Jimmy Buffett (76) was born on December 25, 1946, in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and spent part of his childhood in Mobile and Fairhope, Alabama. He was the son of Mary Lorraine (née Peets) and James Delaney Buffett Jr, who worked for the Army Corps of Engineers. During his grade school years, he attended St. Ignatius School, where he played the trombone in the school band. As a child, he was exposed to sailing through his grandfather who was a steamship captain and these experiences influenced his later music. He graduated from McGill Institute for Boys, a Catholic high school in Mobile, in 1964. He began playing the guitar during his first year at Auburn University after seeing a fraternity brother playing while surrounded by a group of girls. Buffett left Auburn after a year due to his grades and continued his college years at Pearl River Community College and the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, where he received a bachelor’s degree in history in 1969. From 1969 to 1970, Buffett worked for Billboard as a Nashville correspondent, and in 1969, he was the first writer to report that the bluegrass duo Flatt and Scruggs had disbanded. Continue reading Jimmy Buffett – 9/2023
Tag: singer/songwriter
David Crosby 1/2023
David Crosby was born August 14, 1941 in Los Angeles, California, second son of Wall Street banker turned Academy Award-winning cinematographer Floyd Crosby and Aliph Van Cortlandt Whitehead, a salesperson at Macy’s department store. His father was related to the famous Van Rensselaer family, a fiercely prominent family of Dutch descent during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries in the greater New York area. Members of this family played a critical role in the formation of the United States and served as leaders in business, politics and society. His mother—granddaughter of Bishop of Pittsburgh Cortlandt Whitehead—descended from the equally prominent Dutch descent New York Van Cortlandt family. For those of you interested in his ancestry, David Crosby could never have been anything else than what he became in life: freak, outspoken asshole and forever musical icon.
In all of Rock and Roll, this man was probably my very personal hero. Â
David Crosby lived one of the wildest lives in rock and roll, flying the freak flag high through decades of global fame and several fortunes won and lost, a white knuckle outlaw ride crammed with drugs, sex, death and a stint in prison. But that’s not why I celebrate him or mourn his passing. Because he also participated in some of the most beautiful music heard in our times, writing gorgeous, complex songs of cosmic folk jazz, gilding the air with blissful harmonies and playing impossibly complex chords he seemed to pluck out of the ether. With his walrus moustache and a perpetual twinkle in his eye, he was a fantastic musician and a richly complex human being whose spirit became infused in the rock culture of the 1960s, seventies and beyond. Crosby always yearned for greater musical adventures. He was one of the great hippies, one of the great band members in a couple of the greatest bands, and just really one of the few absolute greats of rock and roll.
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