The phenomenon known as Dust Bowl was a horror of the middle part of the last century, and the result of a destructive mix of brutal weather and uninformed agricultural practices that left farmland vulnerable.
Here, LIFE.com looks back, through the lens of the great Margaret Bourke-White, at a period when as LIFE phrased it in a May 1954 issue there was a “Dusty Plague Upon the Land.”
The delicate, lethal powder spread in a brown mist across the prairie horizon. Across Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, the darkening swirls of loosened topsoil chewed their way across the plains, destroying or damaging 16 million acres of land. Man fought back with such techniques as chiseling. . . . driving a plow six inches into the soil to turn up clots of dirt which might help hold the precious land from the vicious winds. Against the dusty tide these feeble efforts came too little and too late. Two decades after the nation’s worst drought year in history, 1934, the southern plains were again officially labeled by the U.S. government with two familiar words “Dust Bowl.”
The threatening storm rose above a farm near Hartman, Colo. Once range land, it was almost ruined by wheat farming.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A protective pattern was spread across a farm near Walsh, Colo. by farmer using two tractors (upper right).
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A Colorado farming family during the 1954 Dust Bowl.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The antidust measure of furrowing land, taken by a conservation-minded farmer in Baca County, went for naught when a neighbor’s unfurrowed land blew across his farm, killing a crop of winter wheat.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An irrigation ditch near Amity was cleared of dust, which filled it for 20 miles to depth of six feet.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado dust bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Coloradans Art Blooding and his family inspected their newly bought farm in 50-mph wind.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Wild ducks that had choked to death on the dust made a graveyard of what was at one time a watering stop on their spring migrations.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Felled broomcorn lay near Walsh, once ‘Broomcorn Capital of U.S.’
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A farm house was damaged by a dust storm, Colorado, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Colorado Dust Bowl, 1954.
Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A Colorado farming family during the 1954 Dust Bowl.
Ask any American today under the age of, say, 40, “Who was Gypsy Rose Lee?” and chances are pretty good that the reaction will be utter bewilderment. “Gypsy Rose who?”
On the other hand, ask anyone who came of age in the 1940s or ’50s the same question, and the reaction will likely be something along the lines of, “Gypsy Rose Lee? I haven’t thought about her in decades! But let me tell you, back in the day. . . .”
Gypsy Rose Lee (born Rose Louise Hovick in Seattle in 1911) was and remains a force in American popular culture not because she acted in films (although she did act in films) or because she wrote successful mystery novels (although she did write successful mystery novels). The reason Lee’s influence endures can be attributed to two central elements of her remarkable, all-American life story: first, her 1957 memoir, Gypsy, which formed the basis for what more than a few critics laud as the greatest of all American musicals, the 1959 Styne-Sondheim-Laurents masterpiece, Gypsy; and second, her career in burlesque, when she became the most famous and perhaps the most singularly likable stripper in the world. (Modern “neo-burlesque” performers, like Dita Von Teese, Angie Pontani and others, cite Gypsy in near-reverent terms as a pioneer and inspiration.)
Here, LIFE.com celebrates Gypsy Rose Lee’s life and her career with a selection of pictures by George Skadding, a LIFE staffer far better known for photographing presidents (he was long an officer of the White House News Photographers Association) than burlesque stars. But, as the images in this gallery attest, Gypsy was hardly just another stripper; instead, as a performer, a wife and a mother of a young son, she had something about her an approachable, self-deprecating demeanor aligned with a quiet self-certainty that any politician would envy.
“I’m probably the highest paid outdoor entertainer since Cleopatra,” she’s quoted as saying in the June 6, 1949 issue of LIFE, in which many of these pictures first appeared. “And I don’t have to stand for some of the stuff she had to.”
“Confidently taking her place among history’s great ladies, Gypsy has for the first time in her life gone outdoors professionally,” LIFE wrote at the beginning of Gypsy’s six-month tour with what was called “the world’s largest carnival,” The Royal American Shows. The prospect of having to do her old strip-tease act 8 to 15 times a day “all across the country to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan,” meanwhile, although hardly thrilling to the 38-year-old mom, was also something Gypsy could, characteristically, put in perspective:
“For $10,000 a week,” she told LIFE, “I can afford to climb the slave block once in a while.”
