Happy Birthday Melba Moore Beatrice Melba Hill (born October 29, 1945). Melba Moore is a living legend. A star of the stage, screen and has recorded some timeless classics. Melba first hit the UK charts in 1976 with This Is It and has had many classics hits since including, You Stepped Into My Life, Standing Right Here, Falling, Pick Me Up, Ill Dance, Loves Comin At Ya and many others.Its with great excitement that Melba Moore has a new single called, Just Dance which is now available through iTunes and other download sites and just gone into the UK s top 20 Soul chart on Solar. The single was written by Dominic McFadden, the Son of the late Gene McFadden of McFadden & Whitehead.. So there aint no stopping us now - Just Dance! American Rhythm & Blues singer and actress Melba Moore (b. New York, NY, 29 October 1945) is a four-time Grammy nominee and the winner of the 1970 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical, for her performance as Lutiebelle in Purlie. With a total of eleven top ten U.S. hits on the Billboard charts over the past 40 years, both singles and albums, Melba Moore continues into the 21st century as one of pop music’s most enduring artists. Moore was born Beatrice Melba Hill to the popular R & B singer known as Bonnie Davis (originally named Gertrude Melba Smith) and saxophonist Teddy Hill, who managed the influential Harlem jazz club Minton’s Playhouse in its heyday. The first nine years of the child’s life in Harlem were difficult; her mother was single, and distracted with her busy career (she had a Number One R & B hit, “Don’t Stop Now,” in 1943, before Melba was born). In 1954 Bonnie Davis married her long-time accompanist, pianist Clement Moorman, and the family moved permanently to Newark, New Jersey. Clem Moorman, and the large family of siblings, aunts, and uncles to which he belonged, transformed Melba’s life. He insisted that she and the other children learn to play the piano (although her primary interest was dance) and kept a watchful eye over her musical development. At the High School for Performing Arts in Newark she studied piano and voice, and went on to Montclair State College (New Jersey) for a bachelors degree in music education. After graduation she worked briefly as a music teacher, but a life in the classroom was not what she had envisioned for herself. Moorman was in a position to introduce her to several agents, and soon Melba Moore (a name she chose in honor of her stepfather, abbreviating it slightly) was on track for a singing career, making backup tracks (with Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson on Bobby Hebb’s “Sunny” in 1966), some of them for stars as prominent as Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin – although she was not actually working in the same space with them. chance. Melba Moore moved to Broadway with the original cast of Hair as the character named Dionne, and after several months she replaced Diane Keaton in the role of Sheila. (Keaton had started as a “Waitress” and had moved to “Sheila” a month or so after the Broadway opening. The interchangeability of cast members in this highly unconventional show made it possible for Moore to become the first African-American actress to replace a white actress in a lead role on Broadway.) In a very short time, Moore was cast as Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins, opposite Cleavon Little, in the musical Purlie (1970). Having absolutely no training in acting, she found that working in such company was very scary, and yet she had no fear of being rejected, since stage acting had never been her own ambition. Originally she was assigned only one song, “Purlie,” in the show, but she had such success with it in previews that songwriters Gary Geld and Peter Udell gave her another, “I Got Love.” This song was such a smash hit that it shot her to stardom. Not only did it supply the title to her debut album with Mercury Records, which earned her a 1971 Grammy nomination as Best New Artist, but it boosted her to the 1970 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical, a 1970 Theatre World Award, and a 1970 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance. In much later interviews, Moore has revealed that she considers this Broadway period, despite the three top awards, a hiatus, an interruption in her pilgrimage toward becoming a lead singer in the world of Rhythm and Blues. Still, it led to her first recording contract (three albums with Mercury Records: I Got Love 1970; Look What Youre Doing to the Man 1971; Melba Moore Live! 1972) and a firm foothold as a guest on television (Ed Sullivan, David Frost, Mike Douglas, Dick Cavett, Carol Burnett, Flip Wilson, and thirteen appearances within three years on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show). In the summer of 1972, Melba Moore and actor Clifton Davis co-starred in their own television series. It was intended as a temporary replacement for Carol Burnett’s variety show, but was so successful that it would have continued, had not the couple’s off-screen relationship come to an end. Moore’s career began to slump when her managers and accountants abandoned her in 1973, and she returned to Newark, singing only for benefits.Following a performance at the Apollo Theater in 1974, she met manager and business promoter Charles Huggins, and her career began to pick up again, with a leading role in a film version of Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s Lost in the Stars, opposite Brock Peters and Raymond St. Jacques. Moore and Huggins married in 1975 and formed their own company, Hush Productions, signing several other R & B artists, including Freddie Jackson and Meli’sa Morgan. Melba Moore’s next four albums (Peach Melba 1975; This Is It 1976; Melba ’76; and A Portrait of Melba 1977) were recorded by Buddah Records. Peach Melba brought her a second Grammy nomination. Nineteen seventy-six was a banner year for her, with five singles approaching the top of the charts, and one of them, “Lean on Me,” earning her third Grammy nomination for Best Rhythm & Blues Vocal Performance, Female. As a single, “This Is It” reached Number Two on the U.S. dance charts. Moore also returned to television with a serious acting assignment, playing Harriet Tubman in The American Woman: Portraits of Courage, and emerging with an Emmy nomination. In 1978 Moore returned to Broadway, starring as Marsinah in Timbuktu! with Eartha Kitt. The cast of Timbuktu!, “A Musical Fable based on Kismet,” was all black, with the Robert Wright/George Forrest score supplemented by African folk music, and with direction and choreography by Geoffrey Holder. Despite its success, Moore left the show after only a few weeks. Thanks Gary!
Posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 18:59:24 +0000
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