It wouldn’t be Motown’s 60th Anniversary without visiting their premiere singer, songwriter and producer. As legend goes, Smokey Robinson met Berry Gordy with a notebook of songs, of which maybe one or two Gordy considered viable, yet he was impressed with the teenager’s moxie. So goes the template of who Gordy accepted into the fold,…
Tag: Helen Shapiro
Don’t Trust The Weatherman, And Always Carry Your Umbrella: 35 Tunes For That Rainy Day Feeling
Nobody really warned me that summer ends right after Labor Day in the Pacific Northwest. After a long (short) Summer of 2 months, it’s been mostly rain, rain (please go away) in the Portland Metropolitan area. This is truly bizarre to me, living in the Bay Area, splendid, vaguely summery weather lasts all the way…
Gone Uptown To Box With Dionne: 35 more challenges to the Queen of Uptown Soul’s Throne
I’ve stated before, and provided evidence, that the impact that Dionne Warwick’s influence on popular music was extremely vast during the 1960’s and Early 70s. The previous time we spent on this topic nearly 2 years ago, seemingly only skims the surface of elegant pop/soul confections that not only emerged from the United States, but…
Girls Trip ’64 – Swinging Sixties Divine Diva Delights
I’ve mined the territory of checking in with women were doing in the recording studios through some random assortment of years during the 1960s. I started with 1965, jumped to 1961 and then did 1963. 1964 is an interesting year to ponder. Of course it’s mostly remembered as the beginning of the British Invasion that…
Becky Has The Blues, Darth Susan Succeeds: Your Post-Election Playlist
And here we are, at the end of a tumultuous election season. Admittedly, I have to absolutely scrap everything previously that I wrote in the anticipation that we’d be here, November 9th, 2016, heralding our first female president. We’re not this morning, in fact there’s a number of us mourning in this reckoning, and I’m…
Everybody Loves a Libra: The Balance of Equity at Equinox courtesy of the sign of The Scales
Not only is the Sun moving onto Libra, bringing us Fall’s grace, we have Jupiter expanding all of the relating through October of 2017. It shouldn’t be a surprise that there’s a host of vintage soulful scale balancers to feature this season as we find those we want to cuddle up next to through…