoke College, 2003 (posthumous) Filmography Television {\|class="wikitable sortable" \|- ! Year ! Title \|- \| 1954–1961 \| The Children's Corner \|- \| 1963–1966 \| Misterogers \|- \| 1964–1967 \| Butternut Square \|- \| 1968–2001 \| Mister Rogers' Neighborhood \|- \| 1977–1982 \| Christmastime with Mister Rogers \|- \| 1978–1981 \| Old Friends... New Friends \|- \| 1981 \| Sesame Street \|- \| 1988 \| Good Night, Little Ones! \|- \| 1991 \| Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? \|- \| 1994 \|Mr. Dressup's 25th Anniversary\|- \| 1994 \| Fred Rogers' Heroes\|- \| 1996 \| Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman\|- \| 1997 \| Arthur\|- \| 1998 \| Wheel of Fortune\|- \| 2003 \| 114th Annual Tournament of Roses Parade\|} Published works Children's books Our Small World (with Josie Carey, illustrated by Norb Nathanson), 1954, Reed and Witting, The Elves, the Shoemaker, & the Shoemaker's Wife (illustrated by Richard Hefter), 1973, Small World Enterprises, The Matter of the Mittens, 1973, Small World Enterprises, Speedy Delivery (illustrated by Richard Hefter), 1973, Hubbard, Henrietta Meets Someone New (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1974, Golden Press, Mister Rogers Talks About, 1974, Platt & Munk, Time to Be Friends, 1974, Hallmark Cards, Everyone is Special (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1975, Western Publishing, Tell Me, Mister Rogers, 1975, Platt & Munk, The Costume Party (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1976, Golden Press, Planet Purple (illustrated by Dennis Hockerman), 1986, Texas Instruments, If We Were All the Same (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, A Trolley Visit to Make-Believe (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, Wishes Don't Make Things Come True (illustrated Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, No One Can Ever Take Your Place (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, When Monsters Seem Real (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, You Can Never Go Down the Drain (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, The Giving Box (illustrated by Jennifer Herbert), 2000, Running Press, Good Weather or Not (with Hedda Bluestone Sharapan, illustrated by James Mellet), 2005, Family Communications, Josephine the Short Neck-Giraffe, 2006, Family Communications, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: The Poetry of Mister Rogers Neighborhood (illustrated by Luke Flowers), 2009, Quirk Books, First Experiences series illustrated by Jim Judkis Going to Day Care, 1985, Putnam, The New Baby, 1985, Putnam, Going to the Potty, 1986, Putnam, Going to the Doctor, 1986, Putnam, Making Friends, 1987, Putnam, Moving, 1987, Putnam, Going to the Hospital, 1988, Putnam, When a Pet Dies, 1988, Putnam, Going on an Airplane, 1989, Putnam, Going to the Dentist, 1989, Putnam, Let's Talk About It series Going to the Hospital, 1977, Family Communications, Having an Operation, 1977, Family Communications, So Many Things To See!, 1977, Family Communications, Wearing a Cast, 1977, Family Communications, Adoption, 1993, Putnam, Divorce, 1994, Putnam, Extraordinary Friends, 2000, Putnam, Stepfamilies, 2001, Putnam, Songbooks Tomorrow on the Children's Corner (with Josie Carey, illustrated by Mal Wittman), 1960, Vernon Music Corporation, Mister Rogers' Songbook (with Johnny Costa, illustrated by Steven Kellogg), 1970, Random House, Books for adults Mister Rogers Talks to Parents, 1983, Family Communications, Mister Rogers' Playbook (with Barry Head, illustrated by Jamie Adams), 1986, Berkley Books, Mister Rogers Talks with Families About Divorce (with Clare O'Brien), 1987, Berkley Books, Mister Rogers' How Families Grow (with Barry Head and Jim Prokell), 1988, Berkley Books, You Are Special: Words of Wisdom from America's Most Beloved Neighbor, 1994, Penguin Books, Dear Mister Rogers, 1996, Penguin Books, Mister Rogers' Playtime, 2001, Running Press, The Mister Rogers Parenting Book, 2002, Running Press, You are special: Neighborly Wisdom from Mister Rogers, 2002, Running Press, The World According to Mister Rogers, 2003, Hyperion Books, Life's Journeys According to Mister Rogers, 2005, Hyperion Books, The Mister Rogers Parenting Resource Book, 2005, Courage Books, Many Ways to Say I Love You: Wisdom For Parents And Children, 2019, Hachette Books, Discography Around the Children's Corner (with Josey Carey), 1958, Vernon Music Corporation, Tomorrow on the Children's Corner (with Josie Carey), 1959 King Friday XIII Celebrates, 1964 Won't You Be My Neighbor?, 1967 Let's Be Together Today, 1968 Josephine the Short-Neck Giraffe, 1969 You Are Special, 1969 A Place of Our Own, 1970 Come On and Wake Up, 1972 Growing, 1992 Bedtime, 1992 Won't You Be My Neighbor? (cassette and book), 1994, Hal Leonard, Coming and Going, 1997 It's Such A Good Feeling: The Best Of Mister Rogers, 2019, Omnivore Recordings, posthumous release See also Won't You Be My Neighbor?, 2018 documentary Mister Rogers: It's You I Like, 2018 documentary A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, 2019 biographical drama film List of vegetarians Notes References Works cited Gross, Terry (1984). "Terry Gross and Fred Rogers". Fresh Air. NPR. King, Maxwell (2018). The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers. Abrams Press. . Tiech, John (2012). Pittsburgh Film History: On Set in the Steel City''. Charleston, North Carolina: The History Press. . External links PBS Kids: Official Site The Fred M. Rogers Center The Fred Rogers Company (formerly known as Family Communications) 1984 interview with Fred Rogers. The Music of Mister Rogers—Pittsburgh Music History Fred Rogers at Voice Chasers 1928 births 2003 deaths 20th-century American composers 20th-century American male actors 20th-century American male writers 20th-century American singers 20th-century Presbyterians 21st-century Presbyterians American children's television presenters American male composers American male singers American male songwriters American male television actors American male voice actors American philanthropists American Presbyterian ministers American Presbyterians American puppeteers American television hosts Burials in Pennsylvania Christianity in Pittsburgh Columbia Records artists Dartmouth College alumni Daytime Emmy Award winners Deaths from cancer in Pennsylvania Deaths from stomach cancer Male actors from Pittsburgh Omnivore Recordings artists PBS people Peabody Award winners Pennsylvania Republicans People from Latrobe, Pennsylvania Pittsburgh Theological Seminary alumni Presbyterians from Pennsylvania Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Rollins College alumni Singers from Pennsylvania Songwriters from Pennsylvania Television personalities from Pittsburgh Television producers from Pennsylvania United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America ministers Vegetarianism activists Writers from Pittsburgh Articles containing video clips	false	[ "A VCR/DVD combo, or more commonly, a DVD/VCR combo, is a multiplex or converged device, convenient for consumers who wish to use both VHS tapes and DVDs.\n\nHybrid VCR/DVD players were first introduced around the year 1999, and were sometimes criticized as being of poorer quality in terms of resolution than stand-alone units. The first VCR/DVD combo player released was by Go Video, model DVR5000. The product also has a disadvantage in that if one function (DVD or VHS) becomes unusable, the entire unit must be replaced or repaired, though later models of DVD/VCR which suffered from DVD playback lag still functioned with the VCR.\n\nNormally in a combo unit, it will have typical features such as recording a DVD onto VHS, on most, record a show to VHS with the built-in tuner (Now a digital to analog converter must be used.), LP recording for VHS, surround sound for Dolby Digital and DTS (DVD), component connections for DVD, although some may lack the connection, 480p progressive scan for the DVD side, VCR+, playback of tapes in a variety of playback speeds, and front A/V inputs (VCR only).\n\nTo help the consumer, they will have (a) button(s) for switching the output source for ease of use. Usually, the recording capabilities are VCR exclusive, while the better picture quality is DVD exclusive, but some include S-Video and Component (Or HDMI) for VCR too. \n\nThese devices were among the only VCRs alongside some VCR/Blu-ray combo to be equipped with an HDMI port for HDTV viewing upscaling to several different types of resolutions including 1080i\n\nShortly after the turn of the century, hybrids including DVD recorders (instead of players) also become available. These can be used for transferring VHS material onto recordable blank DVDs. Very rarely, will there be component inputs to record with the best connection possible.\n\nIn July 2016, Funai Electric, the last remaining manufacturer of VCR/DVD combos, due to manufacturing costs, announced they would cease production at the end of the month, causing the demise of the combo after 17 years of production, but they can still be found on store shelves.\n\nSee also\nCombo television unit\nVCR/Blu-ray combo\n\nReferences \n\nFilm and video technology\nVideo hardware", "Video Cassette Recording (VCR) is an early domestic analog recording format designed by Philips. It was the first successful consumer-level home videocassette recorder (VCR) system. Later variants included the VCR-LP and Super Video (SVR) formats.\n\nThe VCR format was introduced in 1972, just after the Sony U-matic format in 1971. Although at first glance the two might appear to have been competing formats, they were aimed at very different markets. After failing as a consumer format, U-matic was marketed as a professional television production format, whilst VCR was targeted particularly at educational but also domestic users. Unlike some other early formats such as Cartrivision, the VCR format does record a high-quality video signal without resorting to Skip field.\n\nHome video systems had previously been available, but they were open-reel systems (such as the Sony CV-2000) and were expensive to both buy and operate. They were also unreliable and often only recorded in black and white such as the EIAJ-1. The VCR system was easy to use and recorded in colour but was still expensive: when it was introduced in 1972 the N1500 recorder cost nearly £600 (). By comparison, a small car (the Morris Mini) could be purchased for just over £600.\n\nThe VCR format used large square cassettes with 2 co-axial reels, one on top of the other, containing half inch (12.7 mm) wide chrome dioxide magnetic tape. Three playing times were available: 30, 45 and 60 minutes. The 60-minute videocassettes proved very unreliable, suffering numerous snags and breakages due to the very thin 17μm video tape. Tapes of 45 minutes or less contained 20 μm thickness tape. The mechanically complicated recorders themselves also proved somewhat unreliable. One particularly common failing occurred should tape slack develop within the cassette; the tape from the top (takeup) spool may droop into the path of the bottom (supply) spool and become entangled in it if rewind was selected. The cassette would then completely jam and require dismantling to clear the problem, and the tape would then be creased and damaged.\n\nThe system predated the development of the slant azimuth technique to prevent crosstalk between adjacent video tracks, so it had to use an unrecorded guard band between tracks. This required the system to run at a high tape speed of 11.26 inches per second.\n\nThe Philips VCR system brought together many advances in video recording technology to produce the first truly practical home video cassette system. The very first Philips N1500 model included all the essential elements of a domestic video cassette recorder:\n Simple loading of cassette and simple operation using \"Piano Key\" controls, with full auto-stop at tape ends.\n A tuner for recording off-air television programmes.\n A clock with timer for unattended recordings.\n A modulator to allow connection to a normal (for the time) television receiver without audio and video input connectors.\n\nThe Philips VCR system was marketed only in the U.K., mainland Europe, Australia and South Africa. In mid-1977, Philips announced they were considering distribution of the format in North America, and it was test marketed for several months. Because the format was initially designed only for use with the 625-line 50 Hz PAL system, VCR units had to be modified in order to work with the 60 Hz NTSC system. Unfortunately, for mechanical and electronic reasons, the tape speed had to be increased by 20%, which resulted in a 60-minute PAL tape running for 50 minutes in a NTSC machine. DuPont announced a thinner videotape formulation that would allow a 60-minute NTSC VCR tape (and roughly 70 minutes in PAL), but the tape was even less reliable than previous formulations. Ultimately, Philips abandoned any hope of trying to sell their VCR format in North America, partly because of the reliability issues, and partly because of the introduction of VHS that same year.\n\nVariants\n\nVCR later evolved into a related format known as VCR-LP. This exploited slant azimuth to greatly increase the recording time. Although both formats used identical VCR cassettes, the recordings were incompatible between the two systems, and few if any dual-format recorders existed. Philips N1700, released in 1977, supported the VCR-LP format.\n\nA later even longer-playing variant, Super Video (SVR) was manufactured by Grundig exclusively. SVR was designed to exclusively use BASF- and Agfa-manufactured chrome-dioxide tape in cassettes that were identical to the earlier Philips ones, with the exception of a small actuator added to the bottom of the cassette. This meant that only the BASF/Agfa tapes would work in SVR machines, but that such tapes could also be used in the older VCR and VCR-LP machines. Just as VCR-LP recordings are incompatible with VCR, so SVR recordings are incompatible with both VCR and VCR-LP. The only model to be built was the Grundig SVR4004, with a few detail variations such as optional audio/video connectors, plus a rebadged ITT 240.\n\nCassette playing times \n\nThis chart provides an overview of playing times (in minutes) for the most common cassettes released for standard VCR, VCR-LP and SVR.\n\nVC cassettes were originally developed for standard VCR. LVC cassettes were developed for VCR-LP, but are physically identical to VC cassettes. SVC cassettes were specifically developed for SVR.\n\n) LVC 180 was not recommended for use in a standard VCR machine due to a thin tape base.\n\n*) VC and LVC cassettes do not work in a SVR machine. However, SVC cassettes may be used in VCR and VCR-LP machines.\n\nModels\n\nN1500 (1972) \nThe first Philips machine was model number N1500, after which the format is also known. This had \"first generation\" mechanics including magnetic braking servo systems applied to relatively large mains voltage induction motors. The outer edge of the cabinet was wooden. The power cable was detachable, but used an obscure connector for which replacements are not readily available.\nThe N1520 was a N1500 without TV tuner and timer, but with editing functions assemble and insert (using four video heads), 2 track linear audio (not stereo but independent mono channels) and direct AV in/out connections.\n\nN1460 (Released 1973)\nOften found in schools and colleges where a few master VCR recorders made off-air recordings and the cheaper N1460s were used for playback. In Poland, a slightly modified version was made under the name Unitra magnetowid kasetowy MTV-20.\n\nN1501 (Released 1974)\n\nAC Mains present all over the place inside: mains motors, mains clock etc. Slightly improved colour circuitry compared to the original N1500, also modified field blanking to reduce flyback interference on some televisions. Cosmetic variations on the N1500, with black replacing the silver frontage and black plastic surround rather than wood.\n\nN1502 (Released 1976)\nThe later model N1502 had a totally different mechanism using DC motors and more advanced electronics, and was somewhat more reliable. A later version again was still called N1502 but had further significant mechanical and electronic advances, and in particular had a worm drive for operation of the loading mechanism rather than a fragile plastic gearbox assembly. Earlier machines had a hardwired mains cable, later ones were fitted with a standard \"Figure-8\" C7 power socket.\n\nN1512 (Released 1976)\nThe N1512 model offered composite video input and output connectors, but was otherwise the same as the N1502. The VCR-LP model N1700 was closely related to the later N1502 variant. Other, rarer Philips models included stereo sound and editing capabilities.\nCircuitry and internal layout was much more modular than the first generation Philips VCRs. Used quiet DC motors (First generation VCR's used hefty synchronous AC mains motors). Basically this model was the same as the Philips N1502 with an extra board for video in / out. Channel button 8 selected video in.\n\nN1700 (Released 1977)\nSuperficially similar to the Philips N1502 both externally and internally. Some components were interchangeable between the two models. Slower tape-speed and a slant-azimuth recording technique (to almost eliminate cross-talk between video tracks without using tape-wasting guard-bands) made possible the longer playing time without a noticeable loss in picture quality. The mains lead was hard-wired into the machine however later releases of the N1700 had a removable lead - this would become standard on the N1702 model. Also on later models, presumably as the company had already started production of the N1702, the internal Video Head is also sometimes labelled as N1702 instead of N1700. The price in the UK was around £700 which would be over £4000 in 2017. A Skantic branded clone model VCR 1209281 had the silver top design of the later N1702 model. \n\nDenis Norden promoted this model in the industrial video \"The Philips Time Machine\".\n\nN1702 (Released 1979)\nSimilar to the Philips model N1700, the N1702 had a lighter coloured top cover (N1702 was silver and black whilst the N1700 was grey). A 4-digit counter, a 9-day timer, separate mains lead (not hardwired in), and a test-pattern generator to aid TV tuning. Tape transport legends in slightly different position on later N1702's.\n\nGrundig models\nGrundig built a VCR4000 VCR-LP model which had microprocessor control and so treated the tapes more gently than the purely mechanical decks, and the SVR4004 (longer running SVR format) model was very similar. Other Grundig models included the VCR3000 (believed to be VCR format) and VCR5000AV (believed to be the only dual format VCR and VCR-LP machine).\n\nReplacement\nIn the late 1970s, the VCR formats were superseded altogether by Video 2000 (also known as 'Video Compact Cassette' or VCC). Due to the similar initialisms, and the fact that both were designed by Philips, the 'VCC' and 'VCR' formats are often confused. However, the two systems are incompatible, and there are significant differences between them. Some Video 2000 machines carry a modified version of the \"VCR\" logo, (such as had appeared on the N1500 and N1700 machines), adding further to this confusion.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nTotal Rewind - The Virtual Museum of Vintage VCRs\nMikey's Vintage VTR Page - N1500/'VCR'\nYahoo group dedicated to N1500, N1700 and SVR format machines\nDetailed look at N1500, N1700 and SVR format tapes and machines on YouTube\nVideo Cassette Recording (VCR) and Video Cassette Recording Long-Play (VCR-LP) at the Museum of Obsolete Media\n\nVideotape\nDiscontinued media formats\nAudiovisual introductions in 1972\n1979 disestablishments in the Netherlands\n1972 establishments in the Netherlands" ]
[ "Fred Rogers", "VCR", "What did Rogers have to do with the VCR?", "Rogers was involved in supporting the manufacturers of VCRs in court." ]	C_633c016260e9440c9c51f1d94034cc41_0	Why did he go to court?	2	Why did Fred Rogers go to court?	Fred Rogers	During the controversy surrounding the introduction of the household VCR, Rogers was involved in supporting the manufacturers of VCRs in court. His 1979 testimony, in the case Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., noted that he did not object to home recordings of his television programs, for instance, by families in order to watch them together at a later time. This testimony contrasted with the views of others in the television industry who objected to home recordings or believed that devices to facilitate it should be taxed or regulated. When the case reached the Supreme Court in 1983, the majority decision considered the testimony of Rogers when it held that the Betamax video recorder did not infringe copyright. The Court stated that his views were a notable piece of evidence "that many [television] producers are willing to allow private time-shifting to continue" and even quoted his testimony in a footnote: Some public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the Neighborhood at hours when some children cannot use it ... I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the Neighborhood off-the-air, and I'm speaking for the Neighborhood because that's what I produce, that they then become much more active in the programming of their family's television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been "You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions." Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important. CANNOTANSWER	who objected to home recordings or believed that devices to facilitate it should be taxed or regulated.	Fred McFeely Rogers (March 20, 1928 – February 27, 2003), also known as Mister Rogers, was an American television host, author, producer, and Presbyterian minister. He was the creator, showrunner, and host of the preschool television series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which ran from 1968 to 2001. Born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, Rogers earned a bachelor's degree in music from Rollins College in 1951. He began his television career at NBC in New York, returning to Pittsburgh in 1953 to work for children's programming at NET (later PBS) television station WQED. He graduated from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary with a bachelor's degree in divinity in 1962 and became a Presbyterian minister in 1963. He attended the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Child Development, where he began his 30-year collaboration with child psychologist Margaret McFarland. He also helped develop the children's shows The Children's Corner (1955) for WQED in Pittsburgh and Misterogers (1963) in Canada for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1968, he returned to Pittsburgh and adapted the format of his Canadian series to create Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which ran for 33 years. The program was critically acclaimed for focusing on children's emotional and physical concerns, such as death, sibling rivalry, school enrollment, and divorce. Rogers died of stomach cancer on February 27, 2003, at age 74. His work in children's television has been widely lauded, and he received more than 40 honorary degrees and several awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002 and a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1997. He was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999. Rogers influenced many writers and producers of children's television shows, and his broadcasts have served as a source of comfort during tragic events, even after his death. Early life Rogers was born on March 20, 1928, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, about outside of Pittsburgh, at 705 Main Street to James and Nancy Rogers. James was "a very successful businessman" who was president of the McFeely Brick Company, one of Latrobe's largest businesses. Nancy's father, Fred Brooks McFeely, after whom Rogers was named, was an entrepreneur. Nancy knitted sweaters for American soldiers from western Pennsylvania who were fighting in Europe and regularly volunteered at the Latrobe Hospital. Initially, dreaming of becoming a doctor, she settled for a life of hospital volunteer work. Rogers grew up in a three-story brick mansion at 737 Weldon Street in Latrobe. He had a sister, Elaine, whom the Rogerses adopted when he was 11 years old. Rogers spent much of his childhood alone, playing with puppets, and also spent time with his grandfather. He began to play the piano when he was five years old. Through an ancestor who immigrated from Germany to the U.S., Johannes Meffert (born 1732), Rogers is the sixth cousin of American actor Tom Hanks, who portrays him in the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019). Rogers had a difficult childhood. He was shy, introverted, and overweight, and was frequently homebound after suffering bouts of asthma. He was bullied and taunted as a child for his weight, and called "Fat Freddy". According to Morgan Neville, director of the 2018 documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor?, Rogers had a "lonely childhood... I think he made friends with himself as much as he could. He had a ventriloquist dummy, he had [stuffed] animals, and he would create his own worlds in his childhood bedroom". Rogers attended Latrobe High School, where he overcame his shyness. "It was tough for me at the beginning," Rogers told NPR's Terry Gross in 1984. "And then I made a couple friends who found out that the core of me was okay. And one of them was... the head of the football team". Rogers served as president of the student council, was a member of the National Honor Society, and was editor-in-chief of the school yearbook. He registered for the draft in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1948 at age 20, where he was classified as “1-A”, available for military service. However, his status was changed to “4-F”, unfit for military service, following an Armed Forces physical on October 12, 1950. Rogers attended Dartmouth College for one year before transferring to Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida; he graduated magna cum laude in 1951 with a Bachelor of Music. Rogers graduated magna cum laude from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1962 with a Bachelor of Divinity. He was ordained a minister by the Pittsburgh Presbytery of the United Presbyterian Church in 1963. His mission as an ordained minister, instead of being a pastor of a church, was to minister to children and their families through television. He regularly appeared before church officials to keep up his ordination. Career Early work Rogers wanted to enter seminary after college, but instead chose to go into the nascent medium of television after encountering a TV at his parents' home in 1951 during his senior year at Rollins College. In a CNN interview, he said, "I went into television because I hated it so, and I thought there's some way of using this fabulous instrument to nurture those who would watch and listen". After graduating in 1951, he worked at NBC in New York City as floor director of Your Hit Parade, The Kate Smith Hour, and Gabby Hayes's children's show, and as an assistant producer of The Voice of Firestone. In 1953, Rogers returned to Pittsburgh to work as a program developer at public television station WQED. Josie Carey worked with him to develop the children's show The Children's Corner, which Carey hosted. Rogers worked off-camera to develop puppets, characters, and music for the show. He used many of the puppet characters developed during this time, such as Daniel the Striped Tiger (named after WQED's station manager, Dorothy Daniel, who gave Rogers a tiger puppet before the show's premiere), King Friday XIII, Queen Sara Saturday (named after Rogers's wife), X the Owl, Henrietta, and Lady Elaine, in his later work. Children's television entertainer Ernie Coombs was an assistant puppeteer. The Children's Corner won a Sylvania Award for best locally produced children's programming in 1955 and was broadcast nationally on NBC. While working on The Children's Corner, Rogers attended Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1963. He also attended the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Child Development, where he began working with child psychologist Margaret McFarland, who according to Rogers's biographer Maxwell King became his "key advisor and collaborator" and "child-education guru". Much of Rogers's "thinking about and appreciation for children was shaped and informed" by McFarland. She was his consultant for most of Mister Rogers' Neighborhoods scripts and songs for 30 years. In 1963, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Toronto contracted Rogers to develop and host the 15-minute black-and-white children's program Misterogers; it lasted from 1963 to 1967. It was the first time Rogers appeared on camera. CBC's children's programming head Fred Rainsberry insisted on it, telling Rogers, "Fred, I've seen you talk with kids. Let's put you yourself on the air". Coombs joined Rogers in Toronto as an assistant puppeteer. Rogers also worked with Coombs on the children's show Butternut Square from 1964 to 1967. He acquired the rights to Misterogers in 1967 and returned to Pittsburgh with his wife, two young sons, and the sets he developed, despite a potentially promising career with CBC and no job prospects in Pittsburgh. On Rogers' recommendation, Coombs remained in Toronto and became Rogers' Canadian equivalent of an iconic television personality, creating the long-running children's program, Mr. Dressup, which ran from 1967 to 1996. Rogers's work for CBC "helped shape and develop the concept and style of his later program for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the U.S." Mister Rogers' Neighborhood Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (also called the Neighborhood), a half-hour educational children's program starring Rogers, began airing nationally in 1968 and ran for 895 episodes. The program was videotaped at WQED in Pittsburgh and was broadcast by National Educational Television (NET), which later became the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Its first season had 180 black-and-white episodes. Each subsequent season, filmed in color and funded by PBS, the Sears-Roebuck Foundation, and other charities, consisted of 65 episodes. By the time the program ended production in December 2000, its average rating was about 0.7 percent of television households, or 680,000 homes, and it aired on 384 PBS stations. At its peak in 1985–1986, its ratings were at 2.1 percent, or 1.8 million homes. Production of the Neighborhood ended in December 2000, and the last original episode aired in 2001, but PBS continued to air reruns; by 2016 it was the third-longest running program in PBS history. Many of the sets and props in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, like the trolley, the sneakers, and the castle, were created for Rogers's show in Toronto by CBC designers and producers. The program also "incorporated most of the highly imaginative elements that later became famous", such as its slow pace and its host's quiet manner. The format of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood "remained virtually unchanged" for the entire run of the program. Every episode begins with a camera's-eye view of a model of a neighborhood, then panning in closer to a representation of a house while a piano instrumental of the theme song, "Won't You be My Neighbor?", performed by music director Johnny Costa and inspired by a Beethoven sonata, is played. The camera zooms in to a model representing Mr. Rogers's house, then cuts to the house's interior and pans across the room to the front door, which Rogers opens as he sings the theme song to greet his visitors while changing his suit jacket to a cardigan (knitted by his mother) and his dress shoes to sneakers, "complete with a shoe tossed from one hand to another". The episode's theme is introduced, and Mr. Rogers leaves his home to visit another location, the camera panning back to the neighborhood model and zooming in to the new location as he enters it. Once this segment ends, Mr. Rogers leaves and returns to his home, indicating that it is time to visit the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Mr. Rogers proceeds to the window seat by the trolley track and sets up the action there as the Trolley comes out. The camera follows it down a tunnel in the back wall of the house as it enters the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. The stories and lessons told take place over a series of a week's worth of episodes and involve puppet and human characters. The end of the visit occurs when the Trolley returns to the same tunnel from which it emerged, reappearing in Mr. Rogers's home. He then talks to the viewers before concluding the episode. He often feeds his fish, cleans up any props he has used, and returns to the front room, where he sings the closing song while changing back into his dress shoes and jacket. He exits the front door as he ends the song, and the camera zooms out of his home and pans across the neighborhood model as the episode ends. Mister Rogers' Neighborhood emphasized young children's social and emotional needs, and unlike another PBS show, Sesame Street, which premiered in 1969, did not focus on cognitive learning. Writer Kathy Merlock Jackson said, "While both shows target the same preschool audience and prepare children for kindergarten, Sesame Street concentrates on school-readiness skills while Mister Rogers Neighborhood focuses on the child's developing psyche and feelings and sense of moral and ethical reasoning". The Neighborhood also spent fewer resources on research than Sesame Street, but Rogers used early childhood education concepts taught by his mentor Margaret McFarland, Benjamin Spock, Erik Erikson, and T. Berry Brazelton in his lessons. As the Washington Post noted, Rogers taught young children about civility, tolerance, sharing, and self-worth "in a reassuring tone and leisurely cadence". He tackled difficult topics such as the death of a family pet, sibling rivalry, the addition of a newborn into a family, moving and enrolling in a new school, and divorce. For example, he wrote a special segment that dealt with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy that aired on June 7, 1968, days after the assassination occurred. According to King, the process of putting each episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood together was "painstaking" and Rogers's contribution to the program was "astounding". Rogers wrote and edited all the episodes, played the piano and sang for most of the songs, wrote 200 songs and 13 operas, created all the characters (both puppet and human), played most of the major puppet roles, hosted every episode, and produced and approved every detail of the program. The puppets created for the Neighborhood of Make-Believe "included an extraordinary variety of personalities". They were simple puppets but "complex, complicated, and utterly honest beings". In 1971, Rogers formed Family Communications, Inc. (FCI, now The Fred Rogers Company), to produce the Neighborhood, other programs, and non-broadcast materials. In 1975, Rogers stopped producing Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood to focus on adult programming. Reruns of the Neighborhood continued to air on PBS. King reports that the decision caught many of his coworkers and supporters "off guard". Rogers continued to confer with McFarland about child development and early childhood education, however. In 1979, after an almost five-year hiatus, Rogers returned to producing the Neighborhood; King calls the new version "stronger and more sophisticated than ever". King writes that by the program's second run in the 1980s, it was "such a cultural touchstone that it had inspired numerous parodies", most notably Eddie Murphy's parody on Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s. Rogers retired from producing the Neighborhood in 2001 at age 73, although reruns continued to air. He and FCI had been making about two or three weeks of new programs per year for many years, "filling the rest of his time slots from a library of about 300 shows made since 1979". The final original episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood aired on August 31, 2001. Other work and appearances In 1969, Rogers testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications, which was chaired by Democratic Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island. U.S. President Lyndon Johnson had proposed a $20 million bill for the creation of PBS before he left office, but his successor, Richard Nixon, wanted to cut the funding to $10 million. Even though Rogers was not yet nationally known, he was chosen to testify because of his ability to make persuasive arguments and to connect emotionally with his audience. The clip of Rogers's testimony, which was televised and has since been viewed by millions of people on the internet, helped to secure funding for PBS for many years afterwards. According to King, Rogers's testimony was "considered one of the most powerful pieces of testimony ever offered before Congress, and one of the most powerful pieces of video presentation ever filmed". It brought Pastore to tears and also, according to King, has been studied by public relations experts and academics. Congressional funding for PBS increased from $9 million to $22 million. In 1970, Nixon appointed Rogers as chair of the White House Conference on Children and Youth. In 1978, while on hiatus from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Rogers wrote, produced, and hosted a 30-minute interview program for adults on PBS called Old Friends... New Friends. It lasted 20 episodes. Rogers's guests included Hoagy Carmichael, Helen Hayes, Milton Berle, Lorin Hollander, poet Robert Frost's daughter Lesley, and Willie Stargell. In September 1987, Rogers visited Moscow to appear as the first guest on the long-running Soviet children's TV show Good Night, Little Ones! with host Tatiana Vedeneyeva. The appearance was broadcast in the Soviet Union on December 7, coinciding with the Washington Summit meeting between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan in Washington D.C. Vedeneyeva visited the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in November. Her visit was taped and later aired in March 1988 as part of Rogers's program. In 1994, Rogers wrote, produced, and hosted a special for PBS called Fred Rogers' Heroes, which featured interviews and portraits of four people from across the country who were having a positive impact on children and education. The first time Rogers appeared on television as an actor, and not himself, was in a 1996 episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, playing a preacher. Rogers gave "scores of interviews". Though reluctant to appear on television talk shows, he would usually "charm the host with his quick wit and ability to ad-lib on a moment's notice". Rogers was "one of the country's most sought-after commencement speakers", making over 150 speeches. His friend and colleague David Newell reported that Rogers would "agonize over a speech", and King reported that Rogers was at his least guarded during his speeches, which were about children, television, education, his view of the world, how to make the world a better place, and his quest for self-knowledge. His tone was quiet and informal but "commanded attention". In many speeches, including the ones he made accepting a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1997, for his induction into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999, and his final commencement speech at Dartmouth College in 2002, he instructed his audiences to remain silent and think for a moment about someone who had a good influence on them. Personal life Rogers met Sara Joanne Byrd (called "Joanne") from Jacksonville, Florida, while attending Rollins College. They were married from 1952 until his death in 2003. They had two sons, James and John. Joanne was "an accomplished pianist", who like Fred earned a Bachelor of Music from Rollins, and went on to earn a Master of Music from Florida State University. She performed publicly with her college classmate, Jeannine Morrison, from 1976 to 2008. According to biographer Maxwell King, Rogers's close associates said he was "absolutely faithful to his marriage vows". Rogers was red-green color-blind. He became a pescatarian in 1970, after the death of his father, and a vegetarian in the early 1980s, saying he "couldn't eat anything that had a mother". He became a co-owner of Vegetarian Times in the mid-1980s and said in one issue, "I love tofu burgers and beets". He told Vegetarian Times that he became a vegetarian for both ethical and health reasons. According to his biographer Maxwell King, Rogers also signed his name to a statement protesting wearing animal furs. Rogers was a registered Republican, but according to Joanne Rogers, he was "very independent in the way he voted", choosing not to talk about politics because he wanted to be impartial. Rogers was a Presbyterian, and many of the messages he expressed in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood were inspired by the core tenets of Christianity. Rogers rarely spoke about his faith on air; he believed that teaching through example was as powerful as preaching. He said, "You don't need to speak overtly about religion in order to get a message across". According to writer Shea Tuttle, Rogers considered his faith a fundamental part of his personality and "called the space between the viewer and the television set 'holy ground'". But despite his strong faith, Rogers struggled with anger, conflict, and self-doubt, especially at the end of his life. He also studied Catholic mysticism, Judaism, Buddhism, and other faiths and cultures. King called him "that unique television star with a real spiritual life", emphasizing the values of patience, reflection, and "silence in a noisy world". King reported that despite Rogers's family's wealth, he cared little about making money, and lived frugally, especially as he and his wife grew older. King reported that Rogers's relationship with his young audience was important to him. For example, since hosting Misterogers in Canada, he answered every letter sent to him by hand. After Mister Rogers' Neighborhood began airing in the U.S., the letters increased in volume and he hired staff member and producer Hedda Sharapan to answer them, but he read, edited, and signed each one. King wrote that Rogers saw responding to his viewers' letters as "a pastoral duty of sorts". The New York Times called Rogers "a dedicated lap-swimmer", and Tom Junod, author of "Can You Say... Hero?", the 1998 Esquire profile of Rogers, said, "Nearly every morning of his life, Mister Rogers has gone swimming". Rogers began swimming when he was a child at his family's vacation home outside Latrobe, where they owned a pool, and during their winter trips to Florida. King wrote that swimming and playing the piano were "lifelong passions" and that "both gave him a chance to feel capable and in charge of his destiny", and that swimming became "an important part of the strong sense of self-discipline he cultivated". Rogers swam daily at the Pittsburgh Athletic Association, after waking every morning between 4:30 and 5:30 A.M. to pray and to "read the Bible and prepare himself for the day". He did not smoke or drink. According to Junod, he did nothing to change his weight from the he weighed for most of his adult life; by 1998, this also included napping daily, going to bed at 9:30 P.M., and sleeping eight hours per night without interruption. Junod said Rogers saw his weight "as a destiny fulfilled", telling Junod, "the number 143 means 'I love you.' It takes one letter to say 'I' and four letters to say 'love' and three letters to say 'you'". Death and memorials After Rogers's retirement in 2001, he remained busy working with FCI, studying religion and spirituality, making public appearances, traveling, and working on a children's media center named after him at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe with Archabbot Douglas Nowicki, chancellor of the college. By the summer of 2002, his chronic stomach pain became severe enough for him to see a doctor about it, and in October 2002, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He delayed treatment until after he served as Grand Marshal of the 2003 Rose Parade, with Art Linkletter and Bill Cosby in January. On January 6, Rogers underwent stomach surgery. He died less than two months later, on February 27, 2003, one month before his 75th birthday, at his home in Pittsburgh, with his wife of 50 years, Joanne, at his side. While comatose shortly before his death, he received the last rites of the Catholic Church from Archabbot Nowicki. The following day, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covered Rogers's death on the front page and dedicated an entire section to his death and impact. The newspaper also reported that by noon, the internet "was already full of appreciative pieces" by parents, viewers, producers, and writers. Rogers's death was widely lamented. Most U.S. metropolitan newspapers ran his obituary on their front page, and some dedicated entire sections to coverage of his death. WQED aired programs about Rogers the evening he died; the Post-Gazette reported that the ratings for their coverage were three times higher than their normal ratings. That same evening, Nightline on ABC broadcast a rerun of a recent interview with Rogers; the program got the highest ratings of the day, beating the February average ratings of Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. On March 4, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution honoring Rogers sponsored by Representative Mike Doyle from Pennsylvania. On March 1, 2003, a private funeral was held for Rogers in Unity Chapel, which was restored by Rogers's father, at Unity Cemetery in Latrobe. About 80 relatives, co-workers, and close friends attended the service, which "was planned in great secrecy so that those closest to him could grieve in private". Reverend John McCall, pastor of the Rogers family's church, Sixth Presbyterian Church in Squirrel Hill, gave the homily, and Reverend William Barker, a retired Presbyterian minister who was a "close friend of Mr. Rogers and the voice of Mr. Platypus on his show", read Rogers's favorite Bible passages. Rogers was interred at Unity Cemetery in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in a mausoleum owned by his mother's family. On May 3, 2003, a public memorial was held at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh. According to the Post-Gazette, 2,700 people attended. Violinist Itzhak Perlman, cellist Yo-Yo Ma (via video), and organist Alan Morrison performed in honor of Rogers. Barker officiated the service; also in attendance were Pittsburgh philanthropist Elsie Hillman, former Good Morning America host David Hartman, The Very Hungry Caterpillar author Eric Carle, and Arthur creator Marc Brown. Businesswoman and philanthropist Teresa Heinz, PBS President Pat Mitchell, and executive director of The Pittsburgh Project Saleem Ghubril gave remarks. Jeff Erlanger, who at age 10 appeared on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 1981 to explain his electric wheelchair, also spoke. The memorial was broadcast several times on Pittsburgh television stations and websites throughout the day. Legacy Marc Brown, creator of another PBS children's show, Arthur, considered Rogers both a friend and "a terrific role model for how to use television and the media to be helpful to kids and families". Josh Selig, creator of Wonder Pets, credits Rogers with influencing his use of structure and predictability, and his use of music, opera, and originality. Rogers inspired Angela Santomero, co-creator of the children's television show Blue's Clues, to earn a degree in developmental psychology and go into educational television. She and the other producers of Blue's Clues used many of Rogers's techniques, such as using child developmental and educational research, and having the host speak directly to the camera and transition to a make-believe world. In 2006, three years after Rogers's death and the end of production of Blue's Clues, the Fred Rogers Company contacted Santomero to create a show that would promote Rogers's legacy. In 2012, Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, with characters from and based upon Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, premiered on PBS. Rogers's style and approach to children's television and early childhood education also "begged to be parodied". Comedian Eddie Murphy parodied Mister Rogers' Neighborhood on Saturday Night Live during the 1980s. Rogers told interviewer David Letterman in 1982 that he believed parodies like Murphy's were done "with kindness in their hearts". Video of Rogers's 1969 testimony in defense of public programming has experienced a resurgence since 2012, going viral at least twice. It first resurfaced after then presidential candidate Mitt Romney suggested cutting funding for PBS. In 2017, video of the testimony again went viral after President Donald Trump proposed defunding several arts-related government programs including PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts. A roadside Pennsylvania Historical Marker dedicated to Rogers to be installed in Latrobe was approved by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission on March 4, 2014. It was installed on June 11, 2016, with the title "Fred McFeely Rogers (1928–2003)". In 2018, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, director Morgan Neville's documentary about Rogers's life, grossed over $22 million and became the top-grossing biographical documentary ever produced, the highest-grossing documentary in five years, and the 12th largest-grossing documentary ever produced. The 2019 drama film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood tells the story of Rogers and his television series, with Tom Hanks portraying Rogers. According to Caitlin Gibson of The Washington Post, Rogers became a source for parenting advice; she called him "a timeless oracle against a backdrop of ever-shifting parenting philosophies and cultural trends". Robert Thompson of Syracuse University noted that Rogers "took American childhood—and I think Americans in general—through some very turbulent and trying times", from the Vietnam War and the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. According to Asia Simone Burns of National Public Radio, in the years following the end of production on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 2001, and his death in 2003, Rogers became "a source of comfort, sometimes in the wake of tragedy". Burns has said Rogers's words of comfort "began circulating on social media" following tragedies such as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, the Manchester Arena bombing in Manchester, England, in 2017, and the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. Awards and honors Museum exhibits Smithsonian Institution permanent collection. In 1984, Rogers donated one of his sweaters to the Smithsonian. Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. Exhibit created by Rogers and FCI in 1998. It attracted hundreds of thousand of visitors over 10 years, and included, from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, one of his sweaters, a pair of his sneakers, original puppets from the program, and photographs of Rogers. The exhibit traveled to children's museums throughout the country for eight years until it was given to the Louisiana Children's Museum in New Orleans as a permanent exhibit, to help them recover from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In 2007, the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh created a traveling exhibit based on the factory tours featured in episodes of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Heinz History Center permanent collection (2018). In honor of the 50th anniversary of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and what would have been Rogers's 90th birthday. Louisiana Children's Museum. The museum contains an exhibit of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which debuted in 2007. The exhibit was donated by the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. Fred Rogers Exhibit. The Exhibit displays the life, career and legacy of Rogers and includes photos, artifacts from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and clips of the program and interviews featuring Rogers. It is located at the Fred Rogers Center. Art pieces There are several pieces of art dedicated to Rogers throughout Pittsburgh, including a 7,000-pound, 11-foot high bronze statue of him in the North Shore neighborhood. In the Oakland neighborhood, his portrait is included in the Martin Luther King Jr. and "Interpretations of Oakland" murals. A statue of a dinosaur titled "Fredasaurus Rex Friday XIII" originally stood in front of the WQED building and as of 2014 stands in front of the building that contains the Fred Rogers Company offices. There is a "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood of Make-Believe" in Idlewild Park and a kiosk of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood artifacts at Pittsburgh International Airport. The Carnegie Science Center's Miniature Railroad and Village debuted a miniature recreation of Rogers's house from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 2005. Honorary degrees Rogers has received honorary degrees from over 43 colleges and universities. After 1973, two commemorative quilts, created by two of Rogers's friends and archived at the Fred Rogers Center at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, were made out of the academic hoods he received during the graduation ceremonies. Note: Much of the below list is taken from "Honorary Degrees Awarded to Fred Rogers", unless otherwise stated. Thiel College, 1969. Thiel also awards a yearly scholarship named for Rogers. Eastern Michigan University, 1973 Saint Vincent College, 1973 Christian Theological Seminary, 1973 Rollins College, 1974 Yale University, 1974 Chatham College, 1975 Carnegie Mellon University, 1976 Lafayette College, 1977 Waynesburg College, 1978 Linfield College, 1982 Slippery Rock State College, 1982 Duquesne University, 1982 Washington & Jefferson College, 1984 University of South Carolina, 1985 Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 1985 Drury College, 1986 MacMurray College, 1986 Bowling Green State University, 1987 Westminster College (Pennsylvania), 1987 University of Indianapolis, 1988 University of Connecticut, 1991 Boston University, 1992 Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1992 Moravian College, 1992 Goucher College, 1993 University of Pittsburgh, 1993 West Virginia University, 1995 North Carolina State University, 1996 Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, 1998 Marist College, 1999 Westminster Choir College, 1999 Old Dominion University, 2000 Marquette University, 2001 Middlebury College, 2001 Dartmouth College, 2002 Seton Hill University, 2003 (posthumous) Union College, 2003 (posthumous) Roanoke College, 2003 (posthumous) Filmography Television {\|class="wikitable sortable" \|- ! Year ! Title \|- \| 1954–1961 \| The Children's Corner \|- \| 1963–1966 \| Misterogers \|- \| 1964–1967 \| Butternut Square \|- \| 1968–2001 \| Mister Rogers' Neighborhood \|- \| 1977–1982 \| Christmastime with Mister Rogers \|- \| 1978–1981 \| Old Friends... New Friends \|- \| 1981 \| Sesame Street \|- \| 1988 \| Good Night, Little Ones! \|- \| 1991 \| Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? \|- \| 1994 \|Mr. Dressup's 25th Anniversary\|- \| 1994 \| Fred Rogers' Heroes\|- \| 1996 \| Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman\|- \| 1997 \| Arthur\|- \| 1998 \| Wheel of Fortune\|- \| 2003 \| 114th Annual Tournament of Roses Parade\|} Published works Children's books Our Small World (with Josie Carey, illustrated by Norb Nathanson), 1954, Reed and Witting, The Elves, the Shoemaker, & the Shoemaker's Wife (illustrated by Richard Hefter), 1973, Small World Enterprises, The Matter of the Mittens, 1973, Small World Enterprises, Speedy Delivery (illustrated by Richard Hefter), 1973, Hubbard, Henrietta Meets Someone New (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1974, Golden Press, Mister Rogers Talks About, 1974, Platt & Munk, Time to Be Friends, 1974, Hallmark Cards, Everyone is Special (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1975, Western Publishing, Tell Me, Mister Rogers, 1975, Platt & Munk, The Costume Party (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1976, Golden Press, Planet Purple (illustrated by Dennis Hockerman), 1986, Texas Instruments, If We Were All the Same (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, A Trolley Visit to Make-Believe (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, Wishes Don't Make Things Come True (illustrated Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, No One Can Ever Take Your Place (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, When Monsters Seem Real (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, You Can Never Go Down the Drain (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, The Giving Box (illustrated by Jennifer Herbert), 2000, Running Press, Good Weather or Not (with Hedda Bluestone Sharapan, illustrated by James Mellet), 2005, Family Communications, Josephine the Short Neck-Giraffe, 2006, Family Communications, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: The Poetry of Mister Rogers Neighborhood (illustrated by Luke Flowers), 2009, Quirk Books, First Experiences series illustrated by Jim Judkis Going to Day Care, 1985, Putnam, The New Baby, 1985, Putnam, Going to the Potty, 1986, Putnam, Going to the Doctor, 1986, Putnam, Making Friends, 1987, Putnam, Moving, 1987, Putnam, Going to the Hospital, 1988, Putnam, When a Pet Dies, 1988, Putnam, Going on an Airplane, 1989, Putnam, Going to the Dentist, 1989, Putnam, Let's Talk About It series Going to the Hospital, 1977, Family Communications, Having an Operation, 1977, Family Communications, So Many Things To See!, 1977, Family Communications, Wearing a Cast, 1977, Family Communications, Adoption, 1993, Putnam, Divorce, 1994, Putnam, Extraordinary Friends, 2000, Putnam, Stepfamilies, 2001, Putnam, Songbooks Tomorrow on the Children's Corner (with Josie Carey, illustrated by Mal Wittman), 1960, Vernon Music Corporation, Mister Rogers' Songbook (with Johnny Costa, illustrated by Steven Kellogg), 1970, Random House, Books for adults Mister Rogers Talks to Parents, 1983, Family Communications, Mister Rogers' Playbook (with Barry Head, illustrated by Jamie Adams), 1986, Berkley Books, Mister Rogers Talks with Families About Divorce (with Clare O'Brien), 1987, Berkley Books, Mister Rogers' How Families Grow (with Barry Head and Jim Prokell), 1988, Berkley Books, You Are Special: Words of Wisdom from America's Most Beloved Neighbor, 1994, Penguin Books, Dear Mister Rogers, 1996, Penguin Books, Mister Rogers' Playtime, 2001, Running Press, The Mister Rogers Parenting Book, 2002, Running Press, You are special: Neighborly Wisdom from Mister Rogers, 2002, Running Press, The World According to Mister Rogers, 2003, Hyperion Books, Life's Journeys According to Mister Rogers, 2005, Hyperion Books, The Mister Rogers Parenting Resource Book, 2005, Courage Books, Many Ways to Say I Love You: Wisdom For Parents And Children, 2019, Hachette Books, Discography Around the Children's Corner (with Josey Carey), 1958, Vernon Music Corporation, Tomorrow on the Children's Corner (with Josie Carey), 1959 King Friday XIII Celebrates, 1964 Won't You Be My Neighbor?, 1967 Let's Be Together Today, 1968 Josephine the Short-Neck Giraffe, 1969 You Are Special, 1969 A Place of Our Own, 1970 Come On and Wake Up, 1972 Growing, 1992 Bedtime, 1992 Won't You Be My Neighbor? (cassette and book), 1994, Hal Leonard, Coming and Going, 1997 It's Such A Good Feeling: The Best Of Mister Rogers, 2019, Omnivore Recordings, posthumous release See also Won't You Be My Neighbor?, 2018 documentary Mister Rogers: It's You I Like, 2018 documentary A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, 2019 biographical drama film List of vegetarians Notes References Works cited Gross, Terry (1984). "Terry Gross and Fred Rogers". Fresh Air. NPR. King, Maxwell (2018). The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers. Abrams Press. . Tiech, John (2012). Pittsburgh Film History: On Set in the Steel City''. Charleston, North Carolina: The History Press. . External links PBS Kids: Official Site The Fred M. Rogers Center The Fred Rogers Company (formerly known as Family Communications) 1984 interview with Fred Rogers. The Music of Mister Rogers—Pittsburgh Music History Fred Rogers at Voice Chasers 1928 births 2003 deaths 20th-century American composers 20th-century American male actors 20th-century American male writers 20th-century American singers 20th-century Presbyterians 21st-century Presbyterians American children's television presenters American male composers American male singers American male songwriters American male television actors American male voice actors American philanthropists American Presbyterian ministers American Presbyterians American puppeteers American television hosts Burials in Pennsylvania Christianity in Pittsburgh Columbia Records artists Dartmouth College alumni Daytime Emmy Award winners Deaths from cancer in Pennsylvania Deaths from stomach cancer Male actors from Pittsburgh Omnivore Recordings artists PBS people Peabody Award winners Pennsylvania Republicans People from Latrobe, Pennsylvania Pittsburgh Theological Seminary alumni Presbyterians from Pennsylvania Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Rollins College alumni Singers from Pennsylvania Songwriters from Pennsylvania Television personalities from Pittsburgh Television producers from Pennsylvania United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America ministers Vegetarianism activists Writers from Pittsburgh Articles containing video clips	false	[ "\"Llangollen Market\" is a song from early 19th century Wales. It is known to have been performed at an eisteddfod at Llangollen in 1858.\n\nThe text of the song survives in a manuscript held by the National Museum of Wales, which came into the possession of singer Mary Davies, a co-founder of the Welsh Folk-Song Society.\n\nThe song tells the tale of a young man from the Llangollen area going off to war and leaving behind his broken-hearted girlfriend. Originally written in English, the song has been translated into Welsh and recorded by several artists such as Siân James, Siobhan Owen, Calennig and Siwsann George.\n\nLyrics\nIt’s far beyond the mountains that look so distant here,\nTo fight his country’s battles, last Mayday went my dear;\nAh, well shall I remember with bitter sighs the day,\nWhy, Owen, did you leave me? At home why did I stay?\n\nAh, cruel was my father that did my flight restrain,\nAnd I was cruel-hearted that did at home remain,\nWith you, my love, contented, I’d journey far away;\nWhy, Owen, did you leave me? At home why did I stay?\n\nWhile thinking of my Owen, my eyes with tears do fill,\nAnd then my mother chides me because my wheel stands still,\nBut how can I think of spinning when my Owen’s far away;\nWhy, Owen, did you leave me? At home why did I stay?\n\nTo market at Llangollen each morning do I go,\nBut how to strike a bargain no longer do I know;\nMy father chides at evening, my mother all the day;\nWhy, Owen, did you leave me, at home why did I stay?\n\nOh, would it please kind heaven to shield my love from harm,\nTo clasp him to my bosom would every care disarm,\nBut alas, I fear, 'tis distant - that happy, happy day;\nWhy, Owen, did you leave me, at home why did stay?\n\nReferences\n\nWelsh folk songs", "Orhan Sefa Kilercioğlu is the Turkish Secretary of State.\n\nDefamation case\nTurkish author Talat Turhan was convicted of defamation of Kilercioğlu in his 1992 book Extraordinary War, Terror and Counter-terrorism. Turhan was ordered to pay damages to Kilercioğlu, but he appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in 2005. The Court stated that the truthfulness of a value judgment did not have to be proven, and that Turhan's opinion was based on information which was already known to the general public. According to the Court, the Turkish courts did not establish why the protection of the personality rights of a public figure weighed more heavily than Turhan's right to freedom of expression on a public issue. The Court therefore unanimously found that Turhan's right to freedom of expression had been violated. He was awarded. €3,100.\n\nNotes \n - The Court held that Turhan had based his opinion on statements made by Kilercioğlu in an interview, which had already been published in a magazine.\n\nExternal links\nNetherlands Institute of Human Rights\n\nYear of birth missing (living people)\nLiving people\nGovernment ministers of Turkey" ]
[ "Fred Rogers", "VCR", "What did Rogers have to do with the VCR?", "Rogers was involved in supporting the manufacturers of VCRs in court.", "Why did he go to court?", "who objected to home recordings or believed that devices to facilitate it should be taxed or regulated." ]	C_633c016260e9440c9c51f1d94034cc41_0	Did he win in court?	3	Did Fred Rogers win in court?	Fred Rogers	During the controversy surrounding the introduction of the household VCR, Rogers was involved in supporting the manufacturers of VCRs in court. His 1979 testimony, in the case Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., noted that he did not object to home recordings of his television programs, for instance, by families in order to watch them together at a later time. This testimony contrasted with the views of others in the television industry who objected to home recordings or believed that devices to facilitate it should be taxed or regulated. When the case reached the Supreme Court in 1983, the majority decision considered the testimony of Rogers when it held that the Betamax video recorder did not infringe copyright. The Court stated that his views were a notable piece of evidence "that many [television] producers are willing to allow private time-shifting to continue" and even quoted his testimony in a footnote: Some public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the Neighborhood at hours when some children cannot use it ... I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the Neighborhood off-the-air, and I'm speaking for the Neighborhood because that's what I produce, that they then become much more active in the programming of their family's television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been "You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions." Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER	Fred McFeely Rogers (March 20, 1928 – February 27, 2003), also known as Mister Rogers, was an American television host, author, producer, and Presbyterian minister. He was the creator, showrunner, and host of the preschool television series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which ran from 1968 to 2001. Born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, Rogers earned a bachelor's degree in music from Rollins College in 1951. He began his television career at NBC in New York, returning to Pittsburgh in 1953 to work for children's programming at NET (later PBS) television station WQED. He graduated from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary with a bachelor's degree in divinity in 1962 and became a Presbyterian minister in 1963. He attended the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Child Development, where he began his 30-year collaboration with child psychologist Margaret McFarland. He also helped develop the children's shows The Children's Corner (1955) for WQED in Pittsburgh and Misterogers (1963) in Canada for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1968, he returned to Pittsburgh and adapted the format of his Canadian series to create Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which ran for 33 years. The program was critically acclaimed for focusing on children's emotional and physical concerns, such as death, sibling rivalry, school enrollment, and divorce. Rogers died of stomach cancer on February 27, 2003, at age 74. His work in children's television has been widely lauded, and he received more than 40 honorary degrees and several awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002 and a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1997. He was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999. Rogers influenced many writers and producers of children's television shows, and his broadcasts have served as a source of comfort during tragic events, even after his death. Early life Rogers was born on March 20, 1928, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, about outside of Pittsburgh, at 705 Main Street to James and Nancy Rogers. James was "a very successful businessman" who was president of the McFeely Brick Company, one of Latrobe's largest businesses. Nancy's father, Fred Brooks McFeely, after whom Rogers was named, was an entrepreneur. Nancy knitted sweaters for American soldiers from western Pennsylvania who were fighting in Europe and regularly volunteered at the Latrobe Hospital. Initially, dreaming of becoming a doctor, she settled for a life of hospital volunteer work. Rogers grew up in a three-story brick mansion at 737 Weldon Street in Latrobe. He had a sister, Elaine, whom the Rogerses adopted when he was 11 years old. Rogers spent much of his childhood alone, playing with puppets, and also spent time with his grandfather. He began to play the piano when he was five years old. Through an ancestor who immigrated from Germany to the U.S., Johannes Meffert (born 1732), Rogers is the sixth cousin of American actor Tom Hanks, who portrays him in the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019). Rogers had a difficult childhood. He was shy, introverted, and overweight, and was frequently homebound after suffering bouts of asthma. He was bullied and taunted as a child for his weight, and called "Fat Freddy". According to Morgan Neville, director of the 2018 documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor?, Rogers had a "lonely childhood... I think he made friends with himself as much as he could. He had a ventriloquist dummy, he had [stuffed] animals, and he would create his own worlds in his childhood bedroom". Rogers attended Latrobe High School, where he overcame his shyness. "It was tough for me at the beginning," Rogers told NPR's Terry Gross in 1984. "And then I made a couple friends who found out that the core of me was okay. And one of them was... the head of the football team". Rogers served as president of the student council, was a member of the National Honor Society, and was editor-in-chief of the school yearbook. He registered for the draft in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1948 at age 20, where he was classified as “1-A”, available for military service. However, his status was changed to “4-F”, unfit for military service, following an Armed Forces physical on October 12, 1950. Rogers attended Dartmouth College for one year before transferring to Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida; he graduated magna cum laude in 1951 with a Bachelor of Music. Rogers graduated magna cum laude from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1962 with a Bachelor of Divinity. He was ordained a minister by the Pittsburgh Presbytery of the United Presbyterian Church in 1963. His mission as an ordained minister, instead of being a pastor of a church, was to minister to children and their families through television. He regularly appeared before church officials to keep up his ordination. Career Early work Rogers wanted to enter seminary after college, but instead chose to go into the nascent medium of television after encountering a TV at his parents' home in 1951 during his senior year at Rollins College. In a CNN interview, he said, "I went into television because I hated it so, and I thought there's some way of using this fabulous instrument to nurture those who would watch and listen". After graduating in 1951, he worked at NBC in New York City as floor director of Your Hit Parade, The Kate Smith Hour, and Gabby Hayes's children's show, and as an assistant producer of The Voice of Firestone. In 1953, Rogers returned to Pittsburgh to work as a program developer at public television station WQED. Josie Carey worked with him to develop the children's show The Children's Corner, which Carey hosted. Rogers worked off-camera to develop puppets, characters, and music for the show. He used many of the puppet characters developed during this time, such as Daniel the Striped Tiger (named after WQED's station manager, Dorothy Daniel, who gave Rogers a tiger puppet before the show's premiere), King Friday XIII, Queen Sara Saturday (named after Rogers's wife), X the Owl, Henrietta, and Lady Elaine, in his later work. Children's television entertainer Ernie Coombs was an assistant puppeteer. The Children's Corner won a Sylvania Award for best locally produced children's programming in 1955 and was broadcast nationally on NBC. While working on The Children's Corner, Rogers attended Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1963. He also attended the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Child Development, where he began working with child psychologist Margaret McFarland, who according to Rogers's biographer Maxwell King became his "key advisor and collaborator" and "child-education guru". Much of Rogers's "thinking about and appreciation for children was shaped and informed" by McFarland. She was his consultant for most of Mister Rogers' Neighborhoods scripts and songs for 30 years. In 1963, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Toronto contracted Rogers to develop and host the 15-minute black-and-white children's program Misterogers; it lasted from 1963 to 1967. It was the first time Rogers appeared on camera. CBC's children's programming head Fred Rainsberry insisted on it, telling Rogers, "Fred, I've seen you talk with kids. Let's put you yourself on the air". Coombs joined Rogers in Toronto as an assistant puppeteer. Rogers also worked with Coombs on the children's show Butternut Square from 1964 to 1967. He acquired the rights to Misterogers in 1967 and returned to Pittsburgh with his wife, two young sons, and the sets he developed, despite a potentially promising career with CBC and no job prospects in Pittsburgh. On Rogers' recommendation, Coombs remained in Toronto and became Rogers' Canadian equivalent of an iconic television personality, creating the long-running children's program, Mr. Dressup, which ran from 1967 to 1996. Rogers's work for CBC "helped shape and develop the concept and style of his later program for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the U.S." Mister Rogers' Neighborhood Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (also called the Neighborhood), a half-hour educational children's program starring Rogers, began airing nationally in 1968 and ran for 895 episodes. The program was videotaped at WQED in Pittsburgh and was broadcast by National Educational Television (NET), which later became the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Its first season had 180 black-and-white episodes. Each subsequent season, filmed in color and funded by PBS, the Sears-Roebuck Foundation, and other charities, consisted of 65 episodes. By the time the program ended production in December 2000, its average rating was about 0.7 percent of television households, or 680,000 homes, and it aired on 384 PBS stations. At its peak in 1985–1986, its ratings were at 2.1 percent, or 1.8 million homes. Production of the Neighborhood ended in December 2000, and the last original episode aired in 2001, but PBS continued to air reruns; by 2016 it was the third-longest running program in PBS history. Many of the sets and props in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, like the trolley, the sneakers, and the castle, were created for Rogers's show in Toronto by CBC designers and producers. The program also "incorporated most of the highly imaginative elements that later became famous", such as its slow pace and its host's quiet manner. The format of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood "remained virtually unchanged" for the entire run of the program. Every episode begins with a camera's-eye view of a model of a neighborhood, then panning in closer to a representation of a house while a piano instrumental of the theme song, "Won't You be My Neighbor?", performed by music director Johnny Costa and inspired by a Beethoven sonata, is played. The camera zooms in to a model representing Mr. Rogers's house, then cuts to the house's interior and pans across the room to the front door, which Rogers opens as he sings the theme song to greet his visitors while changing his suit jacket to a cardigan (knitted by his mother) and his dress shoes to sneakers, "complete with a shoe tossed from one hand to another". The episode's theme is introduced, and Mr. Rogers leaves his home to visit another location, the camera panning back to the neighborhood model and zooming in to the new location as he enters it. Once this segment ends, Mr. Rogers leaves and returns to his home, indicating that it is time to visit the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Mr. Rogers proceeds to the window seat by the trolley track and sets up the action there as the Trolley comes out. The camera follows it down a tunnel in the back wall of the house as it enters the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. The stories and lessons told take place over a series of a week's worth of episodes and involve puppet and human characters. The end of the visit occurs when the Trolley returns to the same tunnel from which it emerged, reappearing in Mr. Rogers's home. He then talks to the viewers before concluding the episode. He often feeds his fish, cleans up any props he has used, and returns to the front room, where he sings the closing song while changing back into his dress shoes and jacket. He exits the front door as he ends the song, and the camera zooms out of his home and pans across the neighborhood model as the episode ends. Mister Rogers' Neighborhood emphasized young children's social and emotional needs, and unlike another PBS show, Sesame Street, which premiered in 1969, did not focus on cognitive learning. Writer Kathy Merlock Jackson said, "While both shows target the same preschool audience and prepare children for kindergarten, Sesame Street concentrates on school-readiness skills while Mister Rogers Neighborhood focuses on the child's developing psyche and feelings and sense of moral and ethical reasoning". The Neighborhood also spent fewer resources on research than Sesame Street, but Rogers used early childhood education concepts taught by his mentor Margaret McFarland, Benjamin Spock, Erik Erikson, and T. Berry Brazelton in his lessons. As the Washington Post noted, Rogers taught young children about civility, tolerance, sharing, and self-worth "in a reassuring tone and leisurely cadence". He tackled difficult topics such as the death of a family pet, sibling rivalry, the addition of a newborn into a family, moving and enrolling in a new school, and divorce. For example, he wrote a special segment that dealt with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy that aired on June 7, 1968, days after the assassination occurred. According to King, the process of putting each episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood together was "painstaking" and Rogers's contribution to the program was "astounding". Rogers wrote and edited all the episodes, played the piano and sang for most of the songs, wrote 200 songs and 13 operas, created all the characters (both puppet and human), played most of the major puppet roles, hosted every episode, and produced and approved every detail of the program. The puppets created for the Neighborhood of Make-Believe "included an extraordinary variety of personalities". They were simple puppets but "complex, complicated, and utterly honest beings". In 1971, Rogers formed Family Communications, Inc. (FCI, now The Fred Rogers Company), to produce the Neighborhood, other programs, and non-broadcast materials. In 1975, Rogers stopped producing Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood to focus on adult programming. Reruns of the Neighborhood continued to air on PBS. King reports that the decision caught many of his coworkers and supporters "off guard". Rogers continued to confer with McFarland about child development and early childhood education, however. In 1979, after an almost five-year hiatus, Rogers returned to producing the Neighborhood; King calls the new version "stronger and more sophisticated than ever". King writes that by the program's second run in the 1980s, it was "such a cultural touchstone that it had inspired numerous parodies", most notably Eddie Murphy's parody on Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s. Rogers retired from producing the Neighborhood in 2001 at age 73, although reruns continued to air. He and FCI had been making about two or three weeks of new programs per year for many years, "filling the rest of his time slots from a library of about 300 shows made since 1979". The final original episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood aired on August 31, 2001. Other work and appearances In 1969, Rogers testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications, which was chaired by Democratic Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island. U.S. President Lyndon Johnson had proposed a $20 million bill for the creation of PBS before he left office, but his successor, Richard Nixon, wanted to cut the funding to $10 million. Even though Rogers was not yet nationally known, he was chosen to testify because of his ability to make persuasive arguments and to connect emotionally with his audience. The clip of Rogers's testimony, which was televised and has since been viewed by millions of people on the internet, helped to secure funding for PBS for many years afterwards. According to King, Rogers's testimony was "considered one of the most powerful pieces of testimony ever offered before Congress, and one of the most powerful pieces of video presentation ever filmed". It brought Pastore to tears and also, according to King, has been studied by public relations experts and academics. Congressional funding for PBS increased from $9 million to $22 million. In 1970, Nixon appointed Rogers as chair of the White House Conference on Children and Youth. In 1978, while on hiatus from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Rogers wrote, produced, and hosted a 30-minute interview program for adults on PBS called Old Friends... New Friends. It lasted 20 episodes. Rogers's guests included Hoagy Carmichael, Helen Hayes, Milton Berle, Lorin Hollander, poet Robert Frost's daughter Lesley, and Willie Stargell. In September 1987, Rogers visited Moscow to appear as the first guest on the long-running Soviet children's TV show Good Night, Little Ones! with host Tatiana Vedeneyeva. The appearance was broadcast in the Soviet Union on December 7, coinciding with the Washington Summit meeting between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan in Washington D.C. Vedeneyeva visited the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in November. Her visit was taped and later aired in March 1988 as part of Rogers's program. In 1994, Rogers wrote, produced, and hosted a special for PBS called Fred Rogers' Heroes, which featured interviews and portraits of four people from across the country who were having a positive impact on children and education. The first time Rogers appeared on television as an actor, and not himself, was in a 1996 episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, playing a preacher. Rogers gave "scores of interviews". Though reluctant to appear on television talk shows, he would usually "charm the host with his quick wit and ability to ad-lib on a moment's notice". Rogers was "one of the country's most sought-after commencement speakers", making over 150 speeches. His friend and colleague David Newell reported that Rogers would "agonize over a speech", and King reported that Rogers was at his least guarded during his speeches, which were about children, television, education, his view of the world, how to make the world a better place, and his quest for self-knowledge. His tone was quiet and informal but "commanded attention". In many speeches, including the ones he made accepting a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1997, for his induction into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999, and his final commencement speech at Dartmouth College in 2002, he instructed his audiences to remain silent and think for a moment about someone who had a good influence on them. Personal life Rogers met Sara Joanne Byrd (called "Joanne") from Jacksonville, Florida, while attending Rollins College. They were married from 1952 until his death in 2003. They had two sons, James and John. Joanne was "an accomplished pianist", who like Fred earned a Bachelor of Music from Rollins, and went on to earn a Master of Music from Florida State University. She performed publicly with her college classmate, Jeannine Morrison, from 1976 to 2008. According to biographer Maxwell King, Rogers's close associates said he was "absolutely faithful to his marriage vows". Rogers was red-green color-blind. He became a pescatarian in 1970, after the death of his father, and a vegetarian in the early 1980s, saying he "couldn't eat anything that had a mother". He became a co-owner of Vegetarian Times in the mid-1980s and said in one issue, "I love tofu burgers and beets". He told Vegetarian Times that he became a vegetarian for both ethical and health reasons. According to his biographer Maxwell King, Rogers also signed his name to a statement protesting wearing animal furs. Rogers was a registered Republican, but according to Joanne Rogers, he was "very independent in the way he voted", choosing not to talk about politics because he wanted to be impartial. Rogers was a Presbyterian, and many of the messages he expressed in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood were inspired by the core tenets of Christianity. Rogers rarely spoke about his faith on air; he believed that teaching through example was as powerful as preaching. He said, "You don't need to speak overtly about religion in order to get a message across". According to writer Shea Tuttle, Rogers considered his faith a fundamental part of his personality and "called the space between the viewer and the television set 'holy ground'". But despite his strong faith, Rogers struggled with anger, conflict, and self-doubt, especially at the end of his life. He also studied Catholic mysticism, Judaism, Buddhism, and other faiths and cultures. King called him "that unique television star with a real spiritual life", emphasizing the values of patience, reflection, and "silence in a noisy world". King reported that despite Rogers's family's wealth, he cared little about making money, and lived frugally, especially as he and his wife grew older. King reported that Rogers's relationship with his young audience was important to him. For example, since hosting Misterogers in Canada, he answered every letter sent to him by hand. After Mister Rogers' Neighborhood began airing in the U.S., the letters increased in volume and he hired staff member and producer Hedda Sharapan to answer them, but he read, edited, and signed each one. King wrote that Rogers saw responding to his viewers' letters as "a pastoral duty of sorts". The New York Times called Rogers "a dedicated lap-swimmer", and Tom Junod, author of "Can You Say... Hero?", the 1998 Esquire profile of Rogers, said, "Nearly every morning of his life, Mister Rogers has gone swimming". Rogers began swimming when he was a child at his family's vacation home outside Latrobe, where they owned a pool, and during their winter trips to Florida. King wrote that swimming and playing the piano were "lifelong passions" and that "both gave him a chance to feel capable and in charge of his destiny", and that swimming became "an important part of the strong sense of self-discipline he cultivated". Rogers swam daily at the Pittsburgh Athletic Association, after waking every morning between 4:30 and 5:30 A.M. to pray and to "read the Bible and prepare himself for the day". He did not smoke or drink. According to Junod, he did nothing to change his weight from the he weighed for most of his adult life; by 1998, this also included napping daily, going to bed at 9:30 P.M., and sleeping eight hours per night without interruption. Junod said Rogers saw his weight "as a destiny fulfilled", telling Junod, "the number 143 means 'I love you.' It takes one letter to say 'I' and four letters to say 'love' and three letters to say 'you'". Death and memorials After Rogers's retirement in 2001, he remained busy working with FCI, studying religion and spirituality, making public appearances, traveling, and working on a children's media center named after him at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe with Archabbot Douglas Nowicki, chancellor of the college. By the summer of 2002, his chronic stomach pain became severe enough for him to see a doctor about it, and in October 2002, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He delayed treatment until after he served as Grand Marshal of the 2003 Rose Parade, with Art Linkletter and Bill Cosby in January. On January 6, Rogers underwent stomach surgery. He died less than two months later, on February 27, 2003, one month before his 75th birthday, at his home in Pittsburgh, with his wife of 50 years, Joanne, at his side. While comatose shortly before his death, he received the last rites of the Catholic Church from Archabbot Nowicki. The following day, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covered Rogers's death on the front page and dedicated an entire section to his death and impact. The newspaper also reported that by noon, the internet "was already full of appreciative pieces" by parents, viewers, producers, and writers. Rogers's death was widely lamented. Most U.S. metropolitan newspapers ran his obituary on their front page, and some dedicated entire sections to coverage of his death. WQED aired programs about Rogers the evening he died; the Post-Gazette reported that the ratings for their coverage were three times higher than their normal ratings. That same evening, Nightline on ABC broadcast a rerun of a recent interview with Rogers; the program got the highest ratings of the day, beating the February average ratings of Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. On March 4, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution honoring Rogers sponsored by Representative Mike Doyle from Pennsylvania. On March 1, 2003, a private funeral was held for Rogers in Unity Chapel, which was restored by Rogers's father, at Unity Cemetery in Latrobe. About 80 relatives, co-workers, and close friends attended the service, which "was planned in great secrecy so that those closest to him could grieve in private". Reverend John McCall, pastor of the Rogers family's church, Sixth Presbyterian Church in Squirrel Hill, gave the homily, and Reverend William Barker, a retired Presbyterian minister who was a "close friend of Mr. Rogers and the voice of Mr. Platypus on his show", read Rogers's favorite Bible passages. Rogers was interred at Unity Cemetery in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in a mausoleum owned by his mother's family. On May 3, 2003, a public memorial was held at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh. According to the Post-Gazette, 2,700 people attended. Violinist Itzhak Perlman, cellist Yo-Yo Ma (via video), and organist Alan Morrison performed in honor of Rogers. Barker officiated the service; also in attendance were Pittsburgh philanthropist Elsie Hillman, former Good Morning America host David Hartman, The Very Hungry Caterpillar author Eric Carle, and Arthur creator Marc Brown. Businesswoman and philanthropist Teresa Heinz, PBS President Pat Mitchell, and executive director of The Pittsburgh Project Saleem Ghubril gave remarks. Jeff Erlanger, who at age 10 appeared on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 1981 to explain his electric wheelchair, also spoke. The memorial was broadcast several times on Pittsburgh television stations and websites throughout the day. Legacy Marc Brown, creator of another PBS children's show, Arthur, considered Rogers both a friend and "a terrific role model for how to use television and the media to be helpful to kids and families". Josh Selig, creator of Wonder Pets, credits Rogers with influencing his use of structure and predictability, and his use of music, opera, and originality. Rogers inspired Angela Santomero, co-creator of the children's television show Blue's Clues, to earn a degree in developmental psychology and go into educational television. She and the other producers of Blue's Clues used many of Rogers's techniques, such as using child developmental and educational research, and having the host speak directly to the camera and transition to a make-believe world. In 2006, three years after Rogers's death and the end of production of Blue's Clues, the Fred Rogers Company contacted Santomero to create a show that would promote Rogers's legacy. In 2012, Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, with characters from and based upon Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, premiered on PBS. Rogers's style and approach to children's television and early childhood education also "begged to be parodied". Comedian Eddie Murphy parodied Mister Rogers' Neighborhood on Saturday Night Live during the 1980s. Rogers told interviewer David Letterman in 1982 that he believed parodies like Murphy's were done "with kindness in their hearts". Video of Rogers's 1969 testimony in defense of public programming has experienced a resurgence since 2012, going viral at least twice. It first resurfaced after then presidential candidate Mitt Romney suggested cutting funding for PBS. In 2017, video of the testimony again went viral after President Donald Trump proposed defunding several arts-related government programs including PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts. A roadside Pennsylvania Historical Marker dedicated to Rogers to be installed in Latrobe was approved by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission on March 4, 2014. It was installed on June 11, 2016, with the title "Fred McFeely Rogers (1928–2003)". In 2018, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, director Morgan Neville's documentary about Rogers's life, grossed over $22 million and became the top-grossing biographical documentary ever produced, the highest-grossing documentary in five years, and the 12th largest-grossing documentary ever produced. The 2019 drama film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood tells the story of Rogers and his television series, with Tom Hanks portraying Rogers. According to Caitlin Gibson of The Washington Post, Rogers became a source for parenting advice; she called him "a timeless oracle against a backdrop of ever-shifting parenting philosophies and cultural trends". Robert Thompson of Syracuse University noted that Rogers "took American childhood—and I think Americans in general—through some very turbulent and trying times", from the Vietnam War and the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. According to Asia Simone Burns of National Public Radio, in the years following the end of production on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 2001, and his death in 2003, Rogers became "a source of comfort, sometimes in the wake of tragedy". Burns has said Rogers's words of comfort "began circulating on social media" following tragedies such as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, the Manchester Arena bombing in Manchester, England, in 2017, and the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. Awards and honors Museum exhibits Smithsonian Institution permanent collection. In 1984, Rogers donated one of his sweaters to the Smithsonian. Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. Exhibit created by Rogers and FCI in 1998. It attracted hundreds of thousand of visitors over 10 years, and included, from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, one of his sweaters, a pair of his sneakers, original puppets from the program, and photographs of Rogers. The exhibit traveled to children's museums throughout the country for eight years until it was given to the Louisiana Children's Museum in New Orleans as a permanent exhibit, to help them recover from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In 2007, the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh created a traveling exhibit based on the factory tours featured in episodes of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Heinz History Center permanent collection (2018). In honor of the 50th anniversary of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and what would have been Rogers's 90th birthday. Louisiana Children's Museum. The museum contains an exhibit of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which debuted in 2007. The exhibit was donated by the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. Fred Rogers Exhibit. The Exhibit displays the life, career and legacy of Rogers and includes photos, artifacts from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and clips of the program and interviews featuring Rogers. It is located at the Fred Rogers Center. Art pieces There are several pieces of art dedicated to Rogers throughout Pittsburgh, including a 7,000-pound, 11-foot high bronze statue of him in the North Shore neighborhood. In the Oakland neighborhood, his portrait is included in the Martin Luther King Jr. and "Interpretations of Oakland" murals. A statue of a dinosaur titled "Fredasaurus Rex Friday XIII" originally stood in front of the WQED building and as of 2014 stands in front of the building that contains the Fred Rogers Company offices. There is a "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood of Make-Believe" in Idlewild Park and a kiosk of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood artifacts at Pittsburgh International Airport. The Carnegie Science Center's Miniature Railroad and Village debuted a miniature recreation of Rogers's house from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 2005. Honorary degrees Rogers has received honorary degrees from over 43 colleges and universities. After 1973, two commemorative quilts, created by two of Rogers's friends and archived at the Fred Rogers Center at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, were made out of the academic hoods he received during the graduation ceremonies. Note: Much of the below list is taken from "Honorary Degrees Awarded to Fred Rogers", unless otherwise stated. Thiel College, 1969. Thiel also awards a yearly scholarship named for Rogers. Eastern Michigan University, 1973 Saint Vincent College, 1973 Christian Theological Seminary, 1973 Rollins College, 1974 Yale University, 1974 Chatham College, 1975 Carnegie Mellon University, 1976 Lafayette College, 1977 Waynesburg College, 1978 Linfield College, 1982 Slippery Rock State College, 1982 Duquesne University, 1982 Washington & Jefferson College, 1984 University of South Carolina, 1985 Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 1985 Drury College, 1986 MacMurray College, 1986 Bowling Green State University, 1987 Westminster College (Pennsylvania), 1987 University of Indianapolis, 1988 University of Connecticut, 1991 Boston University, 1992 Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1992 Moravian College, 1992 Goucher College, 1993 University of Pittsburgh, 1993 West Virginia University, 1995 North Carolina State University, 1996 Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, 1998 Marist College, 1999 Westminster Choir College, 1999 Old Dominion University, 2000 Marquette University, 2001 Middlebury College, 2001 Dartmouth College, 2002 Seton Hill University, 2003 (posthumous) Union College, 2003 (posthumous) Roanoke College, 2003 (posthumous) Filmography Television {\|class="wikitable sortable" \|- ! Year ! Title \|- \| 1954–1961 \| The Children's Corner \|- \| 1963–1966 \| Misterogers \|- \| 1964–1967 \| Butternut Square \|- \| 1968–2001 \| Mister Rogers' Neighborhood \|- \| 1977–1982 \| Christmastime with Mister Rogers \|- \| 1978–1981 \| Old Friends... New Friends \|- \| 1981 \| Sesame Street \|- \| 1988 \| Good Night, Little Ones! \|- \| 1991 \| Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? \|- \| 1994 \|Mr. Dressup's 25th Anniversary\|- \| 1994 \| Fred Rogers' Heroes\|- \| 1996 \| Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman\|- \| 1997 \| Arthur\|- \| 1998 \| Wheel of Fortune\|- \| 2003 \| 114th Annual Tournament of Roses Parade\|} Published works Children's books Our Small World (with Josie Carey, illustrated by Norb Nathanson), 1954, Reed and Witting, The Elves, the Shoemaker, & the Shoemaker's Wife (illustrated by Richard Hefter), 1973, Small World Enterprises, The Matter of the Mittens, 1973, Small World Enterprises, Speedy Delivery (illustrated by Richard Hefter), 1973, Hubbard, Henrietta Meets Someone New (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1974, Golden Press, Mister Rogers Talks About, 1974, Platt & Munk, Time to Be Friends, 1974, Hallmark Cards, Everyone is Special (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1975, Western Publishing, Tell Me, Mister Rogers, 1975, Platt & Munk, The Costume Party (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1976, Golden Press, Planet Purple (illustrated by Dennis Hockerman), 1986, Texas Instruments, If We Were All the Same (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, A Trolley Visit to Make-Believe (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, Wishes Don't Make Things Come True (illustrated Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, No One Can Ever Take Your Place (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, When Monsters Seem Real (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, You Can Never Go Down the Drain (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, The Giving Box (illustrated by Jennifer Herbert), 2000, Running Press, Good Weather or Not (with Hedda Bluestone Sharapan, illustrated by James Mellet), 2005, Family Communications, Josephine the Short Neck-Giraffe, 2006, Family Communications, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: The Poetry of Mister Rogers Neighborhood (illustrated by Luke Flowers), 2009, Quirk Books, First Experiences series illustrated by Jim Judkis Going to Day Care, 1985, Putnam, The New Baby, 1985, Putnam, Going to the Potty, 1986, Putnam, Going to the Doctor, 1986, Putnam, Making Friends, 1987, Putnam, Moving, 1987, Putnam, Going to the Hospital, 1988, Putnam, When a Pet Dies, 1988, Putnam, Going on an Airplane, 1989, Putnam, Going to the Dentist, 1989, Putnam, Let's Talk About It series Going to the Hospital, 1977, Family Communications, Having an Operation, 1977, Family Communications, So Many Things To See!, 1977, Family Communications, Wearing a Cast, 1977, Family Communications, Adoption, 1993, Putnam, Divorce, 1994, Putnam, Extraordinary Friends, 2000, Putnam, Stepfamilies, 2001, Putnam, Songbooks Tomorrow on the Children's Corner (with Josie Carey, illustrated by Mal Wittman), 1960, Vernon Music Corporation, Mister Rogers' Songbook (with Johnny Costa, illustrated by Steven Kellogg), 1970, Random House, Books for adults Mister Rogers Talks to Parents, 1983, Family Communications, Mister Rogers' Playbook (with Barry Head, illustrated by Jamie Adams), 1986, Berkley Books, Mister Rogers Talks with Families About Divorce (with Clare O'Brien), 1987, Berkley Books, Mister Rogers' How Families Grow (with Barry Head and Jim Prokell), 1988, Berkley Books, You Are Special: Words of Wisdom from America's Most Beloved Neighbor, 1994, Penguin Books, Dear Mister Rogers, 1996, Penguin Books, Mister Rogers' Playtime, 2001, Running Press, The Mister Rogers Parenting Book, 2002, Running Press, You are special: Neighborly Wisdom from Mister Rogers, 2002, Running Press, The World According to Mister Rogers, 2003, Hyperion Books, Life's Journeys According to Mister Rogers, 2005, Hyperion Books, The Mister Rogers Parenting Resource Book, 2005, Courage Books, Many Ways to Say I Love You: Wisdom For Parents And Children, 2019, Hachette Books, Discography Around the Children's Corner (with Josey Carey), 1958, Vernon Music Corporation, Tomorrow on the Children's Corner (with Josie Carey), 1959 King Friday XIII Celebrates, 1964 Won't You Be My Neighbor?, 1967 Let's Be Together Today, 1968 Josephine the Short-Neck Giraffe, 1969 You Are Special, 1969 A Place of Our Own, 1970 Come On and Wake Up, 1972 Growing, 1992 Bedtime, 1992 Won't You Be My Neighbor? (cassette and book), 1994, Hal Leonard, Coming and Going, 1997 It's Such A Good Feeling: The Best Of Mister Rogers, 2019, Omnivore Recordings, posthumous release See also Won't You Be My Neighbor?, 2018 documentary Mister Rogers: It's You I Like, 2018 documentary A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, 2019 biographical drama film List of vegetarians Notes References Works cited Gross, Terry (1984). "Terry Gross and Fred Rogers". Fresh Air. NPR. King, Maxwell (2018). The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers. Abrams Press. . Tiech, John (2012). Pittsburgh Film History: On Set in the Steel City''. Charleston, North Carolina: The History Press. . External links PBS Kids: Official Site The Fred M. Rogers Center The Fred Rogers Company (formerly known as Family Communications) 1984 interview with Fred Rogers. The Music of Mister Rogers—Pittsburgh Music History Fred Rogers at Voice Chasers 1928 births 2003 deaths 20th-century American composers 20th-century American male actors 20th-century American male writers 20th-century American singers 20th-century Presbyterians 21st-century Presbyterians American children's television presenters American male composers American male singers American male songwriters American male television actors American male voice actors American philanthropists American Presbyterian ministers American Presbyterians American puppeteers American television hosts Burials in Pennsylvania Christianity in Pittsburgh Columbia Records artists Dartmouth College alumni Daytime Emmy Award winners Deaths from cancer in Pennsylvania Deaths from stomach cancer Male actors from Pittsburgh Omnivore Recordings artists PBS people Peabody Award winners Pennsylvania Republicans People from Latrobe, Pennsylvania Pittsburgh Theological Seminary alumni Presbyterians from Pennsylvania Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Rollins College alumni Singers from Pennsylvania Songwriters from Pennsylvania Television personalities from Pittsburgh Television producers from Pennsylvania United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America ministers Vegetarianism activists Writers from Pittsburgh Articles containing video clips	false	[ "John Knauf (April 5, 1868 – September 19, 1952) was an American judge who served as a Justice of the Supreme Court of North Dakota in 1906. He was first appointed to the court in 1906 after justice Newton C. Young resigned, and he did not win re-election later that year, making his tenure of four and one half months on the court the shortest in North Dakota history. He died in Fargo, North Dakota in 1952 at age 84.\n\nExternal links\nNorth Dakota Supreme Court biography\n\nJustices of the North Dakota Supreme Court\nNorth Dakota state court judges\n1868 births\n1952 deaths", "Jon Kenton Court (born November 26, 1960 in Gainesville, Florida) is an American jockey in Thoroughbred horse racing.\n\nHaving grown up in Florida, Jon Court began riding in Colorado at the now closed Centennial Park in 1980. He rode in Louisiana for 12 years before moving to Kentucky and Indiana in 1995, where he was a top rider at Hoosier Park from 1996 to 1998. In 1999, he gained his 2,000th win at Kentucky Downs.\n\nIn 2001, he rode Percy Hope in the Lone Star Derby, winning, and in the Preakness Stakes, placing 9th. In 2003, he won the Japan Cup Dirt on Fleetstreet Dancer as a 48-1 longshot.\n\nIn 2004, he moved to California tracks on the advice of trainer Doug O'Neill after winning titles at Ellis Park Racecourse, Oaklawn Park, Turfway Park, Kentucky Downs, and Birmingham Racecourse. He rode his 3,000th winner at Santa Anita Park on April 7, 2005, 25 years to the day from his first win.\n\nIn 2006, Court was elected secretary of the Jockeys' Guild and is the Guild's representative board member for the National Thoroughbred Racing Association's (NTRA) Charities-Permanently Disabled Jockeys' Fund.\n\nCourt, who has been called \"an unfailingly polite man\" by ESPN, received the prestigious George Woolf Memorial Jockey Award in February 2007. The award is voted on by American jockeys and is given to a jockey who demonstrates high standards of personal and professional conduct, on and off the racetrack.\n\nCourt was one of the jockeys featured in the first season of Animal Planet's 2009 reality documentary Jockeys before he moved his tack back to Kentucky.\n\nOn April 10, 2010, Court won the $1,000,000 Arkansas Derby aboard Line of David, giving the horse and its connections enough graded stakes earnings to run in the Kentucky Derby. However, Court was removed from the Derby mount by the horse's trainer, John Sadler. Line of David subsequently finished 18th in the 20-horse Derby field.\n\nCourt repeated his win in the Arkansas Derby in 2011 with Archarcharch, trained by his father-in-law, Jinks Fires. He retained the mount for the 2011 Kentucky Derby. Archarcharch drew the first post and finished 15th in a 19-horse field at 12-1 odds.\n\nCourt was injured in a fall on May 3, 2014, breaking his hand. He did not return to the track until late September.\n\nOn December 3, 2016, Court earned his 4,000th win aboard City Without Pity at Turfway Park. He had suffered three broken vertebrae and two broken ribs on September 16 when his mount clipped heals with another horse.\n\nYear-end charts\n\nReferences\n\n Jon Court at the NTRA\n Jockeys Guild Jon Court\n\n1960 births\nLiving people\nAmerican jockeys\nPeople from Gainesville, Florida" ]
