North Florida Music Hall of Fame

Martha Ellis was only 12-years old when she died in 1896.  Her parents obviously loved and sorely missed her as they erected this marker at her grave.  Little Martha is buried at Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon, Georgia.
The cemetery was laid out in the 1880s with the idea that it would be a resting place [...]

Crossover country didn’t start with Shania Twain.
In the Fabulous Fifties, pop crooners like Tony Bennett and Patti Paige discovered that spruced-up versions of “hillbilly” songs could be a gold mine.
That vein ran both ways: country singers and their labels suddenly discovered thousands of pop-music fans who had developed a taste for country. A few [...]

Elizabeth Jones Reed Napier was 90-years old when she passed away in 1945.  Despite all she must have accomplished during her long life, she’s famous because of a guitar player who was not quite two years old when she died.
The Allman Brothers Band formed in Jacksonville in 1969.  The group included guitarist Dickey Betts, who [...]

Marion “Sister” Van Zant, matriarch of the legendary Van Zant musical dynasty, died suddenly on Saturday, April 9 (2000). She was 70.
Her death took family members by surprise, as she appeared to be in good health. But she seemed to sense that her time was up, and she had recently alluded to her impending death, [...]

Northeast Florida musicians broke out the champagne and blasted the amplifiers in October 2002: Modern rock band 3AE became the 100th area act to snag a record deal.
The RCA Records signing is one of eight contracts garnered by Northeast Florida acts in the past two years. They include mainstream rockers Shinedown (signed with Atlantic), singer-songwriter [...]

Bishop John Freeman Young sleeps in Jacksonville’s Old City Cemetery. While there’s nothing on his tombstone to indicate it, he’s known internationally for his English translation of the world’s favorite Christmas carol – “Silent Night, Holy Night.”
Young was born in Pittston, Maine on October 30, 1820.  He graduated from Virginia Theological Seminary in April, 1845 [...]

Several years ago, on the old North Florida Music Association site, we posted a collection of mp3s. As the Internet is truly international, a Chinese site that links to music found these old songs and has linked to them.  There are several hundred downloads a month. So for the rest of you, here’s the original [...]

Act

Debut

Genre

Labels

Blake, “Blind”

1926

Blues

Paramount

Canova, Judy

1939

Cabaret

Okeh, Mercury, Varsity

Haines, Connie

1939

Swing

RCA, Coral, Capitol, Mercury, Columbia, Dot

Waterford, Charles “Crown Prince”

1945

R&B, Gospel

King, Capitol

Masters Family

1946

Gospel

Rich-R-Tone, Mercury,Columbia, Decca

Shay, Dorothy

1947

Cabaret

Columbia

Charles, Ray

1949

Blues/Pop

Atlantic, ABC-Paramount, Warner Bros., Columbia

Whitman, Slim

1949

Country

RCA, Imperial, United Artists, Liberty, Cleveland Intl.

Masters, Owen

1950

Pop

Daniels, Billy

1952

Cabaret

Mercury

Sheldon, Jack

1954

Jazz

GNP, Reprise, Capitol, Dot, Atlas, Concord Jazz, Butterfly

Boone, Pat

1956

Pop

Dot, Motown, MCA, Lion & Lamb, Benson, Bear [...]

“Half the folks in the Georgia Music Hall of Fame are from Jacksonville,” says Dru Lombar. It may be a bit of an exaggeration, but Dru would know about those musicians. He’s one of them.

As part of my instruction in guitar lore, a neighborhood musician named Paul Glass brought me to see a Riverside band called The Second Coming. That august outfit included a virtuoso picker by the name of Dickey Betts. The two of us hitch-hiked all over Northeast Florida — as far as Ravine Gardens in Palatka — to hear Betts at every possible opportunity.

Tom Dowd passed away Sunday, October 27 at an assisted living facility near his Miami home. Tom was 77.
Words fail in trying to describe Tom’s influence in the music industry, but an internet search nails it. A search on the Barnes and Noble website turns up 332 available CDs with Tom’s [...]