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The Untold Story of the Pointer Sisters: Four Sisters, Three Grammys, and a Lifetime of Reinvention
They sang bebop, country, disco, and synth-pop with equal conviction. They won Grammys in categories no one expected them to win, taught a generation of children to count on “Sesame Street,” and became the first Black group to perform at the Grand Ole Opry. And then, one by one, the sisters began to disappear —…
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The Untold Story of Kool & the Gang: From Jersey City Jazz Kids to the Soundtrack of Every Party on Earth
They are the band behind the two songs that get played at nearly every wedding, graduation, and championship celebration on the planet. Yet for most of their early career, Kool & the Gang couldn’t sing a note, couldn’t get arrested, and were named after a case of mistaken identity with James Brown’s band. Before the…
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The Untold Story of Phil Collins: The Drummer Who Fell Into History
In the 1980s, no human being on earth had more hit records than Phil Collins. Not Michael Jackson. Not Madonna. Not Prince. Add up his solo singles, his Genesis singles, and the records he played on or produced for everybody else, and Collins racked up more American Top 40 hits in that decade than any…
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The Untold Story of Gladys Knight & the Pips: The Family Band That Outshone a Dynasty
They called her the Empress of Soul, and the title was earned the hard way — in church pews, on talent-show stages, in the shadow of the biggest girl group on earth, and finally on a midnight train to Georgia. Gladys Knight didn’t just sing the songs; she testified them, wringing every drop of feeling…
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The Untold Story of Smokey Robinson: Motown’s Quiet Poet and the Five-Dollar-a-Week Miracle
Bob Dylan once called him America’s greatest living poet. John Lennon called him one of his favorite singers. And for three decades, William “Smokey” Robinson Jr. was the velvet-voiced engine room of Motown — writing the songs, singing the songs, producing the songs, and, as vice president of the company, practically running the place. He…
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The Untold Story of Patti LaBelle: The Godmother of Soul Who Sang Through the Fire
They call her the Godmother of Soul, but the title hardly captures it. Patti LaBelle is a force of nature in heels — a four-octave dramatic soprano who kicks off her shoes mid-song, rolls across the stage in full holy-roller rapture, and turns “Over the Rainbow” into a ten-minute testifying workout complete with her signature…
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The Untold Story of Anne Murray: The Gym Teacher Who Became Canada’s First Lady of Song
Before Celine Dion, before Shania Twain, before a single Canadian woman had ever topped the American charts, there was a physical-education teacher from a Nova Scotia coal town who taught gym class by day and sang folk songs on television by night. Anne Murray never chased stardom the way stars are supposed to. She backed…
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The Untold Story of Helen Reddy: The Single Mother Who Roared for a Generation
“I am woman, hear me roar.” Four words that became the battle cry of a movement — and they were written by a divorced single mother from Melbourne who arrived in New York with two hundred dollars, a three-year-old daughter, and a talent-show prize that turned out to be worthless. Helen Reddy didn’t set out…
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The Untold Story of Olivia Newton-John: The Spy’s Daughter Who Conquered Pop, Country, and the Silver Screen
She was Sandy’s sweet smile and “Physical”‘s headband, the girl next door who became the biggest female pop star on the planet. But Olivia Newton-John’s life reads like a spy novel that wandered into a musical. Her grandfather was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who fled the Nazis. Her father was a British intelligence officer who…
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The Untold Story of Don McLean: The Paperboy Who Wrote the Longest Number One in History
Eight minutes and forty-two seconds. That’s how long “American Pie” runs — a folk-rock epic so sprawling it had to be split across both sides of a 45-rpm single, so dense with riddles that fans have been arguing about it for more than half a century, and so beloved that it held the record as…