Joseph Souter was born in Atlanta on this day in 1940. After meeting disc jockey Bill Lowery, he shortened his name to Joe South. He played in Lowery’s house band at National Recording Corporation in Atlanta. So did Ray Stevens and Jerry Reed. His first success came writing songs for other performers: “Untie Me” for […]
He was one of the greatest – if not the greatest – running backs to ever play the game of football. Jim Brown was born on St. Simons in 1936. At Syracuse University, Brown excelled in five sports. The NFL’s Cleveland Browns drafted him in 1957 and he led the league in rushing in 8 […]
He streaked to the top of the charts. Singer-songwriter Ray Stevens was born Harold Ray Ragsdale in Clarksdale, Georgia. He attended high school in Albany and soon after got a recording contract in Nashville. In 1970, Stevens hit #1 and won a Grammy with the mainstream “Everything is Beautiful”, but it was the unorthodox songs […]
He was 14 when he saw Jackie Robinson play, and knew he wanted to play major league baseball. There were few better. Henry Louis Aaron was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1934. During a 23-year career with the Milwaukee and Atlanta Braves and the Milwaukee Brewers, Aaron won the National League’s Most Valuable Player and […]
He was known as the black Babe Ruth, and some consider him baseball’s all-time home run king. Josh Gibson was born in Buena Vista, Georgia, in 1911 and moved to Pittsburgh in the 1920s. He dropped out of trade school to play semi-professional baseball, and in 1930 joined the professional Negro Leagues, playing for the […]
Richard Wayne Penniman is not a name most people associate with the beginning of rock n’ roll, but few people did more to make rock one of the hearthstones of 20th-century American culture than the man known as Little Richard. Penniman was born into a family of 12 children in Macon and grew up singing […]
Her signature song was “I’m Sorry” but there was nothing sorry about the career of Brenda Lee…one of the first singers to be launched to stardom by the new medium of TV. She was born Brenda Mae Tarpley in Atlanta and grew up in Conyers and Lithonia. She won a talent show at age five […]
They were the quintessential college rock band of the 1980s, working in the town Rolling Stone called “the best college music scene in the country.” Michael Stipe was an art student at the University of Georgia when he met Peter Buck at the Wuxtry Record Store in Athens. Together with Mike Mills and Bill Berry, […]
There have been a lot of great Georgia Bulldogs, but very few who needed only one name: Herschel. Herschel Junior Walker was born in Wrightsville in 1962. He was a highly touted football player at Johnson County High School. Coach Vince Dooley and UGA won the very heated Herschel recruiting war. In his first game […]
“Moon River,” “Jeepers Creepers,” “Accentuate the Positive” — Savannah native John Herndon Mercer wrote those songs and a thousand more like them, and his songs are some of the most popular of all time. In a career that spanned nearly 50 years, Mercer co-founded Capitol Records, wrote for Broadway musicals, and was nominated for 19 […]
