(The most significant factor in the career of Aaron "T-Bon...)
The most significant factor in the career of Aaron "T-Bone" Walker was his ability to bridge the worlds of blues and jazz. The guitar artistry of this early exponent of urban blues was not only admired by blues musicians like B.B. King, Gatemouth Brown, Albert King, and Albert Collins, and rock guitarists such as Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Duane Allman, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, but by such jazz greats as Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, and many others with whom he recorded. Stormy Monday is the first biography of T-Bone Walker to be published. Using dozens of interviews with Walker, as well as with members of his family, close friends, fellow musicians, and business associates, the book offers a remarkable frank insider’s account of the life of a blues musician and compulsive gambler, from the wild living and hard drinking on the road to a solid and contented family life at home.
https://www.amazon.com/Stormy-Monday-T-Bone-Walker-Story/dp/0807124583/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Stormy+Monday%3A+The+T-Bone+Walker+Story&qid=1579677814&s=books&sr=1-1
1987
historian journalist producer author
Helen Oakley Dance was born on February 15, 1913 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She was a daughter of John Oakley, a managing director of the Joseph Simpson Knitting Mills, and Mary Oakley. She had two sisters and two brothers. In 1933 she moved to the United States.
Helen Oakley Dance's early education was overseen by a succession of governesses, and completed at finishing school in Lausanne, Switzerland.
In the early 1930's, Helen Oakley Dance traveled to London, where she first saw Duke Ellington perform. Soon after, she rebelled against her family by moving to Detroit, where she intended to work as a jazz singer and later met Ellington by forging an introductory note to him from a jazz critic. In 1934 she moved to Chicago and began her career with the Chicago Herald American. She also helped to produce jazz concerts. In 1935 she produced recordings for the Okeh record label, and founded the Chicago Rhythm Club, for which she booked concerts.
In 1942 she volunteered for the Women's Army Corps and was assigned to Algiers, where she sent undercover operatives and radio technicians to occupied zones. Later in the war she trained renegade German soldiers as American spies. After the war, she with her husband moved to Rowayton, Connecticut, and from 1964 to 1982, while her husband managed Hines, Helen ran Hicue, the music publishing company for Hines and Hodges.
Dance’s one book, which was published in 1987, was titled Stormy Monday: The T-Bone Walker Story. She was a personal assistant to musicians like Duke Ellington, Red Norvo, Chick Webb, Johnny Hodges, Bob Crosby and Earl Hines. In 1988 the Helen Oakley Dance and Stanley Dance Archive was established at Yale University, encompassing correspondence, writings, interviews, records, photographs and films.
After her husband's death in 1999, Helen moved away from Bittersweet Hill, to an assisted living community in Escondido, which specialised in "memory care".
(The most significant factor in the career of Aaron "T-Bon...)
1987Helen Oakley Dance worked in the civil rights movement, founding the Catholic Interracial Council within the Roman Catholic diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the Human Relations Commission in Norwalk, Connecticut.
In 1947 Helen Oakley married Stanley Dance, a jazz music writer and music producer who she had met in 1937. They had four children and the two were married over 50 years. In 1999 her husband died.