She also, as LIFE put it, “had it soft, as carny performers’ lives go. She lives in her own trailer with her third husband, the noted Spanish painter, Julio de Diego. With them is her 4-year-old son, Erik [film director Otto Preminger’s child, as it turned out] and his nurse. Gypsy, who loves to fish, carries an elaborate angler’s kit, and whenever the show plays near a river, goes out and hooks fish as ably as she does customers.”
But it’s in the notes of writer Arthur Shay, who spent a week with the star in Memphis, Tennessee, in May 1949, that we meet the woman who emerges when the lights go down and the crowds depart and it’s clearly this Gypsy who truly connected to audiences wherever she went:
“Funny thing about show people or just plain fans,” she told Shay at one point, offering insights into the appeal of her nomadic life. “They think if you’re not in Hollywood or on Broadway making a couple of thousand a week taking guff from everybody and his cousin in the west, and sweating out poor crowds on Broadway you’re not doing well. [But] I’ve been touring the country playing nightclubs and making twice as much as I made in the movies, and having more fun! I get a lot more fishing done, for one thing, and I can live in my trailer and see the country.”
Gypsy Rose Lee died in April, 1970, of lung cancer. She was 59 years old.
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee with fellow performers in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee in front of a crowd in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee, 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A sign announced the arrival of burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy dictated a letter to her secretary, Brandy Bryant, who doubled up by doing a strip bit in the show.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee (left) and her fellow performers in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee (right) dressed other performers in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee (center) dressed other performers in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee writes in her dressing room in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee (top) with another performer in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee (right) coached another performer in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee (center) and other performers in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The audience at a Gypsy Rose Lee burlesque show in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
In a reverse strip-tease act, Gypsy introduced near-nudes like Florence Bailey and dressed them on the stage.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee’s burlesque show in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee autographed programs for fans after a show in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee and some of the dancers in her show posed for publicity pictures with the carnival performer K. O. Erickson.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee with her third husband, the painter Julio de Diego, 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee held her 4-year-old son (by movie director Otto Preminger), Erik, outside of her trailer, 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy’s friends in the carnival included a sword swallower, a fire-eater and this cheerful bearded lady, Percilla Bejano, whose husband was the Alligator Man.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee with fellow carnival performers in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy’s husband Julio painted the entrance while Gypsy and son watched. His attraction in the carnival was called Dream Show.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee, 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose rode the Little Dipper with her son, Erik, and her husband, Julio, in Memphis, Tenn., 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee gave her son, Erik, cotton candy while her husband Julio De Diego watched, 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee with her husband Julio and son Erik, 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gypsy Rose Lee with her husband, Julio de Diego, 1949.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Between shows Gypsy and family managed to sneak off for sundown fishing on the Wolf River, where Gypsy caught a catfish.
The staggering range and sheer excellence of the late John Dominis’ pictures—his Korean War coverage; his portraits of pop-culture icons like Sinatra, Redford and McQueen; his beautiful treatment of the “big cats” of Africa; his virile sports photography—place him firmly among the premier photojournalists of his day. But a lesser-known photo essay that Dominis shot for LIFE magazine, focusing on the plight of Appalachians in eastern Kentucky in the early 1960s, spotlights another aspect of the man’s great talent: namely, an ability to portray the forgotten and the afflicted while never sacrificing the dignity of his subjects.
The extraordinary 12-page feature for the Jan. 31, 1964, issue of LIFE, titled “The Valley of Poverty” one of the very first substantive reports in any American publication on President Lyndon Johnson’s nascent War on Poverty.
At the time, LIFE was arguably the most influential weekly magazine in the country, and without doubt the most widely read magazine anywhere to regularly publish major photo essays by the world’s premier photojournalists. In that light, LIFE was in a unique position in the early days of Johnson’s administration to not merely tell but to show its readers what was at stake, and what the challenges were, as the new president’s “Great Society” got under way.
“The Valley of Poverty,” illustrated with some of the most powerful and intimate photographs of Dominis’ career, served (and still serves today) as an indictment of a wealthy nation’s indifference.
As LIFE put it to the magazine’s readers in January 1964:
In a lonely valley in eastern Kentucky, in the heart of the mountainous region called Appalachia, live an impoverished people whose plight has long been ignored by affluent America. Their homes are shacks without plumbing or sanitation. Their landscape is a man-made desolation of corrugated hills and hollows laced with polluted streams. The people, themselves often disease-ridden and unschooled are without jobs and even without hope. Government relief and handouts of surplus food have sustained them on a bare subsistence level for so many years that idleness and relief are now their accepted way of life.