[ "Fred Rogers", "VCR", "What did Rogers have to do with the VCR?", "Rogers was involved in supporting the manufacturers of VCRs in court.", "Why did he go to court?", "who objected to home recordings or believed that devices to facilitate it should be taxed or regulated.", "Did he win in court?", "I don't know." ]	C_633c016260e9440c9c51f1d94034cc41_0	Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?	4	Other than Fred Rogers taking VCR to court, are there any other interesting facts in this article?	Fred Rogers	During the controversy surrounding the introduction of the household VCR, Rogers was involved in supporting the manufacturers of VCRs in court. His 1979 testimony, in the case Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., noted that he did not object to home recordings of his television programs, for instance, by families in order to watch them together at a later time. This testimony contrasted with the views of others in the television industry who objected to home recordings or believed that devices to facilitate it should be taxed or regulated. When the case reached the Supreme Court in 1983, the majority decision considered the testimony of Rogers when it held that the Betamax video recorder did not infringe copyright. The Court stated that his views were a notable piece of evidence "that many [television] producers are willing to allow private time-shifting to continue" and even quoted his testimony in a footnote: Some public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the Neighborhood at hours when some children cannot use it ... I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the Neighborhood off-the-air, and I'm speaking for the Neighborhood because that's what I produce, that they then become much more active in the programming of their family's television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been "You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions." Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important. CANNOTANSWER	The Court stated that his views were a notable piece of evidence	Fred McFeely Rogers (March 20, 1928 – February 27, 2003), also known as Mister Rogers, was an American television host, author, producer, and Presbyterian minister. He was the creator, showrunner, and host of the preschool television series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which ran from 1968 to 2001. Born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, Rogers earned a bachelor's degree in music from Rollins College in 1951. He began his television career at NBC in New York, returning to Pittsburgh in 1953 to work for children's programming at NET (later PBS) television station WQED. He graduated from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary with a bachelor's degree in divinity in 1962 and became a Presbyterian minister in 1963. He attended the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Child Development, where he began his 30-year collaboration with child psychologist Margaret McFarland. He also helped develop the children's shows The Children's Corner (1955) for WQED in Pittsburgh and Misterogers (1963) in Canada for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1968, he returned to Pittsburgh and adapted the format of his Canadian series to create Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which ran for 33 years. The program was critically acclaimed for focusing on children's emotional and physical concerns, such as death, sibling rivalry, school enrollment, and divorce. Rogers died of stomach cancer on February 27, 2003, at age 74. His work in children's television has been widely lauded, and he received more than 40 honorary degrees and several awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002 and a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1997. He was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999. Rogers influenced many writers and producers of children's television shows, and his broadcasts have served as a source of comfort during tragic events, even after his death. Early life Rogers was born on March 20, 1928, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, about outside of Pittsburgh, at 705 Main Street to James and Nancy Rogers. James was "a very successful businessman" who was president of the McFeely Brick Company, one of Latrobe's largest businesses. Nancy's father, Fred Brooks McFeely, after whom Rogers was named, was an entrepreneur. Nancy knitted sweaters for American soldiers from western Pennsylvania who were fighting in Europe and regularly volunteered at the Latrobe Hospital. Initially, dreaming of becoming a doctor, she settled for a life of hospital volunteer work. Rogers grew up in a three-story brick mansion at 737 Weldon Street in Latrobe. He had a sister, Elaine, whom the Rogerses adopted when he was 11 years old. Rogers spent much of his childhood alone, playing with puppets, and also spent time with his grandfather. He began to play the piano when he was five years old. Through an ancestor who immigrated from Germany to the U.S., Johannes Meffert (born 1732), Rogers is the sixth cousin of American actor Tom Hanks, who portrays him in the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019). Rogers had a difficult childhood. He was shy, introverted, and overweight, and was frequently homebound after suffering bouts of asthma. He was bullied and taunted as a child for his weight, and called "Fat Freddy". According to Morgan Neville, director of the 2018 documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor?, Rogers had a "lonely childhood... I think he made friends with himself as much as he could. He had a ventriloquist dummy, he had [stuffed] animals, and he would create his own worlds in his childhood bedroom". Rogers attended Latrobe High School, where he overcame his shyness. "It was tough for me at the beginning," Rogers told NPR's Terry Gross in 1984. "And then I made a couple friends who found out that the core of me was okay. And one of them was... the head of the football team". Rogers served as president of the student council, was a member of the National Honor Society, and was editor-in-chief of the school yearbook. He registered for the draft in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1948 at age 20, where he was classified as “1-A”, available for military service. However, his status was changed to “4-F”, unfit for military service, following an Armed Forces physical on October 12, 1950. Rogers attended Dartmouth College for one year before transferring to Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida; he graduated magna cum laude in 1951 with a Bachelor of Music. Rogers graduated magna cum laude from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1962 with a Bachelor of Divinity. He was ordained a minister by the Pittsburgh Presbytery of the United Presbyterian Church in 1963. His mission as an ordained minister, instead of being a pastor of a church, was to minister to children and their families through television. He regularly appeared before church officials to keep up his ordination. Career Early work Rogers wanted to enter seminary after college, but instead chose to go into the nascent medium of television after encountering a TV at his parents' home in 1951 during his senior year at Rollins College. In a CNN interview, he said, "I went into television because I hated it so, and I thought there's some way of using this fabulous instrument to nurture those who would watch and listen". After graduating in 1951, he worked at NBC in New York City as floor director of Your Hit Parade, The Kate Smith Hour, and Gabby Hayes's children's show, and as an assistant producer of The Voice of Firestone. In 1953, Rogers returned to Pittsburgh to work as a program developer at public television station WQED. Josie Carey worked with him to develop the children's show The Children's Corner, which Carey hosted. Rogers worked off-camera to develop puppets, characters, and music for the show. He used many of the puppet characters developed during this time, such as Daniel the Striped Tiger (named after WQED's station manager, Dorothy Daniel, who gave Rogers a tiger puppet before the show's premiere), King Friday XIII, Queen Sara Saturday (named after Rogers's wife), X the Owl, Henrietta, and Lady Elaine, in his later work. Children's television entertainer Ernie Coombs was an assistant puppeteer. The Children's Corner won a Sylvania Award for best locally produced children's programming in 1955 and was broadcast nationally on NBC. While working on The Children's Corner, Rogers attended Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1963. He also attended the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Child Development, where he began working with child psychologist Margaret McFarland, who according to Rogers's biographer Maxwell King became his "key advisor and collaborator" and "child-education guru". Much of Rogers's "thinking about and appreciation for children was shaped and informed" by McFarland. She was his consultant for most of Mister Rogers' Neighborhoods scripts and songs for 30 years. In 1963, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Toronto contracted Rogers to develop and host the 15-minute black-and-white children's program Misterogers; it lasted from 1963 to 1967. It was the first time Rogers appeared on camera. CBC's children's programming head Fred Rainsberry insisted on it, telling Rogers, "Fred, I've seen you talk with kids. Let's put you yourself on the air". Coombs joined Rogers in Toronto as an assistant puppeteer. Rogers also worked with Coombs on the children's show Butternut Square from 1964 to 1967. He acquired the rights to Misterogers in 1967 and returned to Pittsburgh with his wife, two young sons, and the sets he developed, despite a potentially promising career with CBC and no job prospects in Pittsburgh. On Rogers' recommendation, Coombs remained in Toronto and became Rogers' Canadian equivalent of an iconic television personality, creating the long-running children's program, Mr. Dressup, which ran from 1967 to 1996. Rogers's work for CBC "helped shape and develop the concept and style of his later program for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the U.S." Mister Rogers' Neighborhood Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (also called the Neighborhood), a half-hour educational children's program starring Rogers, began airing nationally in 1968 and ran for 895 episodes. The program was videotaped at WQED in Pittsburgh and was broadcast by National Educational Television (NET), which later became the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Its first season had 180 black-and-white episodes. Each subsequent season, filmed in color and funded by PBS, the Sears-Roebuck Foundation, and other charities, consisted of 65 episodes. By the time the program ended production in December 2000, its average rating was about 0.7 percent of television households, or 680,000 homes, and it aired on 384 PBS stations. At its peak in 1985–1986, its ratings were at 2.1 percent, or 1.8 million homes. Production of the Neighborhood ended in December 2000, and the last original episode aired in 2001, but PBS continued to air reruns; by 2016 it was the third-longest running program in PBS history. Many of the sets and props in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, like the trolley, the sneakers, and the castle, were created for Rogers's show in Toronto by CBC designers and producers. The program also "incorporated most of the highly imaginative elements that later became famous", such as its slow pace and its host's quiet manner. The format of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood "remained virtually unchanged" for the entire run of the program. Every episode begins with a camera's-eye view of a model of a neighborhood, then panning in closer to a representation of a house while a piano instrumental of the theme song, "Won't You be My Neighbor?", performed by music director Johnny Costa and inspired by a Beethoven sonata, is played. The camera zooms in to a model representing Mr. Rogers's house, then cuts to the house's interior and pans across the room to the front door, which Rogers opens as he sings the theme song to greet his visitors while changing his suit jacket to a cardigan (knitted by his mother) and his dress shoes to sneakers, "complete with a shoe tossed from one hand to another". The episode's theme is introduced, and Mr. Rogers leaves his home to visit another location, the camera panning back to the neighborhood model and zooming in to the new location as he enters it. Once this segment ends, Mr. Rogers leaves and returns to his home, indicating that it is time to visit the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Mr. Rogers proceeds to the window seat by the trolley track and sets up the action there as the Trolley comes out. The camera follows it down a tunnel in the back wall of the house as it enters the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. The stories and lessons told take place over a series of a week's worth of episodes and involve puppet and human characters. The end of the visit occurs when the Trolley returns to the same tunnel from which it emerged, reappearing in Mr. Rogers's home. He then talks to the viewers before concluding the episode. He often feeds his fish, cleans up any props he has used, and returns to the front room, where he sings the closing song while changing back into his dress shoes and jacket. He exits the front door as he ends the song, and the camera zooms out of his home and pans across the neighborhood model as the episode ends. Mister Rogers' Neighborhood emphasized young children's social and emotional needs, and unlike another PBS show, Sesame Street, which premiered in 1969, did not focus on cognitive learning. Writer Kathy Merlock Jackson said, "While both shows target the same preschool audience and prepare children for kindergarten, Sesame Street concentrates on school-readiness skills while Mister Rogers Neighborhood focuses on the child's developing psyche and feelings and sense of moral and ethical reasoning". The Neighborhood also spent fewer resources on research than Sesame Street, but Rogers used early childhood education concepts taught by his mentor Margaret McFarland, Benjamin Spock, Erik Erikson, and T. Berry Brazelton in his lessons. As the Washington Post noted, Rogers taught young children about civility, tolerance, sharing, and self-worth "in a reassuring tone and leisurely cadence". He tackled difficult topics such as the death of a family pet, sibling rivalry, the addition of a newborn into a family, moving and enrolling in a new school, and divorce. For example, he wrote a special segment that dealt with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy that aired on June 7, 1968, days after the assassination occurred. According to King, the process of putting each episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood together was "painstaking" and Rogers's contribution to the program was "astounding". Rogers wrote and edited all the episodes, played the piano and sang for most of the songs, wrote 200 songs and 13 operas, created all the characters (both puppet and human), played most of the major puppet roles, hosted every episode, and produced and approved every detail of the program. The puppets created for the Neighborhood of Make-Believe "included an extraordinary variety of personalities". They were simple puppets but "complex, complicated, and utterly honest beings". In 1971, Rogers formed Family Communications, Inc. (FCI, now The Fred Rogers Company), to produce the Neighborhood, other programs, and non-broadcast materials. In 1975, Rogers stopped producing Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood to focus on adult programming. Reruns of the Neighborhood continued to air on PBS. King reports that the decision caught many of his coworkers and supporters "off guard". Rogers continued to confer with McFarland about child development and early childhood education, however. In 1979, after an almost five-year hiatus, Rogers returned to producing the Neighborhood; King calls the new version "stronger and more sophisticated than ever". King writes that by the program's second run in the 1980s, it was "such a cultural touchstone that it had inspired numerous parodies", most notably Eddie Murphy's parody on Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s. Rogers retired from producing the Neighborhood in 2001 at age 73, although reruns continued to air. He and FCI had been making about two or three weeks of new programs per year for many years, "filling the rest of his time slots from a library of about 300 shows made since 1979". The final original episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood aired on August 31, 2001. Other work and appearances In 1969, Rogers testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications, which was chaired by Democratic Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island. U.S. President Lyndon Johnson had proposed a $20 million bill for the creation of PBS before he left office, but his successor, Richard Nixon, wanted to cut the funding to $10 million. Even though Rogers was not yet nationally known, he was chosen to testify because of his ability to make persuasive arguments and to connect emotionally with his audience. The clip of Rogers's testimony, which was televised and has since been viewed by millions of people on the internet, helped to secure funding for PBS for many years afterwards. According to King, Rogers's testimony was "considered one of the most powerful pieces of testimony ever offered before Congress, and one of the most powerful pieces of video presentation ever filmed". It brought Pastore to tears and also, according to King, has been studied by public relations experts and academics. Congressional funding for PBS increased from $9 million to $22 million. In 1970, Nixon appointed Rogers as chair of the White House Conference on Children and Youth. In 1978, while on hiatus from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Rogers wrote, produced, and hosted a 30-minute interview program for adults on PBS called Old Friends... New Friends. It lasted 20 episodes. Rogers's guests included Hoagy Carmichael, Helen Hayes, Milton Berle, Lorin Hollander, poet Robert Frost's daughter Lesley, and Willie Stargell. In September 1987, Rogers visited Moscow to appear as the first guest on the long-running Soviet children's TV show Good Night, Little Ones! with host Tatiana Vedeneyeva. The appearance was broadcast in the Soviet Union on December 7, coinciding with the Washington Summit meeting between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan in Washington D.C. Vedeneyeva visited the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in November. Her visit was taped and later aired in March 1988 as part of Rogers's program. In 1994, Rogers wrote, produced, and hosted a special for PBS called Fred Rogers' Heroes, which featured interviews and portraits of four people from across the country who were having a positive impact on children and education. The first time Rogers appeared on television as an actor, and not himself, was in a 1996 episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, playing a preacher. Rogers gave "scores of interviews". Though reluctant to appear on television talk shows, he would usually "charm the host with his quick wit and ability to ad-lib on a moment's notice". Rogers was "one of the country's most sought-after commencement speakers", making over 150 speeches. His friend and colleague David Newell reported that Rogers would "agonize over a speech", and King reported that Rogers was at his least guarded during his speeches, which were about children, television, education, his view of the world, how to make the world a better place, and his quest for self-knowledge. His tone was quiet and informal but "commanded attention". In many speeches, including the ones he made accepting a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1997, for his induction into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999, and his final commencement speech at Dartmouth College in 2002, he instructed his audiences to remain silent and think for a moment about someone who had a good influence on them. Personal life Rogers met Sara Joanne Byrd (called "Joanne") from Jacksonville, Florida, while attending Rollins College. They were married from 1952 until his death in 2003. They had two sons, James and John. Joanne was "an accomplished pianist", who like Fred earned a Bachelor of Music from Rollins, and went on to earn a Master of Music from Florida State University. She performed publicly with her college classmate, Jeannine Morrison, from 1976 to 2008. According to biographer Maxwell King, Rogers's close associates said he was "absolutely faithful to his marriage vows". Rogers was red-green color-blind. He became a pescatarian in 1970, after the death of his father, and a vegetarian in the early 1980s, saying he "couldn't eat anything that had a mother". He became a co-owner of Vegetarian Times in the mid-1980s and said in one issue, "I love tofu burgers and beets". He told Vegetarian Times that he became a vegetarian for both ethical and health reasons. According to his biographer Maxwell King, Rogers also signed his name to a statement protesting wearing animal furs. Rogers was a registered Republican, but according to Joanne Rogers, he was "very independent in the way he voted", choosing not to talk about politics because he wanted to be impartial. Rogers was a Presbyterian, and many of the messages he expressed in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood were inspired by the core tenets of Christianity. Rogers rarely spoke about his faith on air; he believed that teaching through example was as powerful as preaching. He said, "You don't need to speak overtly about religion in order to get a message across". According to writer Shea Tuttle, Rogers considered his faith a fundamental part of his personality and "called the space between the viewer and the television set 'holy ground'". But despite his strong faith, Rogers struggled with anger, conflict, and self-doubt, especially at the end of his life. He also studied Catholic mysticism, Judaism, Buddhism, and other faiths and cultures. King called him "that unique television star with a real spiritual life", emphasizing the values of patience, reflection, and "silence in a noisy world". King reported that despite Rogers's family's wealth, he cared little about making money, and lived frugally, especially as he and his wife grew older. King reported that Rogers's relationship with his young audience was important to him. For example, since hosting Misterogers in Canada, he answered every letter sent to him by hand. After Mister Rogers' Neighborhood began airing in the U.S., the letters increased in volume and he hired staff member and producer Hedda Sharapan to answer them, but he read, edited, and signed each one. King wrote that Rogers saw responding to his viewers' letters as "a pastoral duty of sorts". The New York Times called Rogers "a dedicated lap-swimmer", and Tom Junod, author of "Can You Say... Hero?", the 1998 Esquire profile of Rogers, said, "Nearly every morning of his life, Mister Rogers has gone swimming". Rogers began swimming when he was a child at his family's vacation home outside Latrobe, where they owned a pool, and during their winter trips to Florida. King wrote that swimming and playing the piano were "lifelong passions" and that "both gave him a chance to feel capable and in charge of his destiny", and that swimming became "an important part of the strong sense of self-discipline he cultivated". Rogers swam daily at the Pittsburgh Athletic Association, after waking every morning between 4:30 and 5:30 A.M. to pray and to "read the Bible and prepare himself for the day". He did not smoke or drink. According to Junod, he did nothing to change his weight from the he weighed for most of his adult life; by 1998, this also included napping daily, going to bed at 9:30 P.M., and sleeping eight hours per night without interruption. Junod said Rogers saw his weight "as a destiny fulfilled", telling Junod, "the number 143 means 'I love you.' It takes one letter to say 'I' and four letters to say 'love' and three letters to say 'you'". Death and memorials After Rogers's retirement in 2001, he remained busy working with FCI, studying religion and spirituality, making public appearances, traveling, and working on a children's media center named after him at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe with Archabbot Douglas Nowicki, chancellor of the college. By the summer of 2002, his chronic stomach pain became severe enough for him to see a doctor about it, and in October 2002, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He delayed treatment until after he served as Grand Marshal of the 2003 Rose Parade, with Art Linkletter and Bill Cosby in January. On January 6, Rogers underwent stomach surgery. He died less than two months later, on February 27, 2003, one month before his 75th birthday, at his home in Pittsburgh, with his wife of 50 years, Joanne, at his side. While comatose shortly before his death, he received the last rites of the Catholic Church from Archabbot Nowicki. The following day, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covered Rogers's death on the front page and dedicated an entire section to his death and impact. The newspaper also reported that by noon, the internet "was already full of appreciative pieces" by parents, viewers, producers, and writers. Rogers's death was widely lamented. Most U.S. metropolitan newspapers ran his obituary on their front page, and some dedicated entire sections to coverage of his death. WQED aired programs about Rogers the evening he died; the Post-Gazette reported that the ratings for their coverage were three times higher than their normal ratings. That same evening, Nightline on ABC broadcast a rerun of a recent interview with Rogers; the program got the highest ratings of the day, beating the February average ratings of Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. On March 4, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution honoring Rogers sponsored by Representative Mike Doyle from Pennsylvania. On March 1, 2003, a private funeral was held for Rogers in Unity Chapel, which was restored by Rogers's father, at Unity Cemetery in Latrobe. About 80 relatives, co-workers, and close friends attended the service, which "was planned in great secrecy so that those closest to him could grieve in private". Reverend John McCall, pastor of the Rogers family's church, Sixth Presbyterian Church in Squirrel Hill, gave the homily, and Reverend William Barker, a retired Presbyterian minister who was a "close friend of Mr. Rogers and the voice of Mr. Platypus on his show", read Rogers's favorite Bible passages. Rogers was interred at Unity Cemetery in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in a mausoleum owned by his mother's family. On May 3, 2003, a public memorial was held at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh. According to the Post-Gazette, 2,700 people attended. Violinist Itzhak Perlman, cellist Yo-Yo Ma (via video), and organist Alan Morrison performed in honor of Rogers. Barker officiated the service; also in attendance were Pittsburgh philanthropist Elsie Hillman, former Good Morning America host David Hartman, The Very Hungry Caterpillar author Eric Carle, and Arthur creator Marc Brown. Businesswoman and philanthropist Teresa Heinz, PBS President Pat Mitchell, and executive director of The Pittsburgh Project Saleem Ghubril gave remarks. Jeff Erlanger, who at age 10 appeared on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 1981 to explain his electric wheelchair, also spoke. The memorial was broadcast several times on Pittsburgh television stations and websites throughout the day. Legacy Marc Brown, creator of another PBS children's show, Arthur, considered Rogers both a friend and "a terrific role model for how to use television and the media to be helpful to kids and families". Josh Selig, creator of Wonder Pets, credits Rogers with influencing his use of structure and predictability, and his use of music, opera, and originality. Rogers inspired Angela Santomero, co-creator of the children's television show Blue's Clues, to earn a degree in developmental psychology and go into educational television. She and the other producers of Blue's Clues used many of Rogers's techniques, such as using child developmental and educational research, and having the host speak directly to the camera and transition to a make-believe world. In 2006, three years after Rogers's death and the end of production of Blue's Clues, the Fred Rogers Company contacted Santomero to create a show that would promote Rogers's legacy. In 2012, Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, with characters from and based upon Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, premiered on PBS. Rogers's style and approach to children's television and early childhood education also "begged to be parodied". Comedian Eddie Murphy parodied Mister Rogers' Neighborhood on Saturday Night Live during the 1980s. Rogers told interviewer David Letterman in 1982 that he believed parodies like Murphy's were done "with kindness in their hearts". Video of Rogers's 1969 testimony in defense of public programming has experienced a resurgence since 2012, going viral at least twice. It first resurfaced after then presidential candidate Mitt Romney suggested cutting funding for PBS. In 2017, video of the testimony again went viral after President Donald Trump proposed defunding several arts-related government programs including PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts. A roadside Pennsylvania Historical Marker dedicated to Rogers to be installed in Latrobe was approved by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission on March 4, 2014. It was installed on June 11, 2016, with the title "Fred McFeely Rogers (1928–2003)". In 2018, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, director Morgan Neville's documentary about Rogers's life, grossed over $22 million and became the top-grossing biographical documentary ever produced, the highest-grossing documentary in five years, and the 12th largest-grossing documentary ever produced. The 2019 drama film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood tells the story of Rogers and his television series, with Tom Hanks portraying Rogers. According to Caitlin Gibson of The Washington Post, Rogers became a source for parenting advice; she called him "a timeless oracle against a backdrop of ever-shifting parenting philosophies and cultural trends". Robert Thompson of Syracuse University noted that Rogers "took American childhood—and I think Americans in general—through some very turbulent and trying times", from the Vietnam War and the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. According to Asia Simone Burns of National Public Radio, in the years following the end of production on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 2001, and his death in 2003, Rogers became "a source of comfort, sometimes in the wake of tragedy". Burns has said Rogers's words of comfort "began circulating on social media" following tragedies such as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, the Manchester Arena bombing in Manchester, England, in 2017, and the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. Awards and honors Museum exhibits Smithsonian Institution permanent collection. In 1984, Rogers donated one of his sweaters to the Smithsonian. Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. Exhibit created by Rogers and FCI in 1998. It attracted hundreds of thousand of visitors over 10 years, and included, from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, one of his sweaters, a pair of his sneakers, original puppets from the program, and photographs of Rogers. The exhibit traveled to children's museums throughout the country for eight years until it was given to the Louisiana Children's Museum in New Orleans as a permanent exhibit, to help them recover from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In 2007, the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh created a traveling exhibit based on the factory tours featured in episodes of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Heinz History Center permanent collection (2018). In honor of the 50th anniversary of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and what would have been Rogers's 90th birthday. Louisiana Children's Museum. The museum contains an exhibit of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which debuted in 2007. The exhibit was donated by the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. Fred Rogers Exhibit. The Exhibit displays the life, career and legacy of Rogers and includes photos, artifacts from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and clips of the program and interviews featuring Rogers. It is located at the Fred Rogers Center. Art pieces There are several pieces of art dedicated to Rogers throughout Pittsburgh, including a 7,000-pound, 11-foot high bronze statue of him in the North Shore neighborhood. In the Oakland neighborhood, his portrait is included in the Martin Luther King Jr. and "Interpretations of Oakland" murals. A statue of a dinosaur titled "Fredasaurus Rex Friday XIII" originally stood in front of the WQED building and as of 2014 stands in front of the building that contains the Fred Rogers Company offices. There is a "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood of Make-Believe" in Idlewild Park and a kiosk of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood artifacts at Pittsburgh International Airport. The Carnegie Science Center's Miniature Railroad and Village debuted a miniature recreation of Rogers's house from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 2005. Honorary degrees Rogers has received honorary degrees from over 43 colleges and universities. After 1973, two commemorative quilts, created by two of Rogers's friends and archived at the Fred Rogers Center at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, were made out of the academic hoods he received during the graduation ceremonies. Note: Much of the below list is taken from "Honorary Degrees Awarded to Fred Rogers", unless otherwise stated. Thiel College, 1969. Thiel also awards a yearly scholarship named for Rogers. Eastern Michigan University, 1973 Saint Vincent College, 1973 Christian Theological Seminary, 1973 Rollins College, 1974 Yale University, 1974 Chatham College, 1975 Carnegie Mellon University, 1976 Lafayette College, 1977 Waynesburg College, 1978 Linfield College, 1982 Slippery Rock State College, 1982 Duquesne University, 1982 Washington & Jefferson College, 1984 University of South Carolina, 1985 Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 1985 Drury College, 1986 MacMurray College, 1986 Bowling Green State University, 1987 Westminster College (Pennsylvania), 1987 University of Indianapolis, 1988 University of Connecticut, 1991 Boston University, 1992 Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1992 Moravian College, 1992 Goucher College, 1993 University of Pittsburgh, 1993 West Virginia University, 1995 North Carolina State University, 1996 Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, 1998 Marist College, 1999 Westminster Choir College, 1999 Old Dominion University, 2000 Marquette University, 2001 Middlebury College, 2001 Dartmouth College, 2002 Seton Hill University, 2003 (posthumous) Union College, 2003 (posthumous) Roanoke College, 2003 (posthumous) Filmography Television {\|class="wikitable sortable" \|- ! Year ! Title \|- \| 1954–1961 \| The Children's Corner \|- \| 1963–1966 \| Misterogers \|- \| 1964–1967 \| Butternut Square \|- \| 1968–2001 \| Mister Rogers' Neighborhood \|- \| 1977–1982 \| Christmastime with Mister Rogers \|- \| 1978–1981 \| Old Friends... New Friends \|- \| 1981 \| Sesame Street \|- \| 1988 \| Good Night, Little Ones! \|- \| 1991 \| Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? \|- \| 1994 \|Mr. Dressup's 25th Anniversary\|- \| 1994 \| Fred Rogers' Heroes\|- \| 1996 \| Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman\|- \| 1997 \| Arthur\|- \| 1998 \| Wheel of Fortune\|- \| 2003 \| 114th Annual Tournament of Roses Parade\|} Published works Children's books Our Small World (with Josie Carey, illustrated by Norb Nathanson), 1954, Reed and Witting, The Elves, the Shoemaker, & the Shoemaker's Wife (illustrated by Richard Hefter), 1973, Small World Enterprises, The Matter of the Mittens, 1973, Small World Enterprises, Speedy Delivery (illustrated by Richard Hefter), 1973, Hubbard, Henrietta Meets Someone New (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1974, Golden Press, Mister Rogers Talks About, 1974, Platt & Munk, Time to Be Friends, 1974, Hallmark Cards, Everyone is Special (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1975, Western Publishing, Tell Me, Mister Rogers, 1975, Platt & Munk, The Costume Party (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1976, Golden Press, Planet Purple (illustrated by Dennis Hockerman), 1986, Texas Instruments, If We Were All the Same (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, A Trolley Visit to Make-Believe (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, Wishes Don't Make Things Come True (illustrated Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, No One Can Ever Take Your Place (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, When Monsters Seem Real (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, You Can Never Go Down the Drain (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, The Giving Box (illustrated by Jennifer Herbert), 2000, Running Press, Good Weather or Not (with Hedda Bluestone Sharapan, illustrated by James Mellet), 2005, Family Communications, Josephine the Short Neck-Giraffe, 2006, Family Communications, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: The Poetry of Mister Rogers Neighborhood (illustrated by Luke Flowers), 2009, Quirk Books, First Experiences series illustrated by Jim Judkis Going to Day Care, 1985, Putnam, The New Baby, 1985, Putnam, Going to the Potty, 1986, Putnam, Going to the Doctor, 1986, Putnam, Making Friends, 1987, Putnam, Moving, 1987, Putnam, Going to the Hospital, 1988, Putnam, When a Pet Dies, 1988, Putnam, Going on an Airplane, 1989, Putnam, Going to the Dentist, 1989, Putnam, Let's Talk About It series Going to the Hospital, 1977, Family Communications, Having an Operation, 1977, Family Communications, So Many Things To See!, 1977, Family Communications, Wearing a Cast, 1977, Family Communications, Adoption, 1993, Putnam, Divorce, 1994, Putnam, Extraordinary Friends, 2000, Putnam, Stepfamilies, 2001, Putnam, Songbooks Tomorrow on the Children's Corner (with Josie Carey, illustrated by Mal Wittman), 1960, Vernon Music Corporation, Mister Rogers' Songbook (with Johnny Costa, illustrated by Steven Kellogg), 1970, Random House, Books for adults Mister Rogers Talks to Parents, 1983, Family Communications, Mister Rogers' Playbook (with Barry Head, illustrated by Jamie Adams), 1986, Berkley Books, Mister Rogers Talks with Families About Divorce (with Clare O'Brien), 1987, Berkley Books, Mister Rogers' How Families Grow (with Barry Head and Jim Prokell), 1988, Berkley Books, You Are Special: Words of Wisdom from America's Most Beloved Neighbor, 1994, Penguin Books, Dear Mister Rogers, 1996, Penguin Books, Mister Rogers' Playtime, 2001, Running Press, The Mister Rogers Parenting Book, 2002, Running Press, You are special: Neighborly Wisdom from Mister Rogers, 2002, Running Press, The World According to Mister Rogers, 2003, Hyperion Books, Life's Journeys According to Mister Rogers, 2005, Hyperion Books, The Mister Rogers Parenting Resource Book, 2005, Courage Books, Many Ways to Say I Love You: Wisdom For Parents And Children, 2019, Hachette Books, Discography Around the Children's Corner (with Josey Carey), 1958, Vernon Music Corporation, Tomorrow on the Children's Corner (with Josie Carey), 1959 King Friday XIII Celebrates, 1964 Won't You Be My Neighbor?, 1967 Let's Be Together Today, 1968 Josephine the Short-Neck Giraffe, 1969 You Are Special, 1969 A Place of Our Own, 1970 Come On and Wake Up, 1972 Growing, 1992 Bedtime, 1992 Won't You Be My Neighbor? (cassette and book), 1994, Hal Leonard, Coming and Going, 1997 It's Such A Good Feeling: The Best Of Mister Rogers, 2019, Omnivore Recordings, posthumous release See also Won't You Be My Neighbor?, 2018 documentary Mister Rogers: It's You I Like, 2018 documentary A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, 2019 biographical drama film List of vegetarians Notes References Works cited Gross, Terry (1984). "Terry Gross and Fred Rogers". Fresh Air. NPR. King, Maxwell (2018). The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers. Abrams Press. . Tiech, John (2012). Pittsburgh Film History: On Set in the Steel City''. Charleston, North Carolina: The History Press. . External links PBS Kids: Official Site The Fred M. Rogers Center The Fred Rogers Company (formerly known as Family Communications) 1984 interview with Fred Rogers. The Music of Mister Rogers—Pittsburgh Music History Fred Rogers at Voice Chasers 1928 births 2003 deaths 20th-century American composers 20th-century American male actors 20th-century American male writers 20th-century American singers 20th-century Presbyterians 21st-century Presbyterians American children's television presenters American male composers American male singers American male songwriters American male television actors American male voice actors American philanthropists American Presbyterian ministers American Presbyterians American puppeteers American television hosts Burials in Pennsylvania Christianity in Pittsburgh Columbia Records artists Dartmouth College alumni Daytime Emmy Award winners Deaths from cancer in Pennsylvania Deaths from stomach cancer Male actors from Pittsburgh Omnivore Recordings artists PBS people Peabody Award winners Pennsylvania Republicans People from Latrobe, Pennsylvania Pittsburgh Theological Seminary alumni Presbyterians from Pennsylvania Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Rollins College alumni Singers from Pennsylvania Songwriters from Pennsylvania Television personalities from Pittsburgh Television producers from Pennsylvania United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America ministers Vegetarianism activists Writers from Pittsburgh Articles containing video clips	false	[ "Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region", "Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts" ]
[ "Fred Rogers", "VCR", "What did Rogers have to do with the VCR?", "Rogers was involved in supporting the manufacturers of VCRs in court.", "Why did he go to court?", "who objected to home recordings or believed that devices to facilitate it should be taxed or regulated.", "Did he win in court?", "I don't know.", "Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?", "The Court stated that his views were a notable piece of evidence" ]	C_633c016260e9440c9c51f1d94034cc41_0	When was the court case?	5	When was the Fred Rogers v. VCR court case?	Fred Rogers	During the controversy surrounding the introduction of the household VCR, Rogers was involved in supporting the manufacturers of VCRs in court. His 1979 testimony, in the case Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., noted that he did not object to home recordings of his television programs, for instance, by families in order to watch them together at a later time. This testimony contrasted with the views of others in the television industry who objected to home recordings or believed that devices to facilitate it should be taxed or regulated. When the case reached the Supreme Court in 1983, the majority decision considered the testimony of Rogers when it held that the Betamax video recorder did not infringe copyright. The Court stated that his views were a notable piece of evidence "that many [television] producers are willing to allow private time-shifting to continue" and even quoted his testimony in a footnote: Some public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the Neighborhood at hours when some children cannot use it ... I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the Neighborhood off-the-air, and I'm speaking for the Neighborhood because that's what I produce, that they then become much more active in the programming of their family's television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been "You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions." Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important. CANNOTANSWER	When the case reached the Supreme Court in 1983,	Fred McFeely Rogers (March 20, 1928 – February 27, 2003), also known as Mister Rogers, was an American television host, author, producer, and Presbyterian minister. He was the creator, showrunner, and host of the preschool television series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which ran from 1968 to 2001. Born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, Rogers earned a bachelor's degree in music from Rollins College in 1951. He began his television career at NBC in New York, returning to Pittsburgh in 1953 to work for children's programming at NET (later PBS) television station WQED. He graduated from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary with a bachelor's degree in divinity in 1962 and became a Presbyterian minister in 1963. He attended the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Child Development, where he began his 30-year collaboration with child psychologist Margaret McFarland. He also helped develop the children's shows The Children's Corner (1955) for WQED in Pittsburgh and Misterogers (1963) in Canada for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1968, he returned to Pittsburgh and adapted the format of his Canadian series to create Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which ran for 33 years. The program was critically acclaimed for focusing on children's emotional and physical concerns, such as death, sibling rivalry, school enrollment, and divorce. Rogers died of stomach cancer on February 27, 2003, at age 74. His work in children's television has been widely lauded, and he received more than 40 honorary degrees and several awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002 and a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1997. He was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999. Rogers influenced many writers and producers of children's television shows, and his broadcasts have served as a source of comfort during tragic events, even after his death. Early life Rogers was born on March 20, 1928, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, about outside of Pittsburgh, at 705 Main Street to James and Nancy Rogers. James was "a very successful businessman" who was president of the McFeely Brick Company, one of Latrobe's largest businesses. Nancy's father, Fred Brooks McFeely, after whom Rogers was named, was an entrepreneur. Nancy knitted sweaters for American soldiers from western Pennsylvania who were fighting in Europe and regularly volunteered at the Latrobe Hospital. Initially, dreaming of becoming a doctor, she settled for a life of hospital volunteer work. Rogers grew up in a three-story brick mansion at 737 Weldon Street in Latrobe. He had a sister, Elaine, whom the Rogerses adopted when he was 11 years old. Rogers spent much of his childhood alone, playing with puppets, and also spent time with his grandfather. He began to play the piano when he was five years old. Through an ancestor who immigrated from Germany to the U.S., Johannes Meffert (born 1732), Rogers is the sixth cousin of American actor Tom Hanks, who portrays him in the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019). Rogers had a difficult childhood. He was shy, introverted, and overweight, and was frequently homebound after suffering bouts of asthma. He was bullied and taunted as a child for his weight, and called "Fat Freddy". According to Morgan Neville, director of the 2018 documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor?, Rogers had a "lonely childhood... I think he made friends with himself as much as he could. He had a ventriloquist dummy, he had [stuffed] animals, and he would create his own worlds in his childhood bedroom". Rogers attended Latrobe High School, where he overcame his shyness. "It was tough for me at the beginning," Rogers told NPR's Terry Gross in 1984. "And then I made a couple friends who found out that the core of me was okay. And one of them was... the head of the football team". Rogers served as president of the student council, was a member of the National Honor Society, and was editor-in-chief of the school yearbook. He registered for the draft in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1948 at age 20, where he was classified as “1-A”, available for military service. However, his status was changed to “4-F”, unfit for military service, following an Armed Forces physical on October 12, 1950. Rogers attended Dartmouth College for one year before transferring to Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida; he graduated magna cum laude in 1951 with a Bachelor of Music. Rogers graduated magna cum laude from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1962 with a Bachelor of Divinity. He was ordained a minister by the Pittsburgh Presbytery of the United Presbyterian Church in 1963. His mission as an ordained minister, instead of being a pastor of a church, was to minister to children and their families through television. He regularly appeared before church officials to keep up his ordination. Career Early work Rogers wanted to enter seminary after college, but instead chose to go into the nascent medium of television after encountering a TV at his parents' home in 1951 during his senior year at Rollins College. In a CNN interview, he said, "I went into television because I hated it so, and I thought there's some way of using this fabulous instrument to nurture those who would watch and listen". After graduating in 1951, he worked at NBC in New York City as floor director of Your Hit Parade, The Kate Smith Hour, and Gabby Hayes's children's show, and as an assistant producer of The Voice of Firestone. In 1953, Rogers returned to Pittsburgh to work as a program developer at public television station WQED. Josie Carey worked with him to develop the children's show The Children's Corner, which Carey hosted. Rogers worked off-camera to develop puppets, characters, and music for the show. He used many of the puppet characters developed during this time, such as Daniel the Striped Tiger (named after WQED's station manager, Dorothy Daniel, who gave Rogers a tiger puppet before the show's premiere), King Friday XIII, Queen Sara Saturday (named after Rogers's wife), X the Owl, Henrietta, and Lady Elaine, in his later work. Children's television entertainer Ernie Coombs was an assistant puppeteer. The Children's Corner won a Sylvania Award for best locally produced children's programming in 1955 and was broadcast nationally on NBC. While working on The Children's Corner, Rogers attended Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1963. He also attended the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Child Development, where he began working with child psychologist Margaret McFarland, who according to Rogers's biographer Maxwell King became his "key advisor and collaborator" and "child-education guru". Much of Rogers's "thinking about and appreciation for children was shaped and informed" by McFarland. She was his consultant for most of Mister Rogers' Neighborhoods scripts and songs for 30 years. In 1963, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Toronto contracted Rogers to develop and host the 15-minute black-and-white children's program Misterogers; it lasted from 1963 to 1967. It was the first time Rogers appeared on camera. CBC's children's programming head Fred Rainsberry insisted on it, telling Rogers, "Fred, I've seen you talk with kids. Let's put you yourself on the air". Coombs joined Rogers in Toronto as an assistant puppeteer. Rogers also worked with Coombs on the children's show Butternut Square from 1964 to 1967. He acquired the rights to Misterogers in 1967 and returned to Pittsburgh with his wife, two young sons, and the sets he developed, despite a potentially promising career with CBC and no job prospects in Pittsburgh. On Rogers' recommendation, Coombs remained in Toronto and became Rogers' Canadian equivalent of an iconic television personality, creating the long-running children's program, Mr. Dressup, which ran from 1967 to 1996. Rogers's work for CBC "helped shape and develop the concept and style of his later program for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the U.S." Mister Rogers' Neighborhood Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (also called the Neighborhood), a half-hour educational children's program starring Rogers, began airing nationally in 1968 and ran for 895 episodes. The program was videotaped at WQED in Pittsburgh and was broadcast by National Educational Television (NET), which later became the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Its first season had 180 black-and-white episodes. Each subsequent season, filmed in color and funded by PBS, the Sears-Roebuck Foundation, and other charities, consisted of 65 episodes. By the time the program ended production in December 2000, its average rating was about 0.7 percent of television households, or 680,000 homes, and it aired on 384 PBS stations. At its peak in 1985–1986, its ratings were at 2.1 percent, or 1.8 million homes. Production of the Neighborhood ended in December 2000, and the last original episode aired in 2001, but PBS continued to air reruns; by 2016 it was the third-longest running program in PBS history. Many of the sets and props in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, like the trolley, the sneakers, and the castle, were created for Rogers's show in Toronto by CBC designers and producers. The program also "incorporated most of the highly imaginative elements that later became famous", such as its slow pace and its host's quiet manner. The format of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood "remained virtually unchanged" for the entire run of the program. Every episode begins with a camera's-eye view of a model of a neighborhood, then panning in closer to a representation of a house while a piano instrumental of the theme song, "Won't You be My Neighbor?", performed by music director Johnny Costa and inspired by a Beethoven sonata, is played. The camera zooms in to a model representing Mr. Rogers's house, then cuts to the house's interior and pans across the room to the front door, which Rogers opens as he sings the theme song to greet his visitors while changing his suit jacket to a cardigan (knitted by his mother) and his dress shoes to sneakers, "complete with a shoe tossed from one hand to another". The episode's theme is introduced, and Mr. Rogers leaves his home to visit another location, the camera panning back to the neighborhood model and zooming in to the new location as he enters it. Once this segment ends, Mr. Rogers leaves and returns to his home, indicating that it is time to visit the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Mr. Rogers proceeds to the window seat by the trolley track and sets up the action there as the Trolley comes out. The camera follows it down a tunnel in the back wall of the house as it enters the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. The stories and lessons told take place over a series of a week's worth of episodes and involve puppet and human characters. The end of the visit occurs when the Trolley returns to the same tunnel from which it emerged, reappearing in Mr. Rogers's home. He then talks to the viewers before concluding the episode. He often feeds his fish, cleans up any props he has used, and returns to the front room, where he sings the closing song while changing back into his dress shoes and jacket. He exits the front door as he ends the song, and the camera zooms out of his home and pans across the neighborhood model as the episode ends. Mister Rogers' Neighborhood emphasized young children's social and emotional needs, and unlike another PBS show, Sesame Street, which premiered in 1969, did not focus on cognitive learning. Writer Kathy Merlock Jackson said, "While both shows target the same preschool audience and prepare children for kindergarten, Sesame Street concentrates on school-readiness skills while Mister Rogers Neighborhood focuses on the child's developing psyche and feelings and sense of moral and ethical reasoning". The Neighborhood also spent fewer resources on research than Sesame Street, but Rogers used early childhood education concepts taught by his mentor Margaret McFarland, Benjamin Spock, Erik Erikson, and T. Berry Brazelton in his lessons. As the Washington Post noted, Rogers taught young children about civility, tolerance, sharing, and self-worth "in a reassuring tone and leisurely cadence". He tackled difficult topics such as the death of a family pet, sibling rivalry, the addition of a newborn into a family, moving and enrolling in a new school, and divorce. For example, he wrote a special segment that dealt with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy that aired on June 7, 1968, days after the assassination occurred. According to King, the process of putting each episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood together was "painstaking" and Rogers's contribution to the program was "astounding". Rogers wrote and edited all the episodes, played the piano and sang for most of the songs, wrote 200 songs and 13 operas, created all the characters (both puppet and human), played most of the major puppet roles, hosted every episode, and produced and approved every detail of the program. The puppets created for the Neighborhood of Make-Believe "included an extraordinary variety of personalities". They were simple puppets but "complex, complicated, and utterly honest beings". In 1971, Rogers formed Family Communications, Inc. (FCI, now The Fred Rogers Company), to produce the Neighborhood, other programs, and non-broadcast materials. In 1975, Rogers stopped producing Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood to focus on adult programming. Reruns of the Neighborhood continued to air on PBS. King reports that the decision caught many of his coworkers and supporters "off guard". Rogers continued to confer with McFarland about child development and early childhood education, however. In 1979, after an almost five-year hiatus, Rogers returned to producing the Neighborhood; King calls the new version "stronger and more sophisticated than ever". King writes that by the program's second run in the 1980s, it was "such a cultural touchstone that it had inspired numerous parodies", most notably Eddie Murphy's parody on Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s. Rogers retired from producing the Neighborhood in 2001 at age 73, although reruns continued to air. He and FCI had been making about two or three weeks of new programs per year for many years, "filling the rest of his time slots from a library of about 300 shows made since 1979". The final original episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood aired on August 31, 2001. Other work and appearances In 1969, Rogers testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications, which was chaired by Democratic Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island. U.S. President Lyndon Johnson had proposed a $20 million bill for the creation of PBS before he left office, but his successor, Richard Nixon, wanted to cut the funding to $10 million. Even though Rogers was not yet nationally known, he was chosen to testify because of his ability to make persuasive arguments and to connect emotionally with his audience. The clip of Rogers's testimony, which was televised and has since been viewed by millions of people on the internet, helped to secure funding for PBS for many years afterwards. According to King, Rogers's testimony was "considered one of the most powerful pieces of testimony ever offered before Congress, and one of the most powerful pieces of video presentation ever filmed". It brought Pastore to tears and also, according to King, has been studied by public relations experts and academics. Congressional funding for PBS increased from $9 million to $22 million. In 1970, Nixon appointed Rogers as chair of the White House Conference on Children and Youth. In 1978, while on hiatus from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Rogers wrote, produced, and hosted a 30-minute interview program for adults on PBS called Old Friends... New Friends. It lasted 20 episodes. Rogers's guests included Hoagy Carmichael, Helen Hayes, Milton Berle, Lorin Hollander, poet Robert Frost's daughter Lesley, and Willie Stargell. In September 1987, Rogers visited Moscow to appear as the first guest on the long-running Soviet children's TV show Good Night, Little Ones! with host Tatiana Vedeneyeva. The appearance was broadcast in the Soviet Union on December 7, coinciding with the Washington Summit meeting between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan in Washington D.C. Vedeneyeva visited the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in November. Her visit was taped and later aired in March 1988 as part of Rogers's program. In 1994, Rogers wrote, produced, and hosted a special for PBS called Fred Rogers' Heroes, which featured interviews and portraits of four people from across the country who were having a positive impact on children and education. The first time Rogers appeared on television as an actor, and not himself, was in a 1996 episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, playing a preacher. Rogers gave "scores of interviews". Though reluctant to appear on television talk shows, he would usually "charm the host with his quick wit and ability to ad-lib on a moment's notice". Rogers was "one of the country's most sought-after commencement speakers", making over 150 speeches. His friend and colleague David Newell reported that Rogers would "agonize over a speech", and King reported that Rogers was at his least guarded during his speeches, which were about children, television, education, his view of the world, how to make the world a better place, and his quest for self-knowledge. His tone was quiet and informal but "commanded attention". In many speeches, including the ones he made accepting a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1997, for his induction into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999, and his final commencement speech at Dartmouth College in 2002, he instructed his audiences to remain silent and think for a moment about someone who had a good influence on them. Personal life Rogers met Sara Joanne Byrd (called "Joanne") from Jacksonville, Florida, while attending Rollins College. They were married from 1952 until his death in 2003. They had two sons, James and John. Joanne was "an accomplished pianist", who like Fred earned a Bachelor of Music from Rollins, and went on to earn a Master of Music from Florida State University. She performed publicly with her college classmate, Jeannine Morrison, from 1976 to 2008. According to biographer Maxwell King, Rogers's close associates said he was "absolutely faithful to his marriage vows". Rogers was red-green color-blind. He became a pescatarian in 1970, after the death of his father, and a vegetarian in the early 1980s, saying he "couldn't eat anything that had a mother". He became a co-owner of Vegetarian Times in the mid-1980s and said in one issue, "I love tofu burgers and beets". He told Vegetarian Times that he became a vegetarian for both ethical and health reasons. According to his biographer Maxwell King, Rogers also signed his name to a statement protesting wearing animal furs. Rogers was a registered Republican, but according to Joanne Rogers, he was "very independent in the way he voted", choosing not to talk about politics because he wanted to be impartial. Rogers was a Presbyterian, and many of the messages he expressed in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood were inspired by the core tenets of Christianity. Rogers rarely spoke about his faith on air; he believed that teaching through example was as powerful as preaching. He said, "You don't need to speak overtly about religion in order to get a message across". According to writer Shea Tuttle, Rogers considered his faith a fundamental part of his personality and "called the space between the viewer and the television set 'holy ground'". But despite his strong faith, Rogers struggled with anger, conflict, and self-doubt, especially at the end of his life. He also studied Catholic mysticism, Judaism, Buddhism, and other faiths and cultures. King called him "that unique television star with a real spiritual life", emphasizing the values of patience, reflection, and "silence in a noisy world". King reported that despite Rogers's family's wealth, he cared little about making money, and lived frugally, especially as he and his wife grew older. King reported that Rogers's relationship with his young audience was important to him. For example, since hosting Misterogers in Canada, he answered every letter sent to him by hand. After Mister Rogers' Neighborhood began airing in the U.S., the letters increased in volume and he hired staff member and producer Hedda Sharapan to answer them, but he read, edited, and signed each one. King wrote that Rogers saw responding to his viewers' letters as "a pastoral duty of sorts". The New York Times called Rogers "a dedicated lap-swimmer", and Tom Junod, author of "Can You Say... Hero?", the 1998 Esquire profile of Rogers, said, "Nearly every morning of his life, Mister Rogers has gone swimming". Rogers began swimming when he was a child at his family's vacation home outside Latrobe, where they owned a pool, and during their winter trips to Florida. King wrote that swimming and playing the piano were "lifelong passions" and that "both gave him a chance to feel capable and in charge of his destiny", and that swimming became "an important part of the strong sense of self-discipline he cultivated". Rogers swam daily at the Pittsburgh Athletic Association, after waking every morning between 4:30 and 5:30 A.M. to pray and to "read the Bible and prepare himself for the day". He did not smoke or drink. According to Junod, he did nothing to change his weight from the he weighed for most of his adult life; by 1998, this also included napping daily, going to bed at 9:30 P.M., and sleeping eight hours per night without interruption. Junod said Rogers saw his weight "as a destiny fulfilled", telling Junod, "the number 143 means 'I love you.' It takes one letter to say 'I' and four letters to say 'love' and three letters to say 'you'". Death and memorials After Rogers's retirement in 2001, he remained busy working with FCI, studying religion and spirituality, making public appearances, traveling, and working on a children's media center named after him at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe with Archabbot Douglas Nowicki, chancellor of the college. By the summer of 2002, his chronic stomach pain became severe enough for him to see a doctor about it, and in October 2002, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He delayed treatment until after he served as Grand Marshal of the 2003 Rose Parade, with Art Linkletter and Bill Cosby in January. On January 6, Rogers underwent stomach surgery. He died less than two months later, on February 27, 2003, one month before his 75th birthday, at his home in Pittsburgh, with his wife of 50 years, Joanne, at his side. While comatose shortly before his death, he received the last rites of the Catholic Church from Archabbot Nowicki. The following day, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covered Rogers's death on the front page and dedicated an entire section to his death and impact. The newspaper also reported that by noon, the internet "was already full of appreciative pieces" by parents, viewers, producers, and writers. Rogers's death was widely lamented. Most U.S. metropolitan newspapers ran his obituary on their front page, and some dedicated entire sections to coverage of his death. WQED aired programs about Rogers the evening he died; the Post-Gazette reported that the ratings for their coverage were three times higher than their normal ratings. That same evening, Nightline on ABC broadcast a rerun of a recent interview with Rogers; the program got the highest ratings of the day, beating the February average ratings of Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. On March 4, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution honoring Rogers sponsored by Representative Mike Doyle from Pennsylvania. On March 1, 2003, a private funeral was held for Rogers in Unity Chapel, which was restored by Rogers's father, at Unity Cemetery in Latrobe. About 80 relatives, co-workers, and close friends attended the service, which "was planned in great secrecy so that those closest to him could grieve in private". Reverend John McCall, pastor of the Rogers family's church, Sixth Presbyterian Church in Squirrel Hill, gave the homily, and Reverend William Barker, a retired Presbyterian minister who was a "close friend of Mr. Rogers and the voice of Mr. Platypus on his show", read Rogers's favorite Bible passages. Rogers was interred at Unity Cemetery in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in a mausoleum owned by his mother's family. On May 3, 2003, a public memorial was held at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh. According to the Post-Gazette, 2,700 people attended. Violinist Itzhak Perlman, cellist Yo-Yo Ma (via video), and organist Alan Morrison performed in honor of Rogers. Barker officiated the service; also in attendance were Pittsburgh philanthropist Elsie Hillman, former Good Morning America host David Hartman, The Very Hungry Caterpillar author Eric Carle, and Arthur creator Marc Brown. Businesswoman and philanthropist Teresa Heinz, PBS President Pat Mitchell, and executive director of The Pittsburgh Project Saleem Ghubril gave remarks. Jeff Erlanger, who at age 10 appeared on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 1981 to explain his electric wheelchair, also spoke. The memorial was broadcast several times on Pittsburgh television stations and websites throughout the day. Legacy Marc Brown, creator of another PBS children's show, Arthur, considered Rogers both a friend and "a terrific role model for how to use television and the media to be helpful to kids and families". Josh Selig, creator of Wonder Pets, credits Rogers with influencing his use of structure and predictability, and his use of music, opera, and originality. Rogers inspired Angela Santomero, co-creator of the children's television show Blue's Clues, to earn a degree in developmental psychology and go into educational television. She and the other producers of Blue's Clues used many of Rogers's techniques, such as using child developmental and educational research, and having the host speak directly to the camera and transition to a make-believe world. In 2006, three years after Rogers's death and the end of production of Blue's Clues, the Fred Rogers Company contacted Santomero to create a show that would promote Rogers's legacy. In 2012, Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, with characters from and based upon Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, premiered on PBS. Rogers's style and approach to children's television and early childhood education also "begged to be parodied". Comedian Eddie Murphy parodied Mister Rogers' Neighborhood on Saturday Night Live during the 1980s. Rogers told interviewer David Letterman in 1982 that he believed parodies like Murphy's were done "with kindness in their hearts". Video of Rogers's 1969 testimony in defense of public programming has experienced a resurgence since 2012, going viral at least twice. It first resurfaced after then presidential candidate Mitt Romney suggested cutting funding for PBS. In 2017, video of the testimony again went viral after President Donald Trump proposed defunding several arts-related government programs including PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts. A roadside Pennsylvania Historical Marker dedicated to Rogers to be installed in Latrobe was approved by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission on March 4, 2014. It was installed on June 11, 2016, with the title "Fred McFeely Rogers (1928–2003)". In 2018, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, director Morgan Neville's documentary about Rogers's life, grossed over $22 million and became the top-grossing biographical documentary ever produced, the highest-grossing documentary in five years, and the 12th largest-grossing documentary ever produced. The 2019 drama film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood tells the story of Rogers and his television series, with Tom Hanks portraying Rogers. According to Caitlin Gibson of The Washington Post, Rogers became a source for parenting advice; she called him "a timeless oracle against a backdrop of ever-shifting parenting philosophies and cultural trends". Robert Thompson of Syracuse University noted that Rogers "took American childhood—and I think Americans in general—through some very turbulent and trying times", from the Vietnam War and the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. According to Asia Simone Burns of National Public Radio, in the years following the end of production on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 2001, and his death in 2003, Rogers became "a source of comfort, sometimes in the wake of tragedy". Burns has said Rogers's words of comfort "began circulating on social media" following tragedies such as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, the Manchester Arena bombing in Manchester, England, in 2017, and the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. Awards and honors Museum exhibits Smithsonian Institution permanent collection. In 1984, Rogers donated one of his sweaters to the Smithsonian. Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. Exhibit created by Rogers and FCI in 1998. It attracted hundreds of thousand of visitors over 10 years, and included, from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, one of his sweaters, a pair of his sneakers, original puppets from the program, and photographs of Rogers. The exhibit traveled to children's museums throughout the country for eight years until it was given to the Louisiana Children's Museum in New Orleans as a permanent exhibit, to help them recover from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In 2007, the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh created a traveling exhibit based on the factory tours featured in episodes of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Heinz History Center permanent collection (2018). In honor of the 50th anniversary of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and what would have been Rogers's 90th birthday. Louisiana Children's Museum. The museum contains an exhibit of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which debuted in 2007. The exhibit was donated by the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. Fred Rogers Exhibit. The Exhibit displays the life, career and legacy of Rogers and includes photos, artifacts from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and clips of the program and interviews featuring Rogers. It is located at the Fred Rogers Center. Art pieces There are several pieces of art dedicated to Rogers throughout Pittsburgh, including a 7,000-pound, 11-foot high bronze statue of him in the North Shore neighborhood. In the Oakland neighborhood, his portrait is included in the Martin Luther King Jr. and "Interpretations of Oakland" murals. A statue of a dinosaur titled "Fredasaurus Rex Friday XIII" originally stood in front of the WQED building and as of 2014 stands in front of the building that contains the Fred Rogers Company offices. There is a "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood of Make-Believe" in Idlewild Park and a kiosk of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood artifacts at Pittsburgh International Airport. The Carnegie Science Center's Miniature Railroad and Village debuted a miniature recreation of Rogers's house from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 2005. Honorary degrees Rogers has received honorary degrees from over 43 colleges and universities. After 1973, two commemorative quilts, created by two of Rogers's friends and archived at the Fred Rogers Center at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, were made out of the academic hoods he received during the graduation ceremonies. Note: Much of the below list is taken from "Honorary Degrees Awarded to Fred Rogers", unless otherwise stated. Thiel College, 1969. Thiel also awards a yearly scholarship named for Rogers. Eastern Michigan University, 1973 Saint Vincent College, 1973 Christian Theological Seminary, 1973 Rollins College, 1974 Yale University, 1974 Chatham College, 1975 Carnegie Mellon University, 1976 Lafayette College, 1977 Waynesburg College, 1978 Linfield College, 1982 Slippery Rock State College, 1982 Duquesne University, 1982 Washington & Jefferson College, 1984 University of South Carolina, 1985 Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 1985 Drury College, 1986 MacMurray College, 1986 Bowling Green State University, 1987 Westminster College (Pennsylvania), 1987 University of Indianapolis, 1988 University of Connecticut, 1991 Boston University, 1992 Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1992 Moravian College, 1992 Goucher College, 1993 University of Pittsburgh, 1993 West Virginia University, 1995 North Carolina State University, 1996 Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, 1998 Marist College, 1999 Westminster Choir College, 1999 Old Dominion University, 2000 Marquette University, 2001 Middlebury College, 2001 Dartmouth College, 2002 Seton Hill University, 2003 (posthumous) Union College, 2003 (posthumous) Roanoke College, 2003 (posthumous) Filmography Television {\|class="wikitable sortable" \|- ! Year ! Title \|- \| 1954–1961 \| The Children's Corner \|- \| 1963–1966 \| Misterogers \|- \| 1964–1967 \| Butternut Square \|- \| 1968–2001 \| Mister Rogers' Neighborhood \|- \| 1977–1982 \| Christmastime with Mister Rogers \|- \| 1978–1981 \| Old Friends... New Friends \|- \| 1981 \| Sesame Street \|- \| 1988 \| Good Night, Little Ones! \|- \| 1991 \| Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? \|- \| 1994 \|Mr. Dressup's 25th Anniversary\|- \| 1994 \| Fred Rogers' Heroes\|- \| 1996 \| Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman\|- \| 1997 \| Arthur\|- \| 1998 \| Wheel of Fortune\|- \| 2003 \| 114th Annual Tournament of Roses Parade\|} Published works Children's books Our Small World (with Josie Carey, illustrated by Norb Nathanson), 1954, Reed and Witting, The Elves, the Shoemaker, & the Shoemaker's Wife (illustrated by Richard Hefter), 1973, Small World Enterprises, The Matter of the Mittens, 1973, Small World Enterprises, Speedy Delivery (illustrated by Richard Hefter), 1973, Hubbard, Henrietta Meets Someone New (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1974, Golden Press, Mister Rogers Talks About, 1974, Platt & Munk, Time to Be Friends, 1974, Hallmark Cards, Everyone is Special (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1975, Western Publishing, Tell Me, Mister Rogers, 1975, Platt & Munk, The Costume Party (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1976, Golden Press, Planet Purple (illustrated by Dennis Hockerman), 1986, Texas Instruments, If We Were All the Same (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, A Trolley Visit to Make-Believe (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, Wishes Don't Make Things Come True (illustrated Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, No One Can Ever Take Your Place (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, When Monsters Seem Real (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, You Can Never Go Down the Drain (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, The Giving Box (illustrated by Jennifer Herbert), 2000, Running Press, Good Weather or Not (with Hedda Bluestone Sharapan, illustrated by James Mellet), 2005, Family Communications, Josephine the Short Neck-Giraffe, 2006, Family Communications, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: The Poetry of Mister Rogers Neighborhood (illustrated by Luke Flowers), 2009, Quirk Books, First Experiences series illustrated by Jim Judkis Going to Day Care, 1985, Putnam, The New Baby, 1985, Putnam, Going to the Potty, 1986, Putnam, Going to the Doctor, 1986, Putnam, Making Friends, 1987, Putnam, Moving, 1987, Putnam, Going to the Hospital, 1988, Putnam, When a Pet Dies, 1988, Putnam, Going on an Airplane, 1989, Putnam, Going to the Dentist, 1989, Putnam, Let's Talk About It series Going to the Hospital, 1977, Family Communications, Having an Operation, 1977, Family Communications, So Many Things To See!, 1977, Family Communications, Wearing a Cast, 1977, Family Communications, Adoption, 1993, Putnam, Divorce, 1994, Putnam, Extraordinary Friends, 2000, Putnam, Stepfamilies, 2001, Putnam, Songbooks Tomorrow on the Children's Corner (with Josie Carey, illustrated by Mal Wittman), 1960, Vernon Music Corporation, Mister Rogers' Songbook (with Johnny Costa, illustrated by Steven Kellogg), 1970, Random House, Books for adults Mister Rogers Talks to Parents, 1983, Family Communications, Mister Rogers' Playbook (with Barry Head, illustrated by Jamie Adams), 1986, Berkley Books, Mister Rogers Talks with Families About Divorce (with Clare O'Brien), 1987, Berkley Books, Mister Rogers' How Families Grow (with Barry Head and Jim Prokell), 1988, Berkley Books, You Are Special: Words of Wisdom from America's Most Beloved Neighbor, 1994, Penguin Books, Dear Mister Rogers, 1996, Penguin Books, Mister Rogers' Playtime, 2001, Running Press, The Mister Rogers Parenting Book, 2002, Running Press, You are special: Neighborly Wisdom from Mister Rogers, 2002, Running Press, The World According to Mister Rogers, 2003, Hyperion Books, Life's Journeys According to Mister Rogers, 2005, Hyperion Books, The Mister Rogers Parenting Resource Book, 2005, Courage Books, Many Ways to Say I Love You: Wisdom For Parents And Children, 2019, Hachette Books, Discography Around the Children's Corner (with Josey Carey), 1958, Vernon Music Corporation, Tomorrow on the Children's Corner (with Josie Carey), 1959 King Friday XIII Celebrates, 1964 Won't You Be My Neighbor?, 1967 Let's Be Together Today, 1968 Josephine the Short-Neck Giraffe, 1969 You Are Special, 1969 A Place of Our Own, 1970 Come On and Wake Up, 1972 Growing, 1992 Bedtime, 1992 Won't You Be My Neighbor? (cassette and book), 1994, Hal Leonard, Coming and Going, 1997 It's Such A Good Feeling: The Best Of Mister Rogers, 2019, Omnivore Recordings, posthumous release See also Won't You Be My Neighbor?, 2018 documentary Mister Rogers: It's You I Like, 2018 documentary A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, 2019 biographical drama film List of vegetarians Notes References Works cited Gross, Terry (1984). "Terry Gross and Fred Rogers". Fresh Air. NPR. King, Maxwell (2018). The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers. Abrams Press. . Tiech, John (2012). Pittsburgh Film History: On Set in the Steel City''. Charleston, North Carolina: The History Press. . External links PBS Kids: Official Site The Fred M. Rogers Center The Fred Rogers Company (formerly known as Family Communications) 1984 interview with Fred Rogers. The Music of Mister Rogers—Pittsburgh Music History Fred Rogers at Voice Chasers 1928 births 2003 deaths 20th-century American composers 20th-century American male actors 20th-century American male writers 20th-century American singers 20th-century Presbyterians 21st-century Presbyterians American children's television presenters American male composers American male singers American male songwriters American male television actors American male voice actors American philanthropists American Presbyterian ministers American Presbyterians American puppeteers American television hosts Burials in Pennsylvania Christianity in Pittsburgh Columbia Records artists Dartmouth College alumni Daytime Emmy Award winners Deaths from cancer in Pennsylvania Deaths from stomach cancer Male actors from Pittsburgh Omnivore Recordings artists PBS people Peabody Award winners Pennsylvania Republicans People from Latrobe, Pennsylvania Pittsburgh Theological Seminary alumni Presbyterians from Pennsylvania Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Rollins College alumni Singers from Pennsylvania Songwriters from Pennsylvania Television personalities from Pittsburgh Television producers from Pennsylvania United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America ministers Vegetarianism activists Writers from Pittsburgh Articles containing video clips	false	[ "Fox Film Corp. v. Muller, 296 U.S. 207 (1935), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that it cannot exert certiorari jurisdiction over a case in which there is an adequate and independent state law ground for the state court's final judgment.\n\nFacts\nPlaintiff Fox Film Corporation sued defendant Muller in the state trial court of Minnesota, alleging that Muller had breached two contracts to exhibit the company's motion pictures. Muller's defense was that the contract was invalid under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The trial court found for Muller, first determining that the contract was invalid under the Sherman Act. The Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed, and the plaintiffs petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for certiorari. When it was discovered that the judgment was not final, the writ of certiorari was dismissed as improvidently granted. The case was then remanded back to the state supreme court, which framed the question on appeal as whether the arbitration clause was severable from the rest of the contract.\n\nThe state supreme court followed the judgment of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of United States v. Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation, , which held that a similar contract was illegal in its entirety. The court then determined that the arbitration clause was not severable from the rest of the contract, rendering the entire agreement void.\n\nDecision\nThe issue on appeal was whether a question of federal law was involved in the Minnesota Supreme Court's decision. Justice Sutherland, writing for a unanimous court, held that whether a federal question existed was irrelevant, because where there is an independent question of state law which is adequate to support the state court's judgment, the U.S. Supreme Court has no jurisdiction. The severability of a contractual clause was an issue of state law, and the invalidity of the arbitration clause had already been determined by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Paramount case. The state court's determination of the non-severability of the unlawful clause was thus adequate to render the contract invalid, and was independent of any question of federal law.\n\nSee also\nList of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 296\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1935 in United States case law\nUnited States Constitution Article Three case law\nUnited States Supreme Court cases\nUnited States Supreme Court cases of the Hughes Court\nAdequate and independent state ground\n20th Century Fox litigation", "Courvoisier v. Raymond, 23 Colo. 113 (1896), was a case decided by the Colorado Supreme Court that affirmed the use of a reasonableness standard when determining the validity of a mistaken self-defense.\n\nFactual background\nCourvoisier was a jewelry store owner, and he was awoken in the middle of the night when robbers tried to break into his store. He retrieved his revolver and chased them outside. Raymond was a Denver police officer who began to approach Courvoisier, and Courvoisier shot him. Courvoisier said that he mistook Raymond for a robber, but the trial court found for Raymond.\n\nDecision\nThe Colorado Supreme Court reversed the decision for Raymond because of faulty jury instructions in the trial court. The trial court failed to give the instruction that Courvoisier should not be held liable if his mistake that Raymond was a robber was reasonable given the circumstances.\n\nReferences\n\n1896 in United States case law\nUnited States tort case law\nColorado state case law\n1896 in Colorado\nSelf-defense" ]
[ "Fred Rogers", "VCR", "What did Rogers have to do with the VCR?", "Rogers was involved in supporting the manufacturers of VCRs in court.", "Why did he go to court?", "who objected to home recordings or believed that devices to facilitate it should be taxed or regulated.", "Did he win in court?", "I don't know.", "Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?", "The Court stated that his views were a notable piece of evidence", "When was the court case?", "When the case reached the Supreme Court in 1983," ]	C_633c016260e9440c9c51f1d94034cc41_0	What was the result of the Supreme Court case?	6	What was the result of the Supreme Court case?	Fred Rogers	During the controversy surrounding the introduction of the household VCR, Rogers was involved in supporting the manufacturers of VCRs in court. His 1979 testimony, in the case Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., noted that he did not object to home recordings of his television programs, for instance, by families in order to watch them together at a later time. This testimony contrasted with the views of others in the television industry who objected to home recordings or believed that devices to facilitate it should be taxed or regulated. When the case reached the Supreme Court in 1983, the majority decision considered the testimony of Rogers when it held that the Betamax video recorder did not infringe copyright. The Court stated that his views were a notable piece of evidence "that many [television] producers are willing to allow private time-shifting to continue" and even quoted his testimony in a footnote: Some public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the Neighborhood at hours when some children cannot use it ... I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the Neighborhood off-the-air, and I'm speaking for the Neighborhood because that's what I produce, that they then become much more active in the programming of their family's television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been "You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions." Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important. CANNOTANSWER	the majority decision considered the testimony of Rogers when it held that the Betamax video recorder did not infringe copyright.	Fred McFeely Rogers (March 20, 1928 – February 27, 2003), also known as Mister Rogers, was an American television host, author, producer, and Presbyterian minister. He was the creator, showrunner, and host of the preschool television series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which ran from 1968 to 2001. Born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, Rogers earned a bachelor's degree in music from Rollins College in 1951. He began his television career at NBC in New York, returning to Pittsburgh in 1953 to work for children's programming at NET (later PBS) television station WQED. He graduated from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary with a bachelor's degree in divinity in 1962 and became a Presbyterian minister in 1963. He attended the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Child Development, where he began his 30-year collaboration with child psychologist Margaret McFarland. He also helped develop the children's shows The Children's Corner (1955) for WQED in Pittsburgh and Misterogers (1963) in Canada for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1968, he returned to Pittsburgh and adapted the format of his Canadian series to create Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which ran for 33 years. The program was critically acclaimed for focusing on children's emotional and physical concerns, such as death, sibling rivalry, school enrollment, and divorce. Rogers died of stomach cancer on February 27, 2003, at age 74. His work in children's television has been widely lauded, and he received more than 40 honorary degrees and several awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002 and a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1997. He was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999. Rogers influenced many writers and producers of children's television shows, and his broadcasts have served as a source of comfort during tragic events, even after his death. Early life Rogers was born on March 20, 1928, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, about outside of Pittsburgh, at 705 Main Street to James and Nancy Rogers. James was "a very successful businessman" who was president of the McFeely Brick Company, one of Latrobe's largest businesses. Nancy's father, Fred Brooks McFeely, after whom Rogers was named, was an entrepreneur. Nancy knitted sweaters for American soldiers from western Pennsylvania who were fighting in Europe and regularly volunteered at the Latrobe Hospital. Initially, dreaming of becoming a doctor, she settled for a life of hospital volunteer work. Rogers grew up in a three-story brick mansion at 737 Weldon Street in Latrobe. He had a sister, Elaine, whom the Rogerses adopted when he was 11 years old. Rogers spent much of his childhood alone, playing with puppets, and also spent time with his grandfather. He began to play the piano when he was five years old. Through an ancestor who immigrated from Germany to the U.S., Johannes Meffert (born 1732), Rogers is the sixth cousin of American actor Tom Hanks, who portrays him in the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019). Rogers had a difficult childhood. He was shy, introverted, and overweight, and was frequently homebound after suffering bouts of asthma. He was bullied and taunted as a child for his weight, and called "Fat Freddy". According to Morgan Neville, director of the 2018 documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor?, Rogers had a "lonely childhood... I think he made friends with himself as much as he could. He had a ventriloquist dummy, he had [stuffed] animals, and he would create his own worlds in his childhood bedroom". Rogers attended Latrobe High School, where he overcame his shyness. "It was tough for me at the beginning," Rogers told NPR's Terry Gross in 1984. "And then I made a couple friends who found out that the core of me was okay. And one of them was... the head of the football team". Rogers served as president of the student council, was a member of the National Honor Society, and was editor-in-chief of the school yearbook. He registered for the draft in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1948 at age 20, where he was classified as “1-A”, available for military service. However, his status was changed to “4-F”, unfit for military service, following an Armed Forces physical on October 12, 1950. Rogers attended Dartmouth College for one year before transferring to Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida; he graduated magna cum laude in 1951 with a Bachelor of Music. Rogers graduated magna cum laude from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1962 with a Bachelor of Divinity. He was ordained a minister by the Pittsburgh Presbytery of the United Presbyterian Church in 1963. His mission as an ordained minister, instead of being a pastor of a church, was to minister to children and their families through television. He regularly appeared before church officials to keep up his ordination. Career Early work Rogers wanted to enter seminary after college, but instead chose to go into the nascent medium of television after encountering a TV at his parents' home in 1951 during his senior year at Rollins College. In a CNN interview, he said, "I went into television because I hated it so, and I thought there's some way of using this fabulous instrument to nurture those who would watch and listen". After graduating in 1951, he worked at NBC in New York City as floor director of Your Hit Parade, The Kate Smith Hour, and Gabby Hayes's children's show, and as an assistant producer of The Voice of Firestone. In 1953, Rogers returned to Pittsburgh to work as a program developer at public television station WQED. Josie Carey worked with him to develop the children's show The Children's Corner, which Carey hosted. Rogers worked off-camera to develop puppets, characters, and music for the show. He used many of the puppet characters developed during this time, such as Daniel the Striped Tiger (named after WQED's station manager, Dorothy Daniel, who gave Rogers a tiger puppet before the show's premiere), King Friday XIII, Queen Sara Saturday (named after Rogers's wife), X the Owl, Henrietta, and Lady Elaine, in his later work. Children's television entertainer Ernie Coombs was an assistant puppeteer. The Children's Corner won a Sylvania Award for best locally produced children's programming in 1955 and was broadcast nationally on NBC. While working on The Children's Corner, Rogers attended Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1963. He also attended the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Child Development, where he began working with child psychologist Margaret McFarland, who according to Rogers's biographer Maxwell King became his "key advisor and collaborator" and "child-education guru". Much of Rogers's "thinking about and appreciation for children was shaped and informed" by McFarland. She was his consultant for most of Mister Rogers' Neighborhoods scripts and songs for 30 years. In 1963, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Toronto contracted Rogers to develop and host the 15-minute black-and-white children's program Misterogers; it lasted from 1963 to 1967. It was the first time Rogers appeared on camera. CBC's children's programming head Fred Rainsberry insisted on it, telling Rogers, "Fred, I've seen you talk with kids. Let's put you yourself on the air". Coombs joined Rogers in Toronto as an assistant puppeteer. Rogers also worked with Coombs on the children's show Butternut Square from 1964 to 1967. He acquired the rights to Misterogers in 1967 and returned to Pittsburgh with his wife, two young sons, and the sets he developed, despite a potentially promising career with CBC and no job prospects in Pittsburgh. On Rogers' recommendation, Coombs remained in Toronto and became Rogers' Canadian equivalent of an iconic television personality, creating the long-running children's program, Mr. Dressup, which ran from 1967 to 1996. Rogers's work for CBC "helped shape and develop the concept and style of his later program for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the U.S." Mister Rogers' Neighborhood Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (also called the Neighborhood), a half-hour educational children's program starring Rogers, began airing nationally in 1968 and ran for 895 episodes. The program was videotaped at WQED in Pittsburgh and was broadcast by National Educational Television (NET), which later became the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Its first season had 180 black-and-white episodes. Each subsequent season, filmed in color and funded by PBS, the Sears-Roebuck Foundation, and other charities, consisted of 65 episodes. By the time the program ended production in December 2000, its average rating was about 0.7 percent of television households, or 680,000 homes, and it aired on 384 PBS stations. At its peak in 1985–1986, its ratings were at 2.1 percent, or 1.8 million homes. Production of the Neighborhood ended in December 2000, and the last original episode aired in 2001, but PBS continued to air reruns; by 2016 it was the third-longest running program in PBS history. Many of the sets and props in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, like the trolley, the sneakers, and the castle, were created for Rogers's show in Toronto by CBC designers and producers. The program also "incorporated most of the highly imaginative elements that later became famous", such as its slow pace and its host's quiet manner. The format of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood "remained virtually unchanged" for the entire run of the program. Every episode begins with a camera's-eye view of a model of a neighborhood, then panning in closer to a representation of a house while a piano instrumental of the theme song, "Won't You be My Neighbor?", performed by music director Johnny Costa and inspired by a Beethoven sonata, is played. The camera zooms in to a model representing Mr. Rogers's house, then cuts to the house's interior and pans across the room to the front door, which Rogers opens as he sings the theme song to greet his visitors while changing his suit jacket to a cardigan (knitted by his mother) and his dress shoes to sneakers, "complete with a shoe tossed from one hand to another". The episode's theme is introduced, and Mr. Rogers leaves his home to visit another location, the camera panning back to the neighborhood model and zooming in to the new location as he enters it. Once this segment ends, Mr. Rogers leaves and returns to his home, indicating that it is time to visit the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Mr. Rogers proceeds to the window seat by the trolley track and sets up the action there as the Trolley comes out. The camera follows it down a tunnel in the back wall of the house as it enters the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. The stories and lessons told take place over a series of a week's worth of episodes and involve puppet and human characters. The end of the visit occurs when the Trolley returns to the same tunnel from which it emerged, reappearing in Mr. Rogers's home. He then talks to the viewers before concluding the episode. He often feeds his fish, cleans up any props he has used, and returns to the front room, where he sings the closing song while changing back into his dress shoes and jacket. He exits the front door as he ends the song, and the camera zooms out of his home and pans across the neighborhood model as the episode ends. Mister Rogers' Neighborhood emphasized young children's social and emotional needs, and unlike another PBS show, Sesame Street, which premiered in 1969, did not focus on cognitive learning. Writer Kathy Merlock Jackson said, "While both shows target the same preschool audience and prepare children for kindergarten, Sesame Street concentrates on school-readiness skills while Mister Rogers Neighborhood focuses on the child's developing psyche and feelings and sense of moral and ethical reasoning". The Neighborhood also spent fewer resources on research than Sesame Street, but Rogers used early childhood education concepts taught by his mentor Margaret McFarland, Benjamin Spock, Erik Erikson, and T. Berry Brazelton in his lessons. As the Washington Post noted, Rogers taught young children about civility, tolerance, sharing, and self-worth "in a reassuring tone and leisurely cadence". He tackled difficult topics such as the death of a family pet, sibling rivalry, the addition of a newborn into a family, moving and enrolling in a new school, and divorce. For example, he wrote a special segment that dealt with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy that aired on June 7, 1968, days after the assassination occurred. According to King, the process of putting each episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood together was "painstaking" and Rogers's contribution to the program was "astounding". Rogers wrote and edited all the episodes, played the piano and sang for most of the songs, wrote 200 songs and 13 operas, created all the characters (both puppet and human), played most of the major puppet roles, hosted every episode, and produced and approved every detail of the program. The puppets created for the Neighborhood of Make-Believe "included an extraordinary variety of personalities". They were simple puppets but "complex, complicated, and utterly honest beings". In 1971, Rogers formed Family Communications, Inc. (FCI, now The Fred Rogers Company), to produce the Neighborhood, other programs, and non-broadcast materials. In 1975, Rogers stopped producing Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood to focus on adult programming. Reruns of the Neighborhood continued to air on PBS. King reports that the decision caught many of his coworkers and supporters "off guard". Rogers continued to confer with McFarland about child development and early childhood education, however. In 1979, after an almost five-year hiatus, Rogers returned to producing the Neighborhood; King calls the new version "stronger and more sophisticated than ever". King writes that by the program's second run in the 1980s, it was "such a cultural touchstone that it had inspired numerous parodies", most notably Eddie Murphy's parody on Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s. Rogers retired from producing the Neighborhood in 2001 at age 73, although reruns continued to air. He and FCI had been making about two or three weeks of new programs per year for many years, "filling the rest of his time slots from a library of about 300 shows made since 1979". The final original episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood aired on August 31, 2001. Other work and appearances In 1969, Rogers testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications, which was chaired by Democratic Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island. U.S. President Lyndon Johnson had proposed a $20 million bill for the creation of PBS before he left office, but his successor, Richard Nixon, wanted to cut the funding to $10 million. Even though Rogers was not yet nationally known, he was chosen to testify because of his ability to make persuasive arguments and to connect emotionally with his audience. The clip of Rogers's testimony, which was televised and has since been viewed by millions of people on the internet, helped to secure funding for PBS for many years afterwards. According to King, Rogers's testimony was "considered one of the most powerful pieces of testimony ever offered before Congress, and one of the most powerful pieces of video presentation ever filmed". It brought Pastore to tears and also, according to King, has been studied by public relations experts and academics. Congressional funding for PBS increased from $9 million to $22 million. In 1970, Nixon appointed Rogers as chair of the White House Conference on Children and Youth. In 1978, while on hiatus from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Rogers wrote, produced, and hosted a 30-minute interview program for adults on PBS called Old Friends... New Friends. It lasted 20 episodes. Rogers's guests included Hoagy Carmichael, Helen Hayes, Milton Berle, Lorin Hollander, poet Robert Frost's daughter Lesley, and Willie Stargell. In September 1987, Rogers visited Moscow to appear as the first guest on the long-running Soviet children's TV show Good Night, Little Ones! with host Tatiana Vedeneyeva. The appearance was broadcast in the Soviet Union on December 7, coinciding with the Washington Summit meeting between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan in Washington D.C. Vedeneyeva visited the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in November. Her visit was taped and later aired in March 1988 as part of Rogers's program. In 1994, Rogers wrote, produced, and hosted a special for PBS called Fred Rogers' Heroes, which featured interviews and portraits of four people from across the country who were having a positive impact on children and education. The first time Rogers appeared on television as an actor, and not himself, was in a 1996 episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, playing a preacher. Rogers gave "scores of interviews". Though reluctant to appear on television talk shows, he would usually "charm the host with his quick wit and ability to ad-lib on a moment's notice". Rogers was "one of the country's most sought-after commencement speakers", making over 150 speeches. His friend and colleague David Newell reported that Rogers would "agonize over a speech", and King reported that Rogers was at his least guarded during his speeches, which were about children, television, education, his view of the world, how to make the world a better place, and his quest for self-knowledge. His tone was quiet and informal but "commanded attention". In many speeches, including the ones he made accepting a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1997, for his induction into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999, and his final commencement speech at Dartmouth College in 2002, he instructed his audiences to remain silent and think for a moment about someone who had a good influence on them. Personal life Rogers met Sara Joanne Byrd (called "Joanne") from Jacksonville, Florida, while attending Rollins College. They were married from 1952 until his death in 2003. They had two sons, James and John. Joanne was "an accomplished pianist", who like Fred earned a Bachelor of Music from Rollins, and went on to earn a Master of Music from Florida State University. She performed publicly with her college classmate, Jeannine Morrison, from 1976 to 2008. According to biographer Maxwell King, Rogers's close associates said he was "absolutely faithful to his marriage vows". Rogers was red-green color-blind. He became a pescatarian in 1970, after the death of his father, and a vegetarian in the early 1980s, saying he "couldn't eat anything that had a mother". He became a co-owner of Vegetarian Times in the mid-1980s and said in one issue, "I love tofu burgers and beets". He told Vegetarian Times that he became a vegetarian for both ethical and health reasons. According to his biographer Maxwell King, Rogers also signed his name to a statement protesting wearing animal furs. Rogers was a registered Republican, but according to Joanne Rogers, he was "very independent in the way he voted", choosing not to talk about politics because he wanted to be impartial. Rogers was a Presbyterian, and many of the messages he expressed in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood were inspired by the core tenets of Christianity. Rogers rarely spoke about his faith on air; he believed that teaching through example was as powerful as preaching. He said, "You don't need to speak overtly about religion in order to get a message across". According to writer Shea Tuttle, Rogers considered his faith a fundamental part of his personality and "called the space between the viewer and the television set 'holy ground'". But despite his strong faith, Rogers struggled with anger, conflict, and self-doubt, especially at the end of his life. He also studied Catholic mysticism, Judaism, Buddhism, and other faiths and cultures. King called him "that unique television star with a real spiritual life", emphasizing the values of patience, reflection, and "silence in a noisy world". King reported that despite Rogers's family's wealth, he cared little about making money, and lived frugally, especially as he and his wife grew older. King reported that Rogers's relationship with his young audience was important to him. For example, since hosting Misterogers in Canada, he answered every letter sent to him by hand. After Mister Rogers' Neighborhood began airing in the U.S., the letters increased in volume and he hired staff member and producer Hedda Sharapan to answer them, but he read, edited, and signed each one. King wrote that Rogers saw responding to his viewers' letters as "a pastoral duty of sorts". The New York Times called Rogers "a dedicated lap-swimmer", and Tom Junod, author of "Can You Say... Hero?", the 1998 Esquire profile of Rogers, said, "Nearly every morning of his life, Mister Rogers has gone swimming". Rogers began swimming when he was a child at his family's vacation home outside Latrobe, where they owned a pool, and during their winter trips to Florida. King wrote that swimming and playing the piano were "lifelong passions" and that "both gave him a chance to feel capable and in charge of his destiny", and that swimming became "an important part of the strong sense of self-discipline he cultivated". Rogers swam daily at the Pittsburgh Athletic Association, after waking every morning between 4:30 and 5:30 A.M. to pray and to "read the Bible and prepare himself for the day". He did not smoke or drink. According to Junod, he did nothing to change his weight from the he weighed for most of his adult life; by 1998, this also included napping daily, going to bed at 9:30 P.M., and sleeping eight hours per night without interruption. Junod said Rogers saw his weight "as a destiny fulfilled", telling Junod, "the number 143 means 'I love you.' It takes one letter to say 'I' and four letters to say 'love' and three letters to say 'you'". Death and memorials After Rogers's retirement in 2001, he remained busy working with FCI, studying religion and spirituality, making public appearances, traveling, and working on a children's media center named after him at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe with Archabbot Douglas Nowicki, chancellor of the college. By the summer of 2002, his chronic stomach pain became severe enough for him to see a doctor about it, and in October 2002, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He delayed treatment until after he served as Grand Marshal of the 2003 Rose Parade, with Art Linkletter and Bill Cosby in January. On January 6, Rogers underwent stomach surgery. He died less than two months later, on February 27, 2003, one month before his 75th birthday, at his home in Pittsburgh, with his wife of 50 years, Joanne, at his side. While comatose shortly before his death, he received the last rites of the Catholic Church from Archabbot Nowicki. The following day, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covered Rogers's death on the front page and dedicated an entire section to his death and impact. The newspaper also reported that by noon, the internet "was already full of appreciative pieces" by parents, viewers, producers, and writers. Rogers's death was widely lamented. Most U.S. metropolitan newspapers ran his obituary on their front page, and some dedicated entire sections to coverage of his death. WQED aired programs about Rogers the evening he died; the Post-Gazette reported that the ratings for their coverage were three times higher than their normal ratings. That same evening, Nightline on ABC broadcast a rerun of a recent interview with Rogers; the program got the highest ratings of the day, beating the February average ratings of Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. On March 4, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution honoring Rogers sponsored by Representative Mike Doyle from Pennsylvania. On March 1, 2003, a private funeral was held for Rogers in Unity Chapel, which was restored by Rogers's father, at Unity Cemetery in Latrobe. About 80 relatives, co-workers, and close friends attended the service, which "was planned in great secrecy so that those closest to him could grieve in private". Reverend John McCall, pastor of the Rogers family's church, Sixth Presbyterian Church in Squirrel Hill, gave the homily, and Reverend William Barker, a retired Presbyterian minister who was a "close friend of Mr. Rogers and the voice of Mr. Platypus on his show", read Rogers's favorite Bible passages. Rogers was interred at Unity Cemetery in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in a mausoleum owned by his mother's family. On May 3, 2003, a public memorial was held at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh. According to the Post-Gazette, 2,700 people attended. Violinist Itzhak Perlman, cellist Yo-Yo Ma (via video), and organist Alan Morrison performed in honor of Rogers. Barker officiated the service; also in attendance were Pittsburgh philanthropist Elsie Hillman, former Good Morning America host David Hartman, The Very Hungry Caterpillar author Eric Carle, and Arthur creator Marc Brown. Businesswoman and philanthropist Teresa Heinz, PBS President Pat Mitchell, and executive director of The Pittsburgh Project Saleem Ghubril gave remarks. Jeff Erlanger, who at age 10 appeared on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 1981 to explain his electric wheelchair, also spoke. The memorial was broadcast several times on Pittsburgh television stations and websites throughout the day. Legacy Marc Brown, creator of another PBS children's show, Arthur, considered Rogers both a friend and "a terrific role model for how to use television and the media to be helpful to kids and families". Josh Selig, creator of Wonder Pets, credits Rogers with influencing his use of structure and predictability, and his use of music, opera, and originality. Rogers inspired Angela Santomero, co-creator of the children's television show Blue's Clues, to earn a degree in developmental psychology and go into educational television. She and the other producers of Blue's Clues used many of Rogers's techniques, such as using child developmental and educational research, and having the host speak directly to the camera and transition to a make-believe world. In 2006, three years after Rogers's death and the end of production of Blue's Clues, the Fred Rogers Company contacted Santomero to create a show that would promote Rogers's legacy. In 2012, Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, with characters from and based upon Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, premiered on PBS. Rogers's style and approach to children's television and early childhood education also "begged to be parodied". Comedian Eddie Murphy parodied Mister Rogers' Neighborhood on Saturday Night Live during the 1980s. Rogers told interviewer David Letterman in 1982 that he believed parodies like Murphy's were done "with kindness in their hearts". Video of Rogers's 1969 testimony in defense of public programming has experienced a resurgence since 2012, going viral at least twice. It first resurfaced after then presidential candidate Mitt Romney suggested cutting funding for PBS. In 2017, video of the testimony again went viral after President Donald Trump proposed defunding several arts-related government programs including PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts. A roadside Pennsylvania Historical Marker dedicated to Rogers to be installed in Latrobe was approved by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission on March 4, 2014. It was installed on June 11, 2016, with the title "Fred McFeely Rogers (1928–2003)". In 2018, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, director Morgan Neville's documentary about Rogers's life, grossed over $22 million and became the top-grossing biographical documentary ever produced, the highest-grossing documentary in five years, and the 12th largest-grossing documentary ever produced. The 2019 drama film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood tells the story of Rogers and his television series, with Tom Hanks portraying Rogers. According to Caitlin Gibson of The Washington Post, Rogers became a source for parenting advice; she called him "a timeless oracle against a backdrop of ever-shifting parenting philosophies and cultural trends". Robert Thompson of Syracuse University noted that Rogers "took American childhood—and I think Americans in general—through some very turbulent and trying times", from the Vietnam War and the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. According to Asia Simone Burns of National Public Radio, in the years following the end of production on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 2001, and his death in 2003, Rogers became "a source of comfort, sometimes in the wake of tragedy". Burns has said Rogers's words of comfort "began circulating on social media" following tragedies such as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, the Manchester Arena bombing in Manchester, England, in 2017, and the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. Awards and honors Museum exhibits Smithsonian Institution permanent collection. In 1984, Rogers donated one of his sweaters to the Smithsonian. Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. Exhibit created by Rogers and FCI in 1998. It attracted hundreds of thousand of visitors over 10 years, and included, from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, one of his sweaters, a pair of his sneakers, original puppets from the program, and photographs of Rogers. The exhibit traveled to children's museums throughout the country for eight years until it was given to the Louisiana Children's Museum in New Orleans as a permanent exhibit, to help them recover from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In 2007, the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh created a traveling exhibit based on the factory tours featured in episodes of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Heinz History Center permanent collection (2018). In honor of the 50th anniversary of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and what would have been Rogers's 90th birthday. Louisiana Children's Museum. The museum contains an exhibit of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which debuted in 2007. The exhibit was donated by the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. Fred Rogers Exhibit. The Exhibit displays the life, career and legacy of Rogers and includes photos, artifacts from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and clips of the program and interviews featuring Rogers. It is located at the Fred Rogers Center. Art pieces There are several pieces of art dedicated to Rogers throughout Pittsburgh, including a 7,000-pound, 11-foot high bronze statue of him in the North Shore neighborhood. In the Oakland neighborhood, his portrait is included in the Martin Luther King Jr. and "Interpretations of Oakland" murals. A statue of a dinosaur titled "Fredasaurus Rex Friday XIII" originally stood in front of the WQED building and as of 2014 stands in front of the building that contains the Fred Rogers Company offices. There is a "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood of Make-Believe" in Idlewild Park and a kiosk of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood artifacts at Pittsburgh International Airport. The Carnegie Science Center's Miniature Railroad and Village debuted a miniature recreation of Rogers's house from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 2005. Honorary degrees Rogers has received honorary degrees from over 43 colleges and universities. After 1973, two commemorative quilts, created by two of Rogers's friends and archived at the Fred Rogers Center at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, were made out of the academic hoods he received during the graduation ceremonies. Note: Much of the below list is taken from "Honorary Degrees Awarded to Fred Rogers", unless otherwise stated. Thiel College, 1969. Thiel also awards a yearly scholarship named for Rogers. Eastern Michigan University, 1973 Saint Vincent College, 1973 Christian Theological Seminary, 1973 Rollins College, 1974 Yale University, 1974 Chatham College, 1975 Carnegie Mellon University, 1976 Lafayette College, 1977 Waynesburg College, 1978 Linfield College, 1982 Slippery Rock State College, 1982 Duquesne University, 1982 Washington & Jefferson College, 1984 University of South Carolina, 1985 Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 1985 Drury College, 1986 MacMurray College, 1986 Bowling Green State University, 1987 Westminster College (Pennsylvania), 1987 University of Indianapolis, 1988 University of Connecticut, 1991 Boston University, 1992 Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1992 Moravian College, 1992 Goucher College, 1993 University of Pittsburgh, 1993 West Virginia University, 1995 North Carolina State University, 1996 Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, 1998 Marist College, 1999 Westminster Choir College, 1999 Old Dominion University, 2000 Marquette University, 2001 Middlebury College, 2001 Dartmouth College, 2002 Seton Hill University, 2003 (posthumous) Union College, 2003 (posthumous) Roanoke College, 2003 (posthumous) Filmography Television {\|class="wikitable sortable" \|- ! Year ! Title \|- \| 1954–1961 \| The Children's Corner \|- \| 1963–1966 \| Misterogers \|- \| 1964–1967 \| Butternut Square \|- \| 1968–2001 \| Mister Rogers' Neighborhood \|- \| 1977–1982 \| Christmastime with Mister Rogers \|- \| 1978–1981 \| Old Friends... New Friends \|- \| 1981 \| Sesame Street \|- \| 1988 \| Good Night, Little Ones! \|- \| 1991 \| Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? \|- \| 1994 \|Mr. Dressup's 25th Anniversary\|- \| 1994 \| Fred Rogers' Heroes\|- \| 1996 \| Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman\|- \| 1997 \| Arthur\|- \| 1998 \| Wheel of Fortune\|- \| 2003 \| 114th Annual Tournament of Roses Parade\|} Published works Children's books Our Small World (with Josie Carey, illustrated by Norb Nathanson), 1954, Reed and Witting, The Elves, the Shoemaker, & the Shoemaker's Wife (illustrated by Richard Hefter), 1973, Small World Enterprises, The Matter of the Mittens, 1973, Small World Enterprises, Speedy Delivery (illustrated by Richard Hefter), 1973, Hubbard, Henrietta Meets Someone New (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1974, Golden Press, Mister Rogers Talks About, 1974, Platt & Munk, Time to Be Friends, 1974, Hallmark Cards, Everyone is Special (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1975, Western Publishing, Tell Me, Mister Rogers, 1975, Platt & Munk, The Costume Party (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1976, Golden Press, Planet Purple (illustrated by Dennis Hockerman), 1986, Texas Instruments, If We Were All the Same (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, A Trolley Visit to Make-Believe (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, Wishes Don't Make Things Come True (illustrated Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, No One Can Ever Take Your Place (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, When Monsters Seem Real (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, You Can Never Go Down the Drain (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, The Giving Box (illustrated by Jennifer Herbert), 2000, Running Press, Good Weather or Not (with Hedda Bluestone Sharapan, illustrated by James Mellet), 2005, Family Communications, Josephine the Short Neck-Giraffe, 2006, Family Communications, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: The Poetry of Mister Rogers Neighborhood (illustrated by Luke Flowers), 2009, Quirk Books, First Experiences series illustrated by Jim Judkis Going to Day Care, 1985, Putnam, The New Baby, 1985, Putnam, Going to the Potty, 1986, Putnam, Going to the Doctor, 1986, Putnam, Making Friends, 1987, Putnam, Moving, 1987, Putnam, Going to the Hospital, 1988, Putnam, When a Pet Dies, 1988, Putnam, Going on an Airplane, 1989, Putnam, Going to the Dentist, 1989, Putnam, Let's Talk About It series Going to the Hospital, 1977, Family Communications, Having an Operation, 1977, Family Communications, So Many Things To See!, 1977, Family Communications, Wearing a Cast, 1977, Family Communications, Adoption, 1993, Putnam, Divorce, 1994, Putnam, Extraordinary Friends, 2000, Putnam, Stepfamilies, 2001, Putnam, Songbooks Tomorrow on the Children's Corner (with Josie Carey, illustrated by Mal Wittman), 1960, Vernon Music Corporation, Mister Rogers' Songbook (with Johnny Costa, illustrated by Steven Kellogg), 1970, Random House, Books for adults Mister Rogers Talks to Parents, 1983, Family Communications, Mister Rogers' Playbook (with Barry Head, illustrated by Jamie Adams), 1986, Berkley Books, Mister Rogers Talks with Families About Divorce (with Clare O'Brien), 1987, Berkley Books, Mister Rogers' How Families Grow (with Barry Head and Jim Prokell), 1988, Berkley Books, You Are Special: Words of Wisdom from America's Most Beloved Neighbor, 1994, Penguin Books, Dear Mister Rogers, 1996, Penguin Books, Mister Rogers' Playtime, 2001, Running Press, The Mister Rogers Parenting Book, 2002, Running Press, You are special: Neighborly Wisdom from Mister Rogers, 2002, Running Press, The World According to Mister Rogers, 2003, Hyperion Books, Life's Journeys According to Mister Rogers, 2005, Hyperion Books, The Mister Rogers Parenting Resource Book, 2005, Courage Books, Many Ways to Say I Love You: Wisdom For Parents And Children, 2019, Hachette Books, Discography Around the Children's Corner (with Josey Carey), 1958, Vernon Music Corporation, Tomorrow on the Children's Corner (with Josie Carey), 1959 King Friday XIII Celebrates, 1964 Won't You Be My Neighbor?, 1967 Let's Be Together Today, 1968 Josephine the Short-Neck Giraffe, 1969 You Are Special, 1969 A Place of Our Own, 1970 Come On and Wake Up, 1972 Growing, 1992 Bedtime, 1992 Won't You Be My Neighbor? (cassette and book), 1994, Hal Leonard, Coming and Going, 1997 It's Such A Good Feeling: The Best Of Mister Rogers, 2019, Omnivore Recordings, posthumous release See also Won't You Be My Neighbor?, 2018 documentary Mister Rogers: It's You I Like, 2018 documentary A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, 2019 biographical drama film List of vegetarians Notes References Works cited Gross, Terry (1984). "Terry Gross and Fred Rogers". Fresh Air. NPR. King, Maxwell (2018). The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers. Abrams Press. . Tiech, John (2012). Pittsburgh Film History: On Set in the Steel City''. Charleston, North Carolina: The History Press. . External links PBS Kids: Official Site The Fred M. Rogers Center The Fred Rogers Company (formerly known as Family Communications) 1984 interview with Fred Rogers. The Music of Mister Rogers—Pittsburgh Music History Fred Rogers at Voice Chasers 1928 births 2003 deaths 20th-century American composers 20th-century American male actors 20th-century American male writers 20th-century American singers 20th-century Presbyterians 21st-century Presbyterians American children's television presenters American male composers American male singers American male songwriters American male television actors American male voice actors American philanthropists American Presbyterian ministers American Presbyterians American puppeteers American television hosts Burials in Pennsylvania Christianity in Pittsburgh Columbia Records artists Dartmouth College alumni Daytime Emmy Award winners Deaths from cancer in Pennsylvania Deaths from stomach cancer Male actors from Pittsburgh Omnivore Recordings artists PBS people Peabody Award winners Pennsylvania Republicans People from Latrobe, Pennsylvania Pittsburgh Theological Seminary alumni Presbyterians from Pennsylvania Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Rollins College alumni Singers from Pennsylvania Songwriters from Pennsylvania Television personalities from Pittsburgh Television producers from Pennsylvania United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America ministers Vegetarianism activists Writers from Pittsburgh Articles containing video clips	false	[ "Asahi Metal Industry Co. v. Superior Court, 480 U.S. 102 (1987), decided on February 24, 1987, was a case decided by the United States Supreme Court, in which the court decided whether a foreign corporation, by merely being aware that its products could end up in the forum state and into the American \"stream of commerce\" which later caused injuries, satisfied the minimum contact necessary to satisfy jurisdictional due process requirements. The court was unanimous in the result, but issued a fractured decision with Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor writing for a plurality of the court.\n\nFacts\nAsahi Metal Industry Co. was an international corporation based in Japan, which manufactured a valve used in the manufacture of motorcycle wheels. These valves were bought by Cheng Shin Rubber Industrial Co., a Taiwanese distributor. One of these valves was alleged to have failed, causing an accident in California. As a result of the accident the driver of the motorcycle sustained serious injuries and his wife, who was riding on the motorcycle as a passenger, was killed. The accident victim sued Cheng Shin in a California state court, and Cheng Shin in turn filed a third-party complaint (impleader) seeking indemnification from Asahi. Asahi contested California's personal jurisdiction over Asahi, but the California courts found jurisdiction based on Asahi's alleged awareness of the international distribution of its products. Specifically, Asahi moved to quash Cheng Shin's summons. The California Superior Court denied the motion but the California Court of Appeals issued a writ of mandamus to the state of California telling them to quash the summons. The California Supreme Court reversed this decision, leading Asahi to appeal to the United States Supreme Court.\n\nHolding\nThe Supreme Court applied a five-factor test in determining whether \"traditional notions of fair play\" would permit the assertion of personal jurisdiction over a foreign (meaning out-of-state) defendant:\nWhat is the burden on the defendant?\nWhat are the interests of the forum state in the litigation?\nWhat is the interest of the plaintiff in litigating the matter in that state?\nDoes the allowance of jurisdiction serve interstate efficiency?\nDoes the allowance of jurisdiction serve interstate policy interests?\n\nThe Court found that in this case, the burden on the defendant was severe based on both the geographic distance and legal dissimilarities between Japan and the United States. Cheng Shin was not a California resident, diminishing California's interest in the case. Cheng Shin also did not show that it would be inconvenienced if the case for indemnification against Asahi were heard in Japan or Taiwan instead of California. Finally, neither interstate efficiency nor interstate policy interests would be served by finding jurisdiction.\n\nBecause an assertion of jurisdiction would disturb the \"traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice,\" the decision of the California Supreme Court was reversed and the judgment of California Court of Appeal (California's intermediate appellate court) was effectively reinstated.\n\nSee also \n International trade\n Comity\n Trade treaties\n\nSee also\n List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 480\n List of United States Supreme Court cases\n Lists of United States Supreme Court cases by volume\n List of United States Supreme Court cases by the Rehnquist Court\n\nExternal links\n \nAsahi Metal Industry Co. v. Superior Court\nSupreme Court of the United States\n\nUnited States Supreme Court cases\nUnited States personal jurisdiction case law\n1987 in United States case law\nUnited States Supreme Court cases of the Rehnquist Court", "Parisi v. Davidson, 405 U.S. 34 (1972), was a United States Supreme Court case resulting in the grant of habeas corpus relief to a soldier, Joseph Parisi, seeking an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector. The case was argued on October 19 and 20, 1971, and decided on February 23, 1972. The respondent was then Major General Phillip B. Davidson.\n\nParisi had brought a petition to Federal District Court that the Army's refusal to discharge him constituted habeas corpus – that in effect he was being unlawfully imprisoned. As a result, court-martial charges were brought against him by the Army. The Federal District Court and Court of Appeals concluded that consideration of his petition should be deferred pending the result of the court-martial. The Supreme Court decision overturned this, freeing the District Court to consider his petition.\n\nSee also\nList of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 405\n\nExternal links\n \n\nUnited States Supreme Court cases\nUnited States Supreme Court cases of the Burger Court\nUnited States military case law\nAmerican conscientious objectors\n1972 in United States case law" ]
