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 […]

Buck Owens (1929 - 2006)

Owens was born on a farm in Sherman, Texas, to Alvis Edgar Owens, Sr. and his wife, Maicie Azel Ellington. Midway Mall, at 4800 Texoma Parkway, now sits where his father’s farm once was. (U.S. Highway 82 through Sherman was named Buck Owens Freeway in his honor).  “‘Buck’ was a donkey on the Owens farm,” […]

Patsy Cline (1932 - 1963)

Patsy Cline Cline was born Virginia Patterson Hensley in 1932, in Winchester, Virginia, to Hilda Patterson Hensley, a 16-year-old seamstress, and Sam Hensley, a 43-year-old blacksmith. Patsy soon had a younger brother and sister, Samuel and Sylvia; the siblings were called Ginny, John, and Sis. The family moved often before settling in Winchester when Patsy […]

John Adams (1735 - 1826)

John Adams Adams, the eldest of three sons, was born on October 30, 1735 (October 19, 1735 Old Style, Julian calendar), in what is now Quincy, Massachusetts (then called the “north precinct” of Braintree, Massachusetts), to John Adams, Sr., and Susanna Boylston Adams. Adams’s birthplace is now part of Adams National Historical Park. His father […]

Hank Williams Sr. (1923 - 1953)

Hank Williams Sr Williams’s parents, Elonzo Huble “Lon” Williams and Jessie Lillybelle “Lillie” Skipper married on November 12, 1916. Hank Williams was of English-American ancestry. Elonzo Williams worked as an engineer for the railroads of the W.T. Smith lumber company. He was drafted during World War I, serving from July 1918 until June 1919. He […]

George Washington (1732 - 1799)

George Washington (February 22, 1732  – December 14, 1799) was the first President of the United States (1789–1797), the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He presided over the convention that drafted the United States Constitution, which replaced the Articles of […]

Mindy McCready (1975 - 2013)

Mindy McCready Born Malinda Gayle McCready in Fort Myers, Florida, McCready began singing in her local Pentecostal church at age three, and graduated from high school at the age of 16 with the intention of beginning her music career early.  When she was 18, she moved to Nashville, where she was signed by BNA Records. […]

Jimmy Dean (1928 - 2010)

Dean was born in Plainview, Texas, in 1928 the son of George Otto Dean, and his second wife Ruth (née Taylor) Dean. He attributed his interest in music to the Seth Ward Baptist Church. He dropped out of high school and became a professional entertainer after a stint in the Air Force in the late […]

Janette Carter (1923 - 2006)

Janette Carter (2 July 1923, Maces Spring, Virginia – 22 January 2006, Kingsport, Tennessee) was the last surviving child of A.P. and Sara Carter, of Carter Family musical fame. In 1976, she and community members built an 880-seat amphitheater, the Carter Family Fold, beside the store her father operated in Southwestern Virginia. Today, the Carter […]