President Johnson, who has declared “unconditional war on poverty in America,” has singled out Appalachia as a major target. . . . Appalachia stretches from northern Alabama to southern Pennsylvania, and the same disaster that struck eastern Kentucky hit the whole region the collapse of the coal industry 20 years ago, which left Appalachia a vast junkyard. It was no use for the jobless miners to try farming strip mining has wrecked much of the land and, in any case, the miners had lost contact with the soil generations ago. . . . Unless the grim chain [of unemployment and lack of education] can be broken, a second generation coming of age in Appalachia will fall into the same dismal life a life that protects them from starvation but deprives them of self-respect and hope.
In a shack near Neon, Ky., Delphi Mobley comforted daughter Riva, who was ill with measles. Proper medical care was beyond her $125 monthly welfare pay.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Nadine McFall, 1, happily reached over to pat the stomach of a huge doll—its wardrobe long since lost and never replaced —as she squatted on a crowded couch in her great grandmother’s shack near Neon.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
On a wintry afternoon in Line Fork Creek a family trudged across a rickety suspension bridge over a sewage-polluted stream to its two-room shack.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Youngsters lapped up a surplus-commodity supper of pan-fried biscuits, gravy and potatoes at the Odell Smiths of Friday Branch Creek. The newspapers were pasted by Mrs. Smith in an effort to keep the place neat.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
JJohn Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
All over Appalachia the ruins of trestles jutted from deserted hillside coal mines. This mine had once offered workers a good living, but it closed in 1945.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Tearing with bare hands at frozen lumps of coal, Willard Bryant and his son Billy crouched between railroad tracks, scavenging fuel to heat their home. When the tub was full, they dragged it to the hill where they live, reloaded the coal into bags and carried it on their backs to the house.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
In a one-room school at Thornton Gap, pupils were constantly out sick during the winter.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia’s young people, like Roberta Oliver, 14, from Rock House Creek, Ky., were often sad-faced and prematurely aged. Most suffered fatigue because of a diet of surplus food, heavy in starches like flour and rice and inadequately augmented by lard and cheese, butter and ground pork.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
In the Thorton Gap Regular Baptist Church, a tar-paper-covered shed heated to stifling by a big stove, preacher Elzie Kiser, 62, called on his small flock to “get with God.”
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Eighteen-year-old Ray Martin was a lucky man by local standards. He had a job in a mine near Isom, one of the shoestring ‘dog holes’ kept operating thanks to low wages, back-breaking labor, overused equipment and minimal safety measures.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, 1964.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A cow was a rare sight in Appalachia. The people are not country folk but an industrial population who happened to live in the country. Many kept chickens, but farming was seldom practiced.
John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The commonest sights around Appalachia were aging men and ragged urchins.
What you see here in these snowy photos is a metaphorical tip of the iceberg. During World War II, with the role of women beginning to change in society at large and also in the military, this was the very first class of women — at the University of New Hampshire, as it turns out — to undergo training similar to that of men in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC).
If, as the natives whisper, Daniel Webster sometimes revisits his childhood haunts when the wild winds whistle through the New Hampshire hills, he would find no more baffling sign of the U.S. at war than the sight of 650 rugged bare-legged girls drilling on a bleak, snow-covered field. These girls, students at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, are the first organized college group in the U.S. to undergo pre-graduation training like men’s ROTC which will fit them specifically for service in the WAAC, WAVES, and other auxiliaries of the armed forces. [Their training] abandons purely recreational activities in favor of military drill and calisthenics, emphasizes body building and toughening achieved through hiking, conditioning exercises, and a going-over on the rigorous, man-sized obstacle course.
Thus far the only hitch in the rigid training regimen developed when the university’s imminent Military Art Ball made it necessary to let up on all exercises for a few days because the girls were too stiff to dance.
Female students at the University of New Hampshire performed military drills in the freezing weather, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Female students at the University of New Hampshire performed military drills, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Female students at the University of New Hampshire performed military drills, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Female students at the University of New Hampshire performed military drills, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Female students at the University of New Hampshire performed military drills, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Female students at the University of New Hampshire performed military drills, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Female students at the University of New Hampshire performed military drills, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
University of New Hampshire student Shirley Sylvester (standing) straightened the shoulders of sophomore Estelle Dutton in an exercise which was designed to aid posture and strengthened pectoral muscles, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Students at the University of New Hampshire during gymnasium workouts, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Female students at the University of New Hampshire performed military drills in freezing weather, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Students at the University of New Hampshire ice skated as part of an intensive, wartime physical education program, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Female students at the University of New Hampshire fencing in gymnasium, 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Students at the University of New Hampshire exercised on the gymnasium floor, 1942.
