1.
Chester, Pennsylvania
–
Chester is a city in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, United States, with a population of 33,972 at the 2010 census. Chester is situated on the Delaware River, between the cities of Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware, the current mayor of Chester, Thaddeus Kirkland, was elected on November 3,2015 and served his first day in office on January 4,2016. The first European settlers in the area were Swedes and they called the settlement that became Chester first Finlandia, then Upland. They built Fort Mecoponacka in 1641 to defend the settlement, by 1682, Upland was the most populous town of the new Province of Pennsylvania. On October 27, the ship Welcome arrived at the town, Penn renamed the settlement for the English city of Chester. Chester served as the county seat for Chester County, which stretched from the Delaware River to the Susquehanna River. In 1789, the city became the county seat for the newly created Delaware County, the courthouse is near the new City Hall building. Chesters naval shipyard supplied the Union during the Civil War, the Sun Shipbuilding & Drydock Co. later Pennsylvania Shipyard & Dry Dock Company, was located in Chester until it closed in 1990. Two ships of the United States Navy have been named USS Chester in honor of the city, on April 10,1917, an explosion at the Eddystone Ammunition Corporation near Chester resulted in the deaths of 133 workers, mostly women. Chester is one of places that claim to be the birthplace of the hoagie sandwich. It is also known as the Cradle of Rock n Roll, poverty and crime rose as the city declined. In 1995, the state designated Chester as a distressed municipality. When Chester became eligible for Pennsylvanias Keystone Opportunity Zone program, firms began to accept state, one of its tenants is AdminServer, which makes software for the insurance industry. It moved from Malvern, Pennsylvania in 2003 and was acquired by Oracle in 2007, another one of the Wharfs tenants is Power Home Remodeling Group, the nations 2nd largest exterior home remodeling company. Harrahs Casino and Racetrack built its facilities beginning in 2005, launching harness racing along the Delaware River in September 2006, the employment status for workers sixteen and older, and not in the labor force is at 41 percent. Chester has a government system, consisting of a popularly elected city mayor. The terms of the mayor and members are four years, the Chester City Council is made up of four members, Councilwoman Elizabeth Williams, Portia West, William A. Jacobs, and Edith Blackwell and the presiding officer, the mayor, Thaddeus Kirkland. The City Controller is currently Ms. Edith Blackwell, the current mayor of the City of Chester is State Rep. Thaddeus Kirkland who won the Democratic nomination in May 2015 over incumbent Mayor John Linder
2.
Blues
–
Blues is a genre and musical form originated by African Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the end of the 19th century. The genre developed from roots in African musical traditions, African-American work songs, spirituals, Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. Blue notes, usually thirds or fifths flattened in pitch, are also a part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove, Blues as a genre is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times, Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating the troubles experienced in African-American society. Many elements, such as the format and the use of blue notes. The origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community. The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after the ending of slavery and, later and it is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century, the first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres include country blues, such as Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues, World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a form called blues rock evolved. The term blues may have come from blue devils, meaning melancholy and sadness, the phrase blue devils may also have been derived from Britain in the 1600s, when the term referred to the intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal. As time went on, the phrase lost the reference to devils, by the 1800s in the United States, the term blues was associated with drinking alcohol, a meaning which survives in the phrase blue law, which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sunday. Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to in print since 1912, in lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood. The lyrics of traditional blues verses probably often consisted of a single line repeated four times. Two of the first published songs, Dallas Blues and Saint Louis Blues, were 12-bar blues with the AAB lyric structure. Handy wrote that he adopted this convention to avoid the monotony of lines repeated three times, the lines are often sung following a pattern closer to rhythmic talk than to a melody
3.
Jazz
–
Jazz is a music genre that originated amongst African Americans in New Orleans, United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in Blues and Ragtime. Since the 1920s jazz age, jazz has become recognized as a form of musical expression. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms, Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions including blues and ragtime, as well as European military band music. Although the foundation of jazz is deeply rooted within the Black experience of the United States, different cultures have contributed their own experience, intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as one of Americas original art forms. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on different national, regional, and local musical cultures, New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass-band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. In the 1930s, heavily arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz, bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging musicians music which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed in the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments. In the early 1980s, a form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful. Other styles and genres abound in the 2000s, such as Latin, the question of the origin of the word jazz has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well documented. It is believed to be related to jasm, a term dating back to 1860 meaning pep. The use of the word in a context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Its first documented use in a context in New Orleans was in a November 14,1916 Times-Picayune article about jas bands. In an interview with NPR, musician Eubie Blake offered his recollections of the slang connotations of the term, saying, When Broadway picked it up. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, the American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Twentieth Century. Jazz has proved to be difficult to define, since it encompasses such a wide range of music spanning a period of over 100 years. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions, in the opinion of Robert Christgau, most of us would say that inventing meaning while letting loose is the essence and promise of jazz. As Duke Ellington, one of jazzs most famous figures, said, although jazz is considered highly difficult to define, at least in part because it contains so many varied subgenres, improvisation is consistently regarded as being one of its key elements
4.
