Topic: Music & Musicians
In 1907 Herman M. Draper (1858-1927) and his wife, Annie Draper (1860-1927), founded a privately run orphanage, the Children's Industrial Home and Training School -- initially in Seattle's Ballard nei...
With humble roots tracing to Chicago's ghettos and later the segregated World War II-era housing in Bremerton, teen trumpeter Quincy Jones rose quickly through the ranks of Seattle's 1940s jazz scene....
Theo Karle Johnston was the first musical talent to emerge from the Pacific Northwest and become an international star. While still a teenager, Johnston worked as a church soloist in Olympia before mo...
Milton Katims was a violist and orchestral conductor of world renown. From 1954 to 1976 he was Music Director of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. During that time he worked to build the organization fr...
A native of Everett, Washington, Carol Kaye (b. 1935) hailed from a musically talented family and went on to become one of Hollywood's so-called "Wrecking Crew" -- a stable of the finest recording-stu...
Seattle boasts a distinctive history in radio broadcasting. It was home to several pioneering stations at the dawn of this new technology about a century ago, and one of those early stations went on t...
This bibliography on the history of music in King County was prepared as a community history resource by staff of the former King County Office of Cultural Resources, now 4Culture (King County Cultura...
KJR-AM was the pioneering radio station in the Pacific Northwest, and its history mirrors the rise of the radio industry in general. Its origins trace to a tiny "dot-and-dash" Morse Code tra...
Kurt Cobain (1967-1994) was the lead singer of the Seattle grunge band Nirvana. He commited suicide in 1994. In this People's History Clark Humphrey reflects on his life and music.
Roller-skating fun came to Bellevue's Crossroads area in 1962 at Howard and Ida Monta's Lake Hills Roller Rink. In 1963 they experimented with having teen dances at the rink, and thus began a rock 'n'...
For more than 50 years, a community center named for Harlem Renaissance luminary Langston Hughes (1902-1967) and housed under the dome of a former synagogue has played a role in the artistic, cultural...
Seattle-born Rose Louise Hovick had her first brush with fame at age one, winning a healthy baby contest. As Gypsy Rose Lee, she became famous in burlesque as a classy and witty strip tease artist. Sh...
J. Hans Lehmann, M.D. was the only son of middle class Jewish parents in the northern German town of Barsinghausen. He escaped Europe with most of his family on the eve of World War II and established...
This People's History relates the history of the Leonard Gayton family. The jazz drummer, jazz singer, and band leader Leonard Gayton (1908-1982) was the fourth child of the early African American res...
Dave Lewis was the most significant figure on the Pacific Northwest's rhythm & blues scene in the 1950s and 1960s. By 1955 he'd helped found Seattle's first notable teenage doo-wop vocal group (th...
One of America's original cowboy stars, James "Texas Jim" Lewis had (as a showbiz veteran) seemingly done it all by the time he moved to Seattle in 1950. Having played live country music over the radi...
This is an excerpt from an article by novelist Tom Robbins on the lightshows of the 1960s. It appeared in Seattle magazine in 1967, and is reprinted with permission of Tom Robbins.
The first lightshow in the Seattle area occurred on November 5, 1966, when KRAB radio (one of the first community-based FM radio stations in the country) held a benefit concert in Kirkland. It was thi...
The larger-than-life personal saga of Seattle businessman Adolph Frederik Linden (1889-1969) has long overshadowed the publicly known history of one of his numerous enterprises: the Pacific Northwest...
Manuel Lopes arrived in Seattle in 1852, and operated a barbershop equipped with the first barber chair to be brought around Cape Horn. He was Seattle's first black resident, businessman, and property...
Richard Berry's 1957 song "Louie Louie" became a huge regional hit in the Pacific Northwest when the Tacoma band the Wailers recorded it 1960. A couple of years later it was recorded in distinct rendi...
Linnie Lucille Love was a child actress, dancer, and singer in early Washington popular vaudeville. She advanced her skills by studying grand opera at New York City music conservatories. Upon completi...
It was around 1889 that a recent German immigrant named Alfred Lueben arrived in Seattle along with his wife, Sabine, daughter Lillian, and first son Alfred. Over the next four decades he would establ...
During renovations in 2011 at Madigan Army Medical Center on Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Pierce County, 8,000 16-inch phonograph records (transcription discs) were discovered hidden behind a gymnasium...