40 years ago on this date, July 12, 1979, were two pieces of news from the music industry.
One was the death of singer Minnie Riperton, at age 31, from cancer. Riperton, married to music producer Richard Rudolph, was the mother of comic actress and Saturday Night Live alum Maya Rudolph.
Born November 8, 1947, in Chicago, Illinois, Riperton hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Pop Chart in April 1975 with “Lovin’ You.” It was written by Rudolph and Riperton.
Her other songs included “Lover and Friend,” “Memory Lane,” “Simple Things,” and “Young Willing and Able”.
The five-octave singer’s 1974 album Perfect Angel, which was co-produced by her husband with Stevie Wonder (who recently made news, at age 69, of needing a kidney transplant), peaked at No. 4 and reached U.S. Gold.
She was nominated, posthumously, for two Grammys for Female R&B Vocal Performance for her album recordings Minnie (1979) and Love Lives Forever (1980).
Minnie Riperton was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1976. She was a spokesperson for the American Cancer Society and was awarded American Cancer Society’s Courage Award by then-U.S. president Jimmy Carter.
Above is video of Minnie Riperton. (I was looking for interviews of her. She was a guest more than once on the syndicated The Mike Douglas Show. But none of it applies to inclusion in this blog topic.) The last two are tributes or remembrances of her by Stevie Wonder, who met her in 1971 and appeared on a September 1979 episode of the syndicated Soul Train, and daughter Maya Rudolph, in the first of a four-part video, published to YouTube in 2017.
Here is reading material: Wikipedia — Minnie_Riperton.
The second death, although it was the beginning of the death of a particular phenomenon, was to the music genre: Disco Demolition Night.
This happened on a Thursday double-header, at Comiskey Park in Chicago, Illinois, between home team Chicago White Sox and visiting team Detroit Tigers.
The first video, below, is from ESPN. It does a good job, in terms of sports, summarizing how that Major League Baseball team’s ballpark became the site of such a spectacle.
I was 7, exactly five weeks shy of turning 8, years of age. So, how the death of disco—I was told it was just a fad which died—was not something I learned of for years with regard for such details.
Below are materials covering this event, which I think speaks to a lot of human nature—and it is not at all a pretty picture—from that day in 1979.
Reading material: Wikipedia —“Disco Demolition Night”.
Videos:
No comments:
Post a Comment