Chapter 01 — Today in music
On a day like today November 23
1936
Robert Johnson records for the first time: the session that founded the blues myth
In a room at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas, Robert Johnson records his first songs, including “Terraplane Blues” and “Sweet Home Chicago”. His scarce sessions would yield only 29 songs, enough to feed the legend of the deal with the devil and to influence Clapton, the Stones and Zeppelin. Rock was born, in part, in that room.
Robert Johnson
1876
Manuel de Falla is born, who organised the first cante jondo contest with Lorca
On November 23, 1876, Manuel de Falla was born in Cádiz. He brought flamenco and Andalusian popular music into the concert hall with "El amor brujo" and "The Three-Cornered Hat". In 1922, with Federico García Lorca, he organised a cante jondo contest in Granada to rescue the old flamenco, which they believed was in danger of disappearing beneath the commercial café flamenco.
Manuel de Falla
Federico García Lorca
1926
R. L. Burnside is born, who became famous at seventy playing with a punk band
On November 23, 1926, R. L. Burnside was born in Mississippi. He worked as a sharecropper and a fisherman for decades while playing weekends at his neighbour Junior Kimbrough's juke joint. He learned from Mississippi Fred McDowell and played a repetitive blues with no chord changes, hypnotic. In the nineties he recorded with a noisy New York rock band and at seventy found a young audience.
R. L. Burnside
Junior Kimbrough
1954
Bruce Hornsby is born, the pianist who brought virtuosity to the radio
Bruce Hornsby is born in Williamsburg, Virginia; his piano on “The Way It Is” (1986) turned a meditation on racism into a worldwide number one, later sampled by Tupac on “Changes”. He played more than a hundred shows with the Grateful Dead after Brent Mydland's death. A musician's musician, he crosses jazz, folk and pop without asking permission.
Bruce Hornsby
1992
Miley Cyrus is born, who deliberately destroyed the child character that made her famous
On November 23, 1992, Miley Cyrus was born in Tennessee, daughter of a country singer. At eleven she won the part of a teenager with a double life in a Disney series and became the most watched actress among the world's children. When it ended she did something deliberate and loud: she dismantled that character in public, with calculated provocation, until the industry had to treat her as an adult.
Miley Cyrus
1888
Harpo Marx is born, who taught himself the harp and tuned it wrongly for twenty years
On November 23, 1888, Adolph Marx was born in New York, the brother who never spoke on screen. He learned the harp with no teacher, from a photograph: he held it the wrong way round and tuned it incorrectly for two decades, until a professional harpist told him. He played seriously, a moment of calm amid the chaos of every film, and later studied properly.
Harpo Marx
1925
Johnny Mandel is born, whose best-known theme was written with a fourteen-year-old
On November 23, 1925, Johnny Mandel was born in New York, a trumpeter and arranger who wrote for Sinatra and Count Basie before turning to film. In 1970 he was commissioned to write the theme for a war film: the music is his and the words were written by the director's fourteen-year-old son, because the screenwriter wanted something deliberately stupid. The song became famous as a television series theme.
Johnny Mandel
1953
Francis Cabrel is born, whose love song is sung in Spanish across half a continent
On November 23, 1953, Francis Cabrel was born in southern France, son of Italian migrant workers, and learned guitar listening to Bob Dylan without understanding a word of English. In 1979 he wrote "Je l'aime à mourir"; translated into Spanish, so many Latin American artists have sung it that much of the audience does not know the original is French. He has always lived in the same village.
Francis Cabrel
1955
Ludovico Einaudi is born: the most listened-to classical composer in the world and the most argued about
On November 23, 1955, Ludovico Einaudi was born in Turin, grandson of a president of Italy. He writes short, repetitive, melancholy piano pieces that classical critics tend to dismiss as simple and that accumulate more plays than any other living composer in the genre. In 2016 he played on a floating platform in front of an Arctic glacier for an environmental campaign.
Ludovico Einaudi
1972
Kurupt is born: the Philadelphia rapper who ended up defining the California sound
On November 23, 1972, Ricardo Brown was born in Philadelphia. He moved to Los Angeles as a teenager and won a freestyle competition with Snoop Dogg in the audience. He ended up on Dr. Dre's label and formed Tha Dogg Pound. His technique came from the East Coast, fast and dense, laid over slow West Coast beats: that mixture is much of what made that catalogue distinctive.
Kurupt
Tha Dogg Pound
Snoop Dogg
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