Musical theatre
–
Musical theatre is a form of theatrical performance that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The story and emotional content of a musical – humor, pathos, love, anger – are communicated through the words, music, movement, since the early 20th century, musical theatre stage works have generally been called, simply, musicals. These were followed by the numerous Edwardian musical comedies and the theatre works of American creators like George M. Cohan. Musicals are performed around the world and they may be presented in large venues, such as big-budget Broadway or West End productions in New York City or London. Alternatively, musicals may be staged in smaller fringe theatre, Off-Broadway or regional theatre productions, musicals are often presented by amateur and school groups in churches, schools and other performance spaces. In addition to the United States and Britain, there are vibrant musical theatre scenes in continental Europe, Asia, Australasia, Canada, the three main components of a book musical are its music, lyrics and book. The interpretation of a musical is the responsibility of its team, which includes a director. A musicals production is also characterized by technical aspects, such as set design, costumes, stage properties, lighting. The creative team, designs and interpretations generally change from the production to succeeding productions. Some production elements, however, may be retained from the production, for example. There is no fixed length for a musical, while it can range from a short one-act entertainment to several acts and several hours in length, most musicals range from one and a half to three hours. Musicals are usually presented in two acts, with one intermission, and the first act is frequently longer than the second. A book musical is usually built four to six main theme tunes that are reprised later in the show. Several shorter musicals on Broadway and in the West End have been presented in one act in recent decades, moments of greatest dramatic intensity in a book musical are often performed in song. Proverbially, when the emotion becomes too strong for speech, you sing, typically, many fewer words are sung in a five-minute song than are spoken in a five-minute block of dialogue. Therefore, there is time to develop drama in a musical than in a straight play of equivalent length. Within the compressed nature of a musical, the writers must develop the characters, the material presented in a musical may be original, or it may be adapted from novels, plays, classic legends, historical events or films. On the other hand, many musical theatre works have been adapted for musical films, such as West Side Story, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, Oliver
5.
United States
–
Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
6.
Bill Robinson
–
Bill Bojangles Robinson was an American tap dancer and actor, the best known and most highly paid African American entertainer in the first half of the twentieth century. According to dance critic Marshall Stearns, Robinsons contribution to tap dance is exact and he brought it up on its toes, dancing upright and swinging, giving tap a …hitherto-unknown lightness and presence. His signature routine was the dance, in which Robinson would tap up and down a set of stairs in a rhythmically complex sequence of steps. Robinson is also credited with having introduced a new word, copacetic, into popular culture, via his repeated use of it in vaudeville and radio appearances. Robinson is remembered for the support he gave to fellow performers, including Fred Astaire, Lena Horne, Jesse Owens, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Ann Miller credited him as a teacher and mentor, and Miller credits him with having changed the course of my life. Gregory Hines produced and starred in a movie about Robinson for which he won the NAACP Best actor Award. In 1989, the U. S. Congress designated May 25, Robinsons birthday, luther Robinson was born in Richmond, Virginia and raised in its Jackson Ward neighborhood. His parents were Maxwell, a worker, and Maria Robinson. His grandmother raised him after both died in 1884 when he was eight years old—his father from chronic heart disease. Details of Robinsons early life are only through legend, much of it perpetuated by Robinson himself. He claimed he was christened Luther—a name he did not like and he suggested to his younger brother Bill that they should exchange names. Eventually, the exchange between the names of both brothers was made, the brother subsequently adopted the name of Percy and under that name achieved recognition as a musician. At the age of five, Robinson began dancing for small change, appearing as a hoofer or busker in local beer gardens, a promoter saw him performing outside the Globe Theater in Richmond and offered him a job as a pick in a local minstrel show. At that time, minstrel shows were staged by performers in blackface. Pickaninnies were cute black children at the edge of the singing, dancing. In 1890, at the age of 13, Robinson ran away to Washington, D. C. where he did odd jobs at Benning Race Track and he teamed up with a young Al Jolson, with Jolson singing while Robinson danced for pennies or to sell newspapers. In 1891 he was hired by Whallen and Martel, touring with Mayme Remingtons troupe in a show titled The South Before the War, performing again as a pickaninny and he travelled with the show for over a year before growing too mature to play the role credibly. In 1898, he returned to Richmond where he joined the United States Army as a rifleman when the Spanish–American War broke out and he received an accidental gunshot wound from a second lieutenant who was cleaning his gun