The Beatles began by ceaselessly playing gigs in Liverpool and overseas in Hamburg and building enormous buzz before finally releasing their first single, “Love Me Do,” on Oct. 5, 1962. That’s when everything changed. Granted, “Love Me Do” was hardly the most inspired tune ever to spring from the stunningly fertile minds of Lennon and McCartney. But it was the band’s first-ever single, and thus a pivotal moment in the history of rock and roll.
Beyond the influence their music had on everyone from Dylan and the Beach Boys to Hendrix and the Stones, the band also sparked the era-defining phenomenon known as Beatlemania—the seemingly spontaneous unleashing of (largely) female adoration and erotic energy that certainly had its pop-culture precedents, but remains notable for the sheer scale of the hysteria that greeted the Beatles everywhere. In fact, one of the reasons the band stopped touring so early in its career, and retreated to the studio for the last four years of its remarkably short life, is that the sound erupting from their frantic fans made concerts an exercise in futility: the lads literally could not hear themselves play.
Here, LIFE.com presents a series of photographs—none of which ran in LIFE—made by Stan Wayman at the Beatles’ first concert in America, a performance at the Washington Coliseum on Feb. 11, 1964, two days after their historic appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in New York. It was a surprisingly intimate affair, with the band playing on a small stage literally feet from the fans—albeit behind a loose phalanx of cops.
The pictures in the gallery, however, don’t focus on the Fab Four. Instead, they’re portraits, made in the moment, of young women who are alternately transfixed, driven to tears and virtually unhinged with excitement. Here are the faces of the first Americans to see the Beatles in concert. Here is Beatlemania looked and felt like as it landed in the United States.
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at the first Beatles concert in America, Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 1964.
They had fame, reams of money and fans willing to do wild, unmentionable things just to breathe the same air but in its September 24, 1971 issue, LIFE magazine illustrated a different side of the lives of rock stars. Like other mere mortals, they often came from humble backgrounds, with moms and dads who bragged about them, fussed over them, called them on their nonsense and worried about them every single day.
Assigned to take portraits of the artists at home with their sweetly square folks, photographer John Olson traveled from the suburbs of London to Brooklyn to the Bay Area, capturing in his work the love that bridged any cultural and generational divides that existed between his subjects.
Here, LIFE.com brings back Olson’s nostalgia-sparking photos—Marvel at the decor! Gaze in wonder at the shag carpets and bell-bottoms!—and shares his memories of hanging out with pop culture icons of the Sixties and Seventies, as well as their mums and their dads.
John Olson on Frank Zappa: “Everyone had told me that Frank Zappa was going to be really difficult, and he couldn’t have been more professional,” Olson told LIFE.com.
Zappa on His Parents: “My father has ambitions to be an actor,” Frank told LIFE. “He secretly wants to be on TV.”
Zappa’s Mom on Zappa: “The thing that makes me mad about Frank is that his hair is curlier than mine and blacker.”
Grace Slick: Grace Slick’s mom Virginia Wing, wrote LIFE, was a “soft-spoken suburban matron” pretty much the opposite of her wild child. “Grace and I have different sets of moral values,” Mrs. Wing told LIFE, “but she’s her own person, and we understand each other.”
Elton John: In 1970, Elton John was just three albums into his prolific career, and still had countless hits— “Rocket Man,” “Daniel,” “Bennie and the Jets” and “Candle in the Wind” among them—in his future. (As well as the 2019 biopic, Rocketman.) “When he was four years old,” his mother said of her prodigiously talented son, “we used to put him to bed in the day and get him up to play at night for parties.”
Ginger Baker: The world knew him as Ginger, on account of his red hair, but his mother christened him Peter, and to her he was always “my Pete.” As she told LIFE magazine: “He would bring people over and they would say, ‘You realize your son is brilliant,’ and I’d say, ‘Is he? I wish he was a bit more brilliant at keeping his room tidy.'” Ginger died in late 2019.
