British Invasion
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British Invasion
The British Invasion was a cultural phenomenon of the mid-1960s, when rock and pop music acts from the United Kingdom and other aspects of British culture became popular in the United States and significant to the rising "counterculture" on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Pop and rock groups such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Zombies, the Kinks, Small Faces, the Dave Clark Five, Herman's Hermits, the Hollies, the Animals, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Searchers, the Yardbirds, the Who and Them, as well as solo singers like Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, Petula Clark, Tom Jones and Donovan, were at the forefront of the "invasion". Background The rebellious tone and image of US rock and roll and blues musicians became popular with British youth in the late 1950s. While early commercial attempts to replicate US rock and roll mostly failed, the trad jazz–inspired skiffle craze, with its do it yourself attitude, produced two top ten hits in the US by Lonnie Done ...
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Swinging Sixties
The Swinging Sixties was a youth-driven cultural revolution that took place in the United Kingdom during the mid-to-late 1960s, emphasising modernity and fun-loving hedonism, with Swinging London as its centre. It saw a flourishing in art, music and fashion, and was symbolised by the city's "pop and fashion exports". Among its key elements were the Beatles, as leaders of the British Invasion of musical acts; Mary Quant's miniskirt; popular fashion models such as Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton; the mod subculture; the iconic status of popular shopping areas such as London's King's Road, Kensington and Carnaby Street; the political activism of the anti-nuclear movement; and sexual liberation. Music was a big part of the scene, with "the London sound" including the Who, the Kinks, the Small Faces and the Rolling Stones, bands that were the mainstay of pirate radio stations like Radio Caroline, Wonderful Radio London and Swinging Radio England. Swinging London also reached British cinem ...
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The Searchers (band)
The Searchers were an English Merseybeat group who emerged during the British Invasion of the 1960s. The band's hits include a remake of the Drifters' 1961 hit, "Sweets for My Sweet"; " Sugar and Spice" (written by their producer Tony Hatch); remakes of Jackie DeShannon's " Needles and Pins" and "When You Walk in the Room"; a cover of the Orlons' "Don't Throw Your Love Away"; and a cover of the Clovers' " Love Potion No. 9". With the Swinging Blue Jeans, the Searchers tied for being the second group from Liverpool, after the Beatles, to have a hit in the US when their "Needles and Pins" and the Swinging Blue Jeans' "Hippy Hippy Shake" both reached the Hot 100 on 7 March 1964. Band history Origins Founded as a skiffle group in Liverpool in 1959 by John McNally and Mike Pender, the band took their name from the 1956 John Ford western film ''The Searchers''. The band grew out of an earlier skiffle group formed by McNally in 1957, with his friends Brian Dolan (guitar) and Tony Wes ...
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Skiffle
Skiffle is a genre of folk music with influences from American folk music, blues, country, bluegrass, and jazz, generally performed with a mixture of manufactured and homemade or improvised instruments. Originating as a form in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, it became extremely popular in United Kingdom in the 1950s, where it was played by such artists as Lonnie Donegan, The Vipers Skiffle Group, Ken Colyer, and Chas McDevitt. Skiffle was a major part of the early careers of some musicians who later became prominent jazz, pop, blues, folk, and rock performers, The Beatles and Rory Gallagher amongst them. It has been seen as a critical stepping stone to the second British folk revival, the British blues boom, and the British Invasion of American popular music. Origins in the United States The origins of skiffle are obscure but generally thought to lie in African-American musical culture in the early 20th century. Skiffle is often said to have developed ...
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Trad Jazz
Trad jazz, short for "traditional jazz", is a form of jazz in the United States and Britain in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, played by musicians such as Chris Barber, Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball, Ken Colyer and Monty Sunshine, based on a revival of New Orleans Dixieland jazz, on trumpets, trombones, clarinets, tambourines, banjos, double basses, saxophones, Hammond organs, pipe organs, pianos, electric basses, guitars (typically electric guitars) and drums and cymbals, with a populist repertoire which also included jazz versions of pop songs and nursery rhymes. Beginnings of revival A Dixieland revival began in the United States on the West Coast in the late 1930s as a backlash to the Chicago style, which was close to swing. Lu Watters and the Yerba Buena Jazz Band, and trombonist Turk Murphy, adopted the repertoire of Joe "King" Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and W. C. Handy: bands included banjo and tuba in the rhythm sections. A New Orleans-based traditional revi ...
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Blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture. The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and is characterized by the call-and-response pattern (the blues scale and specific chord progressions) of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes (or "worried notes"), usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch, are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove. Blues as a genre is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current str ...
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Rock And Roll
Rock and roll (often written as rock & roll, rock 'n' roll, or rock 'n roll) is a Genre (music), genre of popular music that evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It Origins of rock and roll, originated from African-American music such as jazz, rhythm and blues, boogie woogie, gospel music, gospel, as well as country music. While rock and roll's formative elements can be heard in blues records from the 1920s and in country records of the 1930s,Peterson, Richard A. ''Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity'' (1999), p. 9, . the genre did not acquire its name until 1954. According to journalist Greg Kot, "rock and roll" refers to a style of popular music originating in the United States in the 1950s. By the mid-1960s, rock and roll had developed into "the more encompassing international style known as rock music, though the latter also continued to be known in many circles as rock and roll."Kot, Greg"Rock and roll", in the ''Encyclopædia Bri ...
