Yesteday in Music – Jan 30, 1957 Happy Birthday, Janiva Magness!!

Yesterday Janiva Magness celebrated her 57th birthday. If you do not Janiva is a blues superstar. She was named the Blues Foundation’s B.B. King Entertainer of the Year in 2009, becoming only the second woman, after Koko Taylor, to be so honored. She was also named the Contemporary Blues Female Artist of the Year in that same year! She had won that award in both 2006 and 2007. In 2012 she was nominated for that award again. All ototal since 2006, she has had 22 similar nominations! This year she won the 2013 Blues music Award: for Contemporary Artist of the Year again and her song “I won’t Cry” was song of the Year!!

Now I knew that Janiva was a great blues singer Her 2010 release The Devil is an Angel too… is in my music library. what I didn’t know was that this Detroit native lost both her parents to suicide before she reaches her mid-teens and was placed in a series of a dozen foster homes. At seventeen she became pregnant and gave her baby up for adoption. Now she is a national spokesperson for Casey Family Programs, promoting National Foster Care Month and she has reconnected with her daughter! From Wikipedia:

Casey Family Programs is the nation’s largest operating foundation entirely focused on foster care. Since 1966, they have worked to provide and improve—and ultimately prevent the need for—foster care in the United States. As advocates for change, they are committed to their 2020 Strategy – an ambitious yet attainable goal to safely reduce the number of children in foster care and improve the lives of those who remain in care.
They state that decades of front-line experience make them exceptionally qualified to identify various improvements in child welfare practices, and help states and counties implement them. The foundation, established by UPS founder Jim Casey, is headquartered in Seattle, Washington Read More

Links: Janiva’a website: http://janivamagness.com

Casey Family Programs:http://www.casey.org

So let’s wish Janiva a Happy Belated Birthday and thank her for the music and her charity work!! And let’s go “into the night” and off to work at Target with a live performance of :”The Devil is an Angel too….”