Word: singer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Born in London in 1889, Chaplin spent his childhood in shabby furnished rooms, state poorhouses and an orphanage. He was never sure who his real father was; his mother's husband Charles Chaplin, a singer, deserted the family early and died of alcoholism in 1901. His mother Hannah, a small-time actress, was in and out of mental hospitals. Though he pursued learning passionately in later years, young Charlie left school at 10 to work as a mime and roustabout on the British vaudeville circuit. The poverty of his early years inspired the Tramp's trademark costume, a creative travesty...
...actor, not the camera, did the acting in his films. Never a formal innovator, Chaplin found his persona and plot early and never totally abandoned them. For 13 years, he resisted talking pictures, launched with The Jazz Singer in 1927. Even then, the talkies he made, among them the masterpieces The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952), were daringly far-flung variations on his greatest silent films, The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928) and City Lights...
Born in 1882 in Oranienbaum, Russia, a city southwest of St. Petersburg, Stravinsky was rooted in the nationalistic school that drew inspiration from Russia's beautifully expressive folk music. His father was an opera singer who performed in Kiev and St. Petersburg, but his greatest musical influence was his teacher, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. The colorful, fantastic orchestration that Stravinsky brought to his folk song-inspired melodies was clearly derived from Rimsky-Korsakov. But the primitive, offbeat rhythmic drive he added was entirely his own. The result was a music never before heard in a theater or concert hall...
Dylan was suddenly a singer no longer. He was a shaman. A lot of people called him a prophet. In a way, it must have been scarier than being booed. Everything he sang, said, did or even wore took on a specific gravity that made it harder and harder for him to move. The music became so important to so many people, took on such awesome proportions, that Dylan could respond only with the ultimate sanity: silence...
Like Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye, Franklin helped bring spiritual passion into pop music. In 1961 she signed with Columbia, which tried to turn her into a singer of jazzy pop. In 1966 she switched to Atlantic, delved into soul, and began to flourish. Unlike many of her performing peers, Franklin took a strong hand in creating her own sound. Her guiding principle with producers, she says, is "if you're here to record me, then let's record...