James Madison (1751 - 1836)

James Madison When Madison left office in 1817, he retired to Montpelier, his tobacco plantation in Orange County, Virginia, not far from Jefferson’s Monticello. He was 65 years old. Dolley, who thought they would finally have a chance to travel to Paris, was 49. As with both Washington and Jefferson, Madison left the presidency a […]

Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)

Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson — author of the Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, third president of the United States, and founder of the University of Virginia — voiced the aspirations of a new America as no other individual of his era. As public official, historian, philosopher, and plantation owner, […]

Mickey Mantle (1931 - 1995)

Mickey Mantle was born in Spavinaw, Oklahoma, the son of Elvin Charles Mantle (1912-1952), a lead miner known as “Mutt,” and Lovell (née Richardson) Mantle (1904-1995). He was of at least partial English ancestry; his great-grandfather, George Mantle, left Brierley Hill, in England’s Black Country, in 1848. Mutt named his son in honor of Mickey Cochrane, a Hall of Fame catcher. Later in […]

Joe DiMaggio (1914 - 1999)

Joe DiMaggio DiMaggio was born in Martinez, California, the eighth of nine children born to Italian immigrants Giuseppe (1872–1949) and Rosalia (Mercurio) DiMaggio (1878–1951). He was delivered by a midwife identified on his birth certificate as Mrs. J. Pico. He was named after his father; “Paolo” was in honor of Giuseppe’s favorite saint, Saint Paul. The family moved to nearby San Francisco when […]

Steve McNair (1973 - 2009)

STEVE MCNAIR Steve McNair was born in a small house in Mount Olive, Mississippi, and attended Mount Olive High School as a freshman in the fall of 1987, where he played football, baseball, and basketball in addition to running track. As a junior, McNair led Mount Olive to the state championship. McNair also played free safety in high school, and […]

Don Zimmer (1931 - 2014)

Zimmer, nicknamed “Zim,” “Gerbil,” and sometimes “Popeye” because of his facial resemblance to the cartoon character, began his career in 1949 with the Cambridge Dodgers of the Class-D Eastern Shore League. He then played with the Hornell Dodgers of the Class-D PONY League in 1950, the Elmira Pioneers of the Single-A Eastern League in 1951, the Mobile Bears of the Double-A Southern League in 1952, and the St. Paul Saints of the Triple-A American Association in 1953 […]

George Jones (1931 - 2013)

George Jones Born on September 12, 1931 in Saratoga, Texas, and was raised in Vidor, Texas, with his brother and five sisters. His father, George Washington Jones, worked in a shipyard and played harmonica and guitar while his mother, Clara, played piano in the Pentecostal Church on Sundays. During his delivery, one of the doctors dropped Jones and broke […]

Cindy Walker (1918 - 2006)

Cindy Walker was born on July 20, 1918 on her grandparents’ farm near Mart near Mexia east of Waco, Texas, the daughter of a cotton-broker. Her maternal-grandfather F.L. Eiland was a noted composer of hymns and her mother was a fine pianist. From childhood Cindy Walker was fond of poetry and wrote habitually. As a teenager, inspired by newspaper accounts of […]

Owen Bradley (1915 - 1998)

Owen Bradley A native of Westmoreland, Tennessee, Bradley learned piano at an early age, and began playing in local nightclubs and roadhouses when he was a teenager. At 20, he got a job at WSM-AM radio, where he worked as an arranger and musician. In 1942, he became the station’s musical director, and was also the leader of a sought-after dance band, […]

Porter Wagoner (1927 - 2007)

Porter Wagoner Porter Wagoner, a country singer who mixed rhinestone suits, a towering cotton-candy pompadour and cornball jokes with direct, simple songs over a career best known for his partnership with Dolly Parton, died Sunday in Nashville. He was 80 and lived in Nashville. He had been hospitalized with lung cancer, the Grand Ole Opry […]

Minnie Pearl (1912 - 1996)

Sarah Colley was born in Centerville, in Hickman County, Tennessee, about 50 miles (80 km) southwest of Nashville. She was the youngest of the five daughters of a prosperous lumberman in Centerville. She graduated from Ward-Belmont College (now Belmont University), at the time Nashville’s most prestigious school for young ladies, where her major was theater studies and dance was a particular interest. After graduation […]

Ernest Tubb (1914 - 1984)

Tubb was born on a cotton farm near Crisp, in Ellis County, Texas (now a ghost town). His father was a sharecropper, so Tubb spent his youth working on farms throughout the state. He was inspired by Jimmie Rodgers and spent his spare time learning to sing, yodel, and play the guitar. At age 19, he took a job as a singer on San Antonio radio […]

Gene Autry (1907 - 1998)

Gene Autry Orvon Grover Autry was born September 29, 1907 near Tioga in Grayson County in north Texas, the grandson of a Methodist preacher. His parents, Delbert Autry and Elnora Ozment, moved in the 1920s to Ravia in Johnston County in southern Oklahoma. He worked on his father’s ranch while at school. After leaving high school in 1925, Autry worked as a telegrapher for the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway. His […]

Chet Atkins (1924 - 2001)

Chet Atkins Chet Atkins was born on June 20, 1924, in Luttrell, Tennessee, near Clinch Mountain. His parents divorced when he was six, after which he was raised by his mother. He was the youngest of three boys and a girl. He started out on the ukulele, later moving on to the fiddle, but traded his brother Lowell an old […]

Roy Acuff (1903 - 1992)

