As an amateur historian, musical and otherwise (my minor in university was history), I was delighted to find out about songwriter Otis Blackwell. Yesterday was the 90th anniversary of his birth. Everyone knows the songs "Don't Be Cruel", "Fever", "All Shook Up", "Great Balls of Fire", "Return to Sender", and "Handyman", and Otis wrote all of these and a thousand more. Although his main focus was songwriting, he was also a talented singer and pianist who recorded his own demos. When some of these demos reached the ears of Elvis Presley's team, Otis' place in music history was assured. Happily, he has been inducted into both the Songwriter's (1991) and Rock & Roll (2010) Halls of Fame. For the woman seen by many (including me) as the Mother of Rock & Roll, the ticket to Rock Hall induction came later - and only as a result of much advocacy and petition writing/signing. Even Rolling Stone, not exactly known as a feminist publication, published an opinion piece in 2017 about why Rosetta needed to be in the Hall. In 2018, that finally occurred. As keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith said that same year, “She was playing rock’n’roll way before anyone else... way before Chuck Berry and all those guys. Nobody else had even come up with something like that”. Rosetta herself perhaps said it best: “Can’t no man play like me”. Kudos to Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Otis Blackwell, and let's celebrate Black Music History 365 days a year!