Landau's Great American Songbook: Singer Landau Eugene Murphy, Jr. of Logan, WV
Last edited Mon Jan 2, 2023, 04:10 PM - Edit history (3)
- Landau’s Great American Songbook. By Anthony Hennen, Feb. 8, 2022. *Expatalachians, journalism website.
It can be a monumental task to revive a musical style. Finding new listeners is as troublesome as getting old ones to move beyond nostalgia and try new songs or artists. Obscurity threatens on one side as music trends leave the old style behind, and on the other side, listeners demand the familiar hits instead of encouraging artists to experiment and move forward.
Decline isn’t final, though. Sometimes, a paradigm shift happens and new blood forges ahead. Bluegrass/Americana had a revival spurred by the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? When it came out in 2000. Millennials got into traditional country music that boosted artists like the Avett Brothers, Mumford and Sons, and Old Crow Medicine Show in the years afterward.
For jazz classics from the Great American Songbook, though, the revival of jazz, swing, and big-band music has yet to come. Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Dean Martin are still household names, but their musical successors branched out into rock, hip hop, and decidedly un-jazzy pop music. At least one man, however, hasn’t given up on the standards.
Landau Eugene Murphy, Jr. first made his mark in 2011 when he appeared on America’s Got Talent. Chewing gum during his audition, Murphy came out of Logan County, West Virginia and surprised everyone by singing Frank Sinatra and other jazz classics. “No one had ever seen nobody like me. No one had seen a guy that looks like me, 6-foot-4 with dreadlocks singing like Frank Sinatra,” Murphy said.
Murphy won season 6 of AGT, headlined a show in Las Vegas, and over the next decade released four albums, performed around the world, and published an autobiography...http://expatalachians.com/landaus-great-american-songbook
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