[ "Fred Rogers", "VCR", "What did Rogers have to do with the VCR?", "Rogers was involved in supporting the manufacturers of VCRs in court.", "Why did he go to court?", "who objected to home recordings or believed that devices to facilitate it should be taxed or regulated.", "Did he win in court?", "I don't know.", "Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?", "The Court stated that his views were a notable piece of evidence", "When was the court case?", "When the case reached the Supreme Court in 1983,", "What was the result of the Supreme Court case?", "the majority decision considered the testimony of Rogers when it held that the Betamax video recorder did not infringe copyright." ]	C_633c016260e9440c9c51f1d94034cc41_0	Is there anything else notable about the case?	7	Other than the majority decision considering the testimony of Rogers when it held that the Betamax video recorder did not infringe copyright, is there anything else notable about the case?	Fred Rogers	During the controversy surrounding the introduction of the household VCR, Rogers was involved in supporting the manufacturers of VCRs in court. His 1979 testimony, in the case Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., noted that he did not object to home recordings of his television programs, for instance, by families in order to watch them together at a later time. This testimony contrasted with the views of others in the television industry who objected to home recordings or believed that devices to facilitate it should be taxed or regulated. When the case reached the Supreme Court in 1983, the majority decision considered the testimony of Rogers when it held that the Betamax video recorder did not infringe copyright. The Court stated that his views were a notable piece of evidence "that many [television] producers are willing to allow private time-shifting to continue" and even quoted his testimony in a footnote: Some public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the Neighborhood at hours when some children cannot use it ... I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the Neighborhood off-the-air, and I'm speaking for the Neighborhood because that's what I produce, that they then become much more active in the programming of their family's television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been "You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions." Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important. CANNOTANSWER	Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others.	Fred McFeely Rogers (March 20, 1928 – February 27, 2003), also known as Mister Rogers, was an American television host, author, producer, and Presbyterian minister. He was the creator, showrunner, and host of the preschool television series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which ran from 1968 to 2001. Born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, Rogers earned a bachelor's degree in music from Rollins College in 1951. He began his television career at NBC in New York, returning to Pittsburgh in 1953 to work for children's programming at NET (later PBS) television station WQED. He graduated from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary with a bachelor's degree in divinity in 1962 and became a Presbyterian minister in 1963. He attended the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Child Development, where he began his 30-year collaboration with child psychologist Margaret McFarland. He also helped develop the children's shows The Children's Corner (1955) for WQED in Pittsburgh and Misterogers (1963) in Canada for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1968, he returned to Pittsburgh and adapted the format of his Canadian series to create Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which ran for 33 years. The program was critically acclaimed for focusing on children's emotional and physical concerns, such as death, sibling rivalry, school enrollment, and divorce. Rogers died of stomach cancer on February 27, 2003, at age 74. His work in children's television has been widely lauded, and he received more than 40 honorary degrees and several awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002 and a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1997. He was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999. Rogers influenced many writers and producers of children's television shows, and his broadcasts have served as a source of comfort during tragic events, even after his death. Early life Rogers was born on March 20, 1928, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, about outside of Pittsburgh, at 705 Main Street to James and Nancy Rogers. James was "a very successful businessman" who was president of the McFeely Brick Company, one of Latrobe's largest businesses. Nancy's father, Fred Brooks McFeely, after whom Rogers was named, was an entrepreneur. Nancy knitted sweaters for American soldiers from western Pennsylvania who were fighting in Europe and regularly volunteered at the Latrobe Hospital. Initially, dreaming of becoming a doctor, she settled for a life of hospital volunteer work. Rogers grew up in a three-story brick mansion at 737 Weldon Street in Latrobe. He had a sister, Elaine, whom the Rogerses adopted when he was 11 years old. Rogers spent much of his childhood alone, playing with puppets, and also spent time with his grandfather. He began to play the piano when he was five years old. Through an ancestor who immigrated from Germany to the U.S., Johannes Meffert (born 1732), Rogers is the sixth cousin of American actor Tom Hanks, who portrays him in the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019). Rogers had a difficult childhood. He was shy, introverted, and overweight, and was frequently homebound after suffering bouts of asthma. He was bullied and taunted as a child for his weight, and called "Fat Freddy". According to Morgan Neville, director of the 2018 documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor?, Rogers had a "lonely childhood... I think he made friends with himself as much as he could. He had a ventriloquist dummy, he had [stuffed] animals, and he would create his own worlds in his childhood bedroom". Rogers attended Latrobe High School, where he overcame his shyness. "It was tough for me at the beginning," Rogers told NPR's Terry Gross in 1984. "And then I made a couple friends who found out that the core of me was okay. And one of them was... the head of the football team". Rogers served as president of the student council, was a member of the National Honor Society, and was editor-in-chief of the school yearbook. He registered for the draft in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1948 at age 20, where he was classified as “1-A”, available for military service. However, his status was changed to “4-F”, unfit for military service, following an Armed Forces physical on October 12, 1950. Rogers attended Dartmouth College for one year before transferring to Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida; he graduated magna cum laude in 1951 with a Bachelor of Music. Rogers graduated magna cum laude from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1962 with a Bachelor of Divinity. He was ordained a minister by the Pittsburgh Presbytery of the United Presbyterian Church in 1963. His mission as an ordained minister, instead of being a pastor of a church, was to minister to children and their families through television. He regularly appeared before church officials to keep up his ordination. Career Early work Rogers wanted to enter seminary after college, but instead chose to go into the nascent medium of television after encountering a TV at his parents' home in 1951 during his senior year at Rollins College. In a CNN interview, he said, "I went into television because I hated it so, and I thought there's some way of using this fabulous instrument to nurture those who would watch and listen". After graduating in 1951, he worked at NBC in New York City as floor director of Your Hit Parade, The Kate Smith Hour, and Gabby Hayes's children's show, and as an assistant producer of The Voice of Firestone. In 1953, Rogers returned to Pittsburgh to work as a program developer at public television station WQED. Josie Carey worked with him to develop the children's show The Children's Corner, which Carey hosted. Rogers worked off-camera to develop puppets, characters, and music for the show. He used many of the puppet characters developed during this time, such as Daniel the Striped Tiger (named after WQED's station manager, Dorothy Daniel, who gave Rogers a tiger puppet before the show's premiere), King Friday XIII, Queen Sara Saturday (named after Rogers's wife), X the Owl, Henrietta, and Lady Elaine, in his later work. Children's television entertainer Ernie Coombs was an assistant puppeteer. The Children's Corner won a Sylvania Award for best locally produced children's programming in 1955 and was broadcast nationally on NBC. While working on The Children's Corner, Rogers attended Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1963. He also attended the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Child Development, where he began working with child psychologist Margaret McFarland, who according to Rogers's biographer Maxwell King became his "key advisor and collaborator" and "child-education guru". Much of Rogers's "thinking about and appreciation for children was shaped and informed" by McFarland. She was his consultant for most of Mister Rogers' Neighborhoods scripts and songs for 30 years. In 1963, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Toronto contracted Rogers to develop and host the 15-minute black-and-white children's program Misterogers; it lasted from 1963 to 1967. It was the first time Rogers appeared on camera. CBC's children's programming head Fred Rainsberry insisted on it, telling Rogers, "Fred, I've seen you talk with kids. Let's put you yourself on the air". Coombs joined Rogers in Toronto as an assistant puppeteer. Rogers also worked with Coombs on the children's show Butternut Square from 1964 to 1967. He acquired the rights to Misterogers in 1967 and returned to Pittsburgh with his wife, two young sons, and the sets he developed, despite a potentially promising career with CBC and no job prospects in Pittsburgh. On Rogers' recommendation, Coombs remained in Toronto and became Rogers' Canadian equivalent of an iconic television personality, creating the long-running children's program, Mr. Dressup, which ran from 1967 to 1996. Rogers's work for CBC "helped shape and develop the concept and style of his later program for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the U.S." Mister Rogers' Neighborhood Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (also called the Neighborhood), a half-hour educational children's program starring Rogers, began airing nationally in 1968 and ran for 895 episodes. The program was videotaped at WQED in Pittsburgh and was broadcast by National Educational Television (NET), which later became the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Its first season had 180 black-and-white episodes. Each subsequent season, filmed in color and funded by PBS, the Sears-Roebuck Foundation, and other charities, consisted of 65 episodes. By the time the program ended production in December 2000, its average rating was about 0.7 percent of television households, or 680,000 homes, and it aired on 384 PBS stations. At its peak in 1985–1986, its ratings were at 2.1 percent, or 1.8 million homes. Production of the Neighborhood ended in December 2000, and the last original episode aired in 2001, but PBS continued to air reruns; by 2016 it was the third-longest running program in PBS history. Many of the sets and props in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, like the trolley, the sneakers, and the castle, were created for Rogers's show in Toronto by CBC designers and producers. The program also "incorporated most of the highly imaginative elements that later became famous", such as its slow pace and its host's quiet manner. The format of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood "remained virtually unchanged" for the entire run of the program. Every episode begins with a camera's-eye view of a model of a neighborhood, then panning in closer to a representation of a house while a piano instrumental of the theme song, "Won't You be My Neighbor?", performed by music director Johnny Costa and inspired by a Beethoven sonata, is played. The camera zooms in to a model representing Mr. Rogers's house, then cuts to the house's interior and pans across the room to the front door, which Rogers opens as he sings the theme song to greet his visitors while changing his suit jacket to a cardigan (knitted by his mother) and his dress shoes to sneakers, "complete with a shoe tossed from one hand to another". The episode's theme is introduced, and Mr. Rogers leaves his home to visit another location, the camera panning back to the neighborhood model and zooming in to the new location as he enters it. Once this segment ends, Mr. Rogers leaves and returns to his home, indicating that it is time to visit the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Mr. Rogers proceeds to the window seat by the trolley track and sets up the action there as the Trolley comes out. The camera follows it down a tunnel in the back wall of the house as it enters the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. The stories and lessons told take place over a series of a week's worth of episodes and involve puppet and human characters. The end of the visit occurs when the Trolley returns to the same tunnel from which it emerged, reappearing in Mr. Rogers's home. He then talks to the viewers before concluding the episode. He often feeds his fish, cleans up any props he has used, and returns to the front room, where he sings the closing song while changing back into his dress shoes and jacket. He exits the front door as he ends the song, and the camera zooms out of his home and pans across the neighborhood model as the episode ends. Mister Rogers' Neighborhood emphasized young children's social and emotional needs, and unlike another PBS show, Sesame Street, which premiered in 1969, did not focus on cognitive learning. Writer Kathy Merlock Jackson said, "While both shows target the same preschool audience and prepare children for kindergarten, Sesame Street concentrates on school-readiness skills while Mister Rogers Neighborhood focuses on the child's developing psyche and feelings and sense of moral and ethical reasoning". The Neighborhood also spent fewer resources on research than Sesame Street, but Rogers used early childhood education concepts taught by his mentor Margaret McFarland, Benjamin Spock, Erik Erikson, and T. Berry Brazelton in his lessons. As the Washington Post noted, Rogers taught young children about civility, tolerance, sharing, and self-worth "in a reassuring tone and leisurely cadence". He tackled difficult topics such as the death of a family pet, sibling rivalry, the addition of a newborn into a family, moving and enrolling in a new school, and divorce. For example, he wrote a special segment that dealt with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy that aired on June 7, 1968, days after the assassination occurred. According to King, the process of putting each episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood together was "painstaking" and Rogers's contribution to the program was "astounding". Rogers wrote and edited all the episodes, played the piano and sang for most of the songs, wrote 200 songs and 13 operas, created all the characters (both puppet and human), played most of the major puppet roles, hosted every episode, and produced and approved every detail of the program. The puppets created for the Neighborhood of Make-Believe "included an extraordinary variety of personalities". They were simple puppets but "complex, complicated, and utterly honest beings". In 1971, Rogers formed Family Communications, Inc. (FCI, now The Fred Rogers Company), to produce the Neighborhood, other programs, and non-broadcast materials. In 1975, Rogers stopped producing Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood to focus on adult programming. Reruns of the Neighborhood continued to air on PBS. King reports that the decision caught many of his coworkers and supporters "off guard". Rogers continued to confer with McFarland about child development and early childhood education, however. In 1979, after an almost five-year hiatus, Rogers returned to producing the Neighborhood; King calls the new version "stronger and more sophisticated than ever". King writes that by the program's second run in the 1980s, it was "such a cultural touchstone that it had inspired numerous parodies", most notably Eddie Murphy's parody on Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s. Rogers retired from producing the Neighborhood in 2001 at age 73, although reruns continued to air. He and FCI had been making about two or three weeks of new programs per year for many years, "filling the rest of his time slots from a library of about 300 shows made since 1979". The final original episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood aired on August 31, 2001. Other work and appearances In 1969, Rogers testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications, which was chaired by Democratic Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island. U.S. President Lyndon Johnson had proposed a $20 million bill for the creation of PBS before he left office, but his successor, Richard Nixon, wanted to cut the funding to $10 million. Even though Rogers was not yet nationally known, he was chosen to testify because of his ability to make persuasive arguments and to connect emotionally with his audience. The clip of Rogers's testimony, which was televised and has since been viewed by millions of people on the internet, helped to secure funding for PBS for many years afterwards. According to King, Rogers's testimony was "considered one of the most powerful pieces of testimony ever offered before Congress, and one of the most powerful pieces of video presentation ever filmed". It brought Pastore to tears and also, according to King, has been studied by public relations experts and academics. Congressional funding for PBS increased from $9 million to $22 million. In 1970, Nixon appointed Rogers as chair of the White House Conference on Children and Youth. In 1978, while on hiatus from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Rogers wrote, produced, and hosted a 30-minute interview program for adults on PBS called Old Friends... New Friends. It lasted 20 episodes. Rogers's guests included Hoagy Carmichael, Helen Hayes, Milton Berle, Lorin Hollander, poet Robert Frost's daughter Lesley, and Willie Stargell. In September 1987, Rogers visited Moscow to appear as the first guest on the long-running Soviet children's TV show Good Night, Little Ones! with host Tatiana Vedeneyeva. The appearance was broadcast in the Soviet Union on December 7, coinciding with the Washington Summit meeting between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan in Washington D.C. Vedeneyeva visited the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in November. Her visit was taped and later aired in March 1988 as part of Rogers's program. In 1994, Rogers wrote, produced, and hosted a special for PBS called Fred Rogers' Heroes, which featured interviews and portraits of four people from across the country who were having a positive impact on children and education. The first time Rogers appeared on television as an actor, and not himself, was in a 1996 episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, playing a preacher. Rogers gave "scores of interviews". Though reluctant to appear on television talk shows, he would usually "charm the host with his quick wit and ability to ad-lib on a moment's notice". Rogers was "one of the country's most sought-after commencement speakers", making over 150 speeches. His friend and colleague David Newell reported that Rogers would "agonize over a speech", and King reported that Rogers was at his least guarded during his speeches, which were about children, television, education, his view of the world, how to make the world a better place, and his quest for self-knowledge. His tone was quiet and informal but "commanded attention". In many speeches, including the ones he made accepting a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1997, for his induction into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999, and his final commencement speech at Dartmouth College in 2002, he instructed his audiences to remain silent and think for a moment about someone who had a good influence on them. Personal life Rogers met Sara Joanne Byrd (called "Joanne") from Jacksonville, Florida, while attending Rollins College. They were married from 1952 until his death in 2003. They had two sons, James and John. Joanne was "an accomplished pianist", who like Fred earned a Bachelor of Music from Rollins, and went on to earn a Master of Music from Florida State University. She performed publicly with her college classmate, Jeannine Morrison, from 1976 to 2008. According to biographer Maxwell King, Rogers's close associates said he was "absolutely faithful to his marriage vows". Rogers was red-green color-blind. He became a pescatarian in 1970, after the death of his father, and a vegetarian in the early 1980s, saying he "couldn't eat anything that had a mother". He became a co-owner of Vegetarian Times in the mid-1980s and said in one issue, "I love tofu burgers and beets". He told Vegetarian Times that he became a vegetarian for both ethical and health reasons. According to his biographer Maxwell King, Rogers also signed his name to a statement protesting wearing animal furs. Rogers was a registered Republican, but according to Joanne Rogers, he was "very independent in the way he voted", choosing not to talk about politics because he wanted to be impartial. Rogers was a Presbyterian, and many of the messages he expressed in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood were inspired by the core tenets of Christianity. Rogers rarely spoke about his faith on air; he believed that teaching through example was as powerful as preaching. He said, "You don't need to speak overtly about religion in order to get a message across". According to writer Shea Tuttle, Rogers considered his faith a fundamental part of his personality and "called the space between the viewer and the television set 'holy ground'". But despite his strong faith, Rogers struggled with anger, conflict, and self-doubt, especially at the end of his life. He also studied Catholic mysticism, Judaism, Buddhism, and other faiths and cultures. King called him "that unique television star with a real spiritual life", emphasizing the values of patience, reflection, and "silence in a noisy world". King reported that despite Rogers's family's wealth, he cared little about making money, and lived frugally, especially as he and his wife grew older. King reported that Rogers's relationship with his young audience was important to him. For example, since hosting Misterogers in Canada, he answered every letter sent to him by hand. After Mister Rogers' Neighborhood began airing in the U.S., the letters increased in volume and he hired staff member and producer Hedda Sharapan to answer them, but he read, edited, and signed each one. King wrote that Rogers saw responding to his viewers' letters as "a pastoral duty of sorts". The New York Times called Rogers "a dedicated lap-swimmer", and Tom Junod, author of "Can You Say... Hero?", the 1998 Esquire profile of Rogers, said, "Nearly every morning of his life, Mister Rogers has gone swimming". Rogers began swimming when he was a child at his family's vacation home outside Latrobe, where they owned a pool, and during their winter trips to Florida. King wrote that swimming and playing the piano were "lifelong passions" and that "both gave him a chance to feel capable and in charge of his destiny", and that swimming became "an important part of the strong sense of self-discipline he cultivated". Rogers swam daily at the Pittsburgh Athletic Association, after waking every morning between 4:30 and 5:30 A.M. to pray and to "read the Bible and prepare himself for the day". He did not smoke or drink. According to Junod, he did nothing to change his weight from the he weighed for most of his adult life; by 1998, this also included napping daily, going to bed at 9:30 P.M., and sleeping eight hours per night without interruption. Junod said Rogers saw his weight "as a destiny fulfilled", telling Junod, "the number 143 means 'I love you.' It takes one letter to say 'I' and four letters to say 'love' and three letters to say 'you'". Death and memorials After Rogers's retirement in 2001, he remained busy working with FCI, studying religion and spirituality, making public appearances, traveling, and working on a children's media center named after him at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe with Archabbot Douglas Nowicki, chancellor of the college. By the summer of 2002, his chronic stomach pain became severe enough for him to see a doctor about it, and in October 2002, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He delayed treatment until after he served as Grand Marshal of the 2003 Rose Parade, with Art Linkletter and Bill Cosby in January. On January 6, Rogers underwent stomach surgery. He died less than two months later, on February 27, 2003, one month before his 75th birthday, at his home in Pittsburgh, with his wife of 50 years, Joanne, at his side. While comatose shortly before his death, he received the last rites of the Catholic Church from Archabbot Nowicki. The following day, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covered Rogers's death on the front page and dedicated an entire section to his death and impact. The newspaper also reported that by noon, the internet "was already full of appreciative pieces" by parents, viewers, producers, and writers. Rogers's death was widely lamented. Most U.S. metropolitan newspapers ran his obituary on their front page, and some dedicated entire sections to coverage of his death. WQED aired programs about Rogers the evening he died; the Post-Gazette reported that the ratings for their coverage were three times higher than their normal ratings. That same evening, Nightline on ABC broadcast a rerun of a recent interview with Rogers; the program got the highest ratings of the day, beating the February average ratings of Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. On March 4, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution honoring Rogers sponsored by Representative Mike Doyle from Pennsylvania. On March 1, 2003, a private funeral was held for Rogers in Unity Chapel, which was restored by Rogers's father, at Unity Cemetery in Latrobe. About 80 relatives, co-workers, and close friends attended the service, which "was planned in great secrecy so that those closest to him could grieve in private". Reverend John McCall, pastor of the Rogers family's church, Sixth Presbyterian Church in Squirrel Hill, gave the homily, and Reverend William Barker, a retired Presbyterian minister who was a "close friend of Mr. Rogers and the voice of Mr. Platypus on his show", read Rogers's favorite Bible passages. Rogers was interred at Unity Cemetery in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in a mausoleum owned by his mother's family. On May 3, 2003, a public memorial was held at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh. According to the Post-Gazette, 2,700 people attended. Violinist Itzhak Perlman, cellist Yo-Yo Ma (via video), and organist Alan Morrison performed in honor of Rogers. Barker officiated the service; also in attendance were Pittsburgh philanthropist Elsie Hillman, former Good Morning America host David Hartman, The Very Hungry Caterpillar author Eric Carle, and Arthur creator Marc Brown. Businesswoman and philanthropist Teresa Heinz, PBS President Pat Mitchell, and executive director of The Pittsburgh Project Saleem Ghubril gave remarks. Jeff Erlanger, who at age 10 appeared on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 1981 to explain his electric wheelchair, also spoke. The memorial was broadcast several times on Pittsburgh television stations and websites throughout the day. Legacy Marc Brown, creator of another PBS children's show, Arthur, considered Rogers both a friend and "a terrific role model for how to use television and the media to be helpful to kids and families". Josh Selig, creator of Wonder Pets, credits Rogers with influencing his use of structure and predictability, and his use of music, opera, and originality. Rogers inspired Angela Santomero, co-creator of the children's television show Blue's Clues, to earn a degree in developmental psychology and go into educational television. She and the other producers of Blue's Clues used many of Rogers's techniques, such as using child developmental and educational research, and having the host speak directly to the camera and transition to a make-believe world. In 2006, three years after Rogers's death and the end of production of Blue's Clues, the Fred Rogers Company contacted Santomero to create a show that would promote Rogers's legacy. In 2012, Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, with characters from and based upon Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, premiered on PBS. Rogers's style and approach to children's television and early childhood education also "begged to be parodied". Comedian Eddie Murphy parodied Mister Rogers' Neighborhood on Saturday Night Live during the 1980s. Rogers told interviewer David Letterman in 1982 that he believed parodies like Murphy's were done "with kindness in their hearts". Video of Rogers's 1969 testimony in defense of public programming has experienced a resurgence since 2012, going viral at least twice. It first resurfaced after then presidential candidate Mitt Romney suggested cutting funding for PBS. In 2017, video of the testimony again went viral after President Donald Trump proposed defunding several arts-related government programs including PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts. A roadside Pennsylvania Historical Marker dedicated to Rogers to be installed in Latrobe was approved by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission on March 4, 2014. It was installed on June 11, 2016, with the title "Fred McFeely Rogers (1928–2003)". In 2018, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, director Morgan Neville's documentary about Rogers's life, grossed over $22 million and became the top-grossing biographical documentary ever produced, the highest-grossing documentary in five years, and the 12th largest-grossing documentary ever produced. The 2019 drama film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood tells the story of Rogers and his television series, with Tom Hanks portraying Rogers. According to Caitlin Gibson of The Washington Post, Rogers became a source for parenting advice; she called him "a timeless oracle against a backdrop of ever-shifting parenting philosophies and cultural trends". Robert Thompson of Syracuse University noted that Rogers "took American childhood—and I think Americans in general—through some very turbulent and trying times", from the Vietnam War and the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. According to Asia Simone Burns of National Public Radio, in the years following the end of production on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 2001, and his death in 2003, Rogers became "a source of comfort, sometimes in the wake of tragedy". Burns has said Rogers's words of comfort "began circulating on social media" following tragedies such as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, the Manchester Arena bombing in Manchester, England, in 2017, and the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. Awards and honors Museum exhibits Smithsonian Institution permanent collection. In 1984, Rogers donated one of his sweaters to the Smithsonian. Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. Exhibit created by Rogers and FCI in 1998. It attracted hundreds of thousand of visitors over 10 years, and included, from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, one of his sweaters, a pair of his sneakers, original puppets from the program, and photographs of Rogers. The exhibit traveled to children's museums throughout the country for eight years until it was given to the Louisiana Children's Museum in New Orleans as a permanent exhibit, to help them recover from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In 2007, the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh created a traveling exhibit based on the factory tours featured in episodes of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Heinz History Center permanent collection (2018). In honor of the 50th anniversary of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and what would have been Rogers's 90th birthday. Louisiana Children's Museum. The museum contains an exhibit of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which debuted in 2007. The exhibit was donated by the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. Fred Rogers Exhibit. The Exhibit displays the life, career and legacy of Rogers and includes photos, artifacts from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and clips of the program and interviews featuring Rogers. It is located at the Fred Rogers Center. Art pieces There are several pieces of art dedicated to Rogers throughout Pittsburgh, including a 7,000-pound, 11-foot high bronze statue of him in the North Shore neighborhood. In the Oakland neighborhood, his portrait is included in the Martin Luther King Jr. and "Interpretations of Oakland" murals. A statue of a dinosaur titled "Fredasaurus Rex Friday XIII" originally stood in front of the WQED building and as of 2014 stands in front of the building that contains the Fred Rogers Company offices. There is a "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood of Make-Believe" in Idlewild Park and a kiosk of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood artifacts at Pittsburgh International Airport. The Carnegie Science Center's Miniature Railroad and Village debuted a miniature recreation of Rogers's house from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 2005. Honorary degrees Rogers has received honorary degrees from over 43 colleges and universities. After 1973, two commemorative quilts, created by two of Rogers's friends and archived at the Fred Rogers Center at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, were made out of the academic hoods he received during the graduation ceremonies. Note: Much of the below list is taken from "Honorary Degrees Awarded to Fred Rogers", unless otherwise stated. Thiel College, 1969. Thiel also awards a yearly scholarship named for Rogers. Eastern Michigan University, 1973 Saint Vincent College, 1973 Christian Theological Seminary, 1973 Rollins College, 1974 Yale University, 1974 Chatham College, 1975 Carnegie Mellon University, 1976 Lafayette College, 1977 Waynesburg College, 1978 Linfield College, 1982 Slippery Rock State College, 1982 Duquesne University, 1982 Washington & Jefferson College, 1984 University of South Carolina, 1985 Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 1985 Drury College, 1986 MacMurray College, 1986 Bowling Green State University, 1987 Westminster College (Pennsylvania), 1987 University of Indianapolis, 1988 University of Connecticut, 1991 Boston University, 1992 Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1992 Moravian College, 1992 Goucher College, 1993 University of Pittsburgh, 1993 West Virginia University, 1995 North Carolina State University, 1996 Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, 1998 Marist College, 1999 Westminster Choir College, 1999 Old Dominion University, 2000 Marquette University, 2001 Middlebury College, 2001 Dartmouth College, 2002 Seton Hill University, 2003 (posthumous) Union College, 2003 (posthumous) Roanoke College, 2003 (posthumous) Filmography Television {\|class="wikitable sortable" \|- ! Year ! Title \|- \| 1954–1961 \| The Children's Corner \|- \| 1963–1966 \| Misterogers \|- \| 1964–1967 \| Butternut Square \|- \| 1968–2001 \| Mister Rogers' Neighborhood \|- \| 1977–1982 \| Christmastime with Mister Rogers \|- \| 1978–1981 \| Old Friends... New Friends \|- \| 1981 \| Sesame Street \|- \| 1988 \| Good Night, Little Ones! \|- \| 1991 \| Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? \|- \| 1994 \|Mr. Dressup's 25th Anniversary\|- \| 1994 \| Fred Rogers' Heroes\|- \| 1996 \| Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman\|- \| 1997 \| Arthur\|- \| 1998 \| Wheel of Fortune\|- \| 2003 \| 114th Annual Tournament of Roses Parade\|} Published works Children's books Our Small World (with Josie Carey, illustrated by Norb Nathanson), 1954, Reed and Witting, The Elves, the Shoemaker, & the Shoemaker's Wife (illustrated by Richard Hefter), 1973, Small World Enterprises, The Matter of the Mittens, 1973, Small World Enterprises, Speedy Delivery (illustrated by Richard Hefter), 1973, Hubbard, Henrietta Meets Someone New (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1974, Golden Press, Mister Rogers Talks About, 1974, Platt & Munk, Time to Be Friends, 1974, Hallmark Cards, Everyone is Special (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1975, Western Publishing, Tell Me, Mister Rogers, 1975, Platt & Munk, The Costume Party (illustrated by Jason Art Studios), 1976, Golden Press, Planet Purple (illustrated by Dennis Hockerman), 1986, Texas Instruments, If We Were All the Same (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, A Trolley Visit to Make-Believe (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, Wishes Don't Make Things Come True (illustrated Pat Sustendal), 1987, Random House, No One Can Ever Take Your Place (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, When Monsters Seem Real (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, You Can Never Go Down the Drain (illustrated by Pat Sustendal), 1988, Random House, The Giving Box (illustrated by Jennifer Herbert), 2000, Running Press, Good Weather or Not (with Hedda Bluestone Sharapan, illustrated by James Mellet), 2005, Family Communications, Josephine the Short Neck-Giraffe, 2006, Family Communications, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: The Poetry of Mister Rogers Neighborhood (illustrated by Luke Flowers), 2009, Quirk Books, First Experiences series illustrated by Jim Judkis Going to Day Care, 1985, Putnam, The New Baby, 1985, Putnam, Going to the Potty, 1986, Putnam, Going to the Doctor, 1986, Putnam, Making Friends, 1987, Putnam, Moving, 1987, Putnam, Going to the Hospital, 1988, Putnam, When a Pet Dies, 1988, Putnam, Going on an Airplane, 1989, Putnam, Going to the Dentist, 1989, Putnam, Let's Talk About It series Going to the Hospital, 1977, Family Communications, Having an Operation, 1977, Family Communications, So Many Things To See!, 1977, Family Communications, Wearing a Cast, 1977, Family Communications, Adoption, 1993, Putnam, Divorce, 1994, Putnam, Extraordinary Friends, 2000, Putnam, Stepfamilies, 2001, Putnam, Songbooks Tomorrow on the Children's Corner (with Josie Carey, illustrated by Mal Wittman), 1960, Vernon Music Corporation, Mister Rogers' Songbook (with Johnny Costa, illustrated by Steven Kellogg), 1970, Random House, Books for adults Mister Rogers Talks to Parents, 1983, Family Communications, Mister Rogers' Playbook (with Barry Head, illustrated by Jamie Adams), 1986, Berkley Books, Mister Rogers Talks with Families About Divorce (with Clare O'Brien), 1987, Berkley Books, Mister Rogers' How Families Grow (with Barry Head and Jim Prokell), 1988, Berkley Books, You Are Special: Words of Wisdom from America's Most Beloved Neighbor, 1994, Penguin Books, Dear Mister Rogers, 1996, Penguin Books, Mister Rogers' Playtime, 2001, Running Press, The Mister Rogers Parenting Book, 2002, Running Press, You are special: Neighborly Wisdom from Mister Rogers, 2002, Running Press, The World According to Mister Rogers, 2003, Hyperion Books, Life's Journeys According to Mister Rogers, 2005, Hyperion Books, The Mister Rogers Parenting Resource Book, 2005, Courage Books, Many Ways to Say I Love You: Wisdom For Parents And Children, 2019, Hachette Books, Discography Around the Children's Corner (with Josey Carey), 1958, Vernon Music Corporation, Tomorrow on the Children's Corner (with Josie Carey), 1959 King Friday XIII Celebrates, 1964 Won't You Be My Neighbor?, 1967 Let's Be Together Today, 1968 Josephine the Short-Neck Giraffe, 1969 You Are Special, 1969 A Place of Our Own, 1970 Come On and Wake Up, 1972 Growing, 1992 Bedtime, 1992 Won't You Be My Neighbor? (cassette and book), 1994, Hal Leonard, Coming and Going, 1997 It's Such A Good Feeling: The Best Of Mister Rogers, 2019, Omnivore Recordings, posthumous release See also Won't You Be My Neighbor?, 2018 documentary Mister Rogers: It's You I Like, 2018 documentary A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, 2019 biographical drama film List of vegetarians Notes References Works cited Gross, Terry (1984). "Terry Gross and Fred Rogers". Fresh Air. NPR. King, Maxwell (2018). The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers. Abrams Press. . Tiech, John (2012). Pittsburgh Film History: On Set in the Steel City''. Charleston, North Carolina: The History Press. . External links PBS Kids: Official Site The Fred M. Rogers Center The Fred Rogers Company (formerly known as Family Communications) 1984 interview with Fred Rogers. The Music of Mister Rogers—Pittsburgh Music History Fred Rogers at Voice Chasers 1928 births 2003 deaths 20th-century American composers 20th-century American male actors 20th-century American male writers 20th-century American singers 20th-century Presbyterians 21st-century Presbyterians American children's television presenters American male composers American male singers American male songwriters American male television actors American male voice actors American philanthropists American Presbyterian ministers American Presbyterians American puppeteers American television hosts Burials in Pennsylvania Christianity in Pittsburgh Columbia Records artists Dartmouth College alumni Daytime Emmy Award winners Deaths from cancer in Pennsylvania Deaths from stomach cancer Male actors from Pittsburgh Omnivore Recordings artists PBS people Peabody Award winners Pennsylvania Republicans People from Latrobe, Pennsylvania Pittsburgh Theological Seminary alumni Presbyterians from Pennsylvania Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Rollins College alumni Singers from Pennsylvania Songwriters from Pennsylvania Television personalities from Pittsburgh Television producers from Pennsylvania United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America ministers Vegetarianism activists Writers from Pittsburgh Articles containing video clips	false	[ "In baseball, a fair ball is a batted ball that entitles the batter to attempt to reach first base. By contrast, a foul ball is a batted ball that does not entitle the batter to attempt to reach first base. Whether a batted ball is fair or foul is determined by the location of the ball at the appropriate reference point, as follows:\n\n if the ball leaves the playing field without touching anything, the point where the ball leaves the field;\n else, if the ball first lands past first or third base without touching anything, the point where the ball lands;\n else, if the ball rolls or bounces past first or third base without touching anything other than the ground, the point where the ball passes the base;\n else, if the ball touches anything other than the ground (such as an umpire, a player, or any equipment left on the field) before any of the above happens, the point of such touching;\n else (the ball comes to a rest before reaching first or third base), the point where the ball comes to a rest.\n\nIf any part of the ball is on or above fair territory at the appropriate reference point, it is fair; else it is foul. Fair territory or fair ground is defined as the area of the playing field between the two foul lines, and includes the foul lines themselves and the foul poles. However, certain exceptions exist:\n\n A ball that touches first, second, or third base is always fair.\n Under Rule 5.09(a)(7)-(8), if a batted ball touches the batter or his bat while the batter is in the batter's box and not intentionally interfering with the course of the ball, the ball is foul.\n A ball that hits the foul pole without first having touched anything else off the bat is fair.\n Ground rules may provide whether a ball hitting specific objects (e.g. roof, overhead speaker) is fair or foul.\n\nOn a fair ball, the batter attempts to reach first base or any subsequent base, runners attempt to advance and fielders try to record outs. A fair ball is considered a live ball until the ball becomes dead by leaving the field or any other method.\n\nReferences\n\nBaseball rules", "Tunnel vision is a term used when a shooter is focused on a target, and thus misses what goes on around that target. Therefore an innocent bystander may pass in front or behind of the target and be shot accidentally. This is easily understandable if the bystander is not visible in the telescopic sight (see Tunnel vision#Optical instruments), but can also happen without one. In this case, the mental concentration of the shooter is so focused on the target, that they fail to notice anything else.\n\nMarksmanship\nShooting sports" ]
[ "Sandy Denny", "From Fairport to Fotheringay" ]	C_e6cc2f78b77b4fcab1029b8e527f1a13_0	When was she in the band Fairport Convention?	1	When was Sandy Denny in the band Fairport Convention?	Sandy Denny	After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late sixties, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. CANNOTANSWER	Denny became the obvious choice.	Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny (6 January 1947 – 21 April 1978) was an English singer-songwriter who was lead singer of the British folk rock band Fairport Convention. She has been described as "the pre-eminent British folk rock singer". After briefly working with the Strawbs, Denny joined Fairport Convention in 1968, remaining with them until 1969. She formed the short-lived band Fotheringay in 1970, before focusing on a solo career. Between 1971 and 1977, Denny released four solo albums: The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, Sandy, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz and Rendezvous. She also duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore" for Led Zeppelin's album Led Zeppelin IV in 1971. Denny died in 1978 at the age of 31 due to injuries and health issues related to alcohol abuse. Music publications Uncut and Mojo have described Denny as Britain's finest female singer-songwriter. Her composition "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" has been recorded by Judy Collins, Eva Cassidy, Nina Simone, 10,000 Maniacs and Cat Power. Her recorded work has been the subject of numerous reissues, along with a wealth of previously unreleased material which has appeared over the more than 40 years since her death, including a 19-CD box set released in November 2010. Childhood Denny was born on 6 January 1947 at Nelson Hospital, Kingston Road, Merton Park, London, to Neil and Edna Denny. She studied classical piano as a child. Her paternal grandfather was from Dundee, and her paternal grandmother was a Scots Gaelic speaker and singer of traditional songs. At an early age Denny showed an interest in singing, although her strict parents were reluctant to believe there was a living to be made from it. She attended Coombe Girls' School in New Malden; after leaving school she began training as a nurse at the Royal Brompton Hospital. Early career Denny's nursing career proved short-lived. In the meantime she had secured a place on a foundation course at Kingston College of Art, which she took up in September 1965, becoming involved with the folk club on campus. Her contemporaries at the college included guitarist and future member of Pentangle, John Renbourn. After her first public appearance at the Barge in Kingston upon Thames, Denny began working the folk club circuit in the evenings with an American-influenced repertoire, including songs by Tom Paxton, together with traditional folk songs. Denny made the first of many appearances for the BBC at Cecil Sharp House on 2 December 1966 on the Folk Song Cellar programme where she accompanied herself on two traditional songs: "Fir a Bhata" and "Green Grow the Laurels". Her earliest professional recordings were made a few months later in mid-1967 for the Saga label, featuring traditional songs and covers of folk contemporaries including her boyfriend of this period, the American singer-songwriter Jackson C. Frank. They were released on the albums Alex Campbell and His Friends and Sandy and Johnny with Johnny Silvo. These songs were collected on the 1970 album It's Sandy Denny where the tracks from Sandy and Johnny had been re-recorded with more accomplished vocals and guitar playing. The complete Saga studio recordings were issued on the 2005 compilation Where The Time Goes. By this time, she had abandoned her studies at art college and was devoting herself full-time to music. While she was performing at The Troubadour folk club, a member of the Strawbs heard her, and in 1967, she was invited to join the band. She recorded one album with them in Denmark, which was released belatedly in 1973, credited to Sandy Denny and the Strawbs: All Our Own Work. The album includes an early solo version of her best-known (and widely recorded) composition, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" A demo of that song found its way into the hands of American singer Judy Collins, who chose to cover it as the title track of an album of her own, released in November 1968, thus giving Denny international exposure as a songwriter before she had become widely known as a singer. From Fairport to Fotheringay After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late 1960s, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. Solo career and final years She then turned to recording her first solo album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Released in 1971, it is distinguished by its elusive lyrics and unconventional harmonies. Highlights included "Late November", inspired by a dream and the death of Fairport band member Martin Lamble, and "Next Time Around" a cryptogram about Jackson C. Frank, one of her many portraits in song. Sandy, with a cover photograph by David Bailey, followed in 1972 and was the first of her albums to be produced by Trevor Lucas. As well as introducing eight new original compositions, the album marked her last recording of a traditional song, "The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood" (words by Richard Fariña), with Denny's ambitious multi-tracked vocal arrangement inspired by the Ensemble of the Bulgarian Republic. Melody Maker readers twice voted her the "Best British Female Singer", in 1970 and 1971 and, together with contemporaries including Richard Thompson and Ashley Hutchings, she participated in a one-off project called the Bunch to record a collection of rock and roll era standards released under the title of Rock On. In 1971, Denny duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore", which was included on Led Zeppelin's 1971 album (Led Zeppelin IV); she was the only guest vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin album. In 1972 Denny had a small cameo on Lou Reizner's symphonic arrangement of the Who's rock opera Tommy. Her brief appearance was at the end of the track "It's a Boy", which also featured vocals from Pete Townshend. In 1973, she married long-term boyfriend and producer Trevor Lucas and recorded a third solo album, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz. The songs continued to detail many of her personal preoccupations: loss, loneliness, fear of the dark, the passing of time and the changing seasons. The album contained one of her best loved compositions, "Solo", and featured a cover image by Gered Mankowitz. In 1974, she returned to Fairport Convention (of which her husband was by then a member) for a world tour (captured on the 1974 album Fairport Live Convention) and a studio album, Rising for the Moon in 1975. Although her development as a soloist and songwriter had taken her further away from the folk roots direction that the band had pursued since Liege & Lief, seven of the eleven tracks on Rising for the Moon were either written or co-written by her. Denny and Lucas left Fairport Convention at the end of 1975 and embarked on what was to become her final album Rendezvous. Released in 1977, the album sold poorly and Denny was subsequently dropped by Island Records. Having relocated to the village of Byfield in Northamptonshire in the mid-seventies, Denny gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Georgia, in July 1977. A UK tour to promote Rendezvous in autumn 1977 marked her final public appearances. The closing night at the Royalty Theatre in London on 27 November 1977 was recorded for a live album, Gold Dust, which, because of technical problems in the recording of the electric guitar, was belatedly released in 1998 after most of the guitars had been re-recorded by Jerry Donahue. Death Linda Thompson would later note that Denny "really started going downhill in 1976" and demonstrated increasing levels of both manic and depressive behaviour. Learning that she was pregnant did little to mellow Denny's reckless lifestyle, which was heightened by increasing depression, mood swings and the unravelling of her "tumultuous" marriage to Trevor Lucas. She abused drugs and alcohol while pregnant with her daughter, Georgia, who was born prematurely in July 1977. Much like her moods, Denny's interest towards her daughter appeared to oscillate between obsessive and unconcerned; friends recalled both frantic, middle-of-the-night phone calls about teething, as well as Denny "crashing the car and leaving the baby in the pub and all sorts of stuff". Friends would later note that Denny had a history of purposely throwing herself off bar stools and down flights of stairs in order to get a reaction. Several remembered this behaviour as "Sandy's party trick", while Dave Pegg's wife Chris stated, "She certainly did it in my house and it could be a very dramatic gesture, like self-harming. She could do it without hurting herself usually but I had a feeling there would be one time too many." Those who knew Denny said that her increasing level of alcohol abuse in the last years of her life led to an increasing number of falls (both accidental and deliberate), resulting in a growing number of injuries. In late March 1978, while on holiday with her parents and baby Georgia in Cornwall, Denny was injured when she fell down a staircase and hit her head on concrete. Following the incident, she suffered from intense headaches; a doctor prescribed her the painkiller dextropropoxyphene, a drug known to have fatal side effects when mixed with alcohol. On 1 April, several days after the fall in Cornwall, Denny performed a charity concert at Byfield. The final song she performed was "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" At some unknown point during the first half of April 1978, Denny suffered yet another major fall at her home in Byfield. On 13 April, concerned about his wife's erratic behaviour and fearing for his daughter's safety, Trevor Lucas left the UK and returned to his native Australia with their child, leaving Denny without telling her. He sold their Austin Princess car in order to raise funds for the journey. On discovering Lucas' departure, Denny went to stay at the home of her friend Miranda Ward. During this time, Denny apparently set up an appointment to speak with a doctor about her headaches, and also intended to get advice about her alcohol addiction. At some point after 8 am on 17 April, Denny fell into a coma. Ward was out of the house at the time, and had asked her friend Jon Cole (of the band The Movies) to check in on Denny. Cole entered the home at 3 pm, and found Denny unconscious at the foot of the staircase which led to the second floor of the house. She was rushed by ambulance to Queen Mary's Hospital in nearby Roehampton. On 19 April, she was transferred to Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon. After receiving news that Denny was in a coma, Lucas returned from Australia. Upon his arrival at the hospital, doctors informed him that Denny was effectively brain-dead and her condition would not improve. He granted their recommendation to turn off life-support machines; however, just ten minutes before this was to take place, at 7:50 pm on 21 April 1978, Sandy Denny died, without regaining consciousness. Her death was ruled to be the result of a traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage and blunt force trauma to her head. She was 31 years old. The funeral took place on 27 April 1978 at Putney Vale Cemetery. After the vicar had read Denny's favourite psalm, Psalm 23, a piper played "Flowers of the Forest", a traditional song commemorating the fallen of Flodden Field and one which had appeared on the 1970 Fairport album Full House. The inscription on her headstone reads: Posthumous releases Official releases Although Denny had a devoted following in her lifetime, she did not achieve mass market success. In the years since her death, her reputation has grown. A four-album box set entitled Who Knows Where the Time Goes? (1985) was produced by her widower Trevor Lucas and Joe Boyd and included a number of rare and previously unreleased tracks by Denny, either solo or with Fairport Convention (1968, 1969, 1974) and Fotheringay (1970). This was the first public indication that a large cache of unreleased material existed. A one-disc subset of these recordings was subsequently issued on CD by Island in 1987 entitled The Best Of Sandy Denny. In 1987, a compilation of previously unreleased tracks recorded for the BBC by incarnations of Fairport including Denny was released on LP under the title Heyday, which was subsequently released on CD in 2001 and again, with extra tracks, in 2002; all tracks were later included, with others, on the 2007 4-CD box set Fairport Convention Live at the BBC (see below). The initial purpose of this compilation was to document the more "American" material performed live by the What We Did on Our Holidays lineup of the band that never made it to vinyl, while the re-releases added additional songs as performed by the Unhalfbricking and Liege and Lief lineups. Also in 1987, a VHS documentary, It All Comes 'Round Again, on Fairport Convention was released which contained excerpts of several audio recordings featuring Denny, plus a single poor-quality video recording of her singing her song "Solo" during her second stint with Fairport in 1974, as filmed by the University of Birmingham's "Guild TV" amateur organisation. The original tape of this recording has apparently been lost; however, "Like an Old Fashioned Waltz" does appear on the DVD documentary Sandy Denny Under Review (see below) and other tracks have been made available via YouTube in very poor quality. Over the period 1988–1994, the Australian "Friends of Fairport" issued a series of subscriber-only cassette compilations drawing in the main on previously unreleased tapes from Trevor Lucas' collection (as stored in his attic in fact). Attic Tracks (AT) 1 (1988) contained out-takes from Sandy as well as some Fairport material and a few bizarre extras; AT 2 (1989) contained only Trevor Lucas material, no Denny; AT 3 (1989) entitled First and Last Tracks comprised 1966–1967 home demos and rare radio tracks, as well as 9 "pre-overdub" songs from Denny's last concert at the Royalty Theatre, London, on 27 November 1977 (a partial alternative to the later, overdubbed CD release Gold Dust), and AT 4 (1994): Together Again comprised one side of Lucas and the other of Denny in the form of more home demos, studio outtakes, and 4 tracks from a 1973 BBC radio concert. A cut-down version of these tracks (18 songs) was subsequently compiled for CD release by the Australian label Raven Records in 1995 called Sandy Denny, Trevor Lucas and Friends: The Attic Tracks 1972–1984. In 1991, Joe Boyd issued a new version of Denny's All Our Own Work album with the Strawbs, called Sandy Denny and the Strawbs, on his Hannibal Records label. The album had strings added to some tracks, including "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" and further tracks with Denny on lead vocal. In 1997, a one-disc compilation of Denny's solo BBC recordings was released as The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 on Strange Fruit Records. Due to rights issues it was withdrawn on the day of release, thereby creating a highly collectible disc (up until the release of the comprehensive Live at the BBC box set in 2007). This release was followed in 1998 when Denny's final performance at the Royalty Theatre, entitled Gold Dust, was issued on CD, following a degree of re-recording and overdubbing of selected backing parts to replace reportedly unsatisfactory originals. In 1999, a single-disc compilation, Listen Listen – An Introduction to Sandy Denny, was released on Island Records comprising 17 previously released tracks taken from her four Island solo albums. No More Sad Refrains: The Anthology was released by Universal Records in 2000. When first released, this compilation had several rare tracks, including "The Ballad of Easy Rider" from the Liege and Lief sessions, "Learning the Game" and "When Will I Be Loved" from the Bunch album Rock On, "Here in Silence" and "Man of Iron" from the Pass of Arms soundtrack, and a previously unissued demo of "Stranger to Himself". In 2002, a previously unreleased, 2-CD live US concert recording by Fairport Convention from 1974 featuring Denny was released on the Burning Airlines label. Entitled Before The Moon, it originated from a radio broadcast from Ebbets Field in Denver, Colorado, on 23/24 May 1974. The second disc was a limited release bonus with the original release comprising the second set from the same concert. This recording was re-released in shortened form as a single disc in 2011 on the It's About Music label entitled Fairport Convention with Sandy Denny: Ebbets Field 1974. Also in 2002, the American A&M Records issued a budget-price "20th Century Masters" compilation called The Best of Sandy Denny with 10 tracks all available on Denny's studio albums. In 2004 a second comprehensive five-CD box set was released on the Fledg'ling record label called A Boxful of Treasures that included many unreleased recordings, in particular a whole disc of acoustic demos, many recorded at her home in Byfield that was highly prized amongst fans and critics alike, who had long asserted that her solo performances showed her work in its best light, revealing the true quality of her vocal style and compositions. Also in 2004, the Spectrum label issued a 16-track compilation of previously released material entitled The Collection: Chronological Covers & Concert Classics, including a mix of studio recordings and live excerpts from the Gold Dust Royalty concert. In 2005, remastered versions of all Denny's solo albums came out with bonus tracks. Also in 2005, a single CD compilation entitled Where the Time Goes: Sandy '67 was released on Castle Music containing all of Saga's Denny album tracks (including the alternative recordings on It's Sandy Denny), together with two self accompanied tracks from Denny's recordings with the Strawbs. A DVD documentary entitled Sandy Denny Under Review was released on the Sexy Intellectual label in 2006 which contained interviews with her contemporaries plus brief excerpts from her audio recordings, plus some short video clips including two of the poor quality video recordings with Fairport from Birmingham University (details given above), two with Fotheringay from German TV's Beat-Club (further details given below), and three solo excerpts from the only surviving BBC footage on One In Ten (details as given in the next item). A 4-disc box set, Sandy Denny Live at the BBC, came out in September 2007 containing (virtually) all of the known solo recordings made by Denny for that UK broadcaster including two complete concerts, one at the Paris Theatre in 1972 and one recorded for Sounds on Sunday in 1973, plus a range of other material spanning the years 1966–1973. Disc 3 of this set was a DVD containing surviving TV footage from a 1971 BBC One in Ten session comprising solo performances by Denny of "The North Star Grassman and the Ravens", "Crazy Lady Blues" and "Late November", along with digitised excerpts from her diaries, rare photos and a discography. A 1-disc subset of this box set entitled The Best of the BBC Recordings was subsequently released in 2008. A companion box set, Fairport Convention Live at the BBC, also came out in 2007 and covered equivalent live recordings by Fairport over the period 1968–1974, of which the first two discs (1968–1970) contain examples from Denny's time with that group. In 2008, Jerry Donahue completed the unfinished second Fotheringay album begun in the autumn of 1970. It was released to general acclaim as Fotheringay 2 and contained some notable Denny performances, in particular earlier versions of two Denny compositions, "Late November" and "John the Gun", and performances of the traditional songs "Gypsy Davey" and "Wild Mountain Thyme". Also in 2008, Island Remasters issued a double CD entitled The Music Weaver (Sandy Denny Remembered) which contained a mix of better known tracks and less well known demos and live recordings, previously released but not in companion with studio sessions. This compilation is also one of the very few to contain the Led Zeppelin track "The Battle Of Evermore" which features a rare guest appearance by Denny. In 2010, a large 19-CD retrospective box set, simply titled Sandy Denny, was released by Universal/Island Records in a limited edition of 3,000. It contained Denny's entire catalogue of studio recordings, including her work with the Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay and as a solo artist. The compilation also included a large number of outtakes, demos, live recordings, radio sessions and interviews. The box set was released to good reviews, including a 5-star review in Uncut and a 4-star review in The Guardian. In late 2010, Thea Gilmore was commissioned by Denny's estate, in conjunction with Island Records, to write melodies to unrecorded lyrics found in Denny's papers. The resulting album, Don't Stop Singing, was released in November 2011 to generally good notices, including 4-star reviews in The Independent and The Guardian among others. On 21 April 2012, the single "London" was released as an exclusive Record Store Day 7″ single. Further recordings were released in 2011, including a German recording of Fotheringay in concert released as Essen 1970 on the Garden of Delights label. The performance was remastered by original band member Jerry Donahue. This release was followed by 19 Rupert Street, a home recording of a rehearsal featuring Sandy and Alex Campbell recorded at his flat in August 1967. This release is notable for the fact that Sandy performs a number of tracks that are not available in any other versions, including a cover of "Fairytale Lullaby" by John Martyn. This CD was put out by Sandy's former Strawbs bandmate Dave Cousins on his Witchwood label. Two-disc "Deluxe Editions" of Denny's album reissues appeared in 2011–2012 with additional tracks; the 2012 Deluxe Edition of Sandy included a previously unreleased eight-song solo set from her 1973 U.S. tour recorded at Ebbet's Field in Denver, Colorado. A similar two-disc reissue of Fairport Convention's Rising for the Moon also included, for the first time, the complete 1974 L.A. Troubadour performance of Fairport with Denny back on board, prior to the official announcement of her re-joining the group. On account of unprecedented demand for, and exhaustion of supply of the limited edition 19-CD set cited above, in October 2012 a limited edition 4-CD version was released entitled The Notes and The Words: A Collection of Demos and Rarities, containing "75 songs that represent the cream of the rarities, demos and outtakes from the box set". Limited to 3,500 copies, this compilation is also now out-of-print. In 2013, Spectrum records issued a single-disc CD entitled The Lady – The Essential Sandy Denny that comprised 15 previously issued tracks, generally from Denny's well known albums. 2014 saw the release of another Fairport live U.S. radio broadcast from their 1974 tour with Denny, on RockBeat Records, entitled Live 1974 (My Father's Place), comprising 11 live tracks, most featuring Denny, recorded at the New York rock club My Father's Place. A four-disc Fotheringay retrospective, Nothing More: The Collected Fotheringay, was released on 30 March 2015. This is the most comprehensive compilation of the group's recordings, and contains, in addition to all the tracks on Fotheringay and Fotheringay 2 as both final studio versions and demos/alternate takes, the complete live concert set from Rotterdam in 1970 (including several previously unreleased tracks), seven Fotheringay tracks recorded in session for BBC radio (which had previously circulated only as bootlegs), plus a DVD disc containing four performances by Fotheringay recorded for the German Beat-Club TV series in 1970, which considerably augment the otherwise sparse known TV footage of Denny in particular. May 2016 saw the release of a 2-CD compilation, I've Always Kept A Unicorn – The Acoustic Sandy Denny which collected together many previously released, but dispersed, acoustic and/or demo versions of songs better known from their album counterparts, as well as three previously unreleased demos (with Linda Thompson, at the time Linda Peters) from 1972's Rock On sessions by one-off band The Bunch. A 7-CD box set by Fairport Convention entitled Come All Ye – The First 10 Years was released in July 2017 and contains a small number of additional, previously unreleased demos and alternate takes featuring Denny during her first tenure with the band over the period 1968–1969. Tracks not previously available include versions of Joni Mitchell's Eastern Rain, an a capella version of Nottamun Town, alternative takes of Autopsy and Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and a rehearsal version of The Deserter. Unofficial releases and audience tapes In addition to the authorised material listed above, a number unofficial/unauthorised compilations exist plus a range of audience recordings of varying quality, none of which would likely see the light of day as commercial issues but are of interest to a sector of Denny's audience on either historic or aesthetic grounds, often providing alternative views of songs known otherwise only from their commercially released versions. The first available unauthorised/bootleg CDs available in the 1980s and 1990s comprised principally off-air and other obscure material under such titles as Borrowed Thyme, Poems from Alexandra, Dark the Night, Wild Mountain Thyme and One Last Sad Refrain; such compilations are now largely superseded by the subsequent availability of most of the off-air material in much better quality as official releases as described above. Of more enduring interest are audience tapes of shows of which no "official" tapes survive. These include some early shows by Fairport Convention; a performance by Fotheringay at the 1970 Tenth National Jazz and Blues Festival, held at Plumpton Race Track, Streat, East Sussex, England; "solo" shows by Denny (on occasion with a small band including, among others, Richard Thompson) at the 1971 Lincoln Folk Festival and at the Eltham Well Hall Open Theatre in 1972; performances from York University and Guildhall, Newcastle upon Tyne, also in 1972; an early 1972 U.S. performance from The Bitter End in New York; and several sets (Birmingham and Croydon) from her final 1977 tour in addition to the officially released Gold Dust album; plus quite a large number of recordings strongly featuring Denny as part of the re-formed Fairport Convention over the period 1974–1975. The majority of these can be fairly easily located via relevant internet searches and, in addition, can be readily downloaded from archival music servers such as Sugarmegs (Sandy Denny concerts listed under "S": SugarMegs Streaming Server, Fairport and Fotheringay under "F": SugarMegs Streaming Server). A provisional list of such recordings as are known to exist, with details on where each can be accessed, is available here. Legacy Estate and family After relocating to Australia and remarrying, Trevor Lucas died of a heart attack in 1989. Denny's estate is now managed by Lucas' widow, Elizabeth Hurtt-Lucas. A number of otherwise unreleased recordings of Sandy Denny from his collection have subsequently been the basis for posthumous releases of Denny's work including those on The Attic Tracks and elsewhere. Sandy Denny's daughter, Georgia, has rarely spoken about her mother in a public forum and in the mid-2000s declined an invitation to write the liner notes for Sandy Denny Live at the BBC. However, in 2006 she flew to Britain from Australia to accept on her mother's behalf the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards award for Most Influential Folk Album of All Time, which was given for Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief. Georgia gave birth to twin daughters on 29 April 1997, and a tribute album, Georgia on Our Mind, featuring many of Sandy Denny's former bandmates and friends, was compiled in the children's honour. She also administers a Facebook page "Sandy Denny and Family" dedicated to her mother's memory and more recently, under the name Georgia Katt, has released some of her own DJ-based music. Tributes Since her death, many tributes have been made to Denny, both in music and elsewhere. Dave Pegg of Fairport Convention recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on his 1983 solo album The Cocktail Cowboy Goes It Alone. Dave Cousins of the Strawbs wrote "Ringing Down the Years" in memory of Denny shortly after her death. Songs more specific to the death were Bert Jansch's "Where Did My Life Go" and Richard Thompson's "Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?" Fellow Brit folk pioneers Spriguns changed the title of their 1978 album to Magic Lady after hearing of Denny's death while recording. In 1998, a variety of Daylily was named after her. Denny's songs have been covered by numerous artists in the years since her death. Some of the notable acts to have covered her music include Yo La Tengo, former Marillion frontman Fish, who covered "Solo" on his album Songs from the Mirror, Cat Power, Judy Collins, Nanci Griffith and Nina Simone. Kate Bush mentioned Denny in the lyric of "Blow Away (For Bill)", as one of the musicians to greet Bill in Heaven. "Blow Away (For Bill)" is the third track on Bush's 1980 album Never for Ever. In 1984, Clann Eadair released the single "A tribute to Sandy Denny", featuring Phil Lynott on vocals. Several radio specials have been produced about Denny's life and music, including BBC Radio 2's The Sandy Denny Story: Who Knows Where the Time Goes. In 2007, Denny's song "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" also received BBC Radio 2's 2007 Folk Award for "Favourite Folk Track of All Time". In 2010, she was recognized by NPR in their 50 Great Voices special series. In April 2008, a tribute concert was held at The Troubadour in London, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Denny's death. Those taking part included Martin Carthy, Linda Thompson and Joe Boyd. A more extensive tribute was given later that year in December at the Southbank in the Queen Elizabeth Hall called The Lady: A Tribute to Sandy Denny with a band composed of members of Bellowhead, the evening featured a mix of young folk acts like Jim Moray and Lisa Knapp alongside those that had known and worked with Denny such as Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. These acts were joined by performers from outside the world of folk like PP Arnold and Marc Almond. The concert, which primarily featured songs written by Denny, received a four-star review in The Guardian. In May 2012 the Southbank concert was expanded into an eight date UK tour called The Lady: A Homage to Sandy Denny. The tour showcased Sandy's entire songbook taking in her work with Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, her solo career and the new songs completed by Thea Gilmore on her album Don't Stop Singing. The band was, once again, composed of members of Bellowhead. Other acts performing included the aforementioned Thea Gilmore and up-and-coming folk acts Lavinia Blackwall of Trembling Bells, Blair Dunlop and Sam Carter, alongside more established folk stars Maddy Prior, Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. The line-up was completed with performers not normally associated with the folk scene; Green Gartside, Joan Wasser (also known as Joan As Police Woman), and PP Arnold. The tour was well received, obtaining a four-star review in The Times. The London concert at the Barbican was filmed for BBC4, and broadcast in a 90-minute programme titled The Songs of Sandy Denny in November 2012. In the 2012 Irish film Silence (Harvest Films & South Wind Blows), "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" is used during the film and final credits. In April 2016 Denny was inducted into the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards Hall of Fame. Alela Diane recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on her album Cusp, released in February 2018. The song reflects on Denny's final tragic days and her orphaned baby daughter. Discography Solo studio albums The North Star Grassman and the Ravens (1971) Sandy (1972) Like an Old Fashioned Waltz (1974) Rendezvous (1977) Solo live albums The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 (1997) Gold Dust (1998) (live recording from final tour, 1977) Live at the BBC (2007 4-disc compilation) Sandy – Deluxe edition, 2012 – includes "Live at Ebbetts Field" (previously unreleased concert on disc 2) With others Denny's collaborations with other artists, including with Alex Campbell, The Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, and The Bunch, together with numerous posthumous releases and compilation albums, are detailed further on the Sandy Denny discography page. References and notes General Further reading Mick Houghton. I've Always Kept a Unicorn – The Biography of Sandy Denny. Faber & Faber, 2015; Clinton Heylin. No More Sad Refrains – The Life and Times of Sandy Denny. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Clinton Heylin. Gypsy Love Songs & Sad Refrains – The Recordings of Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny. Labour of Love Productions, 1989. Colin Larkin. The Guinness Who's Who of Folk Music. Guinness Publishing Ltd; Jim Irvin. Angel of Avalon. MOJO Magazine, August 1998. Colin Harper, Trevor Hodgett. Irish Folk, Traditional & Blues: A Secret History. Cherry Red, 2005; Pamela Murray Winters. No Thought of Leaving: A life of Sandy Denny. 2000. (Unpublished). Brian Hinton, Geoff Wall. Ashley Hutchings: The Guv'nor & the Rise of Folk Rock. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Patrick Humphries. Meet On The Ledge: The Classic Years 1967–1975. Virgin Books, 1997; Patrick Humphries. Richard Thompson: Strange Affair – The Biography. Virgin Books, 1996; Philip Ward, "Sandy Denny: A Thirtieth Anniversary", R2 (Rock'n'Reel) 2(9), May/June 2008. Philip Ward, Sandy Denny: Reflections on Her Music''. Matador, 2011; External links Official website Homage to Sandy Denny Dedicated to the memory of Sandy Denny Sandy Denny website 1947 births 1978 deaths 20th-century English singers 20th-century English women singers A&M Records artists Accidental deaths from falls Accidental deaths in London Deaths by intracerebral hemorrhage Alumni of Kingston College (England) British folk rock musicians Burials at Putney Vale Cemetery English folk singers English people of Scottish descent English women singer-songwriters Fairport Convention members Women rock singers Fotheringay members Island Records artists People from Byfield, Northamptonshire People from Wimbledon, London Singers from London Strawbs members The Bunch members	true	[ "Christopher Julian Leslie (born 15 December 1956 in Banbury, Oxfordshire, England) is a British folk rock musician. He joined The Fairport Convention in 1997.\n\nEarly years\n\nLeslie grew up in Banbury, Oxfordshire. His brother John steered him toward The Watersons' Frost and Fire, Dave Swarbrick, and The Corries. In 1969 he began to teach himself fiddle and modelled himself on the fiddle-playing of Dave Swarbrick of Fairport Convention, Peter Knight of Steeleye Span, and Barry Dransfield.\n\nLeslie made his first recording at the age of 16, with a Banbury-based folk rock band and then went on to forge a successful career around the folk clubs with his brother John - cutting their first album, The Ship of Time in 1976. During this period he was also the fiddle player for The Hookey Band and a member of the morris dancers at Adderbury. It was around this time that he first came to the attention of Fairport's Dave Pegg.\n\nFrom 1981-1983 Chris Leslie studied violin making, under the watchful eye of maker Patrick Jowett, at the Newark School of Violin Making in Nottinghamshire, England. He currently plays the second fiddle he made at Newark on stage.\n\nSession work \n\nSince then he has worked with Whippersnapper, the Albion Band, All About Eve, Simon Mayor and Ian Anderson (of Jethro Tull). In 1981 he contributed to a cassette tape produced by CND. It was called Demo Tape and had limited distribution. Also on the tape were songs by Fairport Convention. In 1983 he contributed to More Demo Tapes, again a cassette for CND. He accompanied Steve Ashley on the song \"Down By the Embankment\" on the album All Through the Year (1991). This was a compilation of original tracks. He appeared on People on the Highway (Bert Jansch tribute album, 2000). There were other appearances on Steve Ashley albums (see discography). In 2003, Chris played violin on several tracks from Mostly Autumn's album Passengers. In late 2007 he recorded violin and mandolin parts on Dan Crisp's debut album Far From Here.\n\nWith Fairport and solo albums \nIn 1997 he joined Fairport Convention as singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. He has recorded five solo albums - The Flow, The Gift, Dancing Days, Origins, Turquoise Tales and Fiddle Back. At first sight Dancing Days appears to be a Fairport Convention album, as it features Simon Nicol, Dave Pegg, Ashley Hutchings and Ric Sanders. However, each of these artists appears only in a sequence of duos with Leslie. He has also recorded collaborations with Ashley Hutchings including Grandson of Morris On .\n\nChris also takes part in an annual Christmas tour with St Agnes Fountain and also takes part in \"A Feast of Fiddles\" - a collaboration with Peter Knight, Tom Leary (The Hookey Band), Ian Cutler, Phil Beer (Show of Hands) and Brian McNeill (The Battlefield Band).\n\nPersonal life \nHe is Buddhist, a vegetarian, and a teetotaler.\n\nDiscography\n\nSolo\n 1994 - The Gift\n 1997 - The Flow \n 2004 - Dancing Days \n 2013 - Origins\n 2015 - Turquoise Tales\n 2020 - Fiddle Back\n\nIn Groups\n 1985 - Whippersnapper: Promises \n 1987 - Whippersnapper: Tsubo \n 1988 - Whippersnapper: These Foolish Strings \n 1990 - Whippersnapper: Fortune \n 1991 - Whippersnapper: Stories \n 1996 - The Albion Band: Demi Paradise \n 1997 - Fairport Convention: Who Knows Where the Time Goes? \n 1999 - Fairport Convention: The Wood and the Wire \n 2001 - St Agnes Fountain: Acoustic Carols for Christmas \n 2001 - Fairport Convention: XXXV \n 2002 - Morris On Band: Grandson of Morris On \n 2002 - St Agnes Fountain: Comfort and Joy \n 2004 - Feast of Fiddles: Nicely Wrong \n 2004 - Fairport Convention: Over the Next Hill \n 2006 - St Agnes Fountain: The White Xmas Album \n 2007 - Fairport Convention: Sense of Occasion \n 2008 - St Agnes Fountain: Soal Cake \n 2010 - Feast of Fiddles: Walk Before You Fly \n 2010 - St Agnes Fountain: Spirit of Christmas \n 2011 - Fairport Convention: Festival Bell\n 2012 - Fairport Convention: By Popular Request \n 2012 - St Agnes Fountain: Twelve Years of Christmas\n 2013 - Feast of Fiddles: Rise Above It \n 2014 - St Agnes Fountain: Christmas is Not Far Away \n 2015 - Fairport Convention: Myths and Heroes\n 2017 - Fairport Convention: 50:50@50\n 2017 - Feast of Fiddles: Sleight of Elbow\n 2017 - St Agnes Fountain: 25/12\n 2020 - Fairport Convention: Shuffle and Go\n\nAppearances with Steve Ashley\n1999 - The Test of Time \n2001 - Everyday Lives \n2006 - Live in Concert\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nThe Hookey Band\n, including two written and performed by Chris Leslie\nWebsite of Fairport Convention\nChris Leslie on CND tapes\n\n1956 births\nLiving people\nPeople from Banbury\nEnglish folk musicians\nEnglish fiddlers\nBritish male violinists\nFairport Convention members\nBritish folk rock musicians\n21st-century violinists\n21st-century British male musicians\nThe Albion Band members\nWhippersnapper (band) members", "Woodworm Records was a record label created in 1979 to enable the British folk-rock band Fairport Convention to release their album Farewell, Farewell. The album was a recording of performances taken from the band's 1979 farewell tour. The impending break-up of the band had followed medical advice given to fiddle-player Dave Swarbrick to save his hearing by playing no more amplified music. As there was no record label willing to release the recording, bass guitarist Dave Pegg and his wife Christine formed their own label to release the album.\n\nWoodworm Records soon grew and released albums by Fairport and other artists such as Dave Swarbrick and Steve Ashley. During 2004 the Peggs were divorced, resulting in the sale of studio. The record label was thus put on hold. Members of Fairport Convention decided to form the new label Matty Grooves Records to continue the work of Woodworm Records.\n\nAssociated with the label, and especially with Fairport Convention in recent years, are Woodworm Recording Studios, situated at Barford St. Michael in Oxfordshire, where other artists, including Jethro Tull and Richard Thompson, have also recorded.\n\nSee also \n List of record labels\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Official website: Fairport Convention\n\nBritish record labels\nRecord labels established in 1979\nRecord labels disestablished in 2004\nVanity record labels\nRock record labels\n1979 establishments in England" ]
[ "Sandy Denny", "From Fairport to Fotheringay", "When was she in the band Fairport Convention?", "Denny became the obvious choice." ]	C_e6cc2f78b77b4fcab1029b8e527f1a13_0	who else was in the band with her?	2	Who else was in Fairport Convention other than Denny?	Sandy Denny	After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late sixties, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. CANNOTANSWER	Simon Nicol,	Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny (6 January 1947 – 21 April 1978) was an English singer-songwriter who was lead singer of the British folk rock band Fairport Convention. She has been described as "the pre-eminent British folk rock singer". After briefly working with the Strawbs, Denny joined Fairport Convention in 1968, remaining with them until 1969. She formed the short-lived band Fotheringay in 1970, before focusing on a solo career. Between 1971 and 1977, Denny released four solo albums: The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, Sandy, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz and Rendezvous. She also duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore" for Led Zeppelin's album Led Zeppelin IV in 1971. Denny died in 1978 at the age of 31 due to injuries and health issues related to alcohol abuse. Music publications Uncut and Mojo have described Denny as Britain's finest female singer-songwriter. Her composition "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" has been recorded by Judy Collins, Eva Cassidy, Nina Simone, 10,000 Maniacs and Cat Power. Her recorded work has been the subject of numerous reissues, along with a wealth of previously unreleased material which has appeared over the more than 40 years since her death, including a 19-CD box set released in November 2010. Childhood Denny was born on 6 January 1947 at Nelson Hospital, Kingston Road, Merton Park, London, to Neil and Edna Denny. She studied classical piano as a child. Her paternal grandfather was from Dundee, and her paternal grandmother was a Scots Gaelic speaker and singer of traditional songs. At an early age Denny showed an interest in singing, although her strict parents were reluctant to believe there was a living to be made from it. She attended Coombe Girls' School in New Malden; after leaving school she began training as a nurse at the Royal Brompton Hospital. Early career Denny's nursing career proved short-lived. In the meantime she had secured a place on a foundation course at Kingston College of Art, which she took up in September 1965, becoming involved with the folk club on campus. Her contemporaries at the college included guitarist and future member of Pentangle, John Renbourn. After her first public appearance at the Barge in Kingston upon Thames, Denny began working the folk club circuit in the evenings with an American-influenced repertoire, including songs by Tom Paxton, together with traditional folk songs. Denny made the first of many appearances for the BBC at Cecil Sharp House on 2 December 1966 on the Folk Song Cellar programme where she accompanied herself on two traditional songs: "Fir a Bhata" and "Green Grow the Laurels". Her earliest professional recordings were made a few months later in mid-1967 for the Saga label, featuring traditional songs and covers of folk contemporaries including her boyfriend of this period, the American singer-songwriter Jackson C. Frank. They were released on the albums Alex Campbell and His Friends and Sandy and Johnny with Johnny Silvo. These songs were collected on the 1970 album It's Sandy Denny where the tracks from Sandy and Johnny had been re-recorded with more accomplished vocals and guitar playing. The complete Saga studio recordings were issued on the 2005 compilation Where The Time Goes. By this time, she had abandoned her studies at art college and was devoting herself full-time to music. While she was performing at The Troubadour folk club, a member of the Strawbs heard her, and in 1967, she was invited to join the band. She recorded one album with them in Denmark, which was released belatedly in 1973, credited to Sandy Denny and the Strawbs: All Our Own Work. The album includes an early solo version of her best-known (and widely recorded) composition, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" A demo of that song found its way into the hands of American singer Judy Collins, who chose to cover it as the title track of an album of her own, released in November 1968, thus giving Denny international exposure as a songwriter before she had become widely known as a singer. From Fairport to Fotheringay After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late 1960s, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. Solo career and final years She then turned to recording her first solo album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Released in 1971, it is distinguished by its elusive lyrics and unconventional harmonies. Highlights included "Late November", inspired by a dream and the death of Fairport band member Martin Lamble, and "Next Time Around" a cryptogram about Jackson C. Frank, one of her many portraits in song. Sandy, with a cover photograph by David Bailey, followed in 1972 and was the first of her albums to be produced by Trevor Lucas. As well as introducing eight new original compositions, the album marked her last recording of a traditional song, "The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood" (words by Richard Fariña), with Denny's ambitious multi-tracked vocal arrangement inspired by the Ensemble of the Bulgarian Republic. Melody Maker readers twice voted her the "Best British Female Singer", in 1970 and 1971 and, together with contemporaries including Richard Thompson and Ashley Hutchings, she participated in a one-off project called the Bunch to record a collection of rock and roll era standards released under the title of Rock On. In 1971, Denny duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore", which was included on Led Zeppelin's 1971 album (Led Zeppelin IV); she was the only guest vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin album. In 1972 Denny had a small cameo on Lou Reizner's symphonic arrangement of the Who's rock opera Tommy. Her brief appearance was at the end of the track "It's a Boy", which also featured vocals from Pete Townshend. In 1973, she married long-term boyfriend and producer Trevor Lucas and recorded a third solo album, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz. The songs continued to detail many of her personal preoccupations: loss, loneliness, fear of the dark, the passing of time and the changing seasons. The album contained one of her best loved compositions, "Solo", and featured a cover image by Gered Mankowitz. In 1974, she returned to Fairport Convention (of which her husband was by then a member) for a world tour (captured on the 1974 album Fairport Live Convention) and a studio album, Rising for the Moon in 1975. Although her development as a soloist and songwriter had taken her further away from the folk roots direction that the band had pursued since Liege & Lief, seven of the eleven tracks on Rising for the Moon were either written or co-written by her. Denny and Lucas left Fairport Convention at the end of 1975 and embarked on what was to become her final album Rendezvous. Released in 1977, the album sold poorly and Denny was subsequently dropped by Island Records. Having relocated to the village of Byfield in Northamptonshire in the mid-seventies, Denny gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Georgia, in July 1977. A UK tour to promote Rendezvous in autumn 1977 marked her final public appearances. The closing night at the Royalty Theatre in London on 27 November 1977 was recorded for a live album, Gold Dust, which, because of technical problems in the recording of the electric guitar, was belatedly released in 1998 after most of the guitars had been re-recorded by Jerry Donahue. Death Linda Thompson would later note that Denny "really started going downhill in 1976" and demonstrated increasing levels of both manic and depressive behaviour. Learning that she was pregnant did little to mellow Denny's reckless lifestyle, which was heightened by increasing depression, mood swings and the unravelling of her "tumultuous" marriage to Trevor Lucas. She abused drugs and alcohol while pregnant with her daughter, Georgia, who was born prematurely in July 1977. Much like her moods, Denny's interest towards her daughter appeared to oscillate between obsessive and unconcerned; friends recalled both frantic, middle-of-the-night phone calls about teething, as well as Denny "crashing the car and leaving the baby in the pub and all sorts of stuff". Friends would later note that Denny had a history of purposely throwing herself off bar stools and down flights of stairs in order to get a reaction. Several remembered this behaviour as "Sandy's party trick", while Dave Pegg's wife Chris stated, "She certainly did it in my house and it could be a very dramatic gesture, like self-harming. She could do it without hurting herself usually but I had a feeling there would be one time too many." Those who knew Denny said that her increasing level of alcohol abuse in the last years of her life led to an increasing number of falls (both accidental and deliberate), resulting in a growing number of injuries. In late March 1978, while on holiday with her parents and baby Georgia in Cornwall, Denny was injured when she fell down a staircase and hit her head on concrete. Following the incident, she suffered from intense headaches; a doctor prescribed her the painkiller dextropropoxyphene, a drug known to have fatal side effects when mixed with alcohol. On 1 April, several days after the fall in Cornwall, Denny performed a charity concert at Byfield. The final song she performed was "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" At some unknown point during the first half of April 1978, Denny suffered yet another major fall at her home in Byfield. On 13 April, concerned about his wife's erratic behaviour and fearing for his daughter's safety, Trevor Lucas left the UK and returned to his native Australia with their child, leaving Denny without telling her. He sold their Austin Princess car in order to raise funds for the journey. On discovering Lucas' departure, Denny went to stay at the home of her friend Miranda Ward. During this time, Denny apparently set up an appointment to speak with a doctor about her headaches, and also intended to get advice about her alcohol addiction. At some point after 8 am on 17 April, Denny fell into a coma. Ward was out of the house at the time, and had asked her friend Jon Cole (of the band The Movies) to check in on Denny. Cole entered the home at 3 pm, and found Denny unconscious at the foot of the staircase which led to the second floor of the house. She was rushed by ambulance to Queen Mary's Hospital in nearby Roehampton. On 19 April, she was transferred to Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon. After receiving news that Denny was in a coma, Lucas returned from Australia. Upon his arrival at the hospital, doctors informed him that Denny was effectively brain-dead and her condition would not improve. He granted their recommendation to turn off life-support machines; however, just ten minutes before this was to take place, at 7:50 pm on 21 April 1978, Sandy Denny died, without regaining consciousness. Her death was ruled to be the result of a traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage and blunt force trauma to her head. She was 31 years old. The funeral took place on 27 April 1978 at Putney Vale Cemetery. After the vicar had read Denny's favourite psalm, Psalm 23, a piper played "Flowers of the Forest", a traditional song commemorating the fallen of Flodden Field and one which had appeared on the 1970 Fairport album Full House. The inscription on her headstone reads: Posthumous releases Official releases Although Denny had a devoted following in her lifetime, she did not achieve mass market success. In the years since her death, her reputation has grown. A four-album box set entitled Who Knows Where the Time Goes? (1985) was produced by her widower Trevor Lucas and Joe Boyd and included a number of rare and previously unreleased tracks by Denny, either solo or with Fairport Convention (1968, 1969, 1974) and Fotheringay (1970). This was the first public indication that a large cache of unreleased material existed. A one-disc subset of these recordings was subsequently issued on CD by Island in 1987 entitled The Best Of Sandy Denny. In 1987, a compilation of previously unreleased tracks recorded for the BBC by incarnations of Fairport including Denny was released on LP under the title Heyday, which was subsequently released on CD in 2001 and again, with extra tracks, in 2002; all tracks were later included, with others, on the 2007 4-CD box set Fairport Convention Live at the BBC (see below). The initial purpose of this compilation was to document the more "American" material performed live by the What We Did on Our Holidays lineup of the band that never made it to vinyl, while the re-releases added additional songs as performed by the Unhalfbricking and Liege and Lief lineups. Also in 1987, a VHS documentary, It All Comes 'Round Again, on Fairport Convention was released which contained excerpts of several audio recordings featuring Denny, plus a single poor-quality video recording of her singing her song "Solo" during her second stint with Fairport in 1974, as filmed by the University of Birmingham's "Guild TV" amateur organisation. The original tape of this recording has apparently been lost; however, "Like an Old Fashioned Waltz" does appear on the DVD documentary Sandy Denny Under Review (see below) and other tracks have been made available via YouTube in very poor quality. Over the period 1988–1994, the Australian "Friends of Fairport" issued a series of subscriber-only cassette compilations drawing in the main on previously unreleased tapes from Trevor Lucas' collection (as stored in his attic in fact). Attic Tracks (AT) 1 (1988) contained out-takes from Sandy as well as some Fairport material and a few bizarre extras; AT 2 (1989) contained only Trevor Lucas material, no Denny; AT 3 (1989) entitled First and Last Tracks comprised 1966–1967 home demos and rare radio tracks, as well as 9 "pre-overdub" songs from Denny's last concert at the Royalty Theatre, London, on 27 November 1977 (a partial alternative to the later, overdubbed CD release Gold Dust), and AT 4 (1994): Together Again comprised one side of Lucas and the other of Denny in the form of more home demos, studio outtakes, and 4 tracks from a 1973 BBC radio concert. A cut-down version of these tracks (18 songs) was subsequently compiled for CD release by the Australian label Raven Records in 1995 called Sandy Denny, Trevor Lucas and Friends: The Attic Tracks 1972–1984. In 1991, Joe Boyd issued a new version of Denny's All Our Own Work album with the Strawbs, called Sandy Denny and the Strawbs, on his Hannibal Records label. The album had strings added to some tracks, including "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" and further tracks with Denny on lead vocal. In 1997, a one-disc compilation of Denny's solo BBC recordings was released as The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 on Strange Fruit Records. Due to rights issues it was withdrawn on the day of release, thereby creating a highly collectible disc (up until the release of the comprehensive Live at the BBC box set in 2007). This release was followed in 1998 when Denny's final performance at the Royalty Theatre, entitled Gold Dust, was issued on CD, following a degree of re-recording and overdubbing of selected backing parts to replace reportedly unsatisfactory originals. In 1999, a single-disc compilation, Listen Listen – An Introduction to Sandy Denny, was released on Island Records comprising 17 previously released tracks taken from her four Island solo albums. No More Sad Refrains: The Anthology was released by Universal Records in 2000. When first released, this compilation had several rare tracks, including "The Ballad of Easy Rider" from the Liege and Lief sessions, "Learning the Game" and "When Will I Be Loved" from the Bunch album Rock On, "Here in Silence" and "Man of Iron" from the Pass of Arms soundtrack, and a previously unissued demo of "Stranger to Himself". In 2002, a previously unreleased, 2-CD live US concert recording by Fairport Convention from 1974 featuring Denny was released on the Burning Airlines label. Entitled Before The Moon, it originated from a radio broadcast from Ebbets Field in Denver, Colorado, on 23/24 May 1974. The second disc was a limited release bonus with the original release comprising the second set from the same concert. This recording was re-released in shortened form as a single disc in 2011 on the It's About Music label entitled Fairport Convention with Sandy Denny: Ebbets Field 1974. Also in 2002, the American A&M Records issued a budget-price "20th Century Masters" compilation called The Best of Sandy Denny with 10 tracks all available on Denny's studio albums. In 2004 a second comprehensive five-CD box set was released on the Fledg'ling record label called A Boxful of Treasures that included many unreleased recordings, in particular a whole disc of acoustic demos, many recorded at her home in Byfield that was highly prized amongst fans and critics alike, who had long asserted that her solo performances showed her work in its best light, revealing the true quality of her vocal style and compositions. Also in 2004, the Spectrum label issued a 16-track compilation of previously released material entitled The Collection: Chronological Covers & Concert Classics, including a mix of studio recordings and live excerpts from the Gold Dust Royalty concert. In 2005, remastered versions of all Denny's solo albums came out with bonus tracks. Also in 2005, a single CD compilation entitled Where the Time Goes: Sandy '67 was released on Castle Music containing all of Saga's Denny album tracks (including the alternative recordings on It's Sandy Denny), together with two self accompanied tracks from Denny's recordings with the Strawbs. A DVD documentary entitled Sandy Denny Under Review was released on the Sexy Intellectual label in 2006 which contained interviews with her contemporaries plus brief excerpts from her audio recordings, plus some short video clips including two of the poor quality video recordings with Fairport from Birmingham University (details given above), two with Fotheringay from German TV's Beat-Club (further details given below), and three solo excerpts from the only surviving BBC footage on One In Ten (details as given in the next item). A 4-disc box set, Sandy Denny Live at the BBC, came out in September 2007 containing (virtually) all of the known solo recordings made by Denny for that UK broadcaster including two complete concerts, one at the Paris Theatre in 1972 and one recorded for Sounds on Sunday in 1973, plus a range of other material spanning the years 1966–1973. Disc 3 of this set was a DVD containing surviving TV footage from a 1971 BBC One in Ten session comprising solo performances by Denny of "The North Star Grassman and the Ravens", "Crazy Lady Blues" and "Late November", along with digitised excerpts from her diaries, rare photos and a discography. A 1-disc subset of this box set entitled The Best of the BBC Recordings was subsequently released in 2008. A companion box set, Fairport Convention Live at the BBC, also came out in 2007 and covered equivalent live recordings by Fairport over the period 1968–1974, of which the first two discs (1968–1970) contain examples from Denny's time with that group. In 2008, Jerry Donahue completed the unfinished second Fotheringay album begun in the autumn of 1970. It was released to general acclaim as Fotheringay 2 and contained some notable Denny performances, in particular earlier versions of two Denny compositions, "Late November" and "John the Gun", and performances of the traditional songs "Gypsy Davey" and "Wild Mountain Thyme". Also in 2008, Island Remasters issued a double CD entitled The Music Weaver (Sandy Denny Remembered) which contained a mix of better known tracks and less well known demos and live recordings, previously released but not in companion with studio sessions. This compilation is also one of the very few to contain the Led Zeppelin track "The Battle Of Evermore" which features a rare guest appearance by Denny. In 2010, a large 19-CD retrospective box set, simply titled Sandy Denny, was released by Universal/Island Records in a limited edition of 3,000. It contained Denny's entire catalogue of studio recordings, including her work with the Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay and as a solo artist. The compilation also included a large number of outtakes, demos, live recordings, radio sessions and interviews. The box set was released to good reviews, including a 5-star review in Uncut and a 4-star review in The Guardian. In late 2010, Thea Gilmore was commissioned by Denny's estate, in conjunction with Island Records, to write melodies to unrecorded lyrics found in Denny's papers. The resulting album, Don't Stop Singing, was released in November 2011 to generally good notices, including 4-star reviews in The Independent and The Guardian among others. On 21 April 2012, the single "London" was released as an exclusive Record Store Day 7″ single. Further recordings were released in 2011, including a German recording of Fotheringay in concert released as Essen 1970 on the Garden of Delights label. The performance was remastered by original band member Jerry Donahue. This release was followed by 19 Rupert Street, a home recording of a rehearsal featuring Sandy and Alex Campbell recorded at his flat in August 1967. This release is notable for the fact that Sandy performs a number of tracks that are not available in any other versions, including a cover of "Fairytale Lullaby" by John Martyn. This CD was put out by Sandy's former Strawbs bandmate Dave Cousins on his Witchwood label. Two-disc "Deluxe Editions" of Denny's album reissues appeared in 2011–2012 with additional tracks; the 2012 Deluxe Edition of Sandy included a previously unreleased eight-song solo set from her 1973 U.S. tour recorded at Ebbet's Field in Denver, Colorado. A similar two-disc reissue of Fairport Convention's Rising for the Moon also included, for the first time, the complete 1974 L.A. Troubadour performance of Fairport with Denny back on board, prior to the official announcement of her re-joining the group. On account of unprecedented demand for, and exhaustion of supply of the limited edition 19-CD set cited above, in October 2012 a limited edition 4-CD version was released entitled The Notes and The Words: A Collection of Demos and Rarities, containing "75 songs that represent the cream of the rarities, demos and outtakes from the box set". Limited to 3,500 copies, this compilation is also now out-of-print. In 2013, Spectrum records issued a single-disc CD entitled The Lady – The Essential Sandy Denny that comprised 15 previously issued tracks, generally from Denny's well known albums. 2014 saw the release of another Fairport live U.S. radio broadcast from their 1974 tour with Denny, on RockBeat Records, entitled Live 1974 (My Father's Place), comprising 11 live tracks, most featuring Denny, recorded at the New York rock club My Father's Place. A four-disc Fotheringay retrospective, Nothing More: The Collected Fotheringay, was released on 30 March 2015. This is the most comprehensive compilation of the group's recordings, and contains, in addition to all the tracks on Fotheringay and Fotheringay 2 as both final studio versions and demos/alternate takes, the complete live concert set from Rotterdam in 1970 (including several previously unreleased tracks), seven Fotheringay tracks recorded in session for BBC radio (which had previously circulated only as bootlegs), plus a DVD disc containing four performances by Fotheringay recorded for the German Beat-Club TV series in 1970, which considerably augment the otherwise sparse known TV footage of Denny in particular. May 2016 saw the release of a 2-CD compilation, I've Always Kept A Unicorn – The Acoustic Sandy Denny which collected together many previously released, but dispersed, acoustic and/or demo versions of songs better known from their album counterparts, as well as three previously unreleased demos (with Linda Thompson, at the time Linda Peters) from 1972's Rock On sessions by one-off band The Bunch. A 7-CD box set by Fairport Convention entitled Come All Ye – The First 10 Years was released in July 2017 and contains a small number of additional, previously unreleased demos and alternate takes featuring Denny during her first tenure with the band over the period 1968–1969. Tracks not previously available include versions of Joni Mitchell's Eastern Rain, an a capella version of Nottamun Town, alternative takes of Autopsy and Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and a rehearsal version of The Deserter. Unofficial releases and audience tapes In addition to the authorised material listed above, a number unofficial/unauthorised compilations exist plus a range of audience recordings of varying quality, none of which would likely see the light of day as commercial issues but are of interest to a sector of Denny's audience on either historic or aesthetic grounds, often providing alternative views of songs known otherwise only from their commercially released versions. The first available unauthorised/bootleg CDs available in the 1980s and 1990s comprised principally off-air and other obscure material under such titles as Borrowed Thyme, Poems from Alexandra, Dark the Night, Wild Mountain Thyme and One Last Sad Refrain; such compilations are now largely superseded by the subsequent availability of most of the off-air material in much better quality as official releases as described above. Of more enduring interest are audience tapes of shows of which no "official" tapes survive. These include some early shows by Fairport Convention; a performance by Fotheringay at the 1970 Tenth National Jazz and Blues Festival, held at Plumpton Race Track, Streat, East Sussex, England; "solo" shows by Denny (on occasion with a small band including, among others, Richard Thompson) at the 1971 Lincoln Folk Festival and at the Eltham Well Hall Open Theatre in 1972; performances from York University and Guildhall, Newcastle upon Tyne, also in 1972; an early 1972 U.S. performance from The Bitter End in New York; and several sets (Birmingham and Croydon) from her final 1977 tour in addition to the officially released Gold Dust album; plus quite a large number of recordings strongly featuring Denny as part of the re-formed Fairport Convention over the period 1974–1975. The majority of these can be fairly easily located via relevant internet searches and, in addition, can be readily downloaded from archival music servers such as Sugarmegs (Sandy Denny concerts listed under "S": SugarMegs Streaming Server, Fairport and Fotheringay under "F": SugarMegs Streaming Server). A provisional list of such recordings as are known to exist, with details on where each can be accessed, is available here. Legacy Estate and family After relocating to Australia and remarrying, Trevor Lucas died of a heart attack in 1989. Denny's estate is now managed by Lucas' widow, Elizabeth Hurtt-Lucas. A number of otherwise unreleased recordings of Sandy Denny from his collection have subsequently been the basis for posthumous releases of Denny's work including those on The Attic Tracks and elsewhere. Sandy Denny's daughter, Georgia, has rarely spoken about her mother in a public forum and in the mid-2000s declined an invitation to write the liner notes for Sandy Denny Live at the BBC. However, in 2006 she flew to Britain from Australia to accept on her mother's behalf the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards award for Most Influential Folk Album of All Time, which was given for Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief. Georgia gave birth to twin daughters on 29 April 1997, and a tribute album, Georgia on Our Mind, featuring many of Sandy Denny's former bandmates and friends, was compiled in the children's honour. She also administers a Facebook page "Sandy Denny and Family" dedicated to her mother's memory and more recently, under the name Georgia Katt, has released some of her own DJ-based music. Tributes Since her death, many tributes have been made to Denny, both in music and elsewhere. Dave Pegg of Fairport Convention recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on his 1983 solo album The Cocktail Cowboy Goes It Alone. Dave Cousins of the Strawbs wrote "Ringing Down the Years" in memory of Denny shortly after her death. Songs more specific to the death were Bert Jansch's "Where Did My Life Go" and Richard Thompson's "Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?" Fellow Brit folk pioneers Spriguns changed the title of their 1978 album to Magic Lady after hearing of Denny's death while recording. In 1998, a variety of Daylily was named after her. Denny's songs have been covered by numerous artists in the years since her death. Some of the notable acts to have covered her music include Yo La Tengo, former Marillion frontman Fish, who covered "Solo" on his album Songs from the Mirror, Cat Power, Judy Collins, Nanci Griffith and Nina Simone. Kate Bush mentioned Denny in the lyric of "Blow Away (For Bill)", as one of the musicians to greet Bill in Heaven. "Blow Away (For Bill)" is the third track on Bush's 1980 album Never for Ever. In 1984, Clann Eadair released the single "A tribute to Sandy Denny", featuring Phil Lynott on vocals. Several radio specials have been produced about Denny's life and music, including BBC Radio 2's The Sandy Denny Story: Who Knows Where the Time Goes. In 2007, Denny's song "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" also received BBC Radio 2's 2007 Folk Award for "Favourite Folk Track of All Time". In 2010, she was recognized by NPR in their 50 Great Voices special series. In April 2008, a tribute concert was held at The Troubadour in London, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Denny's death. Those taking part included Martin Carthy, Linda Thompson and Joe Boyd. A more extensive tribute was given later that year in December at the Southbank in the Queen Elizabeth Hall called The Lady: A Tribute to Sandy Denny with a band composed of members of Bellowhead, the evening featured a mix of young folk acts like Jim Moray and Lisa Knapp alongside those that had known and worked with Denny such as Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. These acts were joined by performers from outside the world of folk like PP Arnold and Marc Almond. The concert, which primarily featured songs written by Denny, received a four-star review in The Guardian. In May 2012 the Southbank concert was expanded into an eight date UK tour called The Lady: A Homage to Sandy Denny. The tour showcased Sandy's entire songbook taking in her work with Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, her solo career and the new songs completed by Thea Gilmore on her album Don't Stop Singing. The band was, once again, composed of members of Bellowhead. Other acts performing included the aforementioned Thea Gilmore and up-and-coming folk acts Lavinia Blackwall of Trembling Bells, Blair Dunlop and Sam Carter, alongside more established folk stars Maddy Prior, Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. The line-up was completed with performers not normally associated with the folk scene; Green Gartside, Joan Wasser (also known as Joan As Police Woman), and PP Arnold. The tour was well received, obtaining a four-star review in The Times. The London concert at the Barbican was filmed for BBC4, and broadcast in a 90-minute programme titled The Songs of Sandy Denny in November 2012. In the 2012 Irish film Silence (Harvest Films & South Wind Blows), "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" is used during the film and final credits. In April 2016 Denny was inducted into the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards Hall of Fame. Alela Diane recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on her album Cusp, released in February 2018. The song reflects on Denny's final tragic days and her orphaned baby daughter. Discography Solo studio albums The North Star Grassman and the Ravens (1971) Sandy (1972) Like an Old Fashioned Waltz (1974) Rendezvous (1977) Solo live albums The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 (1997) Gold Dust (1998) (live recording from final tour, 1977) Live at the BBC (2007 4-disc compilation) Sandy – Deluxe edition, 2012 – includes "Live at Ebbetts Field" (previously unreleased concert on disc 2) With others Denny's collaborations with other artists, including with Alex Campbell, The Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, and The Bunch, together with numerous posthumous releases and compilation albums, are detailed further on the Sandy Denny discography page. References and notes General Further reading Mick Houghton. I've Always Kept a Unicorn – The Biography of Sandy Denny. Faber & Faber, 2015; Clinton Heylin. No More Sad Refrains – The Life and Times of Sandy Denny. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Clinton Heylin. Gypsy Love Songs & Sad Refrains – The Recordings of Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny. Labour of Love Productions, 1989. Colin Larkin. The Guinness Who's Who of Folk Music. Guinness Publishing Ltd; Jim Irvin. Angel of Avalon. MOJO Magazine, August 1998. Colin Harper, Trevor Hodgett. Irish Folk, Traditional & Blues: A Secret History. Cherry Red, 2005; Pamela Murray Winters. No Thought of Leaving: A life of Sandy Denny. 2000. (Unpublished). Brian Hinton, Geoff Wall. Ashley Hutchings: The Guv'nor & the Rise of Folk Rock. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Patrick Humphries. Meet On The Ledge: The Classic Years 1967–1975. Virgin Books, 1997; Patrick Humphries. Richard Thompson: Strange Affair – The Biography. Virgin Books, 1996; Philip Ward, "Sandy Denny: A Thirtieth Anniversary", R2 (Rock'n'Reel) 2(9), May/June 2008. Philip Ward, Sandy Denny: Reflections on Her Music''. Matador, 2011; External links Official website Homage to Sandy Denny Dedicated to the memory of Sandy Denny Sandy Denny website 1947 births 1978 deaths 20th-century English singers 20th-century English women singers A&M Records artists Accidental deaths from falls Accidental deaths in London Deaths by intracerebral hemorrhage Alumni of Kingston College (England) British folk rock musicians Burials at Putney Vale Cemetery English folk singers English people of Scottish descent English women singer-songwriters Fairport Convention members Women rock singers Fotheringay members Island Records artists People from Byfield, Northamptonshire People from Wimbledon, London Singers from London Strawbs members The Bunch members	true	[ "Betty Bennett (October 23, 1921 – April 7, 2020) was an American jazz and big band singer.\n\nBennett was born in October 1921 in Lincoln, Nebraska, United States. Her first major signing was with the Claude Thornhill band in 1946, the band in which her husband, bassist Iggy Shevak, was playing. Shortly after her husband left to join Alvino Rey, Bennett followed him there. In 1949, she joined Charlie Ventura's band, before going on to join Benny Goodman in 1959.\n\nHer second album, Nobody Else but Me, featured arrangements by Shorty Rogers and her second husband, André Previn. Bennett later married guitarist Mundell Lowe in 1975. He died in December 2017 at the age of 95.\n\nBennett died in April 2020 at the age of 98.\n\nDiscography\n Betty Bennett Sings Previn Arrangements (Trend, 1953) \n Nobody Else but Me (Atlantic, 1955)\n Blue Sunday (Kapp, 1957)\n I Love to Sing with Andre Previn (United Artists, 1959)\n The Song Is You (Fresh Sound, 1992)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Betty Bennett Interview NAMM Oral History Library (2018)\n\n1921 births\n2020 deaths\nAmerican women jazz singers\nAmerican jazz singers\nPlace of birth missing\nPrevin family\n21st-century American women", "\"Somebody Else's Life\" is a song recorded by British-Irish girl group the Saturdays for their fourth studio album (fifth overall), Living for the Weekend (2013). The song was written by band members Una Healy, Frankie Bridge, Rochelle Humes, Vanessa White and Mollie King as well as Lucie Silvas, Judie Tzuke and Charlie Holmes co-writing the song with the band members. The songs genre is mainly pop, although the song contains a hint dance. When creating the song, the band wanted to create something \"amazing\", \"crazy\" and \"very pop\". The song was chosen to be the opening theme for the band's reality television show Chasing the Saturdays.\n\nBackground and recording\n\"Somebody Else's life was the first song recorded when the band arrived in the United States to record their fourth studio album, Living for the Weekend. The band said they were looking to go back to their \"roots\" with the song and record a song which related to their first studio album, Chasing Lights (2009). They were looking to great a song that was \"amazing\", \"crazy\" and \"very pop\" like they were known for back in their native, the United Kingdom. In late October 2012, it was revealed to the public that the Saturdays were in talks to feature in their own reality television programme. Although, they had already done this previously with The Saturdays: 24/7 broadcast through ITV2. It was later revealed that American television network, E! were interested in showing their show programme. It was announced that they did sign a contract with the network and Chasing the Saturdays would be broadcast through E! internationally. It was later revealed that the band had signed a joint record deal with Island Def Jam Records and Mercury Records, with a view to releasing future material internationally mainly the United States and Canada. While the band were filming their reality television in United States the band began working on new music and collaborating with a number of producers. Rodney Jerkins, who is known as \"Darkchild\" was revealed to be included in the band's fourth studio album. \"Somebody Else's Life is the opening theme for the band's reality show Chasing the Saturdays.\n\nCommercial performance\nAfter the release of Living for the Weekend, \"Somebody Else's Life\" debuted on Official Charts Company UK Singles Chart at number 94, becoming the Saturdays twenty-third top 100 on the chart.\n\nLive performance\n\n\"Somebody Else's Life\" was included on the set list of The Greatest Hits! Live Tour. During their Chasing the Saturdays row, the band performed the song to Island Def Jam and Mercury Records executives, which led to them signing a US record deal.\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2013 songs\nSongs written by Judie Tzuke\nSongs written by Lucie Silvas\nThe Saturdays songs" ]
