Celebrating June Musicians Birthdays with Stamps

Welcome to a new monthly feature, a celebration of stamps depicting musicians with June birthdays. Incredibly, this week begins my second year as a blogger. The Music Stamps blog now averages more than five hundred unique visitors a month. I am blown away by this, and thank you to everyone who reads these thoughts. I hope that there is some useful information on this vanity blog for other collections.

A lot of musicians appear on stamps. You can read about many of them on this blog, from classical musicians, to American pop stars. To show a few more of these stamps, I am going to create a new monthly calendar of musicians birthdays. It will not be complete, but I will pick a selection of things from my collection and link to relevant articles elsewhere on my blog. To see more musicians birthdays check out this site. I hope you enjoy.

June Birthdays

June 2
Edward Elgar (1857-1934) was an English composer.

June 7
Jaime Laredo, b. 1941, Bolivian classical violinist

June 8
Robert Schumann (1810-1856), classical composer and pianist

June 9
Cole Porter(1891-1964) was an American songwriter. Born to a wealthy family in Indiana, Porter pursued training as a classical music. He later fell in love with musical theater and began finding success writing musical plays in the 1920s. Porter wrote both the lyrics and music for his songs, unlike many other songwriters of his era. His famous songs include “Night and Day,” I Get a Kick Out of You,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” and “You’re the Top.”

June 10
Howlin’ Wolf (1910-1976) was an American blues singer, guitarist, and harmonica player. He was born Chester Arthur (after the president) Burnett in Mississippi where he learned to play blues guitar. In 1951, Ike Turner heard Holwin’ Wolf play in Memphis. Soon, Wolf was recording for Sam Phillips in what would become Sun Studios. Chess Records in Chicago secured Wolf’s contract and convinced the singer and guitarist to move north. There, Wolf found success recording and performing. He had many hits including “Moanin’ at Midnight,” “How Many More Years,” and “Smokestack Lightning.”

June 12
Rikard Nordraak (1842-1866) was a Norwegian composer. He was born and grew up in Oslo, Norway. He began playing music as a child and also studied in Berlin. HIs first compositions were played in oslow in 1859. After meeting Edward Grieg, Nordraak decided to turn his attention towards using Norwegian folk musical styles and melodies in his music. Nordraak is most famous for writing the Norwegian national anthem, “Ja, vi elsker dette landt.”

Amadeo Roldan (1900-1939) was a Cuban violinist and composer.

June 14
Hubert de Blanck (1856-1932), Dutch born, Cuban pianist and composer

June 15
Edward Grieg (1843-1907) was a Norwegian pianist and composer. He is famous for his use of Norwegian folk music and melodies in his classical compositions, creating a national identity. Grieg was a leading composer of the Romantic movement and brought Norway to international attention. He is probably most famous for the incidental music he wrote for Herink Ibsen’s play, Peer Gynt.

Erroll Garner (1923-1977) was an American jazz pianist and composer. Garner and his twin brother, Ernest, were born in Pittsburgh. He began playing piano at the age of three and was self taught, after copying what his older sisters played in their lessons. He never learned to read music. Garner moved to New York in 1944 where he found success as a recording artist and as a pianist in many bands, including playing for Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show band. Garner also wrote the jazz standard, “Misty.”

June 17
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) was a Russian born conductor, pianist, and composer. His father was a bass who sang in the Mariinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg. In 1902, Stravinsky met the son of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and quickly became inspired by the older composer. He began studying music full time in 1905. His compositions caught the ear of Sergei Diaghilev who asked him to compose (after Anatoly Lyadov pulled out) to write music for a ballet based on the folk tale of the Firebird. Stravinsky’s resultant composition brought him international fame. He went on to write other ballets including Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. In 1920, Stravinsky moved to Paris, and in 1939 he moved to the United States for the remainder of his life.

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was a Black American civil rights activist and songwriter.

June 18
Charles Gounod (1818-1893) was a French composer. He is well known for his operas, most famous of which are Faust (1859) and Romeo et Juliette (1867). In addition to these operas, he also wrote sacred music and is well known for his piece “Ave Maria” which was based on a piano solo of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Paul McCartney (b. 1942) is a British singer, songer, and musician and is best known as a member of “The Beatles.” Born in Liverpool, McCartney is a self-taught musician. At the age of fifteen, he became a member of the band The Quarrymen, where he played with John Lennon and George Harrison. They changed the band to The Beatles in 1960. In that band, McCartney became one of the most successful composers and performers of all time. He and John Lennon wrote most of the songs for the band.

June 19
Alfredo Catalani (1854-1893) was an Italian operatic composer. He was born in Lucca and trained in the Milan Conservatory. Most of his works have fallen out of the canon, but he is still remembered for Loreley (1890) and La Wally (1892).

June 20
Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) was a German-born composer who was active in France. He was from the city of Cologne where he was the son of a synagogue cantor. He was accepted into the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 14, but left after a year. Offenbach began his professional career as a cellist. In 1855, he leased a small theater in Paris and began composing short, humorous musical works called operettas. He found success in the 1860s for these works and eventually wrote more than one hundred.

Lionel Richie (b. 1949) is an American singer, songwriter, and musician. He was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, and went to college at the Tuskegee Institute on a tennis scholarship. While in Tuskegee, Richie formed R&B ensembles, eventually becoming a singer and saxophone player in the Commodores. With that group he wrote hit singles like “Easy,” “Sail On,” and “Three Times a Lady.” He had a hit single for h is song “Endless Love,” which he sang with Diana Ross. In 1982, he began his solo career. He had a string of number one hits in the 1980s including “All Night Long (All Night),” “We Are the World” (with Michael Jackson), and “Say You, Say Me.”

June 28
Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) was a Hungarian violinist, composer, and teacher. He began playing violin at the age of five in Buda, then in Vienna and Leipzig. His debut took place in London in 1844 where he played Beethoven’s violin concerto with Mendelssohn conducting. In 1853, he was invited by Robert Schumann to the Lower Rhine Music Festival, where he also met Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, who became lifelong friends. He is regarded as one of the greatest violinists who ever lived and many of the late 19th century violin concertos were first written for him to play.

*Originally published Jun 1, 2021. Updated June 2, 2022.