March 12
Singer-songwriter introspection's gentlest voice James Taylor celebrates his 78th birthday today, the North Carolina troubadour whose "Fire and Rain" and vulnerable confessions about mental illness and addiction made him the 1970s' most therapeutic artist for wounded souls… Bebop lost its greatest innovator on this day in 1955 when Charlie Parker died at 34 from a heart attack in New York, the alto saxophonist's years of heroin abuse making the coroner estimate his age at 60, ending the life that revolutionized jazz improvisation… Beatles love found its truest match today in 1969 when Paul McCartney married photographer Linda Eastman at Marylebone Register Office, beginning the partnership that would produce Wings and four children before breast cancer took her in 1998, ending rock's most solid marriage… We remember Chess Records' co-founder Leonard Chess on his birthday today in 1917, the Polish immigrant whose Chicago label recorded Mud...
