Enlightened Free Thinking Nubian Kings And Queens

Andraé Edward Crouch, was born on 1 July, 1942, in  Los Angeles, California . Crouch’s 70's legacy is one of the richest in the gospel genre, yet he has never appealed to the music’s purists. The conservative elements in gospel music have seen his incorporation of rock n roll showmanship and riffs as inappropriate at best, and blasphemy at worst. A gifted singer, songwriter and keyboard player, Crouch undertook a traditional apprenticeship by playing piano and singing in church. For son-of-a-preacher man Andrae, 'playing church' was a childhood equivalent of playing cowboys and Indians. By the age of eight brother and sister were amusing themselves with a pie tin for a tambourine and a commode for a platform. The games came to an abrupt end when one particularly exuberant 'service' ended with the commode breaking! At nine Andrae was converted through the preaching of his father. He remembers, "I sat there in the audience listening. When he gave the...

Born a slave on a plantation near Mt. Pinson, Andrew Jackson Beard had no formal education. He learned instead how to care for animals, make plants grow, and fix things when they broke. Because he was gifted with imagination and intelligence, young Andrew excelled at all these tasks, especially the last. As a grown man working for the railroad, Beard created gadgets that solved on-the-job problems. His experiments soon led to an idea that was worth protecting with a patent. Since Beard could not read or write, he turned to Birmingham's mayor, Melville Drennen. With Drennen's help, Beard completed the necessary forms, and on July 5, 1892, he was granted a patent on a rotary engine. When he later saw a man lose an arm while trying to couple two rail cars together, he went to work on his most famous and profitable invention, the automatic car-coupling device. This invention not only saved lives and limbs of railroad workers around the world, it also made Beard a rich man; h...