An internationally renowned icon of American music, Dolly Parton is one of her country's most versatile and best-loved entertainers. Born on a farm in the hardscrabble hill country of Eastern Tennessee, she sang and wrote songs from early childhood. By age ten, she was singing on a radio station in nearby Knoxville. The day after she graduated from high school, she headed for Nashville, with a portfolio of original songs. Her career took off when country star Porter Wagoner featured her on...

John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie (1917 -1993), the American trumpeter, bandleader and composer, was the most visible and durable leader of the generation of musical iconoclasts who revolutionized jazz in the years following World War II. Along with now-legendary figures such as his friend and frequent collaborator Charlie Parker, Gillespie was a principal creator of the "Be-Bop" style. Breaking from the precise arrangements and massed section voicing of the Big Band Era, Gillespie's Be-Bop...

The arrival of Wynton Marsalis on the music scene in 1982 could not have been more unexpected. Barely out of his teens, this trumpet prodigy from New Orleans recorded jazz and classical music with seemingly equal facility. Even more startling was his dedication to a self-defined mission to restore jazz music to a central place in American life, and with it, the values he believes jazz embodies: freedom and discipline, romance and responsibility, pride and respect for both the African and the...

The arrival of Wynton Marsalis on the music scene in 1982 could not have been more unexpected. Barely out of his teens, this trumpet prodigy from New Orleans recorded jazz and classical music with seemingly equal facility. Even more startling was his dedication to a self-defined mission to restore jazz music to a central place in American life, and with it, the values he believes jazz embodies: freedom and discipline, romance and responsibility, pride and respect for both the African and the...

For over 40 years Johnny Cash wrote and sang about the lives of hard-scrabble farmers, homeless drifters, broken-down cowhands, broken-hearted lovers and men behind bars. He gave a voice to the lonesome and the lost, the dispossessed and the disillusioned. He came by this sympathy naturally, growing up on his family's cotton farm in rural Arkansas in the depths of the Depression. America first discovered Johnny Cash in the mid-1950s, and since then people around the world have heard in his...

For over 40 years Johnny Cash wrote and sang about the lives of hard-scrabble farmers, homeless drifters, broken-down cowhands, broken-hearted lovers and men behind bars. He gave a voice to the lonesome and the lost, the dispossessed and the disillusioned. He came by this sympathy naturally, growing up on his family's cotton farm in rural Arkansas in the depths of the Depression. America first discovered Johnny Cash in the mid-1950s, and since then people around the world have heard in his...

Singer-songwriter, musician and record producer, Lionel Richie, has sold more than 100 million records worldwide. A former student at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, in 1968, he became a part of the successful Commodores recording group. He began to write songs geared to the pop audience, including the timeless ballads, "Easy," "Three Times a Lady" (which sold two million records in the midst of the disco craze), his unstoppable momentum propelled him into a solo career in 1982. Lionel Richie...