Melba Liston was born in Kansas City, Missouri on January 13, 1926. Although she and her mother were poor, they had a piano and a radio, and Melba was exposed to music through her grandfather. One day she saw a trombone in a store window. She later recounted, “I just had to have it. [It was] beautiful, standing in the shop window like a mannequin, and I was mesmerized by it. My mom didn’t question it, she just ... got it for me.”
At seven years old, Melba elected to play the trombone in her elementary school’s new music program. As a young person learning to play the slide, she quickly learned how difficult playing the instrument was, but she stuck with it. By the age of eight, she was so good that she was invited to perform as a soloist on a local radio station.
In 1937, at the age of 10, she moved to Los Angeles, California. After playing in youth bands and studying, she decided to become a professional musician at the age of 16. She joined the musicians union and became a member of the Los Angeles Lincoln Theater band. During her period with the Lincoln Theater band, she also began working as a composer and arranger (roles rarely given or attributed to women in jazz during that era).
After her stint at the Lincoln Theater, she joined a band newly-formed by trumpeter Gerald Wilson and also recorded with Dexter Gordon. She then joined Dizzy Gillespie’s big band which, at the time, included musicians such as John Coltrane and John Lewis. She next joined a band backing Billie Holiday on tour. The experience of touring throughout the south with Holiday’s band, coping with the strains of limited income and even more limited audiences, was strenuous, disheartening and exhausting for Liston. In later years, Liston spoke candidly about the extreme difficulties of being a African-American female jazz musician during this era. Besides being shunned, underpaid and overlooked, she was consistently abused by male musicians. All of this notwithstanding, Melba found strength and motivation in her music.
In 1956, she joined Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra and was commissioned by the U.S. State Department as a musical ambassador of the U.S. in South America. She later transitioned into working with Quincy Jones and his orchestra as both a player and writer. In 1958, she recorded her only album as a leader, Melba Liston and Her ‘Bones – a true gem in jazz history.
After she stopped playing the slide, Liston became known and respected in music as a savvy and remarkable bebop jazz arranger. She worked as an arranger for numerous recording companies, including Motown, and arranged scores for dozens of high profile musicians, including Clark Terry, Marvin Gaye, Mary Lou Williams, and Gloria Lynne. However, perhaps her most important work was written for Randy Weston, with whom she collaborated on and off for four decades from the late 1950s into the 1990s. Her work with Weston has been compared to the collaborations of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington. Liston worked as a "ghost writer" during her career. According to one writer, "Many of the arrangements found in the Gillespie, Jones, and Weston repertoires were accomplished by Liston.”
Liston was a trailblazer as a trombonist and a composer, as well as a woman with stellar ability that transcended various genres and categories of music.
This text is excerpted from: https://thegirlsintheband.com/2013/11/melba-liston/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melba_Liston, and https://archives.susanfleet.com/documents/melba_liston.html.
To listen to an audio recording of her work, visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4rJtLR1ZoQ.
Dr. Alexa Irene Canady was born in Lansing, Michigan to Dr. Clinton Canady, Jr. and Elizabeth Canady. Her father was a dentist and her mother was an educator and a civic leader. Dr. Canady's parents taught her about the importance of education and hard work as a child.
Dr. Canady and her younger brother were the only two African-American students in their elementary school, and unfortunately, Dr. Canady consistently faced prejudice while in school. Dr. Canady’s parents knew she was bright and had her sit for an intelligence test while she was in elementary school. Her IQ test scores were extremely high, which contradicted the average grades she was earning at school. Her parents later discovered that Dr. Canady’s teacher had been switching her test scores with a white student’s to conceal her intelligence. Ultimately, Dr. Canady graduated with honors from Lansing Sexton High School in 1967 and was nominated as a National Achievement Scholar.
Dr. Canady went on to attend the University of Michigan where she received her bachelor’s degree in zoology in 1971. Her time at the University of Michigan was not without its struggles; she almost dropped out of college at one point due to, in her words, a “crisis of confidence.” But she persisted and found her passion: medicine. She would then go on to receive her medical degree from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1975, where she graduated cum laude.
Although she initially had an interest in internal medicine, Dr. Canady decided on neurosurgery after falling in love with neurology during her first two years of medical school. She settled on this specialty against the recommendations of some of her professors. She went on to become a surgical intern at the Yale-New Haven Hospital from 1975–1976. Although an exceptional student, she still faced prejudice and discriminatory comments as she was both the first African American and the first female intern in the program. On her first day as an intern, she was told that she "must be our new equal-opportunity package.” This discrimination notwithstanding, she was later voted one of the top residents by her fellow physicians.
