Biography | Artist Actors Biography

Eunice Kathleen Waymon, better known as Dr. Nina Simone (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003), was a singer, songwriter and pianist. She generally is classified as a jazz musician, but disliked that categorisation herself; and her work also has been described as covering the blues, rhythm and blues and soul. Her vocal style is characterized by passion, breathiness, and tremolo.
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Kenny Chesney (born March 26, 1968 in Knoxville, Tennessee) is a popular country music singer and songwriter, known for such works as No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems and When the Sun Goes Down. Chesney is known for his laid back style of country music.

His first major hit was “Fall in Love,” which reached the Country Top 10 in 1995. The follow-up, “All I Need to Know,” also reached the Top 10, but follow-ups were not so successfull.

However, in 1996, he scored the top 5 hit, “Me and You,” and returned again with “When I Close My Eyes” in early 1997. He hit No. 1 for the first time with “She’s Got It All” in August 1997; the song spent three weeks atop Billboard magazine’s country singles chart.

Other No. 1 hits included “How Forever Feels” (No. 1 for six weeks in 1999); “The Good Stuff” (No. 1 in 2002); “There Goes My Life” (No. 1 in early 2004); and “When the Sun Goes Down” (a duet with Uncle Kracker in 2004). Notable No. 2s include “That’s Why I’m Here” (1998), “Young” (2002), “Big Star” (2003), “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problem” (2003) and “The Woman With You” (2004).

While some of Chesney’s music shows the obvious influence of John Mellencamp and Jimmy Buffett (a point critics are quick to note), he often performs several traditional country songs at his shows (particularly, music from George Jones). He won the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year honor in 2004.

In January 2005, Chesney released the album “Be As You Are: Songs from an Old Blue Chair,” supporting the album with his “Somewhere Under the Sun” tour.

On May 9, 2005, Chesney married Renée Zellweger on the resort island St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The pair met in January 2005 at a tsunami relief benefit. Chesney had previously commented that Zellweger was his favorite actress, and he had written a song, “You Had Me from Hello”, based on her line from Jerry Maguire. On September 15, 2005, after only four months of marriage, they announced their plans for an annulment. Zellweger cited “fraud” as the reason in the related legal papers. [1] Fueled by numerous internet reports, some have speculated that Zellweger discovered Chesney was actually homosexual. Chesney has neither confirmed nor denied these reports.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_Chesney

Joni Mitchell, CC (born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta), is a legendary Canadian musician and painter. Initially working in Toronto and western Canada, she was associated with the burgeoning folk music scene of the mid-1960s in New York City. Through the 1970s she expanded her horizons, predominantly to rock music and jazz, to become one of the most highly respected singer-songwriters of the late 20th century. Mitchell is also an accomplished artist; she has, through photography or painting, created the artwork for each of her albums, and she often describes herself as a “painter derailed by circumstance.”

Early life
A painter who had also dabbled in piano, guitar and ukulele since childhood, Mitchell took her surname from a brief marriage to folksinger Chuck Mitchell in 1965. She performed frequently in coffee houses and folk clubs and became well known for her unique style of song writing and her innovative guitar style. Personal and often self-consciously poetic, her songs were strengthened by her extraordinarily wide-ranging voice (with a range in pitch at one time covering over four octaves) and unique guitar playing, tuning the instrument in unorthodox manners to produce a distinctive rhythmic, driving sound. She has been a cigarette smoker since the age of nine, which may explain the unique texture to her voice, which was especially prominent in her later albums. She claims to have fallen in love with smoking directly upon taking her first puffs, stating that other children in her proximity who were also smoking, broke out in fits of coughing. She says it felt right to her from the very beginning.

Around the time when she left her home in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan she became pregnant and lost her virginity at the same time. Unable to raise a child so young in her life, and with no other alternatives, she was forced to give her daughter up for adoption. This remained a private part of her life during the bulk of her early/progressing career. While playing one night in a New York establishment, a young David Crosby witnessed her perform and was immediately stricken by her ability and her draw as an artist. He took her under his wing and as cited by Crosby himself, when making someone unaware aware of Mitchell’s allure, he would simply “roll them a joint”, and ask that they enjoy the experience.

Much of her initial acclaim was as a result of other artists covering her songs; her first songwriting credit to hit the charts, “Urge for Going”, was a success for country singer George Hamilton IV and for folk singer Tom Rush then many years later by the alternative Glassgow native band Travis - Mitchell’s own 1967 recording of the song was not released until the Hits compilation in 1996. Judy Collins had a top-ten hit in early 1968 with “Both Sides Now”, and British folk rock group Fairport Convention included “Chelsea Morning” and “I Don’t Know Where I Stand” on their debut album, recorded in late 1967, and the otherwise unreleased “Eastern Rain” on their second album the following year. The songs on her first two solo albums Joni Mitchell (Song to a Seagull) (1968) and Clouds (1969) were archetypes of the nascent singer-songwriter movement of the time.

By her third album, Ladies of the Canyon (1970), maturity brought a record infused with the spirit of California life (the canyon of the title is perhaps both Topanga Canyon and Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles) as well as containing her first major hit single, the environmental “Big Yellow Taxi” (about paving paradise to put up a parking lot), and her song “Woodstock”, about the music festival, which was later a hit for both Crosby, Stills and Nash and Matthews Southern Comfort. (Ironically, Mitchell did not even go to Woodstock, having cancelled her appearance at the festival on the advice of her manager for fear that she would miss a scheduled appearance on The Dick Cavett Show.) “For Free” is the first of Mitchell’s many songs that underscore the dichotomy between the benefits of her stardom and its costs, both in terms of its pressure and of the loss of privacy and freedom it entails.