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Westport, CT
Westport is a town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States, along the Long Island Sound within Connecticut's Gold Coast. It is northeast of New York City. The town had a population of 27,141 according to the 2020 U.S. Census. History The earliest known inhabitants of the Westport area as identified through archaeological finds date back 7,500 years. Records from the first white settlers report the Pequot Indians living in the area which they called ''Machamux'' translated by the colonialists as ''beautiful land''. Settlement by colonialists dates back to the five ''Bankside Farmers''; whose families grew and prospered into a community that continued expanding. The settlers arrived in 1693, having followed cattle to the isolated area. The community had its own ecclesiastical society, supported by independent civil and religious elements, enabling it to be independent from the Town of Fairfield. As the settlement expanded its name changed: it was briefly known as "Banks ...
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Donovan
Donovan Phillips Leitch (born 10 May 1946), known mononymously as Donovan, is a Scottish musician, songwriter, and record producer. He developed an eclectic and distinctive style that blended folk, jazz, pop, psychedelic rock and world music (notably calypso). He has lived in Scotland, Hertfordshire (England), London, California, and—since at least 2008—in County Cork, Ireland, with his family. Emerging from the British folk scene, Donovan reached fame in the United Kingdom in early 1965 with live performances on the pop TV series ''Ready Steady Go!''. Having signed with Pye Records in 1965, he recorded singles and two albums in the folk vein for Hickory Records, after which he signed to CBS/Epic in the US—the first signing by the company's new vice-president Clive Davis—and became more successful internationally. He began a long and successful collaboration with leading British independent record producer Mickie Most, scoring multiple hit singles and albums in ...
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Tom Jones (singer)
Sir Thomas Jones Woodward (born 7 June 1940), known professionally as Tom Jones, is a Welsh singer. His career began with a string of top-ten hits in the mid-1960s. He has toured regularly, with appearances in Las Vegas (1967–2011). Jones's voice has been described by AllMusic as a "full-throated, robust baritone". His performing range has included pop, R&B, show tunes, country, dance, soul and gospel. In 2008, the ''New York Times'' called Jones a musical "shape shifter", who could "slide from soulful rasp to pop croon, with a voice as husky as it was pretty". Jones has sold over 100 million records, with 36 Top 40 hits in the UK and 19 in the US, including "It's Not Unusual", "What's New Pussycat?", the theme song for the 1965 James Bond film '' Thunderball'', "Green, Green Grass of Home", "Delilah", "She's a Lady", "Kiss" and " Sex Bomb". Jones has also occasionally dabbled in acting, first making his acting debut playing the lead role in the 1979 television film ...
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Petula Clark
Petula Sally Olwen Clark, CBE (born 15 November 1932) is an English singer, actress, and composer. She has one of the longest serving careers of a British singer, spanning more than seven decades. Clark's professional career began during the Second World War as a child entertainer on BBC Radio. In 1954 she charted with "The Little Shoemaker", the first of her big UK hits, and within two years she began recording in French. Her international successes have included " ''Prends mon coeur''", "Sailor" (a UK number one), "Romeo", and " Chariot". Hits in German, Italian and Spanish followed. In late 1964 Clark's success extended to the United States with a four-year run of career-defining, often upbeat singles, many written or co-written by Tony Hatch and Jackie Trent. These songs include her signature song " Downtown", "I Know a Place", " My Love", " A Sign of the Times", " I Couldn't Live Without Your Love", "Who Am I", " Colour My World", " This Is My Song" (by Charles Chaplin), ...
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Cilla Black
Priscilla Maria Veronica White (27 May 1943 – 1 August 2015), better known as Cilla Black, was an English singer, actress and television presenter. Championed by her friends the Beatles, Black began her career as a singer in 1963. Her singles " Anyone Who Had a Heart" and "You're My World" both reached number one in the UK in 1964. She had 11 top 10 hits on the UK Singles Chart between then and 1971, and an additional eight hits that made the top 40. In May 2010, new research published by BBC Radio 2 showed that her version of "Anyone Who Had a Heart" was the UK's biggest-selling single by a female artist in the 1960s. "You're My World" was also a modest hit in the U.S., peaking at No. 26 on the ''Billboard'' Hot 100. Along with a successful recording career in the 1960s and early 1970s, Black hosted her own BBC variety show, '' Cilla'' (1968–1976). After a brief time as a comedy actress, she became a prominent television presenter in the 1980s and 1990s, hosting hi ...
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Dusty Springfield
Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien (16 April 1939 – 2 March 1999), known professionally as Dusty Springfield, was an English singer. With her distinctive mezzo-soprano sound, she was a popular singer of blue-eyed soul, Pop music, pop and dramatic Ballad, ballads, with chanson, French chanson, Country music, country, and Jazz music, jazz also in her repertoire. During her 1960s peak, she ranked among the most successful British female performers on both sides of the Atlantic. Her image – marked by a peroxide blonde bouffant/Beehive (hairstyle), beehive hairstyle, heavy makeup (thick black eyeliner and eye shadow) and evening gowns, as well as stylised, gestural performances – made her an icon of the Swinging Sixties. Born in West Hampstead in London into a family that enjoyed music, Springfield learned to sing at home. In 1958, she joined her first professional group, The Lana Sisters. Two years later, with her brother Tom Springfield and Reshad Feild, Tim Feild ...
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