New Information on Lives.

 

Mysteries are being revealed all of the time. I found out that Lydia Ruth Patricia Ricks (b. 1948) is my 4th cousin. We share the same ancestors who were my 6th great grandparents of Winifred Woodson-Bozeman (b. 1791. She was the daughter of Nottoway Native American Nancy Woodson and Micajah Woodson)) and Burwell Williams (who was an African American freeman). Lydia Ruth Patricia Ricks was born to Helen Armentia Owens (1922-1953) and Garland Ricks (1908-1967) on November 10, 1948, in Southampton County, Virginia. Her siblings are Elsie Mae Ricks (b. 1938) and Majorie Lee Ricks (b. 1942). Helen Ownes and Garland Ricks married at Courtland, Virginia on June 1, 1941. Helen Owens passed away at a young age, so Helen, Lydia, and Elsie were raised by foster parents in Newport, Rhode Island. Rhode Island is in the New England region, and these siblings are the first people that I found out that were related to me who lived in Rhode Island for an extended period of time. Lydia Ricks went to Rogers High School, studied at Rhode Island College, studied at Sawyer Business School, and worked at medical facilities in Rhode Island. She is retired and lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. So, Lydia Ricks' parents were Garland Ricks and Helen Owens. The parents of Garland Ricks were Levy Ricks Jr. (b. 1888) and Della Williams Ricks (1889-1917). Della Williams Ricks' parents were Mary L. Williams (1855-1905) and Eddie Drew Kello (1851-1922). Mary L. Williams' parents were John Burwell Williams (b. 1815) and Mary Williams (b. 1832). The parents of John Burwell Williams were Buwell Williams and Winifred Woodson-Bozeman (b. 1791). 

 

The fifth generation of country music was in the 1990s. The 1990s was the decade when most of my childhood existed when I had some of the greatest joys in my life. The 1990s was the start of the post-Cold War era filled with celebrity culture growing, the ascendance of black celebrities into the next level, the modernization of the Internet, and the increase of international globalization. Country music was aided by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) Docket 80–90, which led to a significant expansion of FM radio in the 1980s by adding numerous higher-fidelity FM signals to rural and suburban areas. At this point, country music was mainly heard on rural AM radio stations; the expansion of FM was particularly helpful to country music, which migrated to FM from the AM band as AM became overcome by talk radio (the country music stations that stayed on AM developed the classic country format for the AM audience). Country music spread into more by the 1990s. In 1990, Billboard, which had published a country music chart since the 1940s, changed the methodology it used to compile the chart: singles sales were removed from the methodology, and only airplay on country radio determined a song's place on the chart.

By the 1990s, Garth Brooks helped to make country music grow into the next level as a permanent worldwide phenomemon. Garth Brooks was like a rock star with sold-out concerts, tons of fans, and music anthem. He became one of the most successful artists in country music with pop elements too.  The RIAA has certified his recordings at a combined (128× platinum), denoting roughly 113 million U.S. shipments. Other artists who experienced success during this time included Clint Black, John Michael Montgomery, Tracy Lawrence, Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney, Travis Tritt, Alan Jackson, and the newly formed duo of Brooks & Dunn. George Strait, whose career began in the 1980s, also continued to have widespread success in this decade and beyond. Toby Keith began his career as a more pop-oriented country singer in the 1990s, evolving into an outlaw persona in the early 2000s with Pull My Chain and its follow-up, Unleashed. 

The 1990s saw more women carry the torch of country music too. Even where I am from, during the 1990s, most people in America heard of Reba McEntire, Shania Twain, and LeAnn Rhimes. LeAnn Rhimes was on the show Moesha in 1999 to promote country music as the actress Countess Vaughn is a fan of country music in real life. Other women artists spreading their music during the decade of the 1990s are Patty Loveless, Faith Hill, Martina McBride, Deana Carter, Mindy McCready, Pam Tillis, Lorrie Morgan, Shania Twain, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. All of these human beings had released platinum-selling albums in the 1990s. The Chicks became one of the most popular country bands of the 1990s and the early 2000s.  Their 1998 debut album Wide Open Spaces went on to become certified 12× platinum while their 1999 album Fly went on to become 10× platinum. 

