Today in Music History for June 30: In 1917, jazz drummer Buddy Rich was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. Beginning in the late 1930s, Rich drummed with a succession of big bands, including Bunny Berrigan, Artie Shaw and Tommy Dorsey.
Rich's first big band of his own -- started in 1945 with $50,000 backing from Frank Sinatra -- was not a success. But in 1966, he began leading a band of mostly young musicians playing modern, swinging arrangements. Rich continued with this successful formula for most of the next 20 years.
He died on April 2, 1987 of a heart attack, two weeks after undergoing surgery for a brain tumour. In 1917, singer Lena Horne, who broke racial barriers as a Hollywood and Broadway star famed for her velvety rendition of "Stormy Weather," was born in BedfordStuyvesant, Brooklyn. In the 1940s, Horne was one of the first black performers hired to sing with a major white band and among a handful with a Hollywood contract.
In 1943, she won the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical "Stormy Weather." Her rendition of the title song became a major hit. She won a special Tony Award for her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music.
" She died on May 9, 2010. In 1922, fiddlers Eck Robertson and Henry C. Gilliland made what are believed to be the first discs ever recorded by southern country musicians.
In 1943, Florence Ballard of "The Supremes" was born in Detroit. The three original "Supremes" -- Ballard, Diana Ross and Mary Wilson -- grew .