By Lisa Hix — Nichelle Gainer knows a thing or two about glamour: She spent most of her career working for magazines like “Woman’s Day,” “GQ,” “Us Weekly,” and “InStyle,” with a focus on celebrity, fashion, and grooming. But her true passion is fiction, so she decided to write a novel about black beauty pageants in the 1950s, partially inspired by one of her two glamorous aunts, who was a model in the 1950s—the other was an opera singer who rubbed shoulders with the biggest celebrities of her day. "If...

Black History Shared Through Vinyl

By Savoychina1 — In case I haven't shared the beginning, here it is in a nutshell: My son came home from elementary school, and said, "Dad, I need something to take to school for Black History Month.” That was the beginning of collecting black history as a specific area. My son was in second or third grade then and now he is in his first year of college, so let’s call it about 10 years. Now I have a black history collection that includes art, books, records, and anything else that I think will impress...

Secrets of the Blue Note Vault: Rediscovering Monk, Blakey, and Hancock

By Dean Schaffer — When I was a jazz DJ in Philadelphia, Blue Note was always my favorite label. Naturally I had a lot of jazz-musician friends, and many of them told me that they’d played in a lot of Blue Note sessions that were never released. I started to keep a list of these sessions in a little notebook, and in 1973 I started banging on the door of Blue Note to find someone to show it to. My inquiries fell on deaf ears until 1975, when I met a guy named Charlie Lourie, who had just joined Blue Note. He...

Your Turntable Is Not Dead: Inside Jack White’s Vinyl Record Empire

By Dean Schaffer — When the White Stripes got signed, Jack White created Third Man Records as an insurance policy. With the White Stripes and, later on, Whirlwind Heat and the Raconteurs, the bands only licensed their music to record companies—the labels didn’t really own it. So in case things went sour, Third Man was a way for Jack and the bands to be able to maintain ownership of their masters and their records. You hear so many stories about that damning phrase, “in perpetuity,” on contracts. Jack was...

Stephen M. H. Braitman on the British Invasion, from the Beatles to the Sex Pistols

By Dean Schaffer — I was a Hollywood kid. My father was a TV and radio editor in the San Fernando Valley, and he allowed me to do my first writing to review concerts and shows for the newspaper. But as a younger kid, I really hated rock ’n’ roll music and pop music, and I disliked the Beatles and all that. I have a younger sister who was a total Beatlemaniac. She started getting into the ’60s scene, but I was more influenced at that time by my father’s interest in classical music. I was, however,...