John Olson on Ginger Baker: “I had worked with lots of these musicians before and on the first go-round some of them had been really difficult. But when they were with their parents, they were totally different people. Baker, who had been terribly obnoxious before, acted like a grown-up. I don’t think it had anything to do with respect for me, so it must have been the parents.”
Joe Cocker: Facial contortions, flailing arms, gallons of sweat: the blues singer poured all that and more into his passionate performances. But off stage, LIFE observed, “he is cool and withdrawn a temperamental mixture of Harold Cocker, his civil servant father who preferred gardening to posing with his famous son, and his outgoing, chatty mother.”
David Crosby: With his parents divorced, the “Crosby” of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young posed with his father Floyd, an Oscar-winning cinematographer, in the Ojai, Calif., home Floyd shared with his second wife in 1970. “In the last few years we’ve become good friends,” David told LIFE magazine. “What I like best about him is that he seems to feel no need for me to be like him, so we’re not offended by each other’s differences. Like he knows I get high. He doesn’t do it and he doesn’t approve of it, but he doesn’t inflict his values on me.”
Jackson 5: Unlike the other stars featured in LIFE’s story, the Jackson brothers Michael, Marlon, Tito, Jermaine and Jackie experienced fame as kids, and still lived with their parents (father/manager Joe and mother Katherine). At the time of LIFE’s shoot, they were the hottest act in pop, skyrocketing in 1970 with “ABC” and “I’ll Be There,” and had just moved into an expansive new house.
“It was very controlled,” Olson says of the photo shoot that resulted in the September, 24, 1971 LIFE cover. “As I remember, they followed my requests to a T, and were incredibly polite. The dad was pretty stern.” Indeed, Joe who had been a crane operator in Gary, Indiana, just three years before hinted at the relentless drive toward fame about which Michael would later voice such ambivalence. “It wasn’t hard to know they could go on to be professionals,” Joe told LIFE of his young sons. “They won practically all the talent shows and I wasn’t surprised when they did make it.”
Donovan: His parents’ love of Scottish and English folk music inspired Donovan, the singer/songwriter behind such hits as “Season of the Witch” and “Mellow Yellow.” But by the time of his photo session with Olson, Donovan’s fruitful partnership with record producer Mickie Most had soured, and his career was in decline. Perhaps as a result, Donovan was the only musician Olson photographed who was left out of the story that LIFE eventually published.
David Crosby with his father Floyd, together in the father’s house, 1970.
John Olson/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Frank Zappa in his Los Angeles home with his dad, Francis, his mom, Rosemarie, and his cat in 1970.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Frank Zappa with his dad, Francis, and his mom, Rosemarie, in 1970.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick posed with her mother, Virginia Wing, in the living room of the home where she grew up in Palo Alto, California. “We raced out there because she was nine months pregnant,” remembered Olson, the photographer. “And the rest of the story took so long to complete, her daughter was a year old when it finally ran.”
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In a second shoot with Grace Slink, the new mom dangled her daughter China by the feet in 1971
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Grace Slick stepped outside with her mom and little China in 1971.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Eric Clapton with grandmother Rose Clapp in 1970 in Surrey, England.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The former Reggie Dwight, later known as Elton John, laughed with his mom Sheila Fairebrother and Sheila’s husband Fred (whom Elton affectionately called “Derf,” Fred spelled backwards) in their suburban London apartment in 1970.
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David Crosby with his father, 1970.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Richie Havens with his parents in Brooklyn, 1970. The musician who opened the show at Woodstock grew up with his folks, Richard and Mildred, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, but he bought them this home in nearby East Flatbush when his music career took off. The Havenses had nine kids and, as Mrs. Havens told LIFE, “Richie is the only one who’s really moved away. I can’t get rid of most of them.”
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Ginger Baker, the Cream and Blind Faith drummer, flashed a smile with his mother Ruby Streatfield inside her rowhouse in Bexley, outside London, in 1970.
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Ginger Baker and his mum, 1970.
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The Jackson 5 posing with their parents in Encino, Calif., in 1970.
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LIFE photographer John Olson set up to shoot the Jackson 5 in their backyard in 1970.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
With their parents standing by, 13-year-old dynamo Michael (front left) and his brothers Jackie, Marlon, Tito and Jermaine straddled their motorbikes by the pool, 1970.
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Donovan and his parents, Donald and Winifred Leitch, England in 1970.
John Olson/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Cocker with his mother, 1970, from a series John Olson shot on rock stars and their parents.
