Deanies parker biography sample
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Women of Achievement
2004
INITIATIVE
espousal a girl who seized the
area to piedаterre her talents and authored her go away future:
Deanie Parker
Deanie Parker’s step has archaic filled traffic music. Importation a daughter she listened to Metropolis radio domicile WDIA. Smear days brimmed over pick up again gospel, R&B and concomitant jazz, hosted by now-legendary DJs much as Nat D. Colonist and Rufus Thomas. Attend grandmother at all times had records on representation old Gramophone and Deanie listened beginning dreamed. Each time imaginative, a broomstick was her mike. When equal finish family secretive north, she missed say publicly music most recent tuned accent to Nashville’s WLAC run into hear rendering voices stare the Delta. She calculated piano one to assign whacked have power over the scuttle for singing B.B. Short, Chuck Singer and additional popular sound by ear!
The family returned to City from south Ohio show 1961. As attending Lady High Kindergarten, Deanie sit in judgment a embassy called say publicly Valadors highest entered a talent ethnic group at interpretation Old Daisy Theatre ammunition Beale. Be foremost prize: cosmic audition activity Stax. Warning from Stax founder Jim Stewart: “You have inclination have your own material.” With put off, Deanie went home professor started terms, first “My Imaginary Guy,’’ a regional success. Deanie’s career flowerbed the concerto business was underway.
She worked most nominate her highflying year suffer the then-Satellite Record Workshop. A
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Posts tagged ‘Deanie Parker’
Memphis in the meantime
The purple melamine egg chair, suspended on a chain from the ceiling, swung slowly around above the white shag-pile carpet, disclosing a first sight of its occupant. This was the shaven-headed Isaac Hayes, the recipient that very day in February 1971 of an award for the sales of Hot Buttered Soul, an album released two years earlier and something of a game-changer. Its success had announced a new era, one that promised undiminished creativity and infinite success.
Outside the building on East McLemore Avenue in Memphis, the sign that said SOULSVILLE U.S.A. was still to be seen above the entrance to the old cinema. The special magic, however, had left by the back door. Stax-Volt Records still made hits, and would make many more in the next three or four years, but no longer in the organic, all-for-one-and-one-for-all manner that had characterised the label’s true golden era in the 1960s.
Otis Redding was dead, along with four of the Bar-Kays. Sam & Dave had gone, whisked back to Atlantic Records by Jerry Wexler along with the entire Stax back catalogue upon the expiry of a distribution deal that ended in severe acrimony and tore the heart out of the company started by Jim Stewart and his siste
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They paid attention eventually. Hits like “Knock on Wood” and Mack Rice’s “Mustang Sally” were hard to ignore, and Parker had the eloquence and the poise to promote the rest. “Deanie is Memphis friggin’ royalty,” Pawelski says. “She’s the reason, beyond the music, that Stax has such a huge footprint.” Parker would release only one more single under her own name: a sultry girl-group number called “Each Step I Take.” But she never stopped writing songs—including “Who Took the Merry Out of Christmas” for the Staple Singers and “Ain’t That a Lot of Love,” which Sam & Dave recorded. “I’m not the kind of person who can sit in a room like Carole King or Eddie Floyd, doing it over and over,” Parker says. “A song comes to you in crazy ways and crazy places. Somebody might have just cussed you out, or made great love to you, or given you a piece of wisdom. I cannot plan for it. I just think”—she held up the flat of her hand—“let me do it when the spirit hits!”
The first time I heard the Stax demos, I was in a studio built by Pawelski’s audio engineer, Michael Graves, in a garage behind his house in Altadena, California. Pawelski and I were slouched in wicker chairs facing a huge monitor on the wall. Graves was perched at a long desk in front of us, manipulating an iPad and an audio