Whitney Houston is known to be one the greatest, most powerful singers of all time. The Guiness Book of World Records recognizes her as one of the most awarded female artists of all time. Not only is she an amazing powerhouse singer, but she is also an actress who has starred in and produced different movies. However, like many singers and movie stars, Whitney Houston’s life ended tragically and suddenly.
Whitney Houston was born on August 9, 1963 in Newark, New Jersey to her parents Cissy and John Russell Houston. Some people said that she was destined to be a singer. Her mother was a backup singer for Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin and was also a two time Grammy Award winning artist. Her cousin, Dionne Warwick, is an American singer,
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However, by the age of 15 she was trying to land a record deal by frequently performing with her mother. Although music was her true passion, she actually became a teenage model and was the first African-American women to be featured on the cover of Seventeen magazine. A few years later, she was recognized by American Record Producer, Clive Davis. He immediately signed her and steered her from gospel to pop glory. Houston made her first big debut when she performed “Home” from the musical The Wiz on the Merv Griffin show. Over the next couple years, she and Davis worked with some of the best songwriters and producers to create her first debut album to flaunt her outstanding vocal …show more content…
This organization tended to the homeless and children with cancer and AIDS. Her association with the United Negro College Fund brought her many awards for her charity work that she was involved in. After her rendition of the Star Spangled Banner reached the Top 100 she donated all her benefits to the Red Cross. Also in 1977, the HBO Concert “Classic Whitney live from Washington, D.C.” raised a whopping $300,000 for the Children’s Defense Fund. Later in 2011, she collaborated with her sister-in-law to release a line of scented candles for another charity. Something that people will forever remember about Whitney Houston is her major involvement in various
With nearly 60 years in the music industry, Tina Turner is one of the most prolific RnB singers of all time. For two decades, she released hit after hit with ex-husband Ike, then transitioned into an extremely successful solo career. On her own, she released nine studio albums, five of which went multi-platinum. To date, she has sold more than 200 million albums worldwide and remains the Guinness World Record holder for most concert tickets ever sold.
Ella was born in Newport News, Virginia on April 25, 1917. When alled “The First Lady of Song” by some fans. She was known for having beautiful tone, extended range, and great intonation, and famous for her improvisational scat singing. Ella sang during the her most famous song was “A-tiscket A-tasket”. Fitzgerald sang in the period of swing, ballads, and bebop; she made some great albums with other great jazz artists such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Louis Armstrong. She influenced countless American popular singers of the post-swing period and also international performers such as the singer Miriam Makeba. She didn’t really write any of her own songs. Instead she sang songs by other people in a new and great way. The main exception
She is also known to the world as the “Queen of Soul”. She went on tour with her father’s traveling revival and later released her very first recording under the album, Spirituals, when she was 14 years old. Similar to Bessie Smith, Aretha Franklin was signed by Columbia Records. There she released several classics such as, I’ll Keep on Smiling and I Still Can’t Forget. Years later (1966) she signed to Atlantic Records where she recorded I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) and Respect which both sold millions. From the start of her career in 1961 she has had forty three top single and maybe more to come. Having won over eighteen Grammy awards in her career. In 1987, Ms. Franklin was the very first female artist to be inducted the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Grammys awarded her the Legend Award in 1991. In 1994 she was awarded the Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award and also received the Kennedy Center Honors. She has been nominated for nine American Music Award winning four out of her nine nominations. Aretha has performed at both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama presidential inaugurations. She has also been awarded different honorary degrees in music. There is no one who could manipulate the same sound that Aretha Franklin had into this new day
...ng to this day, she is one of few who could compete with the men of hip-hop, but she never pretended to be anything but a woman. She not only sang about female empowerment, but she wrote about being a woman from the insecurities that we as women sometimes feel to the nirvana of being in love. Sensuality and femininity were always as important to her which was her strength, and message to get out to women especially those of color.
R&B singer and actress Aaliyah died after a small plane that was to carry her and eight others back to the United States crashed after takeoff in the Bahamas, authorities said.
Aretha Franklin is a well known pop, R&B, and gospel singer. She has been nicknamed “The Queen of Soul” and is an internationally known artist and a symbol of pride in the African American community. Her popularity soared in 1967 when she released an album containing songs “I Never Loved a Man”, “Respect”, and “Baby I Love You.” Throughout her career she has achieved fifteen Grammy Awards, Lifetime Achievement Award, National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Legend Awards, and many Grammy Hall of Fame Awards. In 1987 she became the first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Time magazine chose her as one of the most influential artists and entertainers of the 20th century. She sang at Dr. Martin Luther King’s funeral and at former President Bill Clinton’s inaugural party. Although she has all these accomplishments and awards there are other reasons that have driven Franklin to fame and landed her on the front cover of Time magazine on June 28, 1968. The reasons I believe allowed Aretha Franklin to become so successful are the following: Her family’s involvement with religion, the inspiring people that surrounded her, and the pain she suffered.
In 1983, Houston was signed to Arista Records and music executive, Clive Davis, became her mentor and helped launch her successful career. Whitney Houston was known as the innocent, girl-next-door, who promoted positivity and love within her professional career. Houston's good-girl image was shattered, when she married R&B bad boy, Bobby Brown, in 1992. Towards the late 90's, it was rumored that she was using drugs and she looked very thin. In 2006, Houston divorced Bobby Brown and entered into rehab, to end her addiction to cocaine and other drugs.
Singer/actress Lena Horne's primary occupation was nightclub entertaining, a profession she pursued successfully around the world for more than 60 years, from the 1930s to the 1990s. In conjunction with her club work, she also maintained a recording career that stretched from 1936 to 2000 and brought her three Grammys, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989; she appeared in 16 feature films and several shorts between 1938 and 1978; she performed occasionally on Broadway, including in her own Tony-winning one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music in 1981-1982; and she sang and acted on radio and television. Adding to the challenge of maintaining such a career was her position as an African-American facing discrimination personally and in her profession during a period of enormous social change in the U.S. Her first job in the 1930s was at the Cotton Club, where blacks could perform, but not be admitted as customers; by 1969, when she acted in the film Death of a Gunfighter, her character's marriage to a white man went unremarked in the script. Horne herself was a pivotal figure in the changing attitudes about race in the 20th century; her middle-class upbringing and musical training predisposed her to the popular music of her day, rather than the blues and jazz genres more commonly associated with African-Americans, and her photogenic looks were sufficiently close to Caucasian that frequently she was encouraged to try to "pass" for white, something she consistently refused to do. But her position in the middle of a social struggle enabled her to become a leader in that struggle, speaking out in favor of racial integration and raising money for civil rights causes. By the end of the century, she could look back at a life that was never short on conflict, but that could be seen ultimately as a triumph.
Aretha was born into a family that attended a Baptist church, with her father named, C.L Franklin, who was a Baptist preacher and gospel singer. Her mother was also a gospel singer and somehow there came to be reports that her mother had abandoned Aretha and her siblings, but she claims it to be all a lie (“CNN”). She was the fourth of five children, and lost her mother in 1952, a few years after her parents had gotten divorced.
Whitney Houston’s career truly took off in the mid-1980s after releasing her second album, Whitney, which includes her smash hit I Wanna Dance With Somebody. I Wanna Dance With Somebody is such an upbeat tune that includes a heavily edited and enhanced pop melodic line, synthesizers, and the notorious percussion and keyboard tease that begins the tune. Whitney Houston definitely brings this to life through her outstanding vocals that fully showcases her range, elastic vibrato, and precise musical abilities. Houston is most known for her voice that, in my opinion, is still considered extremely iconic and powerful. Houston’s chart-topping single also showcased the type of music that the United States enjoyed and cherished in the late 1980s. This song brings to the surface the anticipation, joy, and free-spirit that the 1980s culture presented to its people, and this hit ties in the importance of music, love, and dancing that stem from the core of Whitney’s pop-hit lyrics. The style of music portrayed in the 1980s consisted of many drum machines, synth-based styles of music, and electronic programming that twisted and manipulated the music into its reputable popular techno/rock characteristics. These characteristics are also seen in Gloria Estefan’s hit, Betcha Say That. Betcha Say That and I Wanna Dance With Somebody explicitly shows how popular energetic anthems were to the musical audience being catered back
Aaliyah Dana Haughton was born on January 16, 1979, in Brooklyn, New York . Raised in Detroit , Michigan . Aaliyah Dana Haughton started voice lessons shortly after she learned to talk As a young actress/singer competed successfully on the television program Star Search at age 11. That same year, she performed with R&B legend Gladys Knight, the former wife of her uncle and manager, Barry Hankerson, at a five-night stand in Las Vegas.
Female pop artist in the music market today exhibit a wide range of ability, talent, and physical beauty. It is also safe to say that most of them have a large fan following. The vocal ability of some of these female artists vary; some artists have an extensive vocal range while some keep in minimal. All in all, the most widely known female artists in the popular music remain famous and successful by utilizing their talent to navigate specific spaces and platforms while engaging their fan base. This in turn allows for the female artist to market, brand themselves to maintain celebrity status. A well-known woman in today’s music charts is the young and multi- talented Ariana Grande. Ariana Grande is an excellent example of an accomplished,
Dinah Washington was one of many African Americans who were racially discriminated in the roaring twenties. She was born on August 29, 1924 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Being an African American in the south before the Civil rights movement, she experienced many disadvantages of having her color skin. Even though there was no slavery at this time, she still saw and had to overcome discrimination in the form of sharecropping, and Jim Crow Laws. Sharecropping was when a landowner makes a deal with a farmer to farm on his land in exchange for a share of the crops produced. However, since many blacks were not educated, they got the short end of the stick and ended up in deep debt. Jim Crow Laws were also in place; Jim Crow Laws made blacks and white be separated, but equal. Blacks and whites would use different bathrooms, schools, libraries, restaurants and even water fountains. Having religious parents, she grew up in a church and found her astounding vocals and love for the piano. Finding her love of music, she performed in churches, talent contests, and later clubs, until she was preforming in front of thousands of fans. Even though she dropped out of school a couple months before her eighteenth birthday to marry her first of seven husbands she found her calling ...
The contract that started it all was with Def Jam records, which accompanied her rising for a considerable period of time.
Mariah Carey was born March 27, 1970 in Huntington, Long Island, New York. Her parents are Alfred Roy Carey and Patricia Carey who was a voice coach and opera singer. Mariah Carey shocked her family when she inherited her mother's vocals so she began singing lessons at age four. Today she is one of the most known artist but is also a film actress, music producer, songwriter, and she has won many awards. The day after she graduated high school she moved to New York City to pursue her music career. She started her career as a backing vocalist for Brenda K. Starr who gave columbia records Mariah’s demo tape at a party thrown by CBS records. The goal was to give the demo to a man named Jimmy Greenberg but it ended up in the hands of the president of Columbia records, after that her career took off.