After completing her internship, Dr. Canady went to the University of Minnesota for her residency, becoming the first female African-American neurosurgery resident in the United States. In 1982, after finishing residency, Dr. Canady decided to specialize as a pediatric neurosurgeon, becoming the first African American and the first woman to do so. She chose pediatrics because of her love for the children in the pediatric ward during her residency. She stated, “it never ceased to amaze me how happy the children were.” As a patient-focused surgeon, she was known to play videogames with her pediatric patients and form relationships with each of them. She became Chief of Neurosurgery at the Children's Hospital of Michigan in 1987 and held the position until her partial retirement in 2001. During her time as Chief, she specialized in congenital spinal abnormalities, hydrocephalus, trauma and brain tumors.
Although she has stated that she was not focused on the history she was making, once in retirement she realized the significance of her accomplishments and what they meant for other African Americans and women in medicine. She is famously quoted as saying, “The greatest challenge I faced in becoming a neurosurgeon was believing it was possible.”
This text is excerpted from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexa_Canady, https://medicine.iu.edu/blogs/women-in-medicine/black-history-month-honors-alexa-canady-md-first-african-american-woman-neurosurgeon, https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/dr-alexa-canady-davis-41, and Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls (https://www.rebelgirls.com/?gclid=CjwKCAiAjPyfBhBMEiwAB2CCIs8fvrz3L50eWgbFgiOuJpBCsGiIPUFbhjwyLE14pel3_HXZzVBD8xoCjkQQAvD_BwE).
Lauryn Noelle Hill was born on May 26, 1975, to parents Valerie Hill, an English teacher, and Mal Hill, a computer and management consultant. She grew up in South Orange, New Jersey. From an early age, Hill was fascinated by music. At age 13, she appeared as a contestant on Showtime at the Apollo. With the support of her parents, she pursued singing and acting professionally in her early teens, appearing on local television and auditioning for film roles in nearby New York City.
In high school, she formed the hip hop group The Fugees with Pras Michel and Wyclef Jean. While serving as a songwriter, lead vocalist and rapper for the group, Hill continued to pursue her acting career. At age 17, she played a recurring role on the daytime television drama As the World Turns. The following year, she appeared in a prominent singing role in the feature film Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. Hill excelled academically and earned admission to Columbia University. In her freshman year after The Fugees signed a record contract, Hill left Columbia to concentrate on her performing career.
The Fugees released their first album in 1994, and their second, The Score, in 1996, which was an immediate sensation upon release, shooting to the top of the Billboard 200 and the R&B charts. The album included three hit singles; the biggest was Lauryn Hill’s version of “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” a ballad made famous in the 1970s by singer Roberta Flack. The song went to Number 2 on the U.S. Singles chart (Number 1 in Britain), and brought the group a Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance of the Year. In its first year of release, The Score sold six million copies.
In 1998, Hill produced and released her solo debut, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. The album topped the Billboard 200 chart for four weeks and the Billboard R&B Album charts for six weeks, ultimately selling 19 million copies. Of the five singles released from the album, “Doo Wop (That Thing)” debuted at Number 1 on the Billboard charts. At the 1999 Grammy Awards, Hill broke a number of records, becoming the first woman to be nominated in ten categories in a single year, and the first woman to win five trophies in one night: Album of the Year, Best R&B Album, Best R&B Song, Best Female R&B Vocal Performance and Best New Artist.
By the end of 1999, two years into her solo career, her record sales and touring had earned her an estimated $25 million. In addition to her own performing schedule, she served as co-producer of Carlos Santana’s Supernatural, and won a second Grammy Award for Album of the Year. She is the only female artist to win the Album of the Year award in two consecutive years.
At the height of her success, Lauryn Hill surprised the music world with her decision to withdraw from performing and seclude herself with her growing family.
Outside of her performance career, Hill is a dedicated activist. She founded an organization dedicated to serving underprivileged urban youth called the Refugee Camp Youth Project. The organization raises money to send children from Hill's native New Jersey to summer camp.
In 2012, Hill faced personal and professional tumult which resulted in criminal charges being filed against her. These past challenges notwithstanding, Hill has displayed tremendous grace and resilience. She is often regarded as one of the most influential musicians of her generation. In 2021, she was among the inaugural nominees for the Black Music & Entertainment Walk of Fame.
This text is excerpted from: https://achievement.org/achiever/lauryn-hill/, https://www.hiphopscriptures.com/lauryn-hill, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lauryn-Hill and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauryn_Hill.
