OMMA Artist Bios
50 Cent
50 Cent, the name Curtis James Jackson III chooses to perform and live under, is a double-edged metaphor. On one…
Adele
The London of the mid-2000s seems perfectly designed to launch a talent like Adele to stardom. Studying at the prestigious…
Juan Atkins (Cybotron and Model 500)
The storied Grinnell Brothers Music House, a massive, architecturally significant building in Detroit’s Lower Woodward Avenue Historic District, has seen…
Bee Gees
A boiling teapot in a home on the Isle of Man in 1948 almost kept the world from some of…
Johnny Cash
In the spring of 1955, Johnny Cash stood in a Sun Records studio with nothing but two bandmates and a…
Grateful Dead
On New Year’s Eve 1963, 16-year-old Bob Weir and a couple of friends had come to downtown Palo Alto, Calif.,…
Lauryn Hill
Amateur Night at the Apollo, 1988, and Lauryn Hill, age 13, is about to sing “Who’s Lovin’ You” by the…
The Killers
On a small stage at Sasha’s, a transgender bar off the Las Vegas Strip on a one-way street nicknamed the…
Willie Nelson
Willie Nelson’s musical beginnings start with his childhood town of Abbott, Texas. Raised with his sister Bobbie by their paternal…
Nirvana
From Aberdeen to Nirvana The blue-collar logging town of Aberdeen, Washington, in the mid-1980s was, in Kurt Cobain’s words, “saddest…
Queen
Before the Crown: How Queen Became Queen The story of Queen begins in 1968 with the college band Smile: guitarist…
Jesse Saunders
On weekend nights on Chicago’s South Side in the early 1980s, the line outside the Playground wrapped around the block,…
Tupac Shakur
The New York City neighborhood of Harlem in the late 1960s and 1970s, a majority-Black community staggering under decades of…
Frank Sinatra
In 1939, Harry James had the world in his hands. The virtuoso trumpeter for the world-famous Benny Goodman Orchestra had…
The White Stripes
In mid-1990s Detroit, young upholstery shop owner Jack Gillis worked days repairing furniture and nights playing in country-punk bands, noise…
Stevie Wonder
On a summer day in Detroit, an eleven-year-old boy sat on a front porch, playing the harmonica. Smooth and bluesy…