Many people don't know that Shania Twain was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Country music is not based on geography, birthplace, race, or background. It's based on music period. After collaborating with producer and later husband Robert John "Mutt" Lange, she rose to fame with her second studio album, The Woman in Me (1995), which brought her widespread success. It sold over 20 million copies worldwide, spawned eight singles, including "Any Man of Mine" and earned her a Grammy Award. Twain's third studio album, Come On Over (1997), is recognized by Guinness World Records as the biggest-selling studio album by a woman solo artist. It also became the best-selling country album, best-selling album by a Canadian, and one of the world's best-selling albums of all time, selling over 40 million copies worldwide. Come On Over produced twelve singles, including "You're Still the One", "From This Moment On", "That Don't Impress Me Much" and "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" and earned her four Grammy Awards. In the early-mid-1990s, country western music was influenced by the popularity of line dancing. 

The band Hootie and the Blowfish was very popular in the 1990s and beyond too. The band met in Columbia, South Carolina, and formed in 1986. It was started by Darius Rucker and Mark Bryan who were freshmen at the University of South Carolina. Bryan was a guitar player and Rucker was the vocalist. Their mainstream debut album was Cracked Rear View (1994). Released in July 1994, the album's popularity grew after its release, becoming the best-selling album of 1995, and was one of the fastest-selling debut albums of all time. The album was certified platinum in the United States in January 1995, and incrementally rose to 12× platinum by January 1996, and 16× platinum by March 1999. In May 2019, the certification was updated from 16× platinum to 21× platinum.

The album featured four hits, "Hold My Hand" (U.S. No. 10), "Let Her Cry" (U.S. No. 9), "Only Wanna Be with You" (U.S. No. 6), and "Time" (U.S. No. 14). The album's last single, "Drowning", was not as successful as its predecessors, peaking only on the Mainstream Rock chart. In 1995, Hootie & the Blowfish and Bob Dylan reached an out-of-court settlement for the group's unauthorized use of Dylan's lyrics in their song "Only Wanna Be with You." Miami Dolphins' Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino appeared along with several other athletes in the band's video for the song "Only Wanna Be with You." On February 28, 1996, at the 38th Annual Grammy Awards, Hootie & the Blowfish won the Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal (for the single "Let Her Cry") and the Grammy for "Best New Artist."  The band appeared on MTV Unplugged on the eve of the release of their second album, Fairweather Johnson (1996). The album contained the hit single "Old Man and Me" (U.S. No. 13), and sold four million copies in the United States.

In 1998, the band performed on Frank Wildhorn's concept album of the musical The Civil War. Hootie & the Blowfish released their third studio album, Musical Chairs, on September 15, 1998. It spawned the singles "I Will Wait" and "Only Lonely." 

The group covered the 1968 Orpheus hit "Can't Find the Time" for the soundtrack of the Jim Carrey movie Me, Myself & Irene (2000). The song's writer, Bruce Arnold, traded verses with Darius on several occasions when the band played live on the West Coast. The band kept to an extensive touring schedule, including an annual New Year's Eve show at Silverton Las Vegas (formerly known as Boomtown Las Vegas) in Enterprise, Nevada. Recently, Kris Kristofferson passed away at the age of 88 years old. He was an actor and country music star whose politics inspired the world. 

 

Meta Fuller met sociologist W.E.B. DuBois, who became a lifelong friend and confidant. He encouraged Warrick to draw from African and African-American themes in her work. She met French sculptor Auguste Rodin, who encouraged her sculpting. Her real mentor was Henry Ossawa Tanner while learning from Raphaël Collin. It was the "masculinity and primitive power" of her sculptures that drew the French crowds to her work and generated her acclaim. The Paris crowd was astonished that a woman could produce works that depicted such "horror, pain, and sorrow." It was a relief for Warrick that her gender wasn't an inhibitor of how the public reacted to her racially themed pieces, as it would be in the United States. By the end of her time in Paris, she was widely known and had had her works exhibited in many galleries. Samuel Bing, patron of Aubrey Beardsley, Mary Cassatt, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, recognized her abilities by sponsoring a one-woman exhibition including Siegfried Bing's Salon de l'Art Nouveau (Maison de l'Art Nouveau). In 1903, just before Warrick returned to the United States, two of her works, The Wretched and The Impenitent Thief, were exhibited at the Paris Salon.