Roy Acuff Roy Acuff was born in Maynardville, Tennessee to Ida (née Carr) and Simon E. Neill Acuff, the third of five children. The Acuffs were a fairly prominent Union County family. Roy’s paternal grandfather, Coram Acuff, had been a Tennessee state senator, and Roy’s maternal grandfather was a local physician. Roy’s father was an accomplished fiddler and a Baptist preacher, […]

David Akeman (1916 - 1973)

David Akeman Born in Annville, Jackson County, Kentucky, Akeman came from a musical family. He was taught to play the banjo by his father, James Roy Akemon. He got his first real banjo when he was 12 years old in exchange for a pair of prize bantam chickens. Akeman began playing at local dances and gained a reputation […]

Jim Reeves (1923 - 1964)

Jim Reeves Reeves was born in Galloway, Texas, a small rural community near Carthage. Winning an athletic scholarship to the University of Texas, he enrolled to study speech and drama, but quit after only six weeks to work in the shipyards in Houston. Soon he resumed baseball, playing in the semi-professional leagues before contracting with the St. Louis Cardinals “farm” team […]

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887 - 1986)

Georgia O’Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, in a farmhouse near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Her parents, Francis Calyxtus O’Keeffe and Ida (Totto) O’Keeffe, were dairy farmers. Her father was of Irish descent. Her mother’s father, George Victor Totto, for whom Georgia O’Keeffe was named, was a Hungarian count who came to America in 1848.  Georgia was […]

Salvador Dali (1904 - 1989)

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech was born on May 11, 1904, at 8:45 am GMT in the town of Figueres, in the Empordà region, close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain. Dalí’s older brother, also named Salvador (born October 12, 1901), had died of gastroenteritis nine months earlier, on August 1, 1903. His father, Salvador Dalí i Cusí, was a middle-class lawyer and notary whose strict disciplinary […]

Roy Lichtenstein (1923 - 1997)

Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York City, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family. His father, Milton, was a real estate broker, his mother, Beatrice (Werner), a homemaker. He was raised on the Upper West Side and attended public school until the age of twelve. He then enrolled at New York’s Franklin School for Boys, remaining there for his secondary education. Lichtenstein […]

Giorgio de Chirico (1888 - 1978)

De Chirico was born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. After studying art in Athens—mainly under the guidance of the influential Greek painter Georgios Roilos and Georgios Jakobides—and Florence, he moved to Germany in 1906, following his father’s death in 1905. He entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he read the writings of the philosophers Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer and Otto Weininger and studied the […]

Al Hirschfeld (1903 - 2003)

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, he moved with his family to New York City, where he received his art training at the Art Students League of New York.  In 1943, he married Dolly Haas (1910–1994); they had one child, a daughter, Nina (b. 1945).  In 1996, he married Louise Kerz, a theatre historian. In 1924, Hirschfeld traveled to Paris […]

Claude Monet (1840 - 1926)

Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 on the 5th floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. He was the second son of Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians. On 20 May 1841, he was baptized in the local parish church, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, as Oscar-Claude, but his parents called him […]

Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)

Picasso was baptised Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Crispiniano de la Santísima Trinidad, a series of names honouring various saints and relatives. Added to these were Ruiz and Picasso, for his father and mother, respectively, as per Spanish law. Born in the city of Málaga in the Andalusian region of Spain, he was the […]

Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987)

Andy Warhol Andy Warhol (né Andrej Varhola, Jr.) was born on August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was the fourth child of Andrej Varhola (Americanized as Andrew Warhola, Sr., 1889–1942) and Júlia (née Zavacká, 1892–1972), whose first child was born in their homeland and died before their move to the U.S. Andy had two older brothers, Paul (June 26, 1922 […]

Kitty Wells (1919 - 2012)

Kitty Wells Wells was born Ellen Muriel Deason in 1919 in Nashville, Tennessee, one of the few country singers born in Nashville. She began singing as a child, learning guitar from her father, who was a brakeman on the Tennessee Central Railroad. Her father, Charles, and his brother were musicians and her mother, Myrtle, was […]

Keith Whitley (1954 - 1989)

Whitley was born to Faye (editor of The Elliott County News) and Elmer Whitley (an electrician) in Ashland, Kentucky, but was raised 46 miles away in Sandy Hook, and attended Sandy Hook High School. He had two brothers, Randy and Dwight, and a sister, Mary. The Whitley family has lived in the Elliot County area […]

Tammy Wynette (1942 - 1998)

Tammy Wynette was born Virginia Wynette Pugh in Bounds, Mississippi, a small town in Itawamba County, Mississippi, the only child of William Hollice Pugh (died February 13, 1943) and Mildred Faye Russell Pugh (1922–1991).  Wynette’s father was a farmer and local musician who died of a brain tumor when Wynette was nine months of age. […]

Marty Robbins (1925 - 1982)

Robbins was born in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix in Maricopa County, Arizona. His mother was mostly of Paiute Indian heritage. Robbins was reared in a difficult family situation. His father took odd jobs to support the family of 10 children, but his drinking led to divorce in 1937. Among his warmer memories of his […]

Dottie West (1932 - 1991)

Born Dorothy Marie Marsh outside McMinnville, Tennessee, she was the oldest of 10 children of Hollis and Pelina Marsh. The family soon moved to a bigger, better house, but like many rural families at the time, the family was still so poor they lacked electricity and indoor plumbing and had to make their own soap […]