[ "Sandy Denny", "From Fairport to Fotheringay", "When was she in the band Fairport Convention?", "Denny became the obvious choice.", "who else was in the band with her?", "Simon Nicol," ]	C_e6cc2f78b77b4fcab1029b8e527f1a13_0	did they release an album?	3	Did Fairport Convention release an album?	Sandy Denny	After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late sixties, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. CANNOTANSWER	three albums	Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny (6 January 1947 – 21 April 1978) was an English singer-songwriter who was lead singer of the British folk rock band Fairport Convention. She has been described as "the pre-eminent British folk rock singer". After briefly working with the Strawbs, Denny joined Fairport Convention in 1968, remaining with them until 1969. She formed the short-lived band Fotheringay in 1970, before focusing on a solo career. Between 1971 and 1977, Denny released four solo albums: The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, Sandy, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz and Rendezvous. She also duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore" for Led Zeppelin's album Led Zeppelin IV in 1971. Denny died in 1978 at the age of 31 due to injuries and health issues related to alcohol abuse. Music publications Uncut and Mojo have described Denny as Britain's finest female singer-songwriter. Her composition "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" has been recorded by Judy Collins, Eva Cassidy, Nina Simone, 10,000 Maniacs and Cat Power. Her recorded work has been the subject of numerous reissues, along with a wealth of previously unreleased material which has appeared over the more than 40 years since her death, including a 19-CD box set released in November 2010. Childhood Denny was born on 6 January 1947 at Nelson Hospital, Kingston Road, Merton Park, London, to Neil and Edna Denny. She studied classical piano as a child. Her paternal grandfather was from Dundee, and her paternal grandmother was a Scots Gaelic speaker and singer of traditional songs. At an early age Denny showed an interest in singing, although her strict parents were reluctant to believe there was a living to be made from it. She attended Coombe Girls' School in New Malden; after leaving school she began training as a nurse at the Royal Brompton Hospital. Early career Denny's nursing career proved short-lived. In the meantime she had secured a place on a foundation course at Kingston College of Art, which she took up in September 1965, becoming involved with the folk club on campus. Her contemporaries at the college included guitarist and future member of Pentangle, John Renbourn. After her first public appearance at the Barge in Kingston upon Thames, Denny began working the folk club circuit in the evenings with an American-influenced repertoire, including songs by Tom Paxton, together with traditional folk songs. Denny made the first of many appearances for the BBC at Cecil Sharp House on 2 December 1966 on the Folk Song Cellar programme where she accompanied herself on two traditional songs: "Fir a Bhata" and "Green Grow the Laurels". Her earliest professional recordings were made a few months later in mid-1967 for the Saga label, featuring traditional songs and covers of folk contemporaries including her boyfriend of this period, the American singer-songwriter Jackson C. Frank. They were released on the albums Alex Campbell and His Friends and Sandy and Johnny with Johnny Silvo. These songs were collected on the 1970 album It's Sandy Denny where the tracks from Sandy and Johnny had been re-recorded with more accomplished vocals and guitar playing. The complete Saga studio recordings were issued on the 2005 compilation Where The Time Goes. By this time, she had abandoned her studies at art college and was devoting herself full-time to music. While she was performing at The Troubadour folk club, a member of the Strawbs heard her, and in 1967, she was invited to join the band. She recorded one album with them in Denmark, which was released belatedly in 1973, credited to Sandy Denny and the Strawbs: All Our Own Work. The album includes an early solo version of her best-known (and widely recorded) composition, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" A demo of that song found its way into the hands of American singer Judy Collins, who chose to cover it as the title track of an album of her own, released in November 1968, thus giving Denny international exposure as a songwriter before she had become widely known as a singer. From Fairport to Fotheringay After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late 1960s, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. Solo career and final years She then turned to recording her first solo album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Released in 1971, it is distinguished by its elusive lyrics and unconventional harmonies. Highlights included "Late November", inspired by a dream and the death of Fairport band member Martin Lamble, and "Next Time Around" a cryptogram about Jackson C. Frank, one of her many portraits in song. Sandy, with a cover photograph by David Bailey, followed in 1972 and was the first of her albums to be produced by Trevor Lucas. As well as introducing eight new original compositions, the album marked her last recording of a traditional song, "The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood" (words by Richard Fariña), with Denny's ambitious multi-tracked vocal arrangement inspired by the Ensemble of the Bulgarian Republic. Melody Maker readers twice voted her the "Best British Female Singer", in 1970 and 1971 and, together with contemporaries including Richard Thompson and Ashley Hutchings, she participated in a one-off project called the Bunch to record a collection of rock and roll era standards released under the title of Rock On. In 1971, Denny duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore", which was included on Led Zeppelin's 1971 album (Led Zeppelin IV); she was the only guest vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin album. In 1972 Denny had a small cameo on Lou Reizner's symphonic arrangement of the Who's rock opera Tommy. Her brief appearance was at the end of the track "It's a Boy", which also featured vocals from Pete Townshend. In 1973, she married long-term boyfriend and producer Trevor Lucas and recorded a third solo album, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz. The songs continued to detail many of her personal preoccupations: loss, loneliness, fear of the dark, the passing of time and the changing seasons. The album contained one of her best loved compositions, "Solo", and featured a cover image by Gered Mankowitz. In 1974, she returned to Fairport Convention (of which her husband was by then a member) for a world tour (captured on the 1974 album Fairport Live Convention) and a studio album, Rising for the Moon in 1975. Although her development as a soloist and songwriter had taken her further away from the folk roots direction that the band had pursued since Liege & Lief, seven of the eleven tracks on Rising for the Moon were either written or co-written by her. Denny and Lucas left Fairport Convention at the end of 1975 and embarked on what was to become her final album Rendezvous. Released in 1977, the album sold poorly and Denny was subsequently dropped by Island Records. Having relocated to the village of Byfield in Northamptonshire in the mid-seventies, Denny gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Georgia, in July 1977. A UK tour to promote Rendezvous in autumn 1977 marked her final public appearances. The closing night at the Royalty Theatre in London on 27 November 1977 was recorded for a live album, Gold Dust, which, because of technical problems in the recording of the electric guitar, was belatedly released in 1998 after most of the guitars had been re-recorded by Jerry Donahue. Death Linda Thompson would later note that Denny "really started going downhill in 1976" and demonstrated increasing levels of both manic and depressive behaviour. Learning that she was pregnant did little to mellow Denny's reckless lifestyle, which was heightened by increasing depression, mood swings and the unravelling of her "tumultuous" marriage to Trevor Lucas. She abused drugs and alcohol while pregnant with her daughter, Georgia, who was born prematurely in July 1977. Much like her moods, Denny's interest towards her daughter appeared to oscillate between obsessive and unconcerned; friends recalled both frantic, middle-of-the-night phone calls about teething, as well as Denny "crashing the car and leaving the baby in the pub and all sorts of stuff". Friends would later note that Denny had a history of purposely throwing herself off bar stools and down flights of stairs in order to get a reaction. Several remembered this behaviour as "Sandy's party trick", while Dave Pegg's wife Chris stated, "She certainly did it in my house and it could be a very dramatic gesture, like self-harming. She could do it without hurting herself usually but I had a feeling there would be one time too many." Those who knew Denny said that her increasing level of alcohol abuse in the last years of her life led to an increasing number of falls (both accidental and deliberate), resulting in a growing number of injuries. In late March 1978, while on holiday with her parents and baby Georgia in Cornwall, Denny was injured when she fell down a staircase and hit her head on concrete. Following the incident, she suffered from intense headaches; a doctor prescribed her the painkiller dextropropoxyphene, a drug known to have fatal side effects when mixed with alcohol. On 1 April, several days after the fall in Cornwall, Denny performed a charity concert at Byfield. The final song she performed was "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" At some unknown point during the first half of April 1978, Denny suffered yet another major fall at her home in Byfield. On 13 April, concerned about his wife's erratic behaviour and fearing for his daughter's safety, Trevor Lucas left the UK and returned to his native Australia with their child, leaving Denny without telling her. He sold their Austin Princess car in order to raise funds for the journey. On discovering Lucas' departure, Denny went to stay at the home of her friend Miranda Ward. During this time, Denny apparently set up an appointment to speak with a doctor about her headaches, and also intended to get advice about her alcohol addiction. At some point after 8 am on 17 April, Denny fell into a coma. Ward was out of the house at the time, and had asked her friend Jon Cole (of the band The Movies) to check in on Denny. Cole entered the home at 3 pm, and found Denny unconscious at the foot of the staircase which led to the second floor of the house. She was rushed by ambulance to Queen Mary's Hospital in nearby Roehampton. On 19 April, she was transferred to Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon. After receiving news that Denny was in a coma, Lucas returned from Australia. Upon his arrival at the hospital, doctors informed him that Denny was effectively brain-dead and her condition would not improve. He granted their recommendation to turn off life-support machines; however, just ten minutes before this was to take place, at 7:50 pm on 21 April 1978, Sandy Denny died, without regaining consciousness. Her death was ruled to be the result of a traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage and blunt force trauma to her head. She was 31 years old. The funeral took place on 27 April 1978 at Putney Vale Cemetery. After the vicar had read Denny's favourite psalm, Psalm 23, a piper played "Flowers of the Forest", a traditional song commemorating the fallen of Flodden Field and one which had appeared on the 1970 Fairport album Full House. The inscription on her headstone reads: Posthumous releases Official releases Although Denny had a devoted following in her lifetime, she did not achieve mass market success. In the years since her death, her reputation has grown. A four-album box set entitled Who Knows Where the Time Goes? (1985) was produced by her widower Trevor Lucas and Joe Boyd and included a number of rare and previously unreleased tracks by Denny, either solo or with Fairport Convention (1968, 1969, 1974) and Fotheringay (1970). This was the first public indication that a large cache of unreleased material existed. A one-disc subset of these recordings was subsequently issued on CD by Island in 1987 entitled The Best Of Sandy Denny. In 1987, a compilation of previously unreleased tracks recorded for the BBC by incarnations of Fairport including Denny was released on LP under the title Heyday, which was subsequently released on CD in 2001 and again, with extra tracks, in 2002; all tracks were later included, with others, on the 2007 4-CD box set Fairport Convention Live at the BBC (see below). The initial purpose of this compilation was to document the more "American" material performed live by the What We Did on Our Holidays lineup of the band that never made it to vinyl, while the re-releases added additional songs as performed by the Unhalfbricking and Liege and Lief lineups. Also in 1987, a VHS documentary, It All Comes 'Round Again, on Fairport Convention was released which contained excerpts of several audio recordings featuring Denny, plus a single poor-quality video recording of her singing her song "Solo" during her second stint with Fairport in 1974, as filmed by the University of Birmingham's "Guild TV" amateur organisation. The original tape of this recording has apparently been lost; however, "Like an Old Fashioned Waltz" does appear on the DVD documentary Sandy Denny Under Review (see below) and other tracks have been made available via YouTube in very poor quality. Over the period 1988–1994, the Australian "Friends of Fairport" issued a series of subscriber-only cassette compilations drawing in the main on previously unreleased tapes from Trevor Lucas' collection (as stored in his attic in fact). Attic Tracks (AT) 1 (1988) contained out-takes from Sandy as well as some Fairport material and a few bizarre extras; AT 2 (1989) contained only Trevor Lucas material, no Denny; AT 3 (1989) entitled First and Last Tracks comprised 1966–1967 home demos and rare radio tracks, as well as 9 "pre-overdub" songs from Denny's last concert at the Royalty Theatre, London, on 27 November 1977 (a partial alternative to the later, overdubbed CD release Gold Dust), and AT 4 (1994): Together Again comprised one side of Lucas and the other of Denny in the form of more home demos, studio outtakes, and 4 tracks from a 1973 BBC radio concert. A cut-down version of these tracks (18 songs) was subsequently compiled for CD release by the Australian label Raven Records in 1995 called Sandy Denny, Trevor Lucas and Friends: The Attic Tracks 1972–1984. In 1991, Joe Boyd issued a new version of Denny's All Our Own Work album with the Strawbs, called Sandy Denny and the Strawbs, on his Hannibal Records label. The album had strings added to some tracks, including "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" and further tracks with Denny on lead vocal. In 1997, a one-disc compilation of Denny's solo BBC recordings was released as The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 on Strange Fruit Records. Due to rights issues it was withdrawn on the day of release, thereby creating a highly collectible disc (up until the release of the comprehensive Live at the BBC box set in 2007). This release was followed in 1998 when Denny's final performance at the Royalty Theatre, entitled Gold Dust, was issued on CD, following a degree of re-recording and overdubbing of selected backing parts to replace reportedly unsatisfactory originals. In 1999, a single-disc compilation, Listen Listen – An Introduction to Sandy Denny, was released on Island Records comprising 17 previously released tracks taken from her four Island solo albums. No More Sad Refrains: The Anthology was released by Universal Records in 2000. When first released, this compilation had several rare tracks, including "The Ballad of Easy Rider" from the Liege and Lief sessions, "Learning the Game" and "When Will I Be Loved" from the Bunch album Rock On, "Here in Silence" and "Man of Iron" from the Pass of Arms soundtrack, and a previously unissued demo of "Stranger to Himself". In 2002, a previously unreleased, 2-CD live US concert recording by Fairport Convention from 1974 featuring Denny was released on the Burning Airlines label. Entitled Before The Moon, it originated from a radio broadcast from Ebbets Field in Denver, Colorado, on 23/24 May 1974. The second disc was a limited release bonus with the original release comprising the second set from the same concert. This recording was re-released in shortened form as a single disc in 2011 on the It's About Music label entitled Fairport Convention with Sandy Denny: Ebbets Field 1974. Also in 2002, the American A&M Records issued a budget-price "20th Century Masters" compilation called The Best of Sandy Denny with 10 tracks all available on Denny's studio albums. In 2004 a second comprehensive five-CD box set was released on the Fledg'ling record label called A Boxful of Treasures that included many unreleased recordings, in particular a whole disc of acoustic demos, many recorded at her home in Byfield that was highly prized amongst fans and critics alike, who had long asserted that her solo performances showed her work in its best light, revealing the true quality of her vocal style and compositions. Also in 2004, the Spectrum label issued a 16-track compilation of previously released material entitled The Collection: Chronological Covers & Concert Classics, including a mix of studio recordings and live excerpts from the Gold Dust Royalty concert. In 2005, remastered versions of all Denny's solo albums came out with bonus tracks. Also in 2005, a single CD compilation entitled Where the Time Goes: Sandy '67 was released on Castle Music containing all of Saga's Denny album tracks (including the alternative recordings on It's Sandy Denny), together with two self accompanied tracks from Denny's recordings with the Strawbs. A DVD documentary entitled Sandy Denny Under Review was released on the Sexy Intellectual label in 2006 which contained interviews with her contemporaries plus brief excerpts from her audio recordings, plus some short video clips including two of the poor quality video recordings with Fairport from Birmingham University (details given above), two with Fotheringay from German TV's Beat-Club (further details given below), and three solo excerpts from the only surviving BBC footage on One In Ten (details as given in the next item). A 4-disc box set, Sandy Denny Live at the BBC, came out in September 2007 containing (virtually) all of the known solo recordings made by Denny for that UK broadcaster including two complete concerts, one at the Paris Theatre in 1972 and one recorded for Sounds on Sunday in 1973, plus a range of other material spanning the years 1966–1973. Disc 3 of this set was a DVD containing surviving TV footage from a 1971 BBC One in Ten session comprising solo performances by Denny of "The North Star Grassman and the Ravens", "Crazy Lady Blues" and "Late November", along with digitised excerpts from her diaries, rare photos and a discography. A 1-disc subset of this box set entitled The Best of the BBC Recordings was subsequently released in 2008. A companion box set, Fairport Convention Live at the BBC, also came out in 2007 and covered equivalent live recordings by Fairport over the period 1968–1974, of which the first two discs (1968–1970) contain examples from Denny's time with that group. In 2008, Jerry Donahue completed the unfinished second Fotheringay album begun in the autumn of 1970. It was released to general acclaim as Fotheringay 2 and contained some notable Denny performances, in particular earlier versions of two Denny compositions, "Late November" and "John the Gun", and performances of the traditional songs "Gypsy Davey" and "Wild Mountain Thyme". Also in 2008, Island Remasters issued a double CD entitled The Music Weaver (Sandy Denny Remembered) which contained a mix of better known tracks and less well known demos and live recordings, previously released but not in companion with studio sessions. This compilation is also one of the very few to contain the Led Zeppelin track "The Battle Of Evermore" which features a rare guest appearance by Denny. In 2010, a large 19-CD retrospective box set, simply titled Sandy Denny, was released by Universal/Island Records in a limited edition of 3,000. It contained Denny's entire catalogue of studio recordings, including her work with the Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay and as a solo artist. The compilation also included a large number of outtakes, demos, live recordings, radio sessions and interviews. The box set was released to good reviews, including a 5-star review in Uncut and a 4-star review in The Guardian. In late 2010, Thea Gilmore was commissioned by Denny's estate, in conjunction with Island Records, to write melodies to unrecorded lyrics found in Denny's papers. The resulting album, Don't Stop Singing, was released in November 2011 to generally good notices, including 4-star reviews in The Independent and The Guardian among others. On 21 April 2012, the single "London" was released as an exclusive Record Store Day 7″ single. Further recordings were released in 2011, including a German recording of Fotheringay in concert released as Essen 1970 on the Garden of Delights label. The performance was remastered by original band member Jerry Donahue. This release was followed by 19 Rupert Street, a home recording of a rehearsal featuring Sandy and Alex Campbell recorded at his flat in August 1967. This release is notable for the fact that Sandy performs a number of tracks that are not available in any other versions, including a cover of "Fairytale Lullaby" by John Martyn. This CD was put out by Sandy's former Strawbs bandmate Dave Cousins on his Witchwood label. Two-disc "Deluxe Editions" of Denny's album reissues appeared in 2011–2012 with additional tracks; the 2012 Deluxe Edition of Sandy included a previously unreleased eight-song solo set from her 1973 U.S. tour recorded at Ebbet's Field in Denver, Colorado. A similar two-disc reissue of Fairport Convention's Rising for the Moon also included, for the first time, the complete 1974 L.A. Troubadour performance of Fairport with Denny back on board, prior to the official announcement of her re-joining the group. On account of unprecedented demand for, and exhaustion of supply of the limited edition 19-CD set cited above, in October 2012 a limited edition 4-CD version was released entitled The Notes and The Words: A Collection of Demos and Rarities, containing "75 songs that represent the cream of the rarities, demos and outtakes from the box set". Limited to 3,500 copies, this compilation is also now out-of-print. In 2013, Spectrum records issued a single-disc CD entitled The Lady – The Essential Sandy Denny that comprised 15 previously issued tracks, generally from Denny's well known albums. 2014 saw the release of another Fairport live U.S. radio broadcast from their 1974 tour with Denny, on RockBeat Records, entitled Live 1974 (My Father's Place), comprising 11 live tracks, most featuring Denny, recorded at the New York rock club My Father's Place. A four-disc Fotheringay retrospective, Nothing More: The Collected Fotheringay, was released on 30 March 2015. This is the most comprehensive compilation of the group's recordings, and contains, in addition to all the tracks on Fotheringay and Fotheringay 2 as both final studio versions and demos/alternate takes, the complete live concert set from Rotterdam in 1970 (including several previously unreleased tracks), seven Fotheringay tracks recorded in session for BBC radio (which had previously circulated only as bootlegs), plus a DVD disc containing four performances by Fotheringay recorded for the German Beat-Club TV series in 1970, which considerably augment the otherwise sparse known TV footage of Denny in particular. May 2016 saw the release of a 2-CD compilation, I've Always Kept A Unicorn – The Acoustic Sandy Denny which collected together many previously released, but dispersed, acoustic and/or demo versions of songs better known from their album counterparts, as well as three previously unreleased demos (with Linda Thompson, at the time Linda Peters) from 1972's Rock On sessions by one-off band The Bunch. A 7-CD box set by Fairport Convention entitled Come All Ye – The First 10 Years was released in July 2017 and contains a small number of additional, previously unreleased demos and alternate takes featuring Denny during her first tenure with the band over the period 1968–1969. Tracks not previously available include versions of Joni Mitchell's Eastern Rain, an a capella version of Nottamun Town, alternative takes of Autopsy and Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and a rehearsal version of The Deserter. Unofficial releases and audience tapes In addition to the authorised material listed above, a number unofficial/unauthorised compilations exist plus a range of audience recordings of varying quality, none of which would likely see the light of day as commercial issues but are of interest to a sector of Denny's audience on either historic or aesthetic grounds, often providing alternative views of songs known otherwise only from their commercially released versions. The first available unauthorised/bootleg CDs available in the 1980s and 1990s comprised principally off-air and other obscure material under such titles as Borrowed Thyme, Poems from Alexandra, Dark the Night, Wild Mountain Thyme and One Last Sad Refrain; such compilations are now largely superseded by the subsequent availability of most of the off-air material in much better quality as official releases as described above. Of more enduring interest are audience tapes of shows of which no "official" tapes survive. These include some early shows by Fairport Convention; a performance by Fotheringay at the 1970 Tenth National Jazz and Blues Festival, held at Plumpton Race Track, Streat, East Sussex, England; "solo" shows by Denny (on occasion with a small band including, among others, Richard Thompson) at the 1971 Lincoln Folk Festival and at the Eltham Well Hall Open Theatre in 1972; performances from York University and Guildhall, Newcastle upon Tyne, also in 1972; an early 1972 U.S. performance from The Bitter End in New York; and several sets (Birmingham and Croydon) from her final 1977 tour in addition to the officially released Gold Dust album; plus quite a large number of recordings strongly featuring Denny as part of the re-formed Fairport Convention over the period 1974–1975. The majority of these can be fairly easily located via relevant internet searches and, in addition, can be readily downloaded from archival music servers such as Sugarmegs (Sandy Denny concerts listed under "S": SugarMegs Streaming Server, Fairport and Fotheringay under "F": SugarMegs Streaming Server). A provisional list of such recordings as are known to exist, with details on where each can be accessed, is available here. Legacy Estate and family After relocating to Australia and remarrying, Trevor Lucas died of a heart attack in 1989. Denny's estate is now managed by Lucas' widow, Elizabeth Hurtt-Lucas. A number of otherwise unreleased recordings of Sandy Denny from his collection have subsequently been the basis for posthumous releases of Denny's work including those on The Attic Tracks and elsewhere. Sandy Denny's daughter, Georgia, has rarely spoken about her mother in a public forum and in the mid-2000s declined an invitation to write the liner notes for Sandy Denny Live at the BBC. However, in 2006 she flew to Britain from Australia to accept on her mother's behalf the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards award for Most Influential Folk Album of All Time, which was given for Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief. Georgia gave birth to twin daughters on 29 April 1997, and a tribute album, Georgia on Our Mind, featuring many of Sandy Denny's former bandmates and friends, was compiled in the children's honour. She also administers a Facebook page "Sandy Denny and Family" dedicated to her mother's memory and more recently, under the name Georgia Katt, has released some of her own DJ-based music. Tributes Since her death, many tributes have been made to Denny, both in music and elsewhere. Dave Pegg of Fairport Convention recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on his 1983 solo album The Cocktail Cowboy Goes It Alone. Dave Cousins of the Strawbs wrote "Ringing Down the Years" in memory of Denny shortly after her death. Songs more specific to the death were Bert Jansch's "Where Did My Life Go" and Richard Thompson's "Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?" Fellow Brit folk pioneers Spriguns changed the title of their 1978 album to Magic Lady after hearing of Denny's death while recording. In 1998, a variety of Daylily was named after her. Denny's songs have been covered by numerous artists in the years since her death. Some of the notable acts to have covered her music include Yo La Tengo, former Marillion frontman Fish, who covered "Solo" on his album Songs from the Mirror, Cat Power, Judy Collins, Nanci Griffith and Nina Simone. Kate Bush mentioned Denny in the lyric of "Blow Away (For Bill)", as one of the musicians to greet Bill in Heaven. "Blow Away (For Bill)" is the third track on Bush's 1980 album Never for Ever. In 1984, Clann Eadair released the single "A tribute to Sandy Denny", featuring Phil Lynott on vocals. Several radio specials have been produced about Denny's life and music, including BBC Radio 2's The Sandy Denny Story: Who Knows Where the Time Goes. In 2007, Denny's song "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" also received BBC Radio 2's 2007 Folk Award for "Favourite Folk Track of All Time". In 2010, she was recognized by NPR in their 50 Great Voices special series. In April 2008, a tribute concert was held at The Troubadour in London, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Denny's death. Those taking part included Martin Carthy, Linda Thompson and Joe Boyd. A more extensive tribute was given later that year in December at the Southbank in the Queen Elizabeth Hall called The Lady: A Tribute to Sandy Denny with a band composed of members of Bellowhead, the evening featured a mix of young folk acts like Jim Moray and Lisa Knapp alongside those that had known and worked with Denny such as Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. These acts were joined by performers from outside the world of folk like PP Arnold and Marc Almond. The concert, which primarily featured songs written by Denny, received a four-star review in The Guardian. In May 2012 the Southbank concert was expanded into an eight date UK tour called The Lady: A Homage to Sandy Denny. The tour showcased Sandy's entire songbook taking in her work with Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, her solo career and the new songs completed by Thea Gilmore on her album Don't Stop Singing. The band was, once again, composed of members of Bellowhead. Other acts performing included the aforementioned Thea Gilmore and up-and-coming folk acts Lavinia Blackwall of Trembling Bells, Blair Dunlop and Sam Carter, alongside more established folk stars Maddy Prior, Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. The line-up was completed with performers not normally associated with the folk scene; Green Gartside, Joan Wasser (also known as Joan As Police Woman), and PP Arnold. The tour was well received, obtaining a four-star review in The Times. The London concert at the Barbican was filmed for BBC4, and broadcast in a 90-minute programme titled The Songs of Sandy Denny in November 2012. In the 2012 Irish film Silence (Harvest Films & South Wind Blows), "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" is used during the film and final credits. In April 2016 Denny was inducted into the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards Hall of Fame. Alela Diane recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on her album Cusp, released in February 2018. The song reflects on Denny's final tragic days and her orphaned baby daughter. Discography Solo studio albums The North Star Grassman and the Ravens (1971) Sandy (1972) Like an Old Fashioned Waltz (1974) Rendezvous (1977) Solo live albums The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 (1997) Gold Dust (1998) (live recording from final tour, 1977) Live at the BBC (2007 4-disc compilation) Sandy – Deluxe edition, 2012 – includes "Live at Ebbetts Field" (previously unreleased concert on disc 2) With others Denny's collaborations with other artists, including with Alex Campbell, The Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, and The Bunch, together with numerous posthumous releases and compilation albums, are detailed further on the Sandy Denny discography page. References and notes General Further reading Mick Houghton. I've Always Kept a Unicorn – The Biography of Sandy Denny. Faber & Faber, 2015; Clinton Heylin. No More Sad Refrains – The Life and Times of Sandy Denny. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Clinton Heylin. Gypsy Love Songs & Sad Refrains – The Recordings of Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny. Labour of Love Productions, 1989. Colin Larkin. The Guinness Who's Who of Folk Music. Guinness Publishing Ltd; Jim Irvin. Angel of Avalon. MOJO Magazine, August 1998. Colin Harper, Trevor Hodgett. Irish Folk, Traditional & Blues: A Secret History. Cherry Red, 2005; Pamela Murray Winters. No Thought of Leaving: A life of Sandy Denny. 2000. (Unpublished). Brian Hinton, Geoff Wall. Ashley Hutchings: The Guv'nor & the Rise of Folk Rock. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Patrick Humphries. Meet On The Ledge: The Classic Years 1967–1975. Virgin Books, 1997; Patrick Humphries. Richard Thompson: Strange Affair – The Biography. Virgin Books, 1996; Philip Ward, "Sandy Denny: A Thirtieth Anniversary", R2 (Rock'n'Reel) 2(9), May/June 2008. Philip Ward, Sandy Denny: Reflections on Her Music''. Matador, 2011; External links Official website Homage to Sandy Denny Dedicated to the memory of Sandy Denny Sandy Denny website 1947 births 1978 deaths 20th-century English singers 20th-century English women singers A&M Records artists Accidental deaths from falls Accidental deaths in London Deaths by intracerebral hemorrhage Alumni of Kingston College (England) British folk rock musicians Burials at Putney Vale Cemetery English folk singers English people of Scottish descent English women singer-songwriters Fairport Convention members Women rock singers Fotheringay members Island Records artists People from Byfield, Northamptonshire People from Wimbledon, London Singers from London Strawbs members The Bunch members	true	[ "Cover Up is an album by UB40, released in 2001. It was their first studio album release since 1998 when they released Labour of Love III. It debuted at number 29 on the UK charts but dropped out of the top-100 after its third week. There was no US release, but rather it was released as an international release. The first single released from this album was \"Since I Met You Lady\", but it did not rise higher than No. 40 on the UK charts.\n\nTrack listing\nAll tracks composed by UB40; except where indicated\n\nReferences\n\n2001 albums\nUB40 albums", "Music is the fifth studio album by American ambient post-rock band, Windsor Airlift. It was released on September 23, 2013.\n\nBackground\nIn August 2013, Windsor Airlift started a kickstarter for their up-and-coming album Music. Around this time, they also announced that they would be having an album art contest for the album. After approximately 220 entries came in, the band announced the winner on September 6, 2013. The kickstarter was also a success and the band was able to release a quantity of physical copies for the release which are currently still available.\n\nOn October 13, 2013, the Johnson brothers did an interview with Flux9.com about the release and Windsor Airlift in general.\n\nTrack listing\n\n\"Music Through the Window\" performed by Emily Johnson\n\nMusic videos\n\nNotes and miscellanea\nThe song \"Silhouette Harbor\" was originally intended to be on the album Moonfish Parachutist 2. However, this album has yet to come to fruition. The release of Music encouraged the band to place it on this album instead.\nAs an added bonus to the success of the kickstarter, Windsor Airlift released The Adventures of Flames Pond in its entirety to YouTube.\n\nReferences\n\n2013 albums\nWindsor Airlift albums" ]
[ "Sandy Denny", "From Fairport to Fotheringay", "When was she in the band Fairport Convention?", "Denny became the obvious choice.", "who else was in the band with her?", "Simon Nicol,", "did they release an album?", "three albums" ]	C_e6cc2f78b77b4fcab1029b8e527f1a13_0	when was the first album released?	4	When was the first Fairport Convention album released?	Sandy Denny	After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late sixties, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. CANNOTANSWER	What We Did on Our Holidays,	Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny (6 January 1947 – 21 April 1978) was an English singer-songwriter who was lead singer of the British folk rock band Fairport Convention. She has been described as "the pre-eminent British folk rock singer". After briefly working with the Strawbs, Denny joined Fairport Convention in 1968, remaining with them until 1969. She formed the short-lived band Fotheringay in 1970, before focusing on a solo career. Between 1971 and 1977, Denny released four solo albums: The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, Sandy, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz and Rendezvous. She also duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore" for Led Zeppelin's album Led Zeppelin IV in 1971. Denny died in 1978 at the age of 31 due to injuries and health issues related to alcohol abuse. Music publications Uncut and Mojo have described Denny as Britain's finest female singer-songwriter. Her composition "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" has been recorded by Judy Collins, Eva Cassidy, Nina Simone, 10,000 Maniacs and Cat Power. Her recorded work has been the subject of numerous reissues, along with a wealth of previously unreleased material which has appeared over the more than 40 years since her death, including a 19-CD box set released in November 2010. Childhood Denny was born on 6 January 1947 at Nelson Hospital, Kingston Road, Merton Park, London, to Neil and Edna Denny. She studied classical piano as a child. Her paternal grandfather was from Dundee, and her paternal grandmother was a Scots Gaelic speaker and singer of traditional songs. At an early age Denny showed an interest in singing, although her strict parents were reluctant to believe there was a living to be made from it. She attended Coombe Girls' School in New Malden; after leaving school she began training as a nurse at the Royal Brompton Hospital. Early career Denny's nursing career proved short-lived. In the meantime she had secured a place on a foundation course at Kingston College of Art, which she took up in September 1965, becoming involved with the folk club on campus. Her contemporaries at the college included guitarist and future member of Pentangle, John Renbourn. After her first public appearance at the Barge in Kingston upon Thames, Denny began working the folk club circuit in the evenings with an American-influenced repertoire, including songs by Tom Paxton, together with traditional folk songs. Denny made the first of many appearances for the BBC at Cecil Sharp House on 2 December 1966 on the Folk Song Cellar programme where she accompanied herself on two traditional songs: "Fir a Bhata" and "Green Grow the Laurels". Her earliest professional recordings were made a few months later in mid-1967 for the Saga label, featuring traditional songs and covers of folk contemporaries including her boyfriend of this period, the American singer-songwriter Jackson C. Frank. They were released on the albums Alex Campbell and His Friends and Sandy and Johnny with Johnny Silvo. These songs were collected on the 1970 album It's Sandy Denny where the tracks from Sandy and Johnny had been re-recorded with more accomplished vocals and guitar playing. The complete Saga studio recordings were issued on the 2005 compilation Where The Time Goes. By this time, she had abandoned her studies at art college and was devoting herself full-time to music. While she was performing at The Troubadour folk club, a member of the Strawbs heard her, and in 1967, she was invited to join the band. She recorded one album with them in Denmark, which was released belatedly in 1973, credited to Sandy Denny and the Strawbs: All Our Own Work. The album includes an early solo version of her best-known (and widely recorded) composition, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" A demo of that song found its way into the hands of American singer Judy Collins, who chose to cover it as the title track of an album of her own, released in November 1968, thus giving Denny international exposure as a songwriter before she had become widely known as a singer. From Fairport to Fotheringay After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late 1960s, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. Solo career and final years She then turned to recording her first solo album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Released in 1971, it is distinguished by its elusive lyrics and unconventional harmonies. Highlights included "Late November", inspired by a dream and the death of Fairport band member Martin Lamble, and "Next Time Around" a cryptogram about Jackson C. Frank, one of her many portraits in song. Sandy, with a cover photograph by David Bailey, followed in 1972 and was the first of her albums to be produced by Trevor Lucas. As well as introducing eight new original compositions, the album marked her last recording of a traditional song, "The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood" (words by Richard Fariña), with Denny's ambitious multi-tracked vocal arrangement inspired by the Ensemble of the Bulgarian Republic. Melody Maker readers twice voted her the "Best British Female Singer", in 1970 and 1971 and, together with contemporaries including Richard Thompson and Ashley Hutchings, she participated in a one-off project called the Bunch to record a collection of rock and roll era standards released under the title of Rock On. In 1971, Denny duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore", which was included on Led Zeppelin's 1971 album (Led Zeppelin IV); she was the only guest vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin album. In 1972 Denny had a small cameo on Lou Reizner's symphonic arrangement of the Who's rock opera Tommy. Her brief appearance was at the end of the track "It's a Boy", which also featured vocals from Pete Townshend. In 1973, she married long-term boyfriend and producer Trevor Lucas and recorded a third solo album, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz. The songs continued to detail many of her personal preoccupations: loss, loneliness, fear of the dark, the passing of time and the changing seasons. The album contained one of her best loved compositions, "Solo", and featured a cover image by Gered Mankowitz. In 1974, she returned to Fairport Convention (of which her husband was by then a member) for a world tour (captured on the 1974 album Fairport Live Convention) and a studio album, Rising for the Moon in 1975. Although her development as a soloist and songwriter had taken her further away from the folk roots direction that the band had pursued since Liege & Lief, seven of the eleven tracks on Rising for the Moon were either written or co-written by her. Denny and Lucas left Fairport Convention at the end of 1975 and embarked on what was to become her final album Rendezvous. Released in 1977, the album sold poorly and Denny was subsequently dropped by Island Records. Having relocated to the village of Byfield in Northamptonshire in the mid-seventies, Denny gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Georgia, in July 1977. A UK tour to promote Rendezvous in autumn 1977 marked her final public appearances. The closing night at the Royalty Theatre in London on 27 November 1977 was recorded for a live album, Gold Dust, which, because of technical problems in the recording of the electric guitar, was belatedly released in 1998 after most of the guitars had been re-recorded by Jerry Donahue. Death Linda Thompson would later note that Denny "really started going downhill in 1976" and demonstrated increasing levels of both manic and depressive behaviour. Learning that she was pregnant did little to mellow Denny's reckless lifestyle, which was heightened by increasing depression, mood swings and the unravelling of her "tumultuous" marriage to Trevor Lucas. She abused drugs and alcohol while pregnant with her daughter, Georgia, who was born prematurely in July 1977. Much like her moods, Denny's interest towards her daughter appeared to oscillate between obsessive and unconcerned; friends recalled both frantic, middle-of-the-night phone calls about teething, as well as Denny "crashing the car and leaving the baby in the pub and all sorts of stuff". Friends would later note that Denny had a history of purposely throwing herself off bar stools and down flights of stairs in order to get a reaction. Several remembered this behaviour as "Sandy's party trick", while Dave Pegg's wife Chris stated, "She certainly did it in my house and it could be a very dramatic gesture, like self-harming. She could do it without hurting herself usually but I had a feeling there would be one time too many." Those who knew Denny said that her increasing level of alcohol abuse in the last years of her life led to an increasing number of falls (both accidental and deliberate), resulting in a growing number of injuries. In late March 1978, while on holiday with her parents and baby Georgia in Cornwall, Denny was injured when she fell down a staircase and hit her head on concrete. Following the incident, she suffered from intense headaches; a doctor prescribed her the painkiller dextropropoxyphene, a drug known to have fatal side effects when mixed with alcohol. On 1 April, several days after the fall in Cornwall, Denny performed a charity concert at Byfield. The final song she performed was "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" At some unknown point during the first half of April 1978, Denny suffered yet another major fall at her home in Byfield. On 13 April, concerned about his wife's erratic behaviour and fearing for his daughter's safety, Trevor Lucas left the UK and returned to his native Australia with their child, leaving Denny without telling her. He sold their Austin Princess car in order to raise funds for the journey. On discovering Lucas' departure, Denny went to stay at the home of her friend Miranda Ward. During this time, Denny apparently set up an appointment to speak with a doctor about her headaches, and also intended to get advice about her alcohol addiction. At some point after 8 am on 17 April, Denny fell into a coma. Ward was out of the house at the time, and had asked her friend Jon Cole (of the band The Movies) to check in on Denny. Cole entered the home at 3 pm, and found Denny unconscious at the foot of the staircase which led to the second floor of the house. She was rushed by ambulance to Queen Mary's Hospital in nearby Roehampton. On 19 April, she was transferred to Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon. After receiving news that Denny was in a coma, Lucas returned from Australia. Upon his arrival at the hospital, doctors informed him that Denny was effectively brain-dead and her condition would not improve. He granted their recommendation to turn off life-support machines; however, just ten minutes before this was to take place, at 7:50 pm on 21 April 1978, Sandy Denny died, without regaining consciousness. Her death was ruled to be the result of a traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage and blunt force trauma to her head. She was 31 years old. The funeral took place on 27 April 1978 at Putney Vale Cemetery. After the vicar had read Denny's favourite psalm, Psalm 23, a piper played "Flowers of the Forest", a traditional song commemorating the fallen of Flodden Field and one which had appeared on the 1970 Fairport album Full House. The inscription on her headstone reads: Posthumous releases Official releases Although Denny had a devoted following in her lifetime, she did not achieve mass market success. In the years since her death, her reputation has grown. A four-album box set entitled Who Knows Where the Time Goes? (1985) was produced by her widower Trevor Lucas and Joe Boyd and included a number of rare and previously unreleased tracks by Denny, either solo or with Fairport Convention (1968, 1969, 1974) and Fotheringay (1970). This was the first public indication that a large cache of unreleased material existed. A one-disc subset of these recordings was subsequently issued on CD by Island in 1987 entitled The Best Of Sandy Denny. In 1987, a compilation of previously unreleased tracks recorded for the BBC by incarnations of Fairport including Denny was released on LP under the title Heyday, which was subsequently released on CD in 2001 and again, with extra tracks, in 2002; all tracks were later included, with others, on the 2007 4-CD box set Fairport Convention Live at the BBC (see below). The initial purpose of this compilation was to document the more "American" material performed live by the What We Did on Our Holidays lineup of the band that never made it to vinyl, while the re-releases added additional songs as performed by the Unhalfbricking and Liege and Lief lineups. Also in 1987, a VHS documentary, It All Comes 'Round Again, on Fairport Convention was released which contained excerpts of several audio recordings featuring Denny, plus a single poor-quality video recording of her singing her song "Solo" during her second stint with Fairport in 1974, as filmed by the University of Birmingham's "Guild TV" amateur organisation. The original tape of this recording has apparently been lost; however, "Like an Old Fashioned Waltz" does appear on the DVD documentary Sandy Denny Under Review (see below) and other tracks have been made available via YouTube in very poor quality. Over the period 1988–1994, the Australian "Friends of Fairport" issued a series of subscriber-only cassette compilations drawing in the main on previously unreleased tapes from Trevor Lucas' collection (as stored in his attic in fact). Attic Tracks (AT) 1 (1988) contained out-takes from Sandy as well as some Fairport material and a few bizarre extras; AT 2 (1989) contained only Trevor Lucas material, no Denny; AT 3 (1989) entitled First and Last Tracks comprised 1966–1967 home demos and rare radio tracks, as well as 9 "pre-overdub" songs from Denny's last concert at the Royalty Theatre, London, on 27 November 1977 (a partial alternative to the later, overdubbed CD release Gold Dust), and AT 4 (1994): Together Again comprised one side of Lucas and the other of Denny in the form of more home demos, studio outtakes, and 4 tracks from a 1973 BBC radio concert. A cut-down version of these tracks (18 songs) was subsequently compiled for CD release by the Australian label Raven Records in 1995 called Sandy Denny, Trevor Lucas and Friends: The Attic Tracks 1972–1984. In 1991, Joe Boyd issued a new version of Denny's All Our Own Work album with the Strawbs, called Sandy Denny and the Strawbs, on his Hannibal Records label. The album had strings added to some tracks, including "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" and further tracks with Denny on lead vocal. In 1997, a one-disc compilation of Denny's solo BBC recordings was released as The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 on Strange Fruit Records. Due to rights issues it was withdrawn on the day of release, thereby creating a highly collectible disc (up until the release of the comprehensive Live at the BBC box set in 2007). This release was followed in 1998 when Denny's final performance at the Royalty Theatre, entitled Gold Dust, was issued on CD, following a degree of re-recording and overdubbing of selected backing parts to replace reportedly unsatisfactory originals. In 1999, a single-disc compilation, Listen Listen – An Introduction to Sandy Denny, was released on Island Records comprising 17 previously released tracks taken from her four Island solo albums. No More Sad Refrains: The Anthology was released by Universal Records in 2000. When first released, this compilation had several rare tracks, including "The Ballad of Easy Rider" from the Liege and Lief sessions, "Learning the Game" and "When Will I Be Loved" from the Bunch album Rock On, "Here in Silence" and "Man of Iron" from the Pass of Arms soundtrack, and a previously unissued demo of "Stranger to Himself". In 2002, a previously unreleased, 2-CD live US concert recording by Fairport Convention from 1974 featuring Denny was released on the Burning Airlines label. Entitled Before The Moon, it originated from a radio broadcast from Ebbets Field in Denver, Colorado, on 23/24 May 1974. The second disc was a limited release bonus with the original release comprising the second set from the same concert. This recording was re-released in shortened form as a single disc in 2011 on the It's About Music label entitled Fairport Convention with Sandy Denny: Ebbets Field 1974. Also in 2002, the American A&M Records issued a budget-price "20th Century Masters" compilation called The Best of Sandy Denny with 10 tracks all available on Denny's studio albums. In 2004 a second comprehensive five-CD box set was released on the Fledg'ling record label called A Boxful of Treasures that included many unreleased recordings, in particular a whole disc of acoustic demos, many recorded at her home in Byfield that was highly prized amongst fans and critics alike, who had long asserted that her solo performances showed her work in its best light, revealing the true quality of her vocal style and compositions. Also in 2004, the Spectrum label issued a 16-track compilation of previously released material entitled The Collection: Chronological Covers & Concert Classics, including a mix of studio recordings and live excerpts from the Gold Dust Royalty concert. In 2005, remastered versions of all Denny's solo albums came out with bonus tracks. Also in 2005, a single CD compilation entitled Where the Time Goes: Sandy '67 was released on Castle Music containing all of Saga's Denny album tracks (including the alternative recordings on It's Sandy Denny), together with two self accompanied tracks from Denny's recordings with the Strawbs. A DVD documentary entitled Sandy Denny Under Review was released on the Sexy Intellectual label in 2006 which contained interviews with her contemporaries plus brief excerpts from her audio recordings, plus some short video clips including two of the poor quality video recordings with Fairport from Birmingham University (details given above), two with Fotheringay from German TV's Beat-Club (further details given below), and three solo excerpts from the only surviving BBC footage on One In Ten (details as given in the next item). A 4-disc box set, Sandy Denny Live at the BBC, came out in September 2007 containing (virtually) all of the known solo recordings made by Denny for that UK broadcaster including two complete concerts, one at the Paris Theatre in 1972 and one recorded for Sounds on Sunday in 1973, plus a range of other material spanning the years 1966–1973. Disc 3 of this set was a DVD containing surviving TV footage from a 1971 BBC One in Ten session comprising solo performances by Denny of "The North Star Grassman and the Ravens", "Crazy Lady Blues" and "Late November", along with digitised excerpts from her diaries, rare photos and a discography. A 1-disc subset of this box set entitled The Best of the BBC Recordings was subsequently released in 2008. A companion box set, Fairport Convention Live at the BBC, also came out in 2007 and covered equivalent live recordings by Fairport over the period 1968–1974, of which the first two discs (1968–1970) contain examples from Denny's time with that group. In 2008, Jerry Donahue completed the unfinished second Fotheringay album begun in the autumn of 1970. It was released to general acclaim as Fotheringay 2 and contained some notable Denny performances, in particular earlier versions of two Denny compositions, "Late November" and "John the Gun", and performances of the traditional songs "Gypsy Davey" and "Wild Mountain Thyme". Also in 2008, Island Remasters issued a double CD entitled The Music Weaver (Sandy Denny Remembered) which contained a mix of better known tracks and less well known demos and live recordings, previously released but not in companion with studio sessions. This compilation is also one of the very few to contain the Led Zeppelin track "The Battle Of Evermore" which features a rare guest appearance by Denny. In 2010, a large 19-CD retrospective box set, simply titled Sandy Denny, was released by Universal/Island Records in a limited edition of 3,000. It contained Denny's entire catalogue of studio recordings, including her work with the Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay and as a solo artist. The compilation also included a large number of outtakes, demos, live recordings, radio sessions and interviews. The box set was released to good reviews, including a 5-star review in Uncut and a 4-star review in The Guardian. In late 2010, Thea Gilmore was commissioned by Denny's estate, in conjunction with Island Records, to write melodies to unrecorded lyrics found in Denny's papers. The resulting album, Don't Stop Singing, was released in November 2011 to generally good notices, including 4-star reviews in The Independent and The Guardian among others. On 21 April 2012, the single "London" was released as an exclusive Record Store Day 7″ single. Further recordings were released in 2011, including a German recording of Fotheringay in concert released as Essen 1970 on the Garden of Delights label. The performance was remastered by original band member Jerry Donahue. This release was followed by 19 Rupert Street, a home recording of a rehearsal featuring Sandy and Alex Campbell recorded at his flat in August 1967. This release is notable for the fact that Sandy performs a number of tracks that are not available in any other versions, including a cover of "Fairytale Lullaby" by John Martyn. This CD was put out by Sandy's former Strawbs bandmate Dave Cousins on his Witchwood label. Two-disc "Deluxe Editions" of Denny's album reissues appeared in 2011–2012 with additional tracks; the 2012 Deluxe Edition of Sandy included a previously unreleased eight-song solo set from her 1973 U.S. tour recorded at Ebbet's Field in Denver, Colorado. A similar two-disc reissue of Fairport Convention's Rising for the Moon also included, for the first time, the complete 1974 L.A. Troubadour performance of Fairport with Denny back on board, prior to the official announcement of her re-joining the group. On account of unprecedented demand for, and exhaustion of supply of the limited edition 19-CD set cited above, in October 2012 a limited edition 4-CD version was released entitled The Notes and The Words: A Collection of Demos and Rarities, containing "75 songs that represent the cream of the rarities, demos and outtakes from the box set". Limited to 3,500 copies, this compilation is also now out-of-print. In 2013, Spectrum records issued a single-disc CD entitled The Lady – The Essential Sandy Denny that comprised 15 previously issued tracks, generally from Denny's well known albums. 2014 saw the release of another Fairport live U.S. radio broadcast from their 1974 tour with Denny, on RockBeat Records, entitled Live 1974 (My Father's Place), comprising 11 live tracks, most featuring Denny, recorded at the New York rock club My Father's Place. A four-disc Fotheringay retrospective, Nothing More: The Collected Fotheringay, was released on 30 March 2015. This is the most comprehensive compilation of the group's recordings, and contains, in addition to all the tracks on Fotheringay and Fotheringay 2 as both final studio versions and demos/alternate takes, the complete live concert set from Rotterdam in 1970 (including several previously unreleased tracks), seven Fotheringay tracks recorded in session for BBC radio (which had previously circulated only as bootlegs), plus a DVD disc containing four performances by Fotheringay recorded for the German Beat-Club TV series in 1970, which considerably augment the otherwise sparse known TV footage of Denny in particular. May 2016 saw the release of a 2-CD compilation, I've Always Kept A Unicorn – The Acoustic Sandy Denny which collected together many previously released, but dispersed, acoustic and/or demo versions of songs better known from their album counterparts, as well as three previously unreleased demos (with Linda Thompson, at the time Linda Peters) from 1972's Rock On sessions by one-off band The Bunch. A 7-CD box set by Fairport Convention entitled Come All Ye – The First 10 Years was released in July 2017 and contains a small number of additional, previously unreleased demos and alternate takes featuring Denny during her first tenure with the band over the period 1968–1969. Tracks not previously available include versions of Joni Mitchell's Eastern Rain, an a capella version of Nottamun Town, alternative takes of Autopsy and Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and a rehearsal version of The Deserter. Unofficial releases and audience tapes In addition to the authorised material listed above, a number unofficial/unauthorised compilations exist plus a range of audience recordings of varying quality, none of which would likely see the light of day as commercial issues but are of interest to a sector of Denny's audience on either historic or aesthetic grounds, often providing alternative views of songs known otherwise only from their commercially released versions. The first available unauthorised/bootleg CDs available in the 1980s and 1990s comprised principally off-air and other obscure material under such titles as Borrowed Thyme, Poems from Alexandra, Dark the Night, Wild Mountain Thyme and One Last Sad Refrain; such compilations are now largely superseded by the subsequent availability of most of the off-air material in much better quality as official releases as described above. Of more enduring interest are audience tapes of shows of which no "official" tapes survive. These include some early shows by Fairport Convention; a performance by Fotheringay at the 1970 Tenth National Jazz and Blues Festival, held at Plumpton Race Track, Streat, East Sussex, England; "solo" shows by Denny (on occasion with a small band including, among others, Richard Thompson) at the 1971 Lincoln Folk Festival and at the Eltham Well Hall Open Theatre in 1972; performances from York University and Guildhall, Newcastle upon Tyne, also in 1972; an early 1972 U.S. performance from The Bitter End in New York; and several sets (Birmingham and Croydon) from her final 1977 tour in addition to the officially released Gold Dust album; plus quite a large number of recordings strongly featuring Denny as part of the re-formed Fairport Convention over the period 1974–1975. The majority of these can be fairly easily located via relevant internet searches and, in addition, can be readily downloaded from archival music servers such as Sugarmegs (Sandy Denny concerts listed under "S": SugarMegs Streaming Server, Fairport and Fotheringay under "F": SugarMegs Streaming Server). A provisional list of such recordings as are known to exist, with details on where each can be accessed, is available here. Legacy Estate and family After relocating to Australia and remarrying, Trevor Lucas died of a heart attack in 1989. Denny's estate is now managed by Lucas' widow, Elizabeth Hurtt-Lucas. A number of otherwise unreleased recordings of Sandy Denny from his collection have subsequently been the basis for posthumous releases of Denny's work including those on The Attic Tracks and elsewhere. Sandy Denny's daughter, Georgia, has rarely spoken about her mother in a public forum and in the mid-2000s declined an invitation to write the liner notes for Sandy Denny Live at the BBC. However, in 2006 she flew to Britain from Australia to accept on her mother's behalf the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards award for Most Influential Folk Album of All Time, which was given for Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief. Georgia gave birth to twin daughters on 29 April 1997, and a tribute album, Georgia on Our Mind, featuring many of Sandy Denny's former bandmates and friends, was compiled in the children's honour. She also administers a Facebook page "Sandy Denny and Family" dedicated to her mother's memory and more recently, under the name Georgia Katt, has released some of her own DJ-based music. Tributes Since her death, many tributes have been made to Denny, both in music and elsewhere. Dave Pegg of Fairport Convention recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on his 1983 solo album The Cocktail Cowboy Goes It Alone. Dave Cousins of the Strawbs wrote "Ringing Down the Years" in memory of Denny shortly after her death. Songs more specific to the death were Bert Jansch's "Where Did My Life Go" and Richard Thompson's "Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?" Fellow Brit folk pioneers Spriguns changed the title of their 1978 album to Magic Lady after hearing of Denny's death while recording. In 1998, a variety of Daylily was named after her. Denny's songs have been covered by numerous artists in the years since her death. Some of the notable acts to have covered her music include Yo La Tengo, former Marillion frontman Fish, who covered "Solo" on his album Songs from the Mirror, Cat Power, Judy Collins, Nanci Griffith and Nina Simone. Kate Bush mentioned Denny in the lyric of "Blow Away (For Bill)", as one of the musicians to greet Bill in Heaven. "Blow Away (For Bill)" is the third track on Bush's 1980 album Never for Ever. In 1984, Clann Eadair released the single "A tribute to Sandy Denny", featuring Phil Lynott on vocals. Several radio specials have been produced about Denny's life and music, including BBC Radio 2's The Sandy Denny Story: Who Knows Where the Time Goes. In 2007, Denny's song "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" also received BBC Radio 2's 2007 Folk Award for "Favourite Folk Track of All Time". In 2010, she was recognized by NPR in their 50 Great Voices special series. In April 2008, a tribute concert was held at The Troubadour in London, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Denny's death. Those taking part included Martin Carthy, Linda Thompson and Joe Boyd. A more extensive tribute was given later that year in December at the Southbank in the Queen Elizabeth Hall called The Lady: A Tribute to Sandy Denny with a band composed of members of Bellowhead, the evening featured a mix of young folk acts like Jim Moray and Lisa Knapp alongside those that had known and worked with Denny such as Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. These acts were joined by performers from outside the world of folk like PP Arnold and Marc Almond. The concert, which primarily featured songs written by Denny, received a four-star review in The Guardian. In May 2012 the Southbank concert was expanded into an eight date UK tour called The Lady: A Homage to Sandy Denny. The tour showcased Sandy's entire songbook taking in her work with Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, her solo career and the new songs completed by Thea Gilmore on her album Don't Stop Singing. The band was, once again, composed of members of Bellowhead. Other acts performing included the aforementioned Thea Gilmore and up-and-coming folk acts Lavinia Blackwall of Trembling Bells, Blair Dunlop and Sam Carter, alongside more established folk stars Maddy Prior, Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. The line-up was completed with performers not normally associated with the folk scene; Green Gartside, Joan Wasser (also known as Joan As Police Woman), and PP Arnold. The tour was well received, obtaining a four-star review in The Times. The London concert at the Barbican was filmed for BBC4, and broadcast in a 90-minute programme titled The Songs of Sandy Denny in November 2012. In the 2012 Irish film Silence (Harvest Films & South Wind Blows), "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" is used during the film and final credits. In April 2016 Denny was inducted into the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards Hall of Fame. Alela Diane recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on her album Cusp, released in February 2018. The song reflects on Denny's final tragic days and her orphaned baby daughter. Discography Solo studio albums The North Star Grassman and the Ravens (1971) Sandy (1972) Like an Old Fashioned Waltz (1974) Rendezvous (1977) Solo live albums The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 (1997) Gold Dust (1998) (live recording from final tour, 1977) Live at the BBC (2007 4-disc compilation) Sandy – Deluxe edition, 2012 – includes "Live at Ebbetts Field" (previously unreleased concert on disc 2) With others Denny's collaborations with other artists, including with Alex Campbell, The Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, and The Bunch, together with numerous posthumous releases and compilation albums, are detailed further on the Sandy Denny discography page. References and notes General Further reading Mick Houghton. I've Always Kept a Unicorn – The Biography of Sandy Denny. Faber & Faber, 2015; Clinton Heylin. No More Sad Refrains – The Life and Times of Sandy Denny. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Clinton Heylin. Gypsy Love Songs & Sad Refrains – The Recordings of Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny. Labour of Love Productions, 1989. Colin Larkin. The Guinness Who's Who of Folk Music. Guinness Publishing Ltd; Jim Irvin. Angel of Avalon. MOJO Magazine, August 1998. Colin Harper, Trevor Hodgett. Irish Folk, Traditional & Blues: A Secret History. Cherry Red, 2005; Pamela Murray Winters. No Thought of Leaving: A life of Sandy Denny. 2000. (Unpublished). Brian Hinton, Geoff Wall. Ashley Hutchings: The Guv'nor & the Rise of Folk Rock. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Patrick Humphries. Meet On The Ledge: The Classic Years 1967–1975. Virgin Books, 1997; Patrick Humphries. Richard Thompson: Strange Affair – The Biography. Virgin Books, 1996; Philip Ward, "Sandy Denny: A Thirtieth Anniversary", R2 (Rock'n'Reel) 2(9), May/June 2008. Philip Ward, Sandy Denny: Reflections on Her Music''. Matador, 2011; External links Official website Homage to Sandy Denny Dedicated to the memory of Sandy Denny Sandy Denny website 1947 births 1978 deaths 20th-century English singers 20th-century English women singers A&M Records artists Accidental deaths from falls Accidental deaths in London Deaths by intracerebral hemorrhage Alumni of Kingston College (England) British folk rock musicians Burials at Putney Vale Cemetery English folk singers English people of Scottish descent English women singer-songwriters Fairport Convention members Women rock singers Fotheringay members Island Records artists People from Byfield, Northamptonshire People from Wimbledon, London Singers from London Strawbs members The Bunch members	true	[ "When the Bough Breaks is the second solo album from Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward. It was originally released on April 27, 1997, on Cleopatra Records.\n\nTrack listing\n\"Hate\" – 5:00\n\"Children Killing Children\" – 3:51\n\"Growth\" – 5:45\n\"When I was a Child\" – 4:54\n\"Please Help Mommy (She's a Junkie)\" – 6:40\n\"Shine\" – 5:06\n\"Step Lightly (On the Grass)\" – 5:59\n\"Love & Innocence\" – 1:00\n\"Animals\" – 6:32\n\"Nighthawks Stars & Pines\" – 6:45\n\"Try Life\" – 5:35\n\"When the Bough Breaks\" – 9:45\n\nCD Cleopatra CL9981 (US 1997)\n\nMusicians\n\nBill Ward - vocals, lyrics, musical arrangements\nKeith Lynch - guitars\nPaul Ill - bass, double bass, synthesizer, tape loops\nRonnie Ciago - drums\n\nCover art and reprint issues\n\nAs originally released, this album featured cover art that had two roses on it. After it was released, Bill Ward (as with Ward One, his first solo album) stated on his website that the released cover art was not the correct one that was intended to be released. Additionally, the liner notes for the original printing had lyrics that were so small, most people needed a magnifying glass to read them. This was eventually corrected in 2000 when the version of the album with Bill on the cover from the 70's was released. The album was later on released in a special digipak style of case, but this was later said to be released prematurely, and was withdrawn.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nWhen the Bough Breaks at Bill Ward's site\nWhen the Bough Breaks at Black Sabbath Online\n\nBill Ward (musician) albums\nBlack Sabbath\n1997 albums\nCleopatra Records albums", "Push Rewind is the debut solo album by American pop singer Chris Wallace. It was released digitally on September 4, 2012.\n\nThe album was taken off of iTunes in late 2013 and was re-released on March 4, 2014.\n\nBackground\nAfter Chris' previous band, The White Tie Affair broke up, Chris began working on a solo album.\n\nOn August 23, 2012, Chris tweeted that his first solo album, Push Rewind, would be available on iTunes on September 4. On September 4, 2012, his debut solo album was released via ThinkSay Records.\n\nRelease and promotion\n\nSingles\n\"Remember When (Push Rewind)\" was released as the lead single off of the album on June 12, 2012. The song was available for free for the week of September 4, 2012 as iTunes' Single of the Week to help promote the album. The song has so far reached number 2 on the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100.\n\n\"Keep Me Crazy\" was announced as the second single from the album. It was originally released to mainstream pop radio on April 22, 2013 but it was re-released on July 30, 2013.\n\nTrack listing\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences\n\n2012 debut albums" ]
[ "Sandy Denny", "From Fairport to Fotheringay", "When was she in the band Fairport Convention?", "Denny became the obvious choice.", "who else was in the band with her?", "Simon Nicol,", "did they release an album?", "three albums", "when was the first album released?", "What We Did on Our Holidays," ]	C_e6cc2f78b77b4fcab1029b8e527f1a13_0	what was the name of the second album?	5	What was the name of the second Fairport Convention album?	Sandy Denny	After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late sixties, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. CANNOTANSWER	Unhalfbricking.	Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny (6 January 1947 – 21 April 1978) was an English singer-songwriter who was lead singer of the British folk rock band Fairport Convention. She has been described as "the pre-eminent British folk rock singer". After briefly working with the Strawbs, Denny joined Fairport Convention in 1968, remaining with them until 1969. She formed the short-lived band Fotheringay in 1970, before focusing on a solo career. Between 1971 and 1977, Denny released four solo albums: The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, Sandy, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz and Rendezvous. She also duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore" for Led Zeppelin's album Led Zeppelin IV in 1971. Denny died in 1978 at the age of 31 due to injuries and health issues related to alcohol abuse. Music publications Uncut and Mojo have described Denny as Britain's finest female singer-songwriter. Her composition "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" has been recorded by Judy Collins, Eva Cassidy, Nina Simone, 10,000 Maniacs and Cat Power. Her recorded work has been the subject of numerous reissues, along with a wealth of previously unreleased material which has appeared over the more than 40 years since her death, including a 19-CD box set released in November 2010. Childhood Denny was born on 6 January 1947 at Nelson Hospital, Kingston Road, Merton Park, London, to Neil and Edna Denny. She studied classical piano as a child. Her paternal grandfather was from Dundee, and her paternal grandmother was a Scots Gaelic speaker and singer of traditional songs. At an early age Denny showed an interest in singing, although her strict parents were reluctant to believe there was a living to be made from it. She attended Coombe Girls' School in New Malden; after leaving school she began training as a nurse at the Royal Brompton Hospital. Early career Denny's nursing career proved short-lived. In the meantime she had secured a place on a foundation course at Kingston College of Art, which she took up in September 1965, becoming involved with the folk club on campus. Her contemporaries at the college included guitarist and future member of Pentangle, John Renbourn. After her first public appearance at the Barge in Kingston upon Thames, Denny began working the folk club circuit in the evenings with an American-influenced repertoire, including songs by Tom Paxton, together with traditional folk songs. Denny made the first of many appearances for the BBC at Cecil Sharp House on 2 December 1966 on the Folk Song Cellar programme where she accompanied herself on two traditional songs: "Fir a Bhata" and "Green Grow the Laurels". Her earliest professional recordings were made a few months later in mid-1967 for the Saga label, featuring traditional songs and covers of folk contemporaries including her boyfriend of this period, the American singer-songwriter Jackson C. Frank. They were released on the albums Alex Campbell and His Friends and Sandy and Johnny with Johnny Silvo. These songs were collected on the 1970 album It's Sandy Denny where the tracks from Sandy and Johnny had been re-recorded with more accomplished vocals and guitar playing. The complete Saga studio recordings were issued on the 2005 compilation Where The Time Goes. By this time, she had abandoned her studies at art college and was devoting herself full-time to music. While she was performing at The Troubadour folk club, a member of the Strawbs heard her, and in 1967, she was invited to join the band. She recorded one album with them in Denmark, which was released belatedly in 1973, credited to Sandy Denny and the Strawbs: All Our Own Work. The album includes an early solo version of her best-known (and widely recorded) composition, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" A demo of that song found its way into the hands of American singer Judy Collins, who chose to cover it as the title track of an album of her own, released in November 1968, thus giving Denny international exposure as a songwriter before she had become widely known as a singer. From Fairport to Fotheringay After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late 1960s, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. Solo career and final years She then turned to recording her first solo album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Released in 1971, it is distinguished by its elusive lyrics and unconventional harmonies. Highlights included "Late November", inspired by a dream and the death of Fairport band member Martin Lamble, and "Next Time Around" a cryptogram about Jackson C. Frank, one of her many portraits in song. Sandy, with a cover photograph by David Bailey, followed in 1972 and was the first of her albums to be produced by Trevor Lucas. As well as introducing eight new original compositions, the album marked her last recording of a traditional song, "The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood" (words by Richard Fariña), with Denny's ambitious multi-tracked vocal arrangement inspired by the Ensemble of the Bulgarian Republic. Melody Maker readers twice voted her the "Best British Female Singer", in 1970 and 1971 and, together with contemporaries including Richard Thompson and Ashley Hutchings, she participated in a one-off project called the Bunch to record a collection of rock and roll era standards released under the title of Rock On. In 1971, Denny duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore", which was included on Led Zeppelin's 1971 album (Led Zeppelin IV); she was the only guest vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin album. In 1972 Denny had a small cameo on Lou Reizner's symphonic arrangement of the Who's rock opera Tommy. Her brief appearance was at the end of the track "It's a Boy", which also featured vocals from Pete Townshend. In 1973, she married long-term boyfriend and producer Trevor Lucas and recorded a third solo album, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz. The songs continued to detail many of her personal preoccupations: loss, loneliness, fear of the dark, the passing of time and the changing seasons. The album contained one of her best loved compositions, "Solo", and featured a cover image by Gered Mankowitz. In 1974, she returned to Fairport Convention (of which her husband was by then a member) for a world tour (captured on the 1974 album Fairport Live Convention) and a studio album, Rising for the Moon in 1975. Although her development as a soloist and songwriter had taken her further away from the folk roots direction that the band had pursued since Liege & Lief, seven of the eleven tracks on Rising for the Moon were either written or co-written by her. Denny and Lucas left Fairport Convention at the end of 1975 and embarked on what was to become her final album Rendezvous. Released in 1977, the album sold poorly and Denny was subsequently dropped by Island Records. Having relocated to the village of Byfield in Northamptonshire in the mid-seventies, Denny gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Georgia, in July 1977. A UK tour to promote Rendezvous in autumn 1977 marked her final public appearances. The closing night at the Royalty Theatre in London on 27 November 1977 was recorded for a live album, Gold Dust, which, because of technical problems in the recording of the electric guitar, was belatedly released in 1998 after most of the guitars had been re-recorded by Jerry Donahue. Death Linda Thompson would later note that Denny "really started going downhill in 1976" and demonstrated increasing levels of both manic and depressive behaviour. Learning that she was pregnant did little to mellow Denny's reckless lifestyle, which was heightened by increasing depression, mood swings and the unravelling of her "tumultuous" marriage to Trevor Lucas. She abused drugs and alcohol while pregnant with her daughter, Georgia, who was born prematurely in July 1977. Much like her moods, Denny's interest towards her daughter appeared to oscillate between obsessive and unconcerned; friends recalled both frantic, middle-of-the-night phone calls about teething, as well as Denny "crashing the car and leaving the baby in the pub and all sorts of stuff". Friends would later note that Denny had a history of purposely throwing herself off bar stools and down flights of stairs in order to get a reaction. Several remembered this behaviour as "Sandy's party trick", while Dave Pegg's wife Chris stated, "She certainly did it in my house and it could be a very dramatic gesture, like self-harming. She could do it without hurting herself usually but I had a feeling there would be one time too many." Those who knew Denny said that her increasing level of alcohol abuse in the last years of her life led to an increasing number of falls (both accidental and deliberate), resulting in a growing number of injuries. In late March 1978, while on holiday with her parents and baby Georgia in Cornwall, Denny was injured when she fell down a staircase and hit her head on concrete. Following the incident, she suffered from intense headaches; a doctor prescribed her the painkiller dextropropoxyphene, a drug known to have fatal side effects when mixed with alcohol. On 1 April, several days after the fall in Cornwall, Denny performed a charity concert at Byfield. The final song she performed was "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" At some unknown point during the first half of April 1978, Denny suffered yet another major fall at her home in Byfield. On 13 April, concerned about his wife's erratic behaviour and fearing for his daughter's safety, Trevor Lucas left the UK and returned to his native Australia with their child, leaving Denny without telling her. He sold their Austin Princess car in order to raise funds for the journey. On discovering Lucas' departure, Denny went to stay at the home of her friend Miranda Ward. During this time, Denny apparently set up an appointment to speak with a doctor about her headaches, and also intended to get advice about her alcohol addiction. At some point after 8 am on 17 April, Denny fell into a coma. Ward was out of the house at the time, and had asked her friend Jon Cole (of the band The Movies) to check in on Denny. Cole entered the home at 3 pm, and found Denny unconscious at the foot of the staircase which led to the second floor of the house. She was rushed by ambulance to Queen Mary's Hospital in nearby Roehampton. On 19 April, she was transferred to Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon. After receiving news that Denny was in a coma, Lucas returned from Australia. Upon his arrival at the hospital, doctors informed him that Denny was effectively brain-dead and her condition would not improve. He granted their recommendation to turn off life-support machines; however, just ten minutes before this was to take place, at 7:50 pm on 21 April 1978, Sandy Denny died, without regaining consciousness. Her death was ruled to be the result of a traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage and blunt force trauma to her head. She was 31 years old. The funeral took place on 27 April 1978 at Putney Vale Cemetery. After the vicar had read Denny's favourite psalm, Psalm 23, a piper played "Flowers of the Forest", a traditional song commemorating the fallen of Flodden Field and one which had appeared on the 1970 Fairport album Full House. The inscription on her headstone reads: Posthumous releases Official releases Although Denny had a devoted following in her lifetime, she did not achieve mass market success. In the years since her death, her reputation has grown. A four-album box set entitled Who Knows Where the Time Goes? (1985) was produced by her widower Trevor Lucas and Joe Boyd and included a number of rare and previously unreleased tracks by Denny, either solo or with Fairport Convention (1968, 1969, 1974) and Fotheringay (1970). This was the first public indication that a large cache of unreleased material existed. A one-disc subset of these recordings was subsequently issued on CD by Island in 1987 entitled The Best Of Sandy Denny. In 1987, a compilation of previously unreleased tracks recorded for the BBC by incarnations of Fairport including Denny was released on LP under the title Heyday, which was subsequently released on CD in 2001 and again, with extra tracks, in 2002; all tracks were later included, with others, on the 2007 4-CD box set Fairport Convention Live at the BBC (see below). The initial purpose of this compilation was to document the more "American" material performed live by the What We Did on Our Holidays lineup of the band that never made it to vinyl, while the re-releases added additional songs as performed by the Unhalfbricking and Liege and Lief lineups. Also in 1987, a VHS documentary, It All Comes 'Round Again, on Fairport Convention was released which contained excerpts of several audio recordings featuring Denny, plus a single poor-quality video recording of her singing her song "Solo" during her second stint with Fairport in 1974, as filmed by the University of Birmingham's "Guild TV" amateur organisation. The original tape of this recording has apparently been lost; however, "Like an Old Fashioned Waltz" does appear on the DVD documentary Sandy Denny Under Review (see below) and other tracks have been made available via YouTube in very poor quality. Over the period 1988–1994, the Australian "Friends of Fairport" issued a series of subscriber-only cassette compilations drawing in the main on previously unreleased tapes from Trevor Lucas' collection (as stored in his attic in fact). Attic Tracks (AT) 1 (1988) contained out-takes from Sandy as well as some Fairport material and a few bizarre extras; AT 2 (1989) contained only Trevor Lucas material, no Denny; AT 3 (1989) entitled First and Last Tracks comprised 1966–1967 home demos and rare radio tracks, as well as 9 "pre-overdub" songs from Denny's last concert at the Royalty Theatre, London, on 27 November 1977 (a partial alternative to the later, overdubbed CD release Gold Dust), and AT 4 (1994): Together Again comprised one side of Lucas and the other of Denny in the form of more home demos, studio outtakes, and 4 tracks from a 1973 BBC radio concert. A cut-down version of these tracks (18 songs) was subsequently compiled for CD release by the Australian label Raven Records in 1995 called Sandy Denny, Trevor Lucas and Friends: The Attic Tracks 1972–1984. In 1991, Joe Boyd issued a new version of Denny's All Our Own Work album with the Strawbs, called Sandy Denny and the Strawbs, on his Hannibal Records label. The album had strings added to some tracks, including "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" and further tracks with Denny on lead vocal. In 1997, a one-disc compilation of Denny's solo BBC recordings was released as The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 on Strange Fruit Records. Due to rights issues it was withdrawn on the day of release, thereby creating a highly collectible disc (up until the release of the comprehensive Live at the BBC box set in 2007). This release was followed in 1998 when Denny's final performance at the Royalty Theatre, entitled Gold Dust, was issued on CD, following a degree of re-recording and overdubbing of selected backing parts to replace reportedly unsatisfactory originals. In 1999, a single-disc compilation, Listen Listen – An Introduction to Sandy Denny, was released on Island Records comprising 17 previously released tracks taken from her four Island solo albums. No More Sad Refrains: The Anthology was released by Universal Records in 2000. When first released, this compilation had several rare tracks, including "The Ballad of Easy Rider" from the Liege and Lief sessions, "Learning the Game" and "When Will I Be Loved" from the Bunch album Rock On, "Here in Silence" and "Man of Iron" from the Pass of Arms soundtrack, and a previously unissued demo of "Stranger to Himself". In 2002, a previously unreleased, 2-CD live US concert recording by Fairport Convention from 1974 featuring Denny was released on the Burning Airlines label. Entitled Before The Moon, it originated from a radio broadcast from Ebbets Field in Denver, Colorado, on 23/24 May 1974. The second disc was a limited release bonus with the original release comprising the second set from the same concert. This recording was re-released in shortened form as a single disc in 2011 on the It's About Music label entitled Fairport Convention with Sandy Denny: Ebbets Field 1974. Also in 2002, the American A&M Records issued a budget-price "20th Century Masters" compilation called The Best of Sandy Denny with 10 tracks all available on Denny's studio albums. In 2004 a second comprehensive five-CD box set was released on the Fledg'ling record label called A Boxful of Treasures that included many unreleased recordings, in particular a whole disc of acoustic demos, many recorded at her home in Byfield that was highly prized amongst fans and critics alike, who had long asserted that her solo performances showed her work in its best light, revealing the true quality of her vocal style and compositions. Also in 2004, the Spectrum label issued a 16-track compilation of previously released material entitled The Collection: Chronological Covers & Concert Classics, including a mix of studio recordings and live excerpts from the Gold Dust Royalty concert. In 2005, remastered versions of all Denny's solo albums came out with bonus tracks. Also in 2005, a single CD compilation entitled Where the Time Goes: Sandy '67 was released on Castle Music containing all of Saga's Denny album tracks (including the alternative recordings on It's Sandy Denny), together with two self accompanied tracks from Denny's recordings with the Strawbs. A DVD documentary entitled Sandy Denny Under Review was released on the Sexy Intellectual label in 2006 which contained interviews with her contemporaries plus brief excerpts from her audio recordings, plus some short video clips including two of the poor quality video recordings with Fairport from Birmingham University (details given above), two with Fotheringay from German TV's Beat-Club (further details given below), and three solo excerpts from the only surviving BBC footage on One In Ten (details as given in the next item). A 4-disc box set, Sandy Denny Live at the BBC, came out in September 2007 containing (virtually) all of the known solo recordings made by Denny for that UK broadcaster including two complete concerts, one at the Paris Theatre in 1972 and one recorded for Sounds on Sunday in 1973, plus a range of other material spanning the years 1966–1973. Disc 3 of this set was a DVD containing surviving TV footage from a 1971 BBC One in Ten session comprising solo performances by Denny of "The North Star Grassman and the Ravens", "Crazy Lady Blues" and "Late November", along with digitised excerpts from her diaries, rare photos and a discography. A 1-disc subset of this box set entitled The Best of the BBC Recordings was subsequently released in 2008. A companion box set, Fairport Convention Live at the BBC, also came out in 2007 and covered equivalent live recordings by Fairport over the period 1968–1974, of which the first two discs (1968–1970) contain examples from Denny's time with that group. In 2008, Jerry Donahue completed the unfinished second Fotheringay album begun in the autumn of 1970. It was released to general acclaim as Fotheringay 2 and contained some notable Denny performances, in particular earlier versions of two Denny compositions, "Late November" and "John the Gun", and performances of the traditional songs "Gypsy Davey" and "Wild Mountain Thyme". Also in 2008, Island Remasters issued a double CD entitled The Music Weaver (Sandy Denny Remembered) which contained a mix of better known tracks and less well known demos and live recordings, previously released but not in companion with studio sessions. This compilation is also one of the very few to contain the Led Zeppelin track "The Battle Of Evermore" which features a rare guest appearance by Denny. In 2010, a large 19-CD retrospective box set, simply titled Sandy Denny, was released by Universal/Island Records in a limited edition of 3,000. It contained Denny's entire catalogue of studio recordings, including her work with the Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay and as a solo artist. The compilation also included a large number of outtakes, demos, live recordings, radio sessions and interviews. The box set was released to good reviews, including a 5-star review in Uncut and a 4-star review in The Guardian. In late 2010, Thea Gilmore was commissioned by Denny's estate, in conjunction with Island Records, to write melodies to unrecorded lyrics found in Denny's papers. The resulting album, Don't Stop Singing, was released in November 2011 to generally good notices, including 4-star reviews in The Independent and The Guardian among others. On 21 April 2012, the single "London" was released as an exclusive Record Store Day 7″ single. Further recordings were released in 2011, including a German recording of Fotheringay in concert released as Essen 1970 on the Garden of Delights label. The performance was remastered by original band member Jerry Donahue. This release was followed by 19 Rupert Street, a home recording of a rehearsal featuring Sandy and Alex Campbell recorded at his flat in August 1967. This release is notable for the fact that Sandy performs a number of tracks that are not available in any other versions, including a cover of "Fairytale Lullaby" by John Martyn. This CD was put out by Sandy's former Strawbs bandmate Dave Cousins on his Witchwood label. Two-disc "Deluxe Editions" of Denny's album reissues appeared in 2011–2012 with additional tracks; the 2012 Deluxe Edition of Sandy included a previously unreleased eight-song solo set from her 1973 U.S. tour recorded at Ebbet's Field in Denver, Colorado. A similar two-disc reissue of Fairport Convention's Rising for the Moon also included, for the first time, the complete 1974 L.A. Troubadour performance of Fairport with Denny back on board, prior to the official announcement of her re-joining the group. On account of unprecedented demand for, and exhaustion of supply of the limited edition 19-CD set cited above, in October 2012 a limited edition 4-CD version was released entitled The Notes and The Words: A Collection of Demos and Rarities, containing "75 songs that represent the cream of the rarities, demos and outtakes from the box set". Limited to 3,500 copies, this compilation is also now out-of-print. In 2013, Spectrum records issued a single-disc CD entitled The Lady – The Essential Sandy Denny that comprised 15 previously issued tracks, generally from Denny's well known albums. 2014 saw the release of another Fairport live U.S. radio broadcast from their 1974 tour with Denny, on RockBeat Records, entitled Live 1974 (My Father's Place), comprising 11 live tracks, most featuring Denny, recorded at the New York rock club My Father's Place. A four-disc Fotheringay retrospective, Nothing More: The Collected Fotheringay, was released on 30 March 2015. This is the most comprehensive compilation of the group's recordings, and contains, in addition to all the tracks on Fotheringay and Fotheringay 2 as both final studio versions and demos/alternate takes, the complete live concert set from Rotterdam in 1970 (including several previously unreleased tracks), seven Fotheringay tracks recorded in session for BBC radio (which had previously circulated only as bootlegs), plus a DVD disc containing four performances by Fotheringay recorded for the German Beat-Club TV series in 1970, which considerably augment the otherwise sparse known TV footage of Denny in particular. May 2016 saw the release of a 2-CD compilation, I've Always Kept A Unicorn – The Acoustic Sandy Denny which collected together many previously released, but dispersed, acoustic and/or demo versions of songs better known from their album counterparts, as well as three previously unreleased demos (with Linda Thompson, at the time Linda Peters) from 1972's Rock On sessions by one-off band The Bunch. A 7-CD box set by Fairport Convention entitled Come All Ye – The First 10 Years was released in July 2017 and contains a small number of additional, previously unreleased demos and alternate takes featuring Denny during her first tenure with the band over the period 1968–1969. Tracks not previously available include versions of Joni Mitchell's Eastern Rain, an a capella version of Nottamun Town, alternative takes of Autopsy and Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and a rehearsal version of The Deserter. Unofficial releases and audience tapes In addition to the authorised material listed above, a number unofficial/unauthorised compilations exist plus a range of audience recordings of varying quality, none of which would likely see the light of day as commercial issues but are of interest to a sector of Denny's audience on either historic or aesthetic grounds, often providing alternative views of songs known otherwise only from their commercially released versions. The first available unauthorised/bootleg CDs available in the 1980s and 1990s comprised principally off-air and other obscure material under such titles as Borrowed Thyme, Poems from Alexandra, Dark the Night, Wild Mountain Thyme and One Last Sad Refrain; such compilations are now largely superseded by the subsequent availability of most of the off-air material in much better quality as official releases as described above. Of more enduring interest are audience tapes of shows of which no "official" tapes survive. These include some early shows by Fairport Convention; a performance by Fotheringay at the 1970 Tenth National Jazz and Blues Festival, held at Plumpton Race Track, Streat, East Sussex, England; "solo" shows by Denny (on occasion with a small band including, among others, Richard Thompson) at the 1971 Lincoln Folk Festival and at the Eltham Well Hall Open Theatre in 1972; performances from York University and Guildhall, Newcastle upon Tyne, also in 1972; an early 1972 U.S. performance from The Bitter End in New York; and several sets (Birmingham and Croydon) from her final 1977 tour in addition to the officially released Gold Dust album; plus quite a large number of recordings strongly featuring Denny as part of the re-formed Fairport Convention over the period 1974–1975. The majority of these can be fairly easily located via relevant internet searches and, in addition, can be readily downloaded from archival music servers such as Sugarmegs (Sandy Denny concerts listed under "S": SugarMegs Streaming Server, Fairport and Fotheringay under "F": SugarMegs Streaming Server). A provisional list of such recordings as are known to exist, with details on where each can be accessed, is available here. Legacy Estate and family After relocating to Australia and remarrying, Trevor Lucas died of a heart attack in 1989. Denny's estate is now managed by Lucas' widow, Elizabeth Hurtt-Lucas. A number of otherwise unreleased recordings of Sandy Denny from his collection have subsequently been the basis for posthumous releases of Denny's work including those on The Attic Tracks and elsewhere. Sandy Denny's daughter, Georgia, has rarely spoken about her mother in a public forum and in the mid-2000s declined an invitation to write the liner notes for Sandy Denny Live at the BBC. However, in 2006 she flew to Britain from Australia to accept on her mother's behalf the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards award for Most Influential Folk Album of All Time, which was given for Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief. Georgia gave birth to twin daughters on 29 April 1997, and a tribute album, Georgia on Our Mind, featuring many of Sandy Denny's former bandmates and friends, was compiled in the children's honour. She also administers a Facebook page "Sandy Denny and Family" dedicated to her mother's memory and more recently, under the name Georgia Katt, has released some of her own DJ-based music. Tributes Since her death, many tributes have been made to Denny, both in music and elsewhere. Dave Pegg of Fairport Convention recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on his 1983 solo album The Cocktail Cowboy Goes It Alone. Dave Cousins of the Strawbs wrote "Ringing Down the Years" in memory of Denny shortly after her death. Songs more specific to the death were Bert Jansch's "Where Did My Life Go" and Richard Thompson's "Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?" Fellow Brit folk pioneers Spriguns changed the title of their 1978 album to Magic Lady after hearing of Denny's death while recording. In 1998, a variety of Daylily was named after her. Denny's songs have been covered by numerous artists in the years since her death. Some of the notable acts to have covered her music include Yo La Tengo, former Marillion frontman Fish, who covered "Solo" on his album Songs from the Mirror, Cat Power, Judy Collins, Nanci Griffith and Nina Simone. Kate Bush mentioned Denny in the lyric of "Blow Away (For Bill)", as one of the musicians to greet Bill in Heaven. "Blow Away (For Bill)" is the third track on Bush's 1980 album Never for Ever. In 1984, Clann Eadair released the single "A tribute to Sandy Denny", featuring Phil Lynott on vocals. Several radio specials have been produced about Denny's life and music, including BBC Radio 2's The Sandy Denny Story: Who Knows Where the Time Goes. In 2007, Denny's song "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" also received BBC Radio 2's 2007 Folk Award for "Favourite Folk Track of All Time". In 2010, she was recognized by NPR in their 50 Great Voices special series. In April 2008, a tribute concert was held at The Troubadour in London, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Denny's death. Those taking part included Martin Carthy, Linda Thompson and Joe Boyd. A more extensive tribute was given later that year in December at the Southbank in the Queen Elizabeth Hall called The Lady: A Tribute to Sandy Denny with a band composed of members of Bellowhead, the evening featured a mix of young folk acts like Jim Moray and Lisa Knapp alongside those that had known and worked with Denny such as Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. These acts were joined by performers from outside the world of folk like PP Arnold and Marc Almond. The concert, which primarily featured songs written by Denny, received a four-star review in The Guardian. In May 2012 the Southbank concert was expanded into an eight date UK tour called The Lady: A Homage to Sandy Denny. The tour showcased Sandy's entire songbook taking in her work with Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, her solo career and the new songs completed by Thea Gilmore on her album Don't Stop Singing. The band was, once again, composed of members of Bellowhead. Other acts performing included the aforementioned Thea Gilmore and up-and-coming folk acts Lavinia Blackwall of Trembling Bells, Blair Dunlop and Sam Carter, alongside more established folk stars Maddy Prior, Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. The line-up was completed with performers not normally associated with the folk scene; Green Gartside, Joan Wasser (also known as Joan As Police Woman), and PP Arnold. The tour was well received, obtaining a four-star review in The Times. The London concert at the Barbican was filmed for BBC4, and broadcast in a 90-minute programme titled The Songs of Sandy Denny in November 2012. In the 2012 Irish film Silence (Harvest Films & South Wind Blows), "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" is used during the film and final credits. In April 2016 Denny was inducted into the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards Hall of Fame. Alela Diane recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on her album Cusp, released in February 2018. The song reflects on Denny's final tragic days and her orphaned baby daughter. Discography Solo studio albums The North Star Grassman and the Ravens (1971) Sandy (1972) Like an Old Fashioned Waltz (1974) Rendezvous (1977) Solo live albums The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 (1997) Gold Dust (1998) (live recording from final tour, 1977) Live at the BBC (2007 4-disc compilation) Sandy – Deluxe edition, 2012 – includes "Live at Ebbetts Field" (previously unreleased concert on disc 2) With others Denny's collaborations with other artists, including with Alex Campbell, The Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, and The Bunch, together with numerous posthumous releases and compilation albums, are detailed further on the Sandy Denny discography page. References and notes General Further reading Mick Houghton. I've Always Kept a Unicorn – The Biography of Sandy Denny. Faber & Faber, 2015; Clinton Heylin. No More Sad Refrains – The Life and Times of Sandy Denny. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Clinton Heylin. Gypsy Love Songs & Sad Refrains – The Recordings of Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny. Labour of Love Productions, 1989. Colin Larkin. The Guinness Who's Who of Folk Music. Guinness Publishing Ltd; Jim Irvin. Angel of Avalon. MOJO Magazine, August 1998. Colin Harper, Trevor Hodgett. Irish Folk, Traditional & Blues: A Secret History. Cherry Red, 2005; Pamela Murray Winters. No Thought of Leaving: A life of Sandy Denny. 2000. (Unpublished). Brian Hinton, Geoff Wall. Ashley Hutchings: The Guv'nor & the Rise of Folk Rock. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Patrick Humphries. Meet On The Ledge: The Classic Years 1967–1975. Virgin Books, 1997; Patrick Humphries. Richard Thompson: Strange Affair – The Biography. Virgin Books, 1996; Philip Ward, "Sandy Denny: A Thirtieth Anniversary", R2 (Rock'n'Reel) 2(9), May/June 2008. Philip Ward, Sandy Denny: Reflections on Her Music''. Matador, 2011; External links Official website Homage to Sandy Denny Dedicated to the memory of Sandy Denny Sandy Denny website 1947 births 1978 deaths 20th-century English singers 20th-century English women singers A&M Records artists Accidental deaths from falls Accidental deaths in London Deaths by intracerebral hemorrhage Alumni of Kingston College (England) British folk rock musicians Burials at Putney Vale Cemetery English folk singers English people of Scottish descent English women singer-songwriters Fairport Convention members Women rock singers Fotheringay members Island Records artists People from Byfield, Northamptonshire People from Wimbledon, London Singers from London Strawbs members The Bunch members	true	[ "White Witch is the title of the second studio album by the group Andrea True Connection. It was released in 1977. The album had two singles: and \"N.Y., You Got Me Dancing\" and \"What's Your Name, What's Your Number\". This was the last album released by the group and the vocalist Andrea True would release a new album as a solo release only in 1980.\n\nBackground and production\nAfter the success of her first album and the gold-certified single More, More, More, the band begun to prepeare for their second release. The album production included studio musicians with a new band assembled for the tour, the second line-up, which included future Kiss guitarist Bruce Kulick, it was also produce by the disco pioneers Michael Zager and Jerry Love.\n\nSingles\nThe first single of the album was \"N.Y., You Got Me Dancing\", it was released in 1977 and became True's second biggest hit, reaching No. 27 on Billboard's pop chart, and #4 on the U.S. club chart, it also peaked #89 in the Canadian RPM's chart. \"What's Your Name, What's Your Number\" was released as the second and last single of the album (and also of the group) in 1978 and reached #9 on the U.S. club chart, #34 in the UK and #56 on the Billboard Hot 100\n\nCritical reception\n\nThe album received mixed reviews from music critics. Alex Henderson from the Allmusic website gave the album two and a half stars out of five in a mixed review which he wrote that \"while White Witch isn't a bad album, it falls short of the excellence her first album, More, More, More.\" He also stated that there are a few gems in the album \"including the Michael Zager-produced \"What's Your Name, What's Your Number\" and the exuberant, Gregg Diamond-produced \"N.Y., You Got Me Dancing\"\" according to him they're both \"exercises in unapologetically campy fun.\" He concluded that the album \"LP is strictly for diehard disco collectors.\"\n\nTrack listing\nsource:\n\nReferences\n\n1977 albums\nAndrea True albums\nBuddah Records albums", "Kraken III is the name of the third studio album Colombian group Kraken It was released on January 3, 1990 by Sonolux. The first single from the album was \"Rostros Ocultos\". The second single was \"Lágrimas de Fuego\".\n\nInformation \nThis album confirmed the progressive trend of the band. A trend that featured a group identity and a concept of what is Kraken. This album started to show the other bands of the country's ideology which is the National Rock and how it can be strengthened.\n\nTrack listing\n\nReferences \n\nKraken (band) albums\n1993 albums" ]
