Dizzy Gillespie’s 10 Greatest Jazz Musicians
Jazz legend John Birks ‘Dizzy’ Gillespie was born in Cheraw, South Carolina, October 21, 1917. After learning to play piano at the age of four he taught himself to play the trombone, but had switched to the trumpet by the time he was twelve. The leading exponent of ‘bebop’ jazz, Gillespie was famous for conducting big bands, playing trumpet (many consider him the greatest trumpeter in history), and for his work with Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines and Charlie Parker, among others. Gillespie’s energy was so great that his career never stopped, and at least 10 biographies of the world-famous, beloved revolutionary of jazz have been published. Among his most famous compositions are ‘Salt Peanuts’, ‘Bebop’, ‘Guachi Guararo (Soul Sauce)’, ‘Night In Tunisia’ and ‘Manteca’, a pioneering piece in Afro-Cuban style. Gillespie had a stable private life and disdained the addictive drugs favoured by so many jazz heroes. He remained humorous and charming until the end of his life. He died on January 6, 1993, at the age of 75 and the world mourned the loss of a true jazz giant. In 1980, he prepared this list for The Book of Lists.
1 Charlie Parker
2 Art Tatum
3 Coleman Hawkins
4 Benny Carter
5 Lester Young
6 Roy Eldridge
7 J.J. Johnson
8 Kenny Clarke
9 Oscar Pettiford
10 Miles Davis
Johnny Cash’s 10 Greatest Country Songs of All Time
Johnny Cash, widely considered to be the greatest country music singer and composer in history, died in September of 2003 at the age of 71. Known as ‘The Man in Black’ (he always wore black), Cash was born the son of a poor sharecropper in Arkansas in 1932, and he sang to himself while picking cotton for 10 hours a day. Cash recorded more than 1,500 songs. He toured worldwide and played for free in prisons throughout America. Among his greatest hits are ‘Ring of Fire’ and ‘I Walk the Line’. His 1975 autobiography, Man In Black, has sold well over 1.5 million copies. Cash’s death was long and painful, and his last four albums are considered by many to be his greatest work, as they all examine a hard-working man coming to terms with the end of his life. Said Merle Kilgore, one of the co-authors of Ring of Fire, ‘It’s a sad day in Tennessee, but a great day in Heaven. “The Man in Black” is now wearing white as he joins his wife June in the angel band.’ June and Johnny were married for 35 years, and her death preceded his by four months. Cash contributed this list to The Book of Lists in 1977.
1 ‘I Walk the Line’, Johnny Cash
2 ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’, Don Gibson
3 ‘Wildwood Flower’, Carter Family
4 ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, Johnny Cash
5 ‘Candy Kisses’, George Morgan
6 ‘I’m Movin’ On’, Hank Snow
7 ‘Walking the Floor over You’, Ernest Tubb
8 ‘He’ll Have to Go’, Joe Allison and Audrey Allison
9 ‘Great Speckle Bird’, Carter Family
10 ‘Cold, Cold Heart’, Hank Williams
Andrew Motion’s Top 12 Dylan Lyrics
Andrew Motion is a poet and biographer. His latest collection of poems, Public Property, was published in 2003, and he has written lives of Philip Larkin, John Keats and the nineteenth-century artist and criminal Thomas Wainewright. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and was appointed Poet Laureate in 1999.
For my money, songs accumulate an even larger baggage of associations than poems. The time I first heard them, the situations – intense or otherwise – in which I have listened to them, the people who introduced them to me, or who I know also like them: all these things become attached to the lyrics as well as the melody, at once broadening the experience of listening and making it more intimate.
Turning over the pages of Bob Dylan’s Lyrics 1962–85 is like opening a Pandora’s Box crammed with my life’s delights, winces, blushes, broodings, geographies. Which in turn means that reducing his titles to any kind of list is seriously difficult. One song counted in means one (at least one) left out – and the choice is likely to change from day to day.
On the day I’m writing this, 24 May, 2004, my top 12, in album order, is:
1 Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues – for the comedy in the anger and the wit in the satire
2 Tomorrow Is a Long Time – for the tenderness and simplicity
3 The Times They are A-Changin’ – for saying all the right (but still surprising) things at the right time and every time
4 All I Really Want to Do – for the freedom it offers, and for knowing that freedom is difficult to give in fact
5 Love Minus Zero/No Limit – for being so damn beautiful
6 It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue – for ‘Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you’
7 Desolation Row – for getting its arm round so much, with such a strange mixture of ease and effort
8 All Along the Watchtower – for the economy of its mystery
9 Idiot Wind – for its tender outrage
10 Hurricane – for the accuracy of its anger
11 Man Gave Names to All the Animals – for its jokes
12 O, and (out of order) Visions of Johanna – for all of the above reasons, and more besides
Geoff Dyer’s ‘10 Scholarly Books I Would Like to Write, Using Bob Dylan Lines as Their Titles’
Geoff Dyer is one of the most versatile and least classifiable British writers of his generation. His works include But Beautiful, a book about jazz, several novels and Out of Sheer Rage, in which Dyer records his journey in search of D.H. Lawrence. Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, an idiosyncratic collection of writings about his travels in places as diverse as Cambodia and New Orleans, was published in 2003.
1 And Your Mother’s Drugs: Addiction in the Suffragette Movement
2 Fighting in the Captain’s Tower: Eliot, Pound and the Making of ‘The Waste Land’
3 Alive as You or Me: A Life of St Augustine
4 It’s Much Cheaper Down in the South American Town: Globalisation and the Export of Labour
5 Painting the Passports Brown: A History of the American Circus
6 Going Through All These Things Twice: Nietzsche and the Eternal Recurrence
7 Hands in Her Back Pockets: Bette Davis: The Movies and the Myth
8 Who Really Cares?: A History of Obscenity
9 Nearly Any Task: Masculinity and the New Feminism
10 I Shall Be Released: The Bob Dylan Bootleg Industry
Allen Ginsberg’s 11 Greatest Blues Songs
Born in New Jersey in 1926, Allen Ginsberg was educated at Columbia University in New York City, where he met fellow writers Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, with whom he formed a creative triad that gave birth to the Beat Movement of the 1950s. Ginsberg’s most famous work, Howl and