May Musician Birthday Stamps

It’s time to celebrate May Musician birthday stamps. A lot of musicians and composers appear on stamps. You can read about many of them on this blog, from classical composers to American pop stars. Yet, in order to highlight a few more of these stamps and the musicians on them, I am sharing a monthly calendar of musicians birthdays. It will not even be close to complete. Yet, each moth I will select a few stamps from my collection and share them with links to relevant articles elsewhere on my blog. If you are looking for more musician birthdays you can check out this site.

May Musician Birthday Stamps

May 1
Kate Smith (1907-1986) was an American pop singer

May 3
Bing Crosby (1903-1977) was an American pop singer. He was born in Tacoma, Washington. He came of age with advancements in technologies such as recorded music, radio, movies, and television, and was one of the first stars to take advantage across all of these media. For fifty years, he was a leader in record sales, radio ratings, and motion pictures. He made over seventy feature films and recorded more than 1,600 songs.

May 5
Agustin Barrios (1885-1944) was a Paraguayan classical guitarist and composer. He was the composer of more than one hundred original songs and was the arranger of hundreds of other songs written by others. He toured extensively across Europe and the Americas and became especially popular throughout Latin America for his virtuosic performances.

Pio Leyva (1917-2006) was a Cuban singer and composer. He was a member of the famous Buena Vista Social Club. Leyva had his first musical success at the age of six when he won a bongo concert. His singing debut occured in 1932. He signed with RCA Victor in 1950 and had more than 25 albums. Leyva was also responsible for some of Cuba’s best known standards.

May 6
Georgi Atanasov (1882-1931) was a Bulgarian composer. He was born in the town of Plovdiv and began his formal musical studies in Bucharest when he was fourteen. Then, he went to Italy to study with Pietro Mascagni in Pesaro. He went back to Bulgaria where he became a director of military bands. Atanasov was the first Bulgarian composer to have success writing operas such as Borislav (1911) and Tsveta (1925).

May 7
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was a German pianist, conductor, and composer. Originally from Hamburg, he spent much of his life composing in Vienna. Brahms was a close friend with both Clara and Robert Schumann as well as the violinist Joseph Joachim. He wrote in the Romantic style and for all size of ensembles from solo piano and voice pieces to chamber ensembles to large symphonic pieces. His works are staples of the classical canon and continue to be performed today.

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) was a Russian composer. He was the first musician from that country to gain an international status and to make a lasting impression on classical music. He wrote both small scale and large scale works including ballets such as The Nutcracker and Swan Lake; operas inluding Eugene Onegin, and symphonic pieces including the 1812 Overture.

May 8
Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) was an American pianist and composer.

Robert Johnson (1911-1938) was an American blues guitarist and songwriter. Johnson spent much of his childhood in Memphis where he learned the blues. According to legend, as a young man, Robert wanted to learn the guitar. He was told to take his guitar to a crossroad near Dockery Plantation at midnight where he met the Devil. In exchange for his soul, Johnson was given the ability to play and write the blues. He had two important recordings from 1936 and 1937 that influenced generations of later musicians. He died in 1938.

May 10
Maybelle Carter (1909-1978) was an American country music guitarist and singer.

May 11
Irving Berlin (1888-1989) was an American composer and lyricist. Born in Russia, Berlin came to the United States at the age of five. He grew up in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in a very poor family. He left home at the age of thirteen and began to sing in saloons with other young itinerants. In his freetime, he taught himself to play piano. He began to write original songs and improvise new lyrics to popular songs. His first published song was “Marie from Sunny Italy” in 1907. He went on to have an international hit with “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in 1911. Other famous songs by Berlin include “Easter Parade,” “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” “White Christmas” and “God Bless America.”

May 13
Ritchie Valens (1941-1959) was an American rock & roll singer, guitarist, and songwriter.

May 14
Sidney Bechet (1897-1959) was an American jazz saxophonist and composer.

May 15
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was an Italian composer. He wrote both secular and sacred music and was important to the early development of opera. Born in Cremona, Italy, he began his career at the court of Mantua, before moving to Venice where he was the maestro di cappella at San Marco. Importantly, Monteverdi was an innovator whose new musical forms and techniques contributed to the transition between the Renaissance and Baroque.

May 17
Erik Satie (1866-19242) was a French pianist and composer.

May 18
Karl Goldmark (1830-1915) was a Hungarian-born Viennese composer. He was the son of a Jewish cantor and learned music at home. He began playing violin at the musical academy of Sopron. His father then sent him to Vienna to study music there with Leopold Jansa and then at the Vienna Conservatory. Goldmark was greatly influenced by Richard Wagner, but Wagner’s anti-semitism prevented the two from becoming friends. He found success with his opera “The Queen of Sheba,” and with other works including the orchestral piece the Rustic Wedding Symphony and his violin concerto.

May 21
Ustad Sabri Khan (1927-2015) was an Indian sarangi player. Both of his parents were from distinguished families of musicians. He began playing sarangi under the tutelage of his grandfather, Ustad Haji Mohammed Khan, and later with his father, Ustad Chajju Khan. Sabri Khan gained prominence as a musician on All India Radio and as a staff artiste there. He went on to accompany Ravi Shankar on tours of the United States in the 1960s. Khan became an internationally known musician and received many accolades for his accomplishments.

Ignacio Piñeiro Martinez (1888-1969) was a Cuban bandleader and composer. He began his musical career playing rumba in 1903. Three years later, he joined the vocal group Timbre de Oro coro de clave y guagancó, before direction the Los Roncos. He began to write music and to experiment with style and instrumentation, becoming a leading composer of son music. He wrote more than 320 pieces.

May 22
Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was a German opera composer. Wagner was born in Leipzig and raised by his mother and stepfather in Dresden where he learned to love music and theater. He obtained musical training and was eventually able to enter the Leipzig University. At the age of twenty, he turned his attention to writing opera, completing his first score for Die Feen. Wagner was unusual in that he wrote both the lyrics and music for his operas, and gradually began to conceive of every element of the opera as part of its artistic statement. He coined the term Gesamkustwerk (total work of art) to explain his approach to theater. His most famous work is the “Ring Cycle,” which is four complete operas that tell the story of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

May 26
Al Jolson (1885-1950) was an American pop singer. His family was from Lithuania, but they moved to New York City in 1891. His father was a rabbi and a cantor and Jolson first learned music at home. He began performing vaudeville style routines on street corners to earn a few coins. In 1902, at the age of seventeen, Jolson got a job with the circus. Although he began as an usher, his musical abilities soon led to him singing in a segment of the show. After the circus went bankrupt, Jolson joined a burlesque show. Jolson would go on to find success in vaudeville as an actor, singer, and comedian and became one of the highest paid actors of the 1920s. He may be best known for starring in the first talking picture movie, The Jazz Singer (1927). Jolson is also known for his performances in blackface.

May 29
Isaac Albeniz (1860-1909) was a Spanish pianist and composer

May 30
Benny Goodman (1909-1986) was an American jazz clarinetist and bandleader.