[ "Sandy Denny", "From Fairport to Fotheringay", "When was she in the band Fairport Convention?", "Denny became the obvious choice.", "who else was in the band with her?", "Simon Nicol,", "did they release an album?", "three albums", "when was the first album released?", "What We Did on Our Holidays,", "what was the name of the second album?", "Unhalfbricking." ]	C_e6cc2f78b77b4fcab1029b8e527f1a13_0	what was the name of the third album?	6	What was the name of the third Fairport Convention album?	Sandy Denny	After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late sixties, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. CANNOTANSWER	Liege & Lief	Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny (6 January 1947 – 21 April 1978) was an English singer-songwriter who was lead singer of the British folk rock band Fairport Convention. She has been described as "the pre-eminent British folk rock singer". After briefly working with the Strawbs, Denny joined Fairport Convention in 1968, remaining with them until 1969. She formed the short-lived band Fotheringay in 1970, before focusing on a solo career. Between 1971 and 1977, Denny released four solo albums: The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, Sandy, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz and Rendezvous. She also duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore" for Led Zeppelin's album Led Zeppelin IV in 1971. Denny died in 1978 at the age of 31 due to injuries and health issues related to alcohol abuse. Music publications Uncut and Mojo have described Denny as Britain's finest female singer-songwriter. Her composition "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" has been recorded by Judy Collins, Eva Cassidy, Nina Simone, 10,000 Maniacs and Cat Power. Her recorded work has been the subject of numerous reissues, along with a wealth of previously unreleased material which has appeared over the more than 40 years since her death, including a 19-CD box set released in November 2010. Childhood Denny was born on 6 January 1947 at Nelson Hospital, Kingston Road, Merton Park, London, to Neil and Edna Denny. She studied classical piano as a child. Her paternal grandfather was from Dundee, and her paternal grandmother was a Scots Gaelic speaker and singer of traditional songs. At an early age Denny showed an interest in singing, although her strict parents were reluctant to believe there was a living to be made from it. She attended Coombe Girls' School in New Malden; after leaving school she began training as a nurse at the Royal Brompton Hospital. Early career Denny's nursing career proved short-lived. In the meantime she had secured a place on a foundation course at Kingston College of Art, which she took up in September 1965, becoming involved with the folk club on campus. Her contemporaries at the college included guitarist and future member of Pentangle, John Renbourn. After her first public appearance at the Barge in Kingston upon Thames, Denny began working the folk club circuit in the evenings with an American-influenced repertoire, including songs by Tom Paxton, together with traditional folk songs. Denny made the first of many appearances for the BBC at Cecil Sharp House on 2 December 1966 on the Folk Song Cellar programme where she accompanied herself on two traditional songs: "Fir a Bhata" and "Green Grow the Laurels". Her earliest professional recordings were made a few months later in mid-1967 for the Saga label, featuring traditional songs and covers of folk contemporaries including her boyfriend of this period, the American singer-songwriter Jackson C. Frank. They were released on the albums Alex Campbell and His Friends and Sandy and Johnny with Johnny Silvo. These songs were collected on the 1970 album It's Sandy Denny where the tracks from Sandy and Johnny had been re-recorded with more accomplished vocals and guitar playing. The complete Saga studio recordings were issued on the 2005 compilation Where The Time Goes. By this time, she had abandoned her studies at art college and was devoting herself full-time to music. While she was performing at The Troubadour folk club, a member of the Strawbs heard her, and in 1967, she was invited to join the band. She recorded one album with them in Denmark, which was released belatedly in 1973, credited to Sandy Denny and the Strawbs: All Our Own Work. The album includes an early solo version of her best-known (and widely recorded) composition, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" A demo of that song found its way into the hands of American singer Judy Collins, who chose to cover it as the title track of an album of her own, released in November 1968, thus giving Denny international exposure as a songwriter before she had become widely known as a singer. From Fairport to Fotheringay After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late 1960s, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. Solo career and final years She then turned to recording her first solo album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Released in 1971, it is distinguished by its elusive lyrics and unconventional harmonies. Highlights included "Late November", inspired by a dream and the death of Fairport band member Martin Lamble, and "Next Time Around" a cryptogram about Jackson C. Frank, one of her many portraits in song. Sandy, with a cover photograph by David Bailey, followed in 1972 and was the first of her albums to be produced by Trevor Lucas. As well as introducing eight new original compositions, the album marked her last recording of a traditional song, "The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood" (words by Richard Fariña), with Denny's ambitious multi-tracked vocal arrangement inspired by the Ensemble of the Bulgarian Republic. Melody Maker readers twice voted her the "Best British Female Singer", in 1970 and 1971 and, together with contemporaries including Richard Thompson and Ashley Hutchings, she participated in a one-off project called the Bunch to record a collection of rock and roll era standards released under the title of Rock On. In 1971, Denny duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore", which was included on Led Zeppelin's 1971 album (Led Zeppelin IV); she was the only guest vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin album. In 1972 Denny had a small cameo on Lou Reizner's symphonic arrangement of the Who's rock opera Tommy. Her brief appearance was at the end of the track "It's a Boy", which also featured vocals from Pete Townshend. In 1973, she married long-term boyfriend and producer Trevor Lucas and recorded a third solo album, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz. The songs continued to detail many of her personal preoccupations: loss, loneliness, fear of the dark, the passing of time and the changing seasons. The album contained one of her best loved compositions, "Solo", and featured a cover image by Gered Mankowitz. In 1974, she returned to Fairport Convention (of which her husband was by then a member) for a world tour (captured on the 1974 album Fairport Live Convention) and a studio album, Rising for the Moon in 1975. Although her development as a soloist and songwriter had taken her further away from the folk roots direction that the band had pursued since Liege & Lief, seven of the eleven tracks on Rising for the Moon were either written or co-written by her. Denny and Lucas left Fairport Convention at the end of 1975 and embarked on what was to become her final album Rendezvous. Released in 1977, the album sold poorly and Denny was subsequently dropped by Island Records. Having relocated to the village of Byfield in Northamptonshire in the mid-seventies, Denny gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Georgia, in July 1977. A UK tour to promote Rendezvous in autumn 1977 marked her final public appearances. The closing night at the Royalty Theatre in London on 27 November 1977 was recorded for a live album, Gold Dust, which, because of technical problems in the recording of the electric guitar, was belatedly released in 1998 after most of the guitars had been re-recorded by Jerry Donahue. Death Linda Thompson would later note that Denny "really started going downhill in 1976" and demonstrated increasing levels of both manic and depressive behaviour. Learning that she was pregnant did little to mellow Denny's reckless lifestyle, which was heightened by increasing depression, mood swings and the unravelling of her "tumultuous" marriage to Trevor Lucas. She abused drugs and alcohol while pregnant with her daughter, Georgia, who was born prematurely in July 1977. Much like her moods, Denny's interest towards her daughter appeared to oscillate between obsessive and unconcerned; friends recalled both frantic, middle-of-the-night phone calls about teething, as well as Denny "crashing the car and leaving the baby in the pub and all sorts of stuff". Friends would later note that Denny had a history of purposely throwing herself off bar stools and down flights of stairs in order to get a reaction. Several remembered this behaviour as "Sandy's party trick", while Dave Pegg's wife Chris stated, "She certainly did it in my house and it could be a very dramatic gesture, like self-harming. She could do it without hurting herself usually but I had a feeling there would be one time too many." Those who knew Denny said that her increasing level of alcohol abuse in the last years of her life led to an increasing number of falls (both accidental and deliberate), resulting in a growing number of injuries. In late March 1978, while on holiday with her parents and baby Georgia in Cornwall, Denny was injured when she fell down a staircase and hit her head on concrete. Following the incident, she suffered from intense headaches; a doctor prescribed her the painkiller dextropropoxyphene, a drug known to have fatal side effects when mixed with alcohol. On 1 April, several days after the fall in Cornwall, Denny performed a charity concert at Byfield. The final song she performed was "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" At some unknown point during the first half of April 1978, Denny suffered yet another major fall at her home in Byfield. On 13 April, concerned about his wife's erratic behaviour and fearing for his daughter's safety, Trevor Lucas left the UK and returned to his native Australia with their child, leaving Denny without telling her. He sold their Austin Princess car in order to raise funds for the journey. On discovering Lucas' departure, Denny went to stay at the home of her friend Miranda Ward. During this time, Denny apparently set up an appointment to speak with a doctor about her headaches, and also intended to get advice about her alcohol addiction. At some point after 8 am on 17 April, Denny fell into a coma. Ward was out of the house at the time, and had asked her friend Jon Cole (of the band The Movies) to check in on Denny. Cole entered the home at 3 pm, and found Denny unconscious at the foot of the staircase which led to the second floor of the house. She was rushed by ambulance to Queen Mary's Hospital in nearby Roehampton. On 19 April, she was transferred to Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon. After receiving news that Denny was in a coma, Lucas returned from Australia. Upon his arrival at the hospital, doctors informed him that Denny was effectively brain-dead and her condition would not improve. He granted their recommendation to turn off life-support machines; however, just ten minutes before this was to take place, at 7:50 pm on 21 April 1978, Sandy Denny died, without regaining consciousness. Her death was ruled to be the result of a traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage and blunt force trauma to her head. She was 31 years old. The funeral took place on 27 April 1978 at Putney Vale Cemetery. After the vicar had read Denny's favourite psalm, Psalm 23, a piper played "Flowers of the Forest", a traditional song commemorating the fallen of Flodden Field and one which had appeared on the 1970 Fairport album Full House. The inscription on her headstone reads: Posthumous releases Official releases Although Denny had a devoted following in her lifetime, she did not achieve mass market success. In the years since her death, her reputation has grown. A four-album box set entitled Who Knows Where the Time Goes? (1985) was produced by her widower Trevor Lucas and Joe Boyd and included a number of rare and previously unreleased tracks by Denny, either solo or with Fairport Convention (1968, 1969, 1974) and Fotheringay (1970). This was the first public indication that a large cache of unreleased material existed. A one-disc subset of these recordings was subsequently issued on CD by Island in 1987 entitled The Best Of Sandy Denny. In 1987, a compilation of previously unreleased tracks recorded for the BBC by incarnations of Fairport including Denny was released on LP under the title Heyday, which was subsequently released on CD in 2001 and again, with extra tracks, in 2002; all tracks were later included, with others, on the 2007 4-CD box set Fairport Convention Live at the BBC (see below). The initial purpose of this compilation was to document the more "American" material performed live by the What We Did on Our Holidays lineup of the band that never made it to vinyl, while the re-releases added additional songs as performed by the Unhalfbricking and Liege and Lief lineups. Also in 1987, a VHS documentary, It All Comes 'Round Again, on Fairport Convention was released which contained excerpts of several audio recordings featuring Denny, plus a single poor-quality video recording of her singing her song "Solo" during her second stint with Fairport in 1974, as filmed by the University of Birmingham's "Guild TV" amateur organisation. The original tape of this recording has apparently been lost; however, "Like an Old Fashioned Waltz" does appear on the DVD documentary Sandy Denny Under Review (see below) and other tracks have been made available via YouTube in very poor quality. Over the period 1988–1994, the Australian "Friends of Fairport" issued a series of subscriber-only cassette compilations drawing in the main on previously unreleased tapes from Trevor Lucas' collection (as stored in his attic in fact). Attic Tracks (AT) 1 (1988) contained out-takes from Sandy as well as some Fairport material and a few bizarre extras; AT 2 (1989) contained only Trevor Lucas material, no Denny; AT 3 (1989) entitled First and Last Tracks comprised 1966–1967 home demos and rare radio tracks, as well as 9 "pre-overdub" songs from Denny's last concert at the Royalty Theatre, London, on 27 November 1977 (a partial alternative to the later, overdubbed CD release Gold Dust), and AT 4 (1994): Together Again comprised one side of Lucas and the other of Denny in the form of more home demos, studio outtakes, and 4 tracks from a 1973 BBC radio concert. A cut-down version of these tracks (18 songs) was subsequently compiled for CD release by the Australian label Raven Records in 1995 called Sandy Denny, Trevor Lucas and Friends: The Attic Tracks 1972–1984. In 1991, Joe Boyd issued a new version of Denny's All Our Own Work album with the Strawbs, called Sandy Denny and the Strawbs, on his Hannibal Records label. The album had strings added to some tracks, including "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" and further tracks with Denny on lead vocal. In 1997, a one-disc compilation of Denny's solo BBC recordings was released as The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 on Strange Fruit Records. Due to rights issues it was withdrawn on the day of release, thereby creating a highly collectible disc (up until the release of the comprehensive Live at the BBC box set in 2007). This release was followed in 1998 when Denny's final performance at the Royalty Theatre, entitled Gold Dust, was issued on CD, following a degree of re-recording and overdubbing of selected backing parts to replace reportedly unsatisfactory originals. In 1999, a single-disc compilation, Listen Listen – An Introduction to Sandy Denny, was released on Island Records comprising 17 previously released tracks taken from her four Island solo albums. No More Sad Refrains: The Anthology was released by Universal Records in 2000. When first released, this compilation had several rare tracks, including "The Ballad of Easy Rider" from the Liege and Lief sessions, "Learning the Game" and "When Will I Be Loved" from the Bunch album Rock On, "Here in Silence" and "Man of Iron" from the Pass of Arms soundtrack, and a previously unissued demo of "Stranger to Himself". In 2002, a previously unreleased, 2-CD live US concert recording by Fairport Convention from 1974 featuring Denny was released on the Burning Airlines label. Entitled Before The Moon, it originated from a radio broadcast from Ebbets Field in Denver, Colorado, on 23/24 May 1974. The second disc was a limited release bonus with the original release comprising the second set from the same concert. This recording was re-released in shortened form as a single disc in 2011 on the It's About Music label entitled Fairport Convention with Sandy Denny: Ebbets Field 1974. Also in 2002, the American A&M Records issued a budget-price "20th Century Masters" compilation called The Best of Sandy Denny with 10 tracks all available on Denny's studio albums. In 2004 a second comprehensive five-CD box set was released on the Fledg'ling record label called A Boxful of Treasures that included many unreleased recordings, in particular a whole disc of acoustic demos, many recorded at her home in Byfield that was highly prized amongst fans and critics alike, who had long asserted that her solo performances showed her work in its best light, revealing the true quality of her vocal style and compositions. Also in 2004, the Spectrum label issued a 16-track compilation of previously released material entitled The Collection: Chronological Covers & Concert Classics, including a mix of studio recordings and live excerpts from the Gold Dust Royalty concert. In 2005, remastered versions of all Denny's solo albums came out with bonus tracks. Also in 2005, a single CD compilation entitled Where the Time Goes: Sandy '67 was released on Castle Music containing all of Saga's Denny album tracks (including the alternative recordings on It's Sandy Denny), together with two self accompanied tracks from Denny's recordings with the Strawbs. A DVD documentary entitled Sandy Denny Under Review was released on the Sexy Intellectual label in 2006 which contained interviews with her contemporaries plus brief excerpts from her audio recordings, plus some short video clips including two of the poor quality video recordings with Fairport from Birmingham University (details given above), two with Fotheringay from German TV's Beat-Club (further details given below), and three solo excerpts from the only surviving BBC footage on One In Ten (details as given in the next item). A 4-disc box set, Sandy Denny Live at the BBC, came out in September 2007 containing (virtually) all of the known solo recordings made by Denny for that UK broadcaster including two complete concerts, one at the Paris Theatre in 1972 and one recorded for Sounds on Sunday in 1973, plus a range of other material spanning the years 1966–1973. Disc 3 of this set was a DVD containing surviving TV footage from a 1971 BBC One in Ten session comprising solo performances by Denny of "The North Star Grassman and the Ravens", "Crazy Lady Blues" and "Late November", along with digitised excerpts from her diaries, rare photos and a discography. A 1-disc subset of this box set entitled The Best of the BBC Recordings was subsequently released in 2008. A companion box set, Fairport Convention Live at the BBC, also came out in 2007 and covered equivalent live recordings by Fairport over the period 1968–1974, of which the first two discs (1968–1970) contain examples from Denny's time with that group. In 2008, Jerry Donahue completed the unfinished second Fotheringay album begun in the autumn of 1970. It was released to general acclaim as Fotheringay 2 and contained some notable Denny performances, in particular earlier versions of two Denny compositions, "Late November" and "John the Gun", and performances of the traditional songs "Gypsy Davey" and "Wild Mountain Thyme". Also in 2008, Island Remasters issued a double CD entitled The Music Weaver (Sandy Denny Remembered) which contained a mix of better known tracks and less well known demos and live recordings, previously released but not in companion with studio sessions. This compilation is also one of the very few to contain the Led Zeppelin track "The Battle Of Evermore" which features a rare guest appearance by Denny. In 2010, a large 19-CD retrospective box set, simply titled Sandy Denny, was released by Universal/Island Records in a limited edition of 3,000. It contained Denny's entire catalogue of studio recordings, including her work with the Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay and as a solo artist. The compilation also included a large number of outtakes, demos, live recordings, radio sessions and interviews. The box set was released to good reviews, including a 5-star review in Uncut and a 4-star review in The Guardian. In late 2010, Thea Gilmore was commissioned by Denny's estate, in conjunction with Island Records, to write melodies to unrecorded lyrics found in Denny's papers. The resulting album, Don't Stop Singing, was released in November 2011 to generally good notices, including 4-star reviews in The Independent and The Guardian among others. On 21 April 2012, the single "London" was released as an exclusive Record Store Day 7″ single. Further recordings were released in 2011, including a German recording of Fotheringay in concert released as Essen 1970 on the Garden of Delights label. The performance was remastered by original band member Jerry Donahue. This release was followed by 19 Rupert Street, a home recording of a rehearsal featuring Sandy and Alex Campbell recorded at his flat in August 1967. This release is notable for the fact that Sandy performs a number of tracks that are not available in any other versions, including a cover of "Fairytale Lullaby" by John Martyn. This CD was put out by Sandy's former Strawbs bandmate Dave Cousins on his Witchwood label. Two-disc "Deluxe Editions" of Denny's album reissues appeared in 2011–2012 with additional tracks; the 2012 Deluxe Edition of Sandy included a previously unreleased eight-song solo set from her 1973 U.S. tour recorded at Ebbet's Field in Denver, Colorado. A similar two-disc reissue of Fairport Convention's Rising for the Moon also included, for the first time, the complete 1974 L.A. Troubadour performance of Fairport with Denny back on board, prior to the official announcement of her re-joining the group. On account of unprecedented demand for, and exhaustion of supply of the limited edition 19-CD set cited above, in October 2012 a limited edition 4-CD version was released entitled The Notes and The Words: A Collection of Demos and Rarities, containing "75 songs that represent the cream of the rarities, demos and outtakes from the box set". Limited to 3,500 copies, this compilation is also now out-of-print. In 2013, Spectrum records issued a single-disc CD entitled The Lady – The Essential Sandy Denny that comprised 15 previously issued tracks, generally from Denny's well known albums. 2014 saw the release of another Fairport live U.S. radio broadcast from their 1974 tour with Denny, on RockBeat Records, entitled Live 1974 (My Father's Place), comprising 11 live tracks, most featuring Denny, recorded at the New York rock club My Father's Place. A four-disc Fotheringay retrospective, Nothing More: The Collected Fotheringay, was released on 30 March 2015. This is the most comprehensive compilation of the group's recordings, and contains, in addition to all the tracks on Fotheringay and Fotheringay 2 as both final studio versions and demos/alternate takes, the complete live concert set from Rotterdam in 1970 (including several previously unreleased tracks), seven Fotheringay tracks recorded in session for BBC radio (which had previously circulated only as bootlegs), plus a DVD disc containing four performances by Fotheringay recorded for the German Beat-Club TV series in 1970, which considerably augment the otherwise sparse known TV footage of Denny in particular. May 2016 saw the release of a 2-CD compilation, I've Always Kept A Unicorn – The Acoustic Sandy Denny which collected together many previously released, but dispersed, acoustic and/or demo versions of songs better known from their album counterparts, as well as three previously unreleased demos (with Linda Thompson, at the time Linda Peters) from 1972's Rock On sessions by one-off band The Bunch. A 7-CD box set by Fairport Convention entitled Come All Ye – The First 10 Years was released in July 2017 and contains a small number of additional, previously unreleased demos and alternate takes featuring Denny during her first tenure with the band over the period 1968–1969. Tracks not previously available include versions of Joni Mitchell's Eastern Rain, an a capella version of Nottamun Town, alternative takes of Autopsy and Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and a rehearsal version of The Deserter. Unofficial releases and audience tapes In addition to the authorised material listed above, a number unofficial/unauthorised compilations exist plus a range of audience recordings of varying quality, none of which would likely see the light of day as commercial issues but are of interest to a sector of Denny's audience on either historic or aesthetic grounds, often providing alternative views of songs known otherwise only from their commercially released versions. The first available unauthorised/bootleg CDs available in the 1980s and 1990s comprised principally off-air and other obscure material under such titles as Borrowed Thyme, Poems from Alexandra, Dark the Night, Wild Mountain Thyme and One Last Sad Refrain; such compilations are now largely superseded by the subsequent availability of most of the off-air material in much better quality as official releases as described above. Of more enduring interest are audience tapes of shows of which no "official" tapes survive. These include some early shows by Fairport Convention; a performance by Fotheringay at the 1970 Tenth National Jazz and Blues Festival, held at Plumpton Race Track, Streat, East Sussex, England; "solo" shows by Denny (on occasion with a small band including, among others, Richard Thompson) at the 1971 Lincoln Folk Festival and at the Eltham Well Hall Open Theatre in 1972; performances from York University and Guildhall, Newcastle upon Tyne, also in 1972; an early 1972 U.S. performance from The Bitter End in New York; and several sets (Birmingham and Croydon) from her final 1977 tour in addition to the officially released Gold Dust album; plus quite a large number of recordings strongly featuring Denny as part of the re-formed Fairport Convention over the period 1974–1975. The majority of these can be fairly easily located via relevant internet searches and, in addition, can be readily downloaded from archival music servers such as Sugarmegs (Sandy Denny concerts listed under "S": SugarMegs Streaming Server, Fairport and Fotheringay under "F": SugarMegs Streaming Server). A provisional list of such recordings as are known to exist, with details on where each can be accessed, is available here. Legacy Estate and family After relocating to Australia and remarrying, Trevor Lucas died of a heart attack in 1989. Denny's estate is now managed by Lucas' widow, Elizabeth Hurtt-Lucas. A number of otherwise unreleased recordings of Sandy Denny from his collection have subsequently been the basis for posthumous releases of Denny's work including those on The Attic Tracks and elsewhere. Sandy Denny's daughter, Georgia, has rarely spoken about her mother in a public forum and in the mid-2000s declined an invitation to write the liner notes for Sandy Denny Live at the BBC. However, in 2006 she flew to Britain from Australia to accept on her mother's behalf the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards award for Most Influential Folk Album of All Time, which was given for Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief. Georgia gave birth to twin daughters on 29 April 1997, and a tribute album, Georgia on Our Mind, featuring many of Sandy Denny's former bandmates and friends, was compiled in the children's honour. She also administers a Facebook page "Sandy Denny and Family" dedicated to her mother's memory and more recently, under the name Georgia Katt, has released some of her own DJ-based music. Tributes Since her death, many tributes have been made to Denny, both in music and elsewhere. Dave Pegg of Fairport Convention recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on his 1983 solo album The Cocktail Cowboy Goes It Alone. Dave Cousins of the Strawbs wrote "Ringing Down the Years" in memory of Denny shortly after her death. Songs more specific to the death were Bert Jansch's "Where Did My Life Go" and Richard Thompson's "Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?" Fellow Brit folk pioneers Spriguns changed the title of their 1978 album to Magic Lady after hearing of Denny's death while recording. In 1998, a variety of Daylily was named after her. Denny's songs have been covered by numerous artists in the years since her death. Some of the notable acts to have covered her music include Yo La Tengo, former Marillion frontman Fish, who covered "Solo" on his album Songs from the Mirror, Cat Power, Judy Collins, Nanci Griffith and Nina Simone. Kate Bush mentioned Denny in the lyric of "Blow Away (For Bill)", as one of the musicians to greet Bill in Heaven. "Blow Away (For Bill)" is the third track on Bush's 1980 album Never for Ever. In 1984, Clann Eadair released the single "A tribute to Sandy Denny", featuring Phil Lynott on vocals. Several radio specials have been produced about Denny's life and music, including BBC Radio 2's The Sandy Denny Story: Who Knows Where the Time Goes. In 2007, Denny's song "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" also received BBC Radio 2's 2007 Folk Award for "Favourite Folk Track of All Time". In 2010, she was recognized by NPR in their 50 Great Voices special series. In April 2008, a tribute concert was held at The Troubadour in London, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Denny's death. Those taking part included Martin Carthy, Linda Thompson and Joe Boyd. A more extensive tribute was given later that year in December at the Southbank in the Queen Elizabeth Hall called The Lady: A Tribute to Sandy Denny with a band composed of members of Bellowhead, the evening featured a mix of young folk acts like Jim Moray and Lisa Knapp alongside those that had known and worked with Denny such as Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. These acts were joined by performers from outside the world of folk like PP Arnold and Marc Almond. The concert, which primarily featured songs written by Denny, received a four-star review in The Guardian. In May 2012 the Southbank concert was expanded into an eight date UK tour called The Lady: A Homage to Sandy Denny. The tour showcased Sandy's entire songbook taking in her work with Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, her solo career and the new songs completed by Thea Gilmore on her album Don't Stop Singing. The band was, once again, composed of members of Bellowhead. Other acts performing included the aforementioned Thea Gilmore and up-and-coming folk acts Lavinia Blackwall of Trembling Bells, Blair Dunlop and Sam Carter, alongside more established folk stars Maddy Prior, Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. The line-up was completed with performers not normally associated with the folk scene; Green Gartside, Joan Wasser (also known as Joan As Police Woman), and PP Arnold. The tour was well received, obtaining a four-star review in The Times. The London concert at the Barbican was filmed for BBC4, and broadcast in a 90-minute programme titled The Songs of Sandy Denny in November 2012. In the 2012 Irish film Silence (Harvest Films & South Wind Blows), "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" is used during the film and final credits. In April 2016 Denny was inducted into the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards Hall of Fame. Alela Diane recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on her album Cusp, released in February 2018. The song reflects on Denny's final tragic days and her orphaned baby daughter. Discography Solo studio albums The North Star Grassman and the Ravens (1971) Sandy (1972) Like an Old Fashioned Waltz (1974) Rendezvous (1977) Solo live albums The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 (1997) Gold Dust (1998) (live recording from final tour, 1977) Live at the BBC (2007 4-disc compilation) Sandy – Deluxe edition, 2012 – includes "Live at Ebbetts Field" (previously unreleased concert on disc 2) With others Denny's collaborations with other artists, including with Alex Campbell, The Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, and The Bunch, together with numerous posthumous releases and compilation albums, are detailed further on the Sandy Denny discography page. References and notes General Further reading Mick Houghton. I've Always Kept a Unicorn – The Biography of Sandy Denny. Faber & Faber, 2015; Clinton Heylin. No More Sad Refrains – The Life and Times of Sandy Denny. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Clinton Heylin. Gypsy Love Songs & Sad Refrains – The Recordings of Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny. Labour of Love Productions, 1989. Colin Larkin. The Guinness Who's Who of Folk Music. Guinness Publishing Ltd; Jim Irvin. Angel of Avalon. MOJO Magazine, August 1998. Colin Harper, Trevor Hodgett. Irish Folk, Traditional & Blues: A Secret History. Cherry Red, 2005; Pamela Murray Winters. No Thought of Leaving: A life of Sandy Denny. 2000. (Unpublished). Brian Hinton, Geoff Wall. Ashley Hutchings: The Guv'nor & the Rise of Folk Rock. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Patrick Humphries. Meet On The Ledge: The Classic Years 1967–1975. Virgin Books, 1997; Patrick Humphries. Richard Thompson: Strange Affair – The Biography. Virgin Books, 1996; Philip Ward, "Sandy Denny: A Thirtieth Anniversary", R2 (Rock'n'Reel) 2(9), May/June 2008. Philip Ward, Sandy Denny: Reflections on Her Music''. Matador, 2011; External links Official website Homage to Sandy Denny Dedicated to the memory of Sandy Denny Sandy Denny website 1947 births 1978 deaths 20th-century English singers 20th-century English women singers A&M Records artists Accidental deaths from falls Accidental deaths in London Deaths by intracerebral hemorrhage Alumni of Kingston College (England) British folk rock musicians Burials at Putney Vale Cemetery English folk singers English people of Scottish descent English women singer-songwriters Fairport Convention members Women rock singers Fotheringay members Island Records artists People from Byfield, Northamptonshire People from Wimbledon, London Singers from London Strawbs members The Bunch members	true	[ "Third Eye Open is a 1992 album by American funk/rock supergroup Hardware. Hardware consists of lead guitarist Stevie Salas, P-Funk bassist Bootsy Collins, and drummer Buddy Miles, formerly of the Band of Gypsys. The album was produced by Bill Laswell and Salas, and was the first release to be part of Laswell's Black Arc Series, which includes Lord of the Harvest by Zillatron, Out of the Dark by O.G. Funk, and Under the 6 by Slave Master.\n\nAlbum history\nWhen the album was first released in Japan on the Polystar label, the band was called The Third Eye and the name of the album was \"Hardware\". When the album secured distribution in the U.S., it was found that another band had owned the name \"The Third Eye\". To avoid any further legal hassles, it was opted that the title of the album and the name of band would simply be switched, thus the name of the band would be Hardware and the title of the album became Third Eye Open.\n\nThe song \"Leakin'\" is a version of a track that appeared on Collins' 1988 album What's Bootsy Doin'?, which featured Salas playing guitar. On this album, the song is credited to Salas, whereas the previous version is credited to Collins, George Clinton and Trey Stone.\n\nTrack listing\n\nPersonnel\nStevie Salas – guitars, vocals\nBootsy Collins – space bass, vocals\nBuddy Miles – drums, fuzz bass, vocals\nGeorge Clinton, Gary \"Mudbone\" Cooper, Bernard Fowler – background vocals\nDavid Friendly, Vince McClean, Matt Stein – digital bollocks\n\nHardware (band) albums\n1992 albums\nAlbums produced by Bill Laswell\nRykodisc albums", "Kraken III is the name of the third studio album Colombian group Kraken It was released on January 3, 1990 by Sonolux. The first single from the album was \"Rostros Ocultos\". The second single was \"Lágrimas de Fuego\".\n\nInformation \nThis album confirmed the progressive trend of the band. A trend that featured a group identity and a concept of what is Kraken. This album started to show the other bands of the country's ideology which is the National Rock and how it can be strengthened.\n\nTrack listing\n\nReferences \n\nKraken (band) albums\n1993 albums" ]
[ "Sandy Denny", "From Fairport to Fotheringay", "When was she in the band Fairport Convention?", "Denny became the obvious choice.", "who else was in the band with her?", "Simon Nicol,", "did they release an album?", "three albums", "when was the first album released?", "What We Did on Our Holidays,", "what was the name of the second album?", "Unhalfbricking.", "what was the name of the third album?", "Liege & Lief" ]	C_e6cc2f78b77b4fcab1029b8e527f1a13_0	when did she join Fotheringay?	7	When did Denny join Fotheringay?	Sandy Denny	After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late sixties, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. CANNOTANSWER	Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully.	Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny (6 January 1947 – 21 April 1978) was an English singer-songwriter who was lead singer of the British folk rock band Fairport Convention. She has been described as "the pre-eminent British folk rock singer". After briefly working with the Strawbs, Denny joined Fairport Convention in 1968, remaining with them until 1969. She formed the short-lived band Fotheringay in 1970, before focusing on a solo career. Between 1971 and 1977, Denny released four solo albums: The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, Sandy, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz and Rendezvous. She also duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore" for Led Zeppelin's album Led Zeppelin IV in 1971. Denny died in 1978 at the age of 31 due to injuries and health issues related to alcohol abuse. Music publications Uncut and Mojo have described Denny as Britain's finest female singer-songwriter. Her composition "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" has been recorded by Judy Collins, Eva Cassidy, Nina Simone, 10,000 Maniacs and Cat Power. Her recorded work has been the subject of numerous reissues, along with a wealth of previously unreleased material which has appeared over the more than 40 years since her death, including a 19-CD box set released in November 2010. Childhood Denny was born on 6 January 1947 at Nelson Hospital, Kingston Road, Merton Park, London, to Neil and Edna Denny. She studied classical piano as a child. Her paternal grandfather was from Dundee, and her paternal grandmother was a Scots Gaelic speaker and singer of traditional songs. At an early age Denny showed an interest in singing, although her strict parents were reluctant to believe there was a living to be made from it. She attended Coombe Girls' School in New Malden; after leaving school she began training as a nurse at the Royal Brompton Hospital. Early career Denny's nursing career proved short-lived. In the meantime she had secured a place on a foundation course at Kingston College of Art, which she took up in September 1965, becoming involved with the folk club on campus. Her contemporaries at the college included guitarist and future member of Pentangle, John Renbourn. After her first public appearance at the Barge in Kingston upon Thames, Denny began working the folk club circuit in the evenings with an American-influenced repertoire, including songs by Tom Paxton, together with traditional folk songs. Denny made the first of many appearances for the BBC at Cecil Sharp House on 2 December 1966 on the Folk Song Cellar programme where she accompanied herself on two traditional songs: "Fir a Bhata" and "Green Grow the Laurels". Her earliest professional recordings were made a few months later in mid-1967 for the Saga label, featuring traditional songs and covers of folk contemporaries including her boyfriend of this period, the American singer-songwriter Jackson C. Frank. They were released on the albums Alex Campbell and His Friends and Sandy and Johnny with Johnny Silvo. These songs were collected on the 1970 album It's Sandy Denny where the tracks from Sandy and Johnny had been re-recorded with more accomplished vocals and guitar playing. The complete Saga studio recordings were issued on the 2005 compilation Where The Time Goes. By this time, she had abandoned her studies at art college and was devoting herself full-time to music. While she was performing at The Troubadour folk club, a member of the Strawbs heard her, and in 1967, she was invited to join the band. She recorded one album with them in Denmark, which was released belatedly in 1973, credited to Sandy Denny and the Strawbs: All Our Own Work. The album includes an early solo version of her best-known (and widely recorded) composition, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" A demo of that song found its way into the hands of American singer Judy Collins, who chose to cover it as the title track of an album of her own, released in November 1968, thus giving Denny international exposure as a songwriter before she had become widely known as a singer. From Fairport to Fotheringay After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late 1960s, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. Solo career and final years She then turned to recording her first solo album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Released in 1971, it is distinguished by its elusive lyrics and unconventional harmonies. Highlights included "Late November", inspired by a dream and the death of Fairport band member Martin Lamble, and "Next Time Around" a cryptogram about Jackson C. Frank, one of her many portraits in song. Sandy, with a cover photograph by David Bailey, followed in 1972 and was the first of her albums to be produced by Trevor Lucas. As well as introducing eight new original compositions, the album marked her last recording of a traditional song, "The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood" (words by Richard Fariña), with Denny's ambitious multi-tracked vocal arrangement inspired by the Ensemble of the Bulgarian Republic. Melody Maker readers twice voted her the "Best British Female Singer", in 1970 and 1971 and, together with contemporaries including Richard Thompson and Ashley Hutchings, she participated in a one-off project called the Bunch to record a collection of rock and roll era standards released under the title of Rock On. In 1971, Denny duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore", which was included on Led Zeppelin's 1971 album (Led Zeppelin IV); she was the only guest vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin album. In 1972 Denny had a small cameo on Lou Reizner's symphonic arrangement of the Who's rock opera Tommy. Her brief appearance was at the end of the track "It's a Boy", which also featured vocals from Pete Townshend. In 1973, she married long-term boyfriend and producer Trevor Lucas and recorded a third solo album, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz. The songs continued to detail many of her personal preoccupations: loss, loneliness, fear of the dark, the passing of time and the changing seasons. The album contained one of her best loved compositions, "Solo", and featured a cover image by Gered Mankowitz. In 1974, she returned to Fairport Convention (of which her husband was by then a member) for a world tour (captured on the 1974 album Fairport Live Convention) and a studio album, Rising for the Moon in 1975. Although her development as a soloist and songwriter had taken her further away from the folk roots direction that the band had pursued since Liege & Lief, seven of the eleven tracks on Rising for the Moon were either written or co-written by her. Denny and Lucas left Fairport Convention at the end of 1975 and embarked on what was to become her final album Rendezvous. Released in 1977, the album sold poorly and Denny was subsequently dropped by Island Records. Having relocated to the village of Byfield in Northamptonshire in the mid-seventies, Denny gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Georgia, in July 1977. A UK tour to promote Rendezvous in autumn 1977 marked her final public appearances. The closing night at the Royalty Theatre in London on 27 November 1977 was recorded for a live album, Gold Dust, which, because of technical problems in the recording of the electric guitar, was belatedly released in 1998 after most of the guitars had been re-recorded by Jerry Donahue. Death Linda Thompson would later note that Denny "really started going downhill in 1976" and demonstrated increasing levels of both manic and depressive behaviour. Learning that she was pregnant did little to mellow Denny's reckless lifestyle, which was heightened by increasing depression, mood swings and the unravelling of her "tumultuous" marriage to Trevor Lucas. She abused drugs and alcohol while pregnant with her daughter, Georgia, who was born prematurely in July 1977. Much like her moods, Denny's interest towards her daughter appeared to oscillate between obsessive and unconcerned; friends recalled both frantic, middle-of-the-night phone calls about teething, as well as Denny "crashing the car and leaving the baby in the pub and all sorts of stuff". Friends would later note that Denny had a history of purposely throwing herself off bar stools and down flights of stairs in order to get a reaction. Several remembered this behaviour as "Sandy's party trick", while Dave Pegg's wife Chris stated, "She certainly did it in my house and it could be a very dramatic gesture, like self-harming. She could do it without hurting herself usually but I had a feeling there would be one time too many." Those who knew Denny said that her increasing level of alcohol abuse in the last years of her life led to an increasing number of falls (both accidental and deliberate), resulting in a growing number of injuries. In late March 1978, while on holiday with her parents and baby Georgia in Cornwall, Denny was injured when she fell down a staircase and hit her head on concrete. Following the incident, she suffered from intense headaches; a doctor prescribed her the painkiller dextropropoxyphene, a drug known to have fatal side effects when mixed with alcohol. On 1 April, several days after the fall in Cornwall, Denny performed a charity concert at Byfield. The final song she performed was "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" At some unknown point during the first half of April 1978, Denny suffered yet another major fall at her home in Byfield. On 13 April, concerned about his wife's erratic behaviour and fearing for his daughter's safety, Trevor Lucas left the UK and returned to his native Australia with their child, leaving Denny without telling her. He sold their Austin Princess car in order to raise funds for the journey. On discovering Lucas' departure, Denny went to stay at the home of her friend Miranda Ward. During this time, Denny apparently set up an appointment to speak with a doctor about her headaches, and also intended to get advice about her alcohol addiction. At some point after 8 am on 17 April, Denny fell into a coma. Ward was out of the house at the time, and had asked her friend Jon Cole (of the band The Movies) to check in on Denny. Cole entered the home at 3 pm, and found Denny unconscious at the foot of the staircase which led to the second floor of the house. She was rushed by ambulance to Queen Mary's Hospital in nearby Roehampton. On 19 April, she was transferred to Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon. After receiving news that Denny was in a coma, Lucas returned from Australia. Upon his arrival at the hospital, doctors informed him that Denny was effectively brain-dead and her condition would not improve. He granted their recommendation to turn off life-support machines; however, just ten minutes before this was to take place, at 7:50 pm on 21 April 1978, Sandy Denny died, without regaining consciousness. Her death was ruled to be the result of a traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage and blunt force trauma to her head. She was 31 years old. The funeral took place on 27 April 1978 at Putney Vale Cemetery. After the vicar had read Denny's favourite psalm, Psalm 23, a piper played "Flowers of the Forest", a traditional song commemorating the fallen of Flodden Field and one which had appeared on the 1970 Fairport album Full House. The inscription on her headstone reads: Posthumous releases Official releases Although Denny had a devoted following in her lifetime, she did not achieve mass market success. In the years since her death, her reputation has grown. A four-album box set entitled Who Knows Where the Time Goes? (1985) was produced by her widower Trevor Lucas and Joe Boyd and included a number of rare and previously unreleased tracks by Denny, either solo or with Fairport Convention (1968, 1969, 1974) and Fotheringay (1970). This was the first public indication that a large cache of unreleased material existed. A one-disc subset of these recordings was subsequently issued on CD by Island in 1987 entitled The Best Of Sandy Denny. In 1987, a compilation of previously unreleased tracks recorded for the BBC by incarnations of Fairport including Denny was released on LP under the title Heyday, which was subsequently released on CD in 2001 and again, with extra tracks, in 2002; all tracks were later included, with others, on the 2007 4-CD box set Fairport Convention Live at the BBC (see below). The initial purpose of this compilation was to document the more "American" material performed live by the What We Did on Our Holidays lineup of the band that never made it to vinyl, while the re-releases added additional songs as performed by the Unhalfbricking and Liege and Lief lineups. Also in 1987, a VHS documentary, It All Comes 'Round Again, on Fairport Convention was released which contained excerpts of several audio recordings featuring Denny, plus a single poor-quality video recording of her singing her song "Solo" during her second stint with Fairport in 1974, as filmed by the University of Birmingham's "Guild TV" amateur organisation. The original tape of this recording has apparently been lost; however, "Like an Old Fashioned Waltz" does appear on the DVD documentary Sandy Denny Under Review (see below) and other tracks have been made available via YouTube in very poor quality. Over the period 1988–1994, the Australian "Friends of Fairport" issued a series of subscriber-only cassette compilations drawing in the main on previously unreleased tapes from Trevor Lucas' collection (as stored in his attic in fact). Attic Tracks (AT) 1 (1988) contained out-takes from Sandy as well as some Fairport material and a few bizarre extras; AT 2 (1989) contained only Trevor Lucas material, no Denny; AT 3 (1989) entitled First and Last Tracks comprised 1966–1967 home demos and rare radio tracks, as well as 9 "pre-overdub" songs from Denny's last concert at the Royalty Theatre, London, on 27 November 1977 (a partial alternative to the later, overdubbed CD release Gold Dust), and AT 4 (1994): Together Again comprised one side of Lucas and the other of Denny in the form of more home demos, studio outtakes, and 4 tracks from a 1973 BBC radio concert. A cut-down version of these tracks (18 songs) was subsequently compiled for CD release by the Australian label Raven Records in 1995 called Sandy Denny, Trevor Lucas and Friends: The Attic Tracks 1972–1984. In 1991, Joe Boyd issued a new version of Denny's All Our Own Work album with the Strawbs, called Sandy Denny and the Strawbs, on his Hannibal Records label. The album had strings added to some tracks, including "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" and further tracks with Denny on lead vocal. In 1997, a one-disc compilation of Denny's solo BBC recordings was released as The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 on Strange Fruit Records. Due to rights issues it was withdrawn on the day of release, thereby creating a highly collectible disc (up until the release of the comprehensive Live at the BBC box set in 2007). This release was followed in 1998 when Denny's final performance at the Royalty Theatre, entitled Gold Dust, was issued on CD, following a degree of re-recording and overdubbing of selected backing parts to replace reportedly unsatisfactory originals. In 1999, a single-disc compilation, Listen Listen – An Introduction to Sandy Denny, was released on Island Records comprising 17 previously released tracks taken from her four Island solo albums. No More Sad Refrains: The Anthology was released by Universal Records in 2000. When first released, this compilation had several rare tracks, including "The Ballad of Easy Rider" from the Liege and Lief sessions, "Learning the Game" and "When Will I Be Loved" from the Bunch album Rock On, "Here in Silence" and "Man of Iron" from the Pass of Arms soundtrack, and a previously unissued demo of "Stranger to Himself". In 2002, a previously unreleased, 2-CD live US concert recording by Fairport Convention from 1974 featuring Denny was released on the Burning Airlines label. Entitled Before The Moon, it originated from a radio broadcast from Ebbets Field in Denver, Colorado, on 23/24 May 1974. The second disc was a limited release bonus with the original release comprising the second set from the same concert. This recording was re-released in shortened form as a single disc in 2011 on the It's About Music label entitled Fairport Convention with Sandy Denny: Ebbets Field 1974. Also in 2002, the American A&M Records issued a budget-price "20th Century Masters" compilation called The Best of Sandy Denny with 10 tracks all available on Denny's studio albums. In 2004 a second comprehensive five-CD box set was released on the Fledg'ling record label called A Boxful of Treasures that included many unreleased recordings, in particular a whole disc of acoustic demos, many recorded at her home in Byfield that was highly prized amongst fans and critics alike, who had long asserted that her solo performances showed her work in its best light, revealing the true quality of her vocal style and compositions. Also in 2004, the Spectrum label issued a 16-track compilation of previously released material entitled The Collection: Chronological Covers & Concert Classics, including a mix of studio recordings and live excerpts from the Gold Dust Royalty concert. In 2005, remastered versions of all Denny's solo albums came out with bonus tracks. Also in 2005, a single CD compilation entitled Where the Time Goes: Sandy '67 was released on Castle Music containing all of Saga's Denny album tracks (including the alternative recordings on It's Sandy Denny), together with two self accompanied tracks from Denny's recordings with the Strawbs. A DVD documentary entitled Sandy Denny Under Review was released on the Sexy Intellectual label in 2006 which contained interviews with her contemporaries plus brief excerpts from her audio recordings, plus some short video clips including two of the poor quality video recordings with Fairport from Birmingham University (details given above), two with Fotheringay from German TV's Beat-Club (further details given below), and three solo excerpts from the only surviving BBC footage on One In Ten (details as given in the next item). A 4-disc box set, Sandy Denny Live at the BBC, came out in September 2007 containing (virtually) all of the known solo recordings made by Denny for that UK broadcaster including two complete concerts, one at the Paris Theatre in 1972 and one recorded for Sounds on Sunday in 1973, plus a range of other material spanning the years 1966–1973. Disc 3 of this set was a DVD containing surviving TV footage from a 1971 BBC One in Ten session comprising solo performances by Denny of "The North Star Grassman and the Ravens", "Crazy Lady Blues" and "Late November", along with digitised excerpts from her diaries, rare photos and a discography. A 1-disc subset of this box set entitled The Best of the BBC Recordings was subsequently released in 2008. A companion box set, Fairport Convention Live at the BBC, also came out in 2007 and covered equivalent live recordings by Fairport over the period 1968–1974, of which the first two discs (1968–1970) contain examples from Denny's time with that group. In 2008, Jerry Donahue completed the unfinished second Fotheringay album begun in the autumn of 1970. It was released to general acclaim as Fotheringay 2 and contained some notable Denny performances, in particular earlier versions of two Denny compositions, "Late November" and "John the Gun", and performances of the traditional songs "Gypsy Davey" and "Wild Mountain Thyme". Also in 2008, Island Remasters issued a double CD entitled The Music Weaver (Sandy Denny Remembered) which contained a mix of better known tracks and less well known demos and live recordings, previously released but not in companion with studio sessions. This compilation is also one of the very few to contain the Led Zeppelin track "The Battle Of Evermore" which features a rare guest appearance by Denny. In 2010, a large 19-CD retrospective box set, simply titled Sandy Denny, was released by Universal/Island Records in a limited edition of 3,000. It contained Denny's entire catalogue of studio recordings, including her work with the Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay and as a solo artist. The compilation also included a large number of outtakes, demos, live recordings, radio sessions and interviews. The box set was released to good reviews, including a 5-star review in Uncut and a 4-star review in The Guardian. In late 2010, Thea Gilmore was commissioned by Denny's estate, in conjunction with Island Records, to write melodies to unrecorded lyrics found in Denny's papers. The resulting album, Don't Stop Singing, was released in November 2011 to generally good notices, including 4-star reviews in The Independent and The Guardian among others. On 21 April 2012, the single "London" was released as an exclusive Record Store Day 7″ single. Further recordings were released in 2011, including a German recording of Fotheringay in concert released as Essen 1970 on the Garden of Delights label. The performance was remastered by original band member Jerry Donahue. This release was followed by 19 Rupert Street, a home recording of a rehearsal featuring Sandy and Alex Campbell recorded at his flat in August 1967. This release is notable for the fact that Sandy performs a number of tracks that are not available in any other versions, including a cover of "Fairytale Lullaby" by John Martyn. This CD was put out by Sandy's former Strawbs bandmate Dave Cousins on his Witchwood label. Two-disc "Deluxe Editions" of Denny's album reissues appeared in 2011–2012 with additional tracks; the 2012 Deluxe Edition of Sandy included a previously unreleased eight-song solo set from her 1973 U.S. tour recorded at Ebbet's Field in Denver, Colorado. A similar two-disc reissue of Fairport Convention's Rising for the Moon also included, for the first time, the complete 1974 L.A. Troubadour performance of Fairport with Denny back on board, prior to the official announcement of her re-joining the group. On account of unprecedented demand for, and exhaustion of supply of the limited edition 19-CD set cited above, in October 2012 a limited edition 4-CD version was released entitled The Notes and The Words: A Collection of Demos and Rarities, containing "75 songs that represent the cream of the rarities, demos and outtakes from the box set". Limited to 3,500 copies, this compilation is also now out-of-print. In 2013, Spectrum records issued a single-disc CD entitled The Lady – The Essential Sandy Denny that comprised 15 previously issued tracks, generally from Denny's well known albums. 2014 saw the release of another Fairport live U.S. radio broadcast from their 1974 tour with Denny, on RockBeat Records, entitled Live 1974 (My Father's Place), comprising 11 live tracks, most featuring Denny, recorded at the New York rock club My Father's Place. A four-disc Fotheringay retrospective, Nothing More: The Collected Fotheringay, was released on 30 March 2015. This is the most comprehensive compilation of the group's recordings, and contains, in addition to all the tracks on Fotheringay and Fotheringay 2 as both final studio versions and demos/alternate takes, the complete live concert set from Rotterdam in 1970 (including several previously unreleased tracks), seven Fotheringay tracks recorded in session for BBC radio (which had previously circulated only as bootlegs), plus a DVD disc containing four performances by Fotheringay recorded for the German Beat-Club TV series in 1970, which considerably augment the otherwise sparse known TV footage of Denny in particular. May 2016 saw the release of a 2-CD compilation, I've Always Kept A Unicorn – The Acoustic Sandy Denny which collected together many previously released, but dispersed, acoustic and/or demo versions of songs better known from their album counterparts, as well as three previously unreleased demos (with Linda Thompson, at the time Linda Peters) from 1972's Rock On sessions by one-off band The Bunch. A 7-CD box set by Fairport Convention entitled Come All Ye – The First 10 Years was released in July 2017 and contains a small number of additional, previously unreleased demos and alternate takes featuring Denny during her first tenure with the band over the period 1968–1969. Tracks not previously available include versions of Joni Mitchell's Eastern Rain, an a capella version of Nottamun Town, alternative takes of Autopsy and Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and a rehearsal version of The Deserter. Unofficial releases and audience tapes In addition to the authorised material listed above, a number unofficial/unauthorised compilations exist plus a range of audience recordings of varying quality, none of which would likely see the light of day as commercial issues but are of interest to a sector of Denny's audience on either historic or aesthetic grounds, often providing alternative views of songs known otherwise only from their commercially released versions. The first available unauthorised/bootleg CDs available in the 1980s and 1990s comprised principally off-air and other obscure material under such titles as Borrowed Thyme, Poems from Alexandra, Dark the Night, Wild Mountain Thyme and One Last Sad Refrain; such compilations are now largely superseded by the subsequent availability of most of the off-air material in much better quality as official releases as described above. Of more enduring interest are audience tapes of shows of which no "official" tapes survive. These include some early shows by Fairport Convention; a performance by Fotheringay at the 1970 Tenth National Jazz and Blues Festival, held at Plumpton Race Track, Streat, East Sussex, England; "solo" shows by Denny (on occasion with a small band including, among others, Richard Thompson) at the 1971 Lincoln Folk Festival and at the Eltham Well Hall Open Theatre in 1972; performances from York University and Guildhall, Newcastle upon Tyne, also in 1972; an early 1972 U.S. performance from The Bitter End in New York; and several sets (Birmingham and Croydon) from her final 1977 tour in addition to the officially released Gold Dust album; plus quite a large number of recordings strongly featuring Denny as part of the re-formed Fairport Convention over the period 1974–1975. The majority of these can be fairly easily located via relevant internet searches and, in addition, can be readily downloaded from archival music servers such as Sugarmegs (Sandy Denny concerts listed under "S": SugarMegs Streaming Server, Fairport and Fotheringay under "F": SugarMegs Streaming Server). A provisional list of such recordings as are known to exist, with details on where each can be accessed, is available here. Legacy Estate and family After relocating to Australia and remarrying, Trevor Lucas died of a heart attack in 1989. Denny's estate is now managed by Lucas' widow, Elizabeth Hurtt-Lucas. A number of otherwise unreleased recordings of Sandy Denny from his collection have subsequently been the basis for posthumous releases of Denny's work including those on The Attic Tracks and elsewhere. Sandy Denny's daughter, Georgia, has rarely spoken about her mother in a public forum and in the mid-2000s declined an invitation to write the liner notes for Sandy Denny Live at the BBC. However, in 2006 she flew to Britain from Australia to accept on her mother's behalf the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards award for Most Influential Folk Album of All Time, which was given for Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief. Georgia gave birth to twin daughters on 29 April 1997, and a tribute album, Georgia on Our Mind, featuring many of Sandy Denny's former bandmates and friends, was compiled in the children's honour. She also administers a Facebook page "Sandy Denny and Family" dedicated to her mother's memory and more recently, under the name Georgia Katt, has released some of her own DJ-based music. Tributes Since her death, many tributes have been made to Denny, both in music and elsewhere. Dave Pegg of Fairport Convention recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on his 1983 solo album The Cocktail Cowboy Goes It Alone. Dave Cousins of the Strawbs wrote "Ringing Down the Years" in memory of Denny shortly after her death. Songs more specific to the death were Bert Jansch's "Where Did My Life Go" and Richard Thompson's "Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?" Fellow Brit folk pioneers Spriguns changed the title of their 1978 album to Magic Lady after hearing of Denny's death while recording. In 1998, a variety of Daylily was named after her. Denny's songs have been covered by numerous artists in the years since her death. Some of the notable acts to have covered her music include Yo La Tengo, former Marillion frontman Fish, who covered "Solo" on his album Songs from the Mirror, Cat Power, Judy Collins, Nanci Griffith and Nina Simone. Kate Bush mentioned Denny in the lyric of "Blow Away (For Bill)", as one of the musicians to greet Bill in Heaven. "Blow Away (For Bill)" is the third track on Bush's 1980 album Never for Ever. In 1984, Clann Eadair released the single "A tribute to Sandy Denny", featuring Phil Lynott on vocals. Several radio specials have been produced about Denny's life and music, including BBC Radio 2's The Sandy Denny Story: Who Knows Where the Time Goes. In 2007, Denny's song "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" also received BBC Radio 2's 2007 Folk Award for "Favourite Folk Track of All Time". In 2010, she was recognized by NPR in their 50 Great Voices special series. In April 2008, a tribute concert was held at The Troubadour in London, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Denny's death. Those taking part included Martin Carthy, Linda Thompson and Joe Boyd. A more extensive tribute was given later that year in December at the Southbank in the Queen Elizabeth Hall called The Lady: A Tribute to Sandy Denny with a band composed of members of Bellowhead, the evening featured a mix of young folk acts like Jim Moray and Lisa Knapp alongside those that had known and worked with Denny such as Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. These acts were joined by performers from outside the world of folk like PP Arnold and Marc Almond. The concert, which primarily featured songs written by Denny, received a four-star review in The Guardian. In May 2012 the Southbank concert was expanded into an eight date UK tour called The Lady: A Homage to Sandy Denny. The tour showcased Sandy's entire songbook taking in her work with Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, her solo career and the new songs completed by Thea Gilmore on her album Don't Stop Singing. The band was, once again, composed of members of Bellowhead. Other acts performing included the aforementioned Thea Gilmore and up-and-coming folk acts Lavinia Blackwall of Trembling Bells, Blair Dunlop and Sam Carter, alongside more established folk stars Maddy Prior, Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. The line-up was completed with performers not normally associated with the folk scene; Green Gartside, Joan Wasser (also known as Joan As Police Woman), and PP Arnold. The tour was well received, obtaining a four-star review in The Times. The London concert at the Barbican was filmed for BBC4, and broadcast in a 90-minute programme titled The Songs of Sandy Denny in November 2012. In the 2012 Irish film Silence (Harvest Films & South Wind Blows), "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" is used during the film and final credits. In April 2016 Denny was inducted into the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards Hall of Fame. Alela Diane recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on her album Cusp, released in February 2018. The song reflects on Denny's final tragic days and her orphaned baby daughter. Discography Solo studio albums The North Star Grassman and the Ravens (1971) Sandy (1972) Like an Old Fashioned Waltz (1974) Rendezvous (1977) Solo live albums The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 (1997) Gold Dust (1998) (live recording from final tour, 1977) Live at the BBC (2007 4-disc compilation) Sandy – Deluxe edition, 2012 – includes "Live at Ebbetts Field" (previously unreleased concert on disc 2) With others Denny's collaborations with other artists, including with Alex Campbell, The Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, and The Bunch, together with numerous posthumous releases and compilation albums, are detailed further on the Sandy Denny discography page. References and notes General Further reading Mick Houghton. I've Always Kept a Unicorn – The Biography of Sandy Denny. Faber & Faber, 2015; Clinton Heylin. No More Sad Refrains – The Life and Times of Sandy Denny. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Clinton Heylin. Gypsy Love Songs & Sad Refrains – The Recordings of Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny. Labour of Love Productions, 1989. Colin Larkin. The Guinness Who's Who of Folk Music. Guinness Publishing Ltd; Jim Irvin. Angel of Avalon. MOJO Magazine, August 1998. Colin Harper, Trevor Hodgett. Irish Folk, Traditional & Blues: A Secret History. Cherry Red, 2005; Pamela Murray Winters. No Thought of Leaving: A life of Sandy Denny. 2000. (Unpublished). Brian Hinton, Geoff Wall. Ashley Hutchings: The Guv'nor & the Rise of Folk Rock. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Patrick Humphries. Meet On The Ledge: The Classic Years 1967–1975. Virgin Books, 1997; Patrick Humphries. Richard Thompson: Strange Affair – The Biography. Virgin Books, 1996; Philip Ward, "Sandy Denny: A Thirtieth Anniversary", R2 (Rock'n'Reel) 2(9), May/June 2008. Philip Ward, Sandy Denny: Reflections on Her Music''. Matador, 2011; External links Official website Homage to Sandy Denny Dedicated to the memory of Sandy Denny Sandy Denny website 1947 births 1978 deaths 20th-century English singers 20th-century English women singers A&M Records artists Accidental deaths from falls Accidental deaths in London Deaths by intracerebral hemorrhage Alumni of Kingston College (England) British folk rock musicians Burials at Putney Vale Cemetery English folk singers English people of Scottish descent English women singer-songwriters Fairport Convention members Women rock singers Fotheringay members Island Records artists People from Byfield, Northamptonshire People from Wimbledon, London Singers from London Strawbs members The Bunch members	true	[ "Fotheringay is a 1970-71 British rock band.\n\nFotheringay or Fotheringhay may also refer to:\n\n \"Fotheringay\", a 1969 song by Fairport Convention from the album What We Did on Our Holidays\n Fotheringay (album), a 1970 album by the band\n Fotheringay 2, a 2008 album by the band\n Fotheringhay, a village and civil parish in Northamptonshire, England\n Fotheringhay Castle, also known as Fotheringay Castle, a castle in Fotheringhay, England that existed from around 1100 to 1630\n Fotheringay (Elliston, Virginia), a historic plantation home", "Fotheringay was a short-lived British folk rock group, formed in 1970 by singer-songwriter and musician Sandy Denny on her departure from Fairport Convention. The band drew its name from her 1968 composition \"Fotheringay\" about Fotheringhay Castle, in which Mary, Queen of Scots had been imprisoned. The song originally appeared on the 1969 Fairport Convention album, What We Did on Our Holidays, Denny's first album with that group. The original Fotheringay released one self-titled album but disbanded at the start of 1971 as Denny embarked on a solo career. Forty-five years later, a new version of the band re-formed featuring the three original surviving members together with other musicians, and toured in 2015 and 2016.\n\nCareer\nTwo former members of Eclection, guitarist Trevor Lucas and drummer Gerry Conway, and two former members of Poet and the One Man Band, Jerry Donahue (guitar) and Pat Donaldson (bass), completed the line-up responsible for what was intended to be the quintet's first album. This folk-based set included several Denny original compositions, notably \"Nothing More\", \"The Sea\" and \"The Pond and The Stream\", as well as versions of Gordon Lightfoot's \"The Way I Feel\" and Bob Dylan's \"Too Much of Nothing\". Though during the year of its original release the album featured in two of the UK's music papers' Top 20s (Melody Maker and NME), it did not meet commercial expectations, and pressures on Denny to undertake a solo career increased. She had been voted Britain's number 1 singer for two consecutive years in Melody Maker'''s readers poll. The album peaked at No. 18 in the UK Albums Chart.\n\nA special live performance by Fotheringay was recorded at Gruga-Halle in Essen, Germany, on 23 October 1970. The concert tapes were re-mastered by Fotheringay guitarist Jerry Donahue and the album released in 2011.\n\nFotheringay disbanded in January 1971 during sessions for a projected second album. Some of the songs surfaced on Denny's 1971 debut solo album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Lucas, Conway and Donahue joined Fairport Convention in 1972 to record that band's Rosie album, on which some Fotheringay material was also used. However, Conway played on three tracks only and began session work afterwards. Both Conway and Donaldson have worked with Richard Thompson, amongst many others. Lucas and Donahue stayed with Fairport for another couple of years, the album Nine being released in 1973, while Denny rejoined in 1974. This line-up recorded two additional albums: Fairport Live Convention (re-titled A Movable Feast in the US) and Rising for the Moon. Denny, along with Donahue and Lucas, left the band in December 1975. Conway eventually joined a reformed Fairport in 1997.\n\nIn 2007, the BBC announced that Donahue would be attempting to complete the abandoned projected second Fotheringay album, which he accomplished using previously unheard takes from the original archived tapes. Completed by the summer of the following year, Fotheringay 2 was released by Fledg'ling Records on 29 September 2008.\n\nA four-disc collection, Nothing More: The Collected Fotheringay, was released on 30 March 2015. This is the most comprehensive compilation of the group’s recordings, and contains, in addition to all the tracks on Fotheringay and Fotheringay 2 as both final studio versions and demos/alternate takes, the complete live concert set from Rotterdam in 1970 (including several previously unreleased tracks), seven Fotheringay tracks recorded in session for BBC radio (which had previously circulated only as bootlegs), plus a DVD disc containing 4 performances by Fotheringay recorded for the German \"Beat-Club\" TV series in 1970, which considerably augment the otherwise sparse known TV footage of Sandy Denny in particular.\n\nIn June 2015, the three surviving members of the original band - Jerry Donahue, Gerry Conway and Pat Donaldson - reunited and played 12 tour dates in England over the next 12 months, followed by gigs in Germany and the Netherlands in September, 2016. They were joined by Kathryn Roberts (Equation, KR & Sean Lakeman), Sally Barker (The Poozies, ‘The Voice’) and PJ Wright (The Dylan Project and Little Johnny England) to provide the harmonious vocals in the absence of Denny and Lucas. They played at Wolverhampton on 28 June 2016.\n\nDiscographyFotheringay (Island/A&M, 1970)Fotheringay 2 (Fledg'ling Records, 2008)Fotheringay Essen 1970 (Thor's Hammer Records, 2011)Nothing More: The Collected Fotheringay (Universal Music, 2015)\n\nBibliography\n Mick Houghton. I've Always Kept a Unicorn – The Biography of Sandy Denny. Faber & Faber, 2015; \n Clinton Heylin. No More Sad Refrains – The Life and Times of Sandy Denny. London, Helter Skelter, 2002; \n Clinton Heylin. Gypsy Love Songs & Sad Refrains – The Recordings of Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny''. Labour of Love Productions, 1989.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nFotheringay (artist) at discogs.com\nFotheringay at Fledg'ling Records\nFotheringay 2 at discogs.com\nFotheringay Essen 1970 at discogs.com\nNothing More (The Collected Fotheringay) at discogs.com\n\nBritish folk rock groups\nIsland Records artists\nA&M Records artists\nMusical groups established in 1970\nMusical groups disestablished in 1971" ]
[ "Sandy Denny", "From Fairport to Fotheringay", "When was she in the band Fairport Convention?", "Denny became the obvious choice.", "who else was in the band with her?", "Simon Nicol,", "did they release an album?", "three albums", "when was the first album released?", "What We Did on Our Holidays,", "what was the name of the second album?", "Unhalfbricking.", "what was the name of the third album?", "Liege & Lief", "when did she join Fotheringay?", "Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully." ]	C_e6cc2f78b77b4fcab1029b8e527f1a13_0	What happened after she left Fairway Convention?	8	What happened after Denny left Fairway Convention?	Sandy Denny	After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late sixties, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. CANNOTANSWER	she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection.	Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny (6 January 1947 – 21 April 1978) was an English singer-songwriter who was lead singer of the British folk rock band Fairport Convention. She has been described as "the pre-eminent British folk rock singer". After briefly working with the Strawbs, Denny joined Fairport Convention in 1968, remaining with them until 1969. She formed the short-lived band Fotheringay in 1970, before focusing on a solo career. Between 1971 and 1977, Denny released four solo albums: The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, Sandy, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz and Rendezvous. She also duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore" for Led Zeppelin's album Led Zeppelin IV in 1971. Denny died in 1978 at the age of 31 due to injuries and health issues related to alcohol abuse. Music publications Uncut and Mojo have described Denny as Britain's finest female singer-songwriter. Her composition "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" has been recorded by Judy Collins, Eva Cassidy, Nina Simone, 10,000 Maniacs and Cat Power. Her recorded work has been the subject of numerous reissues, along with a wealth of previously unreleased material which has appeared over the more than 40 years since her death, including a 19-CD box set released in November 2010. Childhood Denny was born on 6 January 1947 at Nelson Hospital, Kingston Road, Merton Park, London, to Neil and Edna Denny. She studied classical piano as a child. Her paternal grandfather was from Dundee, and her paternal grandmother was a Scots Gaelic speaker and singer of traditional songs. At an early age Denny showed an interest in singing, although her strict parents were reluctant to believe there was a living to be made from it. She attended Coombe Girls' School in New Malden; after leaving school she began training as a nurse at the Royal Brompton Hospital. Early career Denny's nursing career proved short-lived. In the meantime she had secured a place on a foundation course at Kingston College of Art, which she took up in September 1965, becoming involved with the folk club on campus. Her contemporaries at the college included guitarist and future member of Pentangle, John Renbourn. After her first public appearance at the Barge in Kingston upon Thames, Denny began working the folk club circuit in the evenings with an American-influenced repertoire, including songs by Tom Paxton, together with traditional folk songs. Denny made the first of many appearances for the BBC at Cecil Sharp House on 2 December 1966 on the Folk Song Cellar programme where she accompanied herself on two traditional songs: "Fir a Bhata" and "Green Grow the Laurels". Her earliest professional recordings were made a few months later in mid-1967 for the Saga label, featuring traditional songs and covers of folk contemporaries including her boyfriend of this period, the American singer-songwriter Jackson C. Frank. They were released on the albums Alex Campbell and His Friends and Sandy and Johnny with Johnny Silvo. These songs were collected on the 1970 album It's Sandy Denny where the tracks from Sandy and Johnny had been re-recorded with more accomplished vocals and guitar playing. The complete Saga studio recordings were issued on the 2005 compilation Where The Time Goes. By this time, she had abandoned her studies at art college and was devoting herself full-time to music. While she was performing at The Troubadour folk club, a member of the Strawbs heard her, and in 1967, she was invited to join the band. She recorded one album with them in Denmark, which was released belatedly in 1973, credited to Sandy Denny and the Strawbs: All Our Own Work. The album includes an early solo version of her best-known (and widely recorded) composition, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" A demo of that song found its way into the hands of American singer Judy Collins, who chose to cover it as the title track of an album of her own, released in November 1968, thus giving Denny international exposure as a songwriter before she had become widely known as a singer. From Fairport to Fotheringay After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late 1960s, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. Solo career and final years She then turned to recording her first solo album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Released in 1971, it is distinguished by its elusive lyrics and unconventional harmonies. Highlights included "Late November", inspired by a dream and the death of Fairport band member Martin Lamble, and "Next Time Around" a cryptogram about Jackson C. Frank, one of her many portraits in song. Sandy, with a cover photograph by David Bailey, followed in 1972 and was the first of her albums to be produced by Trevor Lucas. As well as introducing eight new original compositions, the album marked her last recording of a traditional song, "The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood" (words by Richard Fariña), with Denny's ambitious multi-tracked vocal arrangement inspired by the Ensemble of the Bulgarian Republic. Melody Maker readers twice voted her the "Best British Female Singer", in 1970 and 1971 and, together with contemporaries including Richard Thompson and Ashley Hutchings, she participated in a one-off project called the Bunch to record a collection of rock and roll era standards released under the title of Rock On. In 1971, Denny duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore", which was included on Led Zeppelin's 1971 album (Led Zeppelin IV); she was the only guest vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin album. In 1972 Denny had a small cameo on Lou Reizner's symphonic arrangement of the Who's rock opera Tommy. Her brief appearance was at the end of the track "It's a Boy", which also featured vocals from Pete Townshend. In 1973, she married long-term boyfriend and producer Trevor Lucas and recorded a third solo album, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz. The songs continued to detail many of her personal preoccupations: loss, loneliness, fear of the dark, the passing of time and the changing seasons. The album contained one of her best loved compositions, "Solo", and featured a cover image by Gered Mankowitz. In 1974, she returned to Fairport Convention (of which her husband was by then a member) for a world tour (captured on the 1974 album Fairport Live Convention) and a studio album, Rising for the Moon in 1975. Although her development as a soloist and songwriter had taken her further away from the folk roots direction that the band had pursued since Liege & Lief, seven of the eleven tracks on Rising for the Moon were either written or co-written by her. Denny and Lucas left Fairport Convention at the end of 1975 and embarked on what was to become her final album Rendezvous. Released in 1977, the album sold poorly and Denny was subsequently dropped by Island Records. Having relocated to the village of Byfield in Northamptonshire in the mid-seventies, Denny gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Georgia, in July 1977. A UK tour to promote Rendezvous in autumn 1977 marked her final public appearances. The closing night at the Royalty Theatre in London on 27 November 1977 was recorded for a live album, Gold Dust, which, because of technical problems in the recording of the electric guitar, was belatedly released in 1998 after most of the guitars had been re-recorded by Jerry Donahue. Death Linda Thompson would later note that Denny "really started going downhill in 1976" and demonstrated increasing levels of both manic and depressive behaviour. Learning that she was pregnant did little to mellow Denny's reckless lifestyle, which was heightened by increasing depression, mood swings and the unravelling of her "tumultuous" marriage to Trevor Lucas. She abused drugs and alcohol while pregnant with her daughter, Georgia, who was born prematurely in July 1977. Much like her moods, Denny's interest towards her daughter appeared to oscillate between obsessive and unconcerned; friends recalled both frantic, middle-of-the-night phone calls about teething, as well as Denny "crashing the car and leaving the baby in the pub and all sorts of stuff". Friends would later note that Denny had a history of purposely throwing herself off bar stools and down flights of stairs in order to get a reaction. Several remembered this behaviour as "Sandy's party trick", while Dave Pegg's wife Chris stated, "She certainly did it in my house and it could be a very dramatic gesture, like self-harming. She could do it without hurting herself usually but I had a feeling there would be one time too many." Those who knew Denny said that her increasing level of alcohol abuse in the last years of her life led to an increasing number of falls (both accidental and deliberate), resulting in a growing number of injuries. In late March 1978, while on holiday with her parents and baby Georgia in Cornwall, Denny was injured when she fell down a staircase and hit her head on concrete. Following the incident, she suffered from intense headaches; a doctor prescribed her the painkiller dextropropoxyphene, a drug known to have fatal side effects when mixed with alcohol. On 1 April, several days after the fall in Cornwall, Denny performed a charity concert at Byfield. The final song she performed was "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" At some unknown point during the first half of April 1978, Denny suffered yet another major fall at her home in Byfield. On 13 April, concerned about his wife's erratic behaviour and fearing for his daughter's safety, Trevor Lucas left the UK and returned to his native Australia with their child, leaving Denny without telling her. He sold their Austin Princess car in order to raise funds for the journey. On discovering Lucas' departure, Denny went to stay at the home of her friend Miranda Ward. During this time, Denny apparently set up an appointment to speak with a doctor about her headaches, and also intended to get advice about her alcohol addiction. At some point after 8 am on 17 April, Denny fell into a coma. Ward was out of the house at the time, and had asked her friend Jon Cole (of the band The Movies) to check in on Denny. Cole entered the home at 3 pm, and found Denny unconscious at the foot of the staircase which led to the second floor of the house. She was rushed by ambulance to Queen Mary's Hospital in nearby Roehampton. On 19 April, she was transferred to Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon. After receiving news that Denny was in a coma, Lucas returned from Australia. Upon his arrival at the hospital, doctors informed him that Denny was effectively brain-dead and her condition would not improve. He granted their recommendation to turn off life-support machines; however, just ten minutes before this was to take place, at 7:50 pm on 21 April 1978, Sandy Denny died, without regaining consciousness. Her death was ruled to be the result of a traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage and blunt force trauma to her head. She was 31 years old. The funeral took place on 27 April 1978 at Putney Vale Cemetery. After the vicar had read Denny's favourite psalm, Psalm 23, a piper played "Flowers of the Forest", a traditional song commemorating the fallen of Flodden Field and one which had appeared on the 1970 Fairport album Full House. The inscription on her headstone reads: Posthumous releases Official releases Although Denny had a devoted following in her lifetime, she did not achieve mass market success. In the years since her death, her reputation has grown. A four-album box set entitled Who Knows Where the Time Goes? (1985) was produced by her widower Trevor Lucas and Joe Boyd and included a number of rare and previously unreleased tracks by Denny, either solo or with Fairport Convention (1968, 1969, 1974) and Fotheringay (1970). This was the first public indication that a large cache of unreleased material existed. A one-disc subset of these recordings was subsequently issued on CD by Island in 1987 entitled The Best Of Sandy Denny. In 1987, a compilation of previously unreleased tracks recorded for the BBC by incarnations of Fairport including Denny was released on LP under the title Heyday, which was subsequently released on CD in 2001 and again, with extra tracks, in 2002; all tracks were later included, with others, on the 2007 4-CD box set Fairport Convention Live at the BBC (see below). The initial purpose of this compilation was to document the more "American" material performed live by the What We Did on Our Holidays lineup of the band that never made it to vinyl, while the re-releases added additional songs as performed by the Unhalfbricking and Liege and Lief lineups. Also in 1987, a VHS documentary, It All Comes 'Round Again, on Fairport Convention was released which contained excerpts of several audio recordings featuring Denny, plus a single poor-quality video recording of her singing her song "Solo" during her second stint with Fairport in 1974, as filmed by the University of Birmingham's "Guild TV" amateur organisation. The original tape of this recording has apparently been lost; however, "Like an Old Fashioned Waltz" does appear on the DVD documentary Sandy Denny Under Review (see below) and other tracks have been made available via YouTube in very poor quality. Over the period 1988–1994, the Australian "Friends of Fairport" issued a series of subscriber-only cassette compilations drawing in the main on previously unreleased tapes from Trevor Lucas' collection (as stored in his attic in fact). Attic Tracks (AT) 1 (1988) contained out-takes from Sandy as well as some Fairport material and a few bizarre extras; AT 2 (1989) contained only Trevor Lucas material, no Denny; AT 3 (1989) entitled First and Last Tracks comprised 1966–1967 home demos and rare radio tracks, as well as 9 "pre-overdub" songs from Denny's last concert at the Royalty Theatre, London, on 27 November 1977 (a partial alternative to the later, overdubbed CD release Gold Dust), and AT 4 (1994): Together Again comprised one side of Lucas and the other of Denny in the form of more home demos, studio outtakes, and 4 tracks from a 1973 BBC radio concert. A cut-down version of these tracks (18 songs) was subsequently compiled for CD release by the Australian label Raven Records in 1995 called Sandy Denny, Trevor Lucas and Friends: The Attic Tracks 1972–1984. In 1991, Joe Boyd issued a new version of Denny's All Our Own Work album with the Strawbs, called Sandy Denny and the Strawbs, on his Hannibal Records label. The album had strings added to some tracks, including "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" and further tracks with Denny on lead vocal. In 1997, a one-disc compilation of Denny's solo BBC recordings was released as The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 on Strange Fruit Records. Due to rights issues it was withdrawn on the day of release, thereby creating a highly collectible disc (up until the release of the comprehensive Live at the BBC box set in 2007). This release was followed in 1998 when Denny's final performance at the Royalty Theatre, entitled Gold Dust, was issued on CD, following a degree of re-recording and overdubbing of selected backing parts to replace reportedly unsatisfactory originals. In 1999, a single-disc compilation, Listen Listen – An Introduction to Sandy Denny, was released on Island Records comprising 17 previously released tracks taken from her four Island solo albums. No More Sad Refrains: The Anthology was released by Universal Records in 2000. When first released, this compilation had several rare tracks, including "The Ballad of Easy Rider" from the Liege and Lief sessions, "Learning the Game" and "When Will I Be Loved" from the Bunch album Rock On, "Here in Silence" and "Man of Iron" from the Pass of Arms soundtrack, and a previously unissued demo of "Stranger to Himself". In 2002, a previously unreleased, 2-CD live US concert recording by Fairport Convention from 1974 featuring Denny was released on the Burning Airlines label. Entitled Before The Moon, it originated from a radio broadcast from Ebbets Field in Denver, Colorado, on 23/24 May 1974. The second disc was a limited release bonus with the original release comprising the second set from the same concert. This recording was re-released in shortened form as a single disc in 2011 on the It's About Music label entitled Fairport Convention with Sandy Denny: Ebbets Field 1974. Also in 2002, the American A&M Records issued a budget-price "20th Century Masters" compilation called The Best of Sandy Denny with 10 tracks all available on Denny's studio albums. In 2004 a second comprehensive five-CD box set was released on the Fledg'ling record label called A Boxful of Treasures that included many unreleased recordings, in particular a whole disc of acoustic demos, many recorded at her home in Byfield that was highly prized amongst fans and critics alike, who had long asserted that her solo performances showed her work in its best light, revealing the true quality of her vocal style and compositions. Also in 2004, the Spectrum label issued a 16-track compilation of previously released material entitled The Collection: Chronological Covers & Concert Classics, including a mix of studio recordings and live excerpts from the Gold Dust Royalty concert. In 2005, remastered versions of all Denny's solo albums came out with bonus tracks. Also in 2005, a single CD compilation entitled Where the Time Goes: Sandy '67 was released on Castle Music containing all of Saga's Denny album tracks (including the alternative recordings on It's Sandy Denny), together with two self accompanied tracks from Denny's recordings with the Strawbs. A DVD documentary entitled Sandy Denny Under Review was released on the Sexy Intellectual label in 2006 which contained interviews with her contemporaries plus brief excerpts from her audio recordings, plus some short video clips including two of the poor quality video recordings with Fairport from Birmingham University (details given above), two with Fotheringay from German TV's Beat-Club (further details given below), and three solo excerpts from the only surviving BBC footage on One In Ten (details as given in the next item). A 4-disc box set, Sandy Denny Live at the BBC, came out in September 2007 containing (virtually) all of the known solo recordings made by Denny for that UK broadcaster including two complete concerts, one at the Paris Theatre in 1972 and one recorded for Sounds on Sunday in 1973, plus a range of other material spanning the years 1966–1973. Disc 3 of this set was a DVD containing surviving TV footage from a 1971 BBC One in Ten session comprising solo performances by Denny of "The North Star Grassman and the Ravens", "Crazy Lady Blues" and "Late November", along with digitised excerpts from her diaries, rare photos and a discography. A 1-disc subset of this box set entitled The Best of the BBC Recordings was subsequently released in 2008. A companion box set, Fairport Convention Live at the BBC, also came out in 2007 and covered equivalent live recordings by Fairport over the period 1968–1974, of which the first two discs (1968–1970) contain examples from Denny's time with that group. In 2008, Jerry Donahue completed the unfinished second Fotheringay album begun in the autumn of 1970. It was released to general acclaim as Fotheringay 2 and contained some notable Denny performances, in particular earlier versions of two Denny compositions, "Late November" and "John the Gun", and performances of the traditional songs "Gypsy Davey" and "Wild Mountain Thyme". Also in 2008, Island Remasters issued a double CD entitled The Music Weaver (Sandy Denny Remembered) which contained a mix of better known tracks and less well known demos and live recordings, previously released but not in companion with studio sessions. This compilation is also one of the very few to contain the Led Zeppelin track "The Battle Of Evermore" which features a rare guest appearance by Denny. In 2010, a large 19-CD retrospective box set, simply titled Sandy Denny, was released by Universal/Island Records in a limited edition of 3,000. It contained Denny's entire catalogue of studio recordings, including her work with the Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay and as a solo artist. The compilation also included a large number of outtakes, demos, live recordings, radio sessions and interviews. The box set was released to good reviews, including a 5-star review in Uncut and a 4-star review in The Guardian. In late 2010, Thea Gilmore was commissioned by Denny's estate, in conjunction with Island Records, to write melodies to unrecorded lyrics found in Denny's papers. The resulting album, Don't Stop Singing, was released in November 2011 to generally good notices, including 4-star reviews in The Independent and The Guardian among others. On 21 April 2012, the single "London" was released as an exclusive Record Store Day 7″ single. Further recordings were released in 2011, including a German recording of Fotheringay in concert released as Essen 1970 on the Garden of Delights label. The performance was remastered by original band member Jerry Donahue. This release was followed by 19 Rupert Street, a home recording of a rehearsal featuring Sandy and Alex Campbell recorded at his flat in August 1967. This release is notable for the fact that Sandy performs a number of tracks that are not available in any other versions, including a cover of "Fairytale Lullaby" by John Martyn. This CD was put out by Sandy's former Strawbs bandmate Dave Cousins on his Witchwood label. Two-disc "Deluxe Editions" of Denny's album reissues appeared in 2011–2012 with additional tracks; the 2012 Deluxe Edition of Sandy included a previously unreleased eight-song solo set from her 1973 U.S. tour recorded at Ebbet's Field in Denver, Colorado. A similar two-disc reissue of Fairport Convention's Rising for the Moon also included, for the first time, the complete 1974 L.A. Troubadour performance of Fairport with Denny back on board, prior to the official announcement of her re-joining the group. On account of unprecedented demand for, and exhaustion of supply of the limited edition 19-CD set cited above, in October 2012 a limited edition 4-CD version was released entitled The Notes and The Words: A Collection of Demos and Rarities, containing "75 songs that represent the cream of the rarities, demos and outtakes from the box set". Limited to 3,500 copies, this compilation is also now out-of-print. In 2013, Spectrum records issued a single-disc CD entitled The Lady – The Essential Sandy Denny that comprised 15 previously issued tracks, generally from Denny's well known albums. 2014 saw the release of another Fairport live U.S. radio broadcast from their 1974 tour with Denny, on RockBeat Records, entitled Live 1974 (My Father's Place), comprising 11 live tracks, most featuring Denny, recorded at the New York rock club My Father's Place. A four-disc Fotheringay retrospective, Nothing More: The Collected Fotheringay, was released on 30 March 2015. This is the most comprehensive compilation of the group's recordings, and contains, in addition to all the tracks on Fotheringay and Fotheringay 2 as both final studio versions and demos/alternate takes, the complete live concert set from Rotterdam in 1970 (including several previously unreleased tracks), seven Fotheringay tracks recorded in session for BBC radio (which had previously circulated only as bootlegs), plus a DVD disc containing four performances by Fotheringay recorded for the German Beat-Club TV series in 1970, which considerably augment the otherwise sparse known TV footage of Denny in particular. May 2016 saw the release of a 2-CD compilation, I've Always Kept A Unicorn – The Acoustic Sandy Denny which collected together many previously released, but dispersed, acoustic and/or demo versions of songs better known from their album counterparts, as well as three previously unreleased demos (with Linda Thompson, at the time Linda Peters) from 1972's Rock On sessions by one-off band The Bunch. A 7-CD box set by Fairport Convention entitled Come All Ye – The First 10 Years was released in July 2017 and contains a small number of additional, previously unreleased demos and alternate takes featuring Denny during her first tenure with the band over the period 1968–1969. Tracks not previously available include versions of Joni Mitchell's Eastern Rain, an a capella version of Nottamun Town, alternative takes of Autopsy and Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and a rehearsal version of The Deserter. Unofficial releases and audience tapes In addition to the authorised material listed above, a number unofficial/unauthorised compilations exist plus a range of audience recordings of varying quality, none of which would likely see the light of day as commercial issues but are of interest to a sector of Denny's audience on either historic or aesthetic grounds, often providing alternative views of songs known otherwise only from their commercially released versions. The first available unauthorised/bootleg CDs available in the 1980s and 1990s comprised principally off-air and other obscure material under such titles as Borrowed Thyme, Poems from Alexandra, Dark the Night, Wild Mountain Thyme and One Last Sad Refrain; such compilations are now largely superseded by the subsequent availability of most of the off-air material in much better quality as official releases as described above. Of more enduring interest are audience tapes of shows of which no "official" tapes survive. These include some early shows by Fairport Convention; a performance by Fotheringay at the 1970 Tenth National Jazz and Blues Festival, held at Plumpton Race Track, Streat, East Sussex, England; "solo" shows by Denny (on occasion with a small band including, among others, Richard Thompson) at the 1971 Lincoln Folk Festival and at the Eltham Well Hall Open Theatre in 1972; performances from York University and Guildhall, Newcastle upon Tyne, also in 1972; an early 1972 U.S. performance from The Bitter End in New York; and several sets (Birmingham and Croydon) from her final 1977 tour in addition to the officially released Gold Dust album; plus quite a large number of recordings strongly featuring Denny as part of the re-formed Fairport Convention over the period 1974–1975. The majority of these can be fairly easily located via relevant internet searches and, in addition, can be readily downloaded from archival music servers such as Sugarmegs (Sandy Denny concerts listed under "S": SugarMegs Streaming Server, Fairport and Fotheringay under "F": SugarMegs Streaming Server). A provisional list of such recordings as are known to exist, with details on where each can be accessed, is available here. Legacy Estate and family After relocating to Australia and remarrying, Trevor Lucas died of a heart attack in 1989. Denny's estate is now managed by Lucas' widow, Elizabeth Hurtt-Lucas. A number of otherwise unreleased recordings of Sandy Denny from his collection have subsequently been the basis for posthumous releases of Denny's work including those on The Attic Tracks and elsewhere. Sandy Denny's daughter, Georgia, has rarely spoken about her mother in a public forum and in the mid-2000s declined an invitation to write the liner notes for Sandy Denny Live at the BBC. However, in 2006 she flew to Britain from Australia to accept on her mother's behalf the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards award for Most Influential Folk Album of All Time, which was given for Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief. Georgia gave birth to twin daughters on 29 April 1997, and a tribute album, Georgia on Our Mind, featuring many of Sandy Denny's former bandmates and friends, was compiled in the children's honour. She also administers a Facebook page "Sandy Denny and Family" dedicated to her mother's memory and more recently, under the name Georgia Katt, has released some of her own DJ-based music. Tributes Since her death, many tributes have been made to Denny, both in music and elsewhere. Dave Pegg of Fairport Convention recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on his 1983 solo album The Cocktail Cowboy Goes It Alone. Dave Cousins of the Strawbs wrote "Ringing Down the Years" in memory of Denny shortly after her death. Songs more specific to the death were Bert Jansch's "Where Did My Life Go" and Richard Thompson's "Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?" Fellow Brit folk pioneers Spriguns changed the title of their 1978 album to Magic Lady after hearing of Denny's death while recording. In 1998, a variety of Daylily was named after her. Denny's songs have been covered by numerous artists in the years since her death. Some of the notable acts to have covered her music include Yo La Tengo, former Marillion frontman Fish, who covered "Solo" on his album Songs from the Mirror, Cat Power, Judy Collins, Nanci Griffith and Nina Simone. Kate Bush mentioned Denny in the lyric of "Blow Away (For Bill)", as one of the musicians to greet Bill in Heaven. "Blow Away (For Bill)" is the third track on Bush's 1980 album Never for Ever. In 1984, Clann Eadair released the single "A tribute to Sandy Denny", featuring Phil Lynott on vocals. Several radio specials have been produced about Denny's life and music, including BBC Radio 2's The Sandy Denny Story: Who Knows Where the Time Goes. In 2007, Denny's song "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" also received BBC Radio 2's 2007 Folk Award for "Favourite Folk Track of All Time". In 2010, she was recognized by NPR in their 50 Great Voices special series. In April 2008, a tribute concert was held at The Troubadour in London, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Denny's death. Those taking part included Martin Carthy, Linda Thompson and Joe Boyd. A more extensive tribute was given later that year in December at the Southbank in the Queen Elizabeth Hall called The Lady: A Tribute to Sandy Denny with a band composed of members of Bellowhead, the evening featured a mix of young folk acts like Jim Moray and Lisa Knapp alongside those that had known and worked with Denny such as Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. These acts were joined by performers from outside the world of folk like PP Arnold and Marc Almond. The concert, which primarily featured songs written by Denny, received a four-star review in The Guardian. In May 2012 the Southbank concert was expanded into an eight date UK tour called The Lady: A Homage to Sandy Denny. The tour showcased Sandy's entire songbook taking in her work with Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, her solo career and the new songs completed by Thea Gilmore on her album Don't Stop Singing. The band was, once again, composed of members of Bellowhead. Other acts performing included the aforementioned Thea Gilmore and up-and-coming folk acts Lavinia Blackwall of Trembling Bells, Blair Dunlop and Sam Carter, alongside more established folk stars Maddy Prior, Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. The line-up was completed with performers not normally associated with the folk scene; Green Gartside, Joan Wasser (also known as Joan As Police Woman), and PP Arnold. The tour was well received, obtaining a four-star review in The Times. The London concert at the Barbican was filmed for BBC4, and broadcast in a 90-minute programme titled The Songs of Sandy Denny in November 2012. In the 2012 Irish film Silence (Harvest Films & South Wind Blows), "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" is used during the film and final credits. In April 2016 Denny was inducted into the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards Hall of Fame. Alela Diane recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on her album Cusp, released in February 2018. The song reflects on Denny's final tragic days and her orphaned baby daughter. Discography Solo studio albums The North Star Grassman and the Ravens (1971) Sandy (1972) Like an Old Fashioned Waltz (1974) Rendezvous (1977) Solo live albums The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 (1997) Gold Dust (1998) (live recording from final tour, 1977) Live at the BBC (2007 4-disc compilation) Sandy – Deluxe edition, 2012 – includes "Live at Ebbetts Field" (previously unreleased concert on disc 2) With others Denny's collaborations with other artists, including with Alex Campbell, The Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, and The Bunch, together with numerous posthumous releases and compilation albums, are detailed further on the Sandy Denny discography page. References and notes General Further reading Mick Houghton. I've Always Kept a Unicorn – The Biography of Sandy Denny. Faber & Faber, 2015; Clinton Heylin. No More Sad Refrains – The Life and Times of Sandy Denny. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Clinton Heylin. Gypsy Love Songs & Sad Refrains – The Recordings of Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny. Labour of Love Productions, 1989. Colin Larkin. The Guinness Who's Who of Folk Music. Guinness Publishing Ltd; Jim Irvin. Angel of Avalon. MOJO Magazine, August 1998. Colin Harper, Trevor Hodgett. Irish Folk, Traditional & Blues: A Secret History. Cherry Red, 2005; Pamela Murray Winters. No Thought of Leaving: A life of Sandy Denny. 2000. (Unpublished). Brian Hinton, Geoff Wall. Ashley Hutchings: The Guv'nor & the Rise of Folk Rock. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Patrick Humphries. Meet On The Ledge: The Classic Years 1967–1975. Virgin Books, 1997; Patrick Humphries. Richard Thompson: Strange Affair – The Biography. Virgin Books, 1996; Philip Ward, "Sandy Denny: A Thirtieth Anniversary", R2 (Rock'n'Reel) 2(9), May/June 2008. Philip Ward, Sandy Denny: Reflections on Her Music''. Matador, 2011; External links Official website Homage to Sandy Denny Dedicated to the memory of Sandy Denny Sandy Denny website 1947 births 1978 deaths 20th-century English singers 20th-century English women singers A&M Records artists Accidental deaths from falls Accidental deaths in London Deaths by intracerebral hemorrhage Alumni of Kingston College (England) British folk rock musicians Burials at Putney Vale Cemetery English folk singers English people of Scottish descent English women singer-songwriters Fairport Convention members Women rock singers Fotheringay members Island Records artists People from Byfield, Northamptonshire People from Wimbledon, London Singers from London Strawbs members The Bunch members	true	[ "Dan Glickberg is an American businessman. He is a member of Fairway Market's founding family and served as executive vice president and a director of the company. Additionally, he is the founder of Dan Glickberg Food, and is a featured investor on the Food Network show Food Fortunes.\n\nCareer\nGlickberg earned a bachelor's degree in English and writing from Trinity College. He is the great grandson of Fairway Market's founder, Nathan Glickberg and became the face of Fairway Market. In 2005, Glickberg began serving as vice president of Fairway.\n\nIn 2006, Glickberg designed the company website Discover Fairway which included weekly video food tips and cooking demonstrations. The site lead to a cooperation with WNBC that Glickberg oversaw. He later became a director of Fairway in June 2010.\n\nGlickberg left Fairway and founded Dan Glickberg Food, a food consulting and venture-capital company in April 2013. In 2015, Glickberg joined the cast of Food Network's \"Food Fortune,\" a show that gives new food companies a chance to enter the market and grow their business through the help of the show's featured investors.\n\nReferences\n\nLiving people\nYear of birth missing (living people)\nTrinity College (Connecticut) alumni\nAmerican businesspeople\nAmerican television personalities", "Fairway may refer to:\n\nFairway (golf), part of a golf course\nFairway (horse), a Thoroughbred racehorse\nFairway, Gauteng, South Africa\nFairway, Kansas, United States\nFairway, Lexington, neighborhood in Lexington, Kentucky, United States\nFairway Market, an American grocery chain based mostly in New York City\nFairway Markets, a grocery chain on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada\nFairway, a version of London's Austin FX4 taxicab\n\nSee also\nFarway, a small village and civil parish in the East Devon district of Devon, England\nFairway Rock, an islet in the Bering Strait\n Faraway (disambiguation)\nFareway, a grocery store chain in Boone, Iowa" ]
[ "Sandy Denny", "From Fairport to Fotheringay", "When was she in the band Fairport Convention?", "Denny became the obvious choice.", "who else was in the band with her?", "Simon Nicol,", "did they release an album?", "three albums", "when was the first album released?", "What We Did on Our Holidays,", "what was the name of the second album?", "Unhalfbricking.", "what was the name of the third album?", "Liege & Lief", "when did she join Fotheringay?", "Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully.", "What happened after she left Fairway Convention?", "she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection." ]	C_e6cc2f78b77b4fcab1029b8e527f1a13_0	Did Fotheringay release any albums?	9	Did Fotheringay release any albums?	Sandy Denny	After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late sixties, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. CANNOTANSWER	They created one self-titled album,	Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny (6 January 1947 – 21 April 1978) was an English singer-songwriter who was lead singer of the British folk rock band Fairport Convention. She has been described as "the pre-eminent British folk rock singer". After briefly working with the Strawbs, Denny joined Fairport Convention in 1968, remaining with them until 1969. She formed the short-lived band Fotheringay in 1970, before focusing on a solo career. Between 1971 and 1977, Denny released four solo albums: The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, Sandy, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz and Rendezvous. She also duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore" for Led Zeppelin's album Led Zeppelin IV in 1971. Denny died in 1978 at the age of 31 due to injuries and health issues related to alcohol abuse. Music publications Uncut and Mojo have described Denny as Britain's finest female singer-songwriter. Her composition "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" has been recorded by Judy Collins, Eva Cassidy, Nina Simone, 10,000 Maniacs and Cat Power. Her recorded work has been the subject of numerous reissues, along with a wealth of previously unreleased material which has appeared over the more than 40 years since her death, including a 19-CD box set released in November 2010. Childhood Denny was born on 6 January 1947 at Nelson Hospital, Kingston Road, Merton Park, London, to Neil and Edna Denny. She studied classical piano as a child. Her paternal grandfather was from Dundee, and her paternal grandmother was a Scots Gaelic speaker and singer of traditional songs. At an early age Denny showed an interest in singing, although her strict parents were reluctant to believe there was a living to be made from it. She attended Coombe Girls' School in New Malden; after leaving school she began training as a nurse at the Royal Brompton Hospital. Early career Denny's nursing career proved short-lived. In the meantime she had secured a place on a foundation course at Kingston College of Art, which she took up in September 1965, becoming involved with the folk club on campus. Her contemporaries at the college included guitarist and future member of Pentangle, John Renbourn. After her first public appearance at the Barge in Kingston upon Thames, Denny began working the folk club circuit in the evenings with an American-influenced repertoire, including songs by Tom Paxton, together with traditional folk songs. Denny made the first of many appearances for the BBC at Cecil Sharp House on 2 December 1966 on the Folk Song Cellar programme where she accompanied herself on two traditional songs: "Fir a Bhata" and "Green Grow the Laurels". Her earliest professional recordings were made a few months later in mid-1967 for the Saga label, featuring traditional songs and covers of folk contemporaries including her boyfriend of this period, the American singer-songwriter Jackson C. Frank. They were released on the albums Alex Campbell and His Friends and Sandy and Johnny with Johnny Silvo. These songs were collected on the 1970 album It's Sandy Denny where the tracks from Sandy and Johnny had been re-recorded with more accomplished vocals and guitar playing. The complete Saga studio recordings were issued on the 2005 compilation Where The Time Goes. By this time, she had abandoned her studies at art college and was devoting herself full-time to music. While she was performing at The Troubadour folk club, a member of the Strawbs heard her, and in 1967, she was invited to join the band. She recorded one album with them in Denmark, which was released belatedly in 1973, credited to Sandy Denny and the Strawbs: All Our Own Work. The album includes an early solo version of her best-known (and widely recorded) composition, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" A demo of that song found its way into the hands of American singer Judy Collins, who chose to cover it as the title track of an album of her own, released in November 1968, thus giving Denny international exposure as a songwriter before she had become widely known as a singer. From Fairport to Fotheringay After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late 1960s, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. Solo career and final years She then turned to recording her first solo album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Released in 1971, it is distinguished by its elusive lyrics and unconventional harmonies. Highlights included "Late November", inspired by a dream and the death of Fairport band member Martin Lamble, and "Next Time Around" a cryptogram about Jackson C. Frank, one of her many portraits in song. Sandy, with a cover photograph by David Bailey, followed in 1972 and was the first of her albums to be produced by Trevor Lucas. As well as introducing eight new original compositions, the album marked her last recording of a traditional song, "The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood" (words by Richard Fariña), with Denny's ambitious multi-tracked vocal arrangement inspired by the Ensemble of the Bulgarian Republic. Melody Maker readers twice voted her the "Best British Female Singer", in 1970 and 1971 and, together with contemporaries including Richard Thompson and Ashley Hutchings, she participated in a one-off project called the Bunch to record a collection of rock and roll era standards released under the title of Rock On. In 1971, Denny duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore", which was included on Led Zeppelin's 1971 album (Led Zeppelin IV); she was the only guest vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin album. In 1972 Denny had a small cameo on Lou Reizner's symphonic arrangement of the Who's rock opera Tommy. Her brief appearance was at the end of the track "It's a Boy", which also featured vocals from Pete Townshend. In 1973, she married long-term boyfriend and producer Trevor Lucas and recorded a third solo album, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz. The songs continued to detail many of her personal preoccupations: loss, loneliness, fear of the dark, the passing of time and the changing seasons. The album contained one of her best loved compositions, "Solo", and featured a cover image by Gered Mankowitz. In 1974, she returned to Fairport Convention (of which her husband was by then a member) for a world tour (captured on the 1974 album Fairport Live Convention) and a studio album, Rising for the Moon in 1975. Although her development as a soloist and songwriter had taken her further away from the folk roots direction that the band had pursued since Liege & Lief, seven of the eleven tracks on Rising for the Moon were either written or co-written by her. Denny and Lucas left Fairport Convention at the end of 1975 and embarked on what was to become her final album Rendezvous. Released in 1977, the album sold poorly and Denny was subsequently dropped by Island Records. Having relocated to the village of Byfield in Northamptonshire in the mid-seventies, Denny gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Georgia, in July 1977. A UK tour to promote Rendezvous in autumn 1977 marked her final public appearances. The closing night at the Royalty Theatre in London on 27 November 1977 was recorded for a live album, Gold Dust, which, because of technical problems in the recording of the electric guitar, was belatedly released in 1998 after most of the guitars had been re-recorded by Jerry Donahue. Death Linda Thompson would later note that Denny "really started going downhill in 1976" and demonstrated increasing levels of both manic and depressive behaviour. Learning that she was pregnant did little to mellow Denny's reckless lifestyle, which was heightened by increasing depression, mood swings and the unravelling of her "tumultuous" marriage to Trevor Lucas. She abused drugs and alcohol while pregnant with her daughter, Georgia, who was born prematurely in July 1977. Much like her moods, Denny's interest towards her daughter appeared to oscillate between obsessive and unconcerned; friends recalled both frantic, middle-of-the-night phone calls about teething, as well as Denny "crashing the car and leaving the baby in the pub and all sorts of stuff". Friends would later note that Denny had a history of purposely throwing herself off bar stools and down flights of stairs in order to get a reaction. Several remembered this behaviour as "Sandy's party trick", while Dave Pegg's wife Chris stated, "She certainly did it in my house and it could be a very dramatic gesture, like self-harming. She could do it without hurting herself usually but I had a feeling there would be one time too many." Those who knew Denny said that her increasing level of alcohol abuse in the last years of her life led to an increasing number of falls (both accidental and deliberate), resulting in a growing number of injuries. In late March 1978, while on holiday with her parents and baby Georgia in Cornwall, Denny was injured when she fell down a staircase and hit her head on concrete. Following the incident, she suffered from intense headaches; a doctor prescribed her the painkiller dextropropoxyphene, a drug known to have fatal side effects when mixed with alcohol. On 1 April, several days after the fall in Cornwall, Denny performed a charity concert at Byfield. The final song she performed was "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" At some unknown point during the first half of April 1978, Denny suffered yet another major fall at her home in Byfield. On 13 April, concerned about his wife's erratic behaviour and fearing for his daughter's safety, Trevor Lucas left the UK and returned to his native Australia with their child, leaving Denny without telling her. He sold their Austin Princess car in order to raise funds for the journey. On discovering Lucas' departure, Denny went to stay at the home of her friend Miranda Ward. During this time, Denny apparently set up an appointment to speak with a doctor about her headaches, and also intended to get advice about her alcohol addiction. At some point after 8 am on 17 April, Denny fell into a coma. Ward was out of the house at the time, and had asked her friend Jon Cole (of the band The Movies) to check in on Denny. Cole entered the home at 3 pm, and found Denny unconscious at the foot of the staircase which led to the second floor of the house. She was rushed by ambulance to Queen Mary's Hospital in nearby Roehampton. On 19 April, she was transferred to Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon. After receiving news that Denny was in a coma, Lucas returned from Australia. Upon his arrival at the hospital, doctors informed him that Denny was effectively brain-dead and her condition would not improve. He granted their recommendation to turn off life-support machines; however, just ten minutes before this was to take place, at 7:50 pm on 21 April 1978, Sandy Denny died, without regaining consciousness. Her death was ruled to be the result of a traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage and blunt force trauma to her head. She was 31 years old. The funeral took place on 27 April 1978 at Putney Vale Cemetery. After the vicar had read Denny's favourite psalm, Psalm 23, a piper played "Flowers of the Forest", a traditional song commemorating the fallen of Flodden Field and one which had appeared on the 1970 Fairport album Full House. The inscription on her headstone reads: Posthumous releases Official releases Although Denny had a devoted following in her lifetime, she did not achieve mass market success. In the years since her death, her reputation has grown. A four-album box set entitled Who Knows Where the Time Goes? (1985) was produced by her widower Trevor Lucas and Joe Boyd and included a number of rare and previously unreleased tracks by Denny, either solo or with Fairport Convention (1968, 1969, 1974) and Fotheringay (1970). This was the first public indication that a large cache of unreleased material existed. A one-disc subset of these recordings was subsequently issued on CD by Island in 1987 entitled The Best Of Sandy Denny. In 1987, a compilation of previously unreleased tracks recorded for the BBC by incarnations of Fairport including Denny was released on LP under the title Heyday, which was subsequently released on CD in 2001 and again, with extra tracks, in 2002; all tracks were later included, with others, on the 2007 4-CD box set Fairport Convention Live at the BBC (see below). The initial purpose of this compilation was to document the more "American" material performed live by the What We Did on Our Holidays lineup of the band that never made it to vinyl, while the re-releases added additional songs as performed by the Unhalfbricking and Liege and Lief lineups. Also in 1987, a VHS documentary, It All Comes 'Round Again, on Fairport Convention was released which contained excerpts of several audio recordings featuring Denny, plus a single poor-quality video recording of her singing her song "Solo" during her second stint with Fairport in 1974, as filmed by the University of Birmingham's "Guild TV" amateur organisation. The original tape of this recording has apparently been lost; however, "Like an Old Fashioned Waltz" does appear on the DVD documentary Sandy Denny Under Review (see below) and other tracks have been made available via YouTube in very poor quality. Over the period 1988–1994, the Australian "Friends of Fairport" issued a series of subscriber-only cassette compilations drawing in the main on previously unreleased tapes from Trevor Lucas' collection (as stored in his attic in fact). Attic Tracks (AT) 1 (1988) contained out-takes from Sandy as well as some Fairport material and a few bizarre extras; AT 2 (1989) contained only Trevor Lucas material, no Denny; AT 3 (1989) entitled First and Last Tracks comprised 1966–1967 home demos and rare radio tracks, as well as 9 "pre-overdub" songs from Denny's last concert at the Royalty Theatre, London, on 27 November 1977 (a partial alternative to the later, overdubbed CD release Gold Dust), and AT 4 (1994): Together Again comprised one side of Lucas and the other of Denny in the form of more home demos, studio outtakes, and 4 tracks from a 1973 BBC radio concert. A cut-down version of these tracks (18 songs) was subsequently compiled for CD release by the Australian label Raven Records in 1995 called Sandy Denny, Trevor Lucas and Friends: The Attic Tracks 1972–1984. In 1991, Joe Boyd issued a new version of Denny's All Our Own Work album with the Strawbs, called Sandy Denny and the Strawbs, on his Hannibal Records label. The album had strings added to some tracks, including "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" and further tracks with Denny on lead vocal. In 1997, a one-disc compilation of Denny's solo BBC recordings was released as The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 on Strange Fruit Records. Due to rights issues it was withdrawn on the day of release, thereby creating a highly collectible disc (up until the release of the comprehensive Live at the BBC box set in 2007). This release was followed in 1998 when Denny's final performance at the Royalty Theatre, entitled Gold Dust, was issued on CD, following a degree of re-recording and overdubbing of selected backing parts to replace reportedly unsatisfactory originals. In 1999, a single-disc compilation, Listen Listen – An Introduction to Sandy Denny, was released on Island Records comprising 17 previously released tracks taken from her four Island solo albums. No More Sad Refrains: The Anthology was released by Universal Records in 2000. When first released, this compilation had several rare tracks, including "The Ballad of Easy Rider" from the Liege and Lief sessions, "Learning the Game" and "When Will I Be Loved" from the Bunch album Rock On, "Here in Silence" and "Man of Iron" from the Pass of Arms soundtrack, and a previously unissued demo of "Stranger to Himself". In 2002, a previously unreleased, 2-CD live US concert recording by Fairport Convention from 1974 featuring Denny was released on the Burning Airlines label. Entitled Before The Moon, it originated from a radio broadcast from Ebbets Field in Denver, Colorado, on 23/24 May 1974. The second disc was a limited release bonus with the original release comprising the second set from the same concert. This recording was re-released in shortened form as a single disc in 2011 on the It's About Music label entitled Fairport Convention with Sandy Denny: Ebbets Field 1974. Also in 2002, the American A&M Records issued a budget-price "20th Century Masters" compilation called The Best of Sandy Denny with 10 tracks all available on Denny's studio albums. In 2004 a second comprehensive five-CD box set was released on the Fledg'ling record label called A Boxful of Treasures that included many unreleased recordings, in particular a whole disc of acoustic demos, many recorded at her home in Byfield that was highly prized amongst fans and critics alike, who had long asserted that her solo performances showed her work in its best light, revealing the true quality of her vocal style and compositions. Also in 2004, the Spectrum label issued a 16-track compilation of previously released material entitled The Collection: Chronological Covers & Concert Classics, including a mix of studio recordings and live excerpts from the Gold Dust Royalty concert. In 2005, remastered versions of all Denny's solo albums came out with bonus tracks. Also in 2005, a single CD compilation entitled Where the Time Goes: Sandy '67 was released on Castle Music containing all of Saga's Denny album tracks (including the alternative recordings on It's Sandy Denny), together with two self accompanied tracks from Denny's recordings with the Strawbs. A DVD documentary entitled Sandy Denny Under Review was released on the Sexy Intellectual label in 2006 which contained interviews with her contemporaries plus brief excerpts from her audio recordings, plus some short video clips including two of the poor quality video recordings with Fairport from Birmingham University (details given above), two with Fotheringay from German TV's Beat-Club (further details given below), and three solo excerpts from the only surviving BBC footage on One In Ten (details as given in the next item). A 4-disc box set, Sandy Denny Live at the BBC, came out in September 2007 containing (virtually) all of the known solo recordings made by Denny for that UK broadcaster including two complete concerts, one at the Paris Theatre in 1972 and one recorded for Sounds on Sunday in 1973, plus a range of other material spanning the years 1966–1973. Disc 3 of this set was a DVD containing surviving TV footage from a 1971 BBC One in Ten session comprising solo performances by Denny of "The North Star Grassman and the Ravens", "Crazy Lady Blues" and "Late November", along with digitised excerpts from her diaries, rare photos and a discography. A 1-disc subset of this box set entitled The Best of the BBC Recordings was subsequently released in 2008. A companion box set, Fairport Convention Live at the BBC, also came out in 2007 and covered equivalent live recordings by Fairport over the period 1968–1974, of which the first two discs (1968–1970) contain examples from Denny's time with that group. In 2008, Jerry Donahue completed the unfinished second Fotheringay album begun in the autumn of 1970. It was released to general acclaim as Fotheringay 2 and contained some notable Denny performances, in particular earlier versions of two Denny compositions, "Late November" and "John the Gun", and performances of the traditional songs "Gypsy Davey" and "Wild Mountain Thyme". Also in 2008, Island Remasters issued a double CD entitled The Music Weaver (Sandy Denny Remembered) which contained a mix of better known tracks and less well known demos and live recordings, previously released but not in companion with studio sessions. This compilation is also one of the very few to contain the Led Zeppelin track "The Battle Of Evermore" which features a rare guest appearance by Denny. In 2010, a large 19-CD retrospective box set, simply titled Sandy Denny, was released by Universal/Island Records in a limited edition of 3,000. It contained Denny's entire catalogue of studio recordings, including her work with the Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay and as a solo artist. The compilation also included a large number of outtakes, demos, live recordings, radio sessions and interviews. The box set was released to good reviews, including a 5-star review in Uncut and a 4-star review in The Guardian. In late 2010, Thea Gilmore was commissioned by Denny's estate, in conjunction with Island Records, to write melodies to unrecorded lyrics found in Denny's papers. The resulting album, Don't Stop Singing, was released in November 2011 to generally good notices, including 4-star reviews in The Independent and The Guardian among others. On 21 April 2012, the single "London" was released as an exclusive Record Store Day 7″ single. Further recordings were released in 2011, including a German recording of Fotheringay in concert released as Essen 1970 on the Garden of Delights label. The performance was remastered by original band member Jerry Donahue. This release was followed by 19 Rupert Street, a home recording of a rehearsal featuring Sandy and Alex Campbell recorded at his flat in August 1967. This release is notable for the fact that Sandy performs a number of tracks that are not available in any other versions, including a cover of "Fairytale Lullaby" by John Martyn. This CD was put out by Sandy's former Strawbs bandmate Dave Cousins on his Witchwood label. Two-disc "Deluxe Editions" of Denny's album reissues appeared in 2011–2012 with additional tracks; the 2012 Deluxe Edition of Sandy included a previously unreleased eight-song solo set from her 1973 U.S. tour recorded at Ebbet's Field in Denver, Colorado. A similar two-disc reissue of Fairport Convention's Rising for the Moon also included, for the first time, the complete 1974 L.A. Troubadour performance of Fairport with Denny back on board, prior to the official announcement of her re-joining the group. On account of unprecedented demand for, and exhaustion of supply of the limited edition 19-CD set cited above, in October 2012 a limited edition 4-CD version was released entitled The Notes and The Words: A Collection of Demos and Rarities, containing "75 songs that represent the cream of the rarities, demos and outtakes from the box set". Limited to 3,500 copies, this compilation is also now out-of-print. In 2013, Spectrum records issued a single-disc CD entitled The Lady – The Essential Sandy Denny that comprised 15 previously issued tracks, generally from Denny's well known albums. 2014 saw the release of another Fairport live U.S. radio broadcast from their 1974 tour with Denny, on RockBeat Records, entitled Live 1974 (My Father's Place), comprising 11 live tracks, most featuring Denny, recorded at the New York rock club My Father's Place. A four-disc Fotheringay retrospective, Nothing More: The Collected Fotheringay, was released on 30 March 2015. This is the most comprehensive compilation of the group's recordings, and contains, in addition to all the tracks on Fotheringay and Fotheringay 2 as both final studio versions and demos/alternate takes, the complete live concert set from Rotterdam in 1970 (including several previously unreleased tracks), seven Fotheringay tracks recorded in session for BBC radio (which had previously circulated only as bootlegs), plus a DVD disc containing four performances by Fotheringay recorded for the German Beat-Club TV series in 1970, which considerably augment the otherwise sparse known TV footage of Denny in particular. May 2016 saw the release of a 2-CD compilation, I've Always Kept A Unicorn – The Acoustic Sandy Denny which collected together many previously released, but dispersed, acoustic and/or demo versions of songs better known from their album counterparts, as well as three previously unreleased demos (with Linda Thompson, at the time Linda Peters) from 1972's Rock On sessions by one-off band The Bunch. A 7-CD box set by Fairport Convention entitled Come All Ye – The First 10 Years was released in July 2017 and contains a small number of additional, previously unreleased demos and alternate takes featuring Denny during her first tenure with the band over the period 1968–1969. Tracks not previously available include versions of Joni Mitchell's Eastern Rain, an a capella version of Nottamun Town, alternative takes of Autopsy and Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and a rehearsal version of The Deserter. Unofficial releases and audience tapes In addition to the authorised material listed above, a number unofficial/unauthorised compilations exist plus a range of audience recordings of varying quality, none of which would likely see the light of day as commercial issues but are of interest to a sector of Denny's audience on either historic or aesthetic grounds, often providing alternative views of songs known otherwise only from their commercially released versions. The first available unauthorised/bootleg CDs available in the 1980s and 1990s comprised principally off-air and other obscure material under such titles as Borrowed Thyme, Poems from Alexandra, Dark the Night, Wild Mountain Thyme and One Last Sad Refrain; such compilations are now largely superseded by the subsequent availability of most of the off-air material in much better quality as official releases as described above. Of more enduring interest are audience tapes of shows of which no "official" tapes survive. These include some early shows by Fairport Convention; a performance by Fotheringay at the 1970 Tenth National Jazz and Blues Festival, held at Plumpton Race Track, Streat, East Sussex, England; "solo" shows by Denny (on occasion with a small band including, among others, Richard Thompson) at the 1971 Lincoln Folk Festival and at the Eltham Well Hall Open Theatre in 1972; performances from York University and Guildhall, Newcastle upon Tyne, also in 1972; an early 1972 U.S. performance from The Bitter End in New York; and several sets (Birmingham and Croydon) from her final 1977 tour in addition to the officially released Gold Dust album; plus quite a large number of recordings strongly featuring Denny as part of the re-formed Fairport Convention over the period 1974–1975. The majority of these can be fairly easily located via relevant internet searches and, in addition, can be readily downloaded from archival music servers such as Sugarmegs (Sandy Denny concerts listed under "S": SugarMegs Streaming Server, Fairport and Fotheringay under "F": SugarMegs Streaming Server). A provisional list of such recordings as are known to exist, with details on where each can be accessed, is available here. Legacy Estate and family After relocating to Australia and remarrying, Trevor Lucas died of a heart attack in 1989. Denny's estate is now managed by Lucas' widow, Elizabeth Hurtt-Lucas. A number of otherwise unreleased recordings of Sandy Denny from his collection have subsequently been the basis for posthumous releases of Denny's work including those on The Attic Tracks and elsewhere. Sandy Denny's daughter, Georgia, has rarely spoken about her mother in a public forum and in the mid-2000s declined an invitation to write the liner notes for Sandy Denny Live at the BBC. However, in 2006 she flew to Britain from Australia to accept on her mother's behalf the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards award for Most Influential Folk Album of All Time, which was given for Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief. Georgia gave birth to twin daughters on 29 April 1997, and a tribute album, Georgia on Our Mind, featuring many of Sandy Denny's former bandmates and friends, was compiled in the children's honour. She also administers a Facebook page "Sandy Denny and Family" dedicated to her mother's memory and more recently, under the name Georgia Katt, has released some of her own DJ-based music. Tributes Since her death, many tributes have been made to Denny, both in music and elsewhere. Dave Pegg of Fairport Convention recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on his 1983 solo album The Cocktail Cowboy Goes It Alone. Dave Cousins of the Strawbs wrote "Ringing Down the Years" in memory of Denny shortly after her death. Songs more specific to the death were Bert Jansch's "Where Did My Life Go" and Richard Thompson's "Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?" Fellow Brit folk pioneers Spriguns changed the title of their 1978 album to Magic Lady after hearing of Denny's death while recording. In 1998, a variety of Daylily was named after her. Denny's songs have been covered by numerous artists in the years since her death. Some of the notable acts to have covered her music include Yo La Tengo, former Marillion frontman Fish, who covered "Solo" on his album Songs from the Mirror, Cat Power, Judy Collins, Nanci Griffith and Nina Simone. Kate Bush mentioned Denny in the lyric of "Blow Away (For Bill)", as one of the musicians to greet Bill in Heaven. "Blow Away (For Bill)" is the third track on Bush's 1980 album Never for Ever. In 1984, Clann Eadair released the single "A tribute to Sandy Denny", featuring Phil Lynott on vocals. Several radio specials have been produced about Denny's life and music, including BBC Radio 2's The Sandy Denny Story: Who Knows Where the Time Goes. In 2007, Denny's song "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" also received BBC Radio 2's 2007 Folk Award for "Favourite Folk Track of All Time". In 2010, she was recognized by NPR in their 50 Great Voices special series. In April 2008, a tribute concert was held at The Troubadour in London, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Denny's death. Those taking part included Martin Carthy, Linda Thompson and Joe Boyd. A more extensive tribute was given later that year in December at the Southbank in the Queen Elizabeth Hall called The Lady: A Tribute to Sandy Denny with a band composed of members of Bellowhead, the evening featured a mix of young folk acts like Jim Moray and Lisa Knapp alongside those that had known and worked with Denny such as Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. These acts were joined by performers from outside the world of folk like PP Arnold and Marc Almond. The concert, which primarily featured songs written by Denny, received a four-star review in The Guardian. In May 2012 the Southbank concert was expanded into an eight date UK tour called The Lady: A Homage to Sandy Denny. The tour showcased Sandy's entire songbook taking in her work with Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, her solo career and the new songs completed by Thea Gilmore on her album Don't Stop Singing. The band was, once again, composed of members of Bellowhead. Other acts performing included the aforementioned Thea Gilmore and up-and-coming folk acts Lavinia Blackwall of Trembling Bells, Blair Dunlop and Sam Carter, alongside more established folk stars Maddy Prior, Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. The line-up was completed with performers not normally associated with the folk scene; Green Gartside, Joan Wasser (also known as Joan As Police Woman), and PP Arnold. The tour was well received, obtaining a four-star review in The Times. The London concert at the Barbican was filmed for BBC4, and broadcast in a 90-minute programme titled The Songs of Sandy Denny in November 2012. In the 2012 Irish film Silence (Harvest Films & South Wind Blows), "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" is used during the film and final credits. In April 2016 Denny was inducted into the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards Hall of Fame. Alela Diane recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on her album Cusp, released in February 2018. The song reflects on Denny's final tragic days and her orphaned baby daughter. Discography Solo studio albums The North Star Grassman and the Ravens (1971) Sandy (1972) Like an Old Fashioned Waltz (1974) Rendezvous (1977) Solo live albums The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 (1997) Gold Dust (1998) (live recording from final tour, 1977) Live at the BBC (2007 4-disc compilation) Sandy – Deluxe edition, 2012 – includes "Live at Ebbetts Field" (previously unreleased concert on disc 2) With others Denny's collaborations with other artists, including with Alex Campbell, The Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, and The Bunch, together with numerous posthumous releases and compilation albums, are detailed further on the Sandy Denny discography page. References and notes General Further reading Mick Houghton. I've Always Kept a Unicorn – The Biography of Sandy Denny. Faber & Faber, 2015; Clinton Heylin. No More Sad Refrains – The Life and Times of Sandy Denny. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Clinton Heylin. Gypsy Love Songs & Sad Refrains – The Recordings of Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny. Labour of Love Productions, 1989. Colin Larkin. The Guinness Who's Who of Folk Music. Guinness Publishing Ltd; Jim Irvin. Angel of Avalon. MOJO Magazine, August 1998. Colin Harper, Trevor Hodgett. Irish Folk, Traditional & Blues: A Secret History. Cherry Red, 2005; Pamela Murray Winters. No Thought of Leaving: A life of Sandy Denny. 2000. (Unpublished). Brian Hinton, Geoff Wall. Ashley Hutchings: The Guv'nor & the Rise of Folk Rock. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Patrick Humphries. Meet On The Ledge: The Classic Years 1967–1975. Virgin Books, 1997; Patrick Humphries. Richard Thompson: Strange Affair – The Biography. Virgin Books, 1996; Philip Ward, "Sandy Denny: A Thirtieth Anniversary", R2 (Rock'n'Reel) 2(9), May/June 2008. Philip Ward, Sandy Denny: Reflections on Her Music''. Matador, 2011; External links Official website Homage to Sandy Denny Dedicated to the memory of Sandy Denny Sandy Denny website 1947 births 1978 deaths 20th-century English singers 20th-century English women singers A&M Records artists Accidental deaths from falls Accidental deaths in London Deaths by intracerebral hemorrhage Alumni of Kingston College (England) British folk rock musicians Burials at Putney Vale Cemetery English folk singers English people of Scottish descent English women singer-songwriters Fairport Convention members Women rock singers Fotheringay members Island Records artists People from Byfield, Northamptonshire People from Wimbledon, London Singers from London Strawbs members The Bunch members	true	[ "Fotheringay is the self-titled album by the group formed by Sandy Denny after she left Fairport Convention in 1969, and was the group's only contemporaneous release. It was recorded in 1970 with former Eclection member and Denny's future husband Trevor Lucas, with Gerry Conway, Jerry Donahue, and Pat Donaldson. The album includes five Sandy Denny compositions (one of which was co-written with Lucas), one song by Lucas, as well as two traditional songs and two cover versions: Bob Dylan's \"Too Much of Nothing\" and Gordon Lightfoot's \"The Way I Feel\".\n\nTrack listing\n\nPersonnel\nSandy Denny – guitar, piano, vocals\nTrevor Lucas – guitar, vocals\nJerry Donahue – lead guitar, vocals\nPat Donaldson – bass, vocals\nGerry Conway – drums\nLinda Thompson – vocals\nTodd Lloyd – vocals\n\nProduction\nProducer: Joe Boyd\nRecording engineer: Jerry Boys, Todd Lloyd\nArt direction: cover illustrations by Marion Appleton\nPhotography: gatefold image by Tony Evans\nLiner notes: n/a\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nhttp://www.thebeesknees.com/category/fotheringay/ Fotheringay at Fledg'ling Records (reissued 28 July 2004)\n\n1970 debut albums\nIsland Records albums\nAlbums produced by Joe Boyd\nFotheringay albums\nFledg'ling Records albums", "Fotheringay is a 1970-71 British rock band.\n\nFotheringay or Fotheringhay may also refer to:\n\n \"Fotheringay\", a 1969 song by Fairport Convention from the album What We Did on Our Holidays\n Fotheringay (album), a 1970 album by the band\n Fotheringay 2, a 2008 album by the band\n Fotheringhay, a village and civil parish in Northamptonshire, England\n Fotheringhay Castle, also known as Fotheringay Castle, a castle in Fotheringhay, England that existed from around 1100 to 1630\n Fotheringay (Elliston, Virginia), a historic plantation home" ]
[ "Sandy Denny", "From Fairport to Fotheringay", "When was she in the band Fairport Convention?", "Denny became the obvious choice.", "who else was in the band with her?", "Simon Nicol,", "did they release an album?", "three albums", "when was the first album released?", "What We Did on Our Holidays,", "what was the name of the second album?", "Unhalfbricking.", "what was the name of the third album?", "Liege & Lief", "when did she join Fotheringay?", "Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully.", "What happened after she left Fairway Convention?", "she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection.", "Did Fotheringay release any albums?", "They created one self-titled album," ]	C_e6cc2f78b77b4fcab1029b8e527f1a13_0	What year was that album released?	10	What year was Fotheringays's album released?	Sandy Denny	After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late sixties, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER	Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny (6 January 1947 – 21 April 1978) was an English singer-songwriter who was lead singer of the British folk rock band Fairport Convention. She has been described as "the pre-eminent British folk rock singer". After briefly working with the Strawbs, Denny joined Fairport Convention in 1968, remaining with them until 1969. She formed the short-lived band Fotheringay in 1970, before focusing on a solo career. Between 1971 and 1977, Denny released four solo albums: The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, Sandy, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz and Rendezvous. She also duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore" for Led Zeppelin's album Led Zeppelin IV in 1971. Denny died in 1978 at the age of 31 due to injuries and health issues related to alcohol abuse. Music publications Uncut and Mojo have described Denny as Britain's finest female singer-songwriter. Her composition "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" has been recorded by Judy Collins, Eva Cassidy, Nina Simone, 10,000 Maniacs and Cat Power. Her recorded work has been the subject of numerous reissues, along with a wealth of previously unreleased material which has appeared over the more than 40 years since her death, including a 19-CD box set released in November 2010. Childhood Denny was born on 6 January 1947 at Nelson Hospital, Kingston Road, Merton Park, London, to Neil and Edna Denny. She studied classical piano as a child. Her paternal grandfather was from Dundee, and her paternal grandmother was a Scots Gaelic speaker and singer of traditional songs. At an early age Denny showed an interest in singing, although her strict parents were reluctant to believe there was a living to be made from it. She attended Coombe Girls' School in New Malden; after leaving school she began training as a nurse at the Royal Brompton Hospital. Early career Denny's nursing career proved short-lived. In the meantime she had secured a place on a foundation course at Kingston College of Art, which she took up in September 1965, becoming involved with the folk club on campus. Her contemporaries at the college included guitarist and future member of Pentangle, John Renbourn. After her first public appearance at the Barge in Kingston upon Thames, Denny began working the folk club circuit in the evenings with an American-influenced repertoire, including songs by Tom Paxton, together with traditional folk songs. Denny made the first of many appearances for the BBC at Cecil Sharp House on 2 December 1966 on the Folk Song Cellar programme where she accompanied herself on two traditional songs: "Fir a Bhata" and "Green Grow the Laurels". Her earliest professional recordings were made a few months later in mid-1967 for the Saga label, featuring traditional songs and covers of folk contemporaries including her boyfriend of this period, the American singer-songwriter Jackson C. Frank. They were released on the albums Alex Campbell and His Friends and Sandy and Johnny with Johnny Silvo. These songs were collected on the 1970 album It's Sandy Denny where the tracks from Sandy and Johnny had been re-recorded with more accomplished vocals and guitar playing. The complete Saga studio recordings were issued on the 2005 compilation Where The Time Goes. By this time, she had abandoned her studies at art college and was devoting herself full-time to music. While she was performing at The Troubadour folk club, a member of the Strawbs heard her, and in 1967, she was invited to join the band. She recorded one album with them in Denmark, which was released belatedly in 1973, credited to Sandy Denny and the Strawbs: All Our Own Work. The album includes an early solo version of her best-known (and widely recorded) composition, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" A demo of that song found its way into the hands of American singer Judy Collins, who chose to cover it as the title track of an album of her own, released in November 1968, thus giving Denny international exposure as a songwriter before she had become widely known as a singer. From Fairport to Fotheringay After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late 1960s, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. Solo career and final years She then turned to recording her first solo album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Released in 1971, it is distinguished by its elusive lyrics and unconventional harmonies. Highlights included "Late November", inspired by a dream and the death of Fairport band member Martin Lamble, and "Next Time Around" a cryptogram about Jackson C. Frank, one of her many portraits in song. Sandy, with a cover photograph by David Bailey, followed in 1972 and was the first of her albums to be produced by Trevor Lucas. As well as introducing eight new original compositions, the album marked her last recording of a traditional song, "The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood" (words by Richard Fariña), with Denny's ambitious multi-tracked vocal arrangement inspired by the Ensemble of the Bulgarian Republic. Melody Maker readers twice voted her the "Best British Female Singer", in 1970 and 1971 and, together with contemporaries including Richard Thompson and Ashley Hutchings, she participated in a one-off project called the Bunch to record a collection of rock and roll era standards released under the title of Rock On. In 1971, Denny duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore", which was included on Led Zeppelin's 1971 album (Led Zeppelin IV); she was the only guest vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin album. In 1972 Denny had a small cameo on Lou Reizner's symphonic arrangement of the Who's rock opera Tommy. Her brief appearance was at the end of the track "It's a Boy", which also featured vocals from Pete Townshend. In 1973, she married long-term boyfriend and producer Trevor Lucas and recorded a third solo album, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz. The songs continued to detail many of her personal preoccupations: loss, loneliness, fear of the dark, the passing of time and the changing seasons. The album contained one of her best loved compositions, "Solo", and featured a cover image by Gered Mankowitz. In 1974, she returned to Fairport Convention (of which her husband was by then a member) for a world tour (captured on the 1974 album Fairport Live Convention) and a studio album, Rising for the Moon in 1975. Although her development as a soloist and songwriter had taken her further away from the folk roots direction that the band had pursued since Liege & Lief, seven of the eleven tracks on Rising for the Moon were either written or co-written by her. Denny and Lucas left Fairport Convention at the end of 1975 and embarked on what was to become her final album Rendezvous. Released in 1977, the album sold poorly and Denny was subsequently dropped by Island Records. Having relocated to the village of Byfield in Northamptonshire in the mid-seventies, Denny gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Georgia, in July 1977. A UK tour to promote Rendezvous in autumn 1977 marked her final public appearances. The closing night at the Royalty Theatre in London on 27 November 1977 was recorded for a live album, Gold Dust, which, because of technical problems in the recording of the electric guitar, was belatedly released in 1998 after most of the guitars had been re-recorded by Jerry Donahue. Death Linda Thompson would later note that Denny "really started going downhill in 1976" and demonstrated increasing levels of both manic and depressive behaviour. Learning that she was pregnant did little to mellow Denny's reckless lifestyle, which was heightened by increasing depression, mood swings and the unravelling of her "tumultuous" marriage to Trevor Lucas. She abused drugs and alcohol while pregnant with her daughter, Georgia, who was born prematurely in July 1977. Much like her moods, Denny's interest towards her daughter appeared to oscillate between obsessive and unconcerned; friends recalled both frantic, middle-of-the-night phone calls about teething, as well as Denny "crashing the car and leaving the baby in the pub and all sorts of stuff". Friends would later note that Denny had a history of purposely throwing herself off bar stools and down flights of stairs in order to get a reaction. Several remembered this behaviour as "Sandy's party trick", while Dave Pegg's wife Chris stated, "She certainly did it in my house and it could be a very dramatic gesture, like self-harming. She could do it without hurting herself usually but I had a feeling there would be one time too many." Those who knew Denny said that her increasing level of alcohol abuse in the last years of her life led to an increasing number of falls (both accidental and deliberate), resulting in a growing number of injuries. In late March 1978, while on holiday with her parents and baby Georgia in Cornwall, Denny was injured when she fell down a staircase and hit her head on concrete. Following the incident, she suffered from intense headaches; a doctor prescribed her the painkiller dextropropoxyphene, a drug known to have fatal side effects when mixed with alcohol. On 1 April, several days after the fall in Cornwall, Denny performed a charity concert at Byfield. The final song she performed was "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" At some unknown point during the first half of April 1978, Denny suffered yet another major fall at her home in Byfield. On 13 April, concerned about his wife's erratic behaviour and fearing for his daughter's safety, Trevor Lucas left the UK and returned to his native Australia with their child, leaving Denny without telling her. He sold their Austin Princess car in order to raise funds for the journey. On discovering Lucas' departure, Denny went to stay at the home of her friend Miranda Ward. During this time, Denny apparently set up an appointment to speak with a doctor about her headaches, and also intended to get advice about her alcohol addiction. At some point after 8 am on 17 April, Denny fell into a coma. Ward was out of the house at the time, and had asked her friend Jon Cole (of the band The Movies) to check in on Denny. Cole entered the home at 3 pm, and found Denny unconscious at the foot of the staircase which led to the second floor of the house. She was rushed by ambulance to Queen Mary's Hospital in nearby Roehampton. On 19 April, she was transferred to Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon. After receiving news that Denny was in a coma, Lucas returned from Australia. Upon his arrival at the hospital, doctors informed him that Denny was effectively brain-dead and her condition would not improve. He granted their recommendation to turn off life-support machines; however, just ten minutes before this was to take place, at 7:50 pm on 21 April 1978, Sandy Denny died, without regaining consciousness. Her death was ruled to be the result of a traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage and blunt force trauma to her head. She was 31 years old. The funeral took place on 27 April 1978 at Putney Vale Cemetery. After the vicar had read Denny's favourite psalm, Psalm 23, a piper played "Flowers of the Forest", a traditional song commemorating the fallen of Flodden Field and one which had appeared on the 1970 Fairport album Full House. The inscription on her headstone reads: Posthumous releases Official releases Although Denny had a devoted following in her lifetime, she did not achieve mass market success. In the years since her death, her reputation has grown. A four-album box set entitled Who Knows Where the Time Goes? (1985) was produced by her widower Trevor Lucas and Joe Boyd and included a number of rare and previously unreleased tracks by Denny, either solo or with Fairport Convention (1968, 1969, 1974) and Fotheringay (1970). This was the first public indication that a large cache of unreleased material existed. A one-disc subset of these recordings was subsequently issued on CD by Island in 1987 entitled The Best Of Sandy Denny. In 1987, a compilation of previously unreleased tracks recorded for the BBC by incarnations of Fairport including Denny was released on LP under the title Heyday, which was subsequently released on CD in 2001 and again, with extra tracks, in 2002; all tracks were later included, with others, on the 2007 4-CD box set Fairport Convention Live at the BBC (see below). The initial purpose of this compilation was to document the more "American" material performed live by the What We Did on Our Holidays lineup of the band that never made it to vinyl, while the re-releases added additional songs as performed by the Unhalfbricking and Liege and Lief lineups. Also in 1987, a VHS documentary, It All Comes 'Round Again, on Fairport Convention was released which contained excerpts of several audio recordings featuring Denny, plus a single poor-quality video recording of her singing her song "Solo" during her second stint with Fairport in 1974, as filmed by the University of Birmingham's "Guild TV" amateur organisation. The original tape of this recording has apparently been lost; however, "Like an Old Fashioned Waltz" does appear on the DVD documentary Sandy Denny Under Review (see below) and other tracks have been made available via YouTube in very poor quality. Over the period 1988–1994, the Australian "Friends of Fairport" issued a series of subscriber-only cassette compilations drawing in the main on previously unreleased tapes from Trevor Lucas' collection (as stored in his attic in fact). Attic Tracks (AT) 1 (1988) contained out-takes from Sandy as well as some Fairport material and a few bizarre extras; AT 2 (1989) contained only Trevor Lucas material, no Denny; AT 3 (1989) entitled First and Last Tracks comprised 1966–1967 home demos and rare radio tracks, as well as 9 "pre-overdub" songs from Denny's last concert at the Royalty Theatre, London, on 27 November 1977 (a partial alternative to the later, overdubbed CD release Gold Dust), and AT 4 (1994): Together Again comprised one side of Lucas and the other of Denny in the form of more home demos, studio outtakes, and 4 tracks from a 1973 BBC radio concert. A cut-down version of these tracks (18 songs) was subsequently compiled for CD release by the Australian label Raven Records in 1995 called Sandy Denny, Trevor Lucas and Friends: The Attic Tracks 1972–1984. In 1991, Joe Boyd issued a new version of Denny's All Our Own Work album with the Strawbs, called Sandy Denny and the Strawbs, on his Hannibal Records label. The album had strings added to some tracks, including "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" and further tracks with Denny on lead vocal. In 1997, a one-disc compilation of Denny's solo BBC recordings was released as The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 on Strange Fruit Records. Due to rights issues it was withdrawn on the day of release, thereby creating a highly collectible disc (up until the release of the comprehensive Live at the BBC box set in 2007). This release was followed in 1998 when Denny's final performance at the Royalty Theatre, entitled Gold Dust, was issued on CD, following a degree of re-recording and overdubbing of selected backing parts to replace reportedly unsatisfactory originals. In 1999, a single-disc compilation, Listen Listen – An Introduction to Sandy Denny, was released on Island Records comprising 17 previously released tracks taken from her four Island solo albums. No More Sad Refrains: The Anthology was released by Universal Records in 2000. When first released, this compilation had several rare tracks, including "The Ballad of Easy Rider" from the Liege and Lief sessions, "Learning the Game" and "When Will I Be Loved" from the Bunch album Rock On, "Here in Silence" and "Man of Iron" from the Pass of Arms soundtrack, and a previously unissued demo of "Stranger to Himself". In 2002, a previously unreleased, 2-CD live US concert recording by Fairport Convention from 1974 featuring Denny was released on the Burning Airlines label. Entitled Before The Moon, it originated from a radio broadcast from Ebbets Field in Denver, Colorado, on 23/24 May 1974. The second disc was a limited release bonus with the original release comprising the second set from the same concert. This recording was re-released in shortened form as a single disc in 2011 on the It's About Music label entitled Fairport Convention with Sandy Denny: Ebbets Field 1974. Also in 2002, the American A&M Records issued a budget-price "20th Century Masters" compilation called The Best of Sandy Denny with 10 tracks all available on Denny's studio albums. In 2004 a second comprehensive five-CD box set was released on the Fledg'ling record label called A Boxful of Treasures that included many unreleased recordings, in particular a whole disc of acoustic demos, many recorded at her home in Byfield that was highly prized amongst fans and critics alike, who had long asserted that her solo performances showed her work in its best light, revealing the true quality of her vocal style and compositions. Also in 2004, the Spectrum label issued a 16-track compilation of previously released material entitled The Collection: Chronological Covers & Concert Classics, including a mix of studio recordings and live excerpts from the Gold Dust Royalty concert. In 2005, remastered versions of all Denny's solo albums came out with bonus tracks. Also in 2005, a single CD compilation entitled Where the Time Goes: Sandy '67 was released on Castle Music containing all of Saga's Denny album tracks (including the alternative recordings on It's Sandy Denny), together with two self accompanied tracks from Denny's recordings with the Strawbs. A DVD documentary entitled Sandy Denny Under Review was released on the Sexy Intellectual label in 2006 which contained interviews with her contemporaries plus brief excerpts from her audio recordings, plus some short video clips including two of the poor quality video recordings with Fairport from Birmingham University (details given above), two with Fotheringay from German TV's Beat-Club (further details given below), and three solo excerpts from the only surviving BBC footage on One In Ten (details as given in the next item). A 4-disc box set, Sandy Denny Live at the BBC, came out in September 2007 containing (virtually) all of the known solo recordings made by Denny for that UK broadcaster including two complete concerts, one at the Paris Theatre in 1972 and one recorded for Sounds on Sunday in 1973, plus a range of other material spanning the years 1966–1973. Disc 3 of this set was a DVD containing surviving TV footage from a 1971 BBC One in Ten session comprising solo performances by Denny of "The North Star Grassman and the Ravens", "Crazy Lady Blues" and "Late November", along with digitised excerpts from her diaries, rare photos and a discography. A 1-disc subset of this box set entitled The Best of the BBC Recordings was subsequently released in 2008. A companion box set, Fairport Convention Live at the BBC, also came out in 2007 and covered equivalent live recordings by Fairport over the period 1968–1974, of which the first two discs (1968–1970) contain examples from Denny's time with that group. In 2008, Jerry Donahue completed the unfinished second Fotheringay album begun in the autumn of 1970. It was released to general acclaim as Fotheringay 2 and contained some notable Denny performances, in particular earlier versions of two Denny compositions, "Late November" and "John the Gun", and performances of the traditional songs "Gypsy Davey" and "Wild Mountain Thyme". Also in 2008, Island Remasters issued a double CD entitled The Music Weaver (Sandy Denny Remembered) which contained a mix of better known tracks and less well known demos and live recordings, previously released but not in companion with studio sessions. This compilation is also one of the very few to contain the Led Zeppelin track "The Battle Of Evermore" which features a rare guest appearance by Denny. In 2010, a large 19-CD retrospective box set, simply titled Sandy Denny, was released by Universal/Island Records in a limited edition of 3,000. It contained Denny's entire catalogue of studio recordings, including her work with the Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay and as a solo artist. The compilation also included a large number of outtakes, demos, live recordings, radio sessions and interviews. The box set was released to good reviews, including a 5-star review in Uncut and a 4-star review in The Guardian. In late 2010, Thea Gilmore was commissioned by Denny's estate, in conjunction with Island Records, to write melodies to unrecorded lyrics found in Denny's papers. The resulting album, Don't Stop Singing, was released in November 2011 to generally good notices, including 4-star reviews in The Independent and The Guardian among others. On 21 April 2012, the single "London" was released as an exclusive Record Store Day 7″ single. Further recordings were released in 2011, including a German recording of Fotheringay in concert released as Essen 1970 on the Garden of Delights label. The performance was remastered by original band member Jerry Donahue. This release was followed by 19 Rupert Street, a home recording of a rehearsal featuring Sandy and Alex Campbell recorded at his flat in August 1967. This release is notable for the fact that Sandy performs a number of tracks that are not available in any other versions, including a cover of "Fairytale Lullaby" by John Martyn. This CD was put out by Sandy's former Strawbs bandmate Dave Cousins on his Witchwood label. Two-disc "Deluxe Editions" of Denny's album reissues appeared in 2011–2012 with additional tracks; the 2012 Deluxe Edition of Sandy included a previously unreleased eight-song solo set from her 1973 U.S. tour recorded at Ebbet's Field in Denver, Colorado. A similar two-disc reissue of Fairport Convention's Rising for the Moon also included, for the first time, the complete 1974 L.A. Troubadour performance of Fairport with Denny back on board, prior to the official announcement of her re-joining the group. On account of unprecedented demand for, and exhaustion of supply of the limited edition 19-CD set cited above, in October 2012 a limited edition 4-CD version was released entitled The Notes and The Words: A Collection of Demos and Rarities, containing "75 songs that represent the cream of the rarities, demos and outtakes from the box set". Limited to 3,500 copies, this compilation is also now out-of-print. In 2013, Spectrum records issued a single-disc CD entitled The Lady – The Essential Sandy Denny that comprised 15 previously issued tracks, generally from Denny's well known albums. 2014 saw the release of another Fairport live U.S. radio broadcast from their 1974 tour with Denny, on RockBeat Records, entitled Live 1974 (My Father's Place), comprising 11 live tracks, most featuring Denny, recorded at the New York rock club My Father's Place. A four-disc Fotheringay retrospective, Nothing More: The Collected Fotheringay, was released on 30 March 2015. This is the most comprehensive compilation of the group's recordings, and contains, in addition to all the tracks on Fotheringay and Fotheringay 2 as both final studio versions and demos/alternate takes, the complete live concert set from Rotterdam in 1970 (including several previously unreleased tracks), seven Fotheringay tracks recorded in session for BBC radio (which had previously circulated only as bootlegs), plus a DVD disc containing four performances by Fotheringay recorded for the German Beat-Club TV series in 1970, which considerably augment the otherwise sparse known TV footage of Denny in particular. May 2016 saw the release of a 2-CD compilation, I've Always Kept A Unicorn – The Acoustic Sandy Denny which collected together many previously released, but dispersed, acoustic and/or demo versions of songs better known from their album counterparts, as well as three previously unreleased demos (with Linda Thompson, at the time Linda Peters) from 1972's Rock On sessions by one-off band The Bunch. A 7-CD box set by Fairport Convention entitled Come All Ye – The First 10 Years was released in July 2017 and contains a small number of additional, previously unreleased demos and alternate takes featuring Denny during her first tenure with the band over the period 1968–1969. Tracks not previously available include versions of Joni Mitchell's Eastern Rain, an a capella version of Nottamun Town, alternative takes of Autopsy and Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and a rehearsal version of The Deserter. Unofficial releases and audience tapes In addition to the authorised material listed above, a number unofficial/unauthorised compilations exist plus a range of audience recordings of varying quality, none of which would likely see the light of day as commercial issues but are of interest to a sector of Denny's audience on either historic or aesthetic grounds, often providing alternative views of songs known otherwise only from their commercially released versions. The first available unauthorised/bootleg CDs available in the 1980s and 1990s comprised principally off-air and other obscure material under such titles as Borrowed Thyme, Poems from Alexandra, Dark the Night, Wild Mountain Thyme and One Last Sad Refrain; such compilations are now largely superseded by the subsequent availability of most of the off-air material in much better quality as official releases as described above. Of more enduring interest are audience tapes of shows of which no "official" tapes survive. These include some early shows by Fairport Convention; a performance by Fotheringay at the 1970 Tenth National Jazz and Blues Festival, held at Plumpton Race Track, Streat, East Sussex, England; "solo" shows by Denny (on occasion with a small band including, among others, Richard Thompson) at the 1971 Lincoln Folk Festival and at the Eltham Well Hall Open Theatre in 1972; performances from York University and Guildhall, Newcastle upon Tyne, also in 1972; an early 1972 U.S. performance from The Bitter End in New York; and several sets (Birmingham and Croydon) from her final 1977 tour in addition to the officially released Gold Dust album; plus quite a large number of recordings strongly featuring Denny as part of the re-formed Fairport Convention over the period 1974–1975. The majority of these can be fairly easily located via relevant internet searches and, in addition, can be readily downloaded from archival music servers such as Sugarmegs (Sandy Denny concerts listed under "S": SugarMegs Streaming Server, Fairport and Fotheringay under "F": SugarMegs Streaming Server). A provisional list of such recordings as are known to exist, with details on where each can be accessed, is available here. Legacy Estate and family After relocating to Australia and remarrying, Trevor Lucas died of a heart attack in 1989. Denny's estate is now managed by Lucas' widow, Elizabeth Hurtt-Lucas. A number of otherwise unreleased recordings of Sandy Denny from his collection have subsequently been the basis for posthumous releases of Denny's work including those on The Attic Tracks and elsewhere. Sandy Denny's daughter, Georgia, has rarely spoken about her mother in a public forum and in the mid-2000s declined an invitation to write the liner notes for Sandy Denny Live at the BBC. However, in 2006 she flew to Britain from Australia to accept on her mother's behalf the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards award for Most Influential Folk Album of All Time, which was given for Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief. Georgia gave birth to twin daughters on 29 April 1997, and a tribute album, Georgia on Our Mind, featuring many of Sandy Denny's former bandmates and friends, was compiled in the children's honour. She also administers a Facebook page "Sandy Denny and Family" dedicated to her mother's memory and more recently, under the name Georgia Katt, has released some of her own DJ-based music. Tributes Since her death, many tributes have been made to Denny, both in music and elsewhere. Dave Pegg of Fairport Convention recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on his 1983 solo album The Cocktail Cowboy Goes It Alone. Dave Cousins of the Strawbs wrote "Ringing Down the Years" in memory of Denny shortly after her death. Songs more specific to the death were Bert Jansch's "Where Did My Life Go" and Richard Thompson's "Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?" Fellow Brit folk pioneers Spriguns changed the title of their 1978 album to Magic Lady after hearing of Denny's death while recording. In 1998, a variety of Daylily was named after her. Denny's songs have been covered by numerous artists in the years since her death. Some of the notable acts to have covered her music include Yo La Tengo, former Marillion frontman Fish, who covered "Solo" on his album Songs from the Mirror, Cat Power, Judy Collins, Nanci Griffith and Nina Simone. Kate Bush mentioned Denny in the lyric of "Blow Away (For Bill)", as one of the musicians to greet Bill in Heaven. "Blow Away (For Bill)" is the third track on Bush's 1980 album Never for Ever. In 1984, Clann Eadair released the single "A tribute to Sandy Denny", featuring Phil Lynott on vocals. Several radio specials have been produced about Denny's life and music, including BBC Radio 2's The Sandy Denny Story: Who Knows Where the Time Goes. In 2007, Denny's song "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" also received BBC Radio 2's 2007 Folk Award for "Favourite Folk Track of All Time". In 2010, she was recognized by NPR in their 50 Great Voices special series. In April 2008, a tribute concert was held at The Troubadour in London, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Denny's death. Those taking part included Martin Carthy, Linda Thompson and Joe Boyd. A more extensive tribute was given later that year in December at the Southbank in the Queen Elizabeth Hall called The Lady: A Tribute to Sandy Denny with a band composed of members of Bellowhead, the evening featured a mix of young folk acts like Jim Moray and Lisa Knapp alongside those that had known and worked with Denny such as Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. These acts were joined by performers from outside the world of folk like PP Arnold and Marc Almond. The concert, which primarily featured songs written by Denny, received a four-star review in The Guardian. In May 2012 the Southbank concert was expanded into an eight date UK tour called The Lady: A Homage to Sandy Denny. The tour showcased Sandy's entire songbook taking in her work with Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, her solo career and the new songs completed by Thea Gilmore on her album Don't Stop Singing. The band was, once again, composed of members of Bellowhead. Other acts performing included the aforementioned Thea Gilmore and up-and-coming folk acts Lavinia Blackwall of Trembling Bells, Blair Dunlop and Sam Carter, alongside more established folk stars Maddy Prior, Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. The line-up was completed with performers not normally associated with the folk scene; Green Gartside, Joan Wasser (also known as Joan As Police Woman), and PP Arnold. The tour was well received, obtaining a four-star review in The Times. The London concert at the Barbican was filmed for BBC4, and broadcast in a 90-minute programme titled The Songs of Sandy Denny in November 2012. In the 2012 Irish film Silence (Harvest Films & South Wind Blows), "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" is used during the film and final credits. In April 2016 Denny was inducted into the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards Hall of Fame. Alela Diane recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on her album Cusp, released in February 2018. The song reflects on Denny's final tragic days and her orphaned baby daughter. Discography Solo studio albums The North Star Grassman and the Ravens (1971) Sandy (1972) Like an Old Fashioned Waltz (1974) Rendezvous (1977) Solo live albums The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 (1997) Gold Dust (1998) (live recording from final tour, 1977) Live at the BBC (2007 4-disc compilation) Sandy – Deluxe edition, 2012 – includes "Live at Ebbetts Field" (previously unreleased concert on disc 2) With others Denny's collaborations with other artists, including with Alex Campbell, The Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, and The Bunch, together with numerous posthumous releases and compilation albums, are detailed further on the Sandy Denny discography page. References and notes General Further reading Mick Houghton. I've Always Kept a Unicorn – The Biography of Sandy Denny. Faber & Faber, 2015; Clinton Heylin. No More Sad Refrains – The Life and Times of Sandy Denny. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Clinton Heylin. Gypsy Love Songs & Sad Refrains – The Recordings of Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny. Labour of Love Productions, 1989. Colin Larkin. The Guinness Who's Who of Folk Music. Guinness Publishing Ltd; Jim Irvin. Angel of Avalon. MOJO Magazine, August 1998. Colin Harper, Trevor Hodgett. Irish Folk, Traditional & Blues: A Secret History. Cherry Red, 2005; Pamela Murray Winters. No Thought of Leaving: A life of Sandy Denny. 2000. (Unpublished). Brian Hinton, Geoff Wall. Ashley Hutchings: The Guv'nor & the Rise of Folk Rock. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Patrick Humphries. Meet On The Ledge: The Classic Years 1967–1975. Virgin Books, 1997; Patrick Humphries. Richard Thompson: Strange Affair – The Biography. Virgin Books, 1996; Philip Ward, "Sandy Denny: A Thirtieth Anniversary", R2 (Rock'n'Reel) 2(9), May/June 2008. Philip Ward, Sandy Denny: Reflections on Her Music''. Matador, 2011; External links Official website Homage to Sandy Denny Dedicated to the memory of Sandy Denny Sandy Denny website 1947 births 1978 deaths 20th-century English singers 20th-century English women singers A&M Records artists Accidental deaths from falls Accidental deaths in London Deaths by intracerebral hemorrhage Alumni of Kingston College (England) British folk rock musicians Burials at Putney Vale Cemetery English folk singers English people of Scottish descent English women singer-songwriters Fairport Convention members Women rock singers Fotheringay members Island Records artists People from Byfield, Northamptonshire People from Wimbledon, London Singers from London Strawbs members The Bunch members	false	[ "Feel What U Feel is a children's album by American musician Lisa Loeb. The album was released on October 7, 2016, and the album's first single was \"Feel What U Feel.\" The album won Best Children's Album at the 60th Annual Grammy Awards.\n\nRelease \nThe album was announced on September 8, 2016 with the release of the lead single \"Feel What U Feel,\" featuring Craig Robinson. The album was then released by Furious Rose Productions on October 7, 2016 as an Amazon Music exclusive.\n\nPromotion \nLisa Loeb Embarked a small tour to promote the Children's album in the Fall of 2016 & Winter of 2017. Despite going on a children's tour, Lisa performed many of her \"Adult\" and \"Older\" songs. Lisa also constantly played her songs on \"Kids Place Live Radio\" for nearly 1 year after release.\n\nSingles \n\"Feel What U Feel\" was released as the album's lead single of September 8, 2016. The second single, \"Moon Star Pie (It's Gunna Be Alright)\" was released on October 7, 2016. The third single, \"Wanna Do Day\" ft. Ed Helms was released on January 12, 2017. The fourth and final single of the album, \"The Sky Is Always Blue\" was released on March 13, 2017.\n\nTrack listing\n\nReferences \n\n2016 albums\nChildren's music albums\nLisa Loeb albums", "Unite is the debut album of the Danish indie pop band A Friend in London. It was released on 21 January 2013 on ArtPeople record label and includes \"New Tomorrow\", their Danish Eurovision Song Contest 2011 entry that finished fifth in that year's competition. The album also includes a collaboration with Carly Rae Jepsen, who is featured in the track \"Rest from the Streets\".\n\nSingles\n \"New Tomorrow\" was released as the lead single from the album on 25 February 2011. It represented Denmark in the Eurovision Song Contest 2011, held in Düsseldorf, Germany.\n \"Calling a Friend\" was released as the second single from the album on 30 April 2012.\n \"Get Rich in Vegas\" was released as the third single from the album on 23 July 2012.\n \"What A Way\" was released as the third single from the album on 29 March 2010.\n \"The Light\" was released from the album on 7 February 2011.\n\nTrack listing\n\nChart performance\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences\n\n2013 debut albums\nA Friend in London albums" ]
[ "Sandy Denny", "From Fairport to Fotheringay", "When was she in the band Fairport Convention?", "Denny became the obvious choice.", "who else was in the band with her?", "Simon Nicol,", "did they release an album?", "three albums", "when was the first album released?", "What We Did on Our Holidays,", "what was the name of the second album?", "Unhalfbricking.", "what was the name of the third album?", "Liege & Lief", "when did she join Fotheringay?", "Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully.", "What happened after she left Fairway Convention?", "she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection.", "Did Fotheringay release any albums?", "They created one self-titled album,", "What year was that album released?", "I don't know." ]	C_e6cc2f78b77b4fcab1029b8e527f1a13_0	what was the most well known song on this album?	11	what was the most well known song on Fotheringay's album?	Sandy Denny	After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late sixties, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. CANNOTANSWER	an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile",	Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny (6 January 1947 – 21 April 1978) was an English singer-songwriter who was lead singer of the British folk rock band Fairport Convention. She has been described as "the pre-eminent British folk rock singer". After briefly working with the Strawbs, Denny joined Fairport Convention in 1968, remaining with them until 1969. She formed the short-lived band Fotheringay in 1970, before focusing on a solo career. Between 1971 and 1977, Denny released four solo albums: The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, Sandy, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz and Rendezvous. She also duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore" for Led Zeppelin's album Led Zeppelin IV in 1971. Denny died in 1978 at the age of 31 due to injuries and health issues related to alcohol abuse. Music publications Uncut and Mojo have described Denny as Britain's finest female singer-songwriter. Her composition "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" has been recorded by Judy Collins, Eva Cassidy, Nina Simone, 10,000 Maniacs and Cat Power. Her recorded work has been the subject of numerous reissues, along with a wealth of previously unreleased material which has appeared over the more than 40 years since her death, including a 19-CD box set released in November 2010. Childhood Denny was born on 6 January 1947 at Nelson Hospital, Kingston Road, Merton Park, London, to Neil and Edna Denny. She studied classical piano as a child. Her paternal grandfather was from Dundee, and her paternal grandmother was a Scots Gaelic speaker and singer of traditional songs. At an early age Denny showed an interest in singing, although her strict parents were reluctant to believe there was a living to be made from it. She attended Coombe Girls' School in New Malden; after leaving school she began training as a nurse at the Royal Brompton Hospital. Early career Denny's nursing career proved short-lived. In the meantime she had secured a place on a foundation course at Kingston College of Art, which she took up in September 1965, becoming involved with the folk club on campus. Her contemporaries at the college included guitarist and future member of Pentangle, John Renbourn. After her first public appearance at the Barge in Kingston upon Thames, Denny began working the folk club circuit in the evenings with an American-influenced repertoire, including songs by Tom Paxton, together with traditional folk songs. Denny made the first of many appearances for the BBC at Cecil Sharp House on 2 December 1966 on the Folk Song Cellar programme where she accompanied herself on two traditional songs: "Fir a Bhata" and "Green Grow the Laurels". Her earliest professional recordings were made a few months later in mid-1967 for the Saga label, featuring traditional songs and covers of folk contemporaries including her boyfriend of this period, the American singer-songwriter Jackson C. Frank. They were released on the albums Alex Campbell and His Friends and Sandy and Johnny with Johnny Silvo. These songs were collected on the 1970 album It's Sandy Denny where the tracks from Sandy and Johnny had been re-recorded with more accomplished vocals and guitar playing. The complete Saga studio recordings were issued on the 2005 compilation Where The Time Goes. By this time, she had abandoned her studies at art college and was devoting herself full-time to music. While she was performing at The Troubadour folk club, a member of the Strawbs heard her, and in 1967, she was invited to join the band. She recorded one album with them in Denmark, which was released belatedly in 1973, credited to Sandy Denny and the Strawbs: All Our Own Work. The album includes an early solo version of her best-known (and widely recorded) composition, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" A demo of that song found its way into the hands of American singer Judy Collins, who chose to cover it as the title track of an album of her own, released in November 1968, thus giving Denny international exposure as a songwriter before she had become widely known as a singer. From Fairport to Fotheringay After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band. Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes". Beginning with What We Did on Our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late 1960s, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including "A Sailor's Life" featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny's performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969). Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self-titled album, which included an eight-minute version of the traditional "Banks of the Nile", and several Denny originals, among them "The Sea" and "Nothing More". The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd's hostility towards the group for its demise. Solo career and final years She then turned to recording her first solo album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Released in 1971, it is distinguished by its elusive lyrics and unconventional harmonies. Highlights included "Late November", inspired by a dream and the death of Fairport band member Martin Lamble, and "Next Time Around" a cryptogram about Jackson C. Frank, one of her many portraits in song. Sandy, with a cover photograph by David Bailey, followed in 1972 and was the first of her albums to be produced by Trevor Lucas. As well as introducing eight new original compositions, the album marked her last recording of a traditional song, "The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood" (words by Richard Fariña), with Denny's ambitious multi-tracked vocal arrangement inspired by the Ensemble of the Bulgarian Republic. Melody Maker readers twice voted her the "Best British Female Singer", in 1970 and 1971 and, together with contemporaries including Richard Thompson and Ashley Hutchings, she participated in a one-off project called the Bunch to record a collection of rock and roll era standards released under the title of Rock On. In 1971, Denny duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore", which was included on Led Zeppelin's 1971 album (Led Zeppelin IV); she was the only guest vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin album. In 1972 Denny had a small cameo on Lou Reizner's symphonic arrangement of the Who's rock opera Tommy. Her brief appearance was at the end of the track "It's a Boy", which also featured vocals from Pete Townshend. In 1973, she married long-term boyfriend and producer Trevor Lucas and recorded a third solo album, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz. The songs continued to detail many of her personal preoccupations: loss, loneliness, fear of the dark, the passing of time and the changing seasons. The album contained one of her best loved compositions, "Solo", and featured a cover image by Gered Mankowitz. In 1974, she returned to Fairport Convention (of which her husband was by then a member) for a world tour (captured on the 1974 album Fairport Live Convention) and a studio album, Rising for the Moon in 1975. Although her development as a soloist and songwriter had taken her further away from the folk roots direction that the band had pursued since Liege & Lief, seven of the eleven tracks on Rising for the Moon were either written or co-written by her. Denny and Lucas left Fairport Convention at the end of 1975 and embarked on what was to become her final album Rendezvous. Released in 1977, the album sold poorly and Denny was subsequently dropped by Island Records. Having relocated to the village of Byfield in Northamptonshire in the mid-seventies, Denny gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Georgia, in July 1977. A UK tour to promote Rendezvous in autumn 1977 marked her final public appearances. The closing night at the Royalty Theatre in London on 27 November 1977 was recorded for a live album, Gold Dust, which, because of technical problems in the recording of the electric guitar, was belatedly released in 1998 after most of the guitars had been re-recorded by Jerry Donahue. Death Linda Thompson would later note that Denny "really started going downhill in 1976" and demonstrated increasing levels of both manic and depressive behaviour. Learning that she was pregnant did little to mellow Denny's reckless lifestyle, which was heightened by increasing depression, mood swings and the unravelling of her "tumultuous" marriage to Trevor Lucas. She abused drugs and alcohol while pregnant with her daughter, Georgia, who was born prematurely in July 1977. Much like her moods, Denny's interest towards her daughter appeared to oscillate between obsessive and unconcerned; friends recalled both frantic, middle-of-the-night phone calls about teething, as well as Denny "crashing the car and leaving the baby in the pub and all sorts of stuff". Friends would later note that Denny had a history of purposely throwing herself off bar stools and down flights of stairs in order to get a reaction. Several remembered this behaviour as "Sandy's party trick", while Dave Pegg's wife Chris stated, "She certainly did it in my house and it could be a very dramatic gesture, like self-harming. She could do it without hurting herself usually but I had a feeling there would be one time too many." Those who knew Denny said that her increasing level of alcohol abuse in the last years of her life led to an increasing number of falls (both accidental and deliberate), resulting in a growing number of injuries. In late March 1978, while on holiday with her parents and baby Georgia in Cornwall, Denny was injured when she fell down a staircase and hit her head on concrete. Following the incident, she suffered from intense headaches; a doctor prescribed her the painkiller dextropropoxyphene, a drug known to have fatal side effects when mixed with alcohol. On 1 April, several days after the fall in Cornwall, Denny performed a charity concert at Byfield. The final song she performed was "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" At some unknown point during the first half of April 1978, Denny suffered yet another major fall at her home in Byfield. On 13 April, concerned about his wife's erratic behaviour and fearing for his daughter's safety, Trevor Lucas left the UK and returned to his native Australia with their child, leaving Denny without telling her. He sold their Austin Princess car in order to raise funds for the journey. On discovering Lucas' departure, Denny went to stay at the home of her friend Miranda Ward. During this time, Denny apparently set up an appointment to speak with a doctor about her headaches, and also intended to get advice about her alcohol addiction. At some point after 8 am on 17 April, Denny fell into a coma. Ward was out of the house at the time, and had asked her friend Jon Cole (of the band The Movies) to check in on Denny. Cole entered the home at 3 pm, and found Denny unconscious at the foot of the staircase which led to the second floor of the house. She was rushed by ambulance to Queen Mary's Hospital in nearby Roehampton. On 19 April, she was transferred to Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon. After receiving news that Denny was in a coma, Lucas returned from Australia. Upon his arrival at the hospital, doctors informed him that Denny was effectively brain-dead and her condition would not improve. He granted their recommendation to turn off life-support machines; however, just ten minutes before this was to take place, at 7:50 pm on 21 April 1978, Sandy Denny died, without regaining consciousness. Her death was ruled to be the result of a traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage and blunt force trauma to her head. She was 31 years old. The funeral took place on 27 April 1978 at Putney Vale Cemetery. After the vicar had read Denny's favourite psalm, Psalm 23, a piper played "Flowers of the Forest", a traditional song commemorating the fallen of Flodden Field and one which had appeared on the 1970 Fairport album Full House. The inscription on her headstone reads: Posthumous releases Official releases Although Denny had a devoted following in her lifetime, she did not achieve mass market success. In the years since her death, her reputation has grown. A four-album box set entitled Who Knows Where the Time Goes? (1985) was produced by her widower Trevor Lucas and Joe Boyd and included a number of rare and previously unreleased tracks by Denny, either solo or with Fairport Convention (1968, 1969, 1974) and Fotheringay (1970). This was the first public indication that a large cache of unreleased material existed. A one-disc subset of these recordings was subsequently issued on CD by Island in 1987 entitled The Best Of Sandy Denny. In 1987, a compilation of previously unreleased tracks recorded for the BBC by incarnations of Fairport including Denny was released on LP under the title Heyday, which was subsequently released on CD in 2001 and again, with extra tracks, in 2002; all tracks were later included, with others, on the 2007 4-CD box set Fairport Convention Live at the BBC (see below). The initial purpose of this compilation was to document the more "American" material performed live by the What We Did on Our Holidays lineup of the band that never made it to vinyl, while the re-releases added additional songs as performed by the Unhalfbricking and Liege and Lief lineups. Also in 1987, a VHS documentary, It All Comes 'Round Again, on Fairport Convention was released which contained excerpts of several audio recordings featuring Denny, plus a single poor-quality video recording of her singing her song "Solo" during her second stint with Fairport in 1974, as filmed by the University of Birmingham's "Guild TV" amateur organisation. The original tape of this recording has apparently been lost; however, "Like an Old Fashioned Waltz" does appear on the DVD documentary Sandy Denny Under Review (see below) and other tracks have been made available via YouTube in very poor quality. Over the period 1988–1994, the Australian "Friends of Fairport" issued a series of subscriber-only cassette compilations drawing in the main on previously unreleased tapes from Trevor Lucas' collection (as stored in his attic in fact). Attic Tracks (AT) 1 (1988) contained out-takes from Sandy as well as some Fairport material and a few bizarre extras; AT 2 (1989) contained only Trevor Lucas material, no Denny; AT 3 (1989) entitled First and Last Tracks comprised 1966–1967 home demos and rare radio tracks, as well as 9 "pre-overdub" songs from Denny's last concert at the Royalty Theatre, London, on 27 November 1977 (a partial alternative to the later, overdubbed CD release Gold Dust), and AT 4 (1994): Together Again comprised one side of Lucas and the other of Denny in the form of more home demos, studio outtakes, and 4 tracks from a 1973 BBC radio concert. A cut-down version of these tracks (18 songs) was subsequently compiled for CD release by the Australian label Raven Records in 1995 called Sandy Denny, Trevor Lucas and Friends: The Attic Tracks 1972–1984. In 1991, Joe Boyd issued a new version of Denny's All Our Own Work album with the Strawbs, called Sandy Denny and the Strawbs, on his Hannibal Records label. The album had strings added to some tracks, including "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" and further tracks with Denny on lead vocal. In 1997, a one-disc compilation of Denny's solo BBC recordings was released as The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 on Strange Fruit Records. Due to rights issues it was withdrawn on the day of release, thereby creating a highly collectible disc (up until the release of the comprehensive Live at the BBC box set in 2007). This release was followed in 1998 when Denny's final performance at the Royalty Theatre, entitled Gold Dust, was issued on CD, following a degree of re-recording and overdubbing of selected backing parts to replace reportedly unsatisfactory originals. In 1999, a single-disc compilation, Listen Listen – An Introduction to Sandy Denny, was released on Island Records comprising 17 previously released tracks taken from her four Island solo albums. No More Sad Refrains: The Anthology was released by Universal Records in 2000. When first released, this compilation had several rare tracks, including "The Ballad of Easy Rider" from the Liege and Lief sessions, "Learning the Game" and "When Will I Be Loved" from the Bunch album Rock On, "Here in Silence" and "Man of Iron" from the Pass of Arms soundtrack, and a previously unissued demo of "Stranger to Himself". In 2002, a previously unreleased, 2-CD live US concert recording by Fairport Convention from 1974 featuring Denny was released on the Burning Airlines label. Entitled Before The Moon, it originated from a radio broadcast from Ebbets Field in Denver, Colorado, on 23/24 May 1974. The second disc was a limited release bonus with the original release comprising the second set from the same concert. This recording was re-released in shortened form as a single disc in 2011 on the It's About Music label entitled Fairport Convention with Sandy Denny: Ebbets Field 1974. Also in 2002, the American A&M Records issued a budget-price "20th Century Masters" compilation called The Best of Sandy Denny with 10 tracks all available on Denny's studio albums. In 2004 a second comprehensive five-CD box set was released on the Fledg'ling record label called A Boxful of Treasures that included many unreleased recordings, in particular a whole disc of acoustic demos, many recorded at her home in Byfield that was highly prized amongst fans and critics alike, who had long asserted that her solo performances showed her work in its best light, revealing the true quality of her vocal style and compositions. Also in 2004, the Spectrum label issued a 16-track compilation of previously released material entitled The Collection: Chronological Covers & Concert Classics, including a mix of studio recordings and live excerpts from the Gold Dust Royalty concert. In 2005, remastered versions of all Denny's solo albums came out with bonus tracks. Also in 2005, a single CD compilation entitled Where the Time Goes: Sandy '67 was released on Castle Music containing all of Saga's Denny album tracks (including the alternative recordings on It's Sandy Denny), together with two self accompanied tracks from Denny's recordings with the Strawbs. A DVD documentary entitled Sandy Denny Under Review was released on the Sexy Intellectual label in 2006 which contained interviews with her contemporaries plus brief excerpts from her audio recordings, plus some short video clips including two of the poor quality video recordings with Fairport from Birmingham University (details given above), two with Fotheringay from German TV's Beat-Club (further details given below), and three solo excerpts from the only surviving BBC footage on One In Ten (details as given in the next item). A 4-disc box set, Sandy Denny Live at the BBC, came out in September 2007 containing (virtually) all of the known solo recordings made by Denny for that UK broadcaster including two complete concerts, one at the Paris Theatre in 1972 and one recorded for Sounds on Sunday in 1973, plus a range of other material spanning the years 1966–1973. Disc 3 of this set was a DVD containing surviving TV footage from a 1971 BBC One in Ten session comprising solo performances by Denny of "The North Star Grassman and the Ravens", "Crazy Lady Blues" and "Late November", along with digitised excerpts from her diaries, rare photos and a discography. A 1-disc subset of this box set entitled The Best of the BBC Recordings was subsequently released in 2008. A companion box set, Fairport Convention Live at the BBC, also came out in 2007 and covered equivalent live recordings by Fairport over the period 1968–1974, of which the first two discs (1968–1970) contain examples from Denny's time with that group. In 2008, Jerry Donahue completed the unfinished second Fotheringay album begun in the autumn of 1970. It was released to general acclaim as Fotheringay 2 and contained some notable Denny performances, in particular earlier versions of two Denny compositions, "Late November" and "John the Gun", and performances of the traditional songs "Gypsy Davey" and "Wild Mountain Thyme". Also in 2008, Island Remasters issued a double CD entitled The Music Weaver (Sandy Denny Remembered) which contained a mix of better known tracks and less well known demos and live recordings, previously released but not in companion with studio sessions. This compilation is also one of the very few to contain the Led Zeppelin track "The Battle Of Evermore" which features a rare guest appearance by Denny. In 2010, a large 19-CD retrospective box set, simply titled Sandy Denny, was released by Universal/Island Records in a limited edition of 3,000. It contained Denny's entire catalogue of studio recordings, including her work with the Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay and as a solo artist. The compilation also included a large number of outtakes, demos, live recordings, radio sessions and interviews. The box set was released to good reviews, including a 5-star review in Uncut and a 4-star review in The Guardian. In late 2010, Thea Gilmore was commissioned by Denny's estate, in conjunction with Island Records, to write melodies to unrecorded lyrics found in Denny's papers. The resulting album, Don't Stop Singing, was released in November 2011 to generally good notices, including 4-star reviews in The Independent and The Guardian among others. On 21 April 2012, the single "London" was released as an exclusive Record Store Day 7″ single. Further recordings were released in 2011, including a German recording of Fotheringay in concert released as Essen 1970 on the Garden of Delights label. The performance was remastered by original band member Jerry Donahue. This release was followed by 19 Rupert Street, a home recording of a rehearsal featuring Sandy and Alex Campbell recorded at his flat in August 1967. This release is notable for the fact that Sandy performs a number of tracks that are not available in any other versions, including a cover of "Fairytale Lullaby" by John Martyn. This CD was put out by Sandy's former Strawbs bandmate Dave Cousins on his Witchwood label. Two-disc "Deluxe Editions" of Denny's album reissues appeared in 2011–2012 with additional tracks; the 2012 Deluxe Edition of Sandy included a previously unreleased eight-song solo set from her 1973 U.S. tour recorded at Ebbet's Field in Denver, Colorado. A similar two-disc reissue of Fairport Convention's Rising for the Moon also included, for the first time, the complete 1974 L.A. Troubadour performance of Fairport with Denny back on board, prior to the official announcement of her re-joining the group. On account of unprecedented demand for, and exhaustion of supply of the limited edition 19-CD set cited above, in October 2012 a limited edition 4-CD version was released entitled The Notes and The Words: A Collection of Demos and Rarities, containing "75 songs that represent the cream of the rarities, demos and outtakes from the box set". Limited to 3,500 copies, this compilation is also now out-of-print. In 2013, Spectrum records issued a single-disc CD entitled The Lady – The Essential Sandy Denny that comprised 15 previously issued tracks, generally from Denny's well known albums. 2014 saw the release of another Fairport live U.S. radio broadcast from their 1974 tour with Denny, on RockBeat Records, entitled Live 1974 (My Father's Place), comprising 11 live tracks, most featuring Denny, recorded at the New York rock club My Father's Place. A four-disc Fotheringay retrospective, Nothing More: The Collected Fotheringay, was released on 30 March 2015. This is the most comprehensive compilation of the group's recordings, and contains, in addition to all the tracks on Fotheringay and Fotheringay 2 as both final studio versions and demos/alternate takes, the complete live concert set from Rotterdam in 1970 (including several previously unreleased tracks), seven Fotheringay tracks recorded in session for BBC radio (which had previously circulated only as bootlegs), plus a DVD disc containing four performances by Fotheringay recorded for the German Beat-Club TV series in 1970, which considerably augment the otherwise sparse known TV footage of Denny in particular. May 2016 saw the release of a 2-CD compilation, I've Always Kept A Unicorn – The Acoustic Sandy Denny which collected together many previously released, but dispersed, acoustic and/or demo versions of songs better known from their album counterparts, as well as three previously unreleased demos (with Linda Thompson, at the time Linda Peters) from 1972's Rock On sessions by one-off band The Bunch. A 7-CD box set by Fairport Convention entitled Come All Ye – The First 10 Years was released in July 2017 and contains a small number of additional, previously unreleased demos and alternate takes featuring Denny during her first tenure with the band over the period 1968–1969. Tracks not previously available include versions of Joni Mitchell's Eastern Rain, an a capella version of Nottamun Town, alternative takes of Autopsy and Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and a rehearsal version of The Deserter. Unofficial releases and audience tapes In addition to the authorised material listed above, a number unofficial/unauthorised compilations exist plus a range of audience recordings of varying quality, none of which would likely see the light of day as commercial issues but are of interest to a sector of Denny's audience on either historic or aesthetic grounds, often providing alternative views of songs known otherwise only from their commercially released versions. The first available unauthorised/bootleg CDs available in the 1980s and 1990s comprised principally off-air and other obscure material under such titles as Borrowed Thyme, Poems from Alexandra, Dark the Night, Wild Mountain Thyme and One Last Sad Refrain; such compilations are now largely superseded by the subsequent availability of most of the off-air material in much better quality as official releases as described above. Of more enduring interest are audience tapes of shows of which no "official" tapes survive. These include some early shows by Fairport Convention; a performance by Fotheringay at the 1970 Tenth National Jazz and Blues Festival, held at Plumpton Race Track, Streat, East Sussex, England; "solo" shows by Denny (on occasion with a small band including, among others, Richard Thompson) at the 1971 Lincoln Folk Festival and at the Eltham Well Hall Open Theatre in 1972; performances from York University and Guildhall, Newcastle upon Tyne, also in 1972; an early 1972 U.S. performance from The Bitter End in New York; and several sets (Birmingham and Croydon) from her final 1977 tour in addition to the officially released Gold Dust album; plus quite a large number of recordings strongly featuring Denny as part of the re-formed Fairport Convention over the period 1974–1975. The majority of these can be fairly easily located via relevant internet searches and, in addition, can be readily downloaded from archival music servers such as Sugarmegs (Sandy Denny concerts listed under "S": SugarMegs Streaming Server, Fairport and Fotheringay under "F": SugarMegs Streaming Server). A provisional list of such recordings as are known to exist, with details on where each can be accessed, is available here. Legacy Estate and family After relocating to Australia and remarrying, Trevor Lucas died of a heart attack in 1989. Denny's estate is now managed by Lucas' widow, Elizabeth Hurtt-Lucas. A number of otherwise unreleased recordings of Sandy Denny from his collection have subsequently been the basis for posthumous releases of Denny's work including those on The Attic Tracks and elsewhere. Sandy Denny's daughter, Georgia, has rarely spoken about her mother in a public forum and in the mid-2000s declined an invitation to write the liner notes for Sandy Denny Live at the BBC. However, in 2006 she flew to Britain from Australia to accept on her mother's behalf the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards award for Most Influential Folk Album of All Time, which was given for Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief. Georgia gave birth to twin daughters on 29 April 1997, and a tribute album, Georgia on Our Mind, featuring many of Sandy Denny's former bandmates and friends, was compiled in the children's honour. She also administers a Facebook page "Sandy Denny and Family" dedicated to her mother's memory and more recently, under the name Georgia Katt, has released some of her own DJ-based music. Tributes Since her death, many tributes have been made to Denny, both in music and elsewhere. Dave Pegg of Fairport Convention recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on his 1983 solo album The Cocktail Cowboy Goes It Alone. Dave Cousins of the Strawbs wrote "Ringing Down the Years" in memory of Denny shortly after her death. Songs more specific to the death were Bert Jansch's "Where Did My Life Go" and Richard Thompson's "Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?" Fellow Brit folk pioneers Spriguns changed the title of their 1978 album to Magic Lady after hearing of Denny's death while recording. In 1998, a variety of Daylily was named after her. Denny's songs have been covered by numerous artists in the years since her death. Some of the notable acts to have covered her music include Yo La Tengo, former Marillion frontman Fish, who covered "Solo" on his album Songs from the Mirror, Cat Power, Judy Collins, Nanci Griffith and Nina Simone. Kate Bush mentioned Denny in the lyric of "Blow Away (For Bill)", as one of the musicians to greet Bill in Heaven. "Blow Away (For Bill)" is the third track on Bush's 1980 album Never for Ever. In 1984, Clann Eadair released the single "A tribute to Sandy Denny", featuring Phil Lynott on vocals. Several radio specials have been produced about Denny's life and music, including BBC Radio 2's The Sandy Denny Story: Who Knows Where the Time Goes. In 2007, Denny's song "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" also received BBC Radio 2's 2007 Folk Award for "Favourite Folk Track of All Time". In 2010, she was recognized by NPR in their 50 Great Voices special series. In April 2008, a tribute concert was held at The Troubadour in London, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Denny's death. Those taking part included Martin Carthy, Linda Thompson and Joe Boyd. A more extensive tribute was given later that year in December at the Southbank in the Queen Elizabeth Hall called The Lady: A Tribute to Sandy Denny with a band composed of members of Bellowhead, the evening featured a mix of young folk acts like Jim Moray and Lisa Knapp alongside those that had known and worked with Denny such as Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. These acts were joined by performers from outside the world of folk like PP Arnold and Marc Almond. The concert, which primarily featured songs written by Denny, received a four-star review in The Guardian. In May 2012 the Southbank concert was expanded into an eight date UK tour called The Lady: A Homage to Sandy Denny. The tour showcased Sandy's entire songbook taking in her work with Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, her solo career and the new songs completed by Thea Gilmore on her album Don't Stop Singing. The band was, once again, composed of members of Bellowhead. Other acts performing included the aforementioned Thea Gilmore and up-and-coming folk acts Lavinia Blackwall of Trembling Bells, Blair Dunlop and Sam Carter, alongside more established folk stars Maddy Prior, Dave Swarbrick and Jerry Donahue. The line-up was completed with performers not normally associated with the folk scene; Green Gartside, Joan Wasser (also known as Joan As Police Woman), and PP Arnold. The tour was well received, obtaining a four-star review in The Times. The London concert at the Barbican was filmed for BBC4, and broadcast in a 90-minute programme titled The Songs of Sandy Denny in November 2012. In the 2012 Irish film Silence (Harvest Films & South Wind Blows), "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" is used during the film and final credits. In April 2016 Denny was inducted into the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards Hall of Fame. Alela Diane recorded the tribute "Song for Sandy" on her album Cusp, released in February 2018. The song reflects on Denny's final tragic days and her orphaned baby daughter. Discography Solo studio albums The North Star Grassman and the Ravens (1971) Sandy (1972) Like an Old Fashioned Waltz (1974) Rendezvous (1977) Solo live albums The BBC Sessions 1971–1973 (1997) Gold Dust (1998) (live recording from final tour, 1977) Live at the BBC (2007 4-disc compilation) Sandy – Deluxe edition, 2012 – includes "Live at Ebbetts Field" (previously unreleased concert on disc 2) With others Denny's collaborations with other artists, including with Alex Campbell, The Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, and The Bunch, together with numerous posthumous releases and compilation albums, are detailed further on the Sandy Denny discography page. References and notes General Further reading Mick Houghton. I've Always Kept a Unicorn – The Biography of Sandy Denny. Faber & Faber, 2015; Clinton Heylin. No More Sad Refrains – The Life and Times of Sandy Denny. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Clinton Heylin. Gypsy Love Songs & Sad Refrains – The Recordings of Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny. Labour of Love Productions, 1989. Colin Larkin. The Guinness Who's Who of Folk Music. Guinness Publishing Ltd; Jim Irvin. Angel of Avalon. MOJO Magazine, August 1998. Colin Harper, Trevor Hodgett. Irish Folk, Traditional & Blues: A Secret History. Cherry Red, 2005; Pamela Murray Winters. No Thought of Leaving: A life of Sandy Denny. 2000. (Unpublished). Brian Hinton, Geoff Wall. Ashley Hutchings: The Guv'nor & the Rise of Folk Rock. London: Helter Skelter, 2002; Patrick Humphries. Meet On The Ledge: The Classic Years 1967–1975. Virgin Books, 1997; Patrick Humphries. Richard Thompson: Strange Affair – The Biography. Virgin Books, 1996; Philip Ward, "Sandy Denny: A Thirtieth Anniversary", R2 (Rock'n'Reel) 2(9), May/June 2008. Philip Ward, Sandy Denny: Reflections on Her Music''. Matador, 2011; External links Official website Homage to Sandy Denny Dedicated to the memory of Sandy Denny Sandy Denny website 1947 births 1978 deaths 20th-century English singers 20th-century English women singers A&M Records artists Accidental deaths from falls Accidental deaths in London Deaths by intracerebral hemorrhage Alumni of Kingston College (England) British folk rock musicians Burials at Putney Vale Cemetery English folk singers English people of Scottish descent English women singer-songwriters Fairport Convention members Women rock singers Fotheringay members Island Records artists People from Byfield, Northamptonshire People from Wimbledon, London Singers from London Strawbs members The Bunch members	true	[ "\"What's Forever For\" is a song written by Rafe Van Hoy and first recorded by England Dan & John Ford Coley on their 1979 album Dr. Heckle and Mr. Jive.\n\nThe song saw its biggest success when it was recorded by American country music artist Michael Martin Murphey. It was released in June 1982 as the second single from his album, Michael Martin Murphey. \"What's Forever For\" was Murphey's first of two number ones on the country chart. The single went to number one for one week and spent 16 weeks in the country top 40. On the Hot 100, \"What's Forever For\" was his final Top 40 hit, peaking at number 19. The song is also one of his most well known in the Philippines, along with \"Maybe This Time\".\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nCover versions\nAnne Murray on her 1980 album Somebody's Waiting, released by Capitol Records. \"What's Forever For\" was also included as the B-side of her Beatles cover hit, \"I'm Happy Just to Dance with You\".\nT. G. Sheppard on his 1981 album I Love 'Em All, released by Warner Bros. Records.\nDaryl Somers on his 1982 single.\nJohnny Mathis on his 1982 album Friends in Love, released on Columbia Records.\nBilly Gilman on his 2000 album One Voice, released by Epic Records.\nFilipino acoustic singer Nyoy Volante covered the song on his 2008 album, Heartstrings.\nJeff Trachta and Bobbie Eakes, on the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful.\nTonny Willé and Marco Bakker.\nJohn Conlee on the album With Love in 1981 on MCA.\nB.J. Thomas on his 2000 album You Call That a Mountain.\n\nReferences\n\n1982 singles\nEngland Dan & John Ford Coley songs\nAnne Murray songs\nJohn Conlee songs\nT. G. Sheppard songs\nMichael Martin Murphey songs\nBilly Gilman songs\nB. J. Thomas songs\nSong recordings produced by Jim Ed Norman\nLiberty Records singles\nSongs written by Rafe Van Hoy\n1979 songs", "\"Till I Gain Control Again\" is a country song written by Rodney Crowell and originally recorded by Emmylou Harris in 1975. The song was included on her 1975 studio album Elite Hotel. The song is most known by the No. 1 single version recorded by Crystal Gayle on her 1982 album, True Love.\n\nWaylon Jennings covered this song on his 1977 album, Ol' Waylon. Willie Nelson covered it on his 1978 live album Willie and Family Live. Jerry Jeff Walker also covered the song in 1978 on his Contrary to Ordinary album. Bobby Bare covered the song in 1979. Crowell recorded his own version of the song as well in 1981 on his self-titled album. The eclectic band This Mortal Coil covered it on their 1991 album Blood. Blue Rodeo covered the song in 1993. Van Morrison covered it on his 2006 Pay the Devil album. Alison Krauss recorded it in 2016 as part of a tribute album to Harris titled: The Life & Songs of Emmylou Harris.\n\nComposition\nRodney Crowell wrote the song while working for Jerry Reed's publishing company. At the time, he was hanging out with noted songwriters Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, and Steve Runkle, and wanted to show his own songwriting skill.\n\nIn retrospect, Crowell expresses regret at rhyming \"been\" with \"can\" in the lyric \"What you’ve seen is what I’ve been/There is nothing I could hide from you/You see me better than I can.\" Had he written the song later in his career, Crowell says he would have spent time to find a hard rhyme. Crowell marvels when people tell him this song is their favorite of his. Crowell's version was released on his third (self titled) album in 1981.\n\nCrowell wrote the song back-to-back with \"Song for the Life\" (recorded on his debut album Ain't Living Long Like This) in the 1970s and says both are a \"projection into the future that I later lived through . . . and it was exactly like I predicted.\"\n\nCrystal Gayle version\n\nIn 1982, the song would be recorded by Crystal Gayle and her recording was her tenth number one on the country chart. Her recording would go to number one for one week and spend a total of twelve weeks on the chart. A music video was filmed for the song.\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nBlue Rodeo version\n\nIn 1993, the song was covered by Canadian country rock band Blue Rodeo for their album Five Days in July. Released as a single in 1994, the song peaked at number 24 on the RPM Country Tracks chart.\n\nChart performance\n\nReferences\n\n1975 songs\n1982 singles\n1994 singles\nEmmylou Harris songs\nWaylon Jennings songs\nWillie Nelson songs\nCrystal Gayle songs\nBlue Rodeo songs\nSongs written by Rodney Crowell\nSong recordings produced by Allen Reynolds\nSong recordings produced by Jimmy Bowen\nElektra Records singles" ]
[ "Sri Aurobindo", "Pondicherry (1910-1950)" ]	C_e06b6f4885204728b9ac8cfd9c3f2a87_0	what happened in 1910?	1	What happened in 1910 in Pondicherry to Sri Aurobindo?	Sri Aurobindo	In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo dedicated himself to his spiritual and philosophical pursuits. In 1914, after four years of secluded yoga, he started a monthly philosophical magazine called Arya. This ceased publication in 1921. Many years later, he revised some of these works before they were published in book form. Some of the book series derived out of this publication were The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on The Gita, The Secret of The Veda, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Upanishads, The Renaissance in India, War and Self-determination, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity and The Future Poetry were published in this magazine. At the beginning of his stay at Pondicherry, there were few followers, but with time their numbers grew, resulting in the formation of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926. From 1926 he started to sign himself as Sri Aurobindo, Sri (meaning holy in Sanskrit) being commonly used as an honorific. For some time afterwards, his main literary output was his voluminous correspondence with his disciples. His letters, most of which were written in the 1930s, numbered in the several thousands. Many were brief comments made in the margins of his disciple's notebooks in answer to their questions and reports of their spiritual practice--others extended to several pages of carefully composed explanations of practical aspects of his teachings. These were later collected and published in book form in three volumes of Letters on Yoga. In the late 1930s, he resumed work on a poem he had started earlier--he continued to expand and revise this poem for the rest of his life. It became perhaps his greatest literary achievement, Savitri, an epic spiritual poem in blank verse of approximately 24,000 lines. Sri Aurobindo left his body on 5 December 1950. Around 60,000 people attended to see his body resting peacefully. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and the President Rajendra Prasad praised him for his contribution to Yogic philosophy and the independence movement. National and international newspapers commemorated his death. CANNOTANSWER	In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo dedicated himself to his spiritual and philosophical pursuits.	Sri Aurobindo (born Aurobindo Ghose; 15 August 1872 – 5 December 1950) was an Indian philosopher, yoga guru, maharishi, poet, and Indian nationalist. He was also a journalist, editing newspapers such as Bande Mataram. He joined the Indian movement for independence from British colonial rule, until 1910 was one of its influential leaders and then became a spiritual reformer, introducing his visions on human progress and spiritual evolution. Aurobindo studied for the Indian Civil Service at King's College, Cambridge, England. After returning to India he took up various civil service works under the Maharaja of the Princely state of Baroda and became increasingly involved in nationalist politics in the Indian National Congress and the nascent revolutionary movement in Bengal with the Anushilan Samiti. He was arrested in the aftermath of a number of bombings linked to his organization in a public trial where he faced charges of treason for Alipore Conspiracy. However Sri Aurobindo could only be convicted and imprisoned for writing articles against British colonial rule in India. He was released when no evidence could be provided, following the murder of a prosecution witness, Narendranath Goswami, during the trial. During his stay in the jail, he had mystical and spiritual experiences, after which he moved to Pondicherry, leaving politics for spiritual work. At Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo developed a spiritual practice he called Integral Yoga. The central theme of his vision was the evolution of human life into a divine life in divine body. He believed in a spiritual realisation that not only liberated but transformed human nature, enabling a divine life on earth. In 1926, with the help of his spiritual collaborator, Mirra Alfassa (referred to as "The Mother"), Sri Aurobindo Ashram was founded. His main literary works are The Life Divine, which deals with the philosophical aspect of Integral Yoga; Synthesis of Yoga, which deals with the principles and methods of Integral Yoga; and Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, an epic poem. Biography Early life Aurobindo Ghose was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), Bengal Presidency, India on 15 August 1872 in a Bengali family that was associated with the village of Konnagar in the Hooghly district of present-day West Bengal. His father, Krishna Dhun Ghose, was then assistant surgeon of Rangpur in Bengal and later civil surgeon of Khulna, and a former member of the Brahmo Samaj religious reform movement who had become enamoured with the then-new idea of evolution while pursuing medical studies in Edinburgh. His mother Swarnalata Devi's father Shri Rajnarayan Bose was a leading figure in the Samaj. She had been sent to the more salubrious surroundings of Calcutta for Aurobindo's birth. Aurobindo had two elder siblings, Benoybhusan and Manmohan, a younger sister, Sarojini, and a younger brother, Barindra Kumar (also referred to as Barin). Young Aurobindo was brought up speaking English, but used Hindustani to communicate with servants. Although his family were Bengali, his father believed British culture to be superior. He and his two elder siblings were sent to the English-speaking Loreto House boarding school in Darjeeling, in part to improve their language skills and in part to distance them from their mother, who had developed a mental illness soon after the birth of her first child. Darjeeling was a centre of Anglo-Indians in India and the school was run by Irish nuns, through which the boys would have been exposed to Christian religious teachings and symbolism. England (1879–1893) Krishna Dhun Ghose wanted his sons to enter the Indian Civil Service (ICS), an elite organisation comprising around 1000 people. To achieve this it was necessary that they study in England and so it was there that the entire family moved in 1879. The three brothers were placed in the care of the Reverend W. H. Drewett in Manchester. Drewett was a minister of the Congregational Church whom Krishna Dhun Ghose knew through his British friends at Rangpur. The boys were taught Latin by Drewett and his wife. This was a prerequisite for admission to good English schools and, after two years, in 1881, the elder two siblings were enrolled at Manchester Grammar School. Aurobindo was considered too young for enrolment, and he continued his studies with the Drewetts, learning history, Latin, French, geography and arithmetic. Although the Drewetts were told not to teach religion, the boys inevitably were exposed to Christian teachings and events, which generally bored Aurobindo and sometimes repulsed him. There was little contact with his father, who wrote only a few letters to his sons while they were in England, but what communication there was indicated that he was becoming less endeared to the British in India than he had been, on one occasion describing the British colonial government as "heartless". Drewett emigrated to Australia in 1884, causing the boys to be uprooted as they went to live with Drewett's mother in London. In September of that year, Aurobindo and Manmohan joined St Paul's School there. He learned Greek and spent the last three years reading literature and English poetry, while he also acquired some familiarity with the German and Italian languages; Peter Heehs resumes his linguistic abilities by stating that at "the turn of the century he knew at least twelve languages: English, French, and Bengali to speak, read, and write; Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit to read and write; Gujarati, Marathi, and Hindi to speak and read; and Italian, German, and Spanish to read." Being exposed to the evangelical structures of Drewett's mother developed in him a distaste for religion, and he considered himself at one point to be an atheist but later determined that he was agnostic. A blue plaque unveiled in 2007 commemorates Aurobindo's residence at 49 St Stephen's Avenue in Shepherd's Bush, London, from 1884 to 1887. The three brothers began living in spartan circumstances at the Liberal Club in South Kensington during 1887, their father having experienced some financial difficulties. The club's secretary was James Cotton, brother of their father's friend in the Bengal ICS, Henry Cotton. By 1889, Manmohan had determined to pursue a literary career and Benoybhusan had proved himself unequal to the standards necessary for ICS entrance. This meant that only Aurobindo might fulfill his father's aspirations but to do so when his father lacked money required that he studied hard for a scholarship. To become an ICS official, students were required to pass the competitive examination, as well as to study at an English university for two years under probation. Aurobindo secured a scholarship at King's College, Cambridge, under recommendation of Oscar Browning. He passed the written ICS examination after a few months, being ranked 11th out of 250 competitors. He spent the next two years at King's College. Aurobindo had no interest in the ICS and came late to the horse-riding practical exam purposefully to get himself disqualified for the service. At this time, the Maharaja of Baroda, Sayajirao Gaekwad III, was travelling in England. Cotton secured for him a place in Baroda State Service and arranged for him to meet the prince. He left England for India, arriving there in February 1893. In India, Krishna Dhun Ghose, who was waiting to receive his son, was misinformed by his agents from Bombay (now Mumbai) that the ship on which Aurobindo had been travelling had sunk off the coast of Portugal. His father died upon hearing this news. Baroda and Calcutta (1893–1910) In Baroda, Aurobindo joined the state service in 1893, working first in the Survey and Settlements department, later moving to the Department of Revenue and then to the Secretariat, and much miscellaneous work like teaching grammar and assisting in writing speeches for the Maharaja of Gaekwad until 1897. In 1897 during his work in Baroda, he started working as a part-time French teacher at Baroda College (now Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda). He was later promoted to the post of vice-principal. At Baroda, Aurobindo self-studied Sanskrit and Bengali. During his stay at Baroda, he had contributed to many articles to Indu Prakash and had spoken as a chairman of the Baroda college board. He started taking an active interest in the politics of the Indian independence movement against British colonial rule, working behind the scenes as his position in the Baroda state administration barred him from an overt political activity. He linked up with resistance groups in Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, while travelling to these states. Aurobindo established contact with Lokmanya Tilak and Sister Nivedita. Aurobindo often travelled between Baroda and Bengal, at first in a bid to re-establish links with his parent's families and other Bengali relatives, including his sister Sarojini and brother Barin, and later increased to establish resistance groups across the Presidency. He formally moved to Calcutta in 1906 after the announcement of the Partition of Bengal. In 1901, on a visit to Calcutta, he married 14-year-old Mrinalini, the daughter of Bhupal Chandra Bose, a senior official in government service. Aurobindo was 28 at that time. Mrinalini died seventeen years later in December 1918 during the influenza pandemic. In 1906, Aurobindo was appointed the first principal of the National College in Calcutta, started to impart national education to Indian youth. He resigned from this position in August 1907, due to his increased political activity. The National College continues to the present as Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Aurobindo was influenced by studies on rebellion and revolutions against England in medieval France and the revolts in America and Italy. In his public activities, he favored Non cooperation and Passive resistance; in private he took up secret revolutionary activity as a preparation for open revolt, in case that the passive revolt failed. In Bengal, with Barin's help, he established contacts and inspired revolutionaries such as Bagha Jatin or Jatin Mukherjee and Surendranath Tagore. He helped establish a series of youth clubs, including the Anushilan Samiti of Calcutta in 1902. Aurobindo attended the 1906 Congress meeting headed by Dadabhai Naoroji and participated as a councilor in forming the fourfold objectives of "Swaraj, Swadesh, Boycott, and national education". In 1907 at the Surat session of Congress where moderates and extremists had a major showdown, he led along with extremists along with Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The Congress split after this session. In 1907–1908 Aurobindo travelled extensively to Pune, Bombay and Baroda to firm up support for the nationalist cause, giving speeches and meeting with groups. He was arrested again in May 1908 in connection with the Alipore Bomb Case. He was acquitted in the ensuing trial, following the murder of chief prosecution witness Naren Goswami within jail premises, which subsequently led to the case against him collapsing. Aurobindo was subsequently released after a year of isolated incarceration. Once out of the prison he started two new publications, Karmayogin in English and Dharma in Bengali. He also delivered the, Uttarpara Speech hinting at the transformation of his focus to spiritual matters. Repression from the British colonial government against him continued because of his writings in his new journals and in April 1910 Aurobindo moved to Pondicherry, where the British colonial secret police monitored his activities. Conversion from politics to spirituality In July 1905 then Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, partitioned Bengal. This sparked an outburst of public anger against the British, leading to civil unrest and a nationalist campaign by groups of revolutionaries that included Aurobindo. In 1908, Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki attempted to kill Magistrate Kingsford, a judge known for handing down particularly severe sentences against nationalists. However, the bomb thrown at his horse carriage missed its target and instead landed in another carriage and killed two British women, the wife and daughter of barrister Pringle Kennedy. Aurobindo was also arrested on charges of planning and overseeing the attack and imprisoned in solitary confinement in Alipore Jail. The trial of the Alipore Bomb Case lasted for a year, but eventually, he was acquitted on 6 May 1909. His defense counsel was Chittaranjan Das. During this period in the Jail, his view of life was radically changed due to spiritual experiences and realizations. Consequently, his aim went far beyond the service and liberation of the country. Aurobindo said he was "visited" by Vivekananda in the Alipore Jail: "It is a fact that I was hearing constantly the voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence." In his autobiographical notes, Aurobindo said he felt a vast sense of calmness when he first came back to India. He could not explain this and continued to have various such experiences from time to time. He knew nothing of yoga at that time and started his practice of it without a teacher, except for some rules that he learned from Mr. Devadhar, a friend who was a disciple of Swami Brahmananda of Ganga Math, Chandod. In 1907, Barin introduced Aurobindo to Vishnu Bhaskar Lele, a Maharashtrian yogi. Aurobindo was influenced by the guidance he got from the yogi, who had instructed Aurobindo to depend on an inner guide and any kind of external guru or guidance would not be required. In 1910 Aurobindo withdrew himself from all political activities and went into hiding at Chandannagar in the house of Motilal Roy, while the British colonial government were attempting to prosecute him for sedition on the basis of a signed article titled 'To My Countrymen', published in Karmayogin. As Aurobindo disappeared from view, the warrant was held back and the prosecution postponed. Aurobindo manoeuvred the police into open action and a warrant was issued on 4 April 1910, but the warrant could not be executed because on that date he had reached Pondicherry, then a French colony. The warrant against Aurobindo was withdrawn. Pondicherry (1910–1950) In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo dedicated himself to his spiritual and philosophical pursuits. In 1914, after four years of secluded yoga, he started a monthly philosophical magazine called Arya. This ceased publication in 1921. Many years later, he revised some of these works before they were published in book form. Some of the book series derived out of this publication was The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on The Gita, The Secret of The Veda, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Upanishads, The Renaissance in India, War and Self-determination, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity and The Future Poetry were published in this magazine. At the beginning of his stay at Pondicherry, there were few followers, but with time their numbers grew, resulting in the formation of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926. From 1926 he started to sign himself as Sri Aurobindo, Sri being commonly used as an honorific. For some time afterwards, his main literary output was his voluminous correspondence with his disciples. His letters, most of which were written in the 1930s, numbered in the several thousand. Many were brief comments made in the margins of his disciple's notebooks in answer to their questions and reports of their spiritual practice—others extended to several pages of carefully composed explanations of practical aspects of his teachings. These were later collected and published in book form in three volumes of Letters on Yoga. In the late 1930s, he resumed work on a poem he had started earlier—he continued to expand and revise this poem for the rest of his life. It became perhaps his greatest literary achievement, Savitri, an epic spiritual poem in blank verse of approximately 24,000 lines. On 15 August 1947, Sri Aurobindo strongly opposed the partition of India, stating that he hoped "the Nation will not accept the settled fact as for ever settled, or as anything more than a temporary expedient." Sri Aurobindo was nominated twice for the Nobel prize without it being awarded, in 1943 for the Nobel award in Literature and in 1950 for the Nobel award in Peace. Sri Aurobindo died on 5 December 1950, of uremia. Around 60,000 people attended to see his body resting peacefully. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and the President Rajendra Prasad praised him for his contribution to Yogic philosophy and the independence movement. National and international newspapers commemorated his death. Mirra Alfassa (The Mother) and the development of the Ashram Sri Aurobindo's close spiritual collaborator, Mirra Alfassa (born Alfassa), came to be known as The Mother. She was a French national, born in Paris on 21 February 1878. In her 20s she studied occultism with Max Theon. Along with her husband, Paul Richard, she went to Pondicherry on 29 March 1914, and finally settled there in 1920. Sri Aurobindo considered her his spiritual equal and collaborator. After 24 November 1926, when Sri Aurobindo retired into seclusion, he left it to her to plan, build and run the ashram, the community of disciples which had gathered around them. Sometime later, when families with children joined the ashram, she established and supervised the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education with its experiments in the field of education. When he died in 1950, she continued their spiritual work, directed the ashram, and guided their disciples. Philosophy and spiritual vision Introduction Sri Aurobindo's concept of the Integral Yoga system is described in his books, The Synthesis of Yoga and The Life Divine. The Life Divine is a compilation of essays published serially in Arya. Sri Aurobindo argues that divine Brahman manifests as empirical reality through līlā, or divine play. Instead of positing that the world we experience is an illusion (māyā), Aurobindo argues that world can evolve and become a new world with new species, far above the human species just as human species have evolved after the animal species. As such he argued that the end goal of spiritual practice could not merely be a liberation from the world into Samadhi but would also be that of descent of the Divine into the world in order to transform it into a Divine existence. Thus, this constituted the purpose of Integral Yoga. Regarding the involution of consciousness in matter, he wrote that: "This descent, this sacrifice of the Purusha, the Divine Soul submitting itself to Force and Matter so that it may inform and illuminate them is the seed of redemption of this world of Inconscience and Ignorance." Sri Aurobindo believed that Darwinism merely describes a phenomenon of the evolution of matter into life, but does not explain the reason behind it, while he finds life to be already present in matter, because all of existence is a manifestation of Brahman. He argues that nature (which he interpreted as divine) has evolved life out of matter and the mind out of life. All of existence, he argues, is attempting to manifest to the level of the supermind – that evolution had a purpose. He stated that he found the task of understanding the nature of reality arduous and difficult to justify by immediate tangible results. Supermind At the centre of Aurobindo's metaphysical system is the supermind, an intermediary power between the unmanifested Brahman and the manifested world. Aurobindo claims that the supermind is not completely alien to us and can be realized within ourselves as it is always present within mind since the latter is in reality identical with the former and contains it as a potentiality within itself. Aurobindo does not portray supermind as an original invention of his own but believes it can be found in the Vedas and that the Vedic Gods represent powers of the supermind In The Integral Yoga he declares that "By the supermind is meant the full Truth-Consciousness of the Divine Nature in which there can be no place for the principle of division and ignorance; it is always a full light and knowledge superior to all mental substance or mental movement." Supermind is a bridge between Sachchidananda and the lower manifestation and it is only through the supramental that mind, life and body can be spiritually transformed as opposed to through Sachchidananda The descent of supermind will mean the creation of a supramental race Affinity with Western philosophy In his writings, talks, and letters Sri Aurobindo has referred to several European philosophers with whose basic concepts he was familiar, commenting on their ideas and discussing the question of affinity to his own line of thought. Thus, he wrote a long essay on the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and mentioned especially Plato, Plotinus, Nietzsche and Bergson as thinkers in whom he was interested because of their more intuitive approach. On the other hand, he felt little attraction for the philosophy of Kant or Hegel. Several studies have shown a remarkable closeness to the evolutionary thought of Teilhard de Chardin, whom he did not know, whereas the latter came to know of Sri Aurobindo at a late stage. After reading some chapters of The Life Divine, he is reported to have said that Sri Aurobindo's vision of evolution was basically the same as his own, though stated for Asian readers. Several scholars have discovered significant similarities in the thought of Sri Aurobindo and Hegel. Steve Odin has discussed this subject comprehensively in a comparative study. Odin writes that Sri Aurobindo "has appropriated Hegel’s notion of an Absolute Spirit and employed it to radically restructure the architectonic framework of the ancient Hindu Vedanta system in contemporary terms." In his analysis Odin arrives at the conclusion that "both philosophers similarly envision world creation as the progressive self-manifestation and evolutionary ascent of a universal consciousness in its journey toward Self-realization." He points out that in contrast to the deterministic and continuous dialectal unfolding of Absolute Reason by the mechanism of thesis-antithesis-synthesis or affirmation-negation-integration, "Sri Aurobindo argues for a creative, emergent mode of evolution." In his résumé Odin states that Sri Aurobindo has overcome the ahistorical world-vision of traditional Hinduism and presented a concept which allows for a genuine advance and novelty. Importance of the Upanishads Although Sri Aurobindo was familiar with the most important lines of thought in Western philosophy, he did not acknowledge their influence on his own writings. He wrote that his philosophy "was formed first by the study of the Upanishads and the Gita… They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga." With the help of his readings he tried to move on to actual experience, "and it was on this experience that later on I founded my philosophy, not on ideas themselves." He assumes that the seers of the Upanishads had basically the same approach and gives some details of his vision of the past in a long passage in The Renaissance of India. "The Upanishads have been the acknowledged source of numerous profound philosophies and religions," he writes. Even Buddhism with all its developments was only a "restatement" from a new standpoint and with fresh terms. And, furthermore, the ideas of the Upanishads "can be rediscovered in much of the thought of Pythagoras and Plato and form the profound part of Neo-platonism and Gnosticism..." Finally, the larger part of German metaphysics "is little more in substance than an intellectual development of great realities more spiritually seen in this ancient teaching." When once he was asked by a disciple whether Plato got some of his ideas from Indian books, he responded that though something of the philosophy of India got through "by means of Pythagoras and others", he assumed that Plato got most of his ideas from intuition. Sri Aurobindo's indebtedness to the Indian tradition also becomes obvious through his placing a large number of quotations from the Rig Veda, the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita at the beginning of the chapters in The Life Divine, showing the connection of his own thought to Veda and Vedanta. The Isha Upanishad is considered to be one of the most important and more accessible writings of Sri Aurobindo. Before he published his final translation and analysis, he wrote ten incomplete commentaries. In a key passage he points out that the Brahman or Absolute is both the Stable and the Moving. "We must see it in eternal and immutable Spirit and in all the changing manifestations of universe and relativity." Sri Aurobindo's biographer K.R.S. Iyengar quotes R.S. Mugali as stating that Sri Aurobindo might have obtained in this Upanishad the thought-seed which later grew into The Life Divine. Synthesis and integration Sisir Kumar Maitra, who was a leading exponent of Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy, has referred to the issue of external influences and written that Sri Aurobindo does not mention names, but "as one reads his books one cannot fail to notice how thorough is his grasp of the great Western philosophers of the present age..." Although he is Indian one should not "underrate the influence of Western thought upon him. This influence is there, very clearly visible, but Sri Aurobindo... has not allowed himself to be dominated by it. He has made full use of Western thought, but he has made use of it for the purpose of building up his own system..." Thus Maitra, like Steve Odin, sees Sri Aurobindo not only in the tradition and context of Indian, but also Western philosophy and assumes he may have adopted some elements from the latter for his synthesis. R. Puligandla supports this viewpoint in his book Fundamentals of Indian Philosophy. He describes Sri Aurobindo's philosophy as "an original synthesis of the Indian and Western traditions." "He integrates in a unique fashion the great social, political and scientific achievements of the modern West with the ancient and profound spiritual insights of Hinduism. The vision that powers the life divine of Aurobindo is none other than the Upanishadic vision of the unity of all existence." Puligandla also discusses Sri Aurobindo's critical position vis-à-vis Shankara and his thesis that the latter's Vedanta is a world-negating philosophy, as it teaches that the world is unreal and illusory. From Puligandla's standpoint this is a misrepresentation of Shankara's position, which may have been caused by Sri Aurobindo's endeavour to synthesize Hindu and Western modes of thought, identifying Shankara's Mayavada with the subjective idealism of George Berkeley. However, Sri Aurobindo's critique of Shankara is supported by U. C. Dubey in his paper titled Integralism: The Distinctive Feature of Sri Aurobindo’s Philosophy. He points out that Sri Aurobindo's system presents an integral view of Reality where there is no opposition between the Absolute and its creative force, as they are actually one. Furthermore, he refers to Sri Aurobindo's conception of the supermind as the mediatory principle between the Absolute and the finite world and quotes S.K. Maitra stating that this conception "is the pivot round which the whole of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy moves." Dubey proceeds to analyse the approach of the Shankarites and believes that they follow an inadequate kind of logic that does not do justice to the challenge of tackling the problem of the Absolute, which cannot be known by finite reason. With the help of the finite reason, he says, "we are bound to determine the nature of reality as one or many, being or becoming. But Sri Aurobindo's Integral Advaitism reconciles all apparently different aspects of Existence in an all-embracing unity of the Absolute." Next, Dubey explains that for Sri Aurobindo there is a higher reason, the "logic of the infinite" in which his integralism is rooted. Legacy Sri Aurobindo was an Indian nationalist but is best known for his philosophy on human evolution and Integral Yoga. Influence His influence has been wide-ranging. In India, S. K. Maitra, Anilbaran Roy and D. P. Chattopadhyaya commented on Sri Aurobindo's work. Writers on esotericism and traditional wisdom, such as Mircea Eliade, Paul Brunton, and Rene Guenon, all saw him as an authentic representative of the Indian spiritual tradition. Though Rene Guenon thought Sri Aurobindo's thoughts were betrayed by some of his followers and that some works published under his name were not authentic, since not traditional. Haridas Chaudhuri and Frederic Spiegelberg were among those who were inspired by Aurobindo, who worked on the newly formed American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. Soon after, Chaudhuri and his wife Bina established the Cultural Integration Fellowship, from which later emerged the California Institute of Integral Studies. Sri Aurobindo influenced Subhash Chandra Bose to take an initiative of dedicating to Indian National Movement full-time. Bose writes, "The illustrious example of Arabindo Ghosh looms large before my vision. I feel that I am ready to make the sacrifice which that example demands of me." Karlheinz Stockhausen was heavily inspired by Satprem's writings about Sri Aurobindo during a week in May 1968, a time at which the composer was undergoing a personal crisis and had found Sri Aurobindo's philosophies were relevant to his feelings. After this experience, Stockhausen's music took a completely different turn, focusing on mysticism, that was to continue until the end of his career. Jean Gebser acknowledged Sri Aurobindo's influence on his work and referred to him several times in his writings. Thus, in The Invisible Origin he quotes a long passage from The Synthesis of Yoga. Gebser believes that he was "in some way brought into the extremely powerful spiritual field of force radiating through Sri Aurobindo." In his title Asia Smiles Differently he reports about his visit to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and meeting with the Mother whom he calls an "exceptionally gifted person." After meeting Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry in 1915, the Danish author and artist Johannes Hohlenberg published one of the first Yoga titles in Europe and later on wrote two essays on Sri Aurobindo. He also published extracts from The Life Divine in Danish translation. William Irwin Thompson travelled to Auroville in 1972, where he met "The Mother". Thompson has called Sri Aurobindo's teaching on spirituality a "radical anarchism" and a "post-religious approach" and regards their work as having "... reached back into the Goddess culture of prehistory, and, in Marshall McLuhan's terms, 'culturally retrieved' the archetypes of the shaman and la sage femme... " Thompson also writes that he experienced Shakti, or psychic power coming from The Mother on the night of her death in 1973. Sri Aurobindo's ideas about the further evolution of human capabilities influenced the thinking of Michael Murphy – and indirectly, the human potential movement, through Murphy's writings. The American philosopher Ken Wilber has called Sri Aurobindo "India's greatest modern philosopher sage" and has integrated some of his ideas into his philosophical vision. Wilber's interpretation of Aurobindo has been criticised by Rod Hemsell. New Age writer Andrew Harvey also looks to Sri Aurobindo as a major inspiration. Followers The following authors, disciples and organisations trace their intellectual heritage back to, or have in some measure been influenced by, Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Nolini Kanta Gupta (1889–1983) was one of Sri Aurobindo's senior disciples, and wrote extensively on philosophy, mysticism, and spiritual evolution based on the teaching of Sri Aurobindo and "The Mother". Nirodbaran (1903–2006). A doctor who obtained his medical degree from Edinburgh, his long and voluminous correspondence with Sri Aurobindo elaborate on many aspects of Integral Yoga and fastidious record of conversations bring out Sri Aurobindo's thought on numerous subjects. M. P. Pandit (1918–1993). Secretary to "The Mother" and the ashram, his copious writings and lectures cover Yoga, the Vedas, Tantra, Sri Aubindo's epic "Savitri" and others. Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) joined the ashram in 1944. Later, he wrote the play about Sri Aurobindo's life – Sri Aurobindo: Descent of the Blue – and a book, Infinite: Sri Aurobindo. An author, composer, artist and athlete, he was perhaps best known for holding public events on the theme of inner peace and world harmony (such as concerts, meditations, and races). Pavitra (1894–1969) was one of their early disciples. Born as Philippe Barbier Saint-Hilaire in Paris. Pavitra left some very interesting memoirs of his conversations with them in 1925 and 1926, which were published as Conversations avec Pavitra. Dilipkumar Roy (1897–1980) was a Bengali Indian musician, musicologist, novelist, poet and essayist. T.V. Kapali Sastry (1886–1953) was an eminent author and Sanskrit scholar. He joined the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1929 and wrote books and articles in four languages, exploring especially Sri Aurobindo's Vedic interpretations. Satprem (1923–2007) was a French author and an important disciple of "The Mother" who published Mother's Agenda (1982), Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness (2000), On the Way to Supermanhood (2002) and more. Indra Sen (1903–1994) was another disciple of Sri Aurobindo who, although little-known in the West, was the first to articulate integral psychology and integral philosophy, in the 1940s and 1950s. A compilation of his papers came out under the title, Integral Psychology in 1986. K. D. Sethna (1904–2011) was an Indian poet, scholar, writer, cultural critic and disciple of Sri Aurobindo. For several decades he was the editor of the Ashram journal Mother India. Margaret Woodrow Wilson (Nistha) (1886–1944), daughter of US President Woodrow Wilson, she came to the ashram in 1938 and stayed there until her death. She helped to prepare a revised edition of The Life Divine. Critics Adi Da finds that Sri Aurobindo's contributions were merely literary and cultural and had extended his political motivation into spirituality and human evolution N. R. Malkani finds Sri Aurobindo's theory of creation to be false, as the theory talks about experiences and visions which are beyond normal human experiences. He says the theory is an intellectual response to a difficult problem and that Sri Aurobindo uses the trait of unpredictability in theorising and discussing things not based upon the truth of existence. Malkani says that awareness is already a reality and suggests there would be no need to examine the creative activity subjected to awareness. Ken Wilber's interpretation of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy differed from the notion of dividing reality as a different level of matter, life, mind, overmind, supermind proposed by Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine, and terms them as higher- or lower-nested holons and states that there is only a fourfold reality (a system of reality created by himself). Rajneesh (Osho) says that Sri Aurobindo was a great scholar but was never realised; that his personal ego had made him indirectly claim that he went beyond the Buddha; and that he is said to have believed himself to be enlightened due to increasing number of followers. In popular culture The 1970 Indian Bengali-language biographical drama film Mahabiplabi Aurobindo, directed by Dipak Gupta, depicted Sri Aurobindo's life on screen. On the 72nd Republic Day of India, the Ministry of Culture presented a tableau on his life. Literature Indian editions A first edition of collected works was published in 1972 in 30 volumes: Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL), Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. A new edition of collected works was started in 1995. Currently, 36 out of 37 volumes have been published: Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA). Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Early Cultural Writings. Collected Poems. Collected Plays and Stories. Karmayogin. Records of Yoga. Vedic and Philological Studies. The Secrets of the Veda. Hymns to the Mystic Fire. Isha Upanishad. Kena and Other Upanishads. Essays on the Gita. The Renaissance of India with a Defence of Indian Culture. The Life Divine. The Synthesis of Yoga. The Human Cycle – The Ideal of Human Unity – War and Self-Determination. The Future Poetry. Letters on Poetry and Art Letters on Yoga. The Mother Savitri – A Legend and a Symbol. Letters on Himself and the Ashram. Autobiographical Notes and Other Writings of Historical Interest. American edition Main Works Sri Aurobindo Primary Works Set 12 vol. US Edition, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Sri Aurobindo Selected Writings Software CD-ROM, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Life Divine, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Synthesis of Yoga, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Essays on the Gita, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Ideal of Human Unity, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Human Cycle: The Psychology of Social Development, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Human Cycle, Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self Determination, Lotus Press. The Upanishads, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Secret of the Veda, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Hymns to the Mystic Fire, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Mother, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Compilations and Secondary Literature The Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo's Teaching and Method of Practice, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Future Evolution of Man, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Essential Aurobindo – Writings of Sri Aurobindo Bhagavad Gita and Its Message, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Mind of Light, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Rebirth and Karma, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Hour of God by Sri Aurobindo, Lotus Press. Dictionary of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, (compiled by M.P. Pandit), Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Vedic Symbolism, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Powers Within, Lotus Press. Comparative studies Hemsell, Rod (Oct. 2014). The Philosophy of Evolution. Auro-e-Books, E-Book Hemsell, Rod (Dec. 2014). Sri Aurobindo and the Logic of the Infinite: Essays for the New Millennium. Auro-e-Books, E-Book Hemsell, Rod (2017). The Philosophy of Consciousness: Hegel and Sri Aurobindo. E-Book Huchzermeyer, Wilfried (Oct. 2018). Sri Aurobindo’s Commentaries on Krishna, Buddha, Christ and Ramakrishna. Their Role in the Evolution of Humanity. edition sawitri, E-Book Johnston, David T. (Nov. 2016) Jung's Global Vision: Western Psyche, Eastern Mind, With References to Sri Aurobindo, Integral Yoga, The Mother. Agio Publishing House, Johnston, David T. (Dec. 2016). Prophets in Our Midst: Jung, Tolkien, Gebser, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Universe, E-Book Singh, Satya Prakash (2013). Nature of God. A Comparative Study in Sri Aurobindo and Whitehead. Antrik Express Digital, E-Book Singh, Satya Prakash (2005). Sri Aurobindo, Jung and Vedic Yoga. Mira Aditi Centre, Eric M. Weiss (2003): The Doctrine of the Subtle Worlds. Sri Aurobindo’s Cosmology, Modern Science and the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, Dissertation (PDF; 1,3 MB), California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco See also Integral psychology References Notes Citations Bibliography Further reading (2 volumes, 1945) – written in a hagiographical style K. D. Sethna, Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo Raychaudhuri, Girijashankar.....Sri Aurobindo O Banglar Swadeshi Joog (published 1956)...this book was serially published in the journal Udbodhan and read out to Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry while he was still alive......Sri Aurobindo commented, " he will snatch away smile from my face" Ghose, Aurobindo, Nahar, S., & Institut de recherches évolutives. (2000). India's rebirth: A selection from Sri Aurobindo's writing, talks and speeches Paris: Institut de recherches évolutives. External links Sri Aurobindo Ashram Auroville Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo 1872 births 1950 deaths Bengali people Bengali Hindus 20th-century Hindu religious leaders Advaitin philosophers Anushilan Samiti Alumni of King's College, Cambridge Alumni of the University of Cambridge Bengali Hindu saints 19th-century Bengalis 20th-century Bengalis Bengali spiritual writers Spiritual evolution English-language poets from India English spiritual writers Hindu revivalists 20th-century Hindu philosophers and theologians Hindu reformers Indian Hindu yogis Integral thought Indian male essayists Indian spiritual writers Indian male poets 19th-century Indian translators Indian revolutionaries Indian civil servants Swadeshi activists People from Kolkata People from Vadodara Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda faculty People educated at St Paul's School, London Prisoners and detainees of British India 19th-century Indian philosophers 20th-century Indian philosophers 19th-century Indian poets 20th-century Indian poets 19th-century Indian non-fiction writers 20th-century Indian non-fiction writers Indian male writers English-language writers from India Bengali writers Writers from Puducherry Poets from West Bengal 20th-century Indian essayists Indian political philosophers 19th-century Indian educational theorists 20th-century Indian educational theorists Neo-Vedanta 20th-century Indian translators Scholars from Puducherry Revolutionaries of Bengal during British Rule Modern yoga gurus Scholars from West Bengal	true	[ "Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor, in Spanish Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio (Book of the Examples of Count Lucanor and of Patronio), also commonly known as El Conde Lucanor, Libro de Patronio, or Libro de los ejemplos (original Old Castilian: Libro de los enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor et de Patronio), is one of the earliest works of prose in Castilian Spanish. It was first written in 1335.\n\nThe book is divided into four parts. The first and most well-known part is a series of 51 short stories (some no more than a page or two) drawn from various sources, such as Aesop and other classical writers, and Arabic folktales.\n\nTales of Count Lucanor was first printed in 1575 when it was published at Seville under the auspices of Argote de Molina. It was again printed at Madrid in 1642, after which it lay forgotten for nearly two centuries.\n\nPurpose and structure\n\nA didactic, moralistic purpose, which would color so much of the Spanish literature to follow (see Novela picaresca), is the mark of this book. Count Lucanor engages in conversation with his advisor Patronio, putting to him a problem (\"Some man has made me a proposition...\" or \"I fear that such and such person intends to...\") and asking for advice. Patronio responds always with the greatest humility, claiming not to wish to offer advice to so illustrious a person as the Count, but offering to tell him a story of which the Count's problem reminds him. (Thus, the stories are \"examples\" [ejemplos] of wise action.) At the end he advises the Count to do as the protagonist of his story did.\n\nEach chapter ends in more or less the same way, with slight variations on: \"And this pleased the Count greatly and he did just so, and found it well. And Don Johán (Juan) saw that this example was very good, and had it written in this book, and composed the following verses.\" A rhymed couplet closes, giving the moral of the story.\n\nOrigin of stories and influence on later literature\nMany of the stories written in the book are the first examples written in a modern European language of various stories, which many other writers would use in the proceeding centuries. Many of the stories he included were themselves derived from other stories, coming from western and Arab sources.\n\nShakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew has the basic elements of Tale 35, \"What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\".\n\nTale 32, \"What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth\" tells the story that Hans Christian Andersen made popular as The Emperor's New Clothes.\n\nStory 7, \"What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana\", a version of Aesop's The Milkmaid and Her Pail, was claimed by Max Müller to originate in the Hindu cycle Panchatantra.\n\nTale 2, \"What happened to a good Man and his Son, leading a beast to market,\" is the familiar fable The miller, his son and the donkey.\n\nIn 2016, Baroque Decay released a game under the name \"The Count Lucanor\". As well as some protagonists' names, certain events from the books inspired past events in the game.\n\nThe stories\n\nThe book opens with a prologue which introduces the characters of the Count and Patronio. The titles in the following list are those given in Keller and Keating's 1977 translation into English. James York's 1868 translation into English gives a significantly different ordering of the stories and omits the fifty-first.\n\n What Happened to a King and His Favorite \n What Happened to a Good Man and His Son \n How King Richard of England Leapt into the Sea against the Moors\n What a Genoese Said to His Soul When He Was about to Die \n What Happened to a Fox and a Crow Who Had a Piece of Cheese in His Beak\n How the Swallow Warned the Other Birds When She Saw Flax Being Sown \n What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana \n What Happened to a Man Whose Liver Had to Be Washed \n What Happened to Two Horses Which Were Thrown to the Lion \n What Happened to a Man Who on Account of Poverty and Lack of Other Food Was Eating Bitter Lentils \n What Happened to a Dean of Santiago de Compostela and Don Yllán, the Grand Master of Toledo\n What Happened to the Fox and the Rooster \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Hunting Partridges \n The Miracle of Saint Dominick When He Preached against the Usurer \n What Happened to Lorenzo Suárez at the Siege of Seville \n The Reply that count Fernán González Gave to His Relative Núño Laynes \n What Happened to a Very Hungry Man Who Was Half-heartedly Invited to Dinner \n What Happened to Pero Meléndez de Valdés When He Broke His Leg \n What Happened to the Crows and the Owls \n What Happened to a King for Whom a Man Promised to Perform Alchemy \n What Happened to a Young King and a Philosopher to Whom his Father Commended Him \n What Happened to the Lion and the Bull \n How the Ants Provide for Themselves \n What Happened to the King Who Wanted to Test His Three Sons \n What Happened to the Count of Provence and How He Was Freed from Prison by the Advice of Saladin\n What Happened to the Tree of Lies \n What Happened to an Emperor and to Don Alvarfáñez Minaya and Their Wives \n What Happened in Granada to Don Lorenzo Suárez Gallinato When He Beheaded the Renegade Chaplain \n What Happened to a Fox Who Lay down in the Street to Play Dead \n What Happened to King Abenabet of Seville and Ramayquía His Wife \n How a Cardinal Judged between the Canons of Paris and the Friars Minor \n What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth \n What Happened to Don Juan Manuel's Saker Falcon and an Eagle and a Heron \n What Happened to a Blind Man Who Was Leading Another \n What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\n What Happened to a Merchant When He Found His Son and His Wife Sleeping Together \n What Happened to Count Fernán González with His Men after He Had Won the Battle of Hacinas \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Loaded down with Precious Stones and Drowned in the River \n What Happened to a Man and a Swallow and a Sparrow \n Why the Seneschal of Carcassonne Lost His Soul \n What Happened to a King of Córdova Named Al-Haquem \n What Happened to a Woman of Sham Piety \n What Happened to Good and Evil and the Wise Man and the Madman \n What Happened to Don Pero Núñez the Loyal, to Don Ruy González de Zavallos, and to Don Gutier Roiz de Blaguiello with Don Rodrigo the Generous \n What Happened to a Man Who Became the Devil's Friend and Vassal \n What Happened to a Philosopher who by Accident Went down a Street Where Prostitutes Lived \n What Befell a Moor and His Sister Who Pretended That She Was Timid \n What Happened to a Man Who Tested His Friends \n What Happened to the Man Whom They Cast out Naked on an Island When They Took away from Him the Kingdom He Ruled \n What Happened to Saladin and a Lady, the Wife of a Knight Who Was His Vassal \n What Happened to a Christian King Who Was Very Powerful and Haughty\n\nReferences\n\nNotes\n\nBibliography\n\n Sturm, Harlan\n\n Wacks, David\n\nExternal links\n\nThe Internet Archive provides free access to the 1868 translation by James York.\nJSTOR has the to the 1977 translation by Keller and Keating.\nSelections in English and Spanish (pedagogical edition) with introduction, notes, and bibliography in Open Iberia/América (open access teaching anthology)\n\n14th-century books\nSpanish literature\n1335 books", "\"What Happened to Us\" is a song by Australian recording artist Jessica Mauboy, featuring English recording artist Jay Sean. It was written by Sean, Josh Alexander, Billy Steinberg, Jeremy Skaller, Rob Larow, Khaled Rohaim and Israel Cruz. \"What Happened to Us\" was leaked online in October 2010, and was released on 10 March 2011, as the third single from Mauboy's second studio album, Get 'Em Girls (2010). The song received positive reviews from critics.\n\nA remix of \"What Happened to Us\" made by production team OFM, was released on 11 April 2011. A different version of the song which features Stan Walker, was released on 29 May 2011. \"What Happened to Us\" charted on the ARIA Singles Chart at number 14 and was certified platinum by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA). An accompanying music video was directed by Mark Alston, and reminisces on a former relationship between Mauboy and Sean.\n\nProduction and release\n\n\"What Happened to Us\" was written by Josh Alexander, Billy Steinberg, Jeremy Skaller, Rob Larow, Khaled Rohaim, Israel Cruz and Jay Sean. It was produced by Skaller, Cruz, Rohaim and Bobby Bass. The song uses C, D, and B minor chords in the chorus. \"What Happened to Us\" was sent to contemporary hit radio in Australia on 14 February 2011. The cover art for the song was revealed on 22 February on Mauboy's official Facebook page. A CD release was available for purchase via her official website on 10 March, for one week only. It was released digitally the following day.\n\nReception\nMajhid Heath from ABC Online Indigenous called the song a \"Jordin Sparks-esque duet\", and wrote that it \"has a nice innocence to it that rings true to the experience of losing a first love.\" Chris Urankar from Nine to Five wrote that it as a \"mid-tempo duet ballad\" which signifies Mauboy's strength as a global player. On 21 March 2011, \"What Happened to Us\" debuted at number 30 on the ARIA Singles Chart, and peaked at number 14 the following week. The song was certified platinum by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA), for selling 70,000 copies. \"What Happened to Us\" spent a total of ten weeks in the ARIA top fifty.\n\nMusic video\n\nBackground\nThe music video for the song was shot in the Elizabeth Bay House in Sydney on 26 November 2010. The video was shot during Sean's visit to Australia for the Summerbeatz tour. During an interview with The Daily Telegraph while on the set of the video, Sean said \"the song is sick! ... Jessica's voice is amazing and we're shooting [the video] in this ridiculously beautiful mansion overlooking the harbour.\" The video was directed by Mark Alston, who had previously directed the video for Mauboy's single \"Let Me Be Me\" (2009). It premiered on YouTube on 10 February 2011.\n\nSynopsis and reception\nThe video begins showing Mauboy who appears to be sitting on a yellow antique couch in a mansion, wearing a purple dress. As the video progresses, scenes of memories are displayed of Mauboy and her love interest, played by Sean, spending time there previously. It then cuts to the scenes where Sean appears in the main entrance room of the mansion. The final scene shows Mauboy outdoors in a gold dress, surrounded by green grass and trees. She is later joined by Sean who appears in a black suit and a white shirt, and together they sing the chorus of the song to each other. David Lim of Feed Limmy wrote that the video is \"easily the best thing our R&B princess has committed to film – ever\" and praised the \"mansion and wondrous interior décor\". He also commended Mauboy for choosing Australian talent to direct the video instead of American directors, which she had used for her previous two music videos. Since its release, the video has received over two million views on Vevo.\n\nLive performances\nMauboy performed \"What Happened to Us\" live for the first time during her YouTube Live Sessions program on 4 December 2010. She also appeared on Adam Hills in Gordon Street Tonight on 23 February 2011 for an interview and later performed the song. On 15 March 2011, Mauboy performed \"What Happened to Us\" on Sunrise. She also performed the song with Stan Walker during the Australian leg of Chris Brown's F.A.M.E. Tour in April 2011. Mauboy and Walker later performed \"What Happened to Us\" on Dancing with the Stars Australia on 29 May 2011. From November 2013 to February 2014, \"What Happened to Us\" was part of the set list of the To the End of the Earth Tour, Mauboy's second headlining tour of Australia, with Nathaniel Willemse singing Sean's part.\n\nTrack listing\n\nDigital download\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean – 3:19\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean (Sgt Slick Remix) – 6:33\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean (Just Witness Remix) – 3:45\n\nCD single\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean (Album Version) – 3:19\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean (Sgt Slick Remix) – 6:33\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean (OFM Remix) – 3:39\n\nDigital download – Remix\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean (OFM Remix) – 3:38\n\nDigital download\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Stan Walker – 3:20\n\nPersonnel\nSongwriting – Josh Alexander, Billy Steinberg, Jeremy Skaller, Rob Larow, Khaled Rohaim, Israel Cruz, Jay Sean\nProduction – Jeremy Skaller, Bobby Bass\nAdditional production – Israel Cruz, Khaled Rohaim\nLead vocals – Jessica Mauboy, Jay Sean\nMixing – Phil Tan\nAdditional mixing – Damien Lewis\nMastering – Tom Coyne \nSource:\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly chart\n\nYear-end chart\n\nCertification\n\nRadio dates and release history\n\nReferences\n\n2010 songs\n2011 singles\nJessica Mauboy songs\nJay Sean songs\nSongs written by Billy Steinberg\nSongs written by Jay Sean\nSongs written by Josh Alexander\nSongs written by Israel Cruz\nVocal duets\nSony Music Australia singles\nSongs written by Khaled Rohaim" ]
[ "Sri Aurobindo", "Pondicherry (1910-1950)", "what happened in 1910?", "In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo dedicated himself to his spiritual and philosophical pursuits." ]	C_e06b6f4885204728b9ac8cfd9c3f2a87_0	how did he dedicate himself?	2	How did Sri Aurobindo dedicate himself in 1910?	Sri Aurobindo	In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo dedicated himself to his spiritual and philosophical pursuits. In 1914, after four years of secluded yoga, he started a monthly philosophical magazine called Arya. This ceased publication in 1921. Many years later, he revised some of these works before they were published in book form. Some of the book series derived out of this publication were The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on The Gita, The Secret of The Veda, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Upanishads, The Renaissance in India, War and Self-determination, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity and The Future Poetry were published in this magazine. At the beginning of his stay at Pondicherry, there were few followers, but with time their numbers grew, resulting in the formation of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926. From 1926 he started to sign himself as Sri Aurobindo, Sri (meaning holy in Sanskrit) being commonly used as an honorific. For some time afterwards, his main literary output was his voluminous correspondence with his disciples. His letters, most of which were written in the 1930s, numbered in the several thousands. Many were brief comments made in the margins of his disciple's notebooks in answer to their questions and reports of their spiritual practice--others extended to several pages of carefully composed explanations of practical aspects of his teachings. These were later collected and published in book form in three volumes of Letters on Yoga. In the late 1930s, he resumed work on a poem he had started earlier--he continued to expand and revise this poem for the rest of his life. It became perhaps his greatest literary achievement, Savitri, an epic spiritual poem in blank verse of approximately 24,000 lines. Sri Aurobindo left his body on 5 December 1950. Around 60,000 people attended to see his body resting peacefully. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and the President Rajendra Prasad praised him for his contribution to Yogic philosophy and the independence movement. National and international newspapers commemorated his death. CANNOTANSWER	four years of secluded yoga,	Sri Aurobindo (born Aurobindo Ghose; 15 August 1872 – 5 December 1950) was an Indian philosopher, yoga guru, maharishi, poet, and Indian nationalist. He was also a journalist, editing newspapers such as Bande Mataram. He joined the Indian movement for independence from British colonial rule, until 1910 was one of its influential leaders and then became a spiritual reformer, introducing his visions on human progress and spiritual evolution. Aurobindo studied for the Indian Civil Service at King's College, Cambridge, England. After returning to India he took up various civil service works under the Maharaja of the Princely state of Baroda and became increasingly involved in nationalist politics in the Indian National Congress and the nascent revolutionary movement in Bengal with the Anushilan Samiti. He was arrested in the aftermath of a number of bombings linked to his organization in a public trial where he faced charges of treason for Alipore Conspiracy. However Sri Aurobindo could only be convicted and imprisoned for writing articles against British colonial rule in India. He was released when no evidence could be provided, following the murder of a prosecution witness, Narendranath Goswami, during the trial. During his stay in the jail, he had mystical and spiritual experiences, after which he moved to Pondicherry, leaving politics for spiritual work. At Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo developed a spiritual practice he called Integral Yoga. The central theme of his vision was the evolution of human life into a divine life in divine body. He believed in a spiritual realisation that not only liberated but transformed human nature, enabling a divine life on earth. In 1926, with the help of his spiritual collaborator, Mirra Alfassa (referred to as "The Mother"), Sri Aurobindo Ashram was founded. His main literary works are The Life Divine, which deals with the philosophical aspect of Integral Yoga; Synthesis of Yoga, which deals with the principles and methods of Integral Yoga; and Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, an epic poem. Biography Early life Aurobindo Ghose was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), Bengal Presidency, India on 15 August 1872 in a Bengali family that was associated with the village of Konnagar in the Hooghly district of present-day West Bengal. His father, Krishna Dhun Ghose, was then assistant surgeon of Rangpur in Bengal and later civil surgeon of Khulna, and a former member of the Brahmo Samaj religious reform movement who had become enamoured with the then-new idea of evolution while pursuing medical studies in Edinburgh. His mother Swarnalata Devi's father Shri Rajnarayan Bose was a leading figure in the Samaj. She had been sent to the more salubrious surroundings of Calcutta for Aurobindo's birth. Aurobindo had two elder siblings, Benoybhusan and Manmohan, a younger sister, Sarojini, and a younger brother, Barindra Kumar (also referred to as Barin). Young Aurobindo was brought up speaking English, but used Hindustani to communicate with servants. Although his family were Bengali, his father believed British culture to be superior. He and his two elder siblings were sent to the English-speaking Loreto House boarding school in Darjeeling, in part to improve their language skills and in part to distance them from their mother, who had developed a mental illness soon after the birth of her first child. Darjeeling was a centre of Anglo-Indians in India and the school was run by Irish nuns, through which the boys would have been exposed to Christian religious teachings and symbolism. England (1879–1893) Krishna Dhun Ghose wanted his sons to enter the Indian Civil Service (ICS), an elite organisation comprising around 1000 people. To achieve this it was necessary that they study in England and so it was there that the entire family moved in 1879. The three brothers were placed in the care of the Reverend W. H. Drewett in Manchester. Drewett was a minister of the Congregational Church whom Krishna Dhun Ghose knew through his British friends at Rangpur. The boys were taught Latin by Drewett and his wife. This was a prerequisite for admission to good English schools and, after two years, in 1881, the elder two siblings were enrolled at Manchester Grammar School. Aurobindo was considered too young for enrolment, and he continued his studies with the Drewetts, learning history, Latin, French, geography and arithmetic. Although the Drewetts were told not to teach religion, the boys inevitably were exposed to Christian teachings and events, which generally bored Aurobindo and sometimes repulsed him. There was little contact with his father, who wrote only a few letters to his sons while they were in England, but what communication there was indicated that he was becoming less endeared to the British in India than he had been, on one occasion describing the British colonial government as "heartless". Drewett emigrated to Australia in 1884, causing the boys to be uprooted as they went to live with Drewett's mother in London. In September of that year, Aurobindo and Manmohan joined St Paul's School there. He learned Greek and spent the last three years reading literature and English poetry, while he also acquired some familiarity with the German and Italian languages; Peter Heehs resumes his linguistic abilities by stating that at "the turn of the century he knew at least twelve languages: English, French, and Bengali to speak, read, and write; Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit to read and write; Gujarati, Marathi, and Hindi to speak and read; and Italian, German, and Spanish to read." Being exposed to the evangelical structures of Drewett's mother developed in him a distaste for religion, and he considered himself at one point to be an atheist but later determined that he was agnostic. A blue plaque unveiled in 2007 commemorates Aurobindo's residence at 49 St Stephen's Avenue in Shepherd's Bush, London, from 1884 to 1887. The three brothers began living in spartan circumstances at the Liberal Club in South Kensington during 1887, their father having experienced some financial difficulties. The club's secretary was James Cotton, brother of their father's friend in the Bengal ICS, Henry Cotton. By 1889, Manmohan had determined to pursue a literary career and Benoybhusan had proved himself unequal to the standards necessary for ICS entrance. This meant that only Aurobindo might fulfill his father's aspirations but to do so when his father lacked money required that he studied hard for a scholarship. To become an ICS official, students were required to pass the competitive examination, as well as to study at an English university for two years under probation. Aurobindo secured a scholarship at King's College, Cambridge, under recommendation of Oscar Browning. He passed the written ICS examination after a few months, being ranked 11th out of 250 competitors. He spent the next two years at King's College. Aurobindo had no interest in the ICS and came late to the horse-riding practical exam purposefully to get himself disqualified for the service. At this time, the Maharaja of Baroda, Sayajirao Gaekwad III, was travelling in England. Cotton secured for him a place in Baroda State Service and arranged for him to meet the prince. He left England for India, arriving there in February 1893. In India, Krishna Dhun Ghose, who was waiting to receive his son, was misinformed by his agents from Bombay (now Mumbai) that the ship on which Aurobindo had been travelling had sunk off the coast of Portugal. His father died upon hearing this news. Baroda and Calcutta (1893–1910) In Baroda, Aurobindo joined the state service in 1893, working first in the Survey and Settlements department, later moving to the Department of Revenue and then to the Secretariat, and much miscellaneous work like teaching grammar and assisting in writing speeches for the Maharaja of Gaekwad until 1897. In 1897 during his work in Baroda, he started working as a part-time French teacher at Baroda College (now Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda). He was later promoted to the post of vice-principal. At Baroda, Aurobindo self-studied Sanskrit and Bengali. During his stay at Baroda, he had contributed to many articles to Indu Prakash and had spoken as a chairman of the Baroda college board. He started taking an active interest in the politics of the Indian independence movement against British colonial rule, working behind the scenes as his position in the Baroda state administration barred him from an overt political activity. He linked up with resistance groups in Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, while travelling to these states. Aurobindo established contact with Lokmanya Tilak and Sister Nivedita. Aurobindo often travelled between Baroda and Bengal, at first in a bid to re-establish links with his parent's families and other Bengali relatives, including his sister Sarojini and brother Barin, and later increased to establish resistance groups across the Presidency. He formally moved to Calcutta in 1906 after the announcement of the Partition of Bengal. In 1901, on a visit to Calcutta, he married 14-year-old Mrinalini, the daughter of Bhupal Chandra Bose, a senior official in government service. Aurobindo was 28 at that time. Mrinalini died seventeen years later in December 1918 during the influenza pandemic. In 1906, Aurobindo was appointed the first principal of the National College in Calcutta, started to impart national education to Indian youth. He resigned from this position in August 1907, due to his increased political activity. The National College continues to the present as Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Aurobindo was influenced by studies on rebellion and revolutions against England in medieval France and the revolts in America and Italy. In his public activities, he favored Non cooperation and Passive resistance; in private he took up secret revolutionary activity as a preparation for open revolt, in case that the passive revolt failed. In Bengal, with Barin's help, he established contacts and inspired revolutionaries such as Bagha Jatin or Jatin Mukherjee and Surendranath Tagore. He helped establish a series of youth clubs, including the Anushilan Samiti of Calcutta in 1902. Aurobindo attended the 1906 Congress meeting headed by Dadabhai Naoroji and participated as a councilor in forming the fourfold objectives of "Swaraj, Swadesh, Boycott, and national education". In 1907 at the Surat session of Congress where moderates and extremists had a major showdown, he led along with extremists along with Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The Congress split after this session. In 1907–1908 Aurobindo travelled extensively to Pune, Bombay and Baroda to firm up support for the nationalist cause, giving speeches and meeting with groups. He was arrested again in May 1908 in connection with the Alipore Bomb Case. He was acquitted in the ensuing trial, following the murder of chief prosecution witness Naren Goswami within jail premises, which subsequently led to the case against him collapsing. Aurobindo was subsequently released after a year of isolated incarceration. Once out of the prison he started two new publications, Karmayogin in English and Dharma in Bengali. He also delivered the, Uttarpara Speech hinting at the transformation of his focus to spiritual matters. Repression from the British colonial government against him continued because of his writings in his new journals and in April 1910 Aurobindo moved to Pondicherry, where the British colonial secret police monitored his activities. Conversion from politics to spirituality In July 1905 then Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, partitioned Bengal. This sparked an outburst of public anger against the British, leading to civil unrest and a nationalist campaign by groups of revolutionaries that included Aurobindo. In 1908, Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki attempted to kill Magistrate Kingsford, a judge known for handing down particularly severe sentences against nationalists. However, the bomb thrown at his horse carriage missed its target and instead landed in another carriage and killed two British women, the wife and daughter of barrister Pringle Kennedy. Aurobindo was also arrested on charges of planning and overseeing the attack and imprisoned in solitary confinement in Alipore Jail. The trial of the Alipore Bomb Case lasted for a year, but eventually, he was acquitted on 6 May 1909. His defense counsel was Chittaranjan Das. During this period in the Jail, his view of life was radically changed due to spiritual experiences and realizations. Consequently, his aim went far beyond the service and liberation of the country. Aurobindo said he was "visited" by Vivekananda in the Alipore Jail: "It is a fact that I was hearing constantly the voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence." In his autobiographical notes, Aurobindo said he felt a vast sense of calmness when he first came back to India. He could not explain this and continued to have various such experiences from time to time. He knew nothing of yoga at that time and started his practice of it without a teacher, except for some rules that he learned from Mr. Devadhar, a friend who was a disciple of Swami Brahmananda of Ganga Math, Chandod. In 1907, Barin introduced Aurobindo to Vishnu Bhaskar Lele, a Maharashtrian yogi. Aurobindo was influenced by the guidance he got from the yogi, who had instructed Aurobindo to depend on an inner guide and any kind of external guru or guidance would not be required. In 1910 Aurobindo withdrew himself from all political activities and went into hiding at Chandannagar in the house of Motilal Roy, while the British colonial government were attempting to prosecute him for sedition on the basis of a signed article titled 'To My Countrymen', published in Karmayogin. As Aurobindo disappeared from view, the warrant was held back and the prosecution postponed. Aurobindo manoeuvred the police into open action and a warrant was issued on 4 April 1910, but the warrant could not be executed because on that date he had reached Pondicherry, then a French colony. The warrant against Aurobindo was withdrawn. Pondicherry (1910–1950) In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo dedicated himself to his spiritual and philosophical pursuits. In 1914, after four years of secluded yoga, he started a monthly philosophical magazine called Arya. This ceased publication in 1921. Many years later, he revised some of these works before they were published in book form. Some of the book series derived out of this publication was The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on The Gita, The Secret of The Veda, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Upanishads, The Renaissance in India, War and Self-determination, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity and The Future Poetry were published in this magazine. At the beginning of his stay at Pondicherry, there were few followers, but with time their numbers grew, resulting in the formation of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926. From 1926 he started to sign himself as Sri Aurobindo, Sri being commonly used as an honorific. For some time afterwards, his main literary output was his voluminous correspondence with his disciples. His letters, most of which were written in the 1930s, numbered in the several thousand. Many were brief comments made in the margins of his disciple's notebooks in answer to their questions and reports of their spiritual practice—others extended to several pages of carefully composed explanations of practical aspects of his teachings. These were later collected and published in book form in three volumes of Letters on Yoga. In the late 1930s, he resumed work on a poem he had started earlier—he continued to expand and revise this poem for the rest of his life. It became perhaps his greatest literary achievement, Savitri, an epic spiritual poem in blank verse of approximately 24,000 lines. On 15 August 1947, Sri Aurobindo strongly opposed the partition of India, stating that he hoped "the Nation will not accept the settled fact as for ever settled, or as anything more than a temporary expedient." Sri Aurobindo was nominated twice for the Nobel prize without it being awarded, in 1943 for the Nobel award in Literature and in 1950 for the Nobel award in Peace. Sri Aurobindo died on 5 December 1950, of uremia. Around 60,000 people attended to see his body resting peacefully. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and the President Rajendra Prasad praised him for his contribution to Yogic philosophy and the independence movement. National and international newspapers commemorated his death. Mirra Alfassa (The Mother) and the development of the Ashram Sri Aurobindo's close spiritual collaborator, Mirra Alfassa (born Alfassa), came to be known as The Mother. She was a French national, born in Paris on 21 February 1878. In her 20s she studied occultism with Max Theon. Along with her husband, Paul Richard, she went to Pondicherry on 29 March 1914, and finally settled there in 1920. Sri Aurobindo considered her his spiritual equal and collaborator. After 24 November 1926, when Sri Aurobindo retired into seclusion, he left it to her to plan, build and run the ashram, the community of disciples which had gathered around them. Sometime later, when families with children joined the ashram, she established and supervised the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education with its experiments in the field of education. When he died in 1950, she continued their spiritual work, directed the ashram, and guided their disciples. Philosophy and spiritual vision Introduction Sri Aurobindo's concept of the Integral Yoga system is described in his books, The Synthesis of Yoga and The Life Divine. The Life Divine is a compilation of essays published serially in Arya. Sri Aurobindo argues that divine Brahman manifests as empirical reality through līlā, or divine play. Instead of positing that the world we experience is an illusion (māyā), Aurobindo argues that world can evolve and become a new world with new species, far above the human species just as human species have evolved after the animal species. As such he argued that the end goal of spiritual practice could not merely be a liberation from the world into Samadhi but would also be that of descent of the Divine into the world in order to transform it into a Divine existence. Thus, this constituted the purpose of Integral Yoga. Regarding the involution of consciousness in matter, he wrote that: "This descent, this sacrifice of the Purusha, the Divine Soul submitting itself to Force and Matter so that it may inform and illuminate them is the seed of redemption of this world of Inconscience and Ignorance." Sri Aurobindo believed that Darwinism merely describes a phenomenon of the evolution of matter into life, but does not explain the reason behind it, while he finds life to be already present in matter, because all of existence is a manifestation of Brahman. He argues that nature (which he interpreted as divine) has evolved life out of matter and the mind out of life. All of existence, he argues, is attempting to manifest to the level of the supermind – that evolution had a purpose. He stated that he found the task of understanding the nature of reality arduous and difficult to justify by immediate tangible results. Supermind At the centre of Aurobindo's metaphysical system is the supermind, an intermediary power between the unmanifested Brahman and the manifested world. Aurobindo claims that the supermind is not completely alien to us and can be realized within ourselves as it is always present within mind since the latter is in reality identical with the former and contains it as a potentiality within itself. Aurobindo does not portray supermind as an original invention of his own but believes it can be found in the Vedas and that the Vedic Gods represent powers of the supermind In The Integral Yoga he declares that "By the supermind is meant the full Truth-Consciousness of the Divine Nature in which there can be no place for the principle of division and ignorance; it is always a full light and knowledge superior to all mental substance or mental movement." Supermind is a bridge between Sachchidananda and the lower manifestation and it is only through the supramental that mind, life and body can be spiritually transformed as opposed to through Sachchidananda The descent of supermind will mean the creation of a supramental race Affinity with Western philosophy In his writings, talks, and letters Sri Aurobindo has referred to several European philosophers with whose basic concepts he was familiar, commenting on their ideas and discussing the question of affinity to his own line of thought. Thus, he wrote a long essay on the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and mentioned especially Plato, Plotinus, Nietzsche and Bergson as thinkers in whom he was interested because of their more intuitive approach. On the other hand, he felt little attraction for the philosophy of Kant or Hegel. Several studies have shown a remarkable closeness to the evolutionary thought of Teilhard de Chardin, whom he did not know, whereas the latter came to know of Sri Aurobindo at a late stage. After reading some chapters of The Life Divine, he is reported to have said that Sri Aurobindo's vision of evolution was basically the same as his own, though stated for Asian readers. Several scholars have discovered significant similarities in the thought of Sri Aurobindo and Hegel. Steve Odin has discussed this subject comprehensively in a comparative study. Odin writes that Sri Aurobindo "has appropriated Hegel’s notion of an Absolute Spirit and employed it to radically restructure the architectonic framework of the ancient Hindu Vedanta system in contemporary terms." In his analysis Odin arrives at the conclusion that "both philosophers similarly envision world creation as the progressive self-manifestation and evolutionary ascent of a universal consciousness in its journey toward Self-realization." He points out that in contrast to the deterministic and continuous dialectal unfolding of Absolute Reason by the mechanism of thesis-antithesis-synthesis or affirmation-negation-integration, "Sri Aurobindo argues for a creative, emergent mode of evolution." In his résumé Odin states that Sri Aurobindo has overcome the ahistorical world-vision of traditional Hinduism and presented a concept which allows for a genuine advance and novelty. Importance of the Upanishads Although Sri Aurobindo was familiar with the most important lines of thought in Western philosophy, he did not acknowledge their influence on his own writings. He wrote that his philosophy "was formed first by the study of the Upanishads and the Gita… They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga." With the help of his readings he tried to move on to actual experience, "and it was on this experience that later on I founded my philosophy, not on ideas themselves." He assumes that the seers of the Upanishads had basically the same approach and gives some details of his vision of the past in a long passage in The Renaissance of India. "The Upanishads have been the acknowledged source of numerous profound philosophies and religions," he writes. Even Buddhism with all its developments was only a "restatement" from a new standpoint and with fresh terms. And, furthermore, the ideas of the Upanishads "can be rediscovered in much of the thought of Pythagoras and Plato and form the profound part of Neo-platonism and Gnosticism..." Finally, the larger part of German metaphysics "is little more in substance than an intellectual development of great realities more spiritually seen in this ancient teaching." When once he was asked by a disciple whether Plato got some of his ideas from Indian books, he responded that though something of the philosophy of India got through "by means of Pythagoras and others", he assumed that Plato got most of his ideas from intuition. Sri Aurobindo's indebtedness to the Indian tradition also becomes obvious through his placing a large number of quotations from the Rig Veda, the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita at the beginning of the chapters in The Life Divine, showing the connection of his own thought to Veda and Vedanta. The Isha Upanishad is considered to be one of the most important and more accessible writings of Sri Aurobindo. Before he published his final translation and analysis, he wrote ten incomplete commentaries. In a key passage he points out that the Brahman or Absolute is both the Stable and the Moving. "We must see it in eternal and immutable Spirit and in all the changing manifestations of universe and relativity." Sri Aurobindo's biographer K.R.S. Iyengar quotes R.S. Mugali as stating that Sri Aurobindo might have obtained in this Upanishad the thought-seed which later grew into The Life Divine. Synthesis and integration Sisir Kumar Maitra, who was a leading exponent of Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy, has referred to the issue of external influences and written that Sri Aurobindo does not mention names, but "as one reads his books one cannot fail to notice how thorough is his grasp of the great Western philosophers of the present age..." Although he is Indian one should not "underrate the influence of Western thought upon him. This influence is there, very clearly visible, but Sri Aurobindo... has not allowed himself to be dominated by it. He has made full use of Western thought, but he has made use of it for the purpose of building up his own system..." Thus Maitra, like Steve Odin, sees Sri Aurobindo not only in the tradition and context of Indian, but also Western philosophy and assumes he may have adopted some elements from the latter for his synthesis. R. Puligandla supports this viewpoint in his book Fundamentals of Indian Philosophy. He describes Sri Aurobindo's philosophy as "an original synthesis of the Indian and Western traditions." "He integrates in a unique fashion the great social, political and scientific achievements of the modern West with the ancient and profound spiritual insights of Hinduism. The vision that powers the life divine of Aurobindo is none other than the Upanishadic vision of the unity of all existence." Puligandla also discusses Sri Aurobindo's critical position vis-à-vis Shankara and his thesis that the latter's Vedanta is a world-negating philosophy, as it teaches that the world is unreal and illusory. From Puligandla's standpoint this is a misrepresentation of Shankara's position, which may have been caused by Sri Aurobindo's endeavour to synthesize Hindu and Western modes of thought, identifying Shankara's Mayavada with the subjective idealism of George Berkeley. However, Sri Aurobindo's critique of Shankara is supported by U. C. Dubey in his paper titled Integralism: The Distinctive Feature of Sri Aurobindo’s Philosophy. He points out that Sri Aurobindo's system presents an integral view of Reality where there is no opposition between the Absolute and its creative force, as they are actually one. Furthermore, he refers to Sri Aurobindo's conception of the supermind as the mediatory principle between the Absolute and the finite world and quotes S.K. Maitra stating that this conception "is the pivot round which the whole of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy moves." Dubey proceeds to analyse the approach of the Shankarites and believes that they follow an inadequate kind of logic that does not do justice to the challenge of tackling the problem of the Absolute, which cannot be known by finite reason. With the help of the finite reason, he says, "we are bound to determine the nature of reality as one or many, being or becoming. But Sri Aurobindo's Integral Advaitism reconciles all apparently different aspects of Existence in an all-embracing unity of the Absolute." Next, Dubey explains that for Sri Aurobindo there is a higher reason, the "logic of the infinite" in which his integralism is rooted. Legacy Sri Aurobindo was an Indian nationalist but is best known for his philosophy on human evolution and Integral Yoga. Influence His influence has been wide-ranging. In India, S. K. Maitra, Anilbaran Roy and D. P. Chattopadhyaya commented on Sri Aurobindo's work. Writers on esotericism and traditional wisdom, such as Mircea Eliade, Paul Brunton, and Rene Guenon, all saw him as an authentic representative of the Indian spiritual tradition. Though Rene Guenon thought Sri Aurobindo's thoughts were betrayed by some of his followers and that some works published under his name were not authentic, since not traditional. Haridas Chaudhuri and Frederic Spiegelberg were among those who were inspired by Aurobindo, who worked on the newly formed American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. Soon after, Chaudhuri and his wife Bina established the Cultural Integration Fellowship, from which later emerged the California Institute of Integral Studies. Sri Aurobindo influenced Subhash Chandra Bose to take an initiative of dedicating to Indian National Movement full-time. Bose writes, "The illustrious example of Arabindo Ghosh looms large before my vision. I feel that I am ready to make the sacrifice which that example demands of me." Karlheinz Stockhausen was heavily inspired by Satprem's writings about Sri Aurobindo during a week in May 1968, a time at which the composer was undergoing a personal crisis and had found Sri Aurobindo's philosophies were relevant to his feelings. After this experience, Stockhausen's music took a completely different turn, focusing on mysticism, that was to continue until the end of his career. Jean Gebser acknowledged Sri Aurobindo's influence on his work and referred to him several times in his writings. Thus, in The Invisible Origin he quotes a long passage from The Synthesis of Yoga. Gebser believes that he was "in some way brought into the extremely powerful spiritual field of force radiating through Sri Aurobindo." In his title Asia Smiles Differently he reports about his visit to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and meeting with the Mother whom he calls an "exceptionally gifted person." After meeting Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry in 1915, the Danish author and artist Johannes Hohlenberg published one of the first Yoga titles in Europe and later on wrote two essays on Sri Aurobindo. He also published extracts from The Life Divine in Danish translation. William Irwin Thompson travelled to Auroville in 1972, where he met "The Mother". Thompson has called Sri Aurobindo's teaching on spirituality a "radical anarchism" and a "post-religious approach" and regards their work as having "... reached back into the Goddess culture of prehistory, and, in Marshall McLuhan's terms, 'culturally retrieved' the archetypes of the shaman and la sage femme... " Thompson also writes that he experienced Shakti, or psychic power coming from The Mother on the night of her death in 1973. Sri Aurobindo's ideas about the further evolution of human capabilities influenced the thinking of Michael Murphy – and indirectly, the human potential movement, through Murphy's writings. The American philosopher Ken Wilber has called Sri Aurobindo "India's greatest modern philosopher sage" and has integrated some of his ideas into his philosophical vision. Wilber's interpretation of Aurobindo has been criticised by Rod Hemsell. New Age writer Andrew Harvey also looks to Sri Aurobindo as a major inspiration. Followers The following authors, disciples and organisations trace their intellectual heritage back to, or have in some measure been influenced by, Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Nolini Kanta Gupta (1889–1983) was one of Sri Aurobindo's senior disciples, and wrote extensively on philosophy, mysticism, and spiritual evolution based on the teaching of Sri Aurobindo and "The Mother". Nirodbaran (1903–2006). A doctor who obtained his medical degree from Edinburgh, his long and voluminous correspondence with Sri Aurobindo elaborate on many aspects of Integral Yoga and fastidious record of conversations bring out Sri Aurobindo's thought on numerous subjects. M. P. Pandit (1918–1993). Secretary to "The Mother" and the ashram, his copious writings and lectures cover Yoga, the Vedas, Tantra, Sri Aubindo's epic "Savitri" and others. Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) joined the ashram in 1944. Later, he wrote the play about Sri Aurobindo's life – Sri Aurobindo: Descent of the Blue – and a book, Infinite: Sri Aurobindo. An author, composer, artist and athlete, he was perhaps best known for holding public events on the theme of inner peace and world harmony (such as concerts, meditations, and races). Pavitra (1894–1969) was one of their early disciples. Born as Philippe Barbier Saint-Hilaire in Paris. Pavitra left some very interesting memoirs of his conversations with them in 1925 and 1926, which were published as Conversations avec Pavitra. Dilipkumar Roy (1897–1980) was a Bengali Indian musician, musicologist, novelist, poet and essayist. T.V. Kapali Sastry (1886–1953) was an eminent author and Sanskrit scholar. He joined the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1929 and wrote books and articles in four languages, exploring especially Sri Aurobindo's Vedic interpretations. Satprem (1923–2007) was a French author and an important disciple of "The Mother" who published Mother's Agenda (1982), Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness (2000), On the Way to Supermanhood (2002) and more. Indra Sen (1903–1994) was another disciple of Sri Aurobindo who, although little-known in the West, was the first to articulate integral psychology and integral philosophy, in the 1940s and 1950s. A compilation of his papers came out under the title, Integral Psychology in 1986. K. D. Sethna (1904–2011) was an Indian poet, scholar, writer, cultural critic and disciple of Sri Aurobindo. For several decades he was the editor of the Ashram journal Mother India. Margaret Woodrow Wilson (Nistha) (1886–1944), daughter of US President Woodrow Wilson, she came to the ashram in 1938 and stayed there until her death. She helped to prepare a revised edition of The Life Divine. Critics Adi Da finds that Sri Aurobindo's contributions were merely literary and cultural and had extended his political motivation into spirituality and human evolution N. R. Malkani finds Sri Aurobindo's theory of creation to be false, as the theory talks about experiences and visions which are beyond normal human experiences. He says the theory is an intellectual response to a difficult problem and that Sri Aurobindo uses the trait of unpredictability in theorising and discussing things not based upon the truth of existence. Malkani says that awareness is already a reality and suggests there would be no need to examine the creative activity subjected to awareness. Ken Wilber's interpretation of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy differed from the notion of dividing reality as a different level of matter, life, mind, overmind, supermind proposed by Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine, and terms them as higher- or lower-nested holons and states that there is only a fourfold reality (a system of reality created by himself). Rajneesh (Osho) says that Sri Aurobindo was a great scholar but was never realised; that his personal ego had made him indirectly claim that he went beyond the Buddha; and that he is said to have believed himself to be enlightened due to increasing number of followers. In popular culture The 1970 Indian Bengali-language biographical drama film Mahabiplabi Aurobindo, directed by Dipak Gupta, depicted Sri Aurobindo's life on screen. On the 72nd Republic Day of India, the Ministry of Culture presented a tableau on his life. Literature Indian editions A first edition of collected works was published in 1972 in 30 volumes: Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL), Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. A new edition of collected works was started in 1995. Currently, 36 out of 37 volumes have been published: Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA). Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Early Cultural Writings. Collected Poems. Collected Plays and Stories. Karmayogin. Records of Yoga. Vedic and Philological Studies. The Secrets of the Veda. Hymns to the Mystic Fire. Isha Upanishad. Kena and Other Upanishads. Essays on the Gita. The Renaissance of India with a Defence of Indian Culture. The Life Divine. The Synthesis of Yoga. The Human Cycle – The Ideal of Human Unity – War and Self-Determination. The Future Poetry. Letters on Poetry and Art Letters on Yoga. The Mother Savitri – A Legend and a Symbol. Letters on Himself and the Ashram. Autobiographical Notes and Other Writings of Historical Interest. American edition Main Works Sri Aurobindo Primary Works Set 12 vol. US Edition, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Sri Aurobindo Selected Writings Software CD-ROM, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Life Divine, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Synthesis of Yoga, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Essays on the Gita, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Ideal of Human Unity, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Human Cycle: The Psychology of Social Development, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Human Cycle, Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self Determination, Lotus Press. The Upanishads, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Secret of the Veda, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Hymns to the Mystic Fire, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Mother, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Compilations and Secondary Literature The Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo's Teaching and Method of Practice, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Future Evolution of Man, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Essential Aurobindo – Writings of Sri Aurobindo Bhagavad Gita and Its Message, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Mind of Light, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Rebirth and Karma, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Hour of God by Sri Aurobindo, Lotus Press. Dictionary of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, (compiled by M.P. Pandit), Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Vedic Symbolism, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Powers Within, Lotus Press. Comparative studies Hemsell, Rod (Oct. 2014). The Philosophy of Evolution. Auro-e-Books, E-Book Hemsell, Rod (Dec. 2014). Sri Aurobindo and the Logic of the Infinite: Essays for the New Millennium. Auro-e-Books, E-Book Hemsell, Rod (2017). The Philosophy of Consciousness: Hegel and Sri Aurobindo. E-Book Huchzermeyer, Wilfried (Oct. 2018). Sri Aurobindo’s Commentaries on Krishna, Buddha, Christ and Ramakrishna. Their Role in the Evolution of Humanity. edition sawitri, E-Book Johnston, David T. (Nov. 2016) Jung's Global Vision: Western Psyche, Eastern Mind, With References to Sri Aurobindo, Integral Yoga, The Mother. Agio Publishing House, Johnston, David T. (Dec. 2016). Prophets in Our Midst: Jung, Tolkien, Gebser, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Universe, E-Book Singh, Satya Prakash (2013). Nature of God. A Comparative Study in Sri Aurobindo and Whitehead. Antrik Express Digital, E-Book Singh, Satya Prakash (2005). Sri Aurobindo, Jung and Vedic Yoga. Mira Aditi Centre, Eric M. Weiss (2003): The Doctrine of the Subtle Worlds. Sri Aurobindo’s Cosmology, Modern Science and the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, Dissertation (PDF; 1,3 MB), California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco See also Integral psychology References Notes Citations Bibliography Further reading (2 volumes, 1945) – written in a hagiographical style K. D. Sethna, Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo Raychaudhuri, Girijashankar.....Sri Aurobindo O Banglar Swadeshi Joog (published 1956)...this book was serially published in the journal Udbodhan and read out to Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry while he was still alive......Sri Aurobindo commented, " he will snatch away smile from my face" Ghose, Aurobindo, Nahar, S., & Institut de recherches évolutives. (2000). India's rebirth: A selection from Sri Aurobindo's writing, talks and speeches Paris: Institut de recherches évolutives. External links Sri Aurobindo Ashram Auroville Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo 1872 births 1950 deaths Bengali people Bengali Hindus 20th-century Hindu religious leaders Advaitin philosophers Anushilan Samiti Alumni of King's College, Cambridge Alumni of the University of Cambridge Bengali Hindu saints 19th-century Bengalis 20th-century Bengalis Bengali spiritual writers Spiritual evolution English-language poets from India English spiritual writers Hindu revivalists 20th-century Hindu philosophers and theologians Hindu reformers Indian Hindu yogis Integral thought Indian male essayists Indian spiritual writers Indian male poets 19th-century Indian translators Indian revolutionaries Indian civil servants Swadeshi activists People from Kolkata People from Vadodara Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda faculty People educated at St Paul's School, London Prisoners and detainees of British India 19th-century Indian philosophers 20th-century Indian philosophers 19th-century Indian poets 20th-century Indian poets 19th-century Indian non-fiction writers 20th-century Indian non-fiction writers Indian male writers English-language writers from India Bengali writers Writers from Puducherry Poets from West Bengal 20th-century Indian essayists Indian political philosophers 19th-century Indian educational theorists 20th-century Indian educational theorists Neo-Vedanta 20th-century Indian translators Scholars from Puducherry Revolutionaries of Bengal during British Rule Modern yoga gurus Scholars from West Bengal	true	[ "Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel is a satirical Dilbert book written by Scott Adams. It was originally published in 2002.\n\nPremise\nThe chief premise of the book is that everyday actions of humanity are neither consistently honest nor criminal, but rather weasel. He dissects the aspects of weasel behavior and explores its benefits and ramifications, sometimes referring to his own life experiences. The book is divided up into many sections and chapters which show different types of weasels, how to be a weasel, weasel words, and methods for countering the weasels you may encounter in everyday life.\n\nReception\nSales of the book were hampered by the backfiring of Adams' announcement that he would dedicate a strip to Dilbert having sex if the book became the number one seller on Amazon.com, a marketing promotion that Adams himself characterized as \"what will someday be hailed as the worst idea of the century.\"\n\nReferences\n\nDilbert books\n2002 books", "Dedicate (1952–1973) was an American Champion Thoroughbred racehorse.\n\nBackground\nDedicate was bred in Kentucky by the renowned Claiborne Farm, and owned by Jan Winfrey Burke. His sire was the important Princequillo, a two-time Leading sire in North America and a seven-time Leading broodmare sire in North America. He was trained by Mrs. Burke's father, future U.S. Racing Hall of Fame inductee G. Carey Winfrey.\n\nRacing career\nRacing at age two to four Dedicate won several important races including the Brooklyn and Whitney Handicaps. However, at age five he was a major force in American racing, and his 1957 performances earned him American Champion Older Male Horse honors. He was controversially named Horse of The Year by the TRA after finishing third to Bold Ruler and Gallant Man in the rival DRF poll. Bold Ruler was also preferred in a poll conducted by Turf and Sport Digest magazine.\n\nStud record\nRetired to stud, Dedicate sired a number of winners including Smart Deb, the 1962 Co-Champion 2-Two-Year-Old Filly and the multiple stakes-winning filly, Natashka. Loripori won against 2 and 3 year old fillies in Mexico, and he stood in Mexico for two seasons with Small Crops. Dedicate died in 1973 due to a heart attack whilst jogging in his paddock.\n\nReferences\n\n Dedicate's pedigree and partial racing stats\n\n1952 racehorse births\nRacehorses bred in Kentucky\nRacehorses trained in the United States\nAmerican Thoroughbred Horse of the Year\nThoroughbred family 23-b" ]
[ "Sri Aurobindo", "Pondicherry (1910-1950)", "what happened in 1910?", "In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo dedicated himself to his spiritual and philosophical pursuits.", "how did he dedicate himself?", "four years of secluded yoga," ]	C_e06b6f4885204728b9ac8cfd9c3f2a87_0	what did he learn from this?	3	What did Sri Aurobindo learn from his four years of secluded yoga?	Sri Aurobindo	In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo dedicated himself to his spiritual and philosophical pursuits. In 1914, after four years of secluded yoga, he started a monthly philosophical magazine called Arya. This ceased publication in 1921. Many years later, he revised some of these works before they were published in book form. Some of the book series derived out of this publication were The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on The Gita, The Secret of The Veda, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Upanishads, The Renaissance in India, War and Self-determination, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity and The Future Poetry were published in this magazine. At the beginning of his stay at Pondicherry, there were few followers, but with time their numbers grew, resulting in the formation of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926. From 1926 he started to sign himself as Sri Aurobindo, Sri (meaning holy in Sanskrit) being commonly used as an honorific. For some time afterwards, his main literary output was his voluminous correspondence with his disciples. His letters, most of which were written in the 1930s, numbered in the several thousands. Many were brief comments made in the margins of his disciple's notebooks in answer to their questions and reports of their spiritual practice--others extended to several pages of carefully composed explanations of practical aspects of his teachings. These were later collected and published in book form in three volumes of Letters on Yoga. In the late 1930s, he resumed work on a poem he had started earlier--he continued to expand and revise this poem for the rest of his life. It became perhaps his greatest literary achievement, Savitri, an epic spiritual poem in blank verse of approximately 24,000 lines. Sri Aurobindo left his body on 5 December 1950. Around 60,000 people attended to see his body resting peacefully. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and the President Rajendra Prasad praised him for his contribution to Yogic philosophy and the independence movement. National and international newspapers commemorated his death. CANNOTANSWER	he started a monthly philosophical magazine called Arya.	Sri Aurobindo (born Aurobindo Ghose; 15 August 1872 – 5 December 1950) was an Indian philosopher, yoga guru, maharishi, poet, and Indian nationalist. He was also a journalist, editing newspapers such as Bande Mataram. He joined the Indian movement for independence from British colonial rule, until 1910 was one of its influential leaders and then became a spiritual reformer, introducing his visions on human progress and spiritual evolution. Aurobindo studied for the Indian Civil Service at King's College, Cambridge, England. After returning to India he took up various civil service works under the Maharaja of the Princely state of Baroda and became increasingly involved in nationalist politics in the Indian National Congress and the nascent revolutionary movement in Bengal with the Anushilan Samiti. He was arrested in the aftermath of a number of bombings linked to his organization in a public trial where he faced charges of treason for Alipore Conspiracy. However Sri Aurobindo could only be convicted and imprisoned for writing articles against British colonial rule in India. He was released when no evidence could be provided, following the murder of a prosecution witness, Narendranath Goswami, during the trial. During his stay in the jail, he had mystical and spiritual experiences, after which he moved to Pondicherry, leaving politics for spiritual work. At Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo developed a spiritual practice he called Integral Yoga. The central theme of his vision was the evolution of human life into a divine life in divine body. He believed in a spiritual realisation that not only liberated but transformed human nature, enabling a divine life on earth. In 1926, with the help of his spiritual collaborator, Mirra Alfassa (referred to as "The Mother"), Sri Aurobindo Ashram was founded. His main literary works are The Life Divine, which deals with the philosophical aspect of Integral Yoga; Synthesis of Yoga, which deals with the principles and methods of Integral Yoga; and Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, an epic poem. Biography Early life Aurobindo Ghose was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), Bengal Presidency, India on 15 August 1872 in a Bengali family that was associated with the village of Konnagar in the Hooghly district of present-day West Bengal. His father, Krishna Dhun Ghose, was then assistant surgeon of Rangpur in Bengal and later civil surgeon of Khulna, and a former member of the Brahmo Samaj religious reform movement who had become enamoured with the then-new idea of evolution while pursuing medical studies in Edinburgh. His mother Swarnalata Devi's father Shri Rajnarayan Bose was a leading figure in the Samaj. She had been sent to the more salubrious surroundings of Calcutta for Aurobindo's birth. Aurobindo had two elder siblings, Benoybhusan and Manmohan, a younger sister, Sarojini, and a younger brother, Barindra Kumar (also referred to as Barin). Young Aurobindo was brought up speaking English, but used Hindustani to communicate with servants. Although his family were Bengali, his father believed British culture to be superior. He and his two elder siblings were sent to the English-speaking Loreto House boarding school in Darjeeling, in part to improve their language skills and in part to distance them from their mother, who had developed a mental illness soon after the birth of her first child. Darjeeling was a centre of Anglo-Indians in India and the school was run by Irish nuns, through which the boys would have been exposed to Christian religious teachings and symbolism. England (1879–1893) Krishna Dhun Ghose wanted his sons to enter the Indian Civil Service (ICS), an elite organisation comprising around 1000 people. To achieve this it was necessary that they study in England and so it was there that the entire family moved in 1879. The three brothers were placed in the care of the Reverend W. H. Drewett in Manchester. Drewett was a minister of the Congregational Church whom Krishna Dhun Ghose knew through his British friends at Rangpur. The boys were taught Latin by Drewett and his wife. This was a prerequisite for admission to good English schools and, after two years, in 1881, the elder two siblings were enrolled at Manchester Grammar School. Aurobindo was considered too young for enrolment, and he continued his studies with the Drewetts, learning history, Latin, French, geography and arithmetic. Although the Drewetts were told not to teach religion, the boys inevitably were exposed to Christian teachings and events, which generally bored Aurobindo and sometimes repulsed him. There was little contact with his father, who wrote only a few letters to his sons while they were in England, but what communication there was indicated that he was becoming less endeared to the British in India than he had been, on one occasion describing the British colonial government as "heartless". Drewett emigrated to Australia in 1884, causing the boys to be uprooted as they went to live with Drewett's mother in London. In September of that year, Aurobindo and Manmohan joined St Paul's School there. He learned Greek and spent the last three years reading literature and English poetry, while he also acquired some familiarity with the German and Italian languages; Peter Heehs resumes his linguistic abilities by stating that at "the turn of the century he knew at least twelve languages: English, French, and Bengali to speak, read, and write; Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit to read and write; Gujarati, Marathi, and Hindi to speak and read; and Italian, German, and Spanish to read." Being exposed to the evangelical structures of Drewett's mother developed in him a distaste for religion, and he considered himself at one point to be an atheist but later determined that he was agnostic. A blue plaque unveiled in 2007 commemorates Aurobindo's residence at 49 St Stephen's Avenue in Shepherd's Bush, London, from 1884 to 1887. The three brothers began living in spartan circumstances at the Liberal Club in South Kensington during 1887, their father having experienced some financial difficulties. The club's secretary was James Cotton, brother of their father's friend in the Bengal ICS, Henry Cotton. By 1889, Manmohan had determined to pursue a literary career and Benoybhusan had proved himself unequal to the standards necessary for ICS entrance. This meant that only Aurobindo might fulfill his father's aspirations but to do so when his father lacked money required that he studied hard for a scholarship. To become an ICS official, students were required to pass the competitive examination, as well as to study at an English university for two years under probation. Aurobindo secured a scholarship at King's College, Cambridge, under recommendation of Oscar Browning. He passed the written ICS examination after a few months, being ranked 11th out of 250 competitors. He spent the next two years at King's College. Aurobindo had no interest in the ICS and came late to the horse-riding practical exam purposefully to get himself disqualified for the service. At this time, the Maharaja of Baroda, Sayajirao Gaekwad III, was travelling in England. Cotton secured for him a place in Baroda State Service and arranged for him to meet the prince. He left England for India, arriving there in February 1893. In India, Krishna Dhun Ghose, who was waiting to receive his son, was misinformed by his agents from Bombay (now Mumbai) that the ship on which Aurobindo had been travelling had sunk off the coast of Portugal. His father died upon hearing this news. Baroda and Calcutta (1893–1910) In Baroda, Aurobindo joined the state service in 1893, working first in the Survey and Settlements department, later moving to the Department of Revenue and then to the Secretariat, and much miscellaneous work like teaching grammar and assisting in writing speeches for the Maharaja of Gaekwad until 1897. In 1897 during his work in Baroda, he started working as a part-time French teacher at Baroda College (now Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda). He was later promoted to the post of vice-principal. At Baroda, Aurobindo self-studied Sanskrit and Bengali. During his stay at Baroda, he had contributed to many articles to Indu Prakash and had spoken as a chairman of the Baroda college board. He started taking an active interest in the politics of the Indian independence movement against British colonial rule, working behind the scenes as his position in the Baroda state administration barred him from an overt political activity. He linked up with resistance groups in Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, while travelling to these states. Aurobindo established contact with Lokmanya Tilak and Sister Nivedita. Aurobindo often travelled between Baroda and Bengal, at first in a bid to re-establish links with his parent's families and other Bengali relatives, including his sister Sarojini and brother Barin, and later increased to establish resistance groups across the Presidency. He formally moved to Calcutta in 1906 after the announcement of the Partition of Bengal. In 1901, on a visit to Calcutta, he married 14-year-old Mrinalini, the daughter of Bhupal Chandra Bose, a senior official in government service. Aurobindo was 28 at that time. Mrinalini died seventeen years later in December 1918 during the influenza pandemic. In 1906, Aurobindo was appointed the first principal of the National College in Calcutta, started to impart national education to Indian youth. He resigned from this position in August 1907, due to his increased political activity. The National College continues to the present as Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Aurobindo was influenced by studies on rebellion and revolutions against England in medieval France and the revolts in America and Italy. In his public activities, he favored Non cooperation and Passive resistance; in private he took up secret revolutionary activity as a preparation for open revolt, in case that the passive revolt failed. In Bengal, with Barin's help, he established contacts and inspired revolutionaries such as Bagha Jatin or Jatin Mukherjee and Surendranath Tagore. He helped establish a series of youth clubs, including the Anushilan Samiti of Calcutta in 1902. Aurobindo attended the 1906 Congress meeting headed by Dadabhai Naoroji and participated as a councilor in forming the fourfold objectives of "Swaraj, Swadesh, Boycott, and national education". In 1907 at the Surat session of Congress where moderates and extremists had a major showdown, he led along with extremists along with Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The Congress split after this session. In 1907–1908 Aurobindo travelled extensively to Pune, Bombay and Baroda to firm up support for the nationalist cause, giving speeches and meeting with groups. He was arrested again in May 1908 in connection with the Alipore Bomb Case. He was acquitted in the ensuing trial, following the murder of chief prosecution witness Naren Goswami within jail premises, which subsequently led to the case against him collapsing. Aurobindo was subsequently released after a year of isolated incarceration. Once out of the prison he started two new publications, Karmayogin in English and Dharma in Bengali. He also delivered the, Uttarpara Speech hinting at the transformation of his focus to spiritual matters. Repression from the British colonial government against him continued because of his writings in his new journals and in April 1910 Aurobindo moved to Pondicherry, where the British colonial secret police monitored his activities. Conversion from politics to spirituality In July 1905 then Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, partitioned Bengal. This sparked an outburst of public anger against the British, leading to civil unrest and a nationalist campaign by groups of revolutionaries that included Aurobindo. In 1908, Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki attempted to kill Magistrate Kingsford, a judge known for handing down particularly severe sentences against nationalists. However, the bomb thrown at his horse carriage missed its target and instead landed in another carriage and killed two British women, the wife and daughter of barrister Pringle Kennedy. Aurobindo was also arrested on charges of planning and overseeing the attack and imprisoned in solitary confinement in Alipore Jail. The trial of the Alipore Bomb Case lasted for a year, but eventually, he was acquitted on 6 May 1909. His defense counsel was Chittaranjan Das. During this period in the Jail, his view of life was radically changed due to spiritual experiences and realizations. Consequently, his aim went far beyond the service and liberation of the country. Aurobindo said he was "visited" by Vivekananda in the Alipore Jail: "It is a fact that I was hearing constantly the voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence." In his autobiographical notes, Aurobindo said he felt a vast sense of calmness when he first came back to India. He could not explain this and continued to have various such experiences from time to time. He knew nothing of yoga at that time and started his practice of it without a teacher, except for some rules that he learned from Mr. Devadhar, a friend who was a disciple of Swami Brahmananda of Ganga Math, Chandod. In 1907, Barin introduced Aurobindo to Vishnu Bhaskar Lele, a Maharashtrian yogi. Aurobindo was influenced by the guidance he got from the yogi, who had instructed Aurobindo to depend on an inner guide and any kind of external guru or guidance would not be required. In 1910 Aurobindo withdrew himself from all political activities and went into hiding at Chandannagar in the house of Motilal Roy, while the British colonial government were attempting to prosecute him for sedition on the basis of a signed article titled 'To My Countrymen', published in Karmayogin. As Aurobindo disappeared from view, the warrant was held back and the prosecution postponed. Aurobindo manoeuvred the police into open action and a warrant was issued on 4 April 1910, but the warrant could not be executed because on that date he had reached Pondicherry, then a French colony. The warrant against Aurobindo was withdrawn. Pondicherry (1910–1950) In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo dedicated himself to his spiritual and philosophical pursuits. In 1914, after four years of secluded yoga, he started a monthly philosophical magazine called Arya. This ceased publication in 1921. Many years later, he revised some of these works before they were published in book form. Some of the book series derived out of this publication was The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on The Gita, The Secret of The Veda, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Upanishads, The Renaissance in India, War and Self-determination, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity and The Future Poetry were published in this magazine. At the beginning of his stay at Pondicherry, there were few followers, but with time their numbers grew, resulting in the formation of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926. From 1926 he started to sign himself as Sri Aurobindo, Sri being commonly used as an honorific. For some time afterwards, his main literary output was his voluminous correspondence with his disciples. His letters, most of which were written in the 1930s, numbered in the several thousand. Many were brief comments made in the margins of his disciple's notebooks in answer to their questions and reports of their spiritual practice—others extended to several pages of carefully composed explanations of practical aspects of his teachings. These were later collected and published in book form in three volumes of Letters on Yoga. In the late 1930s, he resumed work on a poem he had started earlier—he continued to expand and revise this poem for the rest of his life. It became perhaps his greatest literary achievement, Savitri, an epic spiritual poem in blank verse of approximately 24,000 lines. On 15 August 1947, Sri Aurobindo strongly opposed the partition of India, stating that he hoped "the Nation will not accept the settled fact as for ever settled, or as anything more than a temporary expedient." Sri Aurobindo was nominated twice for the Nobel prize without it being awarded, in 1943 for the Nobel award in Literature and in 1950 for the Nobel award in Peace. Sri Aurobindo died on 5 December 1950, of uremia. Around 60,000 people attended to see his body resting peacefully. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and the President Rajendra Prasad praised him for his contribution to Yogic philosophy and the independence movement. National and international newspapers commemorated his death. Mirra Alfassa (The Mother) and the development of the Ashram Sri Aurobindo's close spiritual collaborator, Mirra Alfassa (born Alfassa), came to be known as The Mother. She was a French national, born in Paris on 21 February 1878. In her 20s she studied occultism with Max Theon. Along with her husband, Paul Richard, she went to Pondicherry on 29 March 1914, and finally settled there in 1920. Sri Aurobindo considered her his spiritual equal and collaborator. After 24 November 1926, when Sri Aurobindo retired into seclusion, he left it to her to plan, build and run the ashram, the community of disciples which had gathered around them. Sometime later, when families with children joined the ashram, she established and supervised the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education with its experiments in the field of education. When he died in 1950, she continued their spiritual work, directed the ashram, and guided their disciples. Philosophy and spiritual vision Introduction Sri Aurobindo's concept of the Integral Yoga system is described in his books, The Synthesis of Yoga and The Life Divine. The Life Divine is a compilation of essays published serially in Arya. Sri Aurobindo argues that divine Brahman manifests as empirical reality through līlā, or divine play. Instead of positing that the world we experience is an illusion (māyā), Aurobindo argues that world can evolve and become a new world with new species, far above the human species just as human species have evolved after the animal species. As such he argued that the end goal of spiritual practice could not merely be a liberation from the world into Samadhi but would also be that of descent of the Divine into the world in order to transform it into a Divine existence. Thus, this constituted the purpose of Integral Yoga. Regarding the involution of consciousness in matter, he wrote that: "This descent, this sacrifice of the Purusha, the Divine Soul submitting itself to Force and Matter so that it may inform and illuminate them is the seed of redemption of this world of Inconscience and Ignorance." Sri Aurobindo believed that Darwinism merely describes a phenomenon of the evolution of matter into life, but does not explain the reason behind it, while he finds life to be already present in matter, because all of existence is a manifestation of Brahman. He argues that nature (which he interpreted as divine) has evolved life out of matter and the mind out of life. All of existence, he argues, is attempting to manifest to the level of the supermind – that evolution had a purpose. He stated that he found the task of understanding the nature of reality arduous and difficult to justify by immediate tangible results. Supermind At the centre of Aurobindo's metaphysical system is the supermind, an intermediary power between the unmanifested Brahman and the manifested world. Aurobindo claims that the supermind is not completely alien to us and can be realized within ourselves as it is always present within mind since the latter is in reality identical with the former and contains it as a potentiality within itself. Aurobindo does not portray supermind as an original invention of his own but believes it can be found in the Vedas and that the Vedic Gods represent powers of the supermind In The Integral Yoga he declares that "By the supermind is meant the full Truth-Consciousness of the Divine Nature in which there can be no place for the principle of division and ignorance; it is always a full light and knowledge superior to all mental substance or mental movement." Supermind is a bridge between Sachchidananda and the lower manifestation and it is only through the supramental that mind, life and body can be spiritually transformed as opposed to through Sachchidananda The descent of supermind will mean the creation of a supramental race Affinity with Western philosophy In his writings, talks, and letters Sri Aurobindo has referred to several European philosophers with whose basic concepts he was familiar, commenting on their ideas and discussing the question of affinity to his own line of thought. Thus, he wrote a long essay on the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and mentioned especially Plato, Plotinus, Nietzsche and Bergson as thinkers in whom he was interested because of their more intuitive approach. On the other hand, he felt little attraction for the philosophy of Kant or Hegel. Several studies have shown a remarkable closeness to the evolutionary thought of Teilhard de Chardin, whom he did not know, whereas the latter came to know of Sri Aurobindo at a late stage. After reading some chapters of The Life Divine, he is reported to have said that Sri Aurobindo's vision of evolution was basically the same as his own, though stated for Asian readers. Several scholars have discovered significant similarities in the thought of Sri Aurobindo and Hegel. Steve Odin has discussed this subject comprehensively in a comparative study. Odin writes that Sri Aurobindo "has appropriated Hegel’s notion of an Absolute Spirit and employed it to radically restructure the architectonic framework of the ancient Hindu Vedanta system in contemporary terms." In his analysis Odin arrives at the conclusion that "both philosophers similarly envision world creation as the progressive self-manifestation and evolutionary ascent of a universal consciousness in its journey toward Self-realization." He points out that in contrast to the deterministic and continuous dialectal unfolding of Absolute Reason by the mechanism of thesis-antithesis-synthesis or affirmation-negation-integration, "Sri Aurobindo argues for a creative, emergent mode of evolution." In his résumé Odin states that Sri Aurobindo has overcome the ahistorical world-vision of traditional Hinduism and presented a concept which allows for a genuine advance and novelty. Importance of the Upanishads Although Sri Aurobindo was familiar with the most important lines of thought in Western philosophy, he did not acknowledge their influence on his own writings. He wrote that his philosophy "was formed first by the study of the Upanishads and the Gita… They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga." With the help of his readings he tried to move on to actual experience, "and it was on this experience that later on I founded my philosophy, not on ideas themselves." He assumes that the seers of the Upanishads had basically the same approach and gives some details of his vision of the past in a long passage in The Renaissance of India. "The Upanishads have been the acknowledged source of numerous profound philosophies and religions," he writes. Even Buddhism with all its developments was only a "restatement" from a new standpoint and with fresh terms. And, furthermore, the ideas of the Upanishads "can be rediscovered in much of the thought of Pythagoras and Plato and form the profound part of Neo-platonism and Gnosticism..." Finally, the larger part of German metaphysics "is little more in substance than an intellectual development of great realities more spiritually seen in this ancient teaching." When once he was asked by a disciple whether Plato got some of his ideas from Indian books, he responded that though something of the philosophy of India got through "by means of Pythagoras and others", he assumed that Plato got most of his ideas from intuition. Sri Aurobindo's indebtedness to the Indian tradition also becomes obvious through his placing a large number of quotations from the Rig Veda, the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita at the beginning of the chapters in The Life Divine, showing the connection of his own thought to Veda and Vedanta. The Isha Upanishad is considered to be one of the most important and more accessible writings of Sri Aurobindo. Before he published his final translation and analysis, he wrote ten incomplete commentaries. In a key passage he points out that the Brahman or Absolute is both the Stable and the Moving. "We must see it in eternal and immutable Spirit and in all the changing manifestations of universe and relativity." Sri Aurobindo's biographer K.R.S. Iyengar quotes R.S. Mugali as stating that Sri Aurobindo might have obtained in this Upanishad the thought-seed which later grew into The Life Divine. Synthesis and integration Sisir Kumar Maitra, who was a leading exponent of Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy, has referred to the issue of external influences and written that Sri Aurobindo does not mention names, but "as one reads his books one cannot fail to notice how thorough is his grasp of the great Western philosophers of the present age..." Although he is Indian one should not "underrate the influence of Western thought upon him. This influence is there, very clearly visible, but Sri Aurobindo... has not allowed himself to be dominated by it. He has made full use of Western thought, but he has made use of it for the purpose of building up his own system..." Thus Maitra, like Steve Odin, sees Sri Aurobindo not only in the tradition and context of Indian, but also Western philosophy and assumes he may have adopted some elements from the latter for his synthesis. R. Puligandla supports this viewpoint in his book Fundamentals of Indian Philosophy. He describes Sri Aurobindo's philosophy as "an original synthesis of the Indian and Western traditions." "He integrates in a unique fashion the great social, political and scientific achievements of the modern West with the ancient and profound spiritual insights of Hinduism. The vision that powers the life divine of Aurobindo is none other than the Upanishadic vision of the unity of all existence." Puligandla also discusses Sri Aurobindo's critical position vis-à-vis Shankara and his thesis that the latter's Vedanta is a world-negating philosophy, as it teaches that the world is unreal and illusory. From Puligandla's standpoint this is a misrepresentation of Shankara's position, which may have been caused by Sri Aurobindo's endeavour to synthesize Hindu and Western modes of thought, identifying Shankara's Mayavada with the subjective idealism of George Berkeley. However, Sri Aurobindo's critique of Shankara is supported by U. C. Dubey in his paper titled Integralism: The Distinctive Feature of Sri Aurobindo’s Philosophy. He points out that Sri Aurobindo's system presents an integral view of Reality where there is no opposition between the Absolute and its creative force, as they are actually one. Furthermore, he refers to Sri Aurobindo's conception of the supermind as the mediatory principle between the Absolute and the finite world and quotes S.K. Maitra stating that this conception "is the pivot round which the whole of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy moves." Dubey proceeds to analyse the approach of the Shankarites and believes that they follow an inadequate kind of logic that does not do justice to the challenge of tackling the problem of the Absolute, which cannot be known by finite reason. With the help of the finite reason, he says, "we are bound to determine the nature of reality as one or many, being or becoming. But Sri Aurobindo's Integral Advaitism reconciles all apparently different aspects of Existence in an all-embracing unity of the Absolute." Next, Dubey explains that for Sri Aurobindo there is a higher reason, the "logic of the infinite" in which his integralism is rooted. Legacy Sri Aurobindo was an Indian nationalist but is best known for his philosophy on human evolution and Integral Yoga. Influence His influence has been wide-ranging. In India, S. K. Maitra, Anilbaran Roy and D. P. Chattopadhyaya commented on Sri Aurobindo's work. Writers on esotericism and traditional wisdom, such as Mircea Eliade, Paul Brunton, and Rene Guenon, all saw him as an authentic representative of the Indian spiritual tradition. Though Rene Guenon thought Sri Aurobindo's thoughts were betrayed by some of his followers and that some works published under his name were not authentic, since not traditional. Haridas Chaudhuri and Frederic Spiegelberg were among those who were inspired by Aurobindo, who worked on the newly formed American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. Soon after, Chaudhuri and his wife Bina established the Cultural Integration Fellowship, from which later emerged the California Institute of Integral Studies. Sri Aurobindo influenced Subhash Chandra Bose to take an initiative of dedicating to Indian National Movement full-time. Bose writes, "The illustrious example of Arabindo Ghosh looms large before my vision. I feel that I am ready to make the sacrifice which that example demands of me." Karlheinz Stockhausen was heavily inspired by Satprem's writings about Sri Aurobindo during a week in May 1968, a time at which the composer was undergoing a personal crisis and had found Sri Aurobindo's philosophies were relevant to his feelings. After this experience, Stockhausen's music took a completely different turn, focusing on mysticism, that was to continue until the end of his career. Jean Gebser acknowledged Sri Aurobindo's influence on his work and referred to him several times in his writings. Thus, in The Invisible Origin he quotes a long passage from The Synthesis of Yoga. Gebser believes that he was "in some way brought into the extremely powerful spiritual field of force radiating through Sri Aurobindo." In his title Asia Smiles Differently he reports about his visit to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and meeting with the Mother whom he calls an "exceptionally gifted person." After meeting Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry in 1915, the Danish author and artist Johannes Hohlenberg published one of the first Yoga titles in Europe and later on wrote two essays on Sri Aurobindo. He also published extracts from The Life Divine in Danish translation. William Irwin Thompson travelled to Auroville in 1972, where he met "The Mother". Thompson has called Sri Aurobindo's teaching on spirituality a "radical anarchism" and a "post-religious approach" and regards their work as having "... reached back into the Goddess culture of prehistory, and, in Marshall McLuhan's terms, 'culturally retrieved' the archetypes of the shaman and la sage femme... " Thompson also writes that he experienced Shakti, or psychic power coming from The Mother on the night of her death in 1973. Sri Aurobindo's ideas about the further evolution of human capabilities influenced the thinking of Michael Murphy – and indirectly, the human potential movement, through Murphy's writings. The American philosopher Ken Wilber has called Sri Aurobindo "India's greatest modern philosopher sage" and has integrated some of his ideas into his philosophical vision. Wilber's interpretation of Aurobindo has been criticised by Rod Hemsell. New Age writer Andrew Harvey also looks to Sri Aurobindo as a major inspiration. Followers The following authors, disciples and organisations trace their intellectual heritage back to, or have in some measure been influenced by, Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Nolini Kanta Gupta (1889–1983) was one of Sri Aurobindo's senior disciples, and wrote extensively on philosophy, mysticism, and spiritual evolution based on the teaching of Sri Aurobindo and "The Mother". Nirodbaran (1903–2006). A doctor who obtained his medical degree from Edinburgh, his long and voluminous correspondence with Sri Aurobindo elaborate on many aspects of Integral Yoga and fastidious record of conversations bring out Sri Aurobindo's thought on numerous subjects. M. P. Pandit (1918–1993). Secretary to "The Mother" and the ashram, his copious writings and lectures cover Yoga, the Vedas, Tantra, Sri Aubindo's epic "Savitri" and others. Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) joined the ashram in 1944. Later, he wrote the play about Sri Aurobindo's life – Sri Aurobindo: Descent of the Blue – and a book, Infinite: Sri Aurobindo. An author, composer, artist and athlete, he was perhaps best known for holding public events on the theme of inner peace and world harmony (such as concerts, meditations, and races). Pavitra (1894–1969) was one of their early disciples. Born as Philippe Barbier Saint-Hilaire in Paris. Pavitra left some very interesting memoirs of his conversations with them in 1925 and 1926, which were published as Conversations avec Pavitra. Dilipkumar Roy (1897–1980) was a Bengali Indian musician, musicologist, novelist, poet and essayist. T.V. Kapali Sastry (1886–1953) was an eminent author and Sanskrit scholar. He joined the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1929 and wrote books and articles in four languages, exploring especially Sri Aurobindo's Vedic interpretations. Satprem (1923–2007) was a French author and an important disciple of "The Mother" who published Mother's Agenda (1982), Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness (2000), On the Way to Supermanhood (2002) and more. Indra Sen (1903–1994) was another disciple of Sri Aurobindo who, although little-known in the West, was the first to articulate integral psychology and integral philosophy, in the 1940s and 1950s. A compilation of his papers came out under the title, Integral Psychology in 1986. K. D. Sethna (1904–2011) was an Indian poet, scholar, writer, cultural critic and disciple of Sri Aurobindo. For several decades he was the editor of the Ashram journal Mother India. Margaret Woodrow Wilson (Nistha) (1886–1944), daughter of US President Woodrow Wilson, she came to the ashram in 1938 and stayed there until her death. She helped to prepare a revised edition of The Life Divine. Critics Adi Da finds that Sri Aurobindo's contributions were merely literary and cultural and had extended his political motivation into spirituality and human evolution N. R. Malkani finds Sri Aurobindo's theory of creation to be false, as the theory talks about experiences and visions which are beyond normal human experiences. He says the theory is an intellectual response to a difficult problem and that Sri Aurobindo uses the trait of unpredictability in theorising and discussing things not based upon the truth of existence. Malkani says that awareness is already a reality and suggests there would be no need to examine the creative activity subjected to awareness. Ken Wilber's interpretation of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy differed from the notion of dividing reality as a different level of matter, life, mind, overmind, supermind proposed by Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine, and terms them as higher- or lower-nested holons and states that there is only a fourfold reality (a system of reality created by himself). Rajneesh (Osho) says that Sri Aurobindo was a great scholar but was never realised; that his personal ego had made him indirectly claim that he went beyond the Buddha; and that he is said to have believed himself to be enlightened due to increasing number of followers. In popular culture The 1970 Indian Bengali-language biographical drama film Mahabiplabi Aurobindo, directed by Dipak Gupta, depicted Sri Aurobindo's life on screen. On the 72nd Republic Day of India, the Ministry of Culture presented a tableau on his life. Literature Indian editions A first edition of collected works was published in 1972 in 30 volumes: Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL), Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. A new edition of collected works was started in 1995. Currently, 36 out of 37 volumes have been published: Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA). Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Early Cultural Writings. Collected Poems. Collected Plays and Stories. Karmayogin. Records of Yoga. Vedic and Philological Studies. The Secrets of the Veda. Hymns to the Mystic Fire. Isha Upanishad. Kena and Other Upanishads. Essays on the Gita. The Renaissance of India with a Defence of Indian Culture. The Life Divine. The Synthesis of Yoga. The Human Cycle – The Ideal of Human Unity – War and Self-Determination. The Future Poetry. Letters on Poetry and Art Letters on Yoga. The Mother Savitri – A Legend and a Symbol. Letters on Himself and the Ashram. Autobiographical Notes and Other Writings of Historical Interest. American edition Main Works Sri Aurobindo Primary Works Set 12 vol. US Edition, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Sri Aurobindo Selected Writings Software CD-ROM, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Life Divine, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Synthesis of Yoga, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Essays on the Gita, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Ideal of Human Unity, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Human Cycle: The Psychology of Social Development, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Human Cycle, Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self Determination, Lotus Press. The Upanishads, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Secret of the Veda, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Hymns to the Mystic Fire, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Mother, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Compilations and Secondary Literature The Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo's Teaching and Method of Practice, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Future Evolution of Man, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Essential Aurobindo – Writings of Sri Aurobindo Bhagavad Gita and Its Message, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Mind of Light, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Rebirth and Karma, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Hour of God by Sri Aurobindo, Lotus Press. Dictionary of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, (compiled by M.P. Pandit), Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Vedic Symbolism, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Powers Within, Lotus Press. Comparative studies Hemsell, Rod (Oct. 2014). The Philosophy of Evolution. Auro-e-Books, E-Book Hemsell, Rod (Dec. 2014). Sri Aurobindo and the Logic of the Infinite: Essays for the New Millennium. Auro-e-Books, E-Book Hemsell, Rod (2017). The Philosophy of Consciousness: Hegel and Sri Aurobindo. E-Book Huchzermeyer, Wilfried (Oct. 2018). Sri Aurobindo’s Commentaries on Krishna, Buddha, Christ and Ramakrishna. Their Role in the Evolution of Humanity. edition sawitri, E-Book Johnston, David T. (Nov. 2016) Jung's Global Vision: Western Psyche, Eastern Mind, With References to Sri Aurobindo, Integral Yoga, The Mother. Agio Publishing House, Johnston, David T. (Dec. 2016). Prophets in Our Midst: Jung, Tolkien, Gebser, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Universe, E-Book Singh, Satya Prakash (2013). Nature of God. A Comparative Study in Sri Aurobindo and Whitehead. Antrik Express Digital, E-Book Singh, Satya Prakash (2005). Sri Aurobindo, Jung and Vedic Yoga. Mira Aditi Centre, Eric M. Weiss (2003): The Doctrine of the Subtle Worlds. Sri Aurobindo’s Cosmology, Modern Science and the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, Dissertation (PDF; 1,3 MB), California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco See also Integral psychology References Notes Citations Bibliography Further reading (2 volumes, 1945) – written in a hagiographical style K. D. Sethna, Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo Raychaudhuri, Girijashankar.....Sri Aurobindo O Banglar Swadeshi Joog (published 1956)...this book was serially published in the journal Udbodhan and read out to Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry while he was still alive......Sri Aurobindo commented, " he will snatch away smile from my face" Ghose, Aurobindo, Nahar, S., & Institut de recherches évolutives. (2000). India's rebirth: A selection from Sri Aurobindo's writing, talks and speeches Paris: Institut de recherches évolutives. External links Sri Aurobindo Ashram Auroville Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo 1872 births 1950 deaths Bengali people Bengali Hindus 20th-century Hindu religious leaders Advaitin philosophers Anushilan Samiti Alumni of King's College, Cambridge Alumni of the University of Cambridge Bengali Hindu saints 19th-century Bengalis 20th-century Bengalis Bengali spiritual writers Spiritual evolution English-language poets from India English spiritual writers Hindu revivalists 20th-century Hindu philosophers and theologians Hindu reformers Indian Hindu yogis Integral thought Indian male essayists Indian spiritual writers Indian male poets 19th-century Indian translators Indian revolutionaries Indian civil servants Swadeshi activists People from Kolkata People from Vadodara Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda faculty People educated at St Paul's School, London Prisoners and detainees of British India 19th-century Indian philosophers 20th-century Indian philosophers 19th-century Indian poets 20th-century Indian poets 19th-century Indian non-fiction writers 20th-century Indian non-fiction writers Indian male writers English-language writers from India Bengali writers Writers from Puducherry Poets from West Bengal 20th-century Indian essayists Indian political philosophers 19th-century Indian educational theorists 20th-century Indian educational theorists Neo-Vedanta 20th-century Indian translators Scholars from Puducherry Revolutionaries of Bengal during British Rule Modern yoga gurus Scholars from West Bengal	true	[ "The situation, task, action, result (STAR) format is a technique used by interviewers to gather all the relevant information about a specific capability that the job requires. \n\n Situation: The interviewer wants you to present a recent challenging situation in which you found yourself.\n Task: What were you required to achieve? The interviewer will be looking to see what you were trying to achieve from the situation. Some performance development methods use “Target” rather than “Task”. Job interview candidates who describe a “Target” they set themselves instead of an externally imposed “Task” emphasize their own intrinsic motivation to perform and to develop their performance.\n Action: What did you do? The interviewer will be looking for information on what you did, why you did it and what the alternatives were.\n Results: What was the outcome of your actions? What did you achieve through your actions? Did you meet your objectives? What did you learn from this experience? Have you used this learning since?\n\nThe STAR technique is similar to the SOARA technique.\n\nThe STAR technique is also often complemented with an additional R on the end STARR or STAR(R) with the last R resembling reflection. This R aims to gather insight and interviewee's ability to learn and iterate. Whereas the STAR reveals how and what kind of result on an objective was achieved, the STARR with the additional R helps the interviewer to understand what the interviewee learned from the experience and how they would assimilate experiences. The interviewee can define what they would do (differently, the same, or better) next time being posed with a situation.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nThe ‘STAR’ technique to answer behavioral interview questions\nThe STAR method explained\n\nJob interview", "SOARA (Situation, Objective, Action, Results, Aftermath) is a job interview technique developed by Hagymas Laszlo, Professor of Language at the University of Munich, and Alexander Botos, Chief Curator at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. It is similar to the Situation, Task, Action, Result technique. In many interviews, SOARA is used as a structure for clarifying information relating to a recent challenge.\n\nDetails\n\n Situation: The interviewer wants you to present a recent challenge and situation you found yourself in.\n Objective: What did you have to achieve? The interviewer will be looking to see what you were trying to achieve from the situation.\n Action: What did you do? The interviewer will be looking for information on what you did, why you did it and what were the alternatives.\n Results: What was the outcome of your actions? What did you achieve through your actions and did you meet your objectives.\n Aftermath: What did you learn from this experience and have you used this learning since?\n\nJob interview" ]
[ "Sri Aurobindo", "Pondicherry (1910-1950)", "what happened in 1910?", "In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo dedicated himself to his spiritual and philosophical pursuits.", "how did he dedicate himself?", "four years of secluded yoga,", "what did he learn from this?", "he started a monthly philosophical magazine called Arya." ]	C_e06b6f4885204728b9ac8cfd9c3f2a87_0	was the magazine successful?	4	Was Sri Aurobindo's magazine Arya successful?	Sri Aurobindo	In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo dedicated himself to his spiritual and philosophical pursuits. In 1914, after four years of secluded yoga, he started a monthly philosophical magazine called Arya. This ceased publication in 1921. Many years later, he revised some of these works before they were published in book form. Some of the book series derived out of this publication were The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on The Gita, The Secret of The Veda, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Upanishads, The Renaissance in India, War and Self-determination, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity and The Future Poetry were published in this magazine. At the beginning of his stay at Pondicherry, there were few followers, but with time their numbers grew, resulting in the formation of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926. From 1926 he started to sign himself as Sri Aurobindo, Sri (meaning holy in Sanskrit) being commonly used as an honorific. For some time afterwards, his main literary output was his voluminous correspondence with his disciples. His letters, most of which were written in the 1930s, numbered in the several thousands. Many were brief comments made in the margins of his disciple's notebooks in answer to their questions and reports of their spiritual practice--others extended to several pages of carefully composed explanations of practical aspects of his teachings. These were later collected and published in book form in three volumes of Letters on Yoga. In the late 1930s, he resumed work on a poem he had started earlier--he continued to expand and revise this poem for the rest of his life. It became perhaps his greatest literary achievement, Savitri, an epic spiritual poem in blank verse of approximately 24,000 lines. Sri Aurobindo left his body on 5 December 1950. Around 60,000 people attended to see his body resting peacefully. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and the President Rajendra Prasad praised him for his contribution to Yogic philosophy and the independence movement. National and international newspapers commemorated his death. CANNOTANSWER	This ceased publication in 1921.	Sri Aurobindo (born Aurobindo Ghose; 15 August 1872 – 5 December 1950) was an Indian philosopher, yoga guru, maharishi, poet, and Indian nationalist. He was also a journalist, editing newspapers such as Bande Mataram. He joined the Indian movement for independence from British colonial rule, until 1910 was one of its influential leaders and then became a spiritual reformer, introducing his visions on human progress and spiritual evolution. Aurobindo studied for the Indian Civil Service at King's College, Cambridge, England. After returning to India he took up various civil service works under the Maharaja of the Princely state of Baroda and became increasingly involved in nationalist politics in the Indian National Congress and the nascent revolutionary movement in Bengal with the Anushilan Samiti. He was arrested in the aftermath of a number of bombings linked to his organization in a public trial where he faced charges of treason for Alipore Conspiracy. However Sri Aurobindo could only be convicted and imprisoned for writing articles against British colonial rule in India. He was released when no evidence could be provided, following the murder of a prosecution witness, Narendranath Goswami, during the trial. During his stay in the jail, he had mystical and spiritual experiences, after which he moved to Pondicherry, leaving politics for spiritual work. At Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo developed a spiritual practice he called Integral Yoga. The central theme of his vision was the evolution of human life into a divine life in divine body. He believed in a spiritual realisation that not only liberated but transformed human nature, enabling a divine life on earth. In 1926, with the help of his spiritual collaborator, Mirra Alfassa (referred to as "The Mother"), Sri Aurobindo Ashram was founded. His main literary works are The Life Divine, which deals with the philosophical aspect of Integral Yoga; Synthesis of Yoga, which deals with the principles and methods of Integral Yoga; and Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, an epic poem. Biography Early life Aurobindo Ghose was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), Bengal Presidency, India on 15 August 1872 in a Bengali family that was associated with the village of Konnagar in the Hooghly district of present-day West Bengal. His father, Krishna Dhun Ghose, was then assistant surgeon of Rangpur in Bengal and later civil surgeon of Khulna, and a former member of the Brahmo Samaj religious reform movement who had become enamoured with the then-new idea of evolution while pursuing medical studies in Edinburgh. His mother Swarnalata Devi's father Shri Rajnarayan Bose was a leading figure in the Samaj. She had been sent to the more salubrious surroundings of Calcutta for Aurobindo's birth. Aurobindo had two elder siblings, Benoybhusan and Manmohan, a younger sister, Sarojini, and a younger brother, Barindra Kumar (also referred to as Barin). Young Aurobindo was brought up speaking English, but used Hindustani to communicate with servants. Although his family were Bengali, his father believed British culture to be superior. He and his two elder siblings were sent to the English-speaking Loreto House boarding school in Darjeeling, in part to improve their language skills and in part to distance them from their mother, who had developed a mental illness soon after the birth of her first child. Darjeeling was a centre of Anglo-Indians in India and the school was run by Irish nuns, through which the boys would have been exposed to Christian religious teachings and symbolism. England (1879–1893) Krishna Dhun Ghose wanted his sons to enter the Indian Civil Service (ICS), an elite organisation comprising around 1000 people. To achieve this it was necessary that they study in England and so it was there that the entire family moved in 1879. The three brothers were placed in the care of the Reverend W. H. Drewett in Manchester. Drewett was a minister of the Congregational Church whom Krishna Dhun Ghose knew through his British friends at Rangpur. The boys were taught Latin by Drewett and his wife. This was a prerequisite for admission to good English schools and, after two years, in 1881, the elder two siblings were enrolled at Manchester Grammar School. Aurobindo was considered too young for enrolment, and he continued his studies with the Drewetts, learning history, Latin, French, geography and arithmetic. Although the Drewetts were told not to teach religion, the boys inevitably were exposed to Christian teachings and events, which generally bored Aurobindo and sometimes repulsed him. There was little contact with his father, who wrote only a few letters to his sons while they were in England, but what communication there was indicated that he was becoming less endeared to the British in India than he had been, on one occasion describing the British colonial government as "heartless". Drewett emigrated to Australia in 1884, causing the boys to be uprooted as they went to live with Drewett's mother in London. In September of that year, Aurobindo and Manmohan joined St Paul's School there. He learned Greek and spent the last three years reading literature and English poetry, while he also acquired some familiarity with the German and Italian languages; Peter Heehs resumes his linguistic abilities by stating that at "the turn of the century he knew at least twelve languages: English, French, and Bengali to speak, read, and write; Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit to read and write; Gujarati, Marathi, and Hindi to speak and read; and Italian, German, and Spanish to read." Being exposed to the evangelical structures of Drewett's mother developed in him a distaste for religion, and he considered himself at one point to be an atheist but later determined that he was agnostic. A blue plaque unveiled in 2007 commemorates Aurobindo's residence at 49 St Stephen's Avenue in Shepherd's Bush, London, from 1884 to 1887. The three brothers began living in spartan circumstances at the Liberal Club in South Kensington during 1887, their father having experienced some financial difficulties. The club's secretary was James Cotton, brother of their father's friend in the Bengal ICS, Henry Cotton. By 1889, Manmohan had determined to pursue a literary career and Benoybhusan had proved himself unequal to the standards necessary for ICS entrance. This meant that only Aurobindo might fulfill his father's aspirations but to do so when his father lacked money required that he studied hard for a scholarship. To become an ICS official, students were required to pass the competitive examination, as well as to study at an English university for two years under probation. Aurobindo secured a scholarship at King's College, Cambridge, under recommendation of Oscar Browning. He passed the written ICS examination after a few months, being ranked 11th out of 250 competitors. He spent the next two years at King's College. Aurobindo had no interest in the ICS and came late to the horse-riding practical exam purposefully to get himself disqualified for the service. At this time, the Maharaja of Baroda, Sayajirao Gaekwad III, was travelling in England. Cotton secured for him a place in Baroda State Service and arranged for him to meet the prince. He left England for India, arriving there in February 1893. In India, Krishna Dhun Ghose, who was waiting to receive his son, was misinformed by his agents from Bombay (now Mumbai) that the ship on which Aurobindo had been travelling had sunk off the coast of Portugal. His father died upon hearing this news. Baroda and Calcutta (1893–1910) In Baroda, Aurobindo joined the state service in 1893, working first in the Survey and Settlements department, later moving to the Department of Revenue and then to the Secretariat, and much miscellaneous work like teaching grammar and assisting in writing speeches for the Maharaja of Gaekwad until 1897. In 1897 during his work in Baroda, he started working as a part-time French teacher at Baroda College (now Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda). He was later promoted to the post of vice-principal. At Baroda, Aurobindo self-studied Sanskrit and Bengali. During his stay at Baroda, he had contributed to many articles to Indu Prakash and had spoken as a chairman of the Baroda college board. He started taking an active interest in the politics of the Indian independence movement against British colonial rule, working behind the scenes as his position in the Baroda state administration barred him from an overt political activity. He linked up with resistance groups in Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, while travelling to these states. Aurobindo established contact with Lokmanya Tilak and Sister Nivedita. Aurobindo often travelled between Baroda and Bengal, at first in a bid to re-establish links with his parent's families and other Bengali relatives, including his sister Sarojini and brother Barin, and later increased to establish resistance groups across the Presidency. He formally moved to Calcutta in 1906 after the announcement of the Partition of Bengal. In 1901, on a visit to Calcutta, he married 14-year-old Mrinalini, the daughter of Bhupal Chandra Bose, a senior official in government service. Aurobindo was 28 at that time. Mrinalini died seventeen years later in December 1918 during the influenza pandemic. In 1906, Aurobindo was appointed the first principal of the National College in Calcutta, started to impart national education to Indian youth. He resigned from this position in August 1907, due to his increased political activity. The National College continues to the present as Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Aurobindo was influenced by studies on rebellion and revolutions against England in medieval France and the revolts in America and Italy. In his public activities, he favored Non cooperation and Passive resistance; in private he took up secret revolutionary activity as a preparation for open revolt, in case that the passive revolt failed. In Bengal, with Barin's help, he established contacts and inspired revolutionaries such as Bagha Jatin or Jatin Mukherjee and Surendranath Tagore. He helped establish a series of youth clubs, including the Anushilan Samiti of Calcutta in 1902. Aurobindo attended the 1906 Congress meeting headed by Dadabhai Naoroji and participated as a councilor in forming the fourfold objectives of "Swaraj, Swadesh, Boycott, and national education". In 1907 at the Surat session of Congress where moderates and extremists had a major showdown, he led along with extremists along with Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The Congress split after this session. In 1907–1908 Aurobindo travelled extensively to Pune, Bombay and Baroda to firm up support for the nationalist cause, giving speeches and meeting with groups. He was arrested again in May 1908 in connection with the Alipore Bomb Case. He was acquitted in the ensuing trial, following the murder of chief prosecution witness Naren Goswami within jail premises, which subsequently led to the case against him collapsing. Aurobindo was subsequently released after a year of isolated incarceration. Once out of the prison he started two new publications, Karmayogin in English and Dharma in Bengali. He also delivered the, Uttarpara Speech hinting at the transformation of his focus to spiritual matters. Repression from the British colonial government against him continued because of his writings in his new journals and in April 1910 Aurobindo moved to Pondicherry, where the British colonial secret police monitored his activities. Conversion from politics to spirituality In July 1905 then Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, partitioned Bengal. This sparked an outburst of public anger against the British, leading to civil unrest and a nationalist campaign by groups of revolutionaries that included Aurobindo. In 1908, Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki attempted to kill Magistrate Kingsford, a judge known for handing down particularly severe sentences against nationalists. However, the bomb thrown at his horse carriage missed its target and instead landed in another carriage and killed two British women, the wife and daughter of barrister Pringle Kennedy. Aurobindo was also arrested on charges of planning and overseeing the attack and imprisoned in solitary confinement in Alipore Jail. The trial of the Alipore Bomb Case lasted for a year, but eventually, he was acquitted on 6 May 1909. His defense counsel was Chittaranjan Das. During this period in the Jail, his view of life was radically changed due to spiritual experiences and realizations. Consequently, his aim went far beyond the service and liberation of the country. Aurobindo said he was "visited" by Vivekananda in the Alipore Jail: "It is a fact that I was hearing constantly the voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence." In his autobiographical notes, Aurobindo said he felt a vast sense of calmness when he first came back to India. He could not explain this and continued to have various such experiences from time to time. He knew nothing of yoga at that time and started his practice of it without a teacher, except for some rules that he learned from Mr. Devadhar, a friend who was a disciple of Swami Brahmananda of Ganga Math, Chandod. In 1907, Barin introduced Aurobindo to Vishnu Bhaskar Lele, a Maharashtrian yogi. Aurobindo was influenced by the guidance he got from the yogi, who had instructed Aurobindo to depend on an inner guide and any kind of external guru or guidance would not be required. In 1910 Aurobindo withdrew himself from all political activities and went into hiding at Chandannagar in the house of Motilal Roy, while the British colonial government were attempting to prosecute him for sedition on the basis of a signed article titled 'To My Countrymen', published in Karmayogin. As Aurobindo disappeared from view, the warrant was held back and the prosecution postponed. Aurobindo manoeuvred the police into open action and a warrant was issued on 4 April 1910, but the warrant could not be executed because on that date he had reached Pondicherry, then a French colony. The warrant against Aurobindo was withdrawn. Pondicherry (1910–1950) In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo dedicated himself to his spiritual and philosophical pursuits. In 1914, after four years of secluded yoga, he started a monthly philosophical magazine called Arya. This ceased publication in 1921. Many years later, he revised some of these works before they were published in book form. Some of the book series derived out of this publication was The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on The Gita, The Secret of The Veda, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Upanishads, The Renaissance in India, War and Self-determination, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity and The Future Poetry were published in this magazine. At the beginning of his stay at Pondicherry, there were few followers, but with time their numbers grew, resulting in the formation of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926. From 1926 he started to sign himself as Sri Aurobindo, Sri being commonly used as an honorific. For some time afterwards, his main literary output was his voluminous correspondence with his disciples. His letters, most of which were written in the 1930s, numbered in the several thousand. Many were brief comments made in the margins of his disciple's notebooks in answer to their questions and reports of their spiritual practice—others extended to several pages of carefully composed explanations of practical aspects of his teachings. These were later collected and published in book form in three volumes of Letters on Yoga. In the late 1930s, he resumed work on a poem he had started earlier—he continued to expand and revise this poem for the rest of his life. It became perhaps his greatest literary achievement, Savitri, an epic spiritual poem in blank verse of approximately 24,000 lines. On 15 August 1947, Sri Aurobindo strongly opposed the partition of India, stating that he hoped "the Nation will not accept the settled fact as for ever settled, or as anything more than a temporary expedient." Sri Aurobindo was nominated twice for the Nobel prize without it being awarded, in 1943 for the Nobel award in Literature and in 1950 for the Nobel award in Peace. Sri Aurobindo died on 5 December 1950, of uremia. Around 60,000 people attended to see his body resting peacefully. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and the President Rajendra Prasad praised him for his contribution to Yogic philosophy and the independence movement. National and international newspapers commemorated his death. Mirra Alfassa (The Mother) and the development of the Ashram Sri Aurobindo's close spiritual collaborator, Mirra Alfassa (born Alfassa), came to be known as The Mother. She was a French national, born in Paris on 21 February 1878. In her 20s she studied occultism with Max Theon. Along with her husband, Paul Richard, she went to Pondicherry on 29 March 1914, and finally settled there in 1920. Sri Aurobindo considered her his spiritual equal and collaborator. After 24 November 1926, when Sri Aurobindo retired into seclusion, he left it to her to plan, build and run the ashram, the community of disciples which had gathered around them. Sometime later, when families with children joined the ashram, she established and supervised the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education with its experiments in the field of education. When he died in 1950, she continued their spiritual work, directed the ashram, and guided their disciples. Philosophy and spiritual vision Introduction Sri Aurobindo's concept of the Integral Yoga system is described in his books, The Synthesis of Yoga and The Life Divine. The Life Divine is a compilation of essays published serially in Arya. Sri Aurobindo argues that divine Brahman manifests as empirical reality through līlā, or divine play. Instead of positing that the world we experience is an illusion (māyā), Aurobindo argues that world can evolve and become a new world with new species, far above the human species just as human species have evolved after the animal species. As such he argued that the end goal of spiritual practice could not merely be a liberation from the world into Samadhi but would also be that of descent of the Divine into the world in order to transform it into a Divine existence. Thus, this constituted the purpose of Integral Yoga. Regarding the involution of consciousness in matter, he wrote that: "This descent, this sacrifice of the Purusha, the Divine Soul submitting itself to Force and Matter so that it may inform and illuminate them is the seed of redemption of this world of Inconscience and Ignorance." Sri Aurobindo believed that Darwinism merely describes a phenomenon of the evolution of matter into life, but does not explain the reason behind it, while he finds life to be already present in matter, because all of existence is a manifestation of Brahman. He argues that nature (which he interpreted as divine) has evolved life out of matter and the mind out of life. All of existence, he argues, is attempting to manifest to the level of the supermind – that evolution had a purpose. He stated that he found the task of understanding the nature of reality arduous and difficult to justify by immediate tangible results. Supermind At the centre of Aurobindo's metaphysical system is the supermind, an intermediary power between the unmanifested Brahman and the manifested world. Aurobindo claims that the supermind is not completely alien to us and can be realized within ourselves as it is always present within mind since the latter is in reality identical with the former and contains it as a potentiality within itself. Aurobindo does not portray supermind as an original invention of his own but believes it can be found in the Vedas and that the Vedic Gods represent powers of the supermind In The Integral Yoga he declares that "By the supermind is meant the full Truth-Consciousness of the Divine Nature in which there can be no place for the principle of division and ignorance; it is always a full light and knowledge superior to all mental substance or mental movement." Supermind is a bridge between Sachchidananda and the lower manifestation and it is only through the supramental that mind, life and body can be spiritually transformed as opposed to through Sachchidananda The descent of supermind will mean the creation of a supramental race Affinity with Western philosophy In his writings, talks, and letters Sri Aurobindo has referred to several European philosophers with whose basic concepts he was familiar, commenting on their ideas and discussing the question of affinity to his own line of thought. Thus, he wrote a long essay on the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and mentioned especially Plato, Plotinus, Nietzsche and Bergson as thinkers in whom he was interested because of their more intuitive approach. On the other hand, he felt little attraction for the philosophy of Kant or Hegel. Several studies have shown a remarkable closeness to the evolutionary thought of Teilhard de Chardin, whom he did not know, whereas the latter came to know of Sri Aurobindo at a late stage. After reading some chapters of The Life Divine, he is reported to have said that Sri Aurobindo's vision of evolution was basically the same as his own, though stated for Asian readers. Several scholars have discovered significant similarities in the thought of Sri Aurobindo and Hegel. Steve Odin has discussed this subject comprehensively in a comparative study. Odin writes that Sri Aurobindo "has appropriated Hegel’s notion of an Absolute Spirit and employed it to radically restructure the architectonic framework of the ancient Hindu Vedanta system in contemporary terms." In his analysis Odin arrives at the conclusion that "both philosophers similarly envision world creation as the progressive self-manifestation and evolutionary ascent of a universal consciousness in its journey toward Self-realization." He points out that in contrast to the deterministic and continuous dialectal unfolding of Absolute Reason by the mechanism of thesis-antithesis-synthesis or affirmation-negation-integration, "Sri Aurobindo argues for a creative, emergent mode of evolution." In his résumé Odin states that Sri Aurobindo has overcome the ahistorical world-vision of traditional Hinduism and presented a concept which allows for a genuine advance and novelty. Importance of the Upanishads Although Sri Aurobindo was familiar with the most important lines of thought in Western philosophy, he did not acknowledge their influence on his own writings. He wrote that his philosophy "was formed first by the study of the Upanishads and the Gita… They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga." With the help of his readings he tried to move on to actual experience, "and it was on this experience that later on I founded my philosophy, not on ideas themselves." He assumes that the seers of the Upanishads had basically the same approach and gives some details of his vision of the past in a long passage in The Renaissance of India. "The Upanishads have been the acknowledged source of numerous profound philosophies and religions," he writes. Even Buddhism with all its developments was only a "restatement" from a new standpoint and with fresh terms. And, furthermore, the ideas of the Upanishads "can be rediscovered in much of the thought of Pythagoras and Plato and form the profound part of Neo-platonism and Gnosticism..." Finally, the larger part of German metaphysics "is little more in substance than an intellectual development of great realities more spiritually seen in this ancient teaching." When once he was asked by a disciple whether Plato got some of his ideas from Indian books, he responded that though something of the philosophy of India got through "by means of Pythagoras and others", he assumed that Plato got most of his ideas from intuition. Sri Aurobindo's indebtedness to the Indian tradition also becomes obvious through his placing a large number of quotations from the Rig Veda, the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita at the beginning of the chapters in The Life Divine, showing the connection of his own thought to Veda and Vedanta. The Isha Upanishad is considered to be one of the most important and more accessible writings of Sri Aurobindo. Before he published his final translation and analysis, he wrote ten incomplete commentaries. In a key passage he points out that the Brahman or Absolute is both the Stable and the Moving. "We must see it in eternal and immutable Spirit and in all the changing manifestations of universe and relativity." Sri Aurobindo's biographer K.R.S. Iyengar quotes R.S. Mugali as stating that Sri Aurobindo might have obtained in this Upanishad the thought-seed which later grew into The Life Divine. Synthesis and integration Sisir Kumar Maitra, who was a leading exponent of Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy, has referred to the issue of external influences and written that Sri Aurobindo does not mention names, but "as one reads his books one cannot fail to notice how thorough is his grasp of the great Western philosophers of the present age..." Although he is Indian one should not "underrate the influence of Western thought upon him. This influence is there, very clearly visible, but Sri Aurobindo... has not allowed himself to be dominated by it. He has made full use of Western thought, but he has made use of it for the purpose of building up his own system..." Thus Maitra, like Steve Odin, sees Sri Aurobindo not only in the tradition and context of Indian, but also Western philosophy and assumes he may have adopted some elements from the latter for his synthesis. R. Puligandla supports this viewpoint in his book Fundamentals of Indian Philosophy. He describes Sri Aurobindo's philosophy as "an original synthesis of the Indian and Western traditions." "He integrates in a unique fashion the great social, political and scientific achievements of the modern West with the ancient and profound spiritual insights of Hinduism. The vision that powers the life divine of Aurobindo is none other than the Upanishadic vision of the unity of all existence." Puligandla also discusses Sri Aurobindo's critical position vis-à-vis Shankara and his thesis that the latter's Vedanta is a world-negating philosophy, as it teaches that the world is unreal and illusory. From Puligandla's standpoint this is a misrepresentation of Shankara's position, which may have been caused by Sri Aurobindo's endeavour to synthesize Hindu and Western modes of thought, identifying Shankara's Mayavada with the subjective idealism of George Berkeley. However, Sri Aurobindo's critique of Shankara is supported by U. C. Dubey in his paper titled Integralism: The Distinctive Feature of Sri Aurobindo’s Philosophy. He points out that Sri Aurobindo's system presents an integral view of Reality where there is no opposition between the Absolute and its creative force, as they are actually one. Furthermore, he refers to Sri Aurobindo's conception of the supermind as the mediatory principle between the Absolute and the finite world and quotes S.K. Maitra stating that this conception "is the pivot round which the whole of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy moves." Dubey proceeds to analyse the approach of the Shankarites and believes that they follow an inadequate kind of logic that does not do justice to the challenge of tackling the problem of the Absolute, which cannot be known by finite reason. With the help of the finite reason, he says, "we are bound to determine the nature of reality as one or many, being or becoming. But Sri Aurobindo's Integral Advaitism reconciles all apparently different aspects of Existence in an all-embracing unity of the Absolute." Next, Dubey explains that for Sri Aurobindo there is a higher reason, the "logic of the infinite" in which his integralism is rooted. Legacy Sri Aurobindo was an Indian nationalist but is best known for his philosophy on human evolution and Integral Yoga. Influence His influence has been wide-ranging. In India, S. K. Maitra, Anilbaran Roy and D. P. Chattopadhyaya commented on Sri Aurobindo's work. Writers on esotericism and traditional wisdom, such as Mircea Eliade, Paul Brunton, and Rene Guenon, all saw him as an authentic representative of the Indian spiritual tradition. Though Rene Guenon thought Sri Aurobindo's thoughts were betrayed by some of his followers and that some works published under his name were not authentic, since not traditional. Haridas Chaudhuri and Frederic Spiegelberg were among those who were inspired by Aurobindo, who worked on the newly formed American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. Soon after, Chaudhuri and his wife Bina established the Cultural Integration Fellowship, from which later emerged the California Institute of Integral Studies. Sri Aurobindo influenced Subhash Chandra Bose to take an initiative of dedicating to Indian National Movement full-time. Bose writes, "The illustrious example of Arabindo Ghosh looms large before my vision. I feel that I am ready to make the sacrifice which that example demands of me." Karlheinz Stockhausen was heavily inspired by Satprem's writings about Sri Aurobindo during a week in May 1968, a time at which the composer was undergoing a personal crisis and had found Sri Aurobindo's philosophies were relevant to his feelings. After this experience, Stockhausen's music took a completely different turn, focusing on mysticism, that was to continue until the end of his career. Jean Gebser acknowledged Sri Aurobindo's influence on his work and referred to him several times in his writings. Thus, in The Invisible Origin he quotes a long passage from The Synthesis of Yoga. Gebser believes that he was "in some way brought into the extremely powerful spiritual field of force radiating through Sri Aurobindo." In his title Asia Smiles Differently he reports about his visit to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and meeting with the Mother whom he calls an "exceptionally gifted person." After meeting Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry in 1915, the Danish author and artist Johannes Hohlenberg published one of the first Yoga titles in Europe and later on wrote two essays on Sri Aurobindo. He also published extracts from The Life Divine in Danish translation. William Irwin Thompson travelled to Auroville in 1972, where he met "The Mother". Thompson has called Sri Aurobindo's teaching on spirituality a "radical anarchism" and a "post-religious approach" and regards their work as having "... reached back into the Goddess culture of prehistory, and, in Marshall McLuhan's terms, 'culturally retrieved' the archetypes of the shaman and la sage femme... " Thompson also writes that he experienced Shakti, or psychic power coming from The Mother on the night of her death in 1973. Sri Aurobindo's ideas about the further evolution of human capabilities influenced the thinking of Michael Murphy – and indirectly, the human potential movement, through Murphy's writings. The American philosopher Ken Wilber has called Sri Aurobindo "India's greatest modern philosopher sage" and has integrated some of his ideas into his philosophical vision. Wilber's interpretation of Aurobindo has been criticised by Rod Hemsell. New Age writer Andrew Harvey also looks to Sri Aurobindo as a major inspiration. Followers The following authors, disciples and organisations trace their intellectual heritage back to, or have in some measure been influenced by, Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Nolini Kanta Gupta (1889–1983) was one of Sri Aurobindo's senior disciples, and wrote extensively on philosophy, mysticism, and spiritual evolution based on the teaching of Sri Aurobindo and "The Mother". Nirodbaran (1903–2006). A doctor who obtained his medical degree from Edinburgh, his long and voluminous correspondence with Sri Aurobindo elaborate on many aspects of Integral Yoga and fastidious record of conversations bring out Sri Aurobindo's thought on numerous subjects. M. P. Pandit (1918–1993). Secretary to "The Mother" and the ashram, his copious writings and lectures cover Yoga, the Vedas, Tantra, Sri Aubindo's epic "Savitri" and others. Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) joined the ashram in 1944. Later, he wrote the play about Sri Aurobindo's life – Sri Aurobindo: Descent of the Blue – and a book, Infinite: Sri Aurobindo. An author, composer, artist and athlete, he was perhaps best known for holding public events on the theme of inner peace and world harmony (such as concerts, meditations, and races). Pavitra (1894–1969) was one of their early disciples. Born as Philippe Barbier Saint-Hilaire in Paris. Pavitra left some very interesting memoirs of his conversations with them in 1925 and 1926, which were published as Conversations avec Pavitra. Dilipkumar Roy (1897–1980) was a Bengali Indian musician, musicologist, novelist, poet and essayist. T.V. Kapali Sastry (1886–1953) was an eminent author and Sanskrit scholar. He joined the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1929 and wrote books and articles in four languages, exploring especially Sri Aurobindo's Vedic interpretations. Satprem (1923–2007) was a French author and an important disciple of "The Mother" who published Mother's Agenda (1982), Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness (2000), On the Way to Supermanhood (2002) and more. Indra Sen (1903–1994) was another disciple of Sri Aurobindo who, although little-known in the West, was the first to articulate integral psychology and integral philosophy, in the 1940s and 1950s. A compilation of his papers came out under the title, Integral Psychology in 1986. K. D. Sethna (1904–2011) was an Indian poet, scholar, writer, cultural critic and disciple of Sri Aurobindo. For several decades he was the editor of the Ashram journal Mother India. Margaret Woodrow Wilson (Nistha) (1886–1944), daughter of US President Woodrow Wilson, she came to the ashram in 1938 and stayed there until her death. She helped to prepare a revised edition of The Life Divine. Critics Adi Da finds that Sri Aurobindo's contributions were merely literary and cultural and had extended his political motivation into spirituality and human evolution N. R. Malkani finds Sri Aurobindo's theory of creation to be false, as the theory talks about experiences and visions which are beyond normal human experiences. He says the theory is an intellectual response to a difficult problem and that Sri Aurobindo uses the trait of unpredictability in theorising and discussing things not based upon the truth of existence. Malkani says that awareness is already a reality and suggests there would be no need to examine the creative activity subjected to awareness. Ken Wilber's interpretation of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy differed from the notion of dividing reality as a different level of matter, life, mind, overmind, supermind proposed by Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine, and terms them as higher- or lower-nested holons and states that there is only a fourfold reality (a system of reality created by himself). Rajneesh (Osho) says that Sri Aurobindo was a great scholar but was never realised; that his personal ego had made him indirectly claim that he went beyond the Buddha; and that he is said to have believed himself to be enlightened due to increasing number of followers. In popular culture The 1970 Indian Bengali-language biographical drama film Mahabiplabi Aurobindo, directed by Dipak Gupta, depicted Sri Aurobindo's life on screen. On the 72nd Republic Day of India, the Ministry of Culture presented a tableau on his life. Literature Indian editions A first edition of collected works was published in 1972 in 30 volumes: Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL), Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. A new edition of collected works was started in 1995. Currently, 36 out of 37 volumes have been published: Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA). Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Early Cultural Writings. Collected Poems. Collected Plays and Stories. Karmayogin. Records of Yoga. Vedic and Philological Studies. The Secrets of the Veda. Hymns to the Mystic Fire. Isha Upanishad. Kena and Other Upanishads. Essays on the Gita. The Renaissance of India with a Defence of Indian Culture. The Life Divine. The Synthesis of Yoga. The Human Cycle – The Ideal of Human Unity – War and Self-Determination. The Future Poetry. Letters on Poetry and Art Letters on Yoga. The Mother Savitri – A Legend and a Symbol. Letters on Himself and the Ashram. Autobiographical Notes and Other Writings of Historical Interest. American edition Main Works Sri Aurobindo Primary Works Set 12 vol. US Edition, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Sri Aurobindo Selected Writings Software CD-ROM, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Life Divine, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Synthesis of Yoga, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Essays on the Gita, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Ideal of Human Unity, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Human Cycle: The Psychology of Social Development, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Human Cycle, Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self Determination, Lotus Press. The Upanishads, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Secret of the Veda, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Hymns to the Mystic Fire, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Mother, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Compilations and Secondary Literature The Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo's Teaching and Method of Practice, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Future Evolution of Man, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Essential Aurobindo – Writings of Sri Aurobindo Bhagavad Gita and Its Message, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Mind of Light, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Rebirth and Karma, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Hour of God by Sri Aurobindo, Lotus Press. Dictionary of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, (compiled by M.P. Pandit), Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Vedic Symbolism, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Powers Within, Lotus Press. Comparative studies Hemsell, Rod (Oct. 2014). The Philosophy of Evolution. Auro-e-Books, E-Book Hemsell, Rod (Dec. 2014). Sri Aurobindo and the Logic of the Infinite: Essays for the New Millennium. Auro-e-Books, E-Book Hemsell, Rod (2017). The Philosophy of Consciousness: Hegel and Sri Aurobindo. E-Book Huchzermeyer, Wilfried (Oct. 2018). Sri Aurobindo’s Commentaries on Krishna, Buddha, Christ and Ramakrishna. Their Role in the Evolution of Humanity. edition sawitri, E-Book Johnston, David T. (Nov. 2016) Jung's Global Vision: Western Psyche, Eastern Mind, With References to Sri Aurobindo, Integral Yoga, The Mother. Agio Publishing House, Johnston, David T. (Dec. 2016). Prophets in Our Midst: Jung, Tolkien, Gebser, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Universe, E-Book Singh, Satya Prakash (2013). Nature of God. A Comparative Study in Sri Aurobindo and Whitehead. Antrik Express Digital, E-Book Singh, Satya Prakash (2005). Sri Aurobindo, Jung and Vedic Yoga. Mira Aditi Centre, Eric M. Weiss (2003): The Doctrine of the Subtle Worlds. Sri Aurobindo’s Cosmology, Modern Science and the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, Dissertation (PDF; 1,3 MB), California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco See also Integral psychology References Notes Citations Bibliography Further reading (2 volumes, 1945) – written in a hagiographical style K. D. Sethna, Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo Raychaudhuri, Girijashankar.....Sri Aurobindo O Banglar Swadeshi Joog (published 1956)...this book was serially published in the journal Udbodhan and read out to Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry while he was still alive......Sri Aurobindo commented, " he will snatch away smile from my face" Ghose, Aurobindo, Nahar, S., & Institut de recherches évolutives. (2000). India's rebirth: A selection from Sri Aurobindo's writing, talks and speeches Paris: Institut de recherches évolutives. External links Sri Aurobindo Ashram Auroville Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo 1872 births 1950 deaths Bengali people Bengali Hindus 20th-century Hindu religious leaders Advaitin philosophers Anushilan Samiti Alumni of King's College, Cambridge Alumni of the University of Cambridge Bengali Hindu saints 19th-century Bengalis 20th-century Bengalis Bengali spiritual writers Spiritual evolution English-language poets from India English spiritual writers Hindu revivalists 20th-century Hindu philosophers and theologians Hindu reformers Indian Hindu yogis Integral thought Indian male essayists Indian spiritual writers Indian male poets 19th-century Indian translators Indian revolutionaries Indian civil servants Swadeshi activists People from Kolkata People from Vadodara Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda faculty People educated at St Paul's School, London Prisoners and detainees of British India 19th-century Indian philosophers 20th-century Indian philosophers 19th-century Indian poets 20th-century Indian poets 19th-century Indian non-fiction writers 20th-century Indian non-fiction writers Indian male writers English-language writers from India Bengali writers Writers from Puducherry Poets from West Bengal 20th-century Indian essayists Indian political philosophers 19th-century Indian educational theorists 20th-century Indian educational theorists Neo-Vedanta 20th-century Indian translators Scholars from Puducherry Revolutionaries of Bengal during British Rule Modern yoga gurus Scholars from West Bengal	true	[ "Smith's Magazine was a Street & Smith magazine published monthly from April 1905 to February 1922.\n\nCreated for the \"John Smiths\" of the world, Theodore Dreiser was its initial editor, and lasted one year in that position before moving to Broadway Magazine. By the time Dreiser departed, the magazine had a circulation of 125,000.\n\nCharles A. MacLean became editor of Smith's as well as another more successful Street & Smith magazine, The Popular Magazine, for many years.\n\nOriginally a story magazine directed at the general public, it later focused on a female audience. When the magazine ended, Street & Smith merged it and its mainly female readership into the newer, and what proved to be even more successful, Love Story Magazine.\n\nSmith's was the first magazine to publish author Ben Ames Williams, in July 1915.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal\n\n Archive of selected magazine covers\n\nMagazines established in 1905\nMagazines disestablished in 1922\nStreet & Smith\nDefunct women's magazines published in the United States\n1905 establishments in the United States", "Motion Picture was an American monthly fan magazine about film, published from 1911 to 1977. It was later published by Macfadden Publications.\n\nHistory and profile\nThe magazine was established by Vitagraph Studios co-founder J. Stuart Blackton and partner Eugene V. Brewster under the title The Motion Picture Story Magazine. In contrast to earlier film magazines such as The Moving Picture World, which were aimed at film exhibitors, The Motion Picture Story Magazine was aimed at regular film goers. It has been regarded as the first fan magazine.\n\nThe magazine was very successful from its inception, with an initial run of 50,000 copies and a circulation of 200,000 by 1914. Writers were amazed at the outset to receive their checks for contributions almost immediately on acceptance, a policy on the part of Brewster that was effective in quickly inducing the highest grade fiction authors to become affiliated with the publication. Contributors included Rex Beach, Will Carleton and Horatio C. King.\n\nThe magazine's most successful column was entitled \"The Answer Man\" (written by a woman) that answered readers' questions about the film world. This was an innovation, the first of its kind in journalism.\n\nIn 1914, it was renamed Motion Picture Magazine. Early editions included fiction and information on how to get involved in film production. The magazine shifted to a focus on celebrities and attracted a larger female readership. In 1919, the circulation jumped from 248,845 to 400,000.\n\nIts sister publication Motion Picture Classic, which was started as its supplement, was published monthly from September 1915 to March 1931. In 1941, Motion Picture Magazine merged with Hollywood and Screen Life and continued to be published for almost four more decades, ending its run in 1977.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nMotion Picture Story Magazine\nMotion Picture Magazine\nNewsstand: 1925: Motion Picture Magazine via University of West Florida\nMotion Picture Magazine #June 1914 issue,.. $00.15cents(archived)\n\nFilm magazines published in the United States\nMonthly magazines published in the United States\nDefunct magazines published in the United States\nMagazines established in 1911\nMagazines disestablished in 1977" ]
[ "Sri Aurobindo", "Pondicherry (1910-1950)", "what happened in 1910?", "In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo dedicated himself to his spiritual and philosophical pursuits.", "how did he dedicate himself?", "four years of secluded yoga,", "what did he learn from this?", "he started a monthly philosophical magazine called Arya.", "was the magazine successful?", "This ceased publication in 1921." ]	C_e06b6f4885204728b9ac8cfd9c3f2a87_0	why did it cease?	5	Why did Sri Aurobindo's magazine Arya cease publication in 1921?	Sri Aurobindo	In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo dedicated himself to his spiritual and philosophical pursuits. In 1914, after four years of secluded yoga, he started a monthly philosophical magazine called Arya. This ceased publication in 1921. Many years later, he revised some of these works before they were published in book form. Some of the book series derived out of this publication were The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on The Gita, The Secret of The Veda, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Upanishads, The Renaissance in India, War and Self-determination, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity and The Future Poetry were published in this magazine. At the beginning of his stay at Pondicherry, there were few followers, but with time their numbers grew, resulting in the formation of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926. From 1926 he started to sign himself as Sri Aurobindo, Sri (meaning holy in Sanskrit) being commonly used as an honorific. For some time afterwards, his main literary output was his voluminous correspondence with his disciples. His letters, most of which were written in the 1930s, numbered in the several thousands. Many were brief comments made in the margins of his disciple's notebooks in answer to their questions and reports of their spiritual practice--others extended to several pages of carefully composed explanations of practical aspects of his teachings. These were later collected and published in book form in three volumes of Letters on Yoga. In the late 1930s, he resumed work on a poem he had started earlier--he continued to expand and revise this poem for the rest of his life. It became perhaps his greatest literary achievement, Savitri, an epic spiritual poem in blank verse of approximately 24,000 lines. Sri Aurobindo left his body on 5 December 1950. Around 60,000 people attended to see his body resting peacefully. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and the President Rajendra Prasad praised him for his contribution to Yogic philosophy and the independence movement. National and international newspapers commemorated his death. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER	Sri Aurobindo (born Aurobindo Ghose; 15 August 1872 – 5 December 1950) was an Indian philosopher, yoga guru, maharishi, poet, and Indian nationalist. He was also a journalist, editing newspapers such as Bande Mataram. He joined the Indian movement for independence from British colonial rule, until 1910 was one of its influential leaders and then became a spiritual reformer, introducing his visions on human progress and spiritual evolution. Aurobindo studied for the Indian Civil Service at King's College, Cambridge, England. After returning to India he took up various civil service works under the Maharaja of the Princely state of Baroda and became increasingly involved in nationalist politics in the Indian National Congress and the nascent revolutionary movement in Bengal with the Anushilan Samiti. He was arrested in the aftermath of a number of bombings linked to his organization in a public trial where he faced charges of treason for Alipore Conspiracy. However Sri Aurobindo could only be convicted and imprisoned for writing articles against British colonial rule in India. He was released when no evidence could be provided, following the murder of a prosecution witness, Narendranath Goswami, during the trial. During his stay in the jail, he had mystical and spiritual experiences, after which he moved to Pondicherry, leaving politics for spiritual work. At Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo developed a spiritual practice he called Integral Yoga. The central theme of his vision was the evolution of human life into a divine life in divine body. He believed in a spiritual realisation that not only liberated but transformed human nature, enabling a divine life on earth. In 1926, with the help of his spiritual collaborator, Mirra Alfassa (referred to as "The Mother"), Sri Aurobindo Ashram was founded. His main literary works are The Life Divine, which deals with the philosophical aspect of Integral Yoga; Synthesis of Yoga, which deals with the principles and methods of Integral Yoga; and Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, an epic poem. Biography Early life Aurobindo Ghose was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), Bengal Presidency, India on 15 August 1872 in a Bengali family that was associated with the village of Konnagar in the Hooghly district of present-day West Bengal. His father, Krishna Dhun Ghose, was then assistant surgeon of Rangpur in Bengal and later civil surgeon of Khulna, and a former member of the Brahmo Samaj religious reform movement who had become enamoured with the then-new idea of evolution while pursuing medical studies in Edinburgh. His mother Swarnalata Devi's father Shri Rajnarayan Bose was a leading figure in the Samaj. She had been sent to the more salubrious surroundings of Calcutta for Aurobindo's birth. Aurobindo had two elder siblings, Benoybhusan and Manmohan, a younger sister, Sarojini, and a younger brother, Barindra Kumar (also referred to as Barin). Young Aurobindo was brought up speaking English, but used Hindustani to communicate with servants. Although his family were Bengali, his father believed British culture to be superior. He and his two elder siblings were sent to the English-speaking Loreto House boarding school in Darjeeling, in part to improve their language skills and in part to distance them from their mother, who had developed a mental illness soon after the birth of her first child. Darjeeling was a centre of Anglo-Indians in India and the school was run by Irish nuns, through which the boys would have been exposed to Christian religious teachings and symbolism. England (1879–1893) Krishna Dhun Ghose wanted his sons to enter the Indian Civil Service (ICS), an elite organisation comprising around 1000 people. To achieve this it was necessary that they study in England and so it was there that the entire family moved in 1879. The three brothers were placed in the care of the Reverend W. H. Drewett in Manchester. Drewett was a minister of the Congregational Church whom Krishna Dhun Ghose knew through his British friends at Rangpur. The boys were taught Latin by Drewett and his wife. This was a prerequisite for admission to good English schools and, after two years, in 1881, the elder two siblings were enrolled at Manchester Grammar School. Aurobindo was considered too young for enrolment, and he continued his studies with the Drewetts, learning history, Latin, French, geography and arithmetic. Although the Drewetts were told not to teach religion, the boys inevitably were exposed to Christian teachings and events, which generally bored Aurobindo and sometimes repulsed him. There was little contact with his father, who wrote only a few letters to his sons while they were in England, but what communication there was indicated that he was becoming less endeared to the British in India than he had been, on one occasion describing the British colonial government as "heartless". Drewett emigrated to Australia in 1884, causing the boys to be uprooted as they went to live with Drewett's mother in London. In September of that year, Aurobindo and Manmohan joined St Paul's School there. He learned Greek and spent the last three years reading literature and English poetry, while he also acquired some familiarity with the German and Italian languages; Peter Heehs resumes his linguistic abilities by stating that at "the turn of the century he knew at least twelve languages: English, French, and Bengali to speak, read, and write; Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit to read and write; Gujarati, Marathi, and Hindi to speak and read; and Italian, German, and Spanish to read." Being exposed to the evangelical structures of Drewett's mother developed in him a distaste for religion, and he considered himself at one point to be an atheist but later determined that he was agnostic. A blue plaque unveiled in 2007 commemorates Aurobindo's residence at 49 St Stephen's Avenue in Shepherd's Bush, London, from 1884 to 1887. The three brothers began living in spartan circumstances at the Liberal Club in South Kensington during 1887, their father having experienced some financial difficulties. The club's secretary was James Cotton, brother of their father's friend in the Bengal ICS, Henry Cotton. By 1889, Manmohan had determined to pursue a literary career and Benoybhusan had proved himself unequal to the standards necessary for ICS entrance. This meant that only Aurobindo might fulfill his father's aspirations but to do so when his father lacked money required that he studied hard for a scholarship. To become an ICS official, students were required to pass the competitive examination, as well as to study at an English university for two years under probation. Aurobindo secured a scholarship at King's College, Cambridge, under recommendation of Oscar Browning. He passed the written ICS examination after a few months, being ranked 11th out of 250 competitors. He spent the next two years at King's College. Aurobindo had no interest in the ICS and came late to the horse-riding practical exam purposefully to get himself disqualified for the service. At this time, the Maharaja of Baroda, Sayajirao Gaekwad III, was travelling in England. Cotton secured for him a place in Baroda State Service and arranged for him to meet the prince. He left England for India, arriving there in February 1893. In India, Krishna Dhun Ghose, who was waiting to receive his son, was misinformed by his agents from Bombay (now Mumbai) that the ship on which Aurobindo had been travelling had sunk off the coast of Portugal. His father died upon hearing this news. Baroda and Calcutta (1893–1910) In Baroda, Aurobindo joined the state service in 1893, working first in the Survey and Settlements department, later moving to the Department of Revenue and then to the Secretariat, and much miscellaneous work like teaching grammar and assisting in writing speeches for the Maharaja of Gaekwad until 1897. In 1897 during his work in Baroda, he started working as a part-time French teacher at Baroda College (now Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda). He was later promoted to the post of vice-principal. At Baroda, Aurobindo self-studied Sanskrit and Bengali. During his stay at Baroda, he had contributed to many articles to Indu Prakash and had spoken as a chairman of the Baroda college board. He started taking an active interest in the politics of the Indian independence movement against British colonial rule, working behind the scenes as his position in the Baroda state administration barred him from an overt political activity. He linked up with resistance groups in Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, while travelling to these states. Aurobindo established contact with Lokmanya Tilak and Sister Nivedita. Aurobindo often travelled between Baroda and Bengal, at first in a bid to re-establish links with his parent's families and other Bengali relatives, including his sister Sarojini and brother Barin, and later increased to establish resistance groups across the Presidency. He formally moved to Calcutta in 1906 after the announcement of the Partition of Bengal. In 1901, on a visit to Calcutta, he married 14-year-old Mrinalini, the daughter of Bhupal Chandra Bose, a senior official in government service. Aurobindo was 28 at that time. Mrinalini died seventeen years later in December 1918 during the influenza pandemic. In 1906, Aurobindo was appointed the first principal of the National College in Calcutta, started to impart national education to Indian youth. He resigned from this position in August 1907, due to his increased political activity. The National College continues to the present as Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Aurobindo was influenced by studies on rebellion and revolutions against England in medieval France and the revolts in America and Italy. In his public activities, he favored Non cooperation and Passive resistance; in private he took up secret revolutionary activity as a preparation for open revolt, in case that the passive revolt failed. In Bengal, with Barin's help, he established contacts and inspired revolutionaries such as Bagha Jatin or Jatin Mukherjee and Surendranath Tagore. He helped establish a series of youth clubs, including the Anushilan Samiti of Calcutta in 1902. Aurobindo attended the 1906 Congress meeting headed by Dadabhai Naoroji and participated as a councilor in forming the fourfold objectives of "Swaraj, Swadesh, Boycott, and national education". In 1907 at the Surat session of Congress where moderates and extremists had a major showdown, he led along with extremists along with Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The Congress split after this session. In 1907–1908 Aurobindo travelled extensively to Pune, Bombay and Baroda to firm up support for the nationalist cause, giving speeches and meeting with groups. He was arrested again in May 1908 in connection with the Alipore Bomb Case. He was acquitted in the ensuing trial, following the murder of chief prosecution witness Naren Goswami within jail premises, which subsequently led to the case against him collapsing. Aurobindo was subsequently released after a year of isolated incarceration. Once out of the prison he started two new publications, Karmayogin in English and Dharma in Bengali. He also delivered the, Uttarpara Speech hinting at the transformation of his focus to spiritual matters. Repression from the British colonial government against him continued because of his writings in his new journals and in April 1910 Aurobindo moved to Pondicherry, where the British colonial secret police monitored his activities. Conversion from politics to spirituality In July 1905 then Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, partitioned Bengal. This sparked an outburst of public anger against the British, leading to civil unrest and a nationalist campaign by groups of revolutionaries that included Aurobindo. In 1908, Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki attempted to kill Magistrate Kingsford, a judge known for handing down particularly severe sentences against nationalists. However, the bomb thrown at his horse carriage missed its target and instead landed in another carriage and killed two British women, the wife and daughter of barrister Pringle Kennedy. Aurobindo was also arrested on charges of planning and overseeing the attack and imprisoned in solitary confinement in Alipore Jail. The trial of the Alipore Bomb Case lasted for a year, but eventually, he was acquitted on 6 May 1909. His defense counsel was Chittaranjan Das. During this period in the Jail, his view of life was radically changed due to spiritual experiences and realizations. Consequently, his aim went far beyond the service and liberation of the country. Aurobindo said he was "visited" by Vivekananda in the Alipore Jail: "It is a fact that I was hearing constantly the voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence." In his autobiographical notes, Aurobindo said he felt a vast sense of calmness when he first came back to India. He could not explain this and continued to have various such experiences from time to time. He knew nothing of yoga at that time and started his practice of it without a teacher, except for some rules that he learned from Mr. Devadhar, a friend who was a disciple of Swami Brahmananda of Ganga Math, Chandod. In 1907, Barin introduced Aurobindo to Vishnu Bhaskar Lele, a Maharashtrian yogi. Aurobindo was influenced by the guidance he got from the yogi, who had instructed Aurobindo to depend on an inner guide and any kind of external guru or guidance would not be required. In 1910 Aurobindo withdrew himself from all political activities and went into hiding at Chandannagar in the house of Motilal Roy, while the British colonial government were attempting to prosecute him for sedition on the basis of a signed article titled 'To My Countrymen', published in Karmayogin. As Aurobindo disappeared from view, the warrant was held back and the prosecution postponed. Aurobindo manoeuvred the police into open action and a warrant was issued on 4 April 1910, but the warrant could not be executed because on that date he had reached Pondicherry, then a French colony. The warrant against Aurobindo was withdrawn. Pondicherry (1910–1950) In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo dedicated himself to his spiritual and philosophical pursuits. In 1914, after four years of secluded yoga, he started a monthly philosophical magazine called Arya. This ceased publication in 1921. Many years later, he revised some of these works before they were published in book form. Some of the book series derived out of this publication was The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on The Gita, The Secret of The Veda, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Upanishads, The Renaissance in India, War and Self-determination, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity and The Future Poetry were published in this magazine. At the beginning of his stay at Pondicherry, there were few followers, but with time their numbers grew, resulting in the formation of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926. From 1926 he started to sign himself as Sri Aurobindo, Sri being commonly used as an honorific. For some time afterwards, his main literary output was his voluminous correspondence with his disciples. His letters, most of which were written in the 1930s, numbered in the several thousand. Many were brief comments made in the margins of his disciple's notebooks in answer to their questions and reports of their spiritual practice—others extended to several pages of carefully composed explanations of practical aspects of his teachings. These were later collected and published in book form in three volumes of Letters on Yoga. In the late 1930s, he resumed work on a poem he had started earlier—he continued to expand and revise this poem for the rest of his life. It became perhaps his greatest literary achievement, Savitri, an epic spiritual poem in blank verse of approximately 24,000 lines. On 15 August 1947, Sri Aurobindo strongly opposed the partition of India, stating that he hoped "the Nation will not accept the settled fact as for ever settled, or as anything more than a temporary expedient." Sri Aurobindo was nominated twice for the Nobel prize without it being awarded, in 1943 for the Nobel award in Literature and in 1950 for the Nobel award in Peace. Sri Aurobindo died on 5 December 1950, of uremia. Around 60,000 people attended to see his body resting peacefully. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and the President Rajendra Prasad praised him for his contribution to Yogic philosophy and the independence movement. National and international newspapers commemorated his death. Mirra Alfassa (The Mother) and the development of the Ashram Sri Aurobindo's close spiritual collaborator, Mirra Alfassa (born Alfassa), came to be known as The Mother. She was a French national, born in Paris on 21 February 1878. In her 20s she studied occultism with Max Theon. Along with her husband, Paul Richard, she went to Pondicherry on 29 March 1914, and finally settled there in 1920. Sri Aurobindo considered her his spiritual equal and collaborator. After 24 November 1926, when Sri Aurobindo retired into seclusion, he left it to her to plan, build and run the ashram, the community of disciples which had gathered around them. Sometime later, when families with children joined the ashram, she established and supervised the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education with its experiments in the field of education. When he died in 1950, she continued their spiritual work, directed the ashram, and guided their disciples. Philosophy and spiritual vision Introduction Sri Aurobindo's concept of the Integral Yoga system is described in his books, The Synthesis of Yoga and The Life Divine. The Life Divine is a compilation of essays published serially in Arya. Sri Aurobindo argues that divine Brahman manifests as empirical reality through līlā, or divine play. Instead of positing that the world we experience is an illusion (māyā), Aurobindo argues that world can evolve and become a new world with new species, far above the human species just as human species have evolved after the animal species. As such he argued that the end goal of spiritual practice could not merely be a liberation from the world into Samadhi but would also be that of descent of the Divine into the world in order to transform it into a Divine existence. Thus, this constituted the purpose of Integral Yoga. Regarding the involution of consciousness in matter, he wrote that: "This descent, this sacrifice of the Purusha, the Divine Soul submitting itself to Force and Matter so that it may inform and illuminate them is the seed of redemption of this world of Inconscience and Ignorance." Sri Aurobindo believed that Darwinism merely describes a phenomenon of the evolution of matter into life, but does not explain the reason behind it, while he finds life to be already present in matter, because all of existence is a manifestation of Brahman. He argues that nature (which he interpreted as divine) has evolved life out of matter and the mind out of life. All of existence, he argues, is attempting to manifest to the level of the supermind – that evolution had a purpose. He stated that he found the task of understanding the nature of reality arduous and difficult to justify by immediate tangible results. Supermind At the centre of Aurobindo's metaphysical system is the supermind, an intermediary power between the unmanifested Brahman and the manifested world. Aurobindo claims that the supermind is not completely alien to us and can be realized within ourselves as it is always present within mind since the latter is in reality identical with the former and contains it as a potentiality within itself. Aurobindo does not portray supermind as an original invention of his own but believes it can be found in the Vedas and that the Vedic Gods represent powers of the supermind In The Integral Yoga he declares that "By the supermind is meant the full Truth-Consciousness of the Divine Nature in which there can be no place for the principle of division and ignorance; it is always a full light and knowledge superior to all mental substance or mental movement." Supermind is a bridge between Sachchidananda and the lower manifestation and it is only through the supramental that mind, life and body can be spiritually transformed as opposed to through Sachchidananda The descent of supermind will mean the creation of a supramental race Affinity with Western philosophy In his writings, talks, and letters Sri Aurobindo has referred to several European philosophers with whose basic concepts he was familiar, commenting on their ideas and discussing the question of affinity to his own line of thought. Thus, he wrote a long essay on the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and mentioned especially Plato, Plotinus, Nietzsche and Bergson as thinkers in whom he was interested because of their more intuitive approach. On the other hand, he felt little attraction for the philosophy of Kant or Hegel. Several studies have shown a remarkable closeness to the evolutionary thought of Teilhard de Chardin, whom he did not know, whereas the latter came to know of Sri Aurobindo at a late stage. After reading some chapters of The Life Divine, he is reported to have said that Sri Aurobindo's vision of evolution was basically the same as his own, though stated for Asian readers. Several scholars have discovered significant similarities in the thought of Sri Aurobindo and Hegel. Steve Odin has discussed this subject comprehensively in a comparative study. Odin writes that Sri Aurobindo "has appropriated Hegel’s notion of an Absolute Spirit and employed it to radically restructure the architectonic framework of the ancient Hindu Vedanta system in contemporary terms." In his analysis Odin arrives at the conclusion that "both philosophers similarly envision world creation as the progressive self-manifestation and evolutionary ascent of a universal consciousness in its journey toward Self-realization." He points out that in contrast to the deterministic and continuous dialectal unfolding of Absolute Reason by the mechanism of thesis-antithesis-synthesis or affirmation-negation-integration, "Sri Aurobindo argues for a creative, emergent mode of evolution." In his résumé Odin states that Sri Aurobindo has overcome the ahistorical world-vision of traditional Hinduism and presented a concept which allows for a genuine advance and novelty. Importance of the Upanishads Although Sri Aurobindo was familiar with the most important lines of thought in Western philosophy, he did not acknowledge their influence on his own writings. He wrote that his philosophy "was formed first by the study of the Upanishads and the Gita… They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga." With the help of his readings he tried to move on to actual experience, "and it was on this experience that later on I founded my philosophy, not on ideas themselves." He assumes that the seers of the Upanishads had basically the same approach and gives some details of his vision of the past in a long passage in The Renaissance of India. "The Upanishads have been the acknowledged source of numerous profound philosophies and religions," he writes. Even Buddhism with all its developments was only a "restatement" from a new standpoint and with fresh terms. And, furthermore, the ideas of the Upanishads "can be rediscovered in much of the thought of Pythagoras and Plato and form the profound part of Neo-platonism and Gnosticism..." Finally, the larger part of German metaphysics "is little more in substance than an intellectual development of great realities more spiritually seen in this ancient teaching." When once he was asked by a disciple whether Plato got some of his ideas from Indian books, he responded that though something of the philosophy of India got through "by means of Pythagoras and others", he assumed that Plato got most of his ideas from intuition. Sri Aurobindo's indebtedness to the Indian tradition also becomes obvious through his placing a large number of quotations from the Rig Veda, the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita at the beginning of the chapters in The Life Divine, showing the connection of his own thought to Veda and Vedanta. The Isha Upanishad is considered to be one of the most important and more accessible writings of Sri Aurobindo. Before he published his final translation and analysis, he wrote ten incomplete commentaries. In a key passage he points out that the Brahman or Absolute is both the Stable and the Moving. "We must see it in eternal and immutable Spirit and in all the changing manifestations of universe and relativity." Sri Aurobindo's biographer K.R.S. Iyengar quotes R.S. Mugali as stating that Sri Aurobindo might have obtained in this Upanishad the thought-seed which later grew into The Life Divine. Synthesis and integration Sisir Kumar Maitra, who was a leading exponent of Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy, has referred to the issue of external influences and written that Sri Aurobindo does not mention names, but "as one reads his books one cannot fail to notice how thorough is his grasp of the great Western philosophers of the present age..." Although he is Indian one should not "underrate the influence of Western thought upon him. This influence is there, very clearly visible, but Sri Aurobindo... has not allowed himself to be dominated by it. He has made full use of Western thought, but he has made use of it for the purpose of building up his own system..." Thus Maitra, like Steve Odin, sees Sri Aurobindo not only in the tradition and context of Indian, but also Western philosophy and assumes he may have adopted some elements from the latter for his synthesis. R. Puligandla supports this viewpoint in his book Fundamentals of Indian Philosophy. He describes Sri Aurobindo's philosophy as "an original synthesis of the Indian and Western traditions." "He integrates in a unique fashion the great social, political and scientific achievements of the modern West with the ancient and profound spiritual insights of Hinduism. The vision that powers the life divine of Aurobindo is none other than the Upanishadic vision of the unity of all existence." Puligandla also discusses Sri Aurobindo's critical position vis-à-vis Shankara and his thesis that the latter's Vedanta is a world-negating philosophy, as it teaches that the world is unreal and illusory. From Puligandla's standpoint this is a misrepresentation of Shankara's position, which may have been caused by Sri Aurobindo's endeavour to synthesize Hindu and Western modes of thought, identifying Shankara's Mayavada with the subjective idealism of George Berkeley. However, Sri Aurobindo's critique of Shankara is supported by U. C. Dubey in his paper titled Integralism: The Distinctive Feature of Sri Aurobindo’s Philosophy. He points out that Sri Aurobindo's system presents an integral view of Reality where there is no opposition between the Absolute and its creative force, as they are actually one. Furthermore, he refers to Sri Aurobindo's conception of the supermind as the mediatory principle between the Absolute and the finite world and quotes S.K. Maitra stating that this conception "is the pivot round which the whole of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy moves." Dubey proceeds to analyse the approach of the Shankarites and believes that they follow an inadequate kind of logic that does not do justice to the challenge of tackling the problem of the Absolute, which cannot be known by finite reason. With the help of the finite reason, he says, "we are bound to determine the nature of reality as one or many, being or becoming. But Sri Aurobindo's Integral Advaitism reconciles all apparently different aspects of Existence in an all-embracing unity of the Absolute." Next, Dubey explains that for Sri Aurobindo there is a higher reason, the "logic of the infinite" in which his integralism is rooted. Legacy Sri Aurobindo was an Indian nationalist but is best known for his philosophy on human evolution and Integral Yoga. Influence His influence has been wide-ranging. In India, S. K. Maitra, Anilbaran Roy and D. P. Chattopadhyaya commented on Sri Aurobindo's work. Writers on esotericism and traditional wisdom, such as Mircea Eliade, Paul Brunton, and Rene Guenon, all saw him as an authentic representative of the Indian spiritual tradition. Though Rene Guenon thought Sri Aurobindo's thoughts were betrayed by some of his followers and that some works published under his name were not authentic, since not traditional. Haridas Chaudhuri and Frederic Spiegelberg were among those who were inspired by Aurobindo, who worked on the newly formed American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. Soon after, Chaudhuri and his wife Bina established the Cultural Integration Fellowship, from which later emerged the California Institute of Integral Studies. Sri Aurobindo influenced Subhash Chandra Bose to take an initiative of dedicating to Indian National Movement full-time. Bose writes, "The illustrious example of Arabindo Ghosh looms large before my vision. I feel that I am ready to make the sacrifice which that example demands of me." Karlheinz Stockhausen was heavily inspired by Satprem's writings about Sri Aurobindo during a week in May 1968, a time at which the composer was undergoing a personal crisis and had found Sri Aurobindo's philosophies were relevant to his feelings. After this experience, Stockhausen's music took a completely different turn, focusing on mysticism, that was to continue until the end of his career. Jean Gebser acknowledged Sri Aurobindo's influence on his work and referred to him several times in his writings. Thus, in The Invisible Origin he quotes a long passage from The Synthesis of Yoga. Gebser believes that he was "in some way brought into the extremely powerful spiritual field of force radiating through Sri Aurobindo." In his title Asia Smiles Differently he reports about his visit to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and meeting with the Mother whom he calls an "exceptionally gifted person." After meeting Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry in 1915, the Danish author and artist Johannes Hohlenberg published one of the first Yoga titles in Europe and later on wrote two essays on Sri Aurobindo. He also published extracts from The Life Divine in Danish translation. William Irwin Thompson travelled to Auroville in 1972, where he met "The Mother". Thompson has called Sri Aurobindo's teaching on spirituality a "radical anarchism" and a "post-religious approach" and regards their work as having "... reached back into the Goddess culture of prehistory, and, in Marshall McLuhan's terms, 'culturally retrieved' the archetypes of the shaman and la sage femme... " Thompson also writes that he experienced Shakti, or psychic power coming from The Mother on the night of her death in 1973. Sri Aurobindo's ideas about the further evolution of human capabilities influenced the thinking of Michael Murphy – and indirectly, the human potential movement, through Murphy's writings. The American philosopher Ken Wilber has called Sri Aurobindo "India's greatest modern philosopher sage" and has integrated some of his ideas into his philosophical vision. Wilber's interpretation of Aurobindo has been criticised by Rod Hemsell. New Age writer Andrew Harvey also looks to Sri Aurobindo as a major inspiration. Followers The following authors, disciples and organisations trace their intellectual heritage back to, or have in some measure been influenced by, Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Nolini Kanta Gupta (1889–1983) was one of Sri Aurobindo's senior disciples, and wrote extensively on philosophy, mysticism, and spiritual evolution based on the teaching of Sri Aurobindo and "The Mother". Nirodbaran (1903–2006). A doctor who obtained his medical degree from Edinburgh, his long and voluminous correspondence with Sri Aurobindo elaborate on many aspects of Integral Yoga and fastidious record of conversations bring out Sri Aurobindo's thought on numerous subjects. M. P. Pandit (1918–1993). Secretary to "The Mother" and the ashram, his copious writings and lectures cover Yoga, the Vedas, Tantra, Sri Aubindo's epic "Savitri" and others. Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) joined the ashram in 1944. Later, he wrote the play about Sri Aurobindo's life – Sri Aurobindo: Descent of the Blue – and a book, Infinite: Sri Aurobindo. An author, composer, artist and athlete, he was perhaps best known for holding public events on the theme of inner peace and world harmony (such as concerts, meditations, and races). Pavitra (1894–1969) was one of their early disciples. Born as Philippe Barbier Saint-Hilaire in Paris. Pavitra left some very interesting memoirs of his conversations with them in 1925 and 1926, which were published as Conversations avec Pavitra. Dilipkumar Roy (1897–1980) was a Bengali Indian musician, musicologist, novelist, poet and essayist. T.V. Kapali Sastry (1886–1953) was an eminent author and Sanskrit scholar. He joined the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1929 and wrote books and articles in four languages, exploring especially Sri Aurobindo's Vedic interpretations. Satprem (1923–2007) was a French author and an important disciple of "The Mother" who published Mother's Agenda (1982), Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness (2000), On the Way to Supermanhood (2002) and more. Indra Sen (1903–1994) was another disciple of Sri Aurobindo who, although little-known in the West, was the first to articulate integral psychology and integral philosophy, in the 1940s and 1950s. A compilation of his papers came out under the title, Integral Psychology in 1986. K. D. Sethna (1904–2011) was an Indian poet, scholar, writer, cultural critic and disciple of Sri Aurobindo. For several decades he was the editor of the Ashram journal Mother India. Margaret Woodrow Wilson (Nistha) (1886–1944), daughter of US President Woodrow Wilson, she came to the ashram in 1938 and stayed there until her death. She helped to prepare a revised edition of The Life Divine. Critics Adi Da finds that Sri Aurobindo's contributions were merely literary and cultural and had extended his political motivation into spirituality and human evolution N. R. Malkani finds Sri Aurobindo's theory of creation to be false, as the theory talks about experiences and visions which are beyond normal human experiences. He says the theory is an intellectual response to a difficult problem and that Sri Aurobindo uses the trait of unpredictability in theorising and discussing things not based upon the truth of existence. Malkani says that awareness is already a reality and suggests there would be no need to examine the creative activity subjected to awareness. Ken Wilber's interpretation of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy differed from the notion of dividing reality as a different level of matter, life, mind, overmind, supermind proposed by Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine, and terms them as higher- or lower-nested holons and states that there is only a fourfold reality (a system of reality created by himself). Rajneesh (Osho) says that Sri Aurobindo was a great scholar but was never realised; that his personal ego had made him indirectly claim that he went beyond the Buddha; and that he is said to have believed himself to be enlightened due to increasing number of followers. In popular culture The 1970 Indian Bengali-language biographical drama film Mahabiplabi Aurobindo, directed by Dipak Gupta, depicted Sri Aurobindo's life on screen. On the 72nd Republic Day of India, the Ministry of Culture presented a tableau on his life. Literature Indian editions A first edition of collected works was published in 1972 in 30 volumes: Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL), Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. A new edition of collected works was started in 1995. Currently, 36 out of 37 volumes have been published: Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA). Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Early Cultural Writings. Collected Poems. Collected Plays and Stories. Karmayogin. Records of Yoga. Vedic and Philological Studies. The Secrets of the Veda. Hymns to the Mystic Fire. Isha Upanishad. Kena and Other Upanishads. Essays on the Gita. The Renaissance of India with a Defence of Indian Culture. The Life Divine. The Synthesis of Yoga. The Human Cycle – The Ideal of Human Unity – War and Self-Determination. The Future Poetry. Letters on Poetry and Art Letters on Yoga. The Mother Savitri – A Legend and a Symbol. Letters on Himself and the Ashram. Autobiographical Notes and Other Writings of Historical Interest. American edition Main Works Sri Aurobindo Primary Works Set 12 vol. US Edition, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Sri Aurobindo Selected Writings Software CD-ROM, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Life Divine, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Synthesis of Yoga, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Essays on the Gita, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Ideal of Human Unity, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Human Cycle: The Psychology of Social Development, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Human Cycle, Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self Determination, Lotus Press. The Upanishads, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Secret of the Veda, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Hymns to the Mystic Fire, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Mother, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Compilations and Secondary Literature The Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo's Teaching and Method of Practice, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Future Evolution of Man, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Essential Aurobindo – Writings of Sri Aurobindo Bhagavad Gita and Its Message, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Mind of Light, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Rebirth and Karma, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Hour of God by Sri Aurobindo, Lotus Press. Dictionary of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, (compiled by M.P. Pandit), Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Vedic Symbolism, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin The Powers Within, Lotus Press. Comparative studies Hemsell, Rod (Oct. 2014). The Philosophy of Evolution. Auro-e-Books, E-Book Hemsell, Rod (Dec. 2014). Sri Aurobindo and the Logic of the Infinite: Essays for the New Millennium. Auro-e-Books, E-Book Hemsell, Rod (2017). The Philosophy of Consciousness: Hegel and Sri Aurobindo. E-Book Huchzermeyer, Wilfried (Oct. 2018). Sri Aurobindo’s Commentaries on Krishna, Buddha, Christ and Ramakrishna. Their Role in the Evolution of Humanity. edition sawitri, E-Book Johnston, David T. (Nov. 2016) Jung's Global Vision: Western Psyche, Eastern Mind, With References to Sri Aurobindo, Integral Yoga, The Mother. Agio Publishing House, Johnston, David T. (Dec. 2016). Prophets in Our Midst: Jung, Tolkien, Gebser, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Universe, E-Book Singh, Satya Prakash (2013). Nature of God. A Comparative Study in Sri Aurobindo and Whitehead. Antrik Express Digital, E-Book Singh, Satya Prakash (2005). Sri Aurobindo, Jung and Vedic Yoga. Mira Aditi Centre, Eric M. Weiss (2003): The Doctrine of the Subtle Worlds. Sri Aurobindo’s Cosmology, Modern Science and the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, Dissertation (PDF; 1,3 MB), California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco See also Integral psychology References Notes Citations Bibliography Further reading (2 volumes, 1945) – written in a hagiographical style K. D. Sethna, Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo Raychaudhuri, Girijashankar.....Sri Aurobindo O Banglar Swadeshi Joog (published 1956)...this book was serially published in the journal Udbodhan and read out to Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry while he was still alive......Sri Aurobindo commented, " he will snatch away smile from my face" Ghose, Aurobindo, Nahar, S., & Institut de recherches évolutives. (2000). India's rebirth: A selection from Sri Aurobindo's writing, talks and speeches Paris: Institut de recherches évolutives. External links Sri Aurobindo Ashram Auroville Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo 1872 births 1950 deaths Bengali people Bengali Hindus 20th-century Hindu religious leaders Advaitin philosophers Anushilan Samiti Alumni of King's College, Cambridge Alumni of the University of Cambridge Bengali Hindu saints 19th-century Bengalis 20th-century Bengalis Bengali spiritual writers Spiritual evolution English-language poets from India English spiritual writers Hindu revivalists 20th-century Hindu philosophers and theologians Hindu reformers Indian Hindu yogis Integral thought Indian male essayists Indian spiritual writers Indian male poets 19th-century Indian translators Indian revolutionaries Indian civil servants Swadeshi activists People from Kolkata People from Vadodara Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda faculty People educated at St Paul's School, London Prisoners and detainees of British India 19th-century Indian philosophers 20th-century Indian philosophers 19th-century Indian poets 20th-century Indian poets 19th-century Indian non-fiction writers 20th-century Indian non-fiction writers Indian male writers English-language writers from India Bengali writers Writers from Puducherry Poets from West Bengal 20th-century Indian essayists Indian political philosophers 19th-century Indian educational theorists 20th-century Indian educational theorists Neo-Vedanta 20th-century Indian translators Scholars from Puducherry Revolutionaries of Bengal during British Rule Modern yoga gurus Scholars from West Bengal	false	[ "Kyle Cease (born September 19, 1977, in Bothell, Washington) is an American actor, comedian, and motivational speaker.\n\nBiography\nKyle Cease began performing comedy at the age of 12 years. He was a regular in comedy clubs at 15 and a headliner at the age of 18 years. While still keeping residence in Bothell, Washington, his hometown, he was cast as Bogey Lowenstein in the 1999 movie 10 Things I Hate About You. Right after the film, he moved to Los Angeles. Two years later he was featured in Not Another Teen Movie, as the slow clapper. In the same year, he released his first CD, Wait Your Turn. He has made appearances on The Martin Short Show, One on One, Tuned Up, VH1's Super Secret Movie Rules, and in 2005, the movie The Hand Job. Kyle has released a DVD of his nationwide tour called One Dimple. The DVD contains a road documentary, commentary and a performance clip of him on Premium Blend. He was also on Chelsea Lately and other shows that featured his off the cuff style. Cease spent his 20s touring thousands.\n\nIn 2010, Cease released another Comedy Central Album, entitled I Highly Recommend This.\n\nKyle Cease had a Comedy Central Presents special in 2006. He has had hundreds of TV and movie appearances in different commercials, sitcoms and late night shows, etc.\n\nIn 2007 Cease had a 1-hour Comedy Central special called Weirder Blacker Dimpler.\n\nKyle was ranked #1 on Comedy Central's Standup Showdown in 2009.\n\nIn 2010, Cease started combining his comedy with public speaking.\n\nFilmography\n 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)\n Not Another Teen Movie (2001)\n\nAlbums\n\nWorks\nI Hope I Screw This Up: How Falling In Love with Your Fears Can Change the World (2018) \nThe Illusion of Money: Why Chasing Money is Stopping You from Receiving It (2019)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nOfficial website\n\nKyle's Myspace\n\n1977 births\nLiving people\nAmerican male film actors\nAmerican stand-up comedians\nPeople from Bothell, Washington\nMale actors from Washington (state)\n21st-century American comedians\n20th-century American comedians", "A cease and desist letter is a document sent to an individual or business to stop allegedly illegal activity. The phrase \"cease and desist\" is a legal doublet, made up of two near-synonyms. The letter may warn that, if the recipient does not discontinue specified conduct, or take certain actions, by deadlines set in the letter, that party, i.e. the letter's recipient, may be sued. When issued by a public authority, a cease and desist letter, being \"a warning of impending judicial enforcement\", is most appropriately called a \"cease and desist order\".\n\nUsage for intellectual property\n\nAlthough cease and desist letters are not exclusively used in the area of intellectual property, particularly in regards to copyright infringement, such letters \"are frequently utilized in disputes concerning intellectual property and represent an important feature of the intellectual property law landscape\". The holder of an intellectual property right such as a copyrighted work, a trademark, or a patent, may send the cease and desist letter to inform a third party \"of the right holders' rights, identity, and intentions to enforce the rights\". The letter may merely contain a licensing offer or may be an explicit threat of a lawsuit. A cease and desist letter often triggers licensing negotiations, and is a frequent first step towards litigation.\n\nEffects on recipients\n\nReceiving numerous cease and desist letters may be very costly for the recipient. Each claim in the letters must be evaluated, and it should be decided whether to respond to the letters, \"whether or not to obtain an attorney's opinion letter, prepare for a lawsuit, and perhaps initiate [in case of letters regarding a potential patent infringement] a search for alternatives and the development of design-around technologies\".\n\nCease and desist letters are sometimes used to intimidate recipients and can be \"an effective tool used by corporations to chill the critical speech of gripe sites operators\". A company owning a trademark may send such letter to a gripe site operator alleging a trademark infringement, although the actual use of the trademark by the gripe site operator may fall under a fair use exception (in compliance with, in the U.S., the protection of free speech under the First Amendment).\n\nNotable cease and desist letters\n\n2017\nIn 2017, a cease and desist letter sent by Netflix for an unauthorized Stranger Things-related bar event was noted by news outlets such as Fortune and Quartz for its humorous wording.\n\n2020\nThe Philippine National Telecommunications Commission issued a cease and desist letter ordering ABS-CBN to stop broadcasting on May 5, 2020 after its franchise expired the day before (May 4, 2020). At 7:52 pm (PHT), ABS-CBN stopped its broadcast in compliance with the NTC's letter, signing off all of its free TV and radio stations (Channel 2, DZMM 630, and MOR 101.9). The said agency also gave ABS-CBN ten days to explain why its assigned frequencies should not be recalled. On June 30, 2020, considering that Channel 43 was also included in the May 5, 2020 shutdown order issued by the NTC against ABS-CBN (although ABS-CBN CEO Carlo Katigbak insisted that it is part of their blocktime agreement with AMCARA Broadcasting Network), the NTC and Solicitor General Jose Calida released two alias shutdown orders against Channel 43 on digital receiver ABS-CBN TV Plus and Sky Cable's nationwide satellite service Sky Direct.\n\nDonald Trump also sent a cease and desist letter to CNN asking them to retract a poll that showed him being 14 percentage points behind his opponent Joe Biden during the presidential election, prompting The Atlantic to warn about attacks on the media.\n\n2021\nIn 2021, Google's platform YouTube issued a significant number of cease and desist notices to the creators of various music bots on Discord. Some of the most notable bots to be sent this notice were and Groovy, at the time, the two most popular bots on the platform. These music bots allowed users to request songs and have the bot create a queue. This was done by pulling the audio stream from various streaming and video platforms, including YouTube, and then played that audio on the Discord voice channel. Because such music bots did not play any of the advertisements included on the video-hosting site, the company alleged missing revenue for itself and the content uploaders. A spokesperson for Google told The Verge that Groovy violated YouTube's terms of service for \"modifying the service and using it for commercial purposes\". The makers of Groovy had decided to comply with Google's request by shutting down the bot on August 30, 2021. According to estimations, the bot had more than 250 million users.\n\nSee also\n Abmahnung, the equivalent of a cease and desist letter in German and Austrian law\n Lumen (formerly known as Chilling Effects), a collaborative archive to protect lawful online activity from legal threats such as cease and desist letters\n ABS-CBN franchise renewal controversy, a national dispute in the Philippines regarding the ABS-CBN franchise renewal which involved a cease and desist letter\n Clameur de haro\n Demand letter\n Legal threat\n Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act\n Strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Chillingeffects.org—A joint project between the Electronic Frontier Foundation and several universities to monitor uses and abuses of intellectual property rights on the internet. Contains a database of cease-and-desist letters to which either senders or recipients can contribute.\n \n\nLegal terminology\nLetters (message)" ]
[ "Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany", "Biography" ]	C_d7c59ff9f44c41abb2e696c58463b026_1	where was he born?	1	where was Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, born?	Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany	Edward Plunkett (Dunsany), known en famille as "Eddie," was the first son of John William Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany (1853-1899), and his wife, Ernle Elizabeth Louisa Maria Grosvenor Ernle-Erle-Drax, nee Ernle Elizabeth Louisa Maria Grosvenor Burton (1855-1916). From a historically wealthy and famous family, Lord Dunsany was related to many well-known Irish figures. He was a kinsman of the Catholic Saint Oliver Plunkett, the martyred Archbishop of Armagh, whose ring and crozier head are still held by the Dunsany family. He was also related to the prominent Anglo-Irish unionist, and later nationalist / Home Rule politician Sir Horace Plunkett, and George Count Plunkett, Papal Count and Republican politician, father of Joseph Plunkett, executed for his part in the 1916 Rising. His mother was a cousin of Sir Richard Burton, and he inherited from her considerable height, being 6' 4". The Countess of Fingall, wife of Dunsany's cousin, the Earl of Fingall, wrote a best-selling account of the life of the aristocracy in Ireland in the late 19th century and early 20th century, called Seventy Years Young. Plunkett's only grown sibling, a younger brother, from whom he was estranged from around 1916, for reasons not fully clear but connected to his mother's will, was the noted British naval officer Sir Reginald Drax. Another, younger, brother died in infancy. Edward Plunkett grew up at the family properties, most notably Dunstall Priory in Shoreham, Kent, and Dunsany Castle in County Meath, but also family homes such as in London. His schooling was at Cheam, Eton College and finally the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, which he entered in 1896. CANNOTANSWER	Edward Plunkett grew up at the family properties,		false	[ "Miguel Skrobot (Warsaw, 1873 – Curitiba, February 20, 1912) was a businessman Brazilian of Polish origin.\n\nMiguel Skrobot was born in 1873, in Warsaw, Poland, to José Skrobot and Rosa Skrobot. When he was 18 he migrated to Brazil and settled in Curitiba as a merchant.\n\nHe married Maria Pansardi, who was born in Tibagi, Paraná, to Italian immigrants, and she bore him three children. He kept a steam-powered factory where he worked on grinding and toasting coffee beans under the \"Rio Branco\" brand, located on the spot where today stands the square called Praça Zacarias (square located in the center of Curitiba). He also owned a grocery store near Praça Tiradentes (also a square in the center of Curitiba, where the city was born). He died an early death, when he was 39, on February 20, 1912.\n\nReferences\n\n1873 births\n1912 deaths\nBrazilian businesspeople\nPeople from Curitiba\nPolish emigrants to Brazil", "Adolf von Rauch (22 April 1798 - 12 December 1882) was a German paper manufacturer in Heilbronn, where he was born and died and where he was a major builder of social housing.\n\nPapermakers\n1798 births\n1882 deaths\nPeople from Heilbronn", "Jerome D. Schein was Professor Emeritus of Sensory Rehabilitation at New York University, and Adjunct Professor of Education at the University of Alberta, Canada, and a consultant in Coconut Creek, Florida.\n\nPersonal life and ancestry\nJerome Daniel Schein was born on May 22, 1923, to Adolph and Jeanette Schein, who were both from Romania. Adolph was born in Galatz, Romania, and Jeanette was born in Focșani, Romania. He was the younger brother to Harold and Donald. Schein was born in Minneapolis where he stayed for the majority of his adult life. He attended North Community High School where he was a part of the science club. He was a member of the National Honor Society. At NHS, he met Amy Ann Butt, and she became pregnant with his child in March of 1942. His daughter, Carole Dianne Schein was born on December 7, 1942. He attended Northwestern University, and on June 27, 1942, he registered for World War II. His other daughter, Raleigh Helene Schein, was born on January 17, 1947.\n\nCareer\nSchein was a Professor Emeritus of Sensory Rehabilitation at New York University. He was also a professor at Gallaudet University, and an adjust professor at the University of Alberta. He published 25 books and more than 200 refereed papers on sensory disorders and has received numerous honors and awards. He was a member of the Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development. He was the author of over 200 papers and a holder of the Powrie V. Doctor Chair at Gallaudet.\n\nReferences\n\n1923 births\n2010 deaths\nAmerican psychologists\nNew York University faculty\nNorth Community High School alumni\nNorthwestern University alumni\nAmerican expatriates in Canada" ]
[ "Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany", "Biography", "where was he born?", "Edward Plunkett grew up at the family properties," ]	C_d7c59ff9f44c41abb2e696c58463b026_1	Who were his parents?	2	Who were Edward Plunkett's parents?	Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany	Edward Plunkett (Dunsany), known en famille as "Eddie," was the first son of John William Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany (1853-1899), and his wife, Ernle Elizabeth Louisa Maria Grosvenor Ernle-Erle-Drax, nee Ernle Elizabeth Louisa Maria Grosvenor Burton (1855-1916). From a historically wealthy and famous family, Lord Dunsany was related to many well-known Irish figures. He was a kinsman of the Catholic Saint Oliver Plunkett, the martyred Archbishop of Armagh, whose ring and crozier head are still held by the Dunsany family. He was also related to the prominent Anglo-Irish unionist, and later nationalist / Home Rule politician Sir Horace Plunkett, and George Count Plunkett, Papal Count and Republican politician, father of Joseph Plunkett, executed for his part in the 1916 Rising. His mother was a cousin of Sir Richard Burton, and he inherited from her considerable height, being 6' 4". The Countess of Fingall, wife of Dunsany's cousin, the Earl of Fingall, wrote a best-selling account of the life of the aristocracy in Ireland in the late 19th century and early 20th century, called Seventy Years Young. Plunkett's only grown sibling, a younger brother, from whom he was estranged from around 1916, for reasons not fully clear but connected to his mother's will, was the noted British naval officer Sir Reginald Drax. Another, younger, brother died in infancy. Edward Plunkett grew up at the family properties, most notably Dunstall Priory in Shoreham, Kent, and Dunsany Castle in County Meath, but also family homes such as in London. His schooling was at Cheam, Eton College and finally the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, which he entered in 1896. CANNOTANSWER	John William Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany (1853-1899), and his wife, Ernle Elizabeth Louisa		false	[ "The Extraordinary Tale of Nicholas Pierce is a 2011 adventure novel written by Alexander DeLuca. It follows the journey of a university teacher Nicholas Pierce, who suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder as he searches for his biological parents, traveling across states in the United States of America. He travels with a friend, who is an eccentric barista in a cafe in upstate New York, named Sergei Tarasov.\n\nPlot\nNicholas Pierce suffers from OCD. He is also missing the memory of the first five years of his life. Raised by adoptive parents, one day he receives a mysterious box from an \"Uncle Nathan\". Curious, he sets off on a journey to find his biological parents with a Russian friend, Sergei Tarasov. On the trip, they meet several people, face money problems and different challenges. They also pick up a hitchhiker, Jessica, who later turns out to be a criminal.\n\nFinally, Nicholas finds his grandparents, who direct him to his biological parents. When he meets them, he finds out that his vaguely registered biological 'parents' were actually neighbors of his real parents who had died in an accident. The mysterious box that he had received is destroyed. He finds out that it contained photographs from his early life.\n\n2011 American novels\nNovels about obsessive–compulsive disorder", "Bomba and the Jungle Girl is a 1952 adventure film directed by Ford Beebe and starring Johnny Sheffield. It is the eighth film (of 12) in the Bomba, the Jungle Boy film series.\n\nPlot\nBomba decides to find out who his parents were. He starts with Cody Casson's diary and follows the trail to a native village. An ancient blind woman tells him his parents, along the village's true ruler, were murdered by the current chieftain and his daughter. With the aid of an inspector and his daughter, Bomba battles the usurpers in the cave where his parents were buried.\n\nCast\nJohnny Sheffield\nKaren Sharpe\nWalter Sande\nSuzette Harbin\nMartin Wilkins\nMorris Buchanan\nLeonard Mudie\nDon Blackman.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1952 films\nAmerican films\nAmerican adventure films\nFilms directed by Ford Beebe\nFilms produced by Walter Mirisch\nMonogram Pictures films\n1952 adventure films\nAmerican black-and-white films", "Shravana Kumara (), mentioned in the ancient Hindu text Ramayana, known for his filial piety towards his parents, was killed accidentally by King Dasharatha.\n\nFilial piety \n\nShravana Kumara's parents, Shantanu and Gyanvanti (Malaya), were hermits. They were both blind. When they became aged, Shravana wanted them to take to the four most sacred places of Hindu pilgrimage to purify the soul. Since Shravana Kumara could not afford the transport, he decided to put each parent in a basket and tie each basket to an end of a bamboo pole, which he would carry on his shoulder while on their pilgrimage.\n\nAccording to Punjabi folklore, Shravana's mother was distantly related to King Dasharatha as his sister.\n\nDeath \n\nAccording to the Ramayana, while hunting in the forest of Ayodhya, then-Prince Dasharatha heard a sound near a lake and unleashed an arrow, hoping to hit an animal. When he crossed the lake to collect his kill, he found that his arrow had fatally struck a teenage boy who was bleeding. The injured boy was Shravana, who then told Dasharatha he had come to the lake to collect water for his sick and aged parents, who were both blind and whom he had been carrying on a sling. With his dying breath, Shravana requested Dasharatha to take water to his parents and to tell them what happened.\n\nShravana then succumbed to his wounds, and when Dasharatha took water for his parents and told them of his tragic mistake, they were unable to bear the shock. Despite acknowledging that it was an accident, they cursed Dasharatha that he too would experience 'Putrashoka' (Sanskrit, 'putra' is child/son and shoka' is grief; grief due to loss of a son). Thus Shravana's sick and thirsty parents died without drinking water. \n\nThis curse turned out to be true when King Dasharatha had to suffer the exile of his eldest and most beloved and Rama who had to be exiled at his own orders (it was actually his second queen Kaikeyi's wish that could not be ignored since he had promised her a boon years back when she had saved his life). So he did it unwillingly.\n\n Legacy \n\nLocal tradition holds that the place where Shravana died was named 'Sarvan' in Unnao district of Uttar Pradesh in India, and the spot where Dasharatha shot his arrow came to be known as 'Sarwara' and the place where Shravana's parents died is called 'Samadha. An old and dilapidated memorial for Shravana on the banks of the lake is now withering away.\n\nShrine\nMukhed in Nanded district of Maharashtra has a samadhi (shrine) dedicated to Shravana.\n\nSee also \n Hindu text\n Kosala kingdom\n Sarayu\n\nReferences \n\nSages in the Ramayana\nRishis" ]
[ "Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany", "Biography", "where was he born?", "Edward Plunkett grew up at the family properties,", "Who were his parents?", "John William Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany (1853-1899), and his wife, Ernle Elizabeth Louisa" ]	C_d7c59ff9f44c41abb2e696c58463b026_1	Did he have children?	3	Did Edward Plunkett have children?	Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany	Edward Plunkett (Dunsany), known en famille as "Eddie," was the first son of John William Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany (1853-1899), and his wife, Ernle Elizabeth Louisa Maria Grosvenor Ernle-Erle-Drax, nee Ernle Elizabeth Louisa Maria Grosvenor Burton (1855-1916). From a historically wealthy and famous family, Lord Dunsany was related to many well-known Irish figures. He was a kinsman of the Catholic Saint Oliver Plunkett, the martyred Archbishop of Armagh, whose ring and crozier head are still held by the Dunsany family. He was also related to the prominent Anglo-Irish unionist, and later nationalist / Home Rule politician Sir Horace Plunkett, and George Count Plunkett, Papal Count and Republican politician, father of Joseph Plunkett, executed for his part in the 1916 Rising. His mother was a cousin of Sir Richard Burton, and he inherited from her considerable height, being 6' 4". The Countess of Fingall, wife of Dunsany's cousin, the Earl of Fingall, wrote a best-selling account of the life of the aristocracy in Ireland in the late 19th century and early 20th century, called Seventy Years Young. Plunkett's only grown sibling, a younger brother, from whom he was estranged from around 1916, for reasons not fully clear but connected to his mother's will, was the noted British naval officer Sir Reginald Drax. Another, younger, brother died in infancy. Edward Plunkett grew up at the family properties, most notably Dunstall Priory in Shoreham, Kent, and Dunsany Castle in County Meath, but also family homes such as in London. His schooling was at Cheam, Eton College and finally the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, which he entered in 1896. CANNOTANSWER	CANNOTANSWER		false	[ "Antonio Oposa Jr. is a creative litigator, organizer and activist for environmental legislation in the Philippines. Oposa helped to litigate one of the first class-action suits taken by children to oppose environmentally-harmful actions taken by their government: in the 1990s, he represented 43 children from a local village to stop deforestation around the village that had been authorized by the Philippine government, on the basis that the children's rights would be harmed by the deforestation.\n\nThough the case was initially thrown out in lower courts on the basis that the children did not have legal standing, the Philippine Supreme Court overturned these, affirming the children did have standing; between both legal and legislative action, the deforestation activity was halted. The case inspired several other environmental cases around the globe, with children serving as the plaintiffs to fight for these rights.\n\nFor his actions, Oposa won the 2009 non-categorized Ramon Magsaysay Award for his work. He currently leads The Law of Nature Foundation.\n\nIn 2013, Oposa sued seven individual and government officials for violating Philippines environment laws through noise pollution from sound amplifier during regular benefit dance events.\n\nReferences\n\nLiving people\nFilipino environmentalists\nYear of birth missing (living people)\nPlace of birth missing (living people)", "Matthew 11:17 is the seventeenth verse in the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament.\n\nContent\nIn the original Greek according to Westcott-Hort for this verse is:\nκαὶ λέγουσιν, Ηὐλήσαμεν ὑμῖν, καὶ οὐκ ὠρχήσασθε· ἐθρηνήσαμεν ὑμῖν, καὶ οὐκ ἐκόψασθε. \n\nIn the King James Version of the Bible the text reads:\nAnd saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented.\n\nThe New International Version translates the passage as:\n\"'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge and you did not mourn.'\n\nAnalysis\nWitham states that Christ here is represented by the children that piped, while St. John by those that mourned, since Christ did not refuse to eat and converse with sinners.\n\nCommentary from the Church Fathers\nSaint Remigius: \" And straightway He answers Himself, saying, It is like unto children sitting in the market-place, crying unto their fellows, and saying, We have played music to you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned, and ye have not lamented.\"\n\nHilary of Poitiers: \" By the children are meant the Prophets, who preached as children in singleness of meaning, and in the midst of the synagogue, that is in the market-place, reprove them, that when they played to those to whom they had devoted the service of their body, they had not obeyed their words, as the movement of the dancers are regulated by the measures of the music. For the Prophets invited them to make confession by song to God, as it is contained in the song of Moses, of Isaiah, or of David.\"\n\nJerome: \" They say therefore, We have flayed music to you, and ye have not danced; i. e. We have called on you to work good works to our songs, and ye would not. We have lamented and called you to repentance, and this ye would not, rejecting both preaching, as well of exhortation to virtue, as of repentance for sin.\"\n\nSaint Remigius: \" What is that He says, To their fellows? Were the unbelieving Jews then fellows of the Prophets? He speaks thus only because they were sprung of one stock.\"\n\nJerome: \" The children are they of whom Isaiah speaks, Behold I, and the children whom the Lord has given me. (Is. 8:18) These children then sit in the market-place, where are many things for sale, and say,\"\n\nChrysostom: \" We have played music to you, and ye have not danced; that is, I have showed you an unrestricted life, and ye are not convinced; We have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented; that is, John lived a hard life, and ye heeded him not. Yet does not he speak one thing, and I another, but both speak the same thing, because both have one and the same object. For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a dæmon. The Son of man came &c.\"\n\nSee also\nWeddings and Funerals\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nOther translations of Matthew 11:17 at BibleHub\n\n011:17", "The American Homecoming Act or Amerasian Homecoming Act, was an Act of Congress giving preferential immigration status to children in Vietnam born of U.S. fathers. The American Homecoming Act was written in 1987, passed in 1988, and implemented in 1989. The act increased Vietnamese Amerasian immigration to the U.S. because it allowed applicants to establish a mixed race identity by appearance alone. Additionally, the American Homecoming Act allowed the Amerasian children and their immediate relatives to receive refugee benefits. About 23,000 Amerasians and 67,000 of their relatives entered the United States under this act. While the American Homecoming Act was the most successful program in moving Vietnamese Amerasian children to the United States, the act was not the first attempt by the U.S. government. Additionally the act experienced flaws and controversies over the refugees it did and did not include since the act only allowed Vietnamese Amerasian children, as opposed to other South East Asian nations in which the United States also had forces in the war.\n\nBackground\n\nIn April 1975, the U.S.-backed government of South Vietnam fell to North Vietnamese forces. Refugees from Vietnam started to arrive in the United States under U.S. government programs. In 1982, the U.S. Congress passed the Amerasian Immigration Act (PL 97-359). The law prioritized U.S. immigration to children fathered by U.S. citizens including from Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand. However, the law did not provide immigration to mothers or half-siblings, only to Amerasian children. Amerasians would generally have to coordinate with their American fathers in order to obtain a visa. This provided a challenge for many since some fathers did not know they had children or the fathers may not have wanted to claim the children. If the Amerasian children did not have documentation from the American father, then they could be examined for “American” physical features by a group of doctors. Additionally, since the U.S. and Vietnam's governments did not have diplomatic relations, the law could not be applied to Vietnamese Amerasian children. Essentially the Amerasian Immigration Act did little for Amerasian children and even less for Vietnamese Amerasian children.\n\nAs a way to address Vietnamese Amerasian children, the U.S. government permitted another route for Vietnamese-born children of American soldiers to the United States. The children would be classified as immigrants, but would also be eligible to receive refugee benefits. The U.S. and Vietnam governments established the Orderly Departure Program (ODP). The program is housed in the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). The ODP created a system where South Vietnamese soldiers and others connected to the U.S. war effort could emigrate from Vietnam to the United States. Initially the Amerasian children had to have documentation from their American fathers to be issued a visa, however the program eventually expanded to individuals that did not have firm documentation. The Orderly Departure Program moved around 6,000 Amerasians and 11,000 relatives to the United States.\n\nEnactment\n\nOn August 6, 1987, Rep. Robert J. Mrazek [D-NY-3] introduced the Amerasian Homecoming Bill (H.R. 3171). The bill was co-sponsored by 204 U.S. representatives (154 Democrats, 49 Republicans, and 1 Independent). In 1988, the U.S. Congress passed the Amerasian Homecoming Act (PL 100-200). The law took effect on March 21, 1988, and allowed Vietnamese Amerasians born January 1, 1962, through January 1, 1976, to apply for immigrant visas until March 21, 1990. Additionally the legislation removed immigration quotas and reduced legal barriers for Vietnamese Amerasians’ immigration. As a result of the act around 20,000 Amerasian children left Vietnam. Prior to the Amerasian Homecoming Act, many Amerasian children faced prejudice in Vietnam sometimes referred to as bui doi (“the dust of life” or “trash”). However, after the act many of these children would be called “golden children” since not only could the Amerasian children move to the United States, but so could their families. The act allowed the spouse, child, mother, or the next of kin of the Amerasian child to emigrate. The act was significant, because it allowed applicants to establish a mixed race identity by appearance alone.\n\nImmigration process\n\nThe American Homecoming Act operated through the Orderly Departure Program in the respective U.S. embassies. U.S. Embassy officials would conduct interviews for Amerasians children and their families. The interviews were intended to prove whether or not the child's father was a U.S. military personnel. Under the American Homecoming Act, Vietnamese Amerasian children did not have to have documentation from their American fathers; however if they did, their case would be processed quicker. The approval rating for Amerasian applicants was approximately 95 percent.\n\nThe approved applicants and their families would go through a medical exam. The medical exam was less extensive than other immigration medical exams. If they passed, the U.S. would notify Vietnamese authorities and would process them for departure. The Amerasians would then be sent to the Philippines for a 6-month English language (ESL) and cultural orientation (CO) program. Once the Amerasians arrived in the United States they would be resettled by private voluntary agencies contracted with the U.S. State Department. Some Amerasians gave accounts that some “fake families” approached them as a way to immigrate to the United States. The U.S. Attorney General in conversation with the U.S. Secretary of State submitted program reports to the U.S. Congress every three years.\n\nControversies\n\nWhile the American Homecoming Act was the most successful measure by the United States to encourage Amerasian immigration, the act faced controversies. A primary issue was the act only applied to Amerasian children born in Vietnam. The American Homecoming Act excluded Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. While Amerasian children from outside Vietnam could immigrate to the United States, they could do so only if their fathers claimed them. Most fathers did not recognize their children, especially if they were born to sex workers.\n\nIn 1993, a class action lawsuit was filed in the International Court of Complaints to establish Filipino Amerasian children's rights to assistance. The court ruled against the children, stating they were the products of sexual services provided to U.S. service personnel. Since prostitution is illegal, there could be no legal claim for the Filipino Amerasian children. Amerasian advocacy groups are actively attempting to gain recognition for Amerasian children through legal and legislative measures.\n\nThere were other concerns facing the American Homecoming Act by the Vietnamese immigrants. Some accounts include a Vietnamese woman who attempted to claim American citizenship for her Amerasian son, but the father denied the relationship and responsibility by calling her a prostitute. Since sex workers were largely excluded, many children were unable to participate in the program. In the 1970s, the U.S. cut refugee cash assistance and medical aid to only eight months. Many Amerasian children account for their struggles in public school and very few attended higher education. Amerasian children who stayed in their respective countries found difficulties. Many of the children faced prejudice since their fair skin or very dark skin, blue eyes, or curly black hair would quickly identify them as Amerasian. Additionally the children faced judgment from the new socialist Vietnamese officials and other neighbors since their features positioned them as reminders of the “old enemy.”\n\nReferences\n\nUnited States federal immigration and nationality legislation" ]
[ "Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany", "Biography", "where was he born?", "Edward Plunkett grew up at the family properties,", "Who were his parents?", "John William Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany (1853-1899), and his wife, Ernle Elizabeth Louisa", "Did he have children?", "I don't know." ]	C_d7c59ff9f44c41abb2e696c58463b026_1	anything else interesting?	4	Other than Edward Plunkett growing up at the family properties, is there anything else interesting in this article?	Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany	Edward Plunkett (Dunsany), known en famille as "Eddie," was the first son of John William Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany (1853-1899), and his wife, Ernle Elizabeth Louisa Maria Grosvenor Ernle-Erle-Drax, nee Ernle Elizabeth Louisa Maria Grosvenor Burton (1855-1916). From a historically wealthy and famous family, Lord Dunsany was related to many well-known Irish figures. He was a kinsman of the Catholic Saint Oliver Plunkett, the martyred Archbishop of Armagh, whose ring and crozier head are still held by the Dunsany family. He was also related to the prominent Anglo-Irish unionist, and later nationalist / Home Rule politician Sir Horace Plunkett, and George Count Plunkett, Papal Count and Republican politician, father of Joseph Plunkett, executed for his part in the 1916 Rising. His mother was a cousin of Sir Richard Burton, and he inherited from her considerable height, being 6' 4". The Countess of Fingall, wife of Dunsany's cousin, the Earl of Fingall, wrote a best-selling account of the life of the aristocracy in Ireland in the late 19th century and early 20th century, called Seventy Years Young. Plunkett's only grown sibling, a younger brother, from whom he was estranged from around 1916, for reasons not fully clear but connected to his mother's will, was the noted British naval officer Sir Reginald Drax. Another, younger, brother died in infancy. Edward Plunkett grew up at the family properties, most notably Dunstall Priory in Shoreham, Kent, and Dunsany Castle in County Meath, but also family homes such as in London. His schooling was at Cheam, Eton College and finally the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, which he entered in 1896. CANNOTANSWER	His mother was a cousin of Sir Richard Burton,		false	[ "\"How Interesting: A Tiny Man\" is a 2010 science fiction/magical realism short story by American writer Harlan Ellison. It was first published in Realms of Fantasy.\n\nPlot summary\nA scientist creates a tiny man. The tiny man is initially very popular, but then draws the hatred of the world, and so the tiny man must flee, together with the scientist (who is now likewise hated, for having created the tiny man).\n\nReception\n\"How Interesting: A Tiny Man\" won the 2010 Nebula Award for Best Short Story, tied with Kij Johnson's \"Ponies\". It was Ellison's final Nebula nomination and win, of his record-setting eight nominations and three wins.\n\nTor.com calls the story \"deceptively simple\", with \"execution (that) is flawless\" and a \"Geppetto-like\" narrator, while Publishers Weekly describes it as \"memorably depict(ing) humanity's smallness of spirit\". The SF Site, however, felt it was \"contrived and less than profound\".\n\nNick Mamatas compared \"How Interesting: A Tiny Man\" negatively to Ellison's other Nebula-winning short stories, and stated that the story's two mutually exclusive endings (in one, the tiny man is killed; in the other, he becomes God) are evocative of the process of writing short stories. Ben Peek considered it to be \"more allegory than (...) anything else\", and interpreted it as being about how the media \"give(s) everyone a voice\", and also about how Ellison was treated by science fiction fandom.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nAudio version of ''How Interesting: A Tiny Man, at StarShipSofa\nHow Interesting: A Tiny Man, at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database\n\nNebula Award for Best Short Story-winning works\nShort stories by Harlan Ellison", "Say Anything may refer to:\n\nFilm and television\n Say Anything..., a 1989 American film by Cameron Crowe\n \"Say Anything\" (BoJack Horseman), a television episode\n\nMusic\n Say Anything (band), an American rock band\n Say Anything (album), a 2009 album by the band\n \"Say Anything\", a 2012 song by Say Anything from Anarchy, My Dear\n \"Say Anything\" (Marianas Trench song), 2006\n \"Say Anything\" (X Japan song), 1991\n \"Say Anything\", a song by Aimee Mann from Whatever, 1993\n \"Say Anything\", a song by the Bouncing Souls from The Bouncing Souls, 1997\n \"Say Anything\", a song by Good Charlotte from The Young and the Hopeless, 2002\n \"Say Anything\", a song by Girl in Red, 2018\n \"Say Anything\", a song by Will Young from Lexicon, 2019\n \"Say Anything (Else)\", a song by Cartel from Chroma, 2005\n\nOther uses\n Say Anything (party game), a 2008 board game published by North Star Games\n \"Say Anything\", a column in YM magazine\n\nSee also\n Say Something (disambiguation)", "In baseball, a fair ball is a batted ball that entitles the batter to attempt to reach first base. By contrast, a foul ball is a batted ball that does not entitle the batter to attempt to reach first base. Whether a batted ball is fair or foul is determined by the location of the ball at the appropriate reference point, as follows:\n\n if the ball leaves the playing field without touching anything, the point where the ball leaves the field;\n else, if the ball first lands past first or third base without touching anything, the point where the ball lands;\n else, if the ball rolls or bounces past first or third base without touching anything other than the ground, the point where the ball passes the base;\n else, if the ball touches anything other than the ground (such as an umpire, a player, or any equipment left on the field) before any of the above happens, the point of such touching;\n else (the ball comes to a rest before reaching first or third base), the point where the ball comes to a rest.\n\nIf any part of the ball is on or above fair territory at the appropriate reference point, it is fair; else it is foul. Fair territory or fair ground is defined as the area of the playing field between the two foul lines, and includes the foul lines themselves and the foul poles. However, certain exceptions exist:\n\n A ball that touches first, second, or third base is always fair.\n Under Rule 5.09(a)(7)-(8), if a batted ball touches the batter or his bat while the batter is in the batter's box and not intentionally interfering with the course of the ball, the ball is foul.\n A ball that hits the foul pole without first having touched anything else off the bat is fair.\n Ground rules may provide whether a ball hitting specific objects (e.g. roof, overhead speaker) is fair or foul.\n\nOn a fair ball, the batter attempts to reach first base or any subsequent base, runners attempt to advance and fielders try to record outs. A fair ball is considered a live ball until the ball becomes dead by leaving the field or any other method.\n\nReferences\n\nBaseball rules" ]

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