Meta Fuller came back to Philadelphia in 1903. Warrick was shunned by members of the Philadelphia art scene for racist reasons (she was a black woman) and because they felt that her art was "domestic." Yet, Fuller became the first African American woman to receive a U.S. government commission. For this award, she created a series of tableaux depicting African American historical events for the Jamestown Terecenntial Exposition, being held in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1607. The display had 14 dioramas and 130 painted plaster figures showing the scenes of slaves arriving in Virginia in 1619 and the home lives of black human beings. At the time, it was described as the "Historic Tableaux of the Negroes' Progress." Historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage has described Fuller's tableaux as one that suggested "the expansiveness of black abilities, aspirations and experiences, [presenting] a cogent alternative to white representations of history." Warrick's tableaux were given prominent display in the Negro Building at the Jamestown Tercentennial, where they occupied 15,000 square feet. Each scene consisted of painted plaster figures and extensive painted backdrops. The 14 tableaux depicted the following: the landing of the first slaves at Jamestown; slaves at work in a cotton field; a fugitive slave in hiding; a gathering of the first African Methodist Episcopal Church; a slave defending his owner's home during the Civil War; newly freed slaves building their own home; an independent black farmer, builder and contractor; a black businessman and banker; scenes inside a modern African-American home, church and school; and finally, a college commencement. For her work on the tableaux, Warrick was awarded a gold medal by the directors of the exposition.

 

Her work of Mary Turner was her esponse to the 1918 lynching of a young, pregnant black woman in Lowndes County, Georgia. Fuller's contemporary, Angelina Weld Grimké, wrote the short story "Goldie" based on this murder. Warrick's activism also spanned into feminist work. She participated in the Women's Peace Party and the Equal Suffrage Movement, but abruptly stopped once she realized that black women were discriminated against in the fight for equal voting rights by some white racist suffragists. She often sold pieces to fund voter registration campaigns in the South. Warrick exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1906. She exhibited there again in 1908. In 1910, a fire at a warehouse in Philadelphia, where she kept tools and stored numerous paintings and sculptures, destroyed her belongings; she lost 16 years' worth of work. Among her oeuvre, only a few early works stored elsewhere were preserved. The losses were emotionally devastating for her.

Fuller exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1920. She created one of her famous works of Ethiopia (known as Ethiopia Awakening also) for America's Making Exhibition in 1921. The event was meant to show immigrants' contributions to American artistic society and culture. The sculpture of Ethiopia being bronze symbolized a new black identity that was emerging through the Harlem Renaissance. It represented the pride of African Americans in African and black heritage and identity. Ethiopia, drawn from Egyptian sculptural concepts, is an academic sculpture of an African woman emerging from a mummy's wrappings, like a chrysalis from a cocoon, represented her statement on black consciousness globally. Fuller made multiple versions of Ethiopia, including a small maquette with the figure's left-hand projecting from its body (now lost) and two full-size bronze casts, one with the left-hand projecting and a second made incorrectly, with the left-hand flush to the figure's side. In 1922, Fuller showed her sculpture work at the Boston Public Library. Her work was included in an exhibition for the Tanner League, held in the studios of Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. The federal commissions kept her employed, but she did not receive as much encouragement in the US as she had in Paris. Fuller continued to exhibit her work until her last show (1961) at Howard University (Washington, D.C.) in 1961.

The 2024 Summer Paralympic Games existed from August 28, 2024, to September 8, 2024. It was opened by French President Emmanuel Macron and closed by President of the International Paralympic Committee Andrew Parsons. The Games had 4,463 athletes with 549 events in 22 sports. These games marked the first time Paris hosted the Summer Paralympics and the second time France hosted the Paralympic Games, following the 1992 Winter Paralympics in Tignes and Albertville. France also hosted the 2024 Summer Olympics. China topped the medal table for the sixth consecutive Paralympics, winning 94 golds and 221 total medals. Great Britain finished second for the tenth time, with 49 golds and 124 total medals. The United States finished third, with 36 golds, and 105 total medals. Additionally, Mauritius, Nepal, and the Refugee Paralympic Team won their first-ever Paralympic medals. The host nation, France, finished eighth with 19 gold and 75 total medals. 

By Timothy