Word: mothers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Gertrude ("Ma") Rainey, known as the mother of the blues, stands at the juncture of rural country blues and a more urban form that reached its peak with the popularity of her protege, Bessie Smith. As the first broadly known traveling blues woman, Rainey represented for many women in her audiences a tangible incarnation of freedom. A pioneer on the black entertainment circuit, she shaped women's blues for many generations. As blues singer Koko Taylor said, women like "Ma" Rainey were the foundation of the blues...
Born in 1954 to unmarried parents, Winfrey was raised by her grandmother on a farm with no indoor plumbing in Kosciusko, Miss. By age 3 she was reading the Bible and reciting in church. At 6 she moved to her mother's home in Milwaukee, Wis.; later, to her father's in Nashville, Tenn. A lonely child, she found solace in books. When a seventh-grade teacher noticed the young girl reading during lunch, he got her a scholarship to a better school. Winfrey's talent for public performance and spontaneity in answering questions helped her win beauty contests...
...also made dances to go with it--harsh, angular fantasies spun out of the strange proportions of her short-legged body and the pain and loneliness of her secret heart. If Graham ever gave birth, one critic quipped, it would be to a cube; instead, she became the mother of American dance...
...idol, Krusty the Clown; staying for years in the hearts and humors of a fickle, worldwide TV audience. This young scamp--with his paper bag-shaped head, his body's jagged, modernist silhouette, his brat-propelled skateboard--may be "yellow trash" to the town gentry, but to his mother and everyone else, he's our special little...
...small, bristling man with a florid mustache and snowy, brushed-back eyebrows, Glimp guarded his privacy so laxly that more than enough is known of his stormy and unconventional personal life. He always denied the rumor circulating in his hometown, Pascagoula, Miss., that he shot his mother and the mailman before departing for foreign shores. He married the same woman, nude composer Lola Plitskaza, five times and divorced her twice. Their only child, Enrico, an embalmer of some promise, died tragically on the Lusitania, though not